The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  Down the stairs, back in time, until she came upon herself and Cal standing in front of Picasso’s Weeping Woman at the Tate in London. Claire could still visualize the portrait today—the blue in her hair, the red in her hat, that ghastly, skull-like area around the mouth—more clearly, in fact, than she could see the husband who had stood next to her.

  “Kind of ruins it that Picasso was so horrible, doesn’t it,” Claire had said. “He probably made Dora Maar cry, then painted her crying.”

  “So great art requires a morally pure artist?” Cal asked. “You look at the creation, not the creator.”

  “So you ignore that he tormented poor Dora.”

  “No, you judge the paintings as works of art, and Picasso as a man. There’s no inconsistency in loving one and reviling the other. And thankfully the converse is true as well: you love me even though I made some pretty lousy art. Maybe arrogance is necessary for greatness.”

  A ground-floor exit expelled her into midtown. An inexplicable series of police barricades diverted her to a Times Square packed with tourist-naïfs. Her breath sped up in time with the intemperate digital collage—videos, commercials, neon, news tickers—that flickered at the edges of her eyelids. She cut through slow-moving knots, indifferent to indignant looks, until she made her way onto a less packed eastbound street. It was one of those miserable humid days when the pressure squeezes in like walls, the whole surly city waiting on edge for it to break. By the time Claire reached Bryant Park, she was damp.

  Along the sides of the lawn, trees with twisting trunks lined up in perfect allées. The public library stretched before her. On the park’s other three sides, glassy skyscrapers rose, their surfaces trapping greenery and clouds. It was a walled garden. She sank into its grass.

  Even here, in this attenuated form, Khan’s vision beguiled as much as his contempt burned. Perhaps they were inseparable, as Cal had argued—the arrogance firing the creation—but she wanted the Garden pure again, free of associations, free of Khan. The Garden as she first had seen it. But she couldn’t take it from him, because it was his as much as, more than, hers. He had created it.

  She bent her head to her hands and cried.

  Seeking solitude and air, Paul took to Central Park. Other than being driven through by Vladimir, which didn’t count, Paul hadn’t set foot there in months. In fact, he realized, he had been so busy shuttling from home to jury meetings, offices, and politicians’ lairs, that he had barely been outside. Khan’s garden—the reality, as opposed to the controversy—had vanished from his thoughts. Now, strolling the Sheep Meadow’s studied informality, the barely veiled evidence of Frederick Law Olmsted’s designing hand, he realized that the Garden would be, would have been—he no longer knew what tense to use—the first public garden in Manhattan since Central Park’s creation a century and a half before. He imagined a spot of green flashing on the subway map, then vanishing, flashing, then vanishing. A pulse.

  Perhaps it was the breeze and birdsong, or maybe the young people streaking by on Rollerblades and bikes, but Paul felt content as he hadn’t in a long time. His brief foray into inaction, into letting chaos reign—it had been a mistake. Far better that he forced Claire and Khan to confront their differences and work past them. Geraldine Bitman would persist in her demagoguery, but if Claire, as the most prominent family member, insisted that Khan could be trusted—that she trusted him—especially after her very public doubts, there would at least be a showdown between the two women, and Paul thrilled to imagine it. It amused him that this was what his once-racy fantasies of Claire Burwell had come to.

  Edith called, atypically breathless. “Paul, there’s a press conference—Claire Burwell. I’m sending Vladimir.”

  “I can walk,” he started to say, falsely invigorated by the young people taking flight all around, then, faltering: “Yes, Vladimir.”

  Back home he settled into the couch with Edith to watch. Claire was seated at a long table, with members of the Muslim American Coordinating Council on either side of her. Her energy radiated through the screen as she began to read their joint statement.

  “We, the undersigned”—she gestured to the right and left of her—“are asking Mohammad Khan to withdraw his memorial design so that the country can unite around a different memorial. We do not want to take anything from Mr. Khan. His effort to help this country heal is appreciated. We simply think a memorial other than the Garden, at this point, would be better for the families of the dead, for American Muslims, for the country. We are not telling him what to do. We are asking him to use his compassion and his judgment.”

