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.

There are many particulars of his life that remain unclear; generally not through vagueness, but because he offered so many competing versions of it. His paradoxes are legion. An unbeliever, he consoled himself in those final seconds with the words of Isaiah: ‘For a small moment have I forsaken you; but with great mercies will I gather you.’ And in the shape of his disillusioned life, we catch the echo of another: a Jewish boy growing up by an inland sea, infatuated with dreams of the East, who saw that the world was made up of stories in arms and wanted only to invent better ones – stories of love and compassion and forgiveness.

AFTERWORD

THE NOVEL IS A LUNAR ART, borrowing its light from drama. Along with epigraphs and dedications, I’m sceptical of the need for afterwords and acknowledgements. I’m not persuaded of the value of seeing the sweaty actor-manager of a novel’s tiny theatre returning to the stage to give special thanks to their confidants and supporters. It always feels vaguely like boasting and, as a reader, I’m usually affronted that anyone could be more important to the author than me, the paying customer.

But if it were me reading this for the first time, I’d wonder how much of what I’d just been told was true.

The Protocols, of course, are all too true. Only circumstantial evidence connects the book to Rachkovsky – though it is very strong. Its baleful influence lingers. Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide was my chief source and I winked at its title in the text. I also drew inspiration from Stephen Eric Bronner’s A Rumor About the Jews.