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after interrogating him, that the man would never be any good any more. He did not know enough to be a valuablecounter-espionage prize, and as inventor, even as technical craftsman – finished. Physically, indeed, he recovered from his head wound, but not only did he develop a nervous disease, he had also a mental block. The disease was a kind of slow degeneration of the central nervous system, something similar to Parkinson’s disease. He could walk upright, but he had the constant trembling, and his vision was affected. He could no longer mend an alarm clock, let alone handle fine machinery. And the mental block was not so much, perhaps, the loss of inventive capacity as of the will to do anything, to see what made it tick. He had holes in his memory; a kind of disassociation. He looked at simple mechanical contrivances and could not even remember their names or function.
    He had spent, inevitably, years more in observation clinics, resettlement camps, an atom of flotsam like many more, difficult to help, wearisome and unco-operative; a nuisance, a worry, a responsibility. He was no use to anybody any more. He had the arrogance and obstinacy of the outcast. Refused to give evidence against war-criminals. What was the use, he said. Would God not know the sheep from the goats? Would hanging all the Germans take away Treblinka or Baby Yar? And what could he tell them they did not by now know? He would have nothing to do with other Jews. He said he wished he had been exterminated too – what was left of life? No family, no job, no skill, no friends, nothing.
    In the end he had drifted back to Holland. Not to Breda, but wandering about vaguely, a burden on charitable organizations that were sorry for him, but glad to get rid of him. Finally he had turned up in Drente. He liked it here, he said; there were no Jews, nor Christians either (a remark received charitably, like many more).
    In Zwinderen it had been the burgomaster, new then but as energetic as now, who had found a way out of the impasse, with patience and intelligence. He had seen thatnothing was any use without some scrap of independence. He had got a pension for the man, and a disability grant, and a compensation from Germany. And a roof. Besançon had been delighted by the burgomaster’s offer of a little cottage that belonged to the lunatic asylum, tucked in a corner of the grounds there, damp and primitive, used in the nineteenth century to house some turnkey. Nobody in Holland wanted that: he did. He liked the high stone wall, the gloomy cypresses and yews. He dug in the tiny sunless garden with his first show of enthusiasm. Rehabilitation had begun.
    He went, a little later, to the burgomaster, offering to do any work he was still capable of. That was tactfully refused, but the offer was passed to the first factories then being established in Drente. Here he picked up a connexion: the electronics firm could use, they said, a Russian translator from time to time. This spread, and now there were half a dozen firms sending him scientific reports for translation. He had learned pharmaceutical and chemical symbols – or relearned them, along with his lost mathematics – and was much appreciated by his employers. Nobody, they said warmly, could translate Russian or technical German with such lucidity. Nobody was so good at seizing relevant extracts, making a clear and brief paraphrase, piercing the jungle of administrative or bureaucratic phrase, marshalling the kernel of facts in a long waffling report that might cover three years’ work of some dedicated but vague scientific person somewhere behind the Urals.
    His writing was too shaky to be usable, but the grateful electronics firm designed and built a special typewriter for him; it was the owner, too, that found him a housekeeper.
    Now, he said, he was happy. He worked, he earned. He bought books and records. He took long walks and tended his garden. Occasionally someone from