The Submission (8 page)

When Paul entered his office, seeing the back of Jacob’s curly head brought on a familiar, unwilled coldness. They shook hands. Jacob had a tan, or, more accurately, a salmon glow in his usually pale face. “Been traveling?” Paul asked, pretending to study some mail.

“Just a brief vacation,” Jacob said, his shoulders hunching slightly.

“Vacation,” Paul repeated. “Must be nice.”

Jacob made no reply, so Paul asked after his wife, an unsettlingly gorgeous Taiwanese American.

“Bea’s great. So what are you going to do, Dad?”

“About—?” Paul said curtly, although he knew. He was touched, since Jacob rarely inquired about Paul’s own stresses, then sour: it took something this sensational to make him inquire.

“The memorial, of course.”

“What would you do in my shoes, Jacob? If it’s true?”

“Give it to him. Or her: I told Bea I think it’s Zaha Hadid.” No response. “Whoever it is, if they won, they won.”

Like the simple son at the Passover seder, Paul thought. “So what are we here for today?” he asked. Jacob began to talk about his new film—something about a woman who takes her nine-year-old son on a journey to Laos. Laos sounded expensive.

“You know, Dad, the woman who was a minor character in
Exiled
? And she got pregnant? This is her child!” The content of his speech could not bear the weight of his excited tone, and this, Paul concluded, was what made Jacob a poor salesman: he had no sense of when to modulate, no care for how his audience received him. This judgment, Paul knew, was also a dodge for his own guilt: he had missed the screening of
Exiled
for a dinner at Gracie Mansion in honor of the governor, when he was trying to secure his jury chairmanship. Later he had dozed, bored and confused, through the film at home, waking only for the credits, where he saw his name as executive producer, an acknowledgment of the money lost to this folly. He had sent Jacob a note dictated by Edith commending the “originality and passion” of
Exiled
, but today he was distracted, his caution frayed. “I think I slept through that part,” he said, unthinking, gruff—even, he realized in retrospect, snide.

Two spots of deep red glowed in Jacob’s cheeks, and Paul saw him as a stricken boy seeking comfort after being wounded by some insult at school. But his own father had done the wounding. Perhaps, Paul thought, parenting meant protecting children until they were strong enough to sustain the hurt their parents inflicted.

“I’m—” No, he wouldn’t apologize. “I’m tired,” he said. “I have a lot going on.” Jacob opened and closed his mouth but said nothing. This silence, this failure to speak, only diminished Paul’s respect.

“How much do you need?” he asked, wanting the business done.

“Four hundred,” Jacob mumbled, the thousands not needing spelling out. The amount was high, and Paul half hoped that Jacob had been quick enough in hurt to raise it. He couldn’t help comparing his son, and not favorably, to Mohammad Khan.

How could you be dead if you did not exist? Of the forty Bangladeshis reported missing to their consulate in the days after the attack, only twenty-six were legal, and Asma Anwar’s husband was not among them. The undocumented also had to be uncounted, officials insisted. The consulate could not abet illegals, even posthumously. They were very sorry about Inam, “if indeed he had existed” rolling off their tongues as often as
Insh’Allah
, but they could do nothing about repatriating the body, if it were found, or helping with funds for the widow.

The subcontractor who had employed Inam as a janitor argued similarly: there was no Inam Haque, since he had taken the job using a fake name and Social Security number. The subcontractor had insisted on this pretense of legality, but now used it as an excuse to deny Asma help. “He paid real taxes,” she kept telling Nasruddin, the “mayor” of Little Dhaka, as their Brooklyn neighborhood was called, even though its people mostly came from Sandwip. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

Nasruddin just shook his head. He had lived in Brooklyn for longer than Asma, who was only twenty-one, had been alive. In that time, people said, his face had barely aged—though his stomach had swelled, like a very slow-gestating pregnancy. He made his living overseeing a crew of Bangladeshis who remodeled and maintained the dozen Brooklyn brownstones owned by an Irish American butcher. But
his real energy went to tending his community, smoothing its way through green card applications and business licenses, public schools and hospitals, real estate negotiations, marriages and divorces, arrests and fines for trash on the sidewalk and double-parking. His English was excellent, his fairness unquestioned. Inam had worked for him and had been safe under his wing. Nasruddin had counseled him against taking the job in Manhattan—it was like another country. But Asma had insisted, believing that to work in the towers, so much taller than the brownstones of Brooklyn, suggested Inam and she were moving higher, too. With what vanity she had imagined this news crossing the sea. Nasruddin never spoke of her misjudgment; he didn’t need to.

He had brought her the news; perhaps this was why he became her protector. Eight months pregnant, she was dozing in her room when she heard frantic knocking on the door of their landlords, the Mahmouds. Mrs. Mahmoud, who had been on the phone all morning, put the receiver down, waddled to the door, and opened it to a panting Nasruddin. He was wearing his work overalls.

By now Asma had lumbered out.

“Has Inam called?” Nasruddin asked.

