‘I need an amanuensis,’ says Notovitch.

*

THAT DAY ESTABLISHED a pattern of acquaintance that lasted for two and a half months, until April of the same year. Once a week, after work, Vincenzo travelled to Notovitch’s house from the showroom on Fleet Street. He went by suburban train, across his rain-washed adoptive city, whose smells of coal and laundry soap and stale beer he already took for granted.

The housekeeper, Mrs Maguire, would meet him at the door. Invariably, Mr Notovitch would be already seated in the parlour.

It seemed that Notovitch required nothing more than the services of an engineer. Vincenzo’s ostensible job was merely to engage the cylinder of the Imperator and signal to Notovitch with a nod that the recording was under way, then signal once again after fourteen minutes when the cylinder was almost full.

In fact, I believe Notovitch needed Vincenzo for an additional reason. The old man had the gifts of a village storyteller: fluency, directness and an uncanny talent for mimicry, which is hard to render on the page. But a storyteller requires an audience. Notovitch needed the conspiracy of a listener, a human silence to contain and validate his tale. With a few significant exceptions, Vincenzo is absent from the recordings, but you can often sense his outline in those pauses, where Notovitch stops to reorient himself, like a bat navigating through darkness by the echo of its own cries.

At the end of their second meeting, he sealed Vincenzo’s compliance with the payment of a guinea – a payment that he repeated after every subsequent encounter.

It was a relationship upon which Vincenzo embarked with misgivings and with no intention of seeing out to its conclusion. But over time, the transaction mellowed into something more cordial, despite Notovitch’s habit of addressing Vincenzo sometimes as Victor, sometimes Lorenzo, and once Luigi.

On the day of the final recording, with the work concluded, both men sat on in the half-dark for a moment in silence, neither of them ready to dispel the ghosts they had conjured.

By then, both of them knew that time would be unkind to Notovitch’s memory. His exit would be followed by the mortifying laughter of history – a fact that pained him deeply. And yet, Notovitch understood better than most that in some sense all lives are imaginary, beginning with the fiction of a name.

When their work was complete and Notovitch returned to Paris, Vincenzo saw him off at the station. Almost the old man’s final act was to entrust the cylinders to Vincenzo’s care.

The relationship of the story they tell to the historical character they name, the real Nicolas Notovitch, is a complex one. Naturally, it has occurred to me to transcribe the cylinders verbatim, but I feel that you and I are past that, reader. Why commit ourselves to such a tiresome formal obligation? We both know that the recordings themselves are only one ingredient in the spell. This is a story for which no tense properly exists in English: a tale in the subjunctive – contingent, supposed, doubted, wished for, feared. Its purpose will become clear to us gradually. There must be an act of faith on both our parts. The time has come to stand together in the illusory light cast by the enchantment and peer into the pages of the secret books.