The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  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.”

  So much pressure in his head, on his heart. He should have officially reported the threats against her; he should have stopped her from speaking that day. Now he was guilt-sick along with his worry.

  “What happened?” he could hear reporters asking each other and any Bangladeshi they could collar. “What are they saying? What’s wrong with her?”

  He reached her at last. She was on her back, her eyes were closed. In the dark streamers that spread from beneath her, Nasruddin saw the blood that flowed in the streets back home on Eid al-Adha, when hundreds of goats and cows and sheep were slaughtered for the festival. Dr. Chowdhury was there, too. He lifted off the coat and the shawls, then lifted Asma, gently, tearing the salwar kameez, cardinal with blood, to reveal a flash of blood-mottled bare brown skin before he applied pressure to the wound and covered her again. Nasruddin took in her closed eyes, the horrible pallor of her face. Asma would want to know if she had been exposed. She would want the whole scene described: Was everybody looking at me? Was I brave? And who took Abdul? Were the aunties fighting over him, or did you take him? And what was Mrs. Mahmoud doing? Screaming, I bet. Did the paramedics have to treat her, too?

  Did you take him? This imagined question prodded Nasruddin from his shock. Where was Abdul? Nasruddin scanned the crowd. Maybe the police had him? With relief he saw Laila gripping Abdul, who sobbed still. A siren’s mechanical wail grew louder, slower, as the ambulance nosed through the crowd. Two paramedics pushed through to the clearing the police had created around Asma and busied themselves over her. They gave no clue as to her condition, but Nasruddin knew and began to weep even as the ambulance pulled away, and at the sight of a man who had steadied his community for two decades so unsteadied himself, the crowd seemed to melt, women crying, men kneeling, everyone rocking, rocking.

  Abdul: he needed to be removed from the scene.

  “Mrs. Mahmoud! Take Abdul upstairs!” he ordered, then saw Mrs. Mahmoud puddle to the ground. She would have to collect herself to help wash Asma’s body; so would Mrs. Ahmed, who now had found her way to the ground, too. Nasruddin grabbed Mr. Mahmoud and pointed to Laila Fathi and Abdul and said, “Take them upstairs now! Now!” and Mr. Mahmoud, red-eyed himself, led them away, with a police officer clearing the crowd ahead of them. This was only the beginning of getting the boy home, Nasruddin realized—Nasruddin would have to fly Abdul, along with the body, home to Bangladesh. He felt helpless just thinking about it, him alone on a plane with a two-year-old orphan.

  “The press! The press! They killed her!” someone called out. The reporters were scattered through the crowd, refuse on a deltaic river. Men in the crowd had grabbed some of them by the arms and were holding them; other journalists had formed a small defenseless knot by a building, the brick at their back. “Press!” they were shouting. “We are journalists!” Some had fake smiles to go with the terror in their eyes.

  Bangladeshis, furious now, surged toward them, and Nasruddin saw a few of the bigger cameramen move to the front of the group and a few of the women frantically punching their cell phones and still others waving for the police, who moved toward them, shouting at the crowd, “Get back! Stay back!”

  The crowd pushed forward. The reporters pressed themselves against the building, the women among them holding hands. “You killed her!” his neighbors were shouting in fury. Nasruddin didn’t know if they meant this literally—had a reporter stabbed her?—or that the journalists had endangered her with their stories. He was being rocked so hard he could barely keep his footing but even so he saw the police officers’ hands going to their gun holsters and he cried out, in
Bengali and in English, “Back away, leave them to the police, back away!”

  It was then that he saw Alyssa Spier being whirled around by the angry mob. There was fear on her face and he hated himself for the pleasure this gave him. He elbowed through to her. “Come, come now,” he said roughly, grabbing her arm. She resisted, thinking him just another angry member of the crowd. “We met, you know me, I will help you,” he spat through his teeth, and she yielded to him. He dragged her until he saw a police officer, then almost threw her at the cop. It was right she be safeguarded, whatever she had done, but inside he raged no less than the mob.

  “Protect her,” he said. “She is responsible.”

