The Submission (29 page)

“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.

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 vibrate 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 escapes, 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.

Nasruddin lost sight of her, and his attention wandered to the crowd, which had a relaxed air, as if it were celebrating a minor holiday. In honor of little Abdul’s departure, Abdullah’s Sweet Shop was distributing his favorite snack, yogurts, free to children too young to fast. The imam, whom Nasruddin had helped bring from Bangladesh, was encouraging people to come to mosque for the day’s Iftar and not to forget the poor during Ramadan. Someone was playing Hindi music from a window—Nasruddin, a lover of movies, his sole escape, tried but failed to place the soundtrack—and beneath it were layered car horns and the giddy laughter of children and—

The woman’s scream pierced the air so violently that Nasruddin’s hair tried to leap from his scalp in fright. It had come from Asma’s direction, but he couldn’t tell who it was—nothing in a woman’s speaking voice could predict her scream, and the sound was met quickly by its own echo, wave after wave of echo, coming at Nasruddin from all directions. Not an echo, he realized, but other women screaming in response, in fear.

“She is hurt!” someone shouted in Bengali. “Find a doctor!”

Nasruddin pushed his boxes into the arms of the man next to him and shoved his way through. The crowd parted to reveal Asma, her skin a sickly gray-brown. She saw him and opened her mouth as if she had something important to tell him, but no words came out, at least none that he could hear. Her body bent to one side, then slowly she
began to fold like a shirt being put in a box. So thick was the humanity around her that she did not topple, as she otherwise would have; instead she slumped, half upright, against a wall of shifting, juddering flesh. But her eyes had closed and her head was lolling unnaturally and her grip on Abdul had begun to slip. He was bawling now. Laila tried to grab the boy and one of Asma’s arms even as she shrieked, “Help me, she’s fainting! Hold her up!”

“No, lay her down!” someone shouted in Bengali.

“Keep her up!”

“Lay her down!”

The words raced back and forth through the crowd.

“Get a doctor!”

“The boy!”

“A doctor!”

“Air!”

And then someone, a woman, screamed, in Bengali, “Blood! She is bleeding! Blood!” and the crowd grew panicked and fearful and began to move in a hundred different directions at once so that it went nowhere, constrained by its oppositions yet full of movement, like water beneath which a crocodile is devouring its prey. Screams, more screams, some very close, some far away, ricocheted in air, seemed to collide with one another.

“Lay her down!” Nasruddin commanded, even as the crowd jostled in front of him and he again lost sight of her. “Gently! Gently! And find Dr. Chowdhury!”

“Dr. Chowdhury!” the call went back through the crowd. “Dr. Chowdhury!”

Nasruddin didn’t care where he laid his hands, whom he peeled back to push through. Bangladeshis wheeled in annoyance then, recognizing him, murmured apology before turning back to stare. Useless men crowded around Asma like balky, mooning cows. Nasruddin whipped them with his voice: “Move aside! You think this is a test match? If you are not a doctor, move back. If you can’t help, move away.”

“She was stabbed!” came a shout. Still he couldn’t reach her. “Stabbed!” Panicked men and women tried to run and banged into one another, not knowing whether their movements took them farther from danger or brought them closer to it. Nasruddin was slicing time as finely as his wife cut ginger, trying to remember, freeze, anything he had seen—had a white man in a black coat been standing behind Asma before Nasruddin lost sight of her?—while still seeing what was in front of him: a white woman putting her black coat over Asma to shelter her from shock. He was living in the past and present at once: the white man, he was tall, but everyone seemed tall next to Asma; or was his coat blue; or was there even a white man at all, or was that just Nasruddin’s vision of who might be capable of this? He strove to remember that last moment he had seen Asma, but the truth was he had lost sight of her just before the stabbing; he was of no use; then he was in the future, now, too—whoever had done this was still among them, no one was safe, how could he protect his people without alarming them more? There were so many unfamiliar faces mixed in with the ones he knew; but he had to suspect the ones he knew, too. “Take care,” he called out in Bengali. “Whoever did this is still here among us. Look around you. We must find them.”