by Amy Waldman
“He has three kids, remember? Besides, they were caught a little off guard by this whole thing.”
“You didn’t tell him you were entering?”
“Can we talk about something else?” Mo didn’t bother to hide his irritation. “I like living on my own—it’s what I’m used to.” This was what his mother feared. He pivoted to avoid her expression.
“Maybe too used to it,” Salman said. Eager for sunset and food, he had opened Mo’s refrigerator and spotled the telltale white cartons: the Chinese, Indian, and Thai food with which Mo had been ending his fast each day. “Breaking the fast is meant to be communal,” his father said. “Not a man at home alone with his takeout.”
Mo stiffened, disliking this image of himself. “Then it’s good we’re going to the mayor’s,” he said curtly.
“Mo, you know we are proud of you, but we are even more worried.” Salman had made many similar comments by phone, but the vehemence in his face spoke much louder. “The costs of pursuing this—they are too high.”
Mo wasn’t entirely surprised. His father had made brave moves: coming to America for his engineering degree; marrying the woman of his choice—an artist, no less—rather than that of his parents; choosing modernity over tradition. But then, as Mo saw it, he had settled into conventionality. Mo’s deciding on architecture as a career choice had worried Salman. For an Indian son, the preferred professions were business, academia, medicine, not necessarily in that order. Or engineering. Architecture was a low-paying field in which success, unless extravagant, was hard to measure. As Mo’s talent became evident, as buildings he worked on came to be, Salman’s skepticism morphed to pride. He praised his son’s work to everyone. But Mo hadn’t forgotten his initial doubt.
“The costs of not pursuing it are high, too. I can’t just give in.”
“You are drawing attention to yourself, to us—all of us, all Muslims in America—in a way that could be dangerous,” Salman said. He was pacing with his hands behind his back. “My mosque has hired a security guard because of the threats it has been getting, and I almost feel like I should pay for it. Think of the community.”
Salman’s newfound attachment to his mosque was a sore point with Mo. Sometime after the attack, Salman, indifferent if not antagonistic to religion his whole adult life, had begun to pray, first alone, then at the mosque. “Curiosity,” he said when Mo asked why, “or maybe solidarity.” When he asked again a few months later, Salman said, “Because I believe.” Mo hadn’t known what to say to that.
“Which community, Baba? My community is people like me. People who are rational.”
“But even some of your supposedly rational friends are questioning whether you should do this,” Salman said. “Even some of those people are admitting they don’t entirely trust us. That is the most dangerous thing.” Salman sat next to Shireen on the suitcase, which sagged beneath their weight. They looked like they were waiting to be packed up and shipped into exile. A moment later, Salman stood, clumsily, and began to pace again.
“Your mother and I were talking about your name the other day,” he said. “Why Mohammad, of all names? The most obviously Muslim name you could have. It was your grandfather’s name, of course, and he embodied what we wanted you to be: people talked about his piousness, but he was simply good. But also your name was a statement of faith in this country. We could have given you some solid American name. But as much as we turned our backs on religion, we never shied from being Muslim. We believed so strongly in America that we never thought for a moment that your name would hold you back in any way. And now—” He stopped, bent his head, and pressed his hands to his eyes. “You are not responsible for the reaction, Mo. And yet it is my own son who has brought about this doubt—my doubt for the first time about whether this country has a place for us.”
“Baba, please,” Mo spoke softly. “Of course it does. But sometimes America has to be pushed—it has to be reminded of what it is.”
“Mo, look at what your life has become.” Salman’s extended arms and upturned palms beseeched the vacant space.
The buffet tables were piled high with kebab meats and pita, dates and fried feta. Mo stuck close to his parents, nodding at familiar faces, disappointed that Laila’s was not among them. He couldn’t know whether he or the council had kept her at bay. Without mentioning Mo or the memorial, the mayor made brief remarks about the need to not compound the tragedy of the attack by inflicting new traumas on Muslims.
An older man who looked familiar approached. He had a gray beard and no mustache. Mo put out a hand. It wasn’t taken.
“I hope you are satisfied,” the man said gravely. He had been at the first MACC meeting, Mo remembered. Tariq.
“With …”
“With what you’ve unleashed, with the position you’ve put us in. Before you came along, it would have been shocking, unacceptable to refer to us as the enemy. Now it’s no big deal.”
“That’s not my fault,” Mo said. He wished his father weren’t listening.
“You’ve made your point. You won. You can withdraw now.”
“No, no. We need to counter the backlash, not give in to it.” Issam Malik, who had been expertly monopolizing the mayor, magically appeared at Mo’s elbow.
“Counter, or capitalize on?” Tariq said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Issam asked.
“Just that we seem to be sending out a lot of e-mails soliciting donations on the backs of this controversy. A lot of e-mails noting how many times MACC—you—are in the press. All well and good, but in the meantime, we’ve got people yanking headscarves off our women, and our young people being radicalized in return, and who can blame them? This is going to end in a bad place.” He turned to Mo. “You’re leading us to a bad place. It’s you, not the terrorists, who’ve hijacked our religion. At least the terrorists believe. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m sorry, but you cannot accuse him of such things.” Everyone looked at Salman; who was he?
