*2 The Anti-Defamation League has produced a compelling world map of anti-Semitism. Some scores for Europe: 4 per cent of Swedes are anti-Semitic; in Britain the figure is 8 per cent (though in Ireland it is 20), in Germany the figure is 27, in Austria 28, and in France 37 (and in Greece it is a near-Middle Eastern 69). The ADL’s findings are dated 2015; in that year over 8,000 Jews left France (mostly for Israel), compared to 774 from Britain and a mere 200 from Germany.
*3 Meaning the H. G. Wells creation so thrillingly serialised on TV when I was a boy. And now that same boy looked like the Invisible Man – not as you saw him in company or in public (a tweed-jacketed and roll-necked mummy in dark glasses), but as he was when he went on his missions, invisibly naked except for a pair (or so Martin, aged eleven in South Wales, had automatically supposed) of invisible underpants. In the nightclub it was as if I wasn’t there. It was a moment that broke the illusion described by Tolstoy: our feeling that time was something that just moves past us while we stay the same…
*4 By the year 2060 (we had read) most Italians will have no sisters, no brothers, no aunts, no uncles, and no cousins. Yes, Italy.
*5 For an evocation of co-identity, I again turn to Tolstoy. In the novella ‘Family Happiness’ (sometimes called ‘Happy Ever After’) Tolstoy gives us the nocturnal imaginings of the orphaned seventeen-year-old Marya as she reviews the attentions paid to her by her guardian, Sergei: ‘I felt that my dreams and thoughts and prayers were living things, living there in the darkness with me, hovering about my bed and standing over me. And every thought I had was his thought, and every feeling his feeling. I did not know then that this was love – I thought that it was something that often happened…’ Tolstoy is the presiding spirit of this chapter. Who else has made happiness swing on the page?
*6 On the night after Pearl Harbor, Churchill said that for the first time in years his insomnia withdrew, and he slept the sleep of ‘the grateful and the saved’; he said he hoped that the sleep of eternity would be as soft and as pure.
*7 America went through exactly the same routine after the First War, targeting the Germans, and we had ‘liberty cabbage’ and even ‘liberty measles’. Except that Germany was a foe, while France, now, was just a carping ally. This freedom–liberty business, I later discovered, predates the birth of America. The domestic alternative to the heavily taxed tea of the Boston Tea Party was an ‘unappetising potion called Liberty Tea’, writes Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly.
*8 At one point in Ron Rosenbaum’s classic Explaining Hitler, Yehuda Bauer, the dean of Holocaust studies, tells the author that French anti-Semitism was ‘far worse, far more virulent, deep-rooted and bitter than Germany’s in the pre-World War I period’. Bauer cites the highly regarded historian George Mosse, who said that ‘if someone
had come to me in 1914 and told me that one country in Europe would attempt to exterminate the Jews, I would have said then, “No one can be surprised at the depths to which France could sink.” ’ Bauer and Mosse are both serious men, but I find myself starting back from this and shaking my head. For one thing, I can’t imagine the Holocaust translated into French – a language without tonic stresses. ‘Sortez! En dehors! Vite! Plus vite!’; these words have none of the plausibility and menace of ‘Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schneller!’
*9 The toll was 642. The Germans machine-gunned 190 men in sheds and barns; 247 women and 205 children were confined to the church, which was set on fire. The village was looted and razed; there were six survivors. This happened in Oradour-sur-Glane, and it was the wrong village, with no connection to the Resistance. Apparently the SS wanted Oradour-sur-Vayres – just under twenty miles away.
*10 The coralling – its manner, its dot-the-i cruelty – also followed the Nazi example. Before being herded on to cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, 13,152 people, including 4,051 children, were held for several days at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (a bicycle track in the middle of Paris, unventilated for the occasion) in July 1942; according to some reports, all the toilets were sealed and there was only one tap.
*11 It would be some years before Christopher wrote, ‘A Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer.’ Though not nearly as rhetorically satisfying, ‘Holocaust endorser’, I told Christopher, would make the point less ambiguously.
*12 One day, in about 1997, I was confronted in a kitchen by two glass bowls of white crystals, sugar and salt, and it took me quite a long time to establish which was which. Another day, in about 2000, I noticed that my tongue had gone black. It turned out to be nothing that half an hour with a toothbrush and a bar of soap couldn’t put right. But it did occur to me that pretty soon I’d probably have to start thinking about cutting down.
Chapter 2 September 11
1: The day after
Wound
We begin with the day after – September 12, 2001.
I was in my rented workplace (kitchen, study, bedroom, bathroom, in a mews off Portobello Road), standing at the sink and attending to a wound. It was on the back of my right hand
