Shooting in the Dark

she delivered the breakfast, together with a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin. ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’
    I shook my head.
    I was aware of her on the periphery of my vision, flitting from table to table, delivering toast and chips and beans and fried tomatoes to the other customers.
    When I’d finished my breakfast I counted out the right amount of change, added a twenty-pence piece, and left the café.
    I keep my eye on Miriam, just as I keep my eye on the blind woman. I am the watchman. I am a reliable witness. I can testify to the crimes and misdemeanours of those I watch, just as I can confirm their righteous acts.
    And I am a witness, also, to the power of faith. Throughout my conscious life, faith, and faith alone, has kept me fixed to the path of my destiny. I have seen where I must go, and nothing has stood in my way. In our time commitment is not a fashionable virtue. As a culture we are committed only to throw-away ephemera and momentary desires. And because of that our lives lead inexorably to depression, to insanity, and to death.
    I know one thing for sure. My faith will lead me elsewhere. It will lead me away from this vale of sorrow. I shall be reunited with the greatest love of all.
     
    The man from Neighbourhood Watch is supposed to check the garages and doors around midnight. Last night I saw him enter someone’s house. He turned the door handle and hesitated before pushing it open. He looked around, made sure no one was watching, then went through and closed the door behind him. The woman who lives in that house is divorced. The kids on the street call her Sexy Sadie. She hooks scarlet underwear to her washing line, like bait.
     
    These characters form the landscape of my life. I watch them because we can never be sure that the people we meet are real. People begin life with a genetic potential, a temperament, and an environment (including their parents) which is going to somehow modify their behaviour. As they grow, their genetic inheritance usually comes into the foreground, and by the time they have come through the chaos of their teens, they are more or less formed. They have become whatever it is that they were supposed to become.
    But most of them are not satisfied. They look around and find the world populated by people more interesting than themselves. They see intelligent people, or beautiful people, they see people who are strong, or wilful, or talented. And the response is to begin a process of reinventing themselves. They dream up an exotic past, stories of lost fortunes or family tragedies, historical links to the great and the good.
    Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of the book Fragments, describes his experiences as a three-year-old who was separated from his family in Riga and taken to the concentration camp at Majdanek. In the camp he witnessed and survived a series of harrowing ordeals, and ended up, after the war, in a Swiss orphanage. He was taken from the orphanage by a Swiss couple who showed no understanding of his experience, and who forced him to suppress all of his earlier memories.
    Fragments is an interesting book. It has won awards and its child’s-eye-view narrative has ensured an important place on the Holocaust circuit for its author.
    But in the late nineties it was alleged that Wilkomirski is not from Latvia. He was never near a Polish death camp. He is not even Jewish. Instead he was born Bruno Grosjean in 1941 in Biel; in 1945 he was adopted by a wealthy Swiss couple from Zurich, who, when they died in 1986, left him a large inheritance.
    Why is it so fascinating that someone should decide to invent a new identity for himself? Was Bruno Grosjean’s real life so totally devoid of meaning that he could do nothing but dump it?
    We don’t know the answer, because Bruno Grosjean, in spite of the body of evidence against him, still maintains that he is Binjamin Wilkomirski.
    In my profession and in the medical profession this phenomenon is well known. There is even a name for it. When delusions surface in physical symptoms, the condition is called Munchausen’s syndrome. And patients with Munchausen’s syndrome are so convinced and so convincing that they will repeatedly seek out and endure surgery for medical conditions that do not exist.
    Some of us do not have the space or the time in our lives for delusions of any kind. We are different. Fate or circumstances has given us the lonely role of modifying the behaviour of others. In my case