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calls became fewer and fewer, until the former flood had become less a trickle than an occasional and no doubt mistaken drip, he realised that just as Dorothy had said that all his ‘friends’ didn’t really like him, so he didn’t really like them. He didn’t even ‘love’ them or ‘adore’ them, as Dorothy claimed they loved and adored him. What he did like, though—what he had always liked, and it was this that really hurt him as he found it being blown away—was the sort of golden mist that enveloped him whenever he was in their company. A golden mist that seemed to emanate from their houses, their paintings, their jewels, their clothes, their porcelain, their silver, their arrogance, their carelessness, their thoughtless, charming, generous brutality; and a golden mist he had first become aware of at that party they had given for him on board ship, the night the Chateaubriand went down. It was the mist, he told himself, of western civilisation; of Mozart and Shakespeare, of Schubert and Dante, of Velasquez, Michelangelo , Leonardo and Vermeer. And it was the mist that was thrown up by the sun when it shone upon an earth drenched with the blood of all the millions who had died in the name of western civilisation; the victims of the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the two World Wars and the Holocaust; not to mention all the other greater and lesser wars, battles, pogroms and massacres throughout history.
    He, a Jewish poet, had stood in that mist for years and declared it, in the final analysis, to be good. The reason why those most responsible for creating its golden swirls had taken him up. For here was someone who, while potentially perhaps a member of the opposition, and by no means a fool—indeed someone who was fully aware of the horrors that the gods of civilisation fed on and needed to survive—had nevertheless lenthis support to those gods. Now, though, by being so determined to write that foolish, unnecessary and not very interesting article of his, he was, in however feeble a fashion, declaring that mist, and thus by implication its principal manufacturers and distributors, to be bad. He had withdrawn his support for their gods. Well, good, they would withdraw their support for him: ugly, ungrateful little you-know-what.
    At any rate, Alfred supposed that this must be their reasoning. He could think of no other explanation for their behaviour. Moreover, he went on, they were quite right to reason thus. Withdrawing his support he was, in a way. In another way, however: Oh God, he thought, that golden mist, that terrible golden mist that some would dismiss him as a turncoat, a toadie and a lackey for wanting to stand in, was, and he suspected always would be, the greatest love of his life. A love still stronger than his love of ‘the Truth’. That wasn’t, in any case, so much of a love; more, at this stage, a matter of necessity.
    *
    Two days after Alfred had started his eighth draft his car was stolen. He told the police, went for a walk to try and calm himself, and to convince himself that this little incident had nothing to do with the larger drama in which he was involved, and returned home to find the telephone ringing and be told that it certainly was.
    ‘If you want your car,’ a muffled voice told him, ‘go to the corner of boulevard Malesherbes and rue Viète. And let this be a warning to you. We’re not joking. Stick to writing articles about books and music and politics. Otherwise …’
    Feeling faint, and half suspecting what he might find, Alfred walked the five hundred metres from his flat in rue de Phalsbourg and exactly where the voice had told him, saw his car. The paintwork was all scratched. Inside, the upholstery had been ripped, apparently with a razor. And on the driver’s seat, amidstthe ribbons of shredded cloth, there was a pile of human excrement .
    Feeling fainter, Alfred turned away, uncertain what to do, and wanted to stop some