by Amy Waldman
Alyssa had a sudden, uncharacteristic vision of an untamed garden taking over the middle of Manhattan, with trees poking from buildings, roots rampaging beneath sidewalks. It made her shiver, this imagining, partly in delight.
“Florence Garvey. My brother-in-law died that day, but I’m also a historian of early America.” She listed, at tedious length, her credentials, then said, “I don’t mind a garden, but I don’t understand why it’s a walled garden. Walled gardens are un-American or—I dislike that phrase—perhaps ‘not American’ would be better. We have no tradition of them. It privileges some spaces over others. The Puritans called nature ‘God’s second book,’ and to select, as a memorial, a walled garden is to tear off a single page. This memorial is like importing an exotic species, when today we understand the beauty of native plants. Don’t we want a more indigenous symbol?”
An hour passed. Alyssa, desperate for nourishment, discreetly slipped some gummy bears into her mouth.
“David Albon.” A professor of Middle Eastern studies, complete with professorial beard. “Islam is an expansionist religion, and where Islam has gone, gardens have often followed, which is why we see them in India and Spain and Morocco and elsewhere, and now we’ll see one in New York. As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s going to taste like a duck, too. So here we have, right in Manhattan, an Islamic paradise, and achieving that paradise through martyrdom—murder, suicide—has become the obsession of Islamic extremists, the ultimate submission to God. We toy with that idée fixe at our peril.”
Winnie called a fifteen-minute recess. Alyssa, ruing her morning coffee consumption, spent the entire time in line for the bathroom.
“Maxwell Franklin.” Ex-CIA, now a consult ant tracking the jihadist threat. An Arabic speaker. “Other than the president of Iran, who knows how to rile us, I haven’t found evidence that Islamist extremists are out there rubbing their hands in glee about this garden. They’re tracking the reaction to the Garden, the treatment of Mohammad Khan, and all of that is proof to them of the West’s hostility to Islam. We’re handing them a great way to rally their base. But the Garden itself? It’s barely merited a mention.”
“Betsy Stanton.” The frail, white-haired author of a book on Islamic gardens who happened to also be the widow of a late United States senator. “Since when did we become so afraid of learning from other cultures?” she began. “Islam and the West have always influenced each other—in gardens, in architecture. Those buildings so mourned by us all: some say they had Islamic elements. Their architect—not a Muslim, I might add—spent time in the Islamic world, designed buildings there.” She held up photographs, small for the in-house audience, but perfect for television, and said, “The arches at the bases of the buildings are clearly influenced by Islam, and so is the geometric filigree that covered them”—the same filigree, Alyssa realized, perking up, with which Khan had patterned the names in the Garden. “Some scholars believe the entire façade amounted to a mashrabiya, the latticed screens and windows used in mosques and other urban structures.”
The word “mosques” set off a round of booing. Rubin leaned into his microphone, but Stanton got to hers first. Her controlled tone managed to penetrate, then deflate, the raucousness. “You’re not listening. My point is that the buildings we all mourn so deeply contained these possibly Islamicate elements. Are the towers less missed because of it? If you rebuilt them, as so many people want to do, would you purge these aspects? You might as well pull the crescent moon from the night sky while you’re at it.”
Alyssa surveyed the room. Some people were nodding; others looked confused. Even Alyssa wasn’t sure what to make of Stan-ton’s comments: she was saying that this element of Khan’s design was Islamic—but only if the buildings were Islamic, too. Way too complicated for Chaz.
Another hour gone. Alyssa tucked her leg beneath her to relieve her aching butt. Her foot went numb.
“Jody Iacocca.” Lost her husband. “I’m not an intellectual. My husband wasn’t in the Senate—he was just an entry-level accountant, an ordinary Joe. I don’t have an Ivy League degree; I didn’t teach at Yale. But I can read—thank a good, solid American public education for that—and I’ve gone through all of Mr. Khan’s public statements, including what he said here today, and nowhere has he denounced the attack, denounced terrorism.” Was this true? Alyssa made a note to check, and jabbed her thigh with her pen, less to stave off fatigue than to punish herself. To be scooped by an ordinary (if intrepid) Jody! It pained her.
