The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  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.

  “The hearing does seem to have influenced opinions in Khan’s favor,” Paul ventured. “His discussion of his design seems to have softened the opposition a bit.” He knew from Lanny that the shift was due less to Khan’s rocky presentation than to the Bangladeshi woman speaking with such passion. Americans, it seemed, could still be shamed; she had woken some dormant noble impulse.

  “Khan had nothing to do with it,” the governor said. “You’re referring to what Kyle so nicely framed as the Bangladeshi bounce”—Kyle shifted as if he itched—“and I think that’s been taken care of.” Her smile was breezy.

  Paul stared at her. A career in investment banking inured even the most sensitive soul, which he was not, to ruthlessness. But his mouth was agape. Had Geraldine leaked Asma Anwar’s immigration status to Alyssa Spier? The young woman now faced deportation. The president himself had apologetically explained that immigration officials couldn’t turn a blind eye to her status, however tragic her story. Her exit was far from certain: her lawyer was vowing to fight her removal, which could take years, and her defenders within Congress and out were demanding “mercy citizenship.” But her life had been upended and the damage compounded by the subsequent leak of her $1 million in government compensation. Had Geraldine put that out there, too, the better to sap more sympathy? The governor’s ambition kept outflanking Paul’s imagination. And in this case, it offended his sense of decency, too. The Bangladeshi bounce had worked on him.

  “Earth to Paul,” Geraldine said impatiently. She wanted his thoughts on how long she should wait after the jury announced its decision to announce hers, and whether to then convene a new jury. “That’s my thinking,” she said. “One with more family members.”

  “I’m not sure things are going to wrap up so neatly, Geraldine”—she stiffened—“Governor. Assuming the jury backs Khan, which is where they’re leaning, they won’t be complacent about your vetoing their choice.”

  “Perhaps they need to reread the bylaws. They have no recourse.”

  “But they’ll keep looking for one,” Paul said. “They don’t want this decided on public sentiment alone. You’ll remember that’s why we had a jury in the first place—to yield a more considered judgment than the public has the capacity—the time, I should say—to provide.”

  “And the jury did a brilliant job,” Bitman said, with a lift of her eyebrows. “But the process was always meant to allow the people to weigh in, and they have, quite clearly. They don’t want it.”

  The looks Kyle and Harold exchanged suggested, to Paul, two brothers arguing over which one would tell their mother her Spode teapot had shattered.

  “The trouble is sorting out why they dont want it,” Kyle said, too fast. He excelled at bringing the governor’s bad news to others but was unpracticed in delivering such news to her. Her brow furrowed. “The trouble is sorting out why they don’t want it,” he said more slowly. “If they don’t want him simply because he’s a Muslim—the bottom line is that you can’t rely on public opinion if it’s only about his religion.”

  “Then Paul, you should have called all of that crap out of bounds.”

  “You said the people needed to vent,” Paul said, pleased that he had managed to tie her hands while appearing to do her bidding. “They vented.”

  Her pupils went bullet-hard. “They vented about the design: that, not his religion, is the problem here. He created an Islamic paradise!” she snapped. “If nothing else, we should deny him for being an idiot. Did he really think that would fly?”

  “The problem,” Harold said, with another look at Kyle, “is that he hasn’t acknowledged it’s a paradise, in fact he said explicitly in the hearing that Islamic gardens were only one possible influence, and that, structurally, the features we point to as Islamic actually predate the religion. Which means we’re only deducing it’s a martyrs’ garden, what you will, because he’s Muslim. That places the Constitution on his side, not ours. If a Catholic designed that same garden no one would care. And even if he were to admit it was—”

  “Which he won’t,” Paul interjected.

  “That might not be sufficient to bar him, either, since—I’ve done some research—this iconography is cultural as well as religious. It’s hard to separate.”

  “If it will ease your worries, I’ll find it unsuitable without saying why. I’m the governor,” she added. “I’m allowed to pronounce.”

  “Queens pronounce,” Paul said. “Governors explain.”

  A black look came at him. “Fine. The plants will die, and that will be depressing. Is that reason enough for you?”

  “The reasoning has to be defensible in court,” Harold said. He held his polished glasses up to the light to scrutinize them for scratches. This allowed him to avoid Bitman’s eyes. “The state and city will be responsible for maintaining the memorial, so if the plants die, it will be our fault, not the design’s—”

  Her smile chilled him into silence. She examined the faces around the room, then, as if disappointed, stared at her outstretched hands. She looked up with a glance that seemed to swallow all of them at once. “So it’s a lawsuit we’re worried about, correct? Being sued by Khan?”