“My father,” Mo mumbled.
“He is just exercising his rights, his rights as an American,” Salman continued. “You cannot hold him responsible for how people react to that.”
“He has the right, we all agree on that, and it is the message non-Muslims should hear.” Jamilah, MACC’s vice president, had joined them. She sounded more imposing tonight than she had at the MACC meeting. “But among us I’ll say”—she turned to Mo—“that if you step aside, you show we are more interested in healing than confrontation.”
“Why is it always up to us to show that?” asked another woman. Her headscarf, canary yellow, was covered with intricate swirling lines that suggested both calligraphy and fallen leaves. Mo’s eye kept returning to it.
“Exactly,” Malik said. “The real extremism is among those opposing him. And if they succeed in forcing Mohammad to stand down, they’re likely to inspire attacks from so-called Islamic extremists.”
“It sounds like you’re making a threat,” Mo said. All of their hands were full with plates and glasses, and their inability to gesture imposed an awkward and inauthentic politesse.
Mo hadn’t seen Malik since the day they had presented the ad campaign. The loathing from that day returned now, accompanied by blame, no doubt unfair, but visceral anyway, for the sundering between him and Laila.
“But it’s true,” the woman in the yellow scarf interjected. “We need to warn everyone that the extremism of the opposition is fueling Islamist extremism. If we don’t, they’ll hold us responsible if something happens.”
“If something happens, from any quarter, he’ll be responsible,” Tariq said, pointing a judging finger at Mo. “You’ll have blood on your hands.”
“That’s outrageous,” said the woman in the canary-yellow scarf.
Suddenly everyone was yelling and interrupting one another so that their words seemed to be layered like the complicated, somewhat mystifying Middle Eastern dip the Gracie Mansion chef had put out on the buffet tab
le. They also were still jamming food in their mouths because they had a whole day of fasting to make up for and the next day’s fast to prepare for, so the food was going in as fast as the words were coming out—jabbering then gobbling, jabbering then gobbling. The very eating seemed angry.
The mayor, seeing a group around Mo, had wandered over to join the conversation, then, hearing the clamor, retreated to the safety of his aides. He looked baffled that his moderate Muslims could be so hot-tempered.
“I guess I changed your mind,” Mo said to his father when he and his parents were free of the mansion. The cockiness in his voice was bravado. The argument had left him aghast at his own turbulent wake, suggesting that he was bound to disturb every space he entered.
“You changed nothing,” Salman said in answer. He sounded morose, even bitter. “I still think you’re making a terrible mistake. I think even if you win, you will lose. We all will. But you are my son; I had no choice but to defend you in there.”
17
“In any garden, more is happening than you know, than you see,” Mohammad Khan said. “Something is always changing, being changed, outside our grasp.”
His meaning evaded her. She reached toward him in an effort to understand. His hands settled on her head, jolting her inside, and he guided her sight to fibers rotting, leaves curling, aphids sucking sap, Japanese beetles gnawing petals, spider mites scorching leaves, oaks wilting … With microscopic vision, she saw it all.
“Death, it’s all death,” she said. “And no reason for it.”
“There is a reason.”
Wanting comfort, she leaned toward him, those green eyes, that soft mouth …
His beard pricked her awake, except that she came to alone in her bed, shaky with shame and confusion. Her subconscious, dispatched to ascertain his true nature, had instead ferreted out her own buried attraction.
He had not explained the reason for all the death. Cal’s death. The revelation had been so close. She wanted to erase the kiss and continue the conversation. But she couldn’t, for all her trying, will herself back to sleep.
It was 5:30 a.m. She tiptoed downstairs and out the back door. The sky was a vast canvas, pale, almost milky gray, the trees primitive black slashes against it. With all the concentration she could muster, she watched the rising sun shepherd tree branches and bark knots and leaf veins, every delicate particular, into being.
The white marble counter’s dark veins read like a map of country roads. As she waited at the bar, Claire traced the faint lines with a finger. The restaurant, Greek, painted in rich royal blue and white, recalled the summer when she took the bar exam, after which she and Cal spent two weeks in Greece, island-hopping. As in a film, she saw them on mopeds on Samos, its vineyards green ribbons, the sea a sapphire blur. A bandanna held back her hair; her filmy cotton shirt billowed out with the wind. Cal wore a tank top, a sartorial choice so unlike him that she couldn’t stop laughing at it. Their skin had browned through a day of riding and hiking and picnicking, and all these years later she could still see the white outline of the tank-top straps against his dark skin when they made love that night.
Their picnic lunch had included a bottle of Greek wine and when they resumed riding Cal nearly collided with a stone wall. They had doubled over in laughter, possessed of the reckless freedom, the false sense of immortality that came from being young and childless.
When Jack’s hand touched her elbow, Claire felt a jolt even before she looked at him. When she did she saw silver at his temples, interesting lines on his face, the rich dark brown of his eyes, that well-cut mouth. He kissed her with it now, lightly, electrically, on the lips, and took a seat.
