The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  “You seem to think this is a game, Mr. Khan.”

  “It is a game. One for which you made the rules. And now you’re trying to change them.”

  “I’m changing nothing,” Paul said. “I’m doing due diligence, as I told you. The public may wonder, for example, what their memorial designer was doing in Afghanistan.” Paul hadn’t planned to bring this up, but he decided not to regret it. It would be useful to see how Khan behaved when put off-balance.

  He responded with the aplomb of a well-coached judicial nominee. “I went to Afghanistan six months ago on ROI’s behalf,” he said. “We were competing to build the new American embassy there. We didn’t get it—not much of a surprise if you know ROI’s work at all. But I was glad to have the chance to see a country that’s become so important to America,” he finished smoothly.

  “Then you’ll care about how important this memorial is to America,” Paul said, and with more urgency: “You won’t want to tear your country apart.”

  “Of course I don’t want to tear it apart.”

  “Then—it’s hard to see how this plays out any other way. If you persist.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything but what I said. I’m not saying anything except that I don’t know why anyone who loves America, wants it to heal, would subject it to the kind of battle the selection of a Muslim would cause. Think of Solomon’s baby.”

  “Shouldn’t you be making that point to the people gearing up for battle? I’ve done nothing but design a garden.”

  “And they’ve done nothing but lose husbands, wives, children, parents.”

  “So that gives them the moral high ground?”

  “Some might say so, yes.” Paul gave a wintry smile and turned to summon the waiter.

  “I could change my name,” Khan said, when Paul had finished ordering coffee.

  “Many architects have,” Paul said. “Mostly Jewish ones.”

  “It was a joke.”

  “My great-grandfather—he was Rubinsky, then my grandfather comes to America and suddenly he’s Rubin. What’s in a name? Nothing, everything. We all self-improve, change with the times.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, picking a name that hides your roots, your origins, your ethnicity.”

  “Rubin hardly hides anything.”

  “It reveals less than Rubinsky. Not everyone is prepared to remake themselves to rise in America.”

  Was Khan implying something about the Jews, their assimilations and aspirations? Edith’s comment from the morning came to Paul. “A Muslim country would never let a Jew build its memorial,” she said. “Why should we act differently?” Edith had a habit of voicing all the sentiments Paul never would, as if his more illiberal self had taken up residence in his apartment with him.

  “This isn’t a Muslim country, Edith. We’re better than that. We can’t deny him just for being Muslim,” he had said, even though that was his plan.

  “Daniel Pearl paid a much higher price for being a Jew,” she replied with airy unassailability.

  Khan raised his arm. Paul flinched, then realized Khan was merely calling for the check. Paul had the disquieting sense that he had set something new in motion without meaning to. Whatever kind of Muslim Khan was, he would leave as an angry one.

  Paul arrived home ill-disposed toward his next appointment, a longscheduled meeting with his eldest son, Jacob. He had tried to postpone. Edith wouldn’t hear of it.

  These meetings were ostensibly planned for father and son to “catch up,” but really so Jacob, a mendicant with baby-soft palms, could ask for more money. Paul timed these interchanges so they wouldn’t overlap with meals. He hated the pretense of familial affection when dollars were being discussed.

  Jacob called himself a filmmaker, but his films—three shorts, one feature-length that had made a few marginal festivals, then gone straight to DVD—were not ones Paul, or Paul’s friends, had heard of. Calling yourself an artist did not make you one. He was tired of financing Jacob, but Edith was always pestering him, relentless, and Paul knew they must conspire in back-channel conversations to keep the checks coming. Edith was stiff-spined, except when it came to her son.

  Paul’s dispersals to Jacob left mere pockmarks in his fortune, but the presumption that there would always be more silted the flow of his generosity. To make matters worse, Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn’t begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage. Before investing in his son Paul had studied the economics of the film business. It was rare for independent films to make real money, and Jacob, in his black leather jacket (always the same well-cut fit and always replaced whenever it began to wear), prided himself on his anticommercialism. That meant, barring some stroke of success that his talent, so far, did not seem to herald, he would be on Paul’s dole for life. Fatherhood gave less, not more, pleasure through the years, which perhaps explained why his friends mooned over their grandchildren: the chance to start over. Having, as yet, no grandchildren of his own, he was left with his sons, grown, along with all the usual ways, in their capacity to disappoint.

  Paul’s younger son, Samuel, was a go-getter, at least. He ran a prominent gay rights organization and had been featured on the cover of New York magazine as one of 40 Under 40 New Yorkers to Watch. Paul did not object to his sexual preference; he had read up enough, when Samuel came out, to convince himself both that homosexuality was immutable and that he as the father was not to blame. But he hated having it flaunted, hated the endless stream of interchangeable young men brought to Passover and Thanksgiving. “You want me to live like I’m straight,” Samuel had accused him once. This was exactly right. Paul couldn’t quite surmount his perplexity that it was Jacob who was the washout.