Mrs. Mahmoud was the owner not just of the viewless room they rented but of the phone they relied on. “No,” she said. She looked back over her shoulder at the cupboards, as if Inam might be hiding inside.

Nasruddin looked at Asma and said, too formally, “Please sit.” He waited until she was arranged on the couch, her swollen feet propped on a plush footstool by Mrs. Mahmoud.

“The buildings have fallen,” he said, and she knew.

In the haze that followed, Asma gave statements about Inam’s work, his schedule, his habits, his history, to consular officials, investigators hired by Inam’s employer, the police, the FBI, and the American Red Cross. She received all of these visitors and promptly forgot them, attuned only to an inner world of fragile and unpredictable rhythms.
She caressed her distended belly compulsively, measuring her own life from kick to kick. Never had she prayed so deeply, never had she felt the contrast between the tranquillity within prayer and the disturbance outside so strongly. Her belly was far too big for her to bend, but she trusted God to sense her prostration.

Like Inam, Asma was in America illegally. All of this official attention, she was sure, would end with her deportation. Resigned to this, she held only two hopes: that she give birth first, so that her child would be an American citizen, and that Inam’s body be found, so the three of them could fly home together. In the meantime she subsisted on money from the mosque’s Widows and Orphans Fund, to which Inam had always contributed, and on the generosity of the Mahmouds. “Stay for as long as you need to, for free,” Mrs. Mahmoud said, knowing that Asma would soon return to Bangladesh.

When the baby came, Asma studied him, looking for Inam. Everyone said he was there, in the boy, “a perfect copy,” in Mrs. Mahmoud’s words, as though he had been made in a garment factory. But Inam’s face, though gentle, had been long and sallow. This baby had the vitality of Asma’s own father: the big eyes, the dark brows, the round face, the warm-hued skin. Even his reflexively gesticulating arms brought her father’s storytelling to mind. She looked harder for Inam, feeling it important to find him there. A perfect copy.

She named him Abdul Karim, Servant of the Most Generous. She hoped God would safeguard him. At night she huddled with him beneath thin blankets in an underheated apartment and whispered stories. She told him how she had suggested Inam as a groom to her parents, after her bad habit of opening her mouth at every meeting with prospective in-laws had doomed three other matches. Inam was six years older, his family poorer, but she couldn’t be picky. She remembered, vaguely, from childhood, his face being kind. He lived in America, and she wanted to live there, too. Her father she informed that she wouldn’t, like most wives, stay in Sandwip, pregnant, under her in-laws’ thumbs, waiting for her husband to return once a year. She would go, too. To her surprise Inam agreed.

When they spoke by phone—Inam in Brooklyn, she still in Sandwip—he was so quiet that she had to fill the silences herself. Their marriage had been much the same. But she missed his stillness. She hadn’t realized how much it soothed her.

Gold seal, black letters: the death certificate arrived. The Bangladesh consulate acknowledged Inam as one of theirs and provided Asma with a small stipend. With the help of a Jewish lawyer who had made the undocumented relatives his cause, Nasruddin got the subcontractor who had employed Inam to fork over a small amount, too. Three months passed, then six, without a body or even a piece of one. Abdul learned to turn over, and the unspoken question grew louder: When would Asma go home? “They are saying some of the bodies may never be found,” Mrs. Mahmoud said bluntly one day. “They were cremated.”

Were her words meant to sting? Cremation was anathema to Muslims. God had forbidden the use of fire on His Creation, or so Asma had been taught. Then why had God allowed these men to cremate her husband—and claim to have cremated him in God’s name, no less? Where would Inam’s soul go? Would this leave him outside paradise? The next morning, when she heard the Mahmouds leave, she crept to their phone and called the local imam. It was easier to frame her questions without having to face him. She could picture his eyes blinking behind his glasses, the sparse beard that always made her think of a fire struggling to light.

Why did my husband suffer so? she asked.

“It was written,” he said, as she knew he would. The burning Inam might have suffered was nothing next to the torment of the hellfire, which was forever, the cleric continued. If Inam was a believer, she could rest easy—he was in the garden now. His pain here had been momentary; his bliss would be everlasting.

She had no doubt that Inam had been taken into the gardens of paradise. He gave zakat. He always fasted during Ramadan. He prayed, if not five times a day, as often as he could. The morning of his death,
lying in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep, too lazy and heavy with child to get up and cook him breakfast, leaving him to the cold dal she had prepared the night before, she had heard the rustling as he prostrated himself. He believed.

And yet the knowledge that he would gain paradise failed to give her the peace or joy that signaled submission to God’s will. Fearful of what the scratching in her chest signaled instead, she prayed to feel peace.

Why did Inam have to die? she asked the imam, knowing this question was not hers to ask. She had the urge to keep him on the phone, string out the conversation. The imam quoted a sura: “No soul may die except with God’s permission at a predestined time.” God was all-pervading, all-knowing, he said, “the creator, owner, and master of the universe. We cannot question His destruction; we are His Creation to deal with as He chooses.”

