The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  “I don’t remember New York,” Abdul began. “I was two when I left. I came home with my mother’s body. And all this.” The camera panned across a meticulously organized array of children’s books and trucks and Nike shoes and DVDs and clothes. Pristine, none of it played with or worn. These objects had been studied.

  “My parents idealized America. I know this from my relatives. I grew up hearing, over and over, how my mother had refused to come home after my father’s death. If she had, she would still be alive—I heard this all the time.”

  The image changed. Now Abdul was watching, with intense concentration, his mother’s speech defending Mo at the public hearing. Mo could see Abdul’s lips moving ever so faintly, matching both his mother’s Bengali and the English translation provided by the man sitting next to her. Abdul had memorized the words. Mo didn’t want to think about how many times over the years he must have listened to them.

  Abdul had applied to and been accepted at colleges in the United States, but under pressure from his relatives decided to stay in Bangladesh. America tempted him and scared him. Both of his parents had died there. This was reason to go, reason not to. Mo remembered how his own decision not to go home had curled him in bed. How many nights had Abdul spent in the same position?

  “I sometimes feel each place is the wrong place,” the young man on the screen said softly.

  The image on the screen cut to a gray-haired man—the same one who had sat at Asma’s side during the hearing—polishing a brass memorial plaque. Affixed to the side of the Brooklyn building where she had lived, it bore her name in English and Bengali, and her image. The man worked till it gleamed, placed a small bouquet of pink plastic flowers in a holder on the plaque, and put his hand over his heart.

  Mo looked suspiciously at the camera, which had been removed from its case. So far it had brought only grief. And there was more: Molly had tracked down all the jurors and reported gently that most of them—Ariana Montagu, most of all—still felt betrayed by Mo’s abdication. Mo knew this but had worked to bury the knowledge. After deciding to give up, he had packed in haste and fled the country like a fugitive, leaving Paul Rubin to issue a brief statement saying that he had withdrawn. Reading some of the coverage from abroad, Mo had been flabbergasted by Ariana’s assertion that the jury was going to back him. The artist’s condescension toward his design, the scraps he had overheard from other jurors, Claire’s contention that only she had resolutely defended him—all had combined to convince him that the jury would never support the Garden. His face, as he read the interview with Ariana, had burned, as it did even now, at the prospect that he had misread his country as much as he had accused it of misreading him. From then on he shut out all coverage of the Garden. He didn’t want to learn facts that would make him regret his choices. In part, he was ashamed before Asma Anwar, before Laila, too: he had justified his decision to withdraw—to save himself—by saying his memorial would never be built. What if he had been wrong?

  The camera was on, Mo seated near a monumental two-handled water jar carved from marble. Molly didn’t waste time with warm-up questions. “Why did you leave America?” she asked.

  Mo hesitated, then began: “The memorial experience opened the world to me. I began to learn about Islamic architecture, and it became what would seem to be a lifelong interest. And there were so many opportunities abroad—India, China, Qatar, elsewhere in the Arab world. Architecturally it was more exciting to be abroad. The center of gravity had shifted, even if Americans didn’t recognize it back then. I guess they do now. And I figured I might as well work somewhere where the name Mohammad wouldn’t be a liability.” He forced a smile.

  “Your instincts were right—you’ve done well.”

  “Well enough,” Mo said with false modesty. He was better-known internationally than he had ever dreamed, and wealthy, too. And yet his gloss—that he had been pulled abroad by opportunity—was a false one. He had been pushed. America had offered his immigrant parents the freedom to reinvent themselves. Mo had found himself reinvented by others, so distorted he couldn’t recognize himself. His imagination was made suspect. And so he had traced his parents’ journey in reverse: back to India, which seemed a more promising land. When he called his parents to tell them he was withdrawing from the memorial competition, he felt ashamed, even though this was what they wanted. “Don’t feel bad, Mo,” his mother said, and, as if she had been practicing the line: “Eden, paradise—all the best gardens are imaginary.”

