The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  “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 Khan 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.

  Even without direct orders, her legs moved where she needed them to go: to the right of the stage, up the stairs, one by one, into the chair. A few moments later Nasruddin sat next to her.

  “Please give your name,” the woman running the hearing chirped.

  “Asma, wife of Inam Haque. His job was to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms.”

  Nasruddin translated, but left out the bathroom cleaning.

  She plunged on: “My husband was from Bangladesh. I am from Bangladesh. My son”—she beamed—“he is two years old, born three weeks after the attack. He is one hundred percent American. My husband worked. He paid taxes. He sent money to his family in Bangladesh—eleven relatives—and to mine. Do you know how little that left for us to live on? But we managed. Inam was not an uneducated man. He finished high school in Bangladesh, then got his university degree. But there were no good jobs there unless you bought one. He preferred to start at the bottom here because he believed it was possible to work your way up. There you were stuck. The politics, the corruption. Here there was none of that. People helped you. Even the Jewish people.”

  Nasruddin shot her a look. She knew enough English to grasp he was editing her. But there was no stopping. Her voice shook because she kept forgetting to breathe, but she also had the strange sensation of wanting to giggle, as if she were twelve again, with her father, riding a bicycle rickshaw through Dhaka’s packed streets for the first time, barely holding on, laughing from fear and exhilaration.

  “My husband was a man of peace because he was a Muslim. That is our tradition. That is what our Prophet, peace be upon him, taught. You care for widows and orphans, as Mr. Nasruddin has done for me and my child. You have mixed up these bad Muslims, these bad people, and Islam. Millions of people all over the world have done good things because Islam tells them to. There are so many more Muslims who would never think of taking a life. You talk about paradise as a place for bad people. But that is not what we believe. That is not who the garden is for. The gardens of paradise are for men like my husband, who never hurt anyone.” She took a breath. “We do not tell you what it means to be Christian, or what the rules of your Heaven are.” This went untranslated by Nasruddin.

  “I think a garden is right,” she continued, “because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together. How can you pretend we and our traditions are not part of this place? Does my husband matter less than all of your relatives?”

  The faces in the audience were melting into one another, which was a comfort.

  “You don’t like this architect because he is Muslim,” she continued. “An American designed our parliament in Dhaka. He was also named Kahn. Louis Kahn. He designed our parliament.”

  Her father had taken her there when she was twelve years old, showed her the massive, stoic building rising from the water, taken her inside to see the light slanting in, walked her across the vast, sedate lawns, which were a respite from a frantic city. He had told her about the American who had designed it, and how Bangladeshis had come to see it as the most powerful symbol of their new democracy. That democracy’s defects were partly why Nasruddin and Inam, and also Asma, had ended up in New York; what Kahn designed her father pronounced too good for the politicians. And yet the complex’s beauty, its strength, endured, as if it were ignorant of all the broken promises, or believed they might still be fulfilled.

  “We were grateful for that building,” she continued. “We are grateful. We have all tried to give back to America. But also, I want to know, my son—he is Muslim, but he is also American. Or isn’t he? You tell me: What should I tell my son?”

  Outrage, strong as acid, was filling her, threatening to spill over and burn everyone in the room.

  “You should be ashamed!” she finished, heaving out the words, but Nasruddin did not translate that.

  20

  As the Bangladeshi woman made her way toward the exit, people seated alongside the aisle leaned out to whisper words of encouragement or condolence, to grab her hand or, failing that, her interpreter’s. The two of them reminded Sean of a couple leaving the church at the end of their wedding ceremony. They approached the exit, where he had been hovering since leaving his father onstage. His own unexpected impulse to reach toward them he stanched by opening the door.

  “Thank you,” the translator said, looking right through him.

  Watching the woman onstage in her headscarf, Sean had thought of Zahira Hussain. Up close they didn’t look much alike at all. This woman was smaller, darker. Excitement, nervousness, gleamed from her face, but beneath lived qualities less transient. A determination, a stubbornness, that brought his mother to mind. With some primal kind of certainty, both women claimed this memorial for their sons.

  But their claims weren’t equal; he had to remember that. Patrick, trying valiantly to make too-small, too-distractible Sean into a high-school football player, had taught him to marry public sportsmanship with the essential psychological tool of the private gloat. Pitying the other team, Patrick instructed, would erode Sean’s will to crush them, would worm deep within him, even into his hands, so that he would start giving away plays without meaning to. Sean had to stamp out these glimmerings of sympathy. To lend his heart to the other side would weaken his own.

