The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  Mo began scaling the terraces, then wandered off to the side, into the intimate shade of the tree canopies, the grassy turf sinking slightly beneath his feet. Pink blossoms frothed against the green foliage; tulips, tiny cups of color, were scattered offhandedly around the bases of the trunks. Near the garden’s perimeter wall, densely planted mulberry, almond, and fig trees created a deeper shade. He smelled damp earth, spring air, trodden grass, and a faint, floral sweetness.

  The garden’s flaws didn’t escape him: he hadn’t left his critical mind back at the hotel. Bagh-e-Babur lacked crispness. There was no natural or guided progression for a visitor, no journey. Uncoordinated interventions through the centuries—a tomb, a mosque, a pavilion, a swimming pool—had given the garden the random aspect of a poorly developed city.

  The tomb belonged to Babur, an emperor Mo’s book described as warrior and aesthete. His resting place was encased in white marble, contravening Babur’s wish that nothing cover his grave “so that the rain and the sun could beat upon it and perhaps encourage a wildflower to grow.” Instead, Judas trees nearby flaunted scarlet flowers.

  On a lower terrace sat a delicate white marble mosque, beneath whose portico three women heated a lunch of rice and meat. The white of the mosque was offset by the dark, well-groomed vestments of the Mediterranean cypress trees on either side. Their shape reminded Mo of tall bottle brushes or calligraphy quills. Of that “Design Against Terrorism” seminar: cypresses as a line of defense, blasted but erect.

  Descending to yet another terrace, he found his way to the veranda of an elegant small pavilion and sat. Before him the canal stretched like a long runner reflecting the sky. From under the almond trees sprang a joyous cry: the boys who guided him to the garden had rematerialized to play a hybrid of croquet and cricket and horseshoes, each aiming at the other’s tossed rock. The faint thwack of a hit called forth a whoop, a soft thud in the grass, a groan of despair. At a water tap a young man groomed himself in a small, handheld mirror, twisting his face this way and that as if searching for flaws. A group of women raised their burkas atop their heads like nuns’ wimples and turned toward the sun. The walls muffled but didn’t erase the city’s sounds.

  Memories drifted in. Mo recalled a childhood trip to India, to Kashmir, that had included visits to baghs. He remembered his feet in a rectangular pool next to a waterfall and wanting to swim; giant dahlias, purple flowers shaped like bells, terraces like those here; and at the back of the gardens a mountain rising, furred dark green. Clear, cool air. A pavilion—black marble?—where they had sat for a few moments. Fountains spurting up water. Across the road a giant lake, smooth as a mirror, gleamed silver.

  He dawdled in memory until dusk, when the light in Babur’s garden turned murky, soft, and the muezzin’s wail poured over him. From all corners men moved toward the exit and the city beyond as inexorably as the canal flowing down the terraces. Mo felt a pull, more passive than volition, to follow them, as if he were a drop being absorbed by a body of water whose size he had no way to measure. And yet he held back, until he saw one man kneel to pray, alone, on a stone border at a terrace’s edge. He went to join him, pausing first at a tap to splash water on his face and hands in a gesture toward ablution.

  Mo had last prayed maybe a year ago, visiting the Virginia mosque with his father. It was perhaps the first time he had prayed as an adult, and with the steps of the salat foreign to him, he watched his father. It was a lesson of odd intimacy. Salman was past sixty, and his age told in the creak of his knees, the pause of his body in a question mark on the way to the floor, the gathering of breath before he bent to his forehead, the slight stiffness of the rise.

  Mo, even as he moved himself, had been nearly paralyzed by self-consciousness. To see young professionals like him, BlackBerrys blinking from their belts, with their rears hoisted in the air and their socked soles exposed, had made him wince for their dignity and for his own, had made him think that men weren’t meant to be spectators of the prayers of others.

  But today, the Afghan, deep in his prostrations, did not acknowledge Mo, even as together they formed a line, a wall, a mosque; he cared not at all for Mo’s judgment. He had forgotten himself, and this was the truest submission.

