‘You have in your possession,’ I remind him, shutting the van door carefully, ‘a valuable Guadagnini violin, which my father loaned you. It is worth, at today’s values, around three million dollars.’

‘Really?’ he exclaims, seemingly astonished. ‘I shall return it tonight. It is your property. Can you recommend an affordable modern instrument that I can continue to play at our communal celebrations?’

‘I don’t need you to give me back the violin,’ I snap.

‘What, then?’

‘I intend you to play it.’

And he sits aghast – there is no other word for it – as I outline the plan I have sketched on the back of the competition score-sheet. ‘You have a debt to pay, a date to keep,’ I begin. ‘You ducked out once and destroyed my family. It may be a bit late, but you are going to keep that début date, and as many others as it takes, until restitution is made. Wiedergutmachung, as the Germans call their payments to Holocaust victims: making good again.’

‘How do you expect me to play? Like this?’ he demands, pointing to his yeshiva greatcoat, his unkempt beard.

‘If you insist,’ I say icily. ‘It would certainly enhance the publicity value.’

‘Come on,’ he chides, ‘who is going to pay to hear a sixty-one-year-old rabbi sawing through a Bach étude he has not practised since he was so high?’

‘That’s exactly what they will pay to hear,’ I reply. ‘When I put out an announcement that the legendary Rapoport has returned from the dead, every violin fancier in the world will demand tickets and every sensation-seeker in the press will be on your case. We will keep that side of things under control, protecting your privacy. The rest is up to you.

‘Music lovers will flock to hear you because you play like no one alive. And having heard you once, they will flock to hear you again because they will not believe that such playing is still possible. What you represent is a freedom of expression that has been forsaken in modern times.’

And I proceed to enlighten him in the ways of jet-age violinists, who play a hundred and twenty concerts a year and, looking out at a packed house, have no idea if they are in Boston or Brussels. Most of them are multi-millionaires with bulging investment portfolios. They play like zombies, deaf to music, dead from the waist up. Even the young bloods burn out before they reach thirty.

‘When I announce Rapoport is back,’ I continue, ‘people will think: Kreisler, another world, a better world. My father gave you a brand name and a brand association. It won’t matter how rusty you are, people will queue for hours to be connected to the innocent past, to their youth, to a vanished, halcyon era of art. You will be a sensation – short- or long-lived, it’s your choice. What you do will be different from any living performer. It will be like going to the theatre to see Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet and finding Laurence Olivier in his place.’ I have to explain to him who Kenneth Branagh is; Olivier he remembers from the wartime Henry V.