I do not know, or cannot remember, or have suppressed, who it was that approached him to write those newspaper articles. It is scarcely possible that I was the go-between; although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the Vlaamsche Gazet was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbour to the east. In the early hours, when work was over for the night and the presses were rolling, he would hold court for his writing staff, knuckle-duster nationalists to a man, in the Stoof, next door to the Gazet offices on the Nationalestraat, a fine old tavern, still going strong, I am told, although the air must surely be polluted even yet by the lingering vapours of Hendriks and his gang. There he would squat, in his special corner, banging his special pewter stein, sharing gossip and telling jokes and spitting when he laughed, his womanly bosom wobbling. It was Axel who brought me there. I suppose he was curious to see how I would fare, how I would defend myself, among that feral gathering. For the most part I was kept firmly off at the outer edge of things, where I circled, hungry as a hyena, always on the watch for an opening through which I might dart and get my head, too, into the smoking innards of the times. I would catch Axel glancing at me now and then, with that charmingly crooked half-smile of his, amused at my avidity, my glittering eagerness. My presence did nothing to tone down the rabid talk or curb Hendriks's yid jokes; it was all in fun, we were all hearty fellows here, thick of skin and merciless of purpose, and besides, to pay special consideration to those of us whose origins were… different, would have been really to offer insult, surely? As Hendriks was fond of repeating, his eyes skittering sideways, the issue was not Race, but Culture, our Great European Heritage. Now, isn't that so? yes? yes? the pewter stein banging, those fat bubs bobbing. And Axel would nod along with the others, and look at me sidelong again from under his pale lashes, and smile, and faintly shrug.
When those articles of his began to be published I was jealous, I will not deny it. Why had Hendriks not invited me to write for his paper, instead of Axel? I would have been far fiercer on the threat to our – their! – culture that my people were supposed to represent, if it had been asked of me. Yes, I would! I was tougher than Axel, more relentless, more daring, more vicious. I would have sold my soul, I would have sold my people, for one sustained moment of the public's attention, even if it was only in a rag like the Gazet. Why did they turn to him, to Ariel, when in me they had a more than willing Caliban? Those half-dozen articles he wrote were much too elaborated and opaque for what was required of them. But that was how it was: people like Hendriks, even brutes like him, were mesmerised by that mixture of self-esteem and false diffidence that Axel displayed, by that remote, amused, knowing air that enveloped him and into which he would retreat, like Zarathustra into his cloud, leaving only a soft laugh behind him. To me the last piece of the six that he wrote was the sharpest refinement of the insult, the blob of poison smeared on the sharp end of the series. It was cast in the form of an interview with me – with me! – as a typical specimen of dissatisfied intellectual youth. He wrote not only the questions but most of the answers, and freely modified the few opinions that he did allow me to express. Why did I let him do it, why did I let him put words into my mouth? Abject, abject, abject; how they rankle, these old self-betrayals. When the so-called interview appeared, and I saw our photographs accompanying it, printed side by side, I was shamefully, chokingly, unconfessably, proud, although at the same time childishly gratified that Axel's picture was a bad one – he could look quite peaky and anxious in certain lights – and his name underneath it misprinted.
For all my protests, though, I am compelled, in bitter spite of myself, to admit that he did a more successful job as a polemicist than I would have done. It was his very restraint, his scrupulousness, what one might call his insistent tact, that gave those feuilletons their force. I would have ranted, mocked, hurled abuse, amid shrill peals of forced Mephistophelean laughter. The poise and studied distance of Axel's style, with its high patrician burnish and flashes of covert wit – it could take two or more readings to get one of Axel's jokes – the attitude of aristocratic weariness, the sense that he was writing only because world-historical duty had dragged him to his desk and thrust the pen into his hand, these were the things that made him so effective, or would have, had he been addressing a serious audience and not the rabblement who read the Gazet, moving their lips as they did so. What can they have made,'for instance, of his call for the aestheticisation of national life, or his suggestion to them that they might escape the plight of the self by sublimation in the totalitarian ethic? Music to their thick ears, though, simple and rousing as a marching tune, must have been his suggestion – one could hear one of Axel's studiedly otiose sighs rustling amid the words like a breeze in the grass – that nothing of consequence would be lost to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe, really, nothing at all, if certain supposedly assimilated, oriental elements were to be removed and settled somewhere far away, in the steppes of Central Asia, perhaps, or on one of Africa's more clement coasts.