Submission (20 page)

He was right, of course. In the ‘art of living’ alone, there had been a serious falling-off. As Rediger offered me a baklava, which I accepted, I thought of a book I had read some years before, on the history of brothels. The frontispiece featured a brochure from a Parisian brothel of the belle époque. It came as a profound shock when I realised that some of the sexual specialities offered by ‘Mademoiselle Hortense’ were completely unknown to me. I had no idea what a ‘voyage through the yellow land’ or a ‘Russian imperial soap’ could possibly mean. Certain sexual practices had vanished from human memory, in one century – not unlike certain forms of skilled labour, such as cobbling or bell-ringing. How could anyone argue that Europe wasn’t in decline?

‘That Europe, which was the summit of human civilisation, committed suicide in a matter of decades.’ Rediger’s voice was sad. He’d left all the overhead lights off, the only illumination came from the lamp on his desk. ‘Throughout Europe there were anarchist and nihilist movements, calls for violence, the denial of moral law. And then a few years later it all came to an end with the unjustifiable madness of the First World War. Freud was not wrong, and neither was Thomas Mann: if France and Germany, the two most advanced, civilised nations in the world, could unleash this senseless slaughter, then Europe was dead. I spent that last night at the Métropole, until it closed. I walked all the way home, halfway across the city, past the EU compound, that gloomy fortress in the slums. The next day I went to see an imam in Zaventem. And the day after that – Easter Monday – in front of a handful witnesses, I spoke the ritual words and converted to Islam.’

I wasn’t sure I agreed about the crucial importance of the First World War; it had been an inexcusable slaughter, but the War of 1870 had been fairly absurd, too, at least according to Huysmans’ description, and had already seriously eroded patriotic feeling of all kinds. Nations were a murderous absurdity, and after 1870 anyone paying attention had probably figured this out. That’s when nihilism, anarchism and all that crap started. As for older civilisations, I wasn’t really up to speed. Night had fallen on the square; the last tourists had already left; here and there a lone street light shed its feeble beams on the steps of the arena. No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilisation, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too? Rome had been a brutal civilisation and very competent militarily – a cruel civilisation, too, where men fought to the death, or fought animals to the death, just to keep the mob entertained. Did the Romans wish they could disappear? Was that their secret flaw? Rediger had certainly read Gibbon, and other writers like that who were just names to me. I didn’t really feel able to keep up my end of the conversation.

‘I really do talk too much,’ he said, with a dismissive wave. He poured me a glass of
boukha
and held out the pastries again. They were excellent, and the contrast with the bitterness of the fig brandy was delicious. ‘It’s late. I should really go,’ I said uncertainly. The truth was I didn’t really want to leave.

‘Wait!’ He got up and went over to his desk. Behind it, the shelves were full of dictionaries and reference books. He came back with a small, illustrated paperback, inscribed to me, entitled
Ten Questions on Islam
.

‘Here I am, proselytising at you for three hours, when I’ve already written a book on the subject. I guess it’s become second nature … But maybe you’ve heard of it?’

‘Yes, it sold very well, didn’t it?’

‘Three million copies,’ he apologised. ‘I seem to have developed an unexpected knack for the middlebrow. It’s awfully schematic, of course …’ he apologised again. ‘But at least it’s a quick read.’

It was 128 pages long, with lots of pictures, mainly Islamic art. He was right, it wouldn’t take me too long. I put it in my backpack.

He poured us two more glasses of
boukha
. Outside the moon had risen high over the terraces of the arena, and now it outshone the street lights. I noticed that the verses from the Koran and the photographs of galaxies, hung amid the wall of vegetation, were lit by small individual lamps.

‘Your house is very beautiful …’

‘It took me years to get here. Believe me, it wasn’t easy.’

He shifted in his chair, and now, for the first time since I’d arrived, I had the feeling that he was actually unbending: he was about to speak from the heart: ‘Obviously, I have no interest in Paulhan – who could be interested in Paulhan? But it
is
a constant source of happiness to think that I live in the house where Dominique Aury wrote
Story of O
– or, at least, in the house of the lover she wrote it for. It’s a fascinating book, don’t you think?’

I completely agreed. In principle,
Story of O
contained everything I didn’t like in a novel: other people’s fantasies disgusted me, and the whole thing was so ostentatiously kitschy – the apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, the
hôtel particulier
in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
Sir Stephen
, all that stuff was shit. All the same, the book had a passion, a vitality that swept everything before it.

‘It’s submission,’ Rediger murmured. ‘The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in
Story of O
, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God. You see,’ he went on, ‘Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world
as such
, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is
dukkha
– unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called “the prince of the world”? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to His laws. In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea to learn about Islam by reading the Koran, unless of course you take the trouble to learn Arabic and read the original text. What I tell people to do instead is listen to the suras read aloud, and repeat them, so you can feel their breath and their force. In any case, Islam is the only religion where it’s forbidden to use any translations in the liturgy, because the Koran is made up entirely of rhythms, rhymes, refrains, assonance. It starts with the idea, the basic idea of all poetry, that sound and sense can be made one, and so can speak the world.’

Once again, he looked apologetic. I think he was half pretending to be embarrassed by his own proselytising, but he must also have been aware of having used this same speech with so many academics. I bet the part about not translating the Koran was what hooked Gignac: those medievalists always hate to see the object of their devotion translated into modern French. But still, even if his arguments were well rehearsed, that didn’t take away from their strength. And look at how he lived: a forty-year-old wife to do the cooking, a fifteen-year-old wife for whatever else … No doubt he had one or two wives in between, but I couldn’t think how to ask. This time I got up to leave for real. I thanked him for a fascinating afternoon, which had turned into a fascinating evening. He told me it had been a great pleasure for him, too – in short, we had a sort of attack of politeness on his doorstep; but we both meant every word we said.

