by Amy Waldman
Her body had fought doubt like a virus and lost. Up and up ticked her fever at the thought of Alyssa Spier’s questions and Sean Gallagher’s condemnations and Jack Worth’s principled manipulations and Khan himself, elusive. Her mind returned to the Russian dolls, not as a stand-in for Khan’s mysteries or her own, but the actual dolls of the Burwell family, and how they taught her the un-mystery of Cal. Dreaming them up had been one of his last acts; this, not a twenty-year-old resignation from a country club, revealed him. The giving of pleasure was, for him, a creative act, which meant he would have rebuked her less for her uncertainty than for the seriousness she brought to it. In inflating his relatively low-stakes political principles, she had forgotten his highest value, which was to relish life. This understanding—Cal wouldn’t have cared about Khan anywhere near as much as she had pretended—was levitating, freeing. She could decide for herself, could abandon a position she wasn’t sure was hers, could accept that her innermost doll was an uncertain one.
“I abstain because I don’t know,” she said. The silence that followed felt like a pinhole in history. The other jurors, she realized, hadn’t been on the train in her head, hadn’t even seen it go by. Before she could begin to re-create the steps that had taken her to so confidently abandoning her once-firm position, Ariana said, “We have ten votes even without you.”
Claire flinched at the statement, at the lack of respect in its delivery. Then Wilner, the governor’s man, nodded at her supportively. The gesture enfolded her, to her dismay, in his camp. They were gathered like a family around the huge round table, and the intimacy was awful. The adenoidal breathing of the historian next to her could be too clearly discerned. Desperate for air, for space, Claire stood and turned to the window, only to be blasted by the light from the empty, expectant site below. She returned, shattered, to her seat.
“You don’t have any votes yet,” Paul, severe at last, told Ariana. They needed to wait a decent interval—three weeks, he insisted—so they would at least appear to be considering the comments flowing in. No public discussion of their deliberations tonight, he warned; no assertion of any decision. And it would be better for all concerned to find common ground with the sole relative on the jury.
“Claire needs time to sort through her confusion,” he said.
Heat filled her face at the word, but she didn’t disown it.
Mo slept for eleven dreamless hours, then woke disoriented and famished. Only after he scavenged a breakfast of three-day-old Chinese beef-and-broccoli from the fridge did he feel strong enough to turn on his phone. Both mail and text boxes were full. “Call me,” Reiss had messaged, too many times. “Where the fk r u. Call. Call.”
“Good news, bad news,” Reiss spit without greeting. Mo waited, strangely calm.
“Good news: your Bangladeshi cheerleader”—an unlikely image of the woman in short skirt and pom-poms came into Mo’s mind—”dominated the news cycle last night, and that’s created a surge of support for you. The quick polls—keep in mind the small sample size and the large margin of error—show your support has doubled from pre-hearing levels.”
“And the bad news?”
“Apparently you blasphemed at the hearing.”
Blasphemed? The word had a virgin, untested sound.
“I don’t know if you meant to, but you suggested that a man wrote the Quran, not God. It’s spreading over the Internet, and imams from the Netherlands to Nigeria are lining up to denounce you, even though I’m sure most of them have no idea what you actually said.”
“And what did I say?”
“The money line—maybe ‘bankruptcy line’ would be the better phrase here—was: ‘So perhaps the gardens we read about in the Quran were based on what existed at the time, maybe the gardens Mohammad saw when he traveled to Damascus. Maybe man wrote the Quran in response to his context.’ You outed yourself as a nonbeliever. Some asshole in Iran has already issued a fatwa against you. You’re a blasphemer, a godless blasphemer,” Reiss reiterated with a little too much enthusiasm. “Even worse, a beardless one.” Mo put his hand to his face and began to laugh as if it were the most natural response to being in the crosshairs of nations, religions. He laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks; he laughed as if he were stoned. “Maybe I should have shaved half my face,” he gasped.
“I’m missing the humor here.”
