The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  She returned to her needlepoint, and he tugged at loose threads on his sleeve, the two of them making and unmaking each other.

  “I’ve never asked much of you, Sean,” she said. Her ears shifted back slightly. “I would say we’ve asked very little of you. But I asked you for this, begged you to stop this memorial. And now you want to walk away before the job is done, just like you’ve walked away from almost everything in your life, left it half done or half broken. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. But I can be angry.” Her voice sharpened on the words.

  “I don’t want to let you down, Ma. It’s the last thing I want. But my heart’s not in it, not anymore. And that means I’ll be lousy at fighting for it.”

  “You think my heart was in everything I’ve had to do in this life? Where did you get the idea that you decide how to live based on how you feel when you wake up each morning? Not from me. You know, when you were born, I had a very hard time.” He looked up; this was news to him. “Five children already, a sixth seemed too much. Now the doctors probably have some special name for it, but all I knew was that I was tired and I wanted something for myself. I wanted myself back, is more like it. Truth be told, I hated your father for bringing you about. And so I went away for a few weeks after you were born.” She was looking at him, steady, unapologetic. “Maybe only Patrick was old enough to remember. Maybe it’s why Frank has always had a tender spot for you, troubles and all. I just left. Took the housekeeping money I’d saved for emergencies—your father was never good at planning for emergencies, so I had to be—and went up and down the eastern seaboard. Rehoboth. Rhode Island. It was winter. I just walked on the beach. Hadn’t spent so much time alone in years. Hadn’t spent any time alone in years. Then I came back and did my duty. Came back because it was my duty. Never asked your father a single question about how he managed in that time I was gone. Alone with six children, including a newborn!” Her laugh burst forth, breaking up her face like jackhammered cement. It was as if the mere contemplation of Frank shouldering her burdens for a few weeks had helped her bear them for years.

  “I came back because I was nothing outside this family,” she said. “And you will be nothing.”

  “Maybe nothing is what I’m meant to be,” he shot back.

  “I lost one son,” she said. “I don’t want to lose another.” She paused, resumed stitching. Small fingers, steady hand. This, too, he would remember.

  “Why would you lose me?”

  “You can’t be half in a family. You’re in, or you’re out. You want to go on living here like some pacifist suddenly too good to fight, but still eating our food, warming your feet, while the rest of us go get bloody in the war. It doesn’t work that way, Sean.”

  “Let me sleep on it, Ma,” he said abruptly. “We’ll talk in the morning.” He held his hand out to her, and she looked at him with suspicion, then let him help her from the chair. He switched off the lamp, and they moved together through the dark.

  24

  Manila walls, worn corporate carpet, no window—the room might once have been a supply closet. Claire wondered whether Paul Rubin had deliberately procured the smallest possible space at his old bank in which to cage her with Mohammad Khan. She and he were seated, in uncomfortable proximity, across a narrow metal table, the walls too near their backs.

  “Take your time,” Rubin commanded from the doorway. Here was the forceful man who once ran this bank, Claire thought. Too often of late he had vanished, had withdrawn from the messy process of leading. But Asma Anwar’s death had resurrected the natural chairman. The morning after the murder he had called and, sounding both shaken and brusque, ordered her to meet with Khan to hash out her ambivalence. He had indulged it long enough, he said, just as he had indulged Khan’s stubbornness. She needed to get to a place of certainty; Khan, one of flexibility. When Paul shut the door, Claire wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it lock.

  Khan’s comfort with his physical self, long and lean, struck her forcibly in this small space. When she had last seen him, at the end of the public hearing, he had looked exhausted, depleted. His confidence had been restored, and somehow this unnerved her. They were so close they had no choice but to look directly into each other’s eyes, as they had in her dream of him. Except in the dream his face held warmth, the desire to explain. Here it simply withheld. His affect was dispassionate, as if the news of this contretemps had reached everyone but the man who prompted it.

  “I’m so sorry about Asma Anwar,” she began.

