Submission (14 page)

I certainly hadn’t imagined my mother leading a vibrant social life, attending conferences on pre-Columbian civilisation or making the rounds of the local Romanesque churches with other women her age. Even so, I had no idea she was so completely alone. They’d probably tried to get in touch with my father, too, and he must have left the letters unanswered. In spite of everything, it bothered me to think of her being buried in a potter’s field (this, the Internet informed me, was the former name for the common division of the municipal cemetery), and I wondered what had become of her French bulldog (humane society? euthanasia by injection?).

Next I set aside the payment-due notices and the other bills. Those were easy. All I had to do was put each one in the appropriate file in order to isolate the correspondence with my two essential interlocutors, those pillars of a man’s life: my insurer and the tax bureau. I didn’t have the courage to face that right away, and I decided to have a look around Paris – well, maybe not Paris, that would be too much on my first day back. I’d start off with a stroll around the neighbourhood.

As I pushed the lift button, it occurred to me that I hadn’t received any post from the university. I went back and checked my bank statements: my pay cheque had been direct-deposited, as usual, at the end of June. My job status was just as uncertain as ever.

The change in the political regime had left no visible mark on the neighbourhood. Tight knots of Chinese men still gathered in front of the OTB, racing forms in hand. Others hurried along pushing handcarts full of rice noodles, soy sauce, mangos. Nothing, not even a Muslim government, could curb their incessant activity – Muslim proselytising would dissolve without a trace, like the Christian message before it, in the vast ocean of their civilisation.

I wandered through Chinatown for an hour or more. The parish of Saint-Hippolyte was still offering its introductory courses in Mandarin, and there were the flyers for the ‘Asian Fever’ club nights in Maisons-Alfort. I couldn’t find any visible signs of change other than the disappearance of the kosher section from the Géant Casino. Mass retail was nothing if not opportunistic.

Things were different in Italie 2. As I’d predicted, the Jennyfer store had disappeared, replaced by a kind of organic Provençal boutique offering essential oils, olive oil and honey harvested from the
garrigue
. Less explicably, no doubt for strictly economic reasons, the L’Homme Moderne franchise, located in a more or less dead zone of the second floor, had also closed its doors. It had yet to be replaced. The biggest change, a subtle one, was in the shoppers themselves. Like all shopping centres – though naturally, in a much less spectacular way than those in La Défense or Les Halles – Italie 2 had always attracted a fair amount of riff-raff. They’d completely disappeared. Also, women’s clothing had been transformed. I felt the change at once, but I couldn’t put it into words. The number of Muslim veils had increased only slightly – it wasn’t that. I spent almost an hour walking around before it hit me: all the women were wearing trousers. To visualise a woman’s thighs and to mentally reconstruct her pussy where the thighs intersect – a process whose power of excitation is directly proportional to the length of bare leg – was so involuntary and mechanical with me, so genetic you might say, that it took me a while to notice what was missing: no more dresses or skirts. Women were wearing a new garment, a kind of long cotton smock, ending at mid-thigh, which eliminated any objective interest in the tight trousers that some women might potentially wear; as for shorts, these were obviously out of the question. The contemplation of women’s arses, that small, dreamy consolation, had also become impossible. A transformation was indeed under way. There’d been a fundamental shift. Several hours of channel surfing revealed no further changes, but then, soft-core porn had gone out of fashion years before.

It was two weeks before I received the letter from Paris III. According to the new statutes of the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne, I was no longer permitted to teach. Robert Rediger, the new president of the university, had signed the letter himself. He expressed his profound regret and assured me that this was no reflection on the quality of my scholarship. I was, of course, welcome to pursue my career in a secular university. If, however, I preferred to retire, the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne could offer me a pension, effective immediately, at a starting monthly rate of 3,472 euros, to be adjusted for inflation. I was invited to schedule a meeting with HR in order to fill out the necessary paperwork.