  His submission, which had seemed so monumental at the time, had turned out to be only a small fragment of the mosaic of his life. From catastrophe—from failure—had come his true path, his life calling, as if all was meant to happen this way. Even as he was still unsure about God’s existence, he counted this God’s will. Or perhaps this was how he made uneasy peace with what had happened.

  He looked away from the camera, resting his eyes on a sixteenth-century ceramic bowl from Iznik. The artistry of exquisite objects like these—and his apartment was full of them—had come to express his faith more than any ritual or text, including the text of Islam. He had stumbled into sacrilege all those years ago and found he belonged there. He barely prayed. Months could pass without the urge. His uncertainty had abided all these years and most days barred the way to faith. Only rarely did it seem like faith itself.

  Yet these objects were reflections of faith, meant to express divine principles visibly, and so suggest the invisible. Sometimes, studying them, or the complex geometry he spun from computer algorithms, he would sense himself on the edge of something vast, awesome, infinite. Then the feeling would be gone. He didn’t know whether the makers of these objects were merely executing their patrons’ wishes, or had found their way to God, or were looking with their hands, their minds. He wondered the same about himself. If he was ever to find his way to belief, it would not be through fasting, or even through prayer, but through his craft. In the meantime his creations served the belief of others.

  “Looking back now, is there anything you would have done differently?” Molly asked.

  He kept his eyes on the bowl, its lustrous green glaze. His chest tightened. Over the years he had revisited this question hundreds of times in his head, never arriving at a satisfactory answer.

  “I would not have entered,” he said to the camera now. “That was the original mistake—the original sin, perhaps.”

  He sounded bitter despite himself. I am bitter, he thought, and, sensing that the words were on the verge of escaping his lips, pressed them shut.

  “Everyone’s full of regrets,” Molly said elliptically. Then, as if reading his mind: “Who do you blame?”

  “It’s not as if I’ve been tending some enemies list all these years,” Mo said. In fact he had. There were the obvious candidates—Debbie Dawson and Lou Sarge; Governor Bitman; the headscarf puller; that reporter, now a Web doyenne, who from time to time messaged Mo—“Just checking in! Anything new? Alyssa Spier”—as if they were old friends or collaborators.

  But more painful were those who should have been on his side, or who began there. Malik and MACC. Rubin. Claire Burwell. All these years later, she was still disappointing and provoking and mystifying to him. Her turn against him had a kind of logic; he could trace the steps, including his own, that had led her there. He had taken her support for granted; he had pushed her too hard. Her turn against the Garden, when absolutely nothing in the design she loved had changed, still defied belief.

  “Claire Burwell,” he said, surprised they hadn’t brought her up. “What became of her?”

  Her head was covered with a silk scarf the color of one of the sea’s blues, and for half a second Mo saw her as a Muslim. Then he registered her gray skin, the face devastated like the ruins of Kabul. She was sick.

  Claire’s voice filled the room. “What did I think of him? I thought he was sanctimonious. Rigid. I guess that made it harder—he wasn’t the easiest to deal with, you know. And talented—let’s not forget that
. I did think he was very talented. I just couldn’t handle all the vagueness, the elusiveness about what the Garden was because—and I’m trying to be as honest as I can—it made me wonder what he was. You know, he wouldn’t make things clear and simple. He wouldn’t come out and say he didn’t believe in the theology that inspired the attack, wouldn’t even say he thought the attack was wrong. I was under so much pressure. The families. The press—that woman from the Post. It wasn’t all my fault. The New Yorker didn’t trust him! What was I supposed to do? I had thought myself so sophisticated. I was naïve. I do regret … I regret so much.”

  “Do you go to the memorial?”