  23

  In the midst of the mob, Alyssa had craved, for the first time in her reporting life, anonymity. Surrounded by wild eyes, livid mouths, shoving hands, stomping feet, sweaty stink, and foreign cries, her great terror had been that she would be recognized as the person who had exposed Asma Anwar to danger—exposed her first as illegal, then as rich, then, almost down to the hour, as entering exile (OUTTA HERE! the Post had headlined that morning). If she was identified, she would be torn apart. Instead, the sole person who recognized her had saved her, allowing the police to shove her into the safety of their mobile station. For all her fear, the minute she was out of the crowd, she wanted to be back in it. The news, for the first time in her experience, had been a completely physical phenomenon, one that absorbed and churned her, as if she were inside someone’s bloodstream. It was the closest she had come to covering a war.

  Alyssa told the police everything she had seen, which wasn’t much, since she had been in the outer ring of reporters around Asma Anwar. To make matters worse, she lost an hour of reporting time because of her rescuer’s parting comment: “She is responsible.” Three different detectives made her walk through, article by article, what he could have meant by it. By the time she finished, the crowd and any interview-worthy witnesses had dispersed, and she was reduced to interviewing her fellow reporters.

  She had no clue who had killed Asma. No one did—so many people had been crowded around her that even news footage had so far proved useless. But that didn’t stop the speculation. Debbie Dawson of SAFI was sure it was a Wahhabi offended by a woman playing a public role. “See what they do to each other!” she kept saying on television. Chaz was sure, with no basis in evidence, that it was a Bangladeshi jealous of Asma’s money. Issam Malik of the Muslim American Coordinating Council insisted that Asma had been slain by an Islamophobe. No, a xenophobe, insisted immigration reform activists. Random groups—Muslim, anti-Muslim—called news organizations to take credit. But as in psychological warfare, there was no knowing if the calls were legitimate or attempts to pin the killing on opponents.

  To Alyssa’s chagrin none of these calls came to her, which left her scrambling for an angle. Her own nagging feelings of guilt had been largely expiated by her fear in the crowd and her questioning by the police. Both seemed to her sufficient cosmic retribution. Besides, she had only reported on what Khan had started. If anyone was responsible, it was he.

  “Unless he’s the Tin Man, he’s got to feel guilty,” Chaz said approvingly when she mentioned this as a possible angle. “Find him and ask if he feels guilty. Ask him if he’s going to withdraw. Think of the cover when he gives up: SAYAN-ALLAH!” He started laughing. “Get him to drop out just so we can use that. And find out if they’re going to bury her in his garden: She’s a martyr, right?”

  Alyssa staked out Khan’s Chinatown loft. He never turned up. But his type was her own: he couldn’t stay away from work. She parked herself near ROI and waited him out. As the day ended, the architects, all disdainful glances and rectangular glasses, glided by. No Khan. But a hunch told her to hang tight and for hours she did. At eleven, he emerged, looking around warily. She stepped from her hiding place. He flinched.

  “It’s just me,” she said softly, as if they’d known each other forever. In fact, she realized, for all her quarrying of him, they’d never met. “Alyssa Spier, New York Post.” For a moment he looked blank, as if he didn’t recognize her name. She felt crushed, even though she knew most readers didn’t check bylines. Then anger dawned in his face.

  “Leave me the fuck alone,” he said.

  “What are you going to do? Are you going to withdraw?”

  Khan ignored her, walking off in long, measured strides, and she scurried to keep up with him, feeling like a cartoon mouse. “Do you feel responsible?” she asked. “For Asma Anwar’s death?”

  He heeled on her so abruptly it gave her a sharp fright. After what she’d written about Islam and violence, it would be almost funny, she thought, for a Muslim—especially this one—to go postal on her.

  “You, of all people, are asking me that?” he said. “You’re the one who pushed her out into that street. You were probably there, transcribing every bloody detail. You and your paper have done everything you could to make it open season on Muslims.”

  “No, you did, by entering the competition, by insisting on your right to win, even though it offended so many Americans, hurt so many of the families’ feelings. So are you going to withdraw?”

