Submission (7 page)

‘You think the Socialists will give in?’

‘They haven’t got much choice. If they don’t reach an agreement, they don’t stand a chance against the National Front. Even if they do reach an agreement, the National Front could still win. You’ve seen the polls. Suppose Copé refuses to vote for either party, even so, eighty-five per cent of the centre right will vote National Front. It’s going to be close, extremely close – fifty–fifty, really.

‘So their only chance is to adopt a two-tier education system. They’ll probably model it on the polygamy agreement, which will maintain civil marriage as a union between two people, men or women, but will also recognise Muslim marriage – and ultimately polygamy – even though it isn’t administered by the state, and will come with the same benefits and tax exemptions.’

‘Are you sure? That sounds so drastic …’

‘Quite sure. It’s all been settled. And it is exactly in line with the theory of minority sharia, which the Muslim Brotherhood has always embraced. So they could do something similar with education. Public education would still be available to everyone – though with vastly reduced funding. The national budget would be slashed by two-thirds at least, and this time the teachers wouldn’t be able to stop it. In the current economic climate, any budget cut is bound to play well at the polls. At the same time we’d have a parallel system of Muslim charter schools. They’d have all the same accreditations as the state schools – with the difference that they could receive private funding. Obviously, the state schools would soon become second class. Parents who cared at all about their children’s future would sign them up for a Muslim education.’

‘The same goes for the universities,’ said his wife. ‘The Sorbonne would be a huge coup – Saudi Arabia is ready with an almost unlimited endowment. We’re going to be one of the richest universities in the world.’

‘And Rediger will be named president?’ I asked her, remembering our previous conversation.

‘Oh yes. It’s even more certain than before. For the last twenty years he has been unwaveringly pro-Muslim.’

‘He even converted, if memory serves,’ said her husband.

I drained my glass and he refilled it. That really would be a change.

‘I imagine all of this must be top secret …’ I said, after I’d taken a moment to think it over. ‘I don’t quite see why you’re telling me.’

‘Ordinarily, I’d keep it to myself. But it’s already been leaked. That’s what worries us. I could read everything I just told you, and more, on certain blogs maintained by the far right. We’ve been infiltrated.’ He shook his head, as if incredulous. ‘They couldn’t have found out more if they’d bugged the most secure offices of the Ministry of the Interior. The information is explosive, but they haven’t done anything with it. That’s the worst of it. They haven’t gone to the press. They haven’t made any public announcements. They’re just sitting on it. The situation is unprecedented – and really quite alarming.’

I wanted to hear a little bit more about the nativist movement, but it was clear that he’d said all he was going to say. I had a colleague, I told him, who had belonged to a nativist organisation, then broke with them completely. ‘Yes, that’s what they all say,’ he sneered. When I tried to ask whether some of these groups were armed, he sipped his port, then grumbled, ‘We’ve heard talk of funding from Russian oligarchs – but nothing’s been confirmed.’ The subject was closed. I left a few minutes later.

Thursday, 19 May

The next day I went by the university, even though I had nothing to do there, and I called Lempereur’s office. According to my calculations, he would have just got out of his class. He picked up, and I asked him if he wanted to get a drink. He didn’t care for the cafes near the university, and he suggested we meet at Delmas, in Place de la Contrescarpe.

As I walked up the rue Mouffetard, I thought more about what I’d heard from Marie-Françoise’s husband. Was it possible my young colleague knew more than he’d told me? Was he still involved in the movement?

With its leather club chairs, dark floors and red curtains, Delmas was exactly his kind of place. He would never have set foot in the cafe across the street, the Contrescarpe, with its annoying fake bookshelves. He was a man of taste. He ordered a glass of champagne, I got a Leffe, and suddenly, something in me gave way. I was sick of my own subtlety and moderation. I got straight to the point, without even waiting till we had our drinks. ‘The political situation seems very unstable. Tell me honestly, what would you do in my shoes?’

Although he smiled at my candour, he answered just as bluntly: ‘First off, I’d open a new bank account.’