  After watching the Bangladeshis hurry off, Sean made his way outside. It was almost evening—they’d been inside practically the whole day—and the sky, brewing a storm, had gone asphalt-gray. His departure from the stage wo
uld need explaining to his family, and he canvassed possibilities. The truth was that he hadn’t thought before he acted. As always, he learned what he felt by what he did. Some strange scramble of images had beset him up there: Debbie serving him eggs at home, then hurling insults outside MACC; Zahira warming behind that desk, then aghast; Eileen, cold fierceness one minute, childlike grief the next. All these doubles. He couldn’t get a fix on anyone, least of all himself, the brother left behind and the striving son, the shabby handyman and the suited man on the make, the guy pulling the headscarf and the one apologizing and somehow meaning both. His empathy kept settling in new, unstable places. It—he—couldn’t be trusted.

  Any more than Claire Burwell could be. There she was now, fighting her way out of city hall, surrounded by agitated family members. Already taller than most of them, she was straining, with the regal annoyance of a woman who believes herself better than her circumstances, to hold her head even higher. The cluster moved down the steps with her, so that she appeared to be shepherding the relatives even as she tried to shake them off. They pressed close to hear the questions she wasn’t answering.

  “Claire!” he shouted. “Claire Burwell!” He climbed the stairs, shoved into the knot, and pulled her roughly by the arm to extract her. Down they went, into City Hall Park, where she wrested free.

  “You hurt me,” she said angrily, rubbing the spot where his fingers had been.

  “I was trying to help you.”

  “Sure you were. You’re a really helpful guy, Sean. I’m sure you were trying to help me when you brought your gang to my house, too.”

  He was embarrassed that she had been watching, even though he had wanted her to be. Stewing that day over how to make her repudiate Khan, he had also been imagining her naked upstairs, eager for him, Sean. The fantasy of drilling himself into her was so arousing, given her proximity, that he could have hurled that rock just for release. It wasn’t news to him that anger and sex lived inside each other, but he’d never felt them pair with such force.

  “And at your rally,” she continued, “when your people were waving those posters of me with a question mark, that was you helping me, too, right?” In her voice, unvarnished loathing.

  Needing to neutralize her beauty, he trained his gaze on the faint smudges, like erased pencil marks, beneath her eyes, on the fray of lines around their edges. “I was trying to say we were confused by you, Claire. We still are. You won’t hear us. My father up there, how can he not affect you? You choose Khan over him—Khan who got up there today and shoved all our faces in his Islamic garden, didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was anything else. What did they do to you, Claire, people like my parents, that you’ll do anything not to see their pain?”

  “I do see their pain. That’s what makes this so hard.” The edges of her mouth quivered. The question mark in her face, his dubious creative stroke for the rally, hadn’t been wrong. Fury at her transparency seized him, a desire to crush the weakness, the equivocation, he saw in her face. For others, surely, could see the same thing in his.

  She stood statue-still while he paced and turned and once even circled her. “You don’t know what you want,” he said, halting in front of her, peeved by the difference in their height. “You know what you’re supposed to want, but not what you really want. Step aside, Claire. Let people who know their own minds fight this out.”

  “No, people like me, who can see both sides, are needed. It’s called empathy.” Her tone had turned patronizing, superior.

  “Cowardice is what it’s called! You can see all the sides you want, but you can only be on one. One! You have to choose, Claire. Choose!” He was yelling now. That familiar, dreaded tightening, the build of frustration, had begun. Down at his sides, his fists balled and unballed, balled and unballed.

  “Sean! Sean Gallagher!” he heard his father call. Behind Claire he saw Frank barreling, to the extent a sixty-three-year-old man could, toward them. If he was trying to save Sean from himself, it worked.

  Sean pushed his arms at Claire like he was throwing a basketball at her, so that she jerked back, flailing a bit to keep her balance. But he didn’t touch her, he hadn’t touched her.

  It was dark and beginning to rain by the time Claire made her way to the jury’s meeting place, the office suite on the twentieth floor. The glow from the site below, which was lit, as always, for night, seemed to hover outside the windows like an aurora borealis. Claire couldn’t stop staring at it.

  Her arm hurt from where Sean had gripped it; her head clattered with his accusatory words. “Maybe it’s different losing a husband,” his mother had said to her. Maybe she was right. Maybe the problem wasn’t the Gallaghers’ passion but Claire’s lack of it, her reasonableness, her rationality revealing something—to others as much as, or more than, to herself—about her marriage. To have loved Cal: she no longer knew what that obligated.

