Submission Page 7

  ‘It wasn’t all that long ago. You’re too young to remember, but the father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, he still had connections to the old French far right. He was a drunk and a total philistine, he certainly hadn’t read Drumont or Maurras, but I’m sure he heard people talk about them. They were part of his mental landscape. The daughter doesn’t even know who they are, obviously. At any rate, even if the Muslim wins, I don’t think you’ve got much to worry about. He’s still allied with the Socialists, he can’t just do whatever he wants …’

  ‘Hmm …’ She shook her head, unconvinced. ‘I guess I’m less optimistic than you are. When a Muslim party comes to power, it’s never good for the Jews. Can you think of a time it was?’

  I let this go. I didn’t really know much about history. I hadn’t paid attention at school, and since then I’d never managed to read a history book, at least not all the way through.

  She poured another glass. That was certainly the thing to do, considering – to get slightly drunk. Besides, it was good champagne.

  ‘My brother and sister can attend the French school, and I could go to Tel Aviv University. They’d take my credits. But what am I going to do in Israel? I don’t speak a word of Hebrew. France is my country.’

  Her voice changed, I could tell she was on the edge of tears. ‘I love France,’ she said, in a more and more broken voice, ‘I love … I don’t know … I love the cheese.’

  ‘I have some!’ I bounded to my feet clownishly, trying to defuse the situation, and went to look in the fridge. In point of fact, I had picked up some Saint-Marcellin, some Comté, some Bleu des Causses. I also opened a bottle of white wine, but she didn’t even notice.

  ‘And also … and also, I don’t want us to break up,’ she said, then she started to sob. I went to her and held her in my arms. I couldn’t think what to say. I led her to the bedroom and held her some more. She went on softly crying.

  I woke around four. There was a full moon out, and it shone brightly in the bedroom. Myriam lay on her stomach, in a T-shirt. The boulevard was practically empty. After two or three minutes a Renault Trafic minivan rolled up in front of my block. Two Chinese men got out to smoke a cigarette, looked around, then for no apparent reason climbed back into the minivan and drove off towards Porte d’Italie. I went back to bed and caressed her arse. She pressed herself against me but didn’t wake up.

  I turned her over, spread her thighs and touched her pussy; almost immediately, she was wet, and I slipped inside her. She had always liked this simple position. I lifted her legs so I could go in really deep, and I started to move in and out. People often describe a woman’s pleasure as complex, mysterious; but for me, the workings of my own pleasure were even more unknown. All at once I felt that I could control myself as long as I had to, that I could deliberately hold back the pleasure mounting inside me. My thrusts were smooth, relentless, and after a few minutes she began to moan, then to scream. I kept moving inside her, even after her pussy started to contract around my cock. I took slow, easy breaths – I felt eternal – then she gave a very long groan and I threw myself on her and clasped her in my arms, while she said, ‘My love … my love …’ over and over through her tears.

  Sunday, 22 May

  I woke up again around eight, started the coffee machine, and went back to bed. Myriam’s regular breathing added a slow accompaniment to the discreet gurgle of percolation. Chubby little cumulus clouds drifted across the sky. For me these had always been the clouds of happiness, the kind whose brilliant whiteness only heightens the blue of the sky, the kind children draw when they represent an ideal cottage, with a smoking chimney, a lawn and flowers. I don’t know quite why I turned on iTélé once I’d poured my first cup of coffee. The sound was up too loud, and it took me a second to find the remote so I could mute it. But it was too late, she’d already woken up. She came out into the living room, still in her T-shirt, and curled up on the sofa. Our brief moment of peace was over. I unmuted the sound. Overnight, the news had spread online about the secret negotiations between the Socialists and the Muslim Brotherhood. On every channel, from iTélé to BFM to LCI, it was all anyone was talking about. Manuel Valls had yet to comment, but Ben Abbes was going to hold a press conference at eleven.

  When you saw this round, twinkling-eyed man, so mischievous with members of the press, it was easy to forget that he’d been one of youngest students ever admitted to the École Polytechnique, or that he’d been a classmate of Laurent Wauquiez at the École Nationale d’Administration in 2001, the year the students honoured Nelson Mandela as their class patron. Ben Abbes had the kindly look of a neighbourhood grocer – which is just what his father had been, a Tunisian neighbourhood grocer, although his shop was on a fashionable street in Neuilly-sur-Seine, not the Eighteenth Arrondissement, much less the ghettos of Bezons or Argenteuil.

  No one, Ben Abbes reminded us, had benefitted from our republican meritocracy more than he had. He had no wish to undermine a system to which he owed everything, even the supreme honour of asking the French people for their vote. He recalled doing his homework in the little flat over the family shop. He briefly invoked the memory of his father, with just the right touch of emotion. I thought he was absolutely excellent.