‘A bank account – why?’ It came out almost as a yelp, I must have been even more on edge than I’d thought. The waiter came back with our drinks. Lempereur paused before he answered. ‘It’s not clear that the recent actions of the Socialist Party will go down well with their supporters …’ and all of a sudden I realised that he
knew
, that he was still deep in the movement, maybe even one of its leaders: he knew all about the secret leaks. For all I knew, he was the one who decided to keep them secret.

‘Under the circumstances,’ he went on softly, ‘the National Front may well win the run-off. If they do, their supporters will force them to pull France out of the EU, and abandon the euro. It may turn out to be a very good thing for the economy, but in the short term we’ll see some serious convulsions in the markets. It’s not clear that French banks, even the biggest ones, could hang on. So I’d suggest you open an account with a foreign bank – ideally an English one, like Barclays or HSBC.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s not nothing. Do you have a place in the country where you can go to ground?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Even so, I’d urge you to take off, sooner rather than later. Find a little hotel somewhere. Didn’t you say you lived in Chinatown? I doubt we’ll see any looting or rioting near you, but all the same, I’d have a holiday and wait for things to settle down.’

‘I’d feel kind of like a rat abandoning ship.’

‘Rats are intelligent mammals,’ he answered calmly, almost with amusement. ‘They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours.’

‘The academic year isn’t over. I still have two weeks of teaching.’

‘The academic year!’ Now he was grinning, almost laughing. ‘It’s true that all sorts of things could happen, and nobody knows just what, but I do doubt we’ll make it to the end of the academic year!’

Now he fell silent and sipped his champagne, and I knew I’d get nothing more out of him. A slightly contemptuous smile played over his lips, which was odd, since I’d have said he was almost starting to be nice to me. I ordered another beer, this time raspberry-flavoured. I had no desire to go home. There was nothing and no one waiting for me there. I wondered whether Lempereur had a partner, or at least a girlfriend. Probably. He was a kind of
éminence grise
, a political leader, in a clandestine movement. Everyone knows there are girls who go for that kind of thing. There are girls who go for Huysmanists, for that matter. I once met a girl – a pretty, attractive girl – who told me she fantasised about Jean-François Copé. It took me several days to get over it. Really, with girls today, all bets are off.

Friday, 20 May

The next day I opened an account at the Barclays bank in the avenue des Gobelins. The funds would be transferred in just one working day, the bank clerk informed me. A few minutes later I had a Visa, very much to my surprise.

I decided to walk home. I had filled out the paperwork mechanically, on autopilot, and now I needed to think. Crossing Place d’Italie, I was overcome by the feeling that everything could disappear. That petite black woman with the curly hair and the tight jeans, waiting for the 21 bus, could disappear; she
would
disappear, or at least she’d be in for some serious re-education. There were the usual fund-raisers in front of the Italie 2 shopping centre – today they were Greenpeace – and they would disappear, too. I blinked as a bearded young man with long brown hair came up to me holding his clipboard, and it was as if he were already gone. I passed by without seeing him and went through the glass doors that led to the ground floor of the mall.

Inside, the results were more mixed. The Bricorama would stay, but the Jennyfer’s days were numbered. It had nothing to offer the good Muslim tween. Secret Stories, which advertised name-brand lingerie at discount prices, had nothing to worry about: the same kind of shops were doing fine in the malls of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Neither, for that matter, did Chantal Thomass or La Perla. Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicoloured lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favour of clothes that were loose and shapeless. All of a sudden, as I stood in front of the Rapid’Jus (whose concoctions kept getting more and more complicated: they had coconut–passion fruit–guava, mango–lychee–guarana, and a dozen other flavors, all with bewildering vitamin ingredients), I thought of Bruno Deslandes. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. I hadn’t thought of him, either. We’d been doctoral students together, we’d even been what you might call friendly. He worked on Laforgue. His dissertation had received a pass without distinction, and soon afterwards he’d got a job as a tax inspector, then married a girl named Annelise, whom he’d probably met at some student function. She worked in the marketing department of a mobile network, she made much more than he did, but he had job security, as they say. They’d bought a house on a plot of land in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, and they already had two kids, a boy and a girl. He was the only one on our course who’d ended up with a normal family life. The others drifted around, with a little online dating here, a little speed dating there, and a lot of solitude in between. I’d bumped into Bruno on the commuter train, and he’d invited me over the following Friday for a barbecue. It was late June, he had a garden, he could have people over for barbecues. There would be a few neighbours but, he cautioned me, ‘nobody from university’.