“Jim and Erica Marbury.” Lost their daughter. Jim spoke. “We represent the organization Families for Reconciliation. We find the design poetic, healing. It’s become almost real to us. That gardens need care and maintenance is exactly the point. The Garden represents a covenant between us and future generations. It’s a beautiful metaphor for tending the memory of this tragedy. But the design is not getting a fair hearing here, and so we want to say that any reference to Mohammad Khan’s religious background or heritage is a disgrace, an insult to what this country is. Our daughter would have wanted better from us. And if this garden contains Islamic elements—well, we should be looking for ways to unite our cultures.”
“James Pogue III, but everyone calls me the Master-Servant.” He declined the chair the other speakers had used. With his daddy-longlegs frame and worn black suit, he looked like a gaunt usher to the afterlife. Alyssa could see Paul Rubin consulting his list in puzzlement. “My brother perished that day, and I fear for his soul.” There were horrified gasps and a few boos. He made obeisance but didn’t look sorry. “I am here to bring the word of my Lord so your souls will be safe on Judgment Day,” he said, and read from Ecclesiastes in a voice so stupefying the entire audience looked as if it had been cornered by a party bore. Then he held a pamphlet aloft: “I have developed a formula for meaning, and will be distributing it outside. And a CD”—also held up—”which will be for sale.”
“This isn’t QVC,” Paul said. “And time.”
“R,” Alyssa wrote. “CR.”
“Sean and Frank Gallagher.” Alyssa, flagging now, revived. Sean had proved to be full of surprises—apologizing for pulling the woman’s headscarf, then undercutting his own apology by telling a roomful of Muslims that he still didn’t want a Muslim memorial … and now came another one. He leaned into the microphone, said “I’m going to let my father speak for both of us,” touched a startled Frank on the shoulder, and walked off the stage. Alyssa had no code for this. She starred their names.
The spotlight made a halo of Frank’s white hair. His blue eyes were undiluted by age, his bearing pugnacious. He watched his son make his way down the stairs, then put on his glasses and began to read from a prepared text: “This garden is insufficiently”—he stumbled a bit—”heroic to commemorate the lives lost. We would like a more powerful memorial, one that does not suggest America lay down like lambs in the clover, instead of fighting back. We want, we want—”
He lowered his reading glasses and looked at the audience. “I have nothing against anyone personally,” Frank Gallagher said. Then his face crumpled, and Alyssa thought, against her will, of the buildings falling in on themselves. He paused. “But … all I want to say is … I lost my son. I lost my son.”
Alyssa heard sniffles, saw people weeping. The audience seemed to retract from Khan as if he conducted an electric current.
“Murderer!” The voice rent the air.
“It looks like there are no more speakers,” Rubin said blandly, as if he hadn’t heard that shout. But he had to have heard: everyone did. The governor wanted catharsis; Rubin was carrying her water without spilling a drop.
“We will continue accepting input in the form of written statements for another week, and I promise they will be read. Otherwise, we’re finished.”
“Unless there are family members who haven’t spoken but were supposed to,” Winnie reprimanded gently. “Any family members who should have been on my list? Las
t chance.”
A murmur rolled through the spectators and grew so pronounced that Alyssa turned to see the cause. At the back of the room she saw a brown-skinned woman in a headscarf raising her hand, then the older man next to her tugging it down. The arm shot back up, was tugged down, up, down, up, down—heated whispering passed between them, until the woman twisted herself free, stood, and said in a voice strong enough for the whole chamber to hear, “Me.”
19
Asma had awoken that morning, as she often did, around the time Inam used to say goodbye. Her body, of its own will, had put a marker there. For many months, in the quiet she would think, in her first moment of wakefulness, that he was still alive. Now she knew better.