  “Absolutely,” said Harold. “If we deny him his memorial and he sues—”

  “I will have to testify about why I vetoed his design—”

  “Yes, and—”

  “Remind me why that’s so terrible?” She winked at Paul, and he could see her imagining herself on the stand, in a trial covered by every news outlet in the country, defending her defense of the memorial site, of America itself, from the Islamist threat. Even if the state lost, she would win. Every time she had gone on the offensive against Khan she had risen in the polls. He was her oxygen.

  22

  Asma awoke before the sun. The darkness flowed around her like water, filling every hole and crevice of her body: her nostrils, the indent between her lips, the dip between her breasts, the concavity of her belly, the gap between her legs, the cracks between her toes. Her mind flew to Bangladesh, as if to prepare. With dawn the call to prayer would vibr
ate through her. Inam’s mother would rise to make tea for his father, or more likely Asma would be making the tea for both of them, listening for the roosters and the rickshaws, and in monsoon season, the pounding of the rain, dancing feet on the roof.

  Here she heard only an occasional car and her own breath: in out in out. She focused on it until she became only breath, felt that she could just float away. Her bones alone held her down, pinned her in place. They and the boy next to her. His breath—softer, shallower—sounded, too. For a few seconds she held her own breath, silencing the dirge of her life to hear the song of his.

  She was almost packed. She had only to place Abdul’s clothes and toys in the carry-on bag. Her suitcases and boxes were lined up by the door. Her expensive new pots and pans. Her television and DVD player and video camera. She had tried to fit a whole country, the idea of a country, in her luggage: Nike shoes; T-shirts with Disneyland and the White House and all the places she had never been; glossy magazines and American flags; history books; tourist brochures. MetroCards she would never use, children’s books she could not read. DVDs of American movies and television shows, even though the pirated versions in Bangladesh would be cheaper. As Bangladeshis had created a Little Bangladesh here, she would create for herself and Abdul a Little America back home.

  It was her choice to go, and yet not. In the days since her exposure as an alien, politicians had whipped the public into a frenzy of fear over the thousands of untracked Bangladeshi Muslims in New York, starting with Asma’s own dead husband. “I’ll ask it, even if no one else will,” Lou Sarge proclaimed on his show. “What was her husband doing in those buildings, anyway?” The governor invoked the attack: “I feel for Asma Anwar, but she represents a serious problem. When we don’t watch who’s coming through our open door, thousands of Americans die. I won’t let that happen again while I’m leading this state.” She demanded that the federal government comb the Bangladeshi community for illegals and for terrorist links.

  “Next door, upstairs, there are illegals everywhere,” Nasruddin said. “The whole building could go. Half the neighborhood.” Her neighbors were gossiping about her. Blaming her. Saying that Asma put herself before everyone else. The community would starve to feed her pride. Because of her, Bangladeshis were being lumped with Pakistanis as a threat. Asma had a good lawyer in Laila Fathi and public sympathy: she would probably win her case. Not so the others who might be rounded up because of her. Perhaps, she had begun to think, her leaving might ease the pressure.

  But it was the revelation, in the Post, that she had received $1 million in compensation from the government that made her decision. The Mahmouds were furious that she had taken advantage of their generosity by paying only $50 a month for her room. Asma knew that for Mrs. Mahmoud it was less about the money than the embarrassment of missing such sensational news right in her own apartment. Hadn’t she noticed Abdul’s new toys or Asma’s swollen pride, people chided, as if pride were a physical change. Mrs. Mahmoud’s powers of observation were called into question. Mr. Mahmoud announced that Asma would need to find a new place to live. But who in Kensington, or even Jackson Heights or any other Bangladeshi neighborhood, would have her? Everyone was angry at her; or fearful that her illegal status would somehow call attention to theirs; or greedy for a ransom in rent, since, with her million, she could afford it. The world beyond Kensington—the white people’s neighborhoods with their sprinklers—seemed less alluring when she was being forced into it. Where to go, then, speaking so little English? Nowhere but home, Bangladesh, however reluctantly. As soon as she told her landlady her decision, Mrs. Mahmoud forgave her, perhaps because Asma confided in her first.

  Her exile was ending. She was, after all, returning to her own country. Yet it was exile she felt herself entering. Of the boat trip with Inam—the impudent wind, the gulls dropping their cries like loose feathers, stilled Manhattan—flat, mute photos were all that remained. She feared that the ever-thinning cord that still bound her to her husband would snap once she left New York. She was breaking her vow to raise his son in America, and she was abandoning him. Inam’s remains swam in the city’s rivers, hung in its air.

