“I raised the gun blindly and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. A click. I pressed it again. And again, an empty click.

“I turned and looked round. Wimmel and my two guards were standing thirty feet or so away, watching. The hostages suddenly began to call. They thought I had lost the wifi to shoot. I turned back and tried once more. Again, nothing. I turned to the colonel, and gestured with the gun, to show that it would not fire. I felt faint in the heat. Nausea. Yet unable to faint.

“He said, Is something wrong?

“I answered, The gun will not fire.

“It is a Schmeisser. An excellent weapon.

“I have tried three times.

“It will not fire because it is not loaded. It is strictly forbidden for the civilian population to possess loaded weapons.

“I stared at him, then at the gun. Still not understanding. The hostages were silent again.

“I said, very helplessly, How can I kill them?

“He smiled, a smile as thin as a sabre slash. Then he said, Your imagination has… two minutes in which to act.

“I understood then. I was to club them to death. I understood many things. His real self, his real position. And from that came the realization that he was mad, and that he was therefore innocent, as all mad people, even the most cruel, are innocent. He was what life could do if it wanted—an extreme possibility made hideously mind and flesh. Perhaps that was why he could impose himself so strongly, like a black divinity. For there was something superhuman in the spell he cast. And therefore the real evil, the real monstrosity in the situation lay in the other Germans, those less than mad lieutenants and corporals and privates who stood silently there watching this exchange.

“I walked towards him. The two guards thought I was going to attack him because they sharply raised their guns. But he said something to them and stood perfectly still. I stopped some six feet from him. We stared at each other.

“I beg you in the name of European civilization to stop this barbarity.

“And I command you to continue this punishment.

“Without looking down he said, You now have thirty seconds. Refusal to carry out this order will result in your own immediate execution.

“I walked back over the dry earth to that gate. I stood in front of those two men. I was going to say to the one who seemed capable of understanding that I had no choice, I must do this terrible thing to him. But I left a fatal pause of a second to elapse. Perhaps because I realized, close to him, what had happened to his mouth. It had been burnt, not simply bludgeoned or kicked. I remembered that man with the iron stake, the electric fire. They had broken in his teeth and branded his tongue, burnt his tongue right down to the roots with red-hot iron. That word he shouted must finally have driven them beyond endurance. And in those astounding five seconds, the most momentous of my life, I understood this guerrilla. I mean that I understood far better than he did himself what he was. Very simply. He helped me. Because he managed to stretch his head towards me and say the word he could not say. It was almost not a sound, but a contortion in his throat, a five-syllabled choking. But once again, one last time, it was unmistakably that word. And the word was in his eyes, in his being, totally in his being. What did Christ say on the cross? Why hast thou forsaken me? What this man said was something far less sympathetic, far less pitiful, even far less human, but far profounder. He spoke out of a world the very opposite of mine. In mine life had no price. It was so valuable that it was literally priceless. In his, only one thing had that quality of pricelessness. It was eleutheria: freedom. He was the immalleable, the essence, the beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond civilization, beyond history. He was not God, because there is no God we can know. But he was a proof that there is a God that we can never know. He was the final right to deny. To be free to choose. He, or what manifested itself through him, even included the insane Wimmel, the despicable German and Austrian troops. He was every freedom, from the very worst to the very best. The freedom to desert on the battlefield of Neuve Chapelle. The freedom to confront a primitive God at Seidevarre. The freedom to disembowel peasant girls and castrate with wire cutters. I mean he was something that passed beyond morality but sprang out of the very essence of things—that comprehended all, the freedom to do all, and stood against only one thing—the prohibition not to do all.

“All this takes many words to say to you. And I have said nothing about how I felt this immalleability, this refusal to cohere, was essentially Greek. That is, I finally assumed my Greekness. All I saw I saw in a matter of seconds, perhaps not in time at all. I saw that I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defense of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages. Again and again, since then, those eighty men have risen in the night and accused me. You must remember that I was certain I was going to die too. But all I have to set against their crucified faces are those few transcendent seconds of knowledge. But knowledge like a white heat. My reason has repeatedly told me I was wrong. Yet my total being still tells me I was right.

“I stood there perhaps fifteen seconds—I could not tell you, time means nothing in such situations—and then I dropped the gun and stepped beside the guerrilla leader. I saw the colonel watching me, and I said, for him and so also for the remnant of a man beside me to hear, the one word that remained to be said.

“Somewhere beyond Wimmel I saw Anton moving, walking quickly towards him. But it was too late. The colonel spoke, the submachine guns flashed and I closed my eyes at exactly the moment the first bullets hit me.”

He leant forward, after a long silence, and turned up the lamp; then stared at me.

“The disadvantage of our new drama is that in your role you do not know what you can believe and what you cannot. There is no one on the island who was in the square. But many can confirm for you every other incident I have told you.”

I thought of the scene on the central ridge; by not being insertible in the real story, it finally verified. Not that I doubted Conchis; I knew I had been listening to the history of events that happened; that in the story of his life he had saved the certain truth to the end.

“After you were shot?”

“I was hit and I fell and I knew no more because I fainted. I believe I heard the uproar from the hostages before darkness came. And possibly that saved me. I imagine the men firing were distracted. Other orders were being given to fire at the hostages. I am told that half an hour later, when the villagers were allowed to wail over their dead, I was found lying in a pooi of blood at the feet of the guerrillas. I was found by my housekeeper Soula—before the days of Maria—and Hermes. When they moved me I showed faint signs of life. They bandaged me and carried me home and hid me in Soula’s room. Patarescu came and looked after me.”

“Patarescu?”

“Patarescu.” I tried to read his look; understood, by something in it, that he fully admitted that guilt, and did not consider it a guilt; and that he was prepared to justify it if I should press for the truth.

“The colonel?”

“By the end of the war he was wanted for countless atrocities. Several of them showed the same feature. An apparent reprieve at the last moment—which turned out to be a mere prolongation of the agony for the hostages. The War Crimes Commission have done their best. But he is in South America. Or Cairo, perhaps.”

“And Anton?”