There is a pause. In the silence, the sound of a woman’s laughter is audible from the pavement beyond the window. Notovitch looks down at his hands. In this moment, he is suspended between two distinct versions of himself. He sees the outlines of his other lives, ghostly possibilities that will never be fulfilled in this world. His resistance has been briefly weakened. Something about Vincenzo’s honesty has moved him, his willingness to embrace the humiliation of his own identity. The priest’s bastard from Genoa. Notovitch glimpses the relief of confessing everything. It would be so easy. But that isn’t what his life is about. It’s partly the acquired habits of spycraft, the unwillingness to let go of an assumed identity because only bad will come of it. But it’s also an act of faith, the belief that by willpower our stories can overcome the laws of nature. The world is sustained by myths. One replaces another. There are only better and worse. The stone rolls back, the body’s there. The stone rolls back, the body’s gone. One small adjustment and the contingent reality is completely altered. You can’t give up now, he thinks. The future depends on it. This has cost him too much. There must be a best story.

‘You’ve heard my story, Mr Dittami. I translated the Pali text as accurately as I could,’ Notovitch says. And then, with some of the pedagogical huffiness of Renan: ‘Reality doesn’t care whether you choose to believe in it, Mr Dittami.’

‘But there is no evidence!’

‘Evidence! What evidence would satisfy you?’

That’s when Notovitch took off his slipper to show Vincenzo his ancient wound – the livid skin, the missing toes – beneath the strange frugality of his darned sock.

There is a whole genus of tokens that are offered in stories to redeem the inflated currency of words: handkerchiefs dipped in blood, wounds, strawberry marks, the livers of slaughtered animals, heads on silver plates. Sincerity is generally made visible through someone or something’s suffering. ‘I cannot believe in Western sincerity because it is invisible,’ said the writer Yukio Mishima, ‘but in feudal times we believed that sincerity “resided” in our entrails and if we needed to show our sincerity, we had to cut our bellies and take out our visible sincerity.’

Examining the old man’s mutilated foot, Vincenzo allows himself to be persuaded. But doubts remain. And possibilities almost too dark to contemplate.

*

I’VE LIVED WITH NOTOVITCH for a very long time, I’ve wondered about his motives, his aims, and how best to tell his story. There’s no question that his gospel has become an idée fixe – for both of us.