Regret seized her as soon as they began to talk. Making conversation with him, given their intimacy and subsequent estrangement, was almost harder than talking to a stranger. They stuck to facts: her summary of life since Cal, her children. He had, as she assumed, divorced; he had one-third custody of his eleven-year-old son. Most of his time now went to the social activism: financing progressive documentaries; attending Netroots camps; brainstorming with the young Turks of the Democratic Party. A political sugar daddy, Claire thought—one with enough money not to have to work.
After a glass of wine they moved to a table and groped their way to old familiarities.
“Do you remember all the nights in the shanties?” he asked. Pieced together from discarded wood, meant to point up the inhumanity of supporting South Africa’s racist regime, Dartmouth’s antiapartheid shanties were defiantly ugly on that green, pristine campus. Both her relationship with Jack and her political education had taken shape within their flimsy walls. They often spent nights in one of the shanties, often made love there on a carpet of cardboard boxes over hard cement. The shanty had no locks, and to take such a risk, so unlike her, was arousing. The air sneaking through the cracks onto her bare skin, the cricket-quiet of the night in the campus’s brief dormant hours. She remembered all of it and saw, in his invoking this memory, an erotic portent of the evening ahead.
They were barely through the first course when Jack said, “So what’s going on with the memorial?”
She told him how guilty she felt about defying the families opposed to Khan, even if she believed that opposition wrong. How unsure she was what to make of Khan himself. As she unburdened herself, the weight of the choice lightened for the first time in weeks.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve got one leg in New York and one in America,” she said.
“New York is America.”
“You know what I mean—we think so differently, so atypically, here. We’re such a minority in our own country. Liberals, I mean.”
“Which doesn’t mean we’re wrong.”
“Doesn’t mean they are, either.”
“So everyone’s right? How’s that supposed to work?”
“I just meant there are two sides to everything, including this. Probably more than two sides. I mean, the protest was ugly, but I’m supposed to represent the families. I’m one of them, we’ve shared this searing experience. Their presence at that rally was their way of telling me, ‘You let us down, betrayed us.’ I have an obligation to understand their point of view.”
“Some things don’t deserve to be understood. Apartheid didn’t deserve to be understood, even if the whites who benefited from it didn’t see it that way.”
This second reference to their shared history grated, and it cast his earlier evocation of the shanties in a new light, one neither erotic nor accidental. By the time he said “The memorial is the reason I got back in touch,” she didn’t need him to tell her, but the words wrecked her nonetheless. He was here to remind her of their common values and summon them forth. Except that she saw now that they were his values. At twenty she had subscribed to them so strongly because he did, because she wanted to win his approval, which, in retrospect, made her poor soil for the plant of principle. For the first time she wondered if that night at Gracie Mansion it had been Jack’s principles as well as Cal’s that she had been defending. This disconcerted her, to not know where one man’s ideals ended and another’s began, to not know which were her own.
He spoke with earnestness, even desperation.
“Your support needs to be unconditional. There’s more, much more, at stake here than a memorial—don’t you see that? I know you’ve had so much of your own pain to deal with, maybe it’s been hard to follow what’s been happening in this country. The attack made everyone afraid of appearing unpatriotic, of questioning government, leaders. Fear has justified war, torture, secrecy, all kinds of violations of rights and liberties. Don’t let it justify taking the memorial away from Khan. Everything these past couple of years has been about abdications. Don’t succumb to the fear; don’t mistake the absolutism of Khan’s opponents for morality …”
Somehow he managed to say all this and more while polishing off his lamb, a feat of ingestion given that he did not talk with his mouth full and Claire had said barely a word. Her grilled fish
, in contrast, sat almost untouched on her plate, its taste lost to disappointment. Here was what she had wanted—someone reaching out to her, offering reinforcement for her stand—but it did not have the desired effect. How foolish she felt, and how crestfallen, to have dressed for a date and gotten a lecture instead.
Wanting the last word, or the last something, she suggested a nightcap back at the house, saying she had promised to be home by eleven to relieve the babysitter, hoping this would imply that she had anticipated nothing beyond a cordial catching up. He followed her home, his headlights bobbing in the dark, the beams signaling lighthouse comfort one moment and ominous chase the next, like a dream that blurred rescue and pursuit. As her car crested the top of the driveway, the automatic lights around the house came on, bleaching the front yard.
“Nice house,” Jack said, coming up behind her as she opened the glass front door. Madison was curled up with a book on the sofa. As they watched, she stretched with feline indifference, her rising T-shirt revealing a band of tanned stomach and a navel piercing. “You’re home early,” she said. Claire hurried her out and poured two cognacs. They sat in the living room, a polite distance between them on the couch. Claire could hear, within herself, fury’s low thrum.
“Let me try to explain about the Garden,” she said. Her doubts, she told him, were not about Khan but about what the design symbolized.
“That’s bullshit, Claire. It’s all a question of trust. Do you take what he says at face value? Or do you look for something hidden and duplicitous because he’s Muslim?”
“That’s not it at all.”
“Then what?”
“You don’t think it’s a problem if Cal’s memorial is a paradise for Islamic martyrs?”
“That’s the same mistrust,” he said. “The same fear. A garden’s just a garden until you decide to plant suspicion there. Has he said it’s a paradise garden?”