  Her head echoed, too, with the heckles and taunts Khan had endured. To question him, she feared, would ally herself with his tormentors, yet questions were all she had. If the Garden was Islamic, did that mean it was a paradise, and did that make it a martyrs’ paradise, and so on. Each question contained another, like those nesting matryoshka dolls that Cal had commissioned as a playful family portrait.

  His original idea for the dolls, presented to the one-time art restorer from Moscow he had found to do the work, was for little Penelope to sit within William, who would sit within Claire, who would sit within Cal. But when William asked why Daddy got to be the biggest doll, Cal ordered three more sets in which each of them got to be the biggest once. Claire now could create a matryoshka of just herself—Claire within Claire within Claire within Claire. During the hearing, all these different Claires, who just happened to look alike, seemed to rest inside her, so that every argument, no matter how contradictory, found sympathy. Each time she thought she had reached the last Claire, the true and solid one, she was proved wrong. She couldn’t find her own core.

  “We wasted months just to offer guidance?” she heard Elliott, the critic, say. “And ‘not even the most meaningful’ at that?”

  “It’s like letting the public decide on tenure,” Leo, stalwart of academia, sniffed, as if his imagination encompassed no greater affront.

  In the span of her reverie, the room had filled with jurors. Unhappy jurors, snapping at Paul for giving the public the final word.

  “The man who lives to quote Edmund Burke turns out to be from the Thomas Paine school of how to run a public hearing,” said Ian, the historian.

  Paul looked queasy. “I was trying to protect you,” he said. “You saw the tenor of that hearing. To have this decision rest on the thirteen individuals in this room—we, you, will be too easily targeted. Blamed for consequences you can’t predict. Better to let the voices we heard today—the loudest ones, the saddest, whatever you want—count for something, too.”

  “The saddest, you said?” Ariana asked. “The most compelling speaker today was the Bangladeshi woman.” There were nods. “Let her decide.”

  “Asma Anwar,” the mayor’s aide, Violet, said, consulting her notes.

  “An authentic voice,” said Maria, the public art maven, huskily.

  “What makes her voice more authentic than Frank Gallagher’s?” Claire broke in, prodded by the ache in her arm. The young woman’s speech, admittedly inspiring, had stung Claire with implicit rebuke, as if Jack Worth was lecturing her on Khan’s behalf all over again.

  “Nothing, except that we’ve heard a lot from the Gallaghers and families like them. We never hear from people like this woman.”

  “To have her up there in a headscarf, after these barbaric headscarf pullings—it was like some brilliant piece of performance art.” Elliott, the critic, gave a small, ecstatic sigh.

  “Performance, maybe, but not art,” Claire said, then regretted the words. “Look, we need to figure out how to weigh all of the families’ competing views.”

  “Competing views? You make it sound
like there’s no right and wrong, Claire, just different feelings,” Ariana said. Her glance was vivisecting. “You were our conscience. I guess now Asma Anwar is. I move that we should affirm our support for Khan tonight.”

  Claire had scaled to a longed-for view, only to find it vertiginous. Their backing of Khan, which she had sought so vigorously, now dizzied her. With a fierce gaze she urged Paul to remind the group that they weren’t meant to vote tonight, but rather to discuss the hearing and how to survey the public comments. But Paul, looking less like a chairman than like a barman sociably eavesdropping on an interesting conversation, said nothing.

  “You didn’t even like the Garden,” Claire reminded Ariana.

  “It’s not about like, it’s about the fate of art in a democracy,” Ariana said. “We all watched—well, not literally, because they did it in the dead of night—Serra’s Tilted Arc being carved up and carted away from Federal Plaza because ‘the public’ inveighed against it. Now they don’t like Khan’s religion or what his design might or might not mean. Empower the public in this way, and anything ugly or challenging or difficult or produced by a member of an out-of-favor group will be fair game.”

  “So anything the public opposes is worth protecting?” Claire asked. No one answered, as if the question was beneath consideration. “This isn’t a work of art. It’s a memorial. It’s wrong to vote now. If we do, we lose all leverage to get Khan to explain or change the Garden.”

  “Khan’s not obligated to explain anything. And I won’t ask him to change anything because of our speculations.”

  “It’s not speculation—he said today it was Islamic.”

  “No, he said it has Islamic influences.”

  “Pre-Islamic, I think he was trying to say?” Maria interjected.