  “I am, too,” he said, his look intent.

  “Had you met her?” Claire asked. “After the hearing, I mean. Did you speak to her at all?” She didn’t like herself for feeling competitive with a dead woman, but she couldn’t help it: she wanted to know if Khan had thanked Asma for her support, as he never had Claire.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t call her.” Claire glimpsed regret, maybe even embarrassment, in his face, which consoled her, until she thought to be ashamed herself: she hadn’t reached out to Asma, a fellow widow, one facing deportation, either. Those last images of Asma—her green salwar kameez like a blade of grass—came to her now.

  “To have terror touch this process, of all things: it’s very hard,” she said. The words sounded forced, static: they didn’t begin to capture how the killing had shaken her. The threats she had received surged back to life, even though she knew that, in her privilege and isolation, she was well defended. At night, her heart thudding, she thought about that little boy, an orphan; the noun perched like a vulture over her own children, already halfway there. Her self-pity at being a widowed mother evaporated at the prospect of not being able to mother at all. Perhaps Khan was afraid, too. But he had no children.

  “We don’t know who killed her, so we can’t say what it means,” Khan said. The statement, perfectly rational, peeved her for its very rationality. The who almost didn’t matter when the what—his memorial, everything that happened in response—was so clear.

  “To be honest, it makes me uncomfortable about posing questions to you,” she said. “I want to—to honor her defense of you. But I can’t go on backing the Garden without knowing more. So I’m asking out of respect for her.”

  “Respect for her precludes invoking her as a reason for asking or not asking anything, Mrs. Burwell. Ask because you need—or want—to know.”

  “But it’s not just me,” Claire protested, fighting her own chagrin. “I have a lot of families to answer to.”

  “Then we’d better get to your questions,” he said.

  “Let’s start with the hearing, what Betsy Stanton said, about the buildings using Islamic visual language. Does that mean your garden—at least the motif for the names—does, too?”

  “The names were patterned on the exterior of the buildings themselves, just as I said in my submission essay. But I was as surprised as you, as everyone, to learn there might have been Islamic antecedents to those buildings. Intrigued, but surprised. It does seem fairly speculative.”

  “But the architect who designed the towers had spent time in Islamic countries, right?”

  “I believe so, but I don’t know his career well.”

  “And have you?”

  “Have I what?” One side of his mouth smiled, as if he sensed her trying to trap him.

  “Spent time in Islamic countries.”

  “Only briefly,” he said.

  “Which ones?”

  “Afghanistan. Dubai, if five hours in the airport counts as spending time.”

  “What were you doing in Afghanistan?”

  He shifted his chair back from the table so he could cross his leg and, perhaps, get a better look at her. “Representing my firm in the competition to design a new American embassy in Kabul,” he said, “although I’m not sure what bearing that has on the memorial. We didn’t win.”

  Her brain was idling; she wasn’t sure where to go next.

  “Where did your idea come from—for the Garden?” she asked.
/>   “From my imagination.” The line was a wall: she couldn’t see around it.

  “Of course,” she said after a beat. “Of course. But you must have to feed your imagination.”

  “Constantly,” he said evenly. She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “So at the hearing, you mentioned—before you were interrupted, and I want to say I’m sorry about that, too. It was very disturbing to watch; I can’t imagine what it was like to experience.”

  He didn’t respond, so she plunged ahead. “You said you fed it, your imagination, in the case of your design, with Islamic gardens. That’s what you said at the hearing.”

  “I said the gardens we now call Islamic were one influence. Architects—at least the good ones—don’t plagiarize. They quote.”

  “So what were you quoting? Gardens you saw in Afghanistan?”

  “I did see a garden there, yes.”

  “And what was it for—what’s its purpose? I mean—Afghanistan must be full of martyrs.” Clumsy, but she had to know.

  “So that’s why we’re here,” he said. He looked strangely sad.