  “Asma Anwar’s death was devastating,” she added, looking up from her pages. “Even without knowing who is responsible, it shocked us into realizing that this is a time for unity, for flexibility, not for rigidity.”

  She had seduced the jury into backing the Garden, insisted it support Khan, then turned on both design and designer. Without her, the jury’s support of Khan would look like a bunch of artists defending one of their own—the governor’s dream scenario. Paul took umbrage not just at Claire’s betrayal of her fellow jurors, their months of work, their willingness to argue through their differences, but at her lack of humility—her sense that she alone could decide when was the time to fight, when to stand down. She didn’t understand her own country, he thought: it would take more than a new memorial to unite it.

  Yet he, perhaps, had sown this idea. When he had called Claire to insist on the Khan meeting, he had said, almost as an aside, that the best thing would still be Khan’s withdrawing. She had done him one better: she grasped that her request would carry both more force and less risk if she joined with Muslims to make it.

  “I wish this had gone differently,” Claire was saying. “If Mr. Khan had shown more willingness to explain his design, so it wouldn’t be subject to misinterpretation, or even to modify it, I would have continued to push for the Garden and many of the families would have done the same.”

  So Paul had misread not just Claire but Khan. Why had he thought that the architect, after such consistent resistance, would yield to her demands? Khan would fight on, but the fight would get even muddier now, more drawn out. Geraldine Bitman would ride the irresolution and its attendant anxieties as far as she could, no matter the wreckage in her wake. Paul couldn’t imagine the Garden ever coming to be any more than he could imagine Khan giving in. Suddenly he craved a retirement filled not with chairmanships and prestige and continued relevance, but with him and Edith watching the musicals of the 1930s from the couch.

  “She doesn’t know her own mind,” he said of Claire.

  “Really?” said Edith. “It looks to me like she knows it quite well.”

  25

  Mo almost laughed as he watched the press conference, the orchid-white WASP framed by Arab, South Asian, African American Muslims. He had wanted to unite East and West, and he had—against himself. She sat at the center of a long table, members of MACC on either side: Issam Malik to her left, Jamilah to her right, Laila thankfully nowhere in sight. “Safeguard us and we’ll safeguard you”: he should have listened.

  He watched Claire and the MACC members fall over one another to display their mutual respect. See? she seemed to be saying, I don’t have a problem with all Muslims, with Muslims at all, only with Mohammad Khan! This edifice of unexceptional beauty, as he had categorized her, now flaunted newly intriguing angles, as if false ceilings and partitions and scaffoldings, all the conventional interventions, had been cleared to reveal her true and startling bones. To unite with Muslims as opposed to other victims’ families—it was a creative stroke. Even as her principles collapsed, even as she conformed, she had found a way to set herself apart. Mo had dismissed her as a type: the well-off woman who married for money, was married for beauty, and lived on a barren plateau of motherhood, philanthropy, and irrelevance. Now he saw, for the first time, her singularity.

  It was more than odd to be casing Claire at this moment, he knew. But it was the least
painful place he could dwell. He had wanted to undo their encounter the moment she walked out the door. He couldn’t say what she wanted him to say; she couldn’t see why he wouldn’t say it. If they couldn’t find common ground, what hope was there?

  “Our jihad—and I use the word mindfully,” Malik was saying primly, “is to show that it is possible to be both good Muslims and loyal Americans, to worship God and care for your country. God will be the judge, of this as of all things. All we can do is look at the facts before us—this young woman, a mother taken by terror; the ugly passions on all sides—and say that pushing for this memorial serves neither Islam nor America. Even one death—Muslim, non-Muslim, it doesn’t matter—from this controversy is too many. To add another name to those on the wall, all for a fight about what those walls might symbolize, makes no sense. Mr. Khan’s principles, or should I say his ambitions, are not worth any more lives.”

