I had started with childhood, the earliest memories – Wyatt’s Landing ten miles from Cape Cod and my father’s family who had never liked me although I hadn’t realised that fact until his death in Korea in nineteen fifty-three when I was ten. It was only afterwards that it was made plain that the Wyatt blood in me was tainted, for my mother was Sicilian. So to Sicily we went, to the great cool villa on the cliffs above the sea outside Palermo, to my grandfather, Vito Barbaccia, to whom men touched their hats, who ordered the police from here to there like chessmen, who scowled and made the politicians tremble.

Vito Barbaccia, capo mafia, Lord of Life and Death…

I was working my way through my freshman year at Harvard when there was a sudden banging above my head, a chain rattled, and from the scraping I knew that the stones were being pulled away. When the wooden trap was lifted, the sunlight flooded in, momentarily blinding me. I closed my eyes, blinked and looked through a soft, golden haze that told me it was late afternoon.

Major Husseini crouched at the edge, small and wizened, dried up by the Sinai sun that had deranged him, his olive face pitted from the smallpox. A couple of soldiers stood beside him and Tufik was there looking distinctly unhappy.

“So, Jew,” Husseini said in English, for although my Arabic had understandably improved over the past ten months, he considered it an insult to use the language of his fathers with someone like me.

He stood up and laughed contemptuously. “Look at him.” He gestured to the others. “ Squatting in his own excrement like an animal.” He looked down at me again. “Do you like that, Jew? You like to sit there smeared with your own dung?”

“It’s not so bad, major,” I told him in Arabic. “A monk once asked Bodidharma, what is Buddha? The master replied dried dung.”