The Submission - Amy Waldman [110]
Rubin’s lack of urgency puzzled Mo; he seemed to have no interest in controlling the situation. As the spectators settled themselves, Mo scanned his statement. He had not so much lost his place as forgotten it for a moment: he couldn’t remember what he had just said. The large type loomed up like a foreign alphabet. He extemporized.
“—from Japanese gardens, to modern artists and architects like Mondrian and Mies van der Rohe, to the gardens we now call Islamic—”
The stunned silence in the room translated to a roar in Mo’s ears. He had intended to emphasize all the non-Islamic influences on the Garden, to show that if critics were evaluating the same design by anyone not named Mohammad, they would have seen its ranging roots. But the heckling suckled his rage, and he decided, in that moment, that to downplay any Islamic influence was to concede the stigma attached to it.
Boos reverberated, chants of “Save America from Islam!” and “No Muslim memorial!”
“Quiet!” Rubin rapped the hecklers in vain. “Quiet!”
Mo kept on. “The gardens we now call Islamic,” he repeated, “although they predate Islam by at least a millennium, because agriculture, not religion, shaped their structure—”
“Taqiya!” one woman shouted.
“He’s lying about everything! Taqiya!” shrieked another.
“Order!” Rubin bellowed, finally alive. He had gone pale; sweat gleamed from the half-moon of his pate, which he was dabbing furiously with a handkerchief. “Order!” Rubin boomed again. “Or we will end the hearing. Order!”
Mo stopped trying to speak, and after a few minutes, the room went quiet. “If you—the public—can’t conduct yourself with decency,” Rubin said sternly, “you don’t deserve to have your viewpoint weighed.”
“We’re not the public, we’re the families,” a voice called out. “You can’t say we don’t count.” Righteous applause rippled.
Rubin, perspiring still, but composed, held up a hand. “Of course the families count. