The Submission (17 page)

Their fighting was like a radio Asma could not turn down, which gave her the idea of turning hers up. She switched on the BBC and turned up the volume, trying to drown their noise. The radio was so loud that until Mrs. Mahmoud shouted for her, she didn’t hear the phone ringing to inform her of her father’s death.

He had been sick for two weeks—”water in the lungs,” the doctors said, as if he had taken the delta inside of him. His voice on the phone, on the days he could talk, was all rasp and rattle, faint and frail, nothing like the commanding music she remembered. Her mother kept insisting she should come home, and Asma packed and unpacked in her mind, sometimes even in her room. If she did not go, Abdul would never know his grandfather, as he had never known his father—wouldn’t know that a father or grandfather could be anything other than the satiny surface of a picture to stroke. But once she left America, she might never be able to return. Why this mattered mystified her mother, for whom New York was as unreachable, as unimaginable, as unnecessary as the stars, which were proof of God’s greatness but otherwise of negligible use.

Asma was also afraid to know her newly weakened father, since her stubborn strength was modeled on his. To hear him faded was to feel her own power ebb. So much of who she was came from him—and would keep her from him. Clinging to America, to the possibilities it dangled, was her own small war of liberation, if a lonelier one.

She harbored a secret fantasy that in America, she could remarry. Not now, not for a long time, not while her ache for Inam remained so deep. But someday she wanted her son to have more than a paper father. If she remarried in Bangladesh, she would have to leave Abdul with Inam’s family. This she would never do. It wouldn’t be easy to remarry in Brooklyn, but if she had gotten out of Sandwip, she imagined she could get out of Kensington, too. What would it be like to live in those neighborhoods she saw on TV, with white people and big houses and driveways with cars? And sprinklers? She wasn’t saying she wanted to live that way. She just wondered.

“Will you come?” her uncle asked now. Why, she wanted to say: her father would be wrapped and buried before she got home.

“
Insh’Allah
,” she said.

She ended the call inconsolable and irascible. Abdul had put a pot over his head and was stumbling around, bumping into furniture, giggling hysterically. Her neighbors’ argument continued, their voices
rising and falling with no consideration for her loss. It was disrespectful, like bombing during Ramadan, not to pause for the news of her father’s death, even if they didn’t know of it. She resented them as much for having each other as for hating each other—for having each other to hate.

There was a moment of stillness; perhaps it was over. Then she heard Kabir’s voice again, louder, angrier, then a shriek and a howl and sobs. She had had enough. She thought of her husband, the kindest man she knew, and of her father, the bravest; picked up Abdul, took the pot off his head, marched next door, and knocked loudly.

When Hasina’s crying stopped, it left a vacuum—sharper than mere silence—in its wake, like the sudden, startling end of a monsoon. Even wriggling Abdul grew still, as if sensing something had changed. Asma banged again. There was a rustle; she sensed a presence behind the peephole. Then Kabir opened the door, and Asma pushed past him to Hasina, who was huddled on the couch, her face red and puffy, her right eye starting to swell.

“Come with me,” Asma said, trying to grab Hasina’s elbow without dropping Abdul. Hasina seemed to be making her body dead weight, hugging the couch with her thighs. Abdul, straining his own legs toward the floor, wasn’t helping. “Come with me,” Asma said louder, as if Hasina hadn’t heard. “I’m going to find you a place to stay. You must leave this marriage.” She had read about a shelter for abused Muslim women in one of the Bangladeshi papers. And now here was a perfect candidate, as if a character had walked out of a television serial.

“Leave?” Hasina hissed. “Where do you get such language, such thoughts?” Her venom took Asma aback. “I don’t want to leave,” she said. The skin of her socket was still puffing; soon the eye would disappear, like a rock in water. “Shame! Shame!” Her hysteria rose and she began screaming at Asma to mind her own affairs. Kabir joined in. Asma clamped her hands over Abdul’s ears, but he began to scream, too. Backing out of the apartment, she found the hallway full of neighbors, Mrs. Mahmoud among them, who had come to see
what was going on. Before they could investigate, opine, pronounce, she ran into her room, locked the door, and sobbed into Abdul’s hair.

Two hours later came a knock on Mrs. Mahmoud’s door. Three men known to Asma as residents of the building stood there announcing their concerns about her interference. Her response, as in any difficult situation now, was to call Nasruddin. He came quickly, in an elegant pajama, and she wondered, guiltily, if she had taken him from a family occasion. She told him the story, then sobbed to him about her father.

“Did I do the right thing not to go back to Bangladesh?” she wept. “Tell me I did the right thing.”

“You did what I would have done,” he said.

When she finished crying, she felt emptied of fight, tired enough to sleep for days. Nasruddin left her to go thread peace through the building. An hour later, he returned. To stay without worry, he warned, she must leave her neighbors alone.

“There is a right way to handle problems,” he said. “You must learn it.”

“But how am I supposed to live next door to such a man?”

“I will work on him,” Nasruddin said, “but you must leave him to God’s judgment.”

“I am grateful,” she muttered. Embarrassed and angry, too, but this she kept to herself. The sense that she had been outdone by malevolent forces nagged at her. Her father would have been braver.

“What did you say? How did you do it?” she asked.

“I told them the truth,” Nasruddin said. Her father had died, and she had been mad with grief.

The Rally to Protect Sacred Ground kicked off on a balmy Saturday morning in a plaza opposite the site. The members of both the Memorial Defense Committee and Save America from Islam were there,
gathered in a cordoned-off area in front of the stage. Behind them stretched a crowd of thousands: women holding signs that said
NO TOLERANCE FOR THE INTOLERANT OR ISLAM KILLS OR NO VICTORY GARDEN
or
KHAN IS
A CON;
fathers hoisting small children on their shoulders; men in camouflage who may or may not have been veterans. There were hundreds of relatives of the attack victims there—Sean had called many of them personally to ask them to come. The crowd overflowed the small plaza, spilled along the sidewalk, out into the street, around and between the buses that had chauffeured protesters from across the country. News choppers huffed overhead.

Debbie Dawson was kitted out in tight black pants and yet another T-shirt she had designed, this one reading “Kafir and Proud.” Two buff men in Ray-Bans, blue blazers, and khaki pants trailed her through the crowd. When she stopped to give interviews or greet supporters, they positioned themselves on either side of her, facing out, feet planted in a wide stance, arms never fully relaxed. Bodyguards, Sean realized. She looked like she was having the time of her life.

Taking the stage for his speech, Sean surveyed the swelling crowd. Maybe all the nut jobs had gathered near the front; there seemed to be a lot of them. An obese man in suspenders held a poster that showed a pig eating a Quran. Three women hoisted a banner that said
NUKE ‘EM ALL AND LET ALLAH SORT ‘EM OUT.
A pimpled teenager dressed in black with Harry Potter glasses held a sign reading
THEY CAN
HAVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT BECAUSE WE HAVE THE SECOND
, with a crude drawing of a gun aimed at the face of a turbaned man. Human loose ends: an irregular army that Sean hadn’t summoned and couldn’t decommission.

His idea of whiting out Claire Burwell’s face to paint in a question mark, which had seemed so creative, looked creepy when a hundred and fifty of the posters were being waved at him. The SAFI posters of Khan—a line drawn through his face or a target superimposed on it—didn’t look much better. The police were encircling one man who, with the selective application of lighter fluid to his poster, had managed to ignite Khan’s beard.

Every time Sean had given a speech since the attack—some ninety in all—he had been convinced that to lose a loved one in this way was a privilege as well as a curse. The overfed, overeager faces listening to him hungered for what couldn’t be bought, and he pitied them for the desire to go somewhere deeper, be part of something larger. Horrible as the attack was, everyone wanted a little of its ash on their hands.

But this mass, the largest he had ever addressed, radiated neither reverence nor yearning. Patrick once had shown him how the back pressure from opening the nozzle on a fire hose too fast could knock a firefighter off a ladder. Sean didn’t trust this crowd.

His game was off, his speech short. “It wasn’t enough for Khan to demand his rights as a Muslim. Now his garden has rights, too …” The cheers were scattered, irregular, as if people couldn’t hear well. The microphone’s feedback was distracting. When he said, “We all know the Constitution matters, don’t we?” there were uncertain roars, a few boos. “We just don’t think it’s the only thing that matters,” he finished. Some applause, at least, but tepid.

When Debbie strode onstage, a SAFI volunteer moved in behind her to wave the flag. A battery-powered fan placed in front rippled back her long hair. “I want us to be clear that we are fighting for the soul of this country,” she bellowed. The crowd, its hearing suddenly acute, roared. “For generations immigrants came to this country and assimilated, accepted American values. But Muslims want to change America—no, they want to conquer it. Our Constitution protects religious freedom, but Islam is not a religion! It’s a political ideology, a totalitarian one.” More roars. Sean rocked a little on his feet, unhappy that her broadside had revealed his to be utterly forgettable. She moved on to leading a cathartic, rousing cry of “Save America from Islam! Save America from Islam!”