  But, he went on, everyone had to admit that times had changed. More and more families – whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim – wanted their children’s education to go beyond the mere transmission of knowledge, to include spiritual instruction in their own traditions. This return to religion was deep, it crossed sectarian lines, and state education could no longer afford to ignore it. It was time to broaden the idea of republican schooling, to bring it into harmony with the great spiritual traditions – Muslim, Christian or Jewish – of our country.

  He spoke for ten minutes, in a smooth and purring voice, then he took questions. I’d often noticed how even the most tenacious, aggressive reporters went soft in the presence of Ben Abbes, as if hypnotised. And yet it seemed to me there were some tough questions to be asked – about the ban on co-education, for example, or the fact that teachers would have to convert to Islam. But wasn’t that how it already was with Catholics? Did you have to be baptised to teach in a Christian school? On reflection, I realised I didn’t know the first thing about it. By the end of the press conference, I felt that I was right where the Muslim candidate wanted me, in a state of free-floating doubt. Not only did none of this sound scary, none of it sounded especially new.

  Marine Le Pen counter-attacked at twelve thirty. Brisk and blow-dried, shot from below, with the Hôtel de Ville rising up behind her, she was almost beautiful. This was quite a contrast to her earlier appearances. During the 2017 campaign, the National Front candidate had been persuaded that a woman had to look like Angela Merkel to win the presidency, and she did all she could to match the bristling respectability of the German chancellor, right down to copying the cut of her suits. But on this May afternoon, Le Pen seemed to have recovered a flamboyance, a revolutionary elan, that recalled the origins of the movement. For a while there’d been rumours that Renaud Camus was writing some of her speeches, under the direction of Florian Phillipot. I don’t know whether there was anything to that; in any case, her public speaking had certainly improved. Right away I was struck by the republican, even anticlerical, tenor of her remarks. Skipping the usual reference to Jules Ferry and the secularist reforms of the 1880s, she went all the way back to Condorcet and the historic speech he made before the Legislative Assembly in 1792, when he evoked the ancient Egyptians and Indians ‘among whom the human spirit made such progress, and who fell back into the most brutal and shameful ignorance the moment that religious power assumed the right to educate men’.

  ‘I thought she was a Catholic,’ Myriam said.

  ‘She may be, but not her voters. The National Front never got a foothold with the Catholics – they care too much about welfare and the Third World. So she’s adapting.’

  She looked at her watch and stretched, wearily. ‘I have to go, Franço
is. I told my parents I’d be back in time for lunch.’

  ‘They know you’re here?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. They won’t be worried – it’s just that they won’t eat until I get there.’

  I’d visited her parents once, when we were just starting to go out. They lived in a house in the Cité des Fleurs, behind the Brochant metro. There was a garage and a toolshed, it looked like something you might find in a little village in the provinces somewhere, anywhere but in Paris. I remember we had dinner in the garden, the daffodils were in bloom. Her family had been very kind to me, friendly and welcoming, and without treating me as special in any way, which was even better. As her father was uncorking a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, it suddenly occurred to me that for the last twenty years Myriam had had dinner with her parents every night, that she helped her little brother with his homework, that she took her little sister shopping for clothes. They were a tribe, a close-knit family tribe, and as I thought back on my own life, it was so unlike anything I’d ever known that I almost broke down in sobs.

  I hit MUTE. Marine Le Pen gestured more vigorously. She shook her fist, she threw open her arms. Obviously Myriam would go with her parents to Israel. There was nothing else she could do.

  ‘I really hope I come back soon,’ she said, as if she’d read my mind. ‘I’m just going to wait a few months, till things calm down in France.’ I found her optimism slightly overdone, but I kept this to myself.

  She stepped into her skirt. ‘With everything that’s going on now, it’s obvious the National Front’s going to win. That’s all we’ll talk about at lunch. “We told you so, sweetheart.” Still, they’re good people, they only want what’s best for me.’

  ‘Yes, they are good people. Truly good people.’

  ‘But what about you? What will you do? What do you think’s going to happen at the university?’

  We were standing at the door. I realised that I hadn’t the slightest idea, and also that I didn’t give a fuck. I kissed her softly on the lips, and said, ‘There is no Israel for me.’ Not a deep thought; but that’s how it was. She disappeared into the lift.

  There followed an interval of, I suppose, several hours. The sun was setting between the apartment towers by the time I fully regained awareness of myself, of my circumstances, of everything. My mind had wandered in dark and troubled zones. I felt unutterably sad. Those sentences from En ménage kept coming back to me, piercing me, and I was painfully aware that I hadn’t even suggested that Myriam come and live with me, that we move in together, but I knew that wasn’t the real problem. Her parents were prepared to rent her an apartment, and mine was just a one-bedroom – a big one-bedroom, but still. Living together would have spelled the end of all sexual desire between us, and we were still too young to survive that as a couple.