  She was abandoning, as well, her own hopes of being something more than mother, widow, daughter-in-law. She and Inam had lived with his parents for a few weeks after they were married while they waited for their tourist visas to come through. Her mother-in-law was always correcting her—the way she served tea or cooked or washed clothes—as if in those first weeks Asma’s wifely character would be formed and she, Inam’s mother, could risk no leniency. She was always telling Asma what Inam wanted, as if he could not speak for himself. Now she would go to live with them, be less their guest than their servant, always dependent on their kindness. They would blame her for Inam’s death, she suspected, and they would not be wholly wrong. The money would color everything. She discussed this with Nasruddin. One condition of her receiving the funds from the American government was that she agree in writing to abide by America’s inheritance laws and those of no other country, including Bangladesh, where widows inherit only small portions of their husbands’ estates. Neither her parents nor Inam’s would be able to take control of the money; if they did, the American government would take it back. She had tried to look chastened when she learned this, but felt a small glee. In this respect, America had given her power.

  But she had met the limits of that power. She thought her freedom here was limitless but in truth it was bounded—by a larger circle than at home, but a circle nonetheless. When she spoke out, pushed at it, crossed over it, she offended. It was entirely different than at home, and yet the same. Maybe her speaking out would help bring Mohammad Khan’s memorial for Inam into being. But neither she nor Abdul would be here to visit it.

  Sorrow at this flooded her, not once but in waves. Loss piled on loss. Into sleep she slipped, into a place where someone was laying huge, flat, heavy stones on her body to see how much weight she could take. She could not breathe, could not bear it, then saw her little boy trying to lift stones three times his weight from her body and she struggled upward from sleep, only to find nothing had changed: she was in her bed, he by her side, and they were being cast out.

  Except maybe God, the greatest of all plotters, meant for her to return home. She had her money and her American experience, which told her that hard work made any enterprise possible, even if Bangladesh’s corruption and chaos would test that. She would found a girls’ school there. Maybe they couldn’t change a country of 140 million people now, but if each girl founded a school, and each of those students founded a school …

  The power was God’s. This was what the imam had been trying to tell her about Inam’s death, that she had no right to anything in life, not a place, not a position, not a person. Even her own child, born from her womb, was His creation and could be safeguarded only with His blessing. He could take away all He had given. Only He could not be taken. He would not abandon her if she did not abandon Him: she trusted in this. The garden in New York, all that she was being wrenched from, would be nothing next to what awaited her.

  Tugging her chunni, the parrot-green one, away from her perspiring neck, Asma marched down the stairs from the Mahmouds’ apartment. She carried Abdul, and behind her Nasruddin and Mr. Mahmoud came laden with her bags and boxes; and behind them Laila Fathi, holding Asma’s travel documents; and behind her Mrs. Mahmoud and Mrs. Ahmed, crying and holding each other.

  As soon as Asma came out of her building a crowd surrounded her, women reaching out to touch her in a way that reminded Nasruddin of pilgrims at the graves of saints. What they hoped to take from the touch he couldn’t say: her luck wasn’t something to covet—losing her husband, losing her place—and yet he understood. It seemed every Bangladeshi in Kensington and many from beyond had come to witness Asma’s departure, to commiserate or gloat or simply gawk at this woman, one of them, who had become a celebrity. They filled the sidewalks and the street, hung from windows, clung to fire es
capes, peered from roofs. Without hearing them, Nasruddin knew what they were saying. They’d been saying it ever since the effort to deport Asma had begun. Bhabiakoriokaj, koriabhabiona—“Think before acting, don’t act before thinking.”

  To her face they were all kindness, all sympathy. Her efforts to pack had been complicated by the endless stream of visitors, all of them picked over like a pile of burro bananas by Mrs. Mahmoud. She determined who got access to the inner sanctum (Asma’s room), who to the apartment at large, who had to wait in the hall. They brought sweets and small gifts, toys for Abdul, but mostly they came to take news of her purchases and packing back to the street.

  Intermingled among the Bangladeshis today there were also police, who had come to keep order, and reporters and news crews, the satellites atop their vans like giant ears cocked to the sky. The Post, not satisfied with exposing Asma’s status, had also somehow obtained her itinerary. In full gloat at its success in pushing Asma from the country, that morning’s paper had informed the whole world when she would leave.

  At Asma’s appearance the press pushed forward, shoving through the Bangladeshis to get close to her. Already peeved at the reporters’ sense of entitlement and his neighbors’ deference toward them, Nasruddin was furious when he saw Alyssa Spier in their ranks, notebook ready to chronicle the humiliation she had engineered. He tried to order her away, but his hands were full with Asma’s boxes. The reporters circled Asma, shouting questions at her, pressing in on her with their microphones and cameras, swallowing her up.