Back at home, after tossing and turning for an hour, I realised I wasn’t going to fall asleep. The only thing I had in the house to drink was a bottle of rum. It wouldn’t mix well with the
boukha
, but I needed it. For the first time in my life I’d started thinking about God, seriously imagining that there could be a kind of Creator of the universe observing everything I did, and my first reaction was uncomplicated, pure and simple fear. Gradually I calmed down, with the help of the alcohol, by telling myself that I was a relatively insignificant individual, that the Creator certainly had better things to do, etc., but the terrifying idea persisted that He might suddenly become aware of my existence, that He would
lay His hand
on me, and that I’d be stricken with cancer of the jaw, for example, like Huysmans. It was a cancer that smokers often got, Freud had it, too. Yes, cancer of the jaw seemed plausible. What would I do once they removed my jaw? How could I go out into the street, go to the supermarket, buy groceries – how could I stand all those looks of pity and disgust? And if I couldn’t buy groceries, who’d buy them for me? The night ahead was long, and I felt dramatically alone. Would I at least have the base-level courage to kill myself? I didn’t even know.

I woke up around six in the morning, seriously hungover. While the coffee was brewing, I went looking for
Ten Questions on Islam
, but after fifteen minutes I had to face the obvious: my backpack wasn’t there. I’d left it at Rediger’s.

After two aspirin, I felt strong enough to consult a dictionary of theatre slang, published in 1907, in which I managed to find two rare words used by Huysmans that might well have been mistaken for neologisms. This was the fun part of my work, fun and relatively easy. The hard part would be the preface. I knew that’s what everyone was waiting for. Sooner or later, I’d have to go back and reread my own dissertation. The thought of those eight hundred pages was terrifying, almost crushing; as far as I remembered, I’d interpreted Huysmans’ work in the light of his future conversion. The author himself encouraged this, and no doubt I let myself be manipulated by him. His own preface to
À rebours
, written twenty years later, was symptomatic. Did
À rebours
really lead, inevitably, to a return to the Church? In the end Huysmans did return to the Church, and clearly meant it.
Les foules de Lourdes
, his last book, was authentically the work of a Christian, in which the misanthropic aesthete and loner overcomes his aversion to religious trinkets and finally allows himself to be carried away by the simple faith of the pilgrims at Lourdes. On the other hand, practically speaking, this return didn’t require much in the way of personal sacrifice: as a lay brother at Ligugé, Huysmans was allowed to live outside the monastery. He had his own housekeeper, who cooked him the bourgeois meals that played such a prominent role in his life. He had his library, and his packets of Dutch tobacco. He did all the offices, and no doubt he enjoyed them: his aesthetic, almost carnal delight in the Catholic liturgy comes through on every page of his later books. As for the metaphysical questions that Rediger had raised the night before, Huysmans never mentions them. The infinite spaces that terrified Pascal, that inspired in Newton and Kant such awe and respect, Huysmans seems never to have noticed. He was a convert, certainly, but not along the lines of Péguy or Claudel. My own dissertation, I now realised, would not be much help to me; and neither would Huysmans’ own protestations of faith.

Around ten that morning, I decided that it was a decent hour to ring the bell at 5 rue des Arènes. The same butler greeted me with a smile, still wearing his white Nehru suit. Rediger was out, he told me, and yes, I had indeed left something behind. Thirty seconds later, he brought me my Adidas bag. Rediger must have put it aside early that morning. He was polite, efficient and discreet. In a sense, I found Rediger even more impressive than his wives. He must have cut through red tape like a flash, with a snap of his fingers.

As I walked back along the rue de Quatrefages, I found myself – entirely by accident – in front of the Paris Mosque. My thoughts turned not to the ultimate Creator of the universe but, crassly enough, to Steve: clearly, they’d lowered their standards. I was no Gignac, but still, if I decided to go back to work, I could be sure they’d welcome me with open arms.

By contrast, my decision to keep going down the rue Daubenton, towards the Sorbonne-Paris III, was entirely conscious. I wasn’t planning to go in, I just wanted to walk past the gates, but I felt a pang of joy when I recognised the Senegalese guard. He was beaming, too. ‘Happy to see you, monsieur! It’s good to have you back!’ I didn’t have the heart to disabuse him, and so when he waved me through, I ventured inside the courtyard. I had spent fifteen years of my life at this school. I was glad to recognise one person, at least. I wondered if he’d had to convert, too, to get his job back. But maybe he already was a Muslim, some Senegalese are – at least I think so.

I spent fifteen minutes strolling under the arcades with their metal beams, slightly surprised by my own nostalgia and aware, at the same time, that the place really was extremely ugly. Those hideous buildings had been constructed during the worst period of modernism, but nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it’s not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there, whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

Gradually, after I’d walked around enough under the metal beams, my nostalgia faded, and I almost stopped thinking altogether. I did think of Myriam, briefly but very painfully, as I went past the snack bar where we first met. Nowadays, of course, all the female students wore veils, mainly white veils, and as they strolled in groups of two or three under the arcades, the place had the look of a convent – at any rate, the overall impression was undeniably studious. I wondered how it must be to see them in the older setting of Sorbonne-Paris IV, whether it felt like going back to the time of Abélard and Héloïse.

Ten Questions on Islam
was indeed a simple book, and very efficiently structured. The first chapter, answering the question ‘What do we believe?’ didn’t have much to teach me. It was basically what Rediger had said the afternoon before about the vastness and harmony of the universe, the perfection of its design, etc. Then came a brief outline of the prophets, culminating in Muhammad.