  Mo pressed his hands to the window. The Arabian Sea unrolled to the horizon like a bolt of tussar silk. Behind him stretched Mumbai, its blurry edge embroidered farther every time he looked. The megacity, always expanding: new arrivals in the birth wards and bus stations each day, the dying and departing unable to keep pace. Mumbai spread, Mumbai rose. Mo watched from forty stories above the sea.

  He meditated on the water, trying to collect himself. He had spent the past hour in an argument with a Kuwaiti prince for whom he had designed a modest palace, clean-lined and energy-efficient. The commission had gone well until this morning, when the prince announced that he wanted a lawn, a vast, American-style lawn, with sprinklers embedded and mowers at the ready, a lawn on which balls could be bowled, horses cantered, picnics spread, tea parties laid, soccer wars waged. The prince didn’t care that even England and America had turned away from swards of green. With the profits from oil, he could buy water. He wanted a lawn.

  He couldn’t have one, not with Mo as his architect. “The landscaping isn’t an accessory, it’s part of the design, so you take all of it or none of it,” Mo had snapped, irritable even by his own standards. It had been a mistake to work this morning: he should have taken the time to subdue his memories, discipline his feelings. He was on edge, a man near sixty anxious about meeting a couple of American kids less than half his age.

  They were here, the doorman messaged; he was sending them up. Mo surveyed his immaculate space, then opened his door to a young woman, pretty enough, with crinkle-edged brown eyes, a salting of freckles, a wide smile. She wore a vintage wrap dress, but he suspected, from its awkward draping, that she preferred pants. Behind her stood a cameraman with tousled hair and a tentative smile. Mo politely asked that they remove their shoes.

  Molly had pestered him for months, outlining the documentary she hoped to make for the twentieth anniversary of the memorial competition, which she called a “seminal moment” in American cultural history. She was exploring the “politics of memorial,” “America in argument with itself,” “the plight of Muslims after the attack.” Her guiding idea, borrowed from one of her professors, was that the process of creating a memorial was itself part of the memorial.

  “But this memorial was never created,” Mo wrote back. “The process doesn’t matter.”

  She wouldn’t give up. Family members, jurors, journalists, activists, all had talked to her. Mo was the missing piece, and the most important. At last, to end her siege, he agreed. He planned to offer some generic remarks about the past being ancient history, then send her off into Mumbai to explore how memorializing had metastasized. As India continued to Westernize, it had become obsessed with naming its dead just as America did. The plaques were everywhere: at the train station, listing those who had fallen from overcrowded cars; at the airport, remembering those felled by ongoing terror attacks; in the slums, whose handwritten signs recorded those lost to sewage-born infections or police brutality.

  He told himself he admired—recognized—her persistence, but this elided the truth. For nearly two decades now, he had been a global citizen, American only in name. K/K Architects had a New York office, but Thomas Kroll ran it. Mo could pretend only so much of the time that he wanted it this way.

  Two years earlier, the Museum of New Architecture, in New York, had mounted a retrospective of his career. Mohammad Khan, American Architect was a tribute to his blaze of work, most of it in the Middle East, India, or China, over the past twenty years. It was unusual for an architect to complete so many projects so quickly, although Mo knew this was as much about his clients—rich patrons; undemocratic governments; Gatsby nations in a hurry to buy identities with their newfound wealth—as his own talents. But the exhibit also examined his influence. His style, wi
dely copied, married a remarkable simplicity of form with geometric patterns of dazzling complexity. Indeed, he was known as much for what he had convinced his clients not to build—gaudy, gargantuan palaces and mosques—as for what he had built for them. Critics and historians credited him with helping to shift the aesthetic of the Middle East. “Even in a mosque you should feel yourself in a garden,” he had told one interviewer. “Nothing between you and God.”