“I can’t win, in such a ridiculous way that it’s funny. I’m like a child in a custody battle, or, or, the Falkland Islands or something. Whichever way I turn, I’ll have my back to somebody, and so they’ll be offended. People read my face like a text, but the text I wrote, I couldn’t even read.” He was laughing so hard he could barely speak. “I’m laughing because I’m stressed and I’m pissed off and I’m probably on the edge of a fucking nervous breakdown. Is that good enough for you?”
“The Falkland Islands?”
“Never mind, Scott,” Mo sighed. “What do we do?”
The Internet was full of references to him in languages he couldn’t read: Arabic, Urdu, Farsi. What he could read told him that he deserved the death penalty. CNN showed snippets of indignant clerics, marching children, and in Pakistan, a mob burning him in effigy. It wasn’t even a flattering picture.
The crazies he was supposed to keep watch for had broadened beyond Muslim-haters to Muslims who hated him for not being Muslim enough. His mother, on the phone, made no effort to keep the worry from her voice. She wished, she said, that Mo had never entered the competition. “I worked so hard to convince you of your specialness,” she said. “It would have been better to let you think you were ordinary.”
Laila understood Islamist politics, but he hesitated to reach out to her; they hadn’t spoken since the argument at her studio. From pride, from failure to see past the abiding difference between them, he had been unable to apologize. Yet he wanted nothing more than the reassurance of her voice, which would return him, even briefly, to her clear, totalizing presence.
But that voice was behind a scrim now. A mashrabiya. Laila spoke intently, politely, as if he were a client.
“How can I help?” she asked.
“The death penalty?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. It sounds dramatic and gets them tons of press, but only a state would have the power to carry it out, and you don’t live under Sharia. The big beards make hay from what they can. Besides, you didn’t do it on purpose, did you?”
“I didn’t even know I’d said it. You saw what I was dealing with up there.” Fishing for sympathy, or simply proof that she had watched, he got neither.
“Of course it’s always possible some crazy gets the wrong idea, so be careful.” The words were kind enough; the withholding of true tenderness killing.
“How do I make it all go away?”
“You issue a statement saying you did not mean to imply that the Quran was not the word of God.”
He kept silent.
“I thought so,” Laila said at last, and the simple words drew on such deep intimacy that she couldn’t help but let some affection creep into her voice. “Then you’re just going to have to wait for it to die down.”
He wanted to keep her on the phone. “You okay?” he asked.
“Let’s keep things professional, Mo,” she finally said, not sounding professional at all.
21
“And who is Oprah?”
Nasruddin could not tell if Asma meant to be imperious or just sounded that way because she looked, in posture and attitude, like Bangladesh’s female prime minister receiving supplicants. Ladies, so many ladies-in-waiting, surrounded her, since seemingly every wife and a good many daughters of the neighborhood had crowded into Mrs. Mahmoud’s apartment. Trills and squawks flew back and forth across the room, which steamed tropical from all the bodies crammed inside.
Nasruddin squeezed in, pushing away the glass of water and sweets thrust at him. It was still Ramadan. Why were they offering food? “Oprah Winfrey called,” he had told Asma in Bengali. “Or
she didn’t but a lady working for her. She wants you on her show.”
“Oprah!” squealed his daughter, Tasleen, after Asma asked who she was. “She’s the black lady. Very famous, very famous. She gives away cars. I will drive you. I am learning to drive …”
She was? This was news to Nasruddin.
“Did you say something about Oprah Winfrey? Does she want Asma on her show?” Amid the chatter and colors and chaos he had not noticed the white woman, pen poised above her notebook, curled at Asma’s feet, since Mrs. Mahmoud and Mrs. Ahmed had filled the rest of the couch. A journalist, he thought, a guest, which explained the sweets, but how was she conducting an interview with a woman who spoke almost no English?
“I’m translating, Baba,” Tasleen brightly volunteered before he could ask. “And yes”—turning to the white woman, switching seamlessly from Bengali to English—”he said Oprah Winfrey called.”
