He was thin, remarkably thin, with a narrow, long white face and crinkled red hair. He wore a long overcoat, open, and a long, grey muffler hanging down that lent a comically doleful touch to his appearance. He was about my age, although he had the air of being somehow far older. He had a newspaper under his arm, rolled into a tight baton. He looked me up and down almost merrily, and with a large, friendly gesture invited me to step inside. I entered, but stopped just past the threshold. He stood beside me, following my gaze with interest as I looked about. I had anticipated disorder, drawers wrenched open and things thrown on the floor, but everything seemed as usual, only a little more shabby, perhaps, and a little shamefaced, under this stranger's twinkling, sceptical eye. As each moment passed, however, the place was ceasing to be real, was becoming a reproduction, as it were, skilfully done, the details all exact yet lacking all authenticity. Everything looked flat and hollow, like a stage set. I noted the flinty sunlight in the window, it might have been thrown by a powerful electric lamp set up just outside the casement. Even the smell in the air was not quite right. "The name is Schaudeine," the intruder said. "You might call me Max, if you wish. I have been having a look around." He shrugged, and smiled resignedly, showing how he made light of his responsibilities, whatever they were. I have used the word intruder, but in fact he seemed perfectly at ease, seemed at home, almost, certainly more so than I was. He sighed. There was so much to be done in these cases, he said, shaking his head, so much to be checked and listed and accounted for – really, people never thought. "When it is the whole family, that is," he said, and looked at me sidelong, and was it my fancy or did I see his eyelid twitch? Where were they, I heard myself ask, the family, where had they gone? I had been about to add, Where have they been taken to? but stopped myself in time. He made a show of considering for a moment, gnawing at his lower lip. "East?" he said at last, with lifted brows, as if I might be better expected than he to know the answer. He began to walk about the place then, looking at this and that but touching nothing. I followed after him. He stopped in the doorway of my parents' room, with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and rocking on his heels. "Ah," he said, "the master bedroom!" Together we took in the low bed, stripped of bedclothes, with the two ghostly dents side by side in the mattress, the faded quilt folded on the foot of it, the rush-bottomed chair, the night-stand with water jug and basin. The wardrobe stood open, containing not even a hanger. The room had never been so tidy, so orderly, so empty. Schaudeine turned to me. "Did I catch your name?" he said. How polite he was, as if we were a pair of prospective tenants whose appointments to view the property had coincided by mistake, and he had taken the lead in smoothing over any awkwardnesses. "My name?" I said. "My name is Axel Vander."

I had not known what I was about to say, yet it was no surprise to hear myself say it. On the contrary, it felt entirely natural, like putting on a new suit of clothes that had been tailored expressly for me, or, rather, for my identical twin, now dead. It was thrilling, too, in a way that I could not exactly account for. Immediately I had spoken there came a breathless, tottery sensation, as if I had managed a marvellous feat of dare-devilry, as if I had leapt across a chasm, in my dazzling new raiment, or climbed to a dizzyingly high place, from which I could survey another country, one that I had heard fabulous accounts of but had never visited. Nor did I mark the disproportion of these sensations to their cause – I had merely given a false name, after all, as a petty miscreant might to an enquiring policeman. Is this what the actor experiences every night when he steps on to the stage, this weightlessness, this sudden freedom, what Goethe somewhere calls der Fall nach oben, accompanied by its tremor of secret, hardly containable hilarity? "Vander, eh?" Schaudeine said, and looked me up and down with redoubled interest. "That's a name I seem to know." He rubbed the palms of his slender white hands briskly against each other, producing a scraping, papery sound. "Well, we shall have to think what is to be done with you, since you seem to have been…" He shot me a swift, sly grin. "Since you seem to have been left behind." I was never to find out who he was, or why he was there, or from whom he derived his authority. Nor do I know why he decided to help me. He wanted no money, which was as well, since I had none. It will seem absurd, perhaps, but I suspect he saved me, and save me he did, for no other reason than that it amused him that I had escaped seizure and deportation simply by not being at home. "What a thing, eh!" he kept saying, with his comedian's downturned grin, shaking his head as if indeed I had effected some piece of acrobatic daring. Naturally, I had not mentioned the warning note. I still wonder if it was he who wrote it, although I can offer no reasonable explanation as to why he should have done. What profit would there have been for him in an act of such selfless magnanimity? Because, again, it amused him? I have no doubt he was a scoundrel. Hard to credit he is still surviving. How did he escape the rope? They hanged lesser ones than he. Hendriks, for instance, a few years later, in the general high spirits after liberation, was strung up from a lamppost by his own belt, for not much more than writing those editorials that now suddenly everyone, in a late rush of enlightenment, realised had been treasonous. But Schaudeine, Schaudeine was not the kind to let himself be lynched.

He took me to the café on the corner of the square that Axel and I used to frequent, and treated me to a second breakfast, of coffee and rolls, saying I would need feeding up for the journey that lay ahead; I did not enquire what journey he meant. He took nothing himself, but as I ate he sat looking on with avuncular approval and pleasure, still with his rolled newspaper under his arm. I felt like a schoolboy who has been rescued from the clutches of a gang of toughs at the school gate; here I was, without bruise or bloodied nose, enjoying a grand treat generously laid on by my smiling and only slightly sinister new friend. He talked a great deal, dropping hints of powerful contacts in high places; he had access, he assured me airily, to a network of facilitators that stretched across the continent; they were friends, business associates, sympathisers – what cause it was they, and presumably he, sympathised with he did not specify – who would help me to make my way to a new life, beyond the seas, if necessary. He smiled again; this time he definitely winked; he may even have tapped a finger to the side of his nose. I nodded, reaching for another roll. I was not paying full heed. My attention was bent on something that was occurring inside me, a shift, a transformation; it was as if all the particles of which I was made up were being realigned along an entirely new axis. It is not every day one loses one's entire family at a stroke. I will not say I was not upset, or fearful for them. I did not know then that I would never see them again, that the whirlwind into which they had disappeared would release nothing of them but their dust. I took it that they had been sent away, probably to somewhere far off and uncongenial, Axel's Heligoland or Hendriks's Amazon, and I assumed that presently I too would be seized and sent to join them. I even wondered if the new life for me that Schaudeine was speaking of so glowingly might be a euphemism for my imminent arrest and transportation. Indeed, I thought, this might be exactly his job, to go about the city allaying people's fears, so that they would be prepared, however deludedly, and give no trouble, when the soldiers came, with the trucks. But even if this were to be the case I did not mind. At the moment I was too preoccupied to care. For I had been confronted with the all-excluding prospect of freedom. That was the electric possibility toward which all my bristling and crepitant particles were pointed. I was at last, I realised, a wholly free agent. Everything had been taken from me, therefore everything was to be permitted. I could do whatever I wished, follow my wildest whim. I could lie, cheat, steal, maim, murder, and justify it all. More: the necessity of justification would not arise, for the land I was entering now was a land without laws. Historians never tire of observing that one of the ways in which tyranny triumphs is by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfil their most secret and most base desires; few care to understand, however, that its victims too can be made free men. Adrift and homeless, without family or friend, unless Schaudeine should be counted a friend, I could at last become that most elusive thing, namely – namely! – myself. I sometimes surmise that this might be the real and only reason that I took on Axel's identity. If you think this a paradox you know nothing about the problematics of authenticity.