The light deepens the shadows in the old man’s face. It’s hard to see any trace of Kolya there. Indeed, it’s sometimes difficult to believe that any such creature ever existed. But Notovitch has lived a handful of different lives.

Nicolas Notovitch. It’s a name he has grown into. Nicolas suits him. He pronounces it without its terminal s, a Gallic style that’s very close to the Russian original. And the family name carries some pre-revolutionary distinction: the exoticism of the unformalised old-style transliterations – Tchekoff, Turgenyeff, Pouchkine. Certainly, he has as good a claim to this name as anyone else on the planet. But at the time of the events he has described, such a man as Nicolas Notovitch had barely begun to exist. Until he stowed away aboard the Derby, he had gone by another: Naum Moiseich Abramovich.

Can we credit the Cossack with preternatural powers of Jew-detection? No. He sees Jews everywhere. He has a long record of false positives: an Italian aristocrat, a Scottish banker. He’s even drunkenly accused Dass, a Hindu, of being Jewish. And once Kolya’s eaten the salo, it never crosses the Cossack’s mind that he might have been deceived.

But Kolya is a Jew. His grandfather on his father’s side, now dead, was the hazzan, or cantor, of a synagogue in Odessa. His mother counts among her relatives the Litvinoffs of Chernobyl. Kolya’s family has declined in observance after moving to Crimea. Perhaps the sea air has moderated their piety. Since he began at the gymnasium, where all the students wore a round-necked Prussian-style uniform, Kolya has borne no visible signs of his religion.

Is he a coward? Perhaps. It would have been courageous to affirm his faith in the face of that bigot. Jews from the shtetl made a virtue of displaying the symbols of their rites defiantly.

But Kolya – as we must continue to call him – is on a different quest. And it takes another kind of courage to violate your tribe’s taboos. This is what he has seen in MacGahan, foul-mouthed man-woman, seemingly careless of anyone’s opinion. Kolya is beginning to confront the questions that he is fated to encounter for his entire life: What of us is truly real? What are the limits of our nature? What freedom do we have to rewrite or discard our own stories?

The cylinder turns. The old man sorts through the sheaf of notes on his lap. Sometimes, of course, he must wish he’d been a doctor. It is a noble calling. And there is a special grace in pleasing your parents. But then he thinks about what happened to the Jews of the Pale – what was done by the Cossacks and their ilk in Odessa, Rostov, Kishinev, Kiev, Bialystok and elsewhere; he knows he’s lucky to have left when he did.

‘The Cossack appeared to bear me no ill will.’

The passage of time has erased all recollection of his name. Was he Ivan? Let us suppose so.