In those last minutes, he distracts himself from the misery around him with images of calm and transcendence: a cube of lapis lazuli from a certain mine in Badakshan, a lake in Ladakh reputed to bestow immortality, rain falling; for a tiny moment he senses the miraculous possibility of eternal life, swimmers and sinners alike, tumble-turning forever in the azure mercy of divine love.

He gazes down at his naked carcass and waits for the icy waters of history to close over his head.

Briefly these are his memories: the cubbyhole on the Derby where he slept; a crisp morning in Saint Petersburg; the sand dunes at Otrar and the sun in his eyes; dancing with his daughter at her wedding while the band played ‘Is She Not Passing Fair?’; the grey glass roof of the Vélodrome d’Hiver; holding his dying wife’s hand in the ward of the Rothschild Hospital. It is almost finished. He remembers that he too was loved. Now he goes, with all the dignity he can muster, towards the place where all stories end.

There is no body. But someone has to read the eulogy.

History – one of the powerful fictions he had little use for – in so far as it recalls him at all, considers Nicolas Notovitch a buffoon who did a grubby thing; I have come to regard him as a kind of hero.

We can think of him in the aftermath of the war. At Nuremberg, we will have cause to remember what he said: ‘Mr Dittami, the world is stories in arms.’

He foresaw as well as anyone the violence that happens when we follow the instinct to inflict our stories on other people. He was ahead of his time in wondering how we can begin to live in a world where we truly understand nothing. He doubted humanity would be able to let go of its stories: the new tales of progress and nationhood; the old ones of history and religion, of God and the devil. So in their place, he tried to offer a better one.

He was not, as he is sometimes portrayed, a self-interested liar possessed with a contempt for the truth. He was motivated by despair. He knew that no weapon had yet been devised that was as deadly as a typewriter. Men follow orders. But the authority of a command dwells in a story. He understood that few people were capable of living in his thoroughly disillusioned reality. He wanted to improve the fictions people live by, because he knew it was the most human thing in the world to make up stories and start fighting over them.