At the chants, which were meant to cue the lie-in, Sean raised his right hand in the air and blew a whistle. He was important again. His committee members and the SAFIs bunched around him like excited schoolchildren, then smoothed into perfect marching-band rows as they moved into the street.

Sean’s original vision had been constricted by a series of compromises. The governor claimed that she had no power to get them permission to protest on the site itself. “So the gates are open to Khan, but not to us,” Debbie said, with satisfaction. She had a knack for turning any setback into proof of her worldview, any disagreement with her into evidence of dhimmitude. “Fine, we’ll block the street,” she said next, as if it had all been her idea, not Sean’s. But even getting permission to do that in such a sensitive spot had required concession: the police wanted, in advance, the names of all those planning to be arrested. Now Sean, who had earlier been absorbed in watching the crowd, realized the police had already closed the street, which was as empty of cars as the weekday church parking lot where they had practiced. There was no blocking to be done.

With less gusto he blew again, and the marching band became a drill team: some five hundred well-spaced people kneeling as one, the move meant to mimic, then mock, Muslims praying: instead of touching their heads to the ground, they stretched out on their backs. “Giving Allah the Navel,” Debbie called the move.

“Protect sacred ground!” his members chanted.

“Save America from Islam!” the SAFIs chanted.

Sean, after surveying the weave of bodies, lowered himself into a cloud of SAFI perfume and his own sweat. The ground beneath his back was hard, the sky above a piercing blue, smooth as newly made ice cream. A day as clear, as beautiful as the one that had brought the attack, a gift of a day, but irritation was stuck somewhere in him like a pebble in a shoe.

“You are blocking a public street,” a police official said through a bullhorn. “I’m going to count to one hundred, and by the time I finish, you all need to disperse. If not we will begin making arrests.”

The tight scripting struck Sean now as enfeebling (“… forty-three, forty-four, forty-five …”), their defiance as nothing more than managed submission. His secret hope had been that maybe the police wouldn’t arrest them at all, would refuse to follow orders, choose patriotism over duty (“… sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one …”). But listening
for the sound of the blue wall cracking, all he heard were police boots scuffing. And then: “ninety-eight … ninety-nine … one hundred. Time is up, ladies and gentlemen,” and, “Please stand, sir, let’s not make this difficult, thank you, appreciate it, hands in front, these are plastic, don’t actually hurt, thank you.”

“Terrorist lover!” he heard a woman scream at a cop, who said, almost kindly, “Ma’am, I’ve got four kids; the only thing I love is my paycheck.”

Their politeness was killing him, as was his back. Lifting his head to check on the police, he saw a silent group of counterprotesters standing on the sidewalk. Most, but not all, looked Muslim—headscarves on the women, beards on the men, dark skin. They held signs:
WE ALSO ARE AMERICANS
and
ISLAM IS NOT A THREAT
and
MUSLIMS DIED THAT DAY, TOO
and
BIGOTS = IDIOTS.
It was that last sign that flooded Sean’s brain with red, which also happened to be the color of the headscarf on the woman holding it. Rubin wanted
him
to be less crude? He scrambled to his feet and stalked over to her. “Are you calling me an idiot?” His spittle flew; his voice cracked; he didn’t care. “You’re calling my parents bigots? A bunch of Muslims killed my brother. Why aren’t you out protesting them? Have you ever held up a sign that said, ‘Murder in the name of my religion is wrong’?”

“Of course it’s wrong,” the woman said steadily, “but discriminating on the basis of religion is wrong, too.”

Her placidity, so provoking, made him want to provoke her in return, to get a rise, and the most provocative act he could think of was to tug back her headscarf, and he reached out, some small part of him also wanting to see what was so valuable it had to be covered, and caught the edge of the scarf as she stepped back in fear, so that the scarf came forward, a little roughly, maybe he blinded her for a moment, maybe his hand brushed against her head, then a police officer was separating them, or rather holding back then handcuffing Sean, and reading him his rights, bundling him in a van with his committee members and the SAFIs, who were still chanting “No Muslim memorial!” and flashing him wide smiles and thumbs-up, and at the station
the others were taken and quickly processed and released, while he was held for arraignment on a misdemeanor assault charge along with a miscellany of shoplifters, public urinators, and trespassers before being released on his own recognizance.