  That last sentence reverberated in Mo, for even he no longer knew where the line between his ambitions and principles lay. It was that line Laila had been searching for, and her fear that she had mistaken one for the other that ruined them.

  Still floating from place to place, he had landed, for a few days, in a hotel room. He switched off its television, his choice clear: to fight for his garden as it was or withdraw. There was no middle ground. It wouldn’t be hard to change the design—take down the walls, perhaps; set the canals loose to meander. A garden was just a garden. And yet he knew he would refuse to change a thing, even if that refusal doomed his submission. They would have to take the Garden as they had first seen it or not take it at all.

  His lawyer had read the hearing transcripts, the interviews, the bylaws of the competition jury. “No one’s showed you’re in any way ‘unsuitable, ’ and no one has brought forth a single legitimate ground for killing the design,” Reiss told Mo. “If they try, a lawsuit would be very viable with all the Islamophobic talk Rubin permitted at the hearing. People get millions for tripping on a pothole. You’ve had your reputation tarnished, your design denied—”

  “This isn’t about money,” Mo said.

  “Just remember the law is your friend,” Reiss said. “If you decide to stick it out, and they try to move ahead with any other design, you can sue for injunctive relief and block them from going forward with anything else. Maybe one day passions will settle enough for your memorial to be built.”

  So he could use his country’s own laws against it, judo his way to victory, force his vision onto a people who seemed more foreign to him by the day. He could live, indefinitely, this waiting life, from which love, home, even work had been stripped away. Emmanuel Roi, concerned that the controversy was interfering with “the practice of architecture,” had put Mo in a quarantine from which he was to deal with neither clients nor contractors. Thomas talked, too often, of their own practice—“We’ll have more business than we know what to do with once the Garden is being built”—but the words sounded tinny, forced.

  He called Laila for advice.

  “Don’t listen to Malik,” she said. “You can’t blame yourself for Asma’s death.” It was more accurate to say he couldn’t blame himself alone, he thought. Historical events, as much as skylines, were collaborations.

  “Don’t give up.” There was pleading in her voice. “If you give up it’s like Asma died for nothing.”

  The footage of her last hour replayed as often in his mind as it did on every TV channel, Asma’s small frame the axle of a pinwheeling crowd whose dangerous democracy confirmed Mo in his solitariness. Laila clutching Asma’s son, the sun in her face eclipsed. It was shock Mo had felt at first, but fear that stalked him now: the sense that if it could happen to Asma, it could happen to him, no matter how many precautions he took. Should he chance his own death to make hers worthwhile, sacrifice himself for a memorial his country might never embrace? Or preserve himself for the work, his best work, ahead?

  “I just have one thing to add,” he heard Claire Burwell say. “Mr. Khan says he shouldn’t have to say what the Garden is, or where it came from, and he’s right.” She looked directly at the cameras. “But I want him to.”

  On his second morning in Kabul, Mo had called his embassy to say he was too sick to make the day’s meetings and set off to brave the city on his own. He had in hand a thirty-year-old guidebook from the hotel gift shop, but of the gleaming cosmopolitan capital it promised he saw only bedraggled remnants—bullet-pocked façades, shuttered restaurants, dead architecture. The Kabul River had been reduced to a fetid trickle where Kabulis laundered clothes, and there was no trace of the gardens Mogul emperors had laid along it. Kabul blossomed with sewage and trash.

  Batting away hunger and thirst, he crossed a bridge and began to climb a steep, dusty path. The air dried and thinned. Below, the city spread like a grand carpet of indecipherable pattern, every house, every life a knot. In the distance the mountains crested over a low-hanging haze.

  He was in some kind of slum. The hills of Kabul had been left to the poor. Garbage clotted the gutters that ran alongside the unpaved pathways, which rain would churn to mud. Children lugged canisters and plastic jugs full of water back to their homes; the air rioted with cooking smoke. The earthen houses, well-fortified rectangular structures with walls and high windows that made it impossible to see inside, turned their backs to him, made a canyon of the path. Hide everything, show nothing. Women in burkas hurried past, their voices gurgling brooks beneath the cloaking fabric. Men stared, or smiled, or greeted him in soft streams of words that he couldn’t understand. A few boys trailed behind him. “Amerkan?” one asked, giggling when Mo nodded. Their faces were dirty and scabrous, their hair matted, their clothes dust-filmed, their eyes rich with curiosity and mirth.