No one had called to invite her to the public hearing. If any invitation had been mailed, she couldn’t read it. She didn’t know what would happen at the hearing—would there be a vote?—but she wanted to be there. She was a family member as much as the white women she saw on the news. She had the fatherless child and empty bed to prove it.
She prayed, and at seven-fifteen, knowing he would be awake, wanting to catch him before he began his work for the day, she called Nasruddin.
Tiny sequins sparkling from yellow flowers on a hot-pink background: this had been Inam’s favorite among her salwar kameez, which was why today she chose it. She begged Mrs. Mahmoud to watch Abdul for the day, offering, to her landlady’s obvious apoplexy, no explanation, and walked over to Nasruddin’s house. His van, trapped in his small driveway by a low gate with frilly metalwork, looked like an oversize animal in a cage. Nasruddin looked a little like a trapped animal himself. When she told him she wanted to attend the hearing, he balked. If she did anything to draw attention to herself, she could jeopardize Abdul’s future here. And for what?
“Are you saying I don’t belong there?” she snapped, and was instantly sorry: without Nasruddin’s help these two years, she would have drowned. Softer: “Let’s just go listen.”
She felt like skipping, realized it was because this was the first time she had been out of the neighborhood since the headscarf pullings began. Free! But Nasruddin wasn’t enjoying the outing nearly as much; as they descended into the subway, he released a torrent of talk. It seemed to meander, but a purposeful current ran beneath. He told her about coming to America when he was only nineteen, younger than her. Kensington wasn’t full of Bangladeshis then. He was lonely. His English was poor. He wondered why he was here. But little by little, he saw. What Nasruddin revered about America was its systems—its predictability. You could trust the government, even perfect strangers, not just your family or fellow villagers, as was the case back home. There, outcomes too often depended on the capricious—or rather covetous—whims of individuals. Almost nothing happened without a bribe to grease the way. Here, he rounded up donations from the community for the local politicians and for the policemen’s union. He knew this would help obtain a hearing, solicit their attention, but the donations were not demanded, not coerced. Every time he visited Bangladesh, he would return to Brooklyn with renewed appreciation for the emergency room doctor who treated his cut hand without insisting he schedule a follow-up at the same doctor’s private practice. What was expected by most Americans, to him seemed heroic. When he went to the construction-permit office they gave him the right forms and accepted his applications without demanding more money than the form specified. Nasruddin never stopped missing his own country, but he loved this one.
They were on the subway now. Asma watched a woman apply gloss to her doughy bottom lip. She relished the way private lives were conducted in these public cars, as if they were just extra rooms in a house. Women put on their makeup and took off their heels, ate their lunches and cooled their coffee. They had no shyness about sharing the lines of their underwear or the color of their bras, the veins in their calves or the moles on their arms. They chewed, read, spoke, sang, and prayed, as she, but privately, did now.
Nasruddin was still talking. There had been too many problems after the attack. She had not dealt with them: he had. The detentions, worst of all; the deportations; the decision whether to submit to voluntary registration; the agonizing choice of whether to go see family in Bangladesh and risk not being let back in the country. Normalcy was returning. She shouldn’t draw unneeded attention to their vulnerable community. There were always new groups arriving; this was the nature of New York. The brownstone work did not belong to Bangladeshis alone. Lately he had found flyers left in entryways by Polish construction workers, offering good work for cheap. They included group pictures of themselves—white men in white overalls, clustered like bouquets of white carnations. What was this about, he asked Asma, not waiting for her answer, other than to draw attention to their skin color? He spoke of his daughters. He wondered often if he should have raised them in Bangladesh. He wanted to create a cocoon for them here, but it was impossible. Like little chicks they pecked their way out of their eggshells. They saw the world around them and wanted to explore it. He talked so much she wondered if he ever talked to his wife. Two decades of strain flowed onto her. She felt so honored to hear his troubles that she almost forgot that she was adding to them.