They had left the hearing quickly, Nasruddin dragging Asma past staring family members and clamoring reporters and the police officer, who tipped his cap. The clattering smelly crowded subway was, for once, a reprieve, and they sat without speaking all the way home. Too many thoughts turned in his head for words. She had spoken, and he was proud of her and maybe ashamed of himself. Having always believed leadership should be quiet, today he wondered if this approach suggested a lack of courage. What better served his people: his devotion to bureaucratic details and cultivated relationships, or Asma’s demand to be heard?
He dropped her at home with an awkward bow and a compliment: “Now I know what Inam meant.”
Asma looked puzzled.
“Once he told me: ‘Asma cannot speak English, but she has a very good mind.’ “
However impressed he was, Nasruddin had no idea of the impact of her words, of how many times, over the succeeding hours and days, they would be rebroadcast. America thirsted for heroes, the commentators said. Here was one.
A few hours after he left her at home came a frantic call: some white people (and a black man, she whispered) were at her door, Mrs. Mahmoud was out, and Asma didn’t understand what they wanted. Some had cameras. He raced over to find a small press pack calling out “We just want to have a few words with you.” A few words—”Mrs. Anwar said everything she had to say at the hearing”—were all Nasruddin gave them. But ever since, everyone from local news channels to now Oprah had been clamoring for interviews with Asma. The Muslim American Coordinating Council wanted to put her in an ad campaign. Feminists—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—claimed her as their own, casting Nasruddin as the villain for trying to shut her up. “A typical Muslim male,” they said; one of them compared him to genital mutilators in Africa. T-shirts were printed showing a raised hand and the words “Let her speak,” as if Asma now stood for Muslim women across the globe.
Nasruddin rued damaging the image of Islam. His own image had been damaged in turn. His brazen grabbing of Asma’s arm, repeatedly, in public, had started rumors, or perhaps confirmed them: a married man so casually handling a widow, especially one he had spent much time helping since her husband’s death, did not go unnoticed by his neighbors, or his wife. Every time he entered his house the temperature seemed to drop forty degrees.
But soon these troubles were forgotten. Letters were finding their way to Asma, even though she had no listed address. Unable to read the English, she passed them to Nasruddin, who alone saw the words: “we’ll burn you,” so wounding, given how Inam had died; “terrorist bitch”; “fucking cunt.” Nasruddin did not know the English language could be so vile, did not even know some of the words himself, and faced the embarrassment of having to ask his daughter, who knew them all.
Nasruddin wanted to go to the police, but he feared exposing Asma to deportation. He spoke informally to Ralph Pasquale, a beat cop he considered a friend. “Nobody forced her to get up there and speak,” Ralph said. His eyes were unsympathetic. “What do you want us to do? Park someone outside her door? You know how short we are on bodies. You’re always complaining we don’t do enough foot patrols. Don’t think it will sit well if an officer’s off the street full-time because the lady sounded off. File a report if you want.” It was the first time in years Nasruddin, so polite, so respected, had been dismissed like that. To be described as “complaining,” when he thought his requests gentle, was painful.
He felt a new kind of exposure. The day after the hearing, he went to pick up a set of keys from the landlord he worked for. The landlord, whom Nasruddin called Senior because he and his son shared a name, was also a butcher. Nasruddin found him in white cap and bloody apron, disemboweling a lamb.
As usual, no greeting, but instead of the usual barked orders or complaints—”Leak at 28 Baltic Street”; “Mrs. Whiting said your boys didn’t sweep up all the paint chips from the floor”—he got this: “The missus says I should fire you.”
Nasruddin had met the missus a number of times through the years. She was a full-breasted, red-faced woman who seemed to bear him no animus. “But why, sir?” he asked, although he knew.
“She saw you on TV defending that Muslim and thinks you’re on their side,” Senior said.