  When Paul entered his office, seeing the back of Jacob’s curly head brought on a familiar, unwilled coldness. They shook hands. Jacob had a tan, or, more accurately, a salmon glow in his usually pale face. “Been traveling?” Paul asked, pretending to study some mail.

  “Just a brief vacation,” Jacob said, his shoulders hunching slightly.

  “Vacation,” Paul repeated. “Must be nice.”

  Jacob made no reply, so Paul asked after his wife, an unsettlingly gorgeous Taiwanese American.

  “Bea’s great. So what are you going to do, Dad?”

  “About—?” Paul said curtly, although he knew. He was touched, since Jacob rarely inquired about Paul’s own stresses, then sour: it took something this sensational to make him inquire.

  “The memorial, of course.”

  “What would you do in my shoes, Jacob? If it’s true?”

  “Give it to him. Or her: I told Bea I think it’s Zaha Hadid.” No response. “Whoever it is, if they won, they won.”

  Like the simple son at the Passover seder, Paul thought. “So what are we here for today?” he asked. Jacob began to talk about his new film—something about a woman who takes her nine-year-old son on a journey to Laos. Laos sounded expensive.

  “You know, Dad, the woman who was a minor character in Exiled? And she got pregnant? This is her child!” The content of his speech could not bear the weight of his excited tone, and this, Paul concluded, was what made Jacob a poor salesman: he had no sense of when to modulate, no care for how his audience received him. This judgment, Paul knew, was also a dodge for his own guilt: he had missed the screening of Exiled for a dinner at Gracie Mansion in honor of the governor, when he was trying to secure his jury chairmanship. Later he had dozed, bored and confused, through the film at home, waking only for the credits, where he saw his name as executive producer, an acknowledgment of the money lost to this folly. He had sent Jacob a note dictated by Edith commending the “originality and passion” of Exiled, but today he was distracted, his caution frayed. “I think I slept through that part,” he said, unthinking, gruf
f—even, he realized in retrospect, snide.

  Two spots of deep red glowed in Jacob’s cheeks, and Paul saw him as a stricken boy seeking comfort after being wounded by some insult at school. But his own father had done the wounding. Perhaps, Paul thought, parenting meant protecting children until they were strong enough to sustain the hurt their parents inflicted.

  “I’m—” No, he wouldn’t apologize. “I’m tired,” he said. “I have a lot going on.” Jacob opened and closed his mouth but said nothing. This silence, this failure to speak, only diminished Paul’s respect.

  “How much do you need?” he asked, wanting the business done.

  “Four hundred,” Jacob mumbled, the thousands not needing spelling out. The amount was high, and Paul half hoped that Jacob had been quick enough in hurt to raise it. He couldn’t help comparing his son, and not favorably, to Mohammad Khan.

  8

  How could you be dead if you did not exist? Of the forty Bangladeshis reported missing to their consulate in the days after the attack, only twenty-six were legal, and Asma Anwar’s husband was not among them. The undocumented also had to be uncounted, officials insisted. The consulate could not abet illegals, even posthumously. They were very sorry about Inam, “if indeed he had existed” rolling off their tongues as often as Insh’Allah, but they could do nothing about repatriating the body, if it were found, or helping with funds for the widow.

  The subcontractor who had employed Inam as a janitor argued similarly : there was no Inam Haque, since he had taken the job using a fake name and Social Security number. The subcontractor had insisted on this pretense of legality, but now used it as an excuse to deny Asma help. “He paid real taxes,” she kept telling Nasruddin, the “mayor” of Little Dhaka, as their Brooklyn neighborhood was called, even though its people mostly came from Sandwip. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

  Nasruddin just shook his head. He had lived in Brooklyn for longer than Asma, who was only twenty-one, had been alive. In that time, people said, his face had barely aged—though his stomach had swelled, like a very slow-gestating pregnancy. He made his living overseeing a crew of Bangladeshis who remodeled and maintained the dozen Brooklyn brownstones owned by an Irish American butcher. But his real energy went to tending his community, smoothing its way through green card applications and business licenses, public schools and hospitals, real estate negotiations, marriages and divorces, arrests and fines for trash on the sidewalk and double-parking. His English was excellent, his fairness unquestioned. Inam had worked for him and had been safe under his wing. Nasruddin had counseled him against taking the job in Manhattan—it was like another country. But Asma had insisted, believing that to work in the towers, so much taller than the brownstones of Brooklyn, suggested Inam and she were moving higher, too. With what vanity she had imagined this news crossing the sea. Nasruddin never spoke of her misjudgment; he didn’t need to.

  He had brought her the news; perhaps this was why he became her protector. Eight months pregnant, she was dozing in her room when she heard frantic knocking on the door of their landlords, the Mahmouds. Mrs. Mahmoud, who had been on the phone all morning, put the receiver down, waddled to the door, and opened it to a panting Nasruddin. He was wearing his work overalls.

  By now Asma had lumbered out.

  “Has Inam called?” Nasruddin asked.