I reread the letter three times in disbelief. It was, practically to the euro, what I’d have got if I had retired at sixty-five, at the end of a full career. They really were willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media, under rubrics such as ‘tribune’ or ‘points of view’; nowadays these had become a private club. Even if all the university teachers in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn’t found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

From outside, nothing about the university looked different, except for the gilded star and crescent above the doors, next to the big inscription ‘Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III’. Inside the administrative buildings, the transformations were more visible. In the waiting room, one was welcomed by a photograph of pilgrims making their way around the Kaaba, and the offices were decorated with posters bearing hand-lettered verses from the Koran. The secretaries had changed, I didn’t recognise any of them, and they all wore veils. One of them gave me a pension application. Its simplicity was disconcerting. I filled it out right there, on the corner of a table, signed it and gave it back. As I walked out into the courtyard, I realised that my academic career had just ended in a matter of minutes.

When I got to the Censier metro I stopped at the top of the stairs, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t go straight home as if nothing had happened. The stalls of the Mouffetard market had just opened. I was wandering along the edges of the charcuterie d’Auvergne, contemplating the flavoured saucissons (blue cheese, pistachio, hazelnut) without really seeing them, when I spotted Steve coming up the street. He saw me at the same time, and it looked as if he wanted to avoid me, but it was too late, I was already walking towards him.

As I expected, he had accepted a position at the new university: he was teaching a course on Rimbaud. He clearly found the situation embarrassing, and he added, unprompted, that the new administration hadn’t interfered at all with the content of his course. That is to say, Rimbaud’s conversion to Islam was presented as a matter of historical fact – though this was controversial, to say the least – but when it came to analysing the poems, he really had been left alone, and that’s what counted. The longer I listened without any sign of indignation, the more he relaxed, and in the end he invited me for coffee.

‘It took me a long time to make up my mind,’ he said, once he’d ordered a Muscadet. I nodded, full of warmth and understanding; I figured it had taken him ten minutes, tops. ‘But the salary was pretty attractive …’

‘Even the pension isn’t bad.’

‘The salary’s a lot better.’

‘How much better?’

‘Three times more.’

Ten thousand euros a month for a mediocre teacher no one had ever heard of who couldn’t produce a paper worthy of the name – they really did have deep pockets. Oxford had slipped through their fingers; the Qataris had swooped in at the last minute with a higher bid, so they’d decided to double down on the Sorbonne. They’d even bought up flats in the Fifth and Sixth Arondissements for faculty housing. He’d been given a very attractive two-bedroom in the rue du Dragon for next to nothing.

‘I think they really wanted to keep you,’ he added, ‘but they didn’t know where you were. To be honest, they actually asked me to help them track you down; I had to tell them I only saw you at work.’

A few minutes later, he walked me to the metro. Just as I was about to enter the station, I asked, ‘What about the girls?’ He grinned. ‘Obviously, that’s all changed. I guess you could say things are organised differently now. I got married,’ he added, rather brusquely. Then he elaborated: ‘To one of my students.’

‘They arranged that for you, too?’

‘Not exactly. Let’s just say they don’t discourage the possibilities of contact with female students. I’m getting another wife next month.’ With that he headed off towards the rue de Mirbel, leaving me open-mouthed at the top of the stairs.

I stood there for several minutes and then finally decided to go home. When I reached the platform, I saw that the next train to Mairie d’Ivry was leaving in seven minutes. A train pulled into the station, but it was going to Villejuif.

I was
in my prime
. I didn’t suffer from any lethal illness. The health problems that regularly assailed me were painful, but they were minor. I had a good thirty or even forty years before I reached that dark zone where all illnesses are basically fatal, where nearly every illness entails an
end-of-life
discussion. I had no friends, that was true, but when did I ever? Besides, if you really thought about it, what was the point of having friends? Once you reach a certain stage of physical decline, the only relationship that really, clearly makes sense is marriage (the bodies blend together, to a degree, and produce a new organism, at least if you believe Plato). That stage was well on its way. I had maybe ten years, probably less, before the decline grew visible and I could no longer be described as
still young
. As for my marital prospects, clearly, I was off to a bad start. Over the passing weeks, Myriam’s emails had become more infrequent, and shorter. Lately she had given up the salutation ‘Dearest’ and replaced it with a neutral ‘François’. It was only a matter of weeks, I thought, before she, too, would announce that she had
met someone
. The meeting had already taken place, that much I knew. I don’t know exactly how I knew, but something in her choice of words, in the diminishing number of her smiley faces and hearts, left no room for doubt. She just didn’t have the courage to tell me. She was pulling away from me, it was as simple as that. She was making a new life for herself in Israel – what did I expect? She was a lovely girl, intelligent and kind, extremely attractive. Yes, what did I expect? For Israel, at any rate, she showed the same unflagging enthusiasm. ‘It’s hard, but I know why I’m here,’ she wrote. Obviously, that was more than I could say.