  “You’ve never answered that question,” she said, “about whether it’s a martyrs’ paradise, or a paradise at all. Since the question was raised by the Times. You’ve never said.”

  “The question, as I recall, of it being a ‘martyrs’ paradise’”—he mimed quotes around the phrase—“was first raised by Fox.”

  The same embarrassment came over her as when Wilner, the governor’s man, now the Garden’s only opponent, affirmed her in the jury room.

  “Whoever raised it,” she said, “it’s now been raised. And left hanging out there.”

  “Where it will hang forever,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Why should I be responsible for assuaging fears I didn’t create?”

  “But Paul said you would answer my questions,” she said, baffled. “Because of Asma Anwar.”

  “I told him I would answer whatever questions I could,” Khan said. “He chose not to hear me. It’s exactly because of Asma Anwar that I won’t answer questions like the one you just asked me. Didn’t you listen to her speech? She was saying terrorists shouldn’t count more than people like her husband. But your questions—the suspicions they contain—make them count more. You assume we all must think like them unless we prove otherwise.”

  “I’m not assuming anything. A question doesn’t make me a bigot. How can I support a memorial when I don’t know what it is?”

  “You seemed very comfortable with what it was when you first laid eyes on it,” he said softly. “Even when we first met. You seemed to love the Garden. It was very moving to me, what you said about your son.”

  “My son, like any child, forms and forgets attachments very easily,” she said. At Khan’s surprised look, she tried to backpedal. “I just need to know what it is—even for William, when he’s older. Can’t you understand—”

  “Maybe this will help,” he said, extracting a narrow white pad and a pen from the inside of his jacket pocket. He drew two intersecting lines and asked, “What’s this?”

  Claire studied it. “A cross?”

  He turned it diagonally. “And this?”

  “An X.”

  He drew a square around the cross and turned it back to her. “And now?”

  “Not sure—a window maybe?”

  More lines. “A checkerboard?” she said. “Or maybe Manhattan—it looks like a grid.”

  “It’s all of those things, or maybe none of them. It’s lines on a plane, just like the Garden,” he continued. “Lines on a plane. Geometry doesn’t belong to a single culture. The grid is the quintessential modernist form, as I’m sure that Times critic grasps. It barely appeared in art before the twentieth century, then suddenly it’s everywhere. Mondrian wasn’t a Muslim. Mies, Agnes Martin, LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt—none of them were. I can’t help the associations you bring because I am.”

  “The problem isn’t just the associations I bring but those your fellow Muslims might bring. They’ll read it a certain way—”

  “Is that what all your Muslim friends tell you?”

  Claire swallowed. “I think it would be helpful if you just came out and said that it’s not meant for martyrs, or whatever the worst-case scenario is. Or make some change to the Garden to calm the fears. Take out the canals, so your opponents won’t be able to say it’s the paradise in the Quran. ‘Gardens beneath which rivers flow,’ or whatever the line is.”

  “You want me to change the Garden,” he said slowly.

  “Just some symbolic change, as much to show you are eager to find common ground, that you’re flexible, as for any substantive reason.”

  “You want me to take out the canals because it reminds you of a line in the Quran,” he said, as if he hadn’t understood.

  “It’s just an idea.”

  “Asma Anwar got up there and talked about how the paradise of the Quran was for people like her husband—and now, we can only hope, for her. You can’t say you want to honor her memory, then insist on erasing anything that reminds you of the paradise she spoke of.”

  “So it is meant to evoke that paradise.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Khan said. His jaw was clenched. “I said it’s insulting to her to want to purge the Garden of anything that you’ve decided evokes that paradise.”

  “These distinctions are too fine for this country, given what’s happened. Can’t you see that it’s natural for people to be afraid?”

  “As natural as a garden,” Khan said. The line was too perfect: she wanted to tear at it.