  “Never. I went to the dedication, then never returned. A Garden of Flags? Hideous. As ugly as the whole process. And with all the infighting, picking a whole new jury, soliciting new designs—by the time it got built I’m not sure anyone cared. I was so sick of the whole thing, and it was my husband’s memorial! And so many more Americans ended up dying in the wars the attack prompted than in the attack itself that by the time they finished this memorial it seemed wrong to have expended so much effort and money. But it’s almost like we fight over what we can’t settle in real life through these symbols. They’re our nation’s afterlife.”

  “Have you ever told Mohammad Khan how you feel?”

  “No, no, I haven’t. It was just too, too—”

  He leaned forward in his seat, awaiting her next words, then realized he was still being filmed. “Please, turn that off,” he told the cameraman, who started in surprise, as if he had imagined himself invisible.

  “Why not?” Molly was asking Claire. “Why did you never contact him?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. His design would have been so much better than what we ended up with, and I did come to believe that we were in the grip of some frenzy, possessed almost, at that time. I felt like little by little I was pushed—by him among others—until I found myself on the other side of a line I hadn’t wanted to cross. But then he went abroad and began working for whichever Muslim ruler would pay him, and again—I didn’t know what he was about. So even though I wanted to apologize, I must have felt conflicted because whenever I would start to write to him, I could never find the right words.”

  “How about ‘I’m sorry’?”

  Mo laughed aloud at Molly’s assertiveness. On-screen, Claire laughed, too. “Yes, you’re right. Sometimes simpler is better, right? I’m sorry. Not sure why I felt I needed more than that. Except for never being entirely sure I was sorry. There were times, I’ll admit it, when I still thought he should apologize to me, to all the families for asking them to operate on trust when he refused to give us any reason to trust him. It was the hardest part of all for me, really discerning what I felt. So many people—the dead, the living—were telling me what to do. I thought—I thought I finally knew myself, that I was casting off what I was supposed to be. I guess I haven’t lost all of that confusion.” She looked off into the distance, at what he couldn’t see. The screen went to black.

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Molly asked if they could turn the camera back on, finish the interview. He nodded, although he wasn’t in the mood for much more.

  “Do you still think about the Garden? Did you keep the design in your head?”

  Mo smiled. “You could say I never stopped thinking about it.”

  “We have something to show you,” Molly told Claire.

  Mohammad Khan ghosted on the giant screen on her living room wall. Gray threaded his hair; the high white wall he was approaching dwarfed him. He passed through a towering steel door cut with elaborate fretwork, then bent to pick a stray leaf off the path. Before him spread a garden, governed by strict geometry.

  Claire had seen it only on paper, only in miniature. Yet she had no doubt about what was before her.

  “I don’t understand,” she said to Molly. “The Garden. But how? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s the private pleasure garden of some rich Muslim—a sultan or emir or something,” Molly said. “He commissioned it after Khan withdrew from the memorial competition. Khan took us there after we interviewed him. He wanted you to see it.”

  “Before I died?” Claire’s laugh was brittle, but she turned back toward the screen.

  Two canals bisected the garden, forming four squares. Khan walked, narrating. The camera’s focus was tight as he ticked off trees—cherry, almond, pear, apricot, walnut. Rows of Mediterranean cypresses, proud, self-contained. Plane trees of great girth. Steel trees, glinting and upside down, with roots like a distraught woman’s tangled hair in place of branches and leaves.

  The pavilion sat, slightly elevated, at the center of the garden, a giant sculpture floating above land and water. Its design was simple, elegant: a flat roof, unadorned gray marble columns, sharp right angles. Inside, grilles of white marble cast elaborate geometric shadows, creating a series of contemplative spaces with benches. The canals flowed from beneath the pavilion, fed by a reservoir revealed, as if it were the source of all life, by an open circle within the floor.