  In the old days, people lived as families, that is to say, they reproduced, slogged through a few more years, long enough to see their children reach adulthood, then went to meet their Maker. The reasonable thing nowadays was for people to wait until they were closer to fifty or sixty and then move in together, when the one thing their ageing, aching bodies craved was a familiar touch, reassuring and chaste, and when the delights of regional cuisine, as celebrated every Sunday on Les Escapades de Petitrenaud, took precedence over all other pleasures. For a while I sat there toying with the idea of writing an article for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies in which I’d cite the proliferation of hit TV shows devoted to cooking, and in particular to regional cuisine, to argue that, after the long tyranny of modernity, Huysmans’ clear-eyed conclusions had come round again, and were more relevant than ever. Then I realised that I no longer had the energy or desire to write an article, even for a publication as under the radar as the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies. I also realised, with a kind of incredulous stupefaction, that the TV was still on, still tuned to iTélé. I turned on the sound: Marine Le Pen had given her speech hours ago, but all the pundits were still talking about it. She had called for a giant march on the Champs-Élysées. She had no intention of requesting a permit from the police, and if the authorities tried to interfere, she warned, the march would take place ‘by any means necessary’. She’d concluded with a quotation from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the one from 1793: ‘When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people, and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.’ Naturally, the word insurrection had provoked a fair amount of comment. It even drew François Hollande out of his years of silence. At the end of his second disastrous administration – having been re-elected only by pandering shamelessly to the National Front – the departing president had gone quiet, and the media seemed to have forgotten all about him. When he appeared on the steps of the Élysée, in front of the nine or ten journalists who showed up, and called himself the ‘last bastion of the republican order’, there was brief but clearly audible laughter. Ten minutes later, the prime minister issued his own response. Purple-faced, veins bulging in his forehead, he looked apoplectic, and he warned that those who tested the limits of democratic legality would be dealt with as criminals. In the end, the only one who kept his cool was Ben Abbes: he defended the right of free assembly and challenged Le Pen to a debate on secularism – which the pundits generally agreed was a clever move, since it was nearly impossible for her to say yes. So he emerged, at no special cost to himself, as the voice of moderation and dialogue.

  In the end I got bored and wound up flipping back and forth between reality shows on obesity, then I turned off the TV. The idea that political history could play any part in my own life was still disconcerting, and slightly repellent. All the same, I realised – I’d known for years – that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable. For a long time France, like all the other countries of Western Europe, had been drifting towards civil war. That much was obvious. But until a few days before, I was still convinced that the vast majority of French people would always be resigned and apathetic – no doubt because I was more or less resigned and apathetic myself. I’d been wrong.

  Myriam didn’t call until Tuesday evening, a little past eleven; her voice was bright and full of confidence in the future. She was sure things in France would sort themselves out before long. I had my doubts. She’d even managed to persuade herself that Nicolas Sarkozy would return to politics, and be greeted as a saviour. I didn’t have the heart to disabuse her, but that struck me as improbable in the extreme. I had the sense that Sarkozy was finished with politics, that after 2017 he’d moved on.

  Her flight was early the next morning, so there’d be no time to see each other before she left; she had so much to do – she had to pack, for starters. It wasn’t easy to cram your whole life into thirty kilos of luggage. This was as I expected, but still I felt a pang as I put down the phone. I knew that now I’d be truly alone.

  Wednesday, 25 May

  Yet I felt almost cheerful the next morning as I took the metro to my class. The events of the last few days, even Myriam’s leaving, seemed like a bad dream, a mistake that would be corrected soon enough. So I was taken aback when I got to the entrance of the building where my class was held, in the rue de Santeuil, and found that the gate was locked. The guards normally opened up at 7.45. Several students, including a few I recognised as my second years, stood waiting at the entrance.

  It wasn’t until almost eight thirty that a guard emerged from the administration building, stood in front of the gate, and informed us that the university was closed today, and would be closed until further notice. There was nothing more he could tell us, we should go home and wait to be ‘contacted individually’. The guard was a black gentleman, Senegalese if I remembered right, whom I’d known for years and liked. As I was leaving, he took me by the arm and told me that, judging by the rumours
among the staff, things were bad, really bad – he’d be extremely surprised if the university reopened in the next few weeks.

  Maybe Marie-Françoise would know what was going on. I tried to reach her several times that morning, without success. Around one thirty I gave up and turned on iTélé. A lot of protesters had already shown up for the National Front march. Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries were thronged. According to the organisers there were two million people – the police said three hundred thousand. Either way, I’d never seen such a crowd.

  A giant, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud hovered over the north of Paris, all the way from the Sacré-Coeur to the Opéra, its sides a dark sooty grey. I looked over at the TV, where the huge crowd continued to gather, then I looked back at the sky. The storm cloud seemed to be moving slowly south. If it burst over the Tuileries, the demonstration would be seriously disrupted.