  “I’m not going to apologize for wanting to be comfortable with the design for my husband’s memorial,” Claire said with exasperation. “Your design becomes more threatening if you won’t change it: it tells me there’s something there, something hidden, you want to preserve. Followers of your religion have caused enormous pain. Caused me enormous pain. And for all of us, it’s very difficult to sort out what Islam actually means or encourages. What Muslims believe. A lot of Muslims who would never commit terrorism still support it, for political reasons if not religious ones. Or they pretend it wasn’t Muslims at all who did this. So it’s not unreasonable for me to ask where on that continuum you sit. To learn at the hearing that you’ve never denounced the attack—I’ll be honest, that was upsetting. Why haven’t you?”

  “I guess no one ever asked me to.” No flippancy in the voice, but there in the words.

  “And if I ask you now?”

  “Same principle, Mrs. Burwell.” His use of her married name grated. She was barely older than him.

  “Which is what?” she flared up. “What is the principle behind refusing to say a terrorist attack was wrong, or that you don’t believe in the theology that spawned it?”

  “And what is the principle behind demanding that I say it, when your six-year-old son can tell you it’s wrong?” He tried to run his hands through his hair, only to realize it was too short. He clenched his fists on both sides of his head and looked down at the table.

  “What William tells me has no bearing here. I’m interested in what you believe.”

  There was an uncomfortably long silence. “Wouldn’t you assume that any non-Muslim who entered this competition thinks the attack was wrong? Why are you treating me differently? Why are you asking more of me?”

  “Because you’re asking more of us!” she said. “You want us to trust you even though you won’t answer questions about your design—what it means, where it came from.”

  “But you’re only asking those questions because you don’t trust me.”

  “And I don’t trust you because you won’t answer, so we’re stuck.” She smiled, and to her surprise so did he. If they could recognize, even laugh at, this bind, she thought, her antagonism easing, they could escape it.

  “It’s just that—it’s hard for me to have you design the memorial if I don’t know what you think.”

  “It’s a question of f
aith, isn’t it.”

  This silenced her. She reached her arm back, wanting the wall’s solidity. Khan had turned his chair slightly to the side, seeking still more room for his legs, so they were no longer looking directly at each other. She studied him from a three-quarter angle. The historian on the jury, ever the pedant, once commented on how the Germans, even those who hadn’t been born when Hitler died, kept finding new ways to apologize to the Jews, to atone. Individuals innocent of a crime could still feel or bear collective responsibility for it. It was for some sign of accepting this responsibility that she searched Khan’s face.

  “Can’t you see you’re only hurting yourself?” she said. “If you want me to fight for you—you wouldn’t know this, but I was the only juror who didn’t waver when we learned your name—I need to know more. I need you to, if not denounce, distance yourself from some of these ideas, or just make some accommodation in your design. This isn’t about you. It’s about the religion.”

  Even in profile she could see the jerk of shock. He turned his chair to face her, its legs catching in the frayed carpet, and asked:

  “How would you feel if I justified what happened to your husband by saying it wasn’t about him but about his country and its policies—damn shame he got caught up in it, that’s all—but you know, he got what he deserved because he paid taxes to the American government. I get what I deserve because I happen to share a religion with a few crazies?”

  Claire went taut. “Damn shame.” “What he deserved.” The words seemed to strike the fragile bones of her ear, even as she wasn’t exactly sure what he had said: she had been thinking and listening at the same time, which made it hard to hear. But this, at last, had to be what he really thought. It pained her, sickened her, to think that perhaps vile Alyssa Spier was right, that Khan did see Cal as mere collateral damage in a war America had brought on itself, that he believed Cal, generous, good-natured Cal, bore responsibility, guilt, simply because he was American. She jerked to her feet like a mishandled marionette, grabbed her purse, and in one unbroken gesture reached the door, flung it open, stepped through, and slammed it behind her. In the hall, unable to find the elevator, she wandered down corridors and scurried past occupied offices until she spotted an exit sign—the stairs, that would do—and bore toward it as if to head-butt her way out. She opened the door to a dank stairwell and began the bleak mechanics of descent.