The butcher’s son, Junior, was young and good-looking and not so bright, by Nasruddin’s assessment. He was interested in Tibetan Buddhism and yoga: he would disappear from the butcher shop for a month at a time “chasing his girlfriend’s pussy to India,” as Senior put it. Junior assumed that Nasruddin’s brown skin signaled an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Eastern and spiritual, even though Nasruddin had set him straight several times, putting on a goofy grin to soften the corrections: He had never done yoga. He knew nothing about Tibet or Buddhism. And as a Muslim, he had no problem with the bloody cuts of meat in the butcher shop, as Junior had assumed he would. But no, he then had to explain, he did not want to buy choice cuts at a discount, or be given the less choice ones, since he only bought halal meat. Then he had to explain what that meant—”Like kosher, but for Muslims,” he said—thinking to himself is it really possible that a butcher couldn’t know about halal meat? And then thinking, in this neighborhood of Irish, Italians, and prosperous, pitiable atheists: Yes.
But on this day the son showed surprising wisdom. “Mom’s crazy,” he said to his father. “You can’t fire him. Besides, everything they say about Muslims they once said about Catholics—they didn’t trust us, either.”
Nasruddin looked at him with gratitude. Perhaps he had been wrong about the young man.
“It’s only the ones with the big beards you have to worry about,” Junior went on. Perhaps not. Nasruddin left the store to the sound of a knife tearing flesh.
He had tried to silence Asma once and been wrong. How could he make her listen now?
“For whom do you write?” he asked the white woman, who had given neither her name nor publication. “There have already been many stories. I think it is enough.”
“The Post,” the white woman said. “Just trying to get a sense of the woman behind the story, her life story, you know, all that.”
“How long has she been here?” he asked his daughter in Bengali.
“Forty-five minutes.”
“What has she asked?”
“Oh, lots, she’s very nice, where Asma is from and about Inam and why they came to America and how they got here and all of that.” Tasleen kept switching back and forth between Bengali and English, as she did at home.
“Use your Bengali,” he muttered in Bengali. He didn’t want the journalist to glean clues from his questions.
“But Baba, you’re always telling me to use my English,” his daughter said, in English. This was true, indeed was the core of an ongoing argument between him and his wife. She worried that Tasleen would lose her Bengali, making it harder for her to find a good Bangladeshi husband. He worried that Tasleen’s poor grades in English would make it harder for her to get into a good college. But her tone, her deliberate missing of his meaning—when had his obedient little girl turned into an impertinent teenager
with this American attitude? And when had she started wearing lipstick? Time flew and left bird droppings. He would have to talk to his wife.
He dared not ask his daughter whether Asma had said anything about her immigration status, but this was his worry—that she would draw the government’s attention to her illegality.
“Do you have a card?” he asked the woman.
He glanced at the name, Alyssa Spier, and pocketed the card. He was jumpy the rest of the day and all through the night. He said a prayer and tried but failed to sleep. When his wife woke him, unsmiling, for the predawn Ramadan meal he brushed her off, backed the van out of the driveway, and hurried it through the still-dark streets to his friend Hari Patel’s newsstand. The papers had not arrived yet, and neither had Hari. At last he came, and they waited together, Nasruddin pacing back and forth, almost as nervous as he had been at Tasleen’s delivery. Then came the truck. Its driver hoisted and tossed a stack of Posts that thumped down a few feet away. Hari rushed to cut the binding, but Nasruddin didn’t need him to finish to see, on the cover, a photograph of Asma—laughing, head reared back and teeth exposed, as if she found hilarious the word written in huge capital letters across her face.
ILLEGAL
Once again, Paul found himself in the governor’s pied-à-terre at an ungodly hour. This time he had company: Kyle, Bitman’s chief of staff; Harold Dybek, the attorney general; and, from an oversize oil painting above them, the governor’s late husband and his late, aloof Afghan hound.
“Good morning, all.” The governor bustled in with what Paul knew to be her post-workout glow, today set off by a navy-blue suit. “Let’s look a little more alive—it’s not that early.”
She then subjected Kyle to a detailed inquisition about the public comments, which now numbered in the thousands. He, along with Lanny, had been tallying opinions and extracting representative samplings for the governor and jurors to read. They were running six-to-one against Khan, Kyle told her. A type-A asshole with a sailor’s mouth, he seemed unusually docile today.