His words—words she had heard, in one form or another, her whole life—now made God sound like a rich man free to reward or punish His servants as He chose. These thoughts made her ashamed, even apologetic toward God. Yet she persisted in her questions. The men who killed Inam believed it was an act of devotion, one that would get them to paradise, she told the imam. Everyone said so. They believed they were fighting for God, and the Quran promised those who did so a great reward. How could the same paradise make room for both them and her husband?

“God knows best,” he said. But I want to know, too, she thought. Faith for her had always been something like an indestructible building. Now she had spotted a loose brick whose removal could topple the whole structure, and her hand hovered near it, tempted, afraid.

And yet it was God, the greatest of plotters, whom she believed would decide her fate. Or maybe He already had. She expected to be deported; she hadn’t been. She planned to leave when Inam’s body was found; it hadn’t been. One day she realized the wait had become a
pretext. Clinging to the thin thread of hope for his body’s recovery also let her hold on to the entire imaginary American future Inam had woven for their unborn son. Even after spending six years earning a degree from Chittagong University, Inam couldn’t get a job in Bangladesh unless he was willing to buy one. With hundreds vying for every opening in the civil service or a private company, the positions went to the highest bidder. He wasn’t willing, but even if he were, how could he earn the money to buy a job when he didn’t have a job to begin with? It would be different for their son, Inam always said. She determined to make it so. Kensington had such a high concentration of Bangladeshis that she could meet all of her needs for food, cleaning supplies, medicine, and clothing without uttering a word of English, the price being that she could make no move that was not fully vetted in Bengali. But she couldn’t stay without money, and the amounts doled out to her wouldn’t keep her and Abdul for long.

God is the greatest of plotters. One day Nasruddin took her to see a lawyer who wanted to help Asma receive compensation from the government for Inam’s death. All the legal relatives of the dead were getting compensation, so there was no reason Asma shouldn’t as well. And if she truly wanted to stay in America and raise her son, Nasruddin told her, she needed to do this.

The lawyer, he said, was an Iranian American. A Muslim, but unlike any Muslim Asma knew. Her dark hair, unlike Asma’s, was uncovered. The skirt of her snug-fitting turquoise suit struck just above the knee. Her pale legs were bare; her heels, which matched her suit, high. Her lips were painted the color of a plum. Asma would have liked to ask her questions all day, most of them having nothing to do with the attack, but Laila Fathi had no time. Her words came fast; her phones rang often; her calendar, which sat open at her elbow, was full.

Asma herself had never kept a calendar, never needed to: even after the attack, she relied on Nasruddin to call the day before—or even that morning—and tell her they had an appointment. In Sandwip the passage of time was calendared by events, not dates, and so
were her memories: the harvesting of summer paddy, autumn paddy, winter paddy; the arrival of the first mangoes; school holidays and religious ones—the sighting of the crescent moon at Ramadan’s beginning and end. The two Eids. Election time, a season of violence. Schedules, back home, were provisional. Appointments made were often not kept. People were delayed by poor roads, flat rickshaw tires, gasoline shortages, or simply conversations that stretched on. In America time was gold; in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.

Laila was like a baffling dream, which made it hard to concentrate on what she, in Nasruddin’s translation, was saying. The politicians had agreed, after some months of arguing, to compensate illegal aliens who had lost relatives in the attack. Nasruddin and Laila wanted her to meet the man from the government who was distributing the funds. It would be a way to assure Abdul the future her husband had wanted.

Walk right into the government’s arms? Were they crazy? She did not believe any country could be that generous.

“It must be a trick,” Asma said, “a way to find illegals and deport us.”

Laila said that the government had promised that no information obtained through this process would be shared with immigration officials. “Believe me, I would never expose you to any kind of danger,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that if you come to the government’s attention some other way—getting arrested, for example—they can’t deport you, so I’d avoid contact with the police.”

“Will they put in writing that this is not a trick?” Asma asked, impressed by her own shrewdness. Laila’s smile suggested that she was impressed, too.

In the end Asma was persuaded by her faith in Nasruddin. The three of them worked on her claim, trying to estimate what Inam’s income over time would have been. Asma walked into the meeting with the government man shaking with fear, scrutinized his face for deceit, and walked out with $1.05 million for the lifetime loss of her husband’s earnings. She knew it could not have been simple, but for her it was. Just like that, she was a millionaire, although once Nasruddin did the math for her, showing how that money would have to
sustain Abdul until his adulthood, and her for perhaps her whole life, she saw how careful with her dollars she would have to be.

And how careful with herself, for she wasn’t just a millionaire but a secret one. Government largesse had made her rich; government fiat kept her illegal. She had the money to fly to Bangladesh and back a hundred times, but she couldn’t leave America because she might not be allowed back in. There were other relatives of the dead like her, Laila said—relatively well-off, illegal—but Asma did not know how many or who they were. Maybe they passed on the street every day, each of them hiding alone in the dark, fearful that the glimmer from their piles of gold would give them away. God wove a spiderweb to hide Mohammad, sheltering in a cave, from his pursuers. If He wanted to protect her, He would.