  “Offended so many Americans? Was that what you said?” Khan said. He was moving toward her. They were only a couple of feet apart, giving her no choice but to walk backward. “I am an American, too,” he said, continuing to advance on her. “Put that in your paper. I, Mohammad Khan, am an American, and I have the same rights as every other American.” She peddled backward; he moved toward her. “I am an American. That’s the only quote I’m going to give you. I am an American.” She glanced over her shoulder—a few more feet and he would have waltzed her right into Hudson Street, but she couldn’t say that was his intent, that he had any awareness at all of their location, only that he kept moving toward her and she kept moving back.

  “I am an American. I am an American.” One more step and she was off the curb. “I am—”

  “Wait a minute!” she said, coming to a stop so suddenly that he nearly bumped into her. She narrowed her eyes. “You should be grateful to me. If I hadn’t broken this story, they would have buried your memorial—you would never have known that you won.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. He was breathing hard, as if he had been running. “It would have come out regardless.”

  “But I’m the one who brought it out. You should be grateful.”

  Khan put his hands on his hips and looked up. Alyssa took a step back and saw that he was smiling. She looked up, too, to see a crescent moon so slight it was as if a fingernail had scratched the sky.

  NY1 kept replaying the same story on Asma Anwar’s death, but Sean watched it each time as if it were new. Kensington wasn’t far from his parents’ house in Ditmas Park—less than half a mile—but the footage made it look like India. Hundreds of Bangladeshis milled in the street in anticipation of her exodus, then cried and shouted at the news of her death and the terror of a killer among them. He knew Bangladeshis lived nearby—brown-skinned women in headscarves sometimes trailed overstuffed handcarts down his parents’ block—but he’d never known there were so many of them. He kept returning to when Asma Anwar went past him leaving the hearing. He’d said nothing to her. He wished he had told her she was brave. He wished he had apologized to her for pulling Zahira Hussain’s headscarf, for his fear was that his own destructive impulses had unleashed, given license to, more murderous ones. Debbie was sure a Muslim had killed her, but Debbie’s facts coincided miraculously with her opinions. He wondered who would raise Asma Anwar’s son.

  He wandered downstairs. His mother was alone in the living room, working a needlepoint. In the white light of the sole lamp, the frozen set of her features made her look more marble than flesh.

  “Sit with me a bit,” she said, and he did. He heard the clock’s listless tick. The rattle of ice being born in the kitchen freezer. His mother’s concentrating breath. He would remember it.

  “I don’t want to fight Khan anymore,�
�� he said abruptly. He hadn’t known he was going to say that until the words came out.

  Eileen jerked back, as if she’d been dozing with her eyes open, and looked at him. Deep lines marred the skin around her mouth. “It’s terrible about that woman,” she said. “Terrible. To leave a little boy. But it has nothing to do with fighting Khan. Do you think they would want a cross erected at the spot where she died? Don’t you think they would find it disrespectful?”

  She resumed her needlepoint, stitching a relentless peace.

  He churched his hands, balanced his nose on the steeple. “I feel like I started this,” he said.

  “Mohammad Khan started this,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “I guess I don’t want to be the one to finish it. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t want the Garden, but I don’t want to be the one to fight against it.”

  “And who’s supposed to finish what you can’t be bothered with, Sean? Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.”

  “I think Claire Burwell is turning against Khan,” he said. “I helped turn her.” He felt like a fraud, to detest Claire for her weakness, then offer her up to hide his own.

  “So why stop now, Sean, if you feel like it’s close to being over? You’re about to accomplish something, something important. Why stop now, why let them say we don’t know what we want?”

  “Getting in the way of this memorial—I’m blocking something. But I’m not accomplishing anything. They’re not going to turn around and ask me to design the memorial instead,” he said. “I need to find some other way to be. Some other reason to be.”

  “Other than God, there’s no higher reason than family, especially given what happened to us.” Her eyes gleamed watery in the low light, from sadness or age he didn’t know. He cracked his knuckles and saw her flinch at the noise.