Their mistake, I realised as soon as I set foot in his garden and said hello to his wife, was choosing a Friday night. She’d been working all day and was exhausted, plus she’d been watching too many reruns of
Come Dine with Me
on Channel M6 and had planned a menu that was much too ambitious. The morel soufflé was a lost cause, but just when it became clear that even the guacamole was ruined and I thought she was going to break down in sobs, her three-year-old son started screaming at Bruno, who’d got shit-faced as soon as the first guests arrived and couldn’t manage to turn the sausages on the grill, so I helped him out. From the depths of her despair she gave me a look of profound gratitude. It was more complicated than I’d thought, barbecuing: before I knew it, the lamb chops were covered in a film of charred fat, blackish and probably carcinogenic, the flames were leaping higher and higher but I didn’t have any idea what to do, if I fiddled with the thing the bottle of butane could explode, we were alone before the mound of charred meat, and the other guests were emptying the bottles of rosé, oblivious. I was relieved to see the storm clouds gathering overhead. When we felt the first drops, wind-driven and icy, we beat a hasty retreat to the living room, where the barbecue turned into a cold buffet. As she sank down into her sofa, glaring at the tabbouleh, I thought about Annelise’s life – and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether ‘stylish’ or ‘sexy’, most likely ‘stylish’ in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner – he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known – had to have known – that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.

I was one of the last to leave. I even helped Annelise clear up. I had no intention of trying anything with her – which would have been possible. In her situation, anything was possible. I just wanted her to feel a sense of solidarity: solidarity in vain.

Bruno and Annelise must be divorced by now. That’s how it goes nowadays. A century ago, in Huysmans’ time, they would have stayed together, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so unhappy after all. When I got home I poured myself a big glass of wine and plunged back into
En ménage
. I remembered it as one of Huysmans’ best books, and from the first page, even after twenty years, I found my pleasure in reading it was miraculously intact. Never, perhaps, had the tepid happiness of an old couple been so lovingly described: ‘André and Jeanne soon felt nothing but blessed tenderness, maternal satisfaction, at sharing the same bed, at simply lying close together and talking before they turned back to back and went to sleep.’ It was beautiful, but was it realistic? Was it a viable prospect today? Clearly, it was connected with the pleasures of the table: ‘Gourmandise entered their lives as a new interest, brought on by their growing indifference to the flesh, like the passion of priests who, deprived of carnal joys, quiver before delicate viands and old wines.’ Certainly, in an era when a wife bought and peeled the vegetables herself, trimmed the meat and spent hours simmering the stew, a tender and nurturing relationship could take root; the evolution of comestible conditions had caused us to forget this feeling, which, in any case, as Huysmans frankly admits, is a weak substitute for the pleasures of the flesh. In his own life, he never set up house with one of these ‘good little cooks’ whom Baudelaire considered, along with whores, the only kind of wife a writer should have – an especially sensible observation when you consider that a whore can always turn herself into a good little cook over time, that this is even her secret desire, her natural bent. Instead, after a period of ‘debauchery’ (these things being relative), Huysmans turned to the monastic life, and that’s where he and I parted ways. I picked up
En route
, tried to read a few pages, then went back to
En ménage
. I was almost completely lacking in spiritual fibre, which was a shame since the monastic life still existed, unchanged over the centuries. As for the good little cooks, where were they now? In Huysmans’ day they still existed, certainly, but because he moved in literary circles he never met them. The university wasn’t much better, to tell the truth. Take Myriam, for example. Could she turn herself into a good little cook over the years? I was pondering the question when my mobile phone rang, and oddly enough it was her. I stammered in surprise, I’d never actually expected her to call. I looked over at the alarm clock, it was already 6 p.m. I’d been so absorbed in my reading, I’d forgotten to eat. On the other hand, I also noticed that I’d practically finished my second bottle of wine.