  Mrs. Mahmoud was the owner not just of the viewless room they rented but of the phone they relied on. “No,” she said. She looked back over her shoulder at the cupboards, as if Inam might be hiding inside.

  Nasruddin looked at Asma and said, too formally, “Please sit.” He waited until she was arranged on the couch, her swollen feet propped on a plush footstool by Mrs. Mahmoud.

  “The buildings have fallen,” he said, and she knew.

  In the haze that followed, Asma gave statements about Inam’s work, his schedule, his habits, his history, to consular officials, investigators hired by Inam’s employer, the police, the FBI, and the American Red Cross. She received all of these visitors and promptly forgot them, attuned only to an inner world of fragile and unpredictable rhythms. She caressed her distended belly compulsively, measuring her own life from kick to kick. Never had she prayed so deeply, never had she felt the contrast between the tranquillity within prayer and the disturbance outside so strongly. Her belly was far too big for her to bend, but she trusted God to sense her prostration.

  Like Inam, Asma was in America illegally. All of this official attention, she was sure, would end with her deportation. Resigned to this, she held only two hopes: that she give birth first, so that her child would be an American citizen, and that Inam’s body be found, so the three of them could fly home together. In the meantime she subsisted on money from the mosque’s Widows and Orphans Fund, to which Inam had always contributed, and on the generosity of the Mahmouds. “Stay for as long as you need to, for free,” Mrs. Mahmoud said, knowing that Asma would soon return to Bangladesh.

  When the baby came, Asma studied him, looking for Inam. Everyone said he was there, in the boy, “a perfect copy,” in Mrs. Mahmoud’s words, as though he had been made in a garment factory. But Inam’s face, though gentle, had been long and sallow. This baby had the vitality of Asma’s own father: the big eyes, the dark brows, the round face, the warm-hued skin. Even his reflexively gesticulating arms brought her father’s storytelling to mind. She looked harder for Inam, feeling it important to find him there. A perfect copy.

  She named him Abdul Karim, Servant of the Most Generous. She hoped God would safeguard him. At night she huddled with him beneath thin blankets in an underheated apartment and whispered stories. She told him how she had suggested Inam as a groom to her parents, after her bad habit of opening her mouth at every meeting with prospective in-laws had doomed three other matches. Inam was six years older, his family poorer, but she couldn’t be picky. She remembered, vaguely, from childhood, his face being kind. He lived in America, and she wanted to live there, too. Her father she informed that she wouldn’t, like most wives, stay in Sandwip, pregnant, under her in-laws’ thumbs, waiting for her husband to return once a year. She would go, too. To her surprise Inam agreed.

  When they spoke by phone—Inam in Brooklyn, she still in Sandwip—he was so quiet that she had to fill the silences herself. Their marriage had been much the same. But she missed his stillness. She hadn’t realized how much it soothed her.

  Gold seal, black letters: the death certificate arrived. The Bangladesh consulate acknowledged Inam as one of theirs and provided Asma with a small stipend. With the help of a Jewish lawyer who had made the undocumented relatives his cause, Nasruddin got the subcontractor who had employed Inam to fork over a small amount, too. Three months passed, then six, without a body or even a piece of one. Abdul learned to turn over, and the unspoken question grew louder: When would Asma go home? “They are saying some of the bodies may never be found,” Mrs. Mahmoud said bluntly one day. “They were cremated.”

  Were her words meant to sting? Cremation was anathema to Muslims. God had forbidden the use of fire on His Creation, or so Asma had been taught. Then why had God allowed these men to cremate her husband—and claim to have cremated him in God’s name, no less? Where would Inam’s soul go? Would this leave him outside paradise? The next morning, when she heard the Mahmouds leave, she crept to their phone and called the local imam. It was easier to frame her questions without having to face him. She could picture his eyes blinking behind his glasses, the sparse beard that always made her think of a fire struggling to light.

  Why did my husband suffer so? she asked.

  “It was written,” he said, as she knew he would. The burning Inam might have suffered was nothing next to the torment of the hellfire, which was forever, the cleric continued. If Inam was a believer, she could rest easy—he was in the garden now. His pain here had been momentary; his bliss would be everlasting.

  She had no doubt that Inam had been taken into the gardens of paradise. He gave zakat. He always fasted durin
g Ramadan. He prayed, if not five times a day, as often as he could. The morning of his death, lying in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep, too lazy and heavy with child to get up and cook him breakfast, leaving him to the cold dal she had prepared the night before, she had heard the rustling as he prostrated himself. He believed.

  And yet the knowledge that he would gain paradise failed to give her the peace or joy that signaled submission to God’s will. Fearful of what the scratching in her chest signaled instead, she prayed to feel peace.

  Why did Inam have to die? she asked the imam, knowing this question was not hers to ask. She had the urge to keep him on the phone, string out the conversation. The imam quoted a sura: “No soul may die except with God’s permission at a predestined time.” God was all-pervading, all-knowing, he said, “the creator, owner, and master of the universe. We cannot question His destruction; we are His Creation to deal with as He chooses.”