  Claire closed her eyes and heard the water rippling, Khan’s footsteps crunching, birds singing, chattering, telling their stories, maybe hers. She wished she could move into the scene before her. Cal felt closer than he had in twenty years. Seeing the Garden alive was a gift and a rebuke. She had, at first glimpse, made it an allegory for Cal’s perpetual optimism. In walking away from it, she had walked away from him. The real act of will was not in the creating of a garden but in the sustaining, the continuous stand against wildness. She had let herself be overtaken.

  With shame in her face she turned to the cameraman. “Did you tell him?”

  His own look was sheepish. “I wanted to, planned to,” he said. “But once he mentioned the garden, I thought … I was afraid … I thought he might not show it to me.”

  Claire saw William, at that moment, not as a broad-shouldered young man but as the little boy to whom she had described, again and again, the magic of the Garden. He had traced its lines so many times with his hand. How strange it must have been to finally walk them. Garden, then no garden—too much, she grasped now, like father, then no father. He had been a troubled teenager, his poor grades and errant behavior so at odds with her own regimented adolescence that she didn’t know how to help him; she was never sure whether his problems owed to misfortune or an excess of fortune or both. She tried to talk to him about her own father’s death, how it had driven her to excel. He didn’t want to hear it. At last he pulled himself together enough to get into art school.

  When he came to her and told her that he and his girlfriend, Molly, wanted to make a documentary about the memorial competition, she tried to dissuade him. But not as hard as she might have.

  The camera strips the eye of its freedom, holds viewers hostage to its choices. The focus in the footage Claire saw was narrow at first, staying on Khan, on the garden’s details. But now the camera shifted away from him and panned the inside walls, and as it did, Claire heard an odd, primal sound. It took her a moment to realize she had made it. Across the walls, where the names should have been, flowed Arabic calligraphy.

  “The names,” she whispered. “Where are they? What is that?”

  “It’s the Quran,” William said.

  The room wavered around Claire. This wasn’t a gift but a taunt. Doubt was all Khan deserved.

  “I told you this film was a mistake,” she said.

  “It’s a commission,” William pointed out. “I don’t think he had a choice.”

  “We don’t know whose idea it was,” Molly reminded him. “His or the emir’s.”

  “He must at least have agreed to it,” Claire said. “He was too independent—too unbending—to allow it otherwise. From what I saw of him, he wouldn’t do something he didn’t believe in for a patron any more than he would for the families.”

  The footage paused, they sat in silence.

  “We don’t know what it says,” Molly said abruptly. “Being in there—
it was like being under a spell. I didn’t think to ask anything. I didn’t want to ruin it. He said it was the Quran, and I was like, okay. But which verses? What’s the message? We’ll have to get someone to translate it.”

  The screen unfroze. A few moments later—or much longer—Molly’s voice floated over the scene. “What would you say to Claire Burwell about the garden? It’s obviously the same, but different. I mean, the names.” Not just the names, Claire thought—the steel trees upside down. The emir couldn’t have wanted that. These were messages.

  Khan was walking back toward the garden’s entrance now, not looking at the camera. When he spoke, she couldn’t see his face.

  “Use your imagination,” he said. Claire heard his words, closed her eyes, tried to see her husband’s name. But the Arabic script ensnared her like concertina wire.

  Use your imagination.

  She had, and with it assumed the worst. When she opened her eyes, Khan was gone. Only the garden, empty, remained. The camera, or the hand holding it—her son’s hand—trembled. How else to explain why the image before her pulsed with life?

  “Mom,” she heard William say. “Mom—are you still with us? I want you to see one more thing.”

  The screen showed, in close-up, a few small rocks stacked in a corner of the garden.

  “It was the best I could do,” said William. “There wasn’t much time.”

  He was waiting for her reaction. A paltry heap of pebbles: she didn’t see what he wanted her to see.

  “The cairns, Mom. You remember.”

  That day flooded back, the shade of every stone, the shape of every mound they left for Cal to find his way, even as she lost hers.

  In Khan’s garden, her son had laid his hand. With a pile of stones, he had written a name.