They exited the subway in lower Manhattan and found their way through the crowds outside, the rows of police officers, to the packed hearing room. She had never been to city hall, but they were late and she had no time to study it. The room was already full. Asma, newly nervous, knitted her fingers together. A police officer managing the spectators who were trying to squeeze inside looked them up and down and said, “All full up. At this point seats for family members of the deceased only.”
Remembering Laila’s admonition to avoid contact with the police, Asma’s mouth went dry. But Nasruddin showed no nervousness. “We are family members,” he huffed, producing Asma’s documents from the Red Cross. “I am her interpreter.”
“Right,” said the officer. He surveyed the rows and motioned to two spectators to give up their seats. The thrill of being, for once, at the center of things, came over Asma. She saw all the cameras, remembered watching the Circle Line cruise on television. Now she was in the circle, inside the television, acknowledged as a family member. She blinked back tears.
The proceedings began, the speakers traipsing one by one to the stage, reminding Asma of occasions in her town when, as a high-school student, she had had to sit, passing notes to friends, legs bobbing in impatience, through the endless felicitations of some visiting government official.
Nasruddin translated for her as best he could, dropping whole chunks of speeches. She knew this; the talk was too quick for him to do anything else. People turned around to shush them, and she shot dark looks back, telling them with her eyes that she had as much right to understand as they did. Go on, go on: she prodded Nasruddin.
Mohammad Khan looked stiff, wooden, when he took the stage. He scowled against the bright light. She wished for him to soften himself. But she liked what he said, at least as Nasruddin translated it, liked less when audience members interrupted to shout things Nasruddin claimed he could not hear. Khan looked nervous to her.
“Ssss,” Nasruddin said at one point, making a disapproving noise. “What is he saying? That the Quran was written by man? Is he mad?” She didn’t know what he was speaking of.
Then came a parade of speakers—a brown-haired man with glasses, a blond lady dressed elegantly, a white-haired lady, a father and son, and so on. For two hours Asma listened. She had not felt so angry since the conspiracy to deny her husband’s existence. Those who spoke in defense of the design were outnumbered by those against it. Some of them said anything associated with Islam was “painful” to them, that the Garden was a paradise for the killers, that the name Mohammad was connected to a religion of violence, of the sword. The chairman allowed all of these comments, as if Muslims were second-class citizens—or worse, as if they deserved no respect.
Fury rocked her. For the name of the Prophet, peace be upon him, to be taken so. For Mohammad K
han to be so abused.
“I want to speak,” she whispered to Nasruddin, and raised her hand.
He pulled her arm down. “You cannot.”
“I must.” Arm back up.
Arm down. “Think about Abdul.”
“What kind of country is this for him?” Arm up.
Down. “You’ll get yourself deported!”
“Let me speak,” she hissed at him. “Help me speak.”
People had turned to watch their tussle. Heat rose to her face; her bones seemed emptied by her Ramadan fast. Never before had she addressed a crowd. If she didn’t move now, she would be paralyzed. Scraps of a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam that she had memorized in school came to her—”I am the burning volcano in the bosom of the earth, / I am the wild fire of the woods, / I am Hell’s mad terrific sea of wrath! … I am the rebel eternal, / I raise my head beyond this world, / High, ever erect and alone!”—and even before she had finished running the lines in her head she had wrenched her arm free, whispered “I’m begging you,” stood, and shouted “Me!” Face aflame, she walked down the aisle toward the stage, willing Nasruddin to follow so he could translate. She berated herself for being too lazy to learn better English, despite watching so many hours of American television.
Hundreds of eyes bored into her, each pair seeming to claim a tiny piece of her. On she marched, fighting her physical weakness, the fear, all of it with a prayer: God, help me, for You are the best of helpers, and the best of protectors, and the best of forgivers, the most merciful. And she did not need to spell out to Him why she needed forgiveness.