  Planning to attend the opening, Mo instead canceled at the last minute. It took him some time to puzzle out that the memorial was to blame. The Garden’s drawings and model were displayed in the “Unbuilt” section of the exhibit, along with a half dozen projects either in development or already abandoned. The caption read: “Khan’s design represented his first foray into melding modern minimalism with elements of Islamic design. He withdrew his submission in the face of heated political opposition, but the controversy brought his talent to the international stage.” It was a quintessentially American story—that you could profit even by losing—but not the accounting Mo was looking for.

  The country had moved on, self-corrected, as it always did, that feverish time mostly forgotten. Only Mo was stuck in the past. He wanted acknowledgment of the wrong done to him, awaited credit for his refusal to agree that the attack justified America’s suspicion of its Muslims any more than it justified the state’s overreaching. Today most Americans thought as he had, but at the time his stand had been lonely. Hard.

  More than his ego was at stake. American Muslims were now, if not embraced, accepted. Trusted. Their rights unquestioned. Mo wanted to embody this rapprochement through architecture, considered it incomplete otherwise. There wasn’t a single Mohammad Khan building in the United States, but it was his style as much as his name that he longed to imprint. He wanted to design structures that borrowed as freely from Islamic architecture as others borrowed from the Greeks or from medieval cathedrals. Yet his own stubbornness spited him, kept him from the thing he most desired.

  At the time of the opening in New York, he was seized by a regret so powerful it curled him in his bed in Mumbai. Ever since, he had been seeking another way back in. He had never spoken publicly of the memorial controversy, barely spoke of it privately. Perhaps opening up about it now could elicit the conversation, the apology, he wanted. Here he was, playing another game with his country, imposing another test. He couldn’t help himself.

  Molly plunged in. “Can we look around the apartment and see if there are any shots we’d want to get, and where we want to set you up?”

  “You should be able to get what you need out here,” he said, gesturing at the living room. “The light’s best on that side—”

  “I’ll figure it out, thanks,” said the cameraman, whose name Mo had already forgotten.

  “This is some place,” Molly said. Mo didn’t say he had designed it, designed the whole building, in fact, taking the top floor for himself. His apartment was simple, spare, naturally cooled by shade and currents of air. A balcony embraced the entire apartment; its overhang shielded the art and artifacts inside from the afternoon sun. Filigreed screens on windows dappled intricate carpets of light and shadow onto the floor. Where they stood, the actual rug beneath their bare feet was so soft it begged stroking. Its pattern had faded with age—great, expensive age—but could still be seen: a tree of life, cypresses, flowers. A garden.

  “Be careful!” Mo said. The cameraman, like an overexcited Labrador, had nearly knocked over a folio of Persian miniatures displayed on a stand. The cavalier clumsiness of the gesture made Mo homesick as much as irritable. The young man had the peculiarly half-formed quality of his age, class, country. He seemed nervous. This began to make Mo nervous, too.

  Over tea, Molly updated him on everyone they had interviewed, or tried to. Vice President Bitman had not responded to repeated interview requests. Lou Sarge had died of a prescription drug overdose before they could speak with him. Sean Gallagher—“the headscarf-puller”—they had yet to find. He surfaced from time to time to check on his family, according to his tight-lipped mother, then disappeared.

  Paul Rubin had died some years back, of a heart attack, but they had interviewed his wife. Did Mo want to see? Molly asked. They had brought some footage.

  Mo logged her into his wireless system. The image of a white-haired, sharp-eyed woman bloomed on the wall screen. Well past eighty, she was impeccably coiffed, with a string of pearls at her throat, a pale mint suit, discreet lipstick, and a fierce expression that would make Death himself nervous to approach. Edith Rubin.

  She began by quoting, from pained memory, Rubin’s obituary: “‘Despite a distinguished career in finance, he will be remembered mostly for his failed stewardship of the memorial process, which some argued set back America’s long convalescence.’”

  “I spent years arguing with the obituary writers over that,” she said in a tart tone. “It’s wrong. It’s not fair to Paul. No one could have handled the process better than he did. It was an impossible situation. Impossible, especially with the way Geraldine Bitman behaved, and I hope you’ll put that in your film. He always thought the best thing for the country, even for the Muslims, was for Mohammad Khan to withdraw, and that is what happened.”