  Still hungry, even thirstier—and then without warning his stomach turned to liquid, made thunder, began to cramp and roil and clutch in pain. He revisited his meals—maybe the rare steak at the French restaurant—but the problem was not what he had ingested but where to excrete it. He saw an elderly man working his prayer beads in the shade of his house, his white skullcap above his white beard like the clouds over the snow-covered mountains. Mo’s approach sparked light in his glaucous eyes. His smile was riddled with stumps and holes, as if it had been mined.

  “Asalamu alaikum,” the man said.

  “Alaikum asalam,” Mo replied.

  He waited, as his stomach squeezed in agony, for the soft murmur of the rest of the man’s greeting.

  “Toilet?” he asked.

  The man shook his head, uncomprehending.

  “WC?” Again the man shook his head, and Mo tried to think if there was a universal gesture for bathroom. He clutched his stomach. The man pointed to his mouth, thinking Mo hungry, perhaps offering food. Desperate, Mo squatted, patted his rear end, again rubbed his stomach, turned up his hands, and scrunched his face in a question, looking searchingly around him. Chuckling now, the man nodded and motioned for Mo to follow him down a narrow opening between two houses. The foul smell grew stronger as they moved along the alley; then there was the small outhouse. Inside Mo shut the door and squatted over the hole, gagging before he remembered to hold his breath, trying to keep his balance without touching the walls. His bowels emptied in furious stinking squirts; he became pure animal. Standing up, rocking to get his balance, he looked down into a sea with islands of shit.

  As he turned to urinate, a tiny side window revealed the flat roofs of the homes spilling down to the city below, and then, like a sunspot on his vision, a patch of green. When he left the outhouse, stepping over the waste trickling into a gutter nearby, he located the clearing again, seeing it now as a vast green square with the glint of water, cradled by walls all around. Fresh air, clean breath: he pointed to it, and his rescuer gestured toward a path that led down the hill. Mo put his hand on his heart in thanks.

  “Chai?” the man offered.

  Mo shook his head; he thirsted more for that green. The man called out and clapped his hands and two littl
e boys appeared, impish in their salwar kameez, trying to hide behind each other even as they peered at Mo. The old man said something to them and motioned for Mo to follow. Mo again put his hand on his heart and began to trail the boys, breathing the spumes of dust their plastic sandals sent up. The sun drilled into his head. After about ten minutes they emerged from the hillside slum onto a paved road that sloped downward. The boys, after indicating that Mo should keep walking, vanished back up the hill from where they had come. Soon a smooth mud wall inscribed with pointed arches, too high for him to see over, loomed up on his right. He continued downward, shoulder to the wall, until the ground flattened and he reached a corner. Turning right, he at last found an enormous open wooden gate. He walked through the gap and left the city behind.

  Before him a vast garden rose up to meet the slope of the mountain he had just descended. From his new vantage, the hillside slum’s cantilevered houses looked like an Escher drawing, one that could be smeared—by an earthquake, a mudslide—as easily as wet ink on paper. The jumble on the hill broke abruptly at the garden’s rear wall, which demarcated an entirely different landscape, one marked by symmetry, order, geometry. Straight paths climbed the garden’s stepped terraces, a straight canal flowed down toward Mo. Trees—almond and cherry, walnut and pomegranate—marched off to the sides in neat orchard-like rows.

  A Ministry of Tourism signboard told him where he was: Bagh-e-Babur, Babur’s garden, designed around 1526 by the first Mogul emperor, who was now buried in it. After serving as a front line in Afghanistan’s civil war, the garden was being restored. It came closer than almost anything he had seen in Kabul to matching the description he now found in his book.