The Submission (35 page)

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.

Thank you:

Bill Clegg and Courtney Hodell

The American Academy in Berlin, Ledig House International Writers Residency, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room at the New York Public Library

Lorraine Adams, Katherine Boo, Chloe Breyer, Kimberly Cutter, Shaun Dolan, Jonathan Galassi, Scott Glass, Eliza Griswold, Juliette Kayyem, Mark Krotov, Mark Laird, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Ratish Nanda, Philip Nobel, Rachel Nolan, Asad Raza, Sarah Sayeed, Jeff Seroy, Mohammad Shaheer, Lisa Silverman, Brenda Star, Sarah Sze, Sarita Varma, Abdul Waheed Wafa, Don Waldman, Marilyn Waldman

Oliver and Theodora, and Alex most of all

AMY WALDMAN
was co-chief of the South Asia bureau of
The New York Times
. Her fiction has appeared in
The Atlantic
, the
Boston Review
, and the
Financial Times
, and is anthologized in
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010
. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. This is her first novel. Find out more at
www.thesubmissionnovel.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

“More verisimilitude, political resonance, and heart than
The Bonfire of the Vanities
.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner’s name—and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam.

In this deeply humane novel, the breadth of Amy Waldman’s cast of characters is matched by her startling ability to conjure their perspectives. A striking portrait of a fractured city striving to make itself whole, The Submission is a piercing and resonant novel by an important new talent.

“Not only the best of the many excellent 9/11 novels but also the most straightforwardly enjoyable.”

—
Esquire
(The Book of the Year)

“A wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11.”

—Richard Price, author of
Freedomland
and
Lush Life

Cover photography courtesy of Getty Images and Glow Images Author photo by Pieter M. van Hattem

The Submission
Copyright © 2011 by Amy Waldman.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-40745-8

Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

First published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in a hardcover edition: 2011 This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2012

The poem quoted in the epigraph is from
The Afghans
, by Mohammed Ali, Kabul, 1969.

Portions of this novel have previously been published in slightly diff erent form in
The Atlantic.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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ISBN 978-1-44340-744-1

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