  “But I didn’t give in—withdraw—because he asked me to,” Mo protested over Edith’s speech. “Rubin pressuring me only made me fight harder.”

  Molly checked some notes and fast-forwarded a little. “What Paul told me of his interactions with Khan—it reminded me so much of the way he related to our sons,” Edith continued, as if in conversation with Mo. “He always wanted the boys to be something other, something more, than they were. They resisted, and Khan, in his own way, resisted even more zealously. Poor Paul. And Claire Burwell: Paul was so surprised when she united with that Muslim group to ask Khan to withdraw. I think he tried to be like a father to her, too. But she had ambitions.”

  “So many things evaded Paul’s grasp in that period,” she went on. “It was a strain for him, and for me, having to watch. But in the end, what he believed needed to happen did. That wasn’t an accident, not entirely. He deserves credit.”

  “It’s an awfully convenient way of looking at things,” Mo said. “Everything he did was right, even the things that were wrong, because it all turned out well in the end. For everyone but me, that is.”

  The tinge of embarrassment in Molly’s face made Mo regret his self-pity.

  “She loves him,” the cameraman said. “Loved him, I guess.” Both Mo and Molly looked at him in surprise. “Sorry,” he said, halting now. Red. “It’s just—that would color her view of what he did.”

  Molly gave herself over to a radiant smile, briefly forgetting Mo, then turned back to him: “She’s right that it did turn out well for others. Issam Malik’s in Congress, you know.”

  Mo did, because Malik had the gall to solicit him, regularly, unsuccessfully, for campaign contributions. Before entering the House, he and Debbie Dawson—who had become his sparring partner when Sarge became unreliable—had taken their gladiator act on the road, feeding the global appetite for debates over whether Islam was a threat. Dawson, having written three international bestsellers about the threat of Islam, was especially popular with India’s Hindu nationalists. Mo still loathed Malik—for turning on him, for implying that he had brought on Asma Anwar’s death. But everyone then had claimed to be honoring the dead woman’s memory, Mo included.

  As if following his thoughts, Molly turned to Asma next. Laila Fathi had tried to keep Abdul in the United States, so she could raise him herself, Molly told Mo. But she had no legal rights, and no support in the Bangladeshi community. He had returned home to be raised by his grandparents. Mo, trying to absorb this information, remembered Laila holding the wailing boy at the scene of the murder. She had said nothing, when Mo called to tell her he was withdrawing from the competition, braced for her disappointment, about trying to keep Abdul. Did she know then she wanted to? At the time he had been preoccupied w
ith his own decisions, never thinking she might be making one of her own. Now he remembered her silence on the phone when he said he was leaving the country and wondered if he had blown up the bridge behind him.

  Once she had asked Mo if he wanted children.

  “Later,” was his reply, which was the truth. Later had never come. Work had been his child, his partner. And yet the more buildings he added to his name, the more hollow a frame they seemed for his life. Every real relationship over the years had sputtered out, his stretches alone lengthened to something like permanence. What he had with Laila, the briefest, most indelible of his entanglements, had been both created and destroyed by his memorial.

  “Laila,” he said. The name caught in his throat. He coughed. “Laila Fathi. Did you speak with her?”

  “Yes,” Molly said, “we can show you—” Her magic fingers went to work, summoning ghosts. In a few seconds Laila would be on his wall. This mirage of a memory—it might dissolve if he came too close.

  “No,” he said, abrupt. “No. Let’s move on, I can’t give this my whole day.”

  On the way to seeing Mo in India, Molly had gone to interview Abdul in Dhaka. This footage Mo agreed to watch. The young man’s face was warm-hued, thick-browed, and sorrowful. Mo couldn’t remember what Asma looked like. He had never seen an image of the father. A fund had been set up for Abdul after Asma’s death, even though, with her compensation money, he needed little. But Americans horrified by her murder—after watching her speech, they felt as though someone they knew had been killed—gave anyway, and Mo was among them. Then, consumed with his own departure, he forgot the boy.