Michel Houellebecq - Submission

‘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.

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.

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’.