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‘I’ve got
flu
,’ I stutter. ‘What did you expect?’

‘Perhaps you should go,’ she says, clutching at her temples.

‘The thing about snot,’ I try and reassure her, ‘is that it’s basically just saliva with extra
flavour
. Like a kiss with added
salt
.’

‘Fuck off,’ she says, then disappears.

I hear her clattering around in the bathroom, then opening a couple of drawers in the bedroom. I hear some furtive muttering. Then nothing.

Ten minutes pass.

I inspect her tape cassettes. I look at her shoes, her books. I finish my tea (cold). I try to get the TV to work.

Twenty minutes pass.

Thirty.

Is she ill? Asleep? Pondering the snot/kiss dichotomy? Waiting? Distressed?

Does she
want
me to go?

Really
?

Really
?

I give her an hour to change her mind.

Okay
. Ninety minutes, tops.

And my flu–thanks for asking–has grown considerably worse in the meantime.

Track six? Are you
kidding
?! Primal Scream. ‘Higher than the Sun.’

Every
time.

God
please
forgive me, but I speed-read the Primo Levi as I compile the cassette (I can’t commit. I
won’t
commit. This is too Big. I just can’t
own
it). But every so often (just the same) the strong rope of its narrative lassoes me up, pulls me in and drags me along (spreadeagled, scrabbling for a handhold, bleating out my weak defence of terminal frivolity. I’m totally superficial,
see
? I’m inherently trivial. D’you have any fucking idea how
hard
that can sometimes be?).

They’re full of ghosts, these two books, both living and dead. In the Author’s Preface (and even
this
isn’t a safe place) Levi says how for most people (and most peoples) ‘every stranger is an enemy’, but that this belief, this feeling, does not exist (in general) as the basis of any formal doctrine, but rather ‘it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts’.

In Paul Bailey’s Introduction he snipes at ‘the artists who use the terrible fact of the camps for emotional and aesthetic effect’.

So is Blaine doing that? Can we accuse
him
of this crime? Even if it was just a question of
mentioning
the Levi book in passing (like it was vaguely connected, in some way, to the ordeal he was undertaking)?

I ponder this for a while.

But the reference
was
an oblique one.

Is Bailey right, then? Is the holocaust bigger than art?

Is it
beyond
art?

And is Blaine–through this strange, solitary gesture of his–simply pointing a small torch into the huge, black sky of history, and hoping that people might peer up and see–and pause, and
remember
–how very
dark
it is up there?

Seven. Gotta be the Beatles. ‘Here Comes the Sun.’

Doo-dun-doo-doo
!

At the exact midway point of the Levi (and remember I’ve got the two separate books published
together
here), I come across this little kid. This 3-year-old kid called Hurbinek. In fact that isn’t actually even his real name. Nobody knows what he’s called. He doesn’t
have
a name. He’s just this partially functioning scrag of flesh perched determinedly in a grubby cot.

Levi and his fellow survivors (the Germans are on the run by this stage and Levi is slowly recovering from scarlet fever in the camp’s infirmary) think he was born in captivity, but they aren’t entirely sure. He has no family. He’s simply been left. He’s utterly alone.

Hurbinek’s disabled–his legs are just two pegs–and thin. Levi describes his face as ‘triangular’. Merely an amalgam of bones and skin. But what little skin there
is
on this tot’s tiny forearm is tattoed with those indelible digits of Auschwitz.

But the eyes! Hurbinek’s eyes! Flashing and seething and alive. Furious.
Blazing
. Because he cannot speak. He’s never been taught. So he just sits in his cot, an ‘obsessive presence’, his eyes burning with this thwarted desire to communicate. And at first no one will speak to him. Nobody can face that indomitable 3-year-old gaze and bear what it might tell them. Except for one person. A boy called Henek. Fifteen years old. Hungarian.

Henek begins to nurture the tiny, isosceles-faced Hurbinek. He speaks to him, hour after hour, slowly and calmly. He’s unbelievably patient and tender. Then, after a week or so, he approaches the other men on the ward and proudly tells them that Hurbinek–this incandescent scrap, this ‘child of death’–has spoken. He has articulated a
word
. The word (and it varies, slightly, with each faltering pronunciation) sounds something like ‘mass-klo’!
Mass-klo
?

There are men from every corner of Europe lying in that ward, educated men, men who–between them–speak every European language,
every
tongue. But nobody knows what Hurbinek’s word means. People have their theories (certainly) but no one is entirely sure.

And nobody finds out, definitively, because Hurbinek dies (as he surely must), without his word ever being clearly interpreted, without ever experiencing that reassuring thrill of being truly comprehended. And Levi–who has seen so much, and this is merely more–shakes his head, wisely, and in that sublimely understated way of his, murmurs, ‘No, it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation…’

It was just a word–two defiant syllables–which nobody understood.

Mass-klo
.

Some things are beyond the reach of art.

Some words are meaningful beyond understanding.

It was Blaine. It was
him
. He made me read that book.

It’s not a criticism of the girl or anything (well, not
exactly
), but don’t you just hate those people who automatically sympathise with the baddie in a book (or film, or play) simply because they think it makes them seem ‘multifaceted’?

Of course they’ll provide you with some perfectly
coherent
reason for their deranged stance: ‘Oh
no
, I always
loved
the Child-Catcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. I mean he’s so
true
, so
rounded
. And he was probably bullied by the other children at school when
he
was a kid because of his misshapen nose and his chalky pallor…

‘I bet he’s
great
to his mother. In fact I’m pretty certain that he’s a passionate supporter of Help The Aged’s “Sponsor a Granny” scheme, but he just doesn’t go public about it (He’s far too subtle, too self-deprecating for that). My sources tell me that he sends a
very
regular allowance to an isolated Nicaraguan octogenarian called Rosa Francesca Velasquez. A worn-out mother of twelve. She was destitute before he stepped in…’

My
God
. But of
course. Now
I realise. You’re just so complex, so contrary, so intuitive, so
fascinating
…George
Lucas
certainly isn’t helping matters in this respect, now that Darth Vader’s suddenly been unmasked as Luke Skywalker’s
father
.

‘Yeah, so apparently Darth had a stutter as a boy, and it made him feel really socially inept…And then, when he had a kid of his own, he just couldn’t bring himself to express real
love
…’

Why can’t a baddie just be
bad?
And why can’t a good guy just be
better?

The way I’m seeing it, the rot started at ground level: the British school system in the seventies; when they introduced mixed ability classes and abandoned streaming–

‘I’m very sorry Jimmy/Johnny/Jane, but you’re just going to have to sit quietly and read your books while I struggle for an
entire lesson
to get
Smeg
-boy here to hold his
crayon
properly.’

Trust
Aphra
to find something appealing in the money-grabbing Fletcher. Maybe she’s doing it simply to provoke. I mean to refuse–point blank–to admire a
hero
who fills every page with effortless light and grace and colour, in favour of some wealthy absentee landowner who–for crass, financial gain–uses his hired hands to rough-up the law-abiding local folk? Can that be logical (or emotionally sustaining)? Has she no Social
Antennae
?