Although it took a few weeks to sink in, the end of my academic career had deprived me of all contact with female students. What was I supposed to do? Sign on to a dating site like Meetic, as so many had done before me? I was a man of culture. I had a certain status. As I’ve said, I was
in my prime
; and if, after several weeks of strained conversation, in which one or two bursts of enthusiasm on whatever subject – say, Beethoven’s late quartets – covered up my growing, generalised ennui and held out the promise of magical moments or of a complicity based on shared wonder and laughter; if after several weeks I actually met up with one of my numerous female analogues, what would come of it? Erectile dysfunction on one side, vaginal dryness on the other. I’d just as soon avoid it.

I had made only very occasional forays onto escort sites, usually during the summer months as a sort of stopgap between one student and the next. A quick glance online was enough to assure me that these sites were alive and well under the new Islamic regime. I spent a few weeks going back and forth, examining the different profiles, printing out certain ones so I could reread them. (Escort sites were something like restaurant guides, whose remarkable flights of lyricism evoked pleasures decidedly superior to the dishes one actually tasted.) Eventually I decided on Nadia, a girl of Tunisian extraction. It was arousing, in a way, to pick a Muslim, given the overall political situation.

But Nadia, I learned, had been altogether untouched by her generation’s overwhelming return to Islam. The daughter of a radiologist, she’d lived in good neighbourhoods since she was a girl and had never considered wearing the veil. She was doing her master’s degree in literature – she could have been one of my old students, but no, she was at Paris-Diderot. Sexually, she was conscientious, but she assumed each new position like a robot. You could tell she wasn’t really there. She only perked up, vaguely, when we got to sodomy. She had a tight little arse, but for some reason I didn’t experience any pleasure, I felt as if I could spend hours fucking it without the slightest fatigue or joy. As she started to whimper, it seemed to me that she was afraid of enjoying herself, as if it might lead to actual feelings. She quickly turned round and finished me off in her mouth.

Before I left, we sat and talked for a few more minutes on her folding sofa, long enough to use up the hour I’d paid for. She was intelligent, but rather conventional. Whether we were discussing the election of Ben Abbes or Third World debt, her opinions were all the generally approved ones. Her studio was tasteful and impeccably furnished. I could tell she behaved sensibly, that far from spending what she made on expensive clothes, she put most of it aside. Indeed, she confirmed that in just four years – she’d started when she was eighteen – she had made enough to buy the studio where she worked. She planned to keep at it long enough to complete her studies, then she was thinking of a career in broadcasting.

A few days later I went to see Slutty Babeth, whose site was full of enthusiastic testimonials, and who described herself as ‘hot and up for anything’. Indeed, she welcomed me into her pretty, slightly old-fashioned one-bedroom wearing nothing but a cut-out bra and a crotchless thong. She had long blonde hair and an open, almost angelic face. She, too, had a taste for sodomy, but she didn’t try to hide it. After an hour, I still hadn’t come, and she remarked that I was really resistant. It was the same as before: even though I never lost my erection, I never experienced any pleasure either. She asked me to come on her breasts; I did. Spreading the semen over her chest, she told me that she loved to be covered in cum. She was a regular participant in gang bangs, usually held in swingers’ clubs, sometimes in car parks or other public places. Although she charged a nominal fee – fifty euros per person – she made a lot at these parties, since she invited as many as forty or fifty men, who took turns in all three orifices before they came on her. She promised to let me know next time she organised a gang bang. I thanked her. The truth was, I wasn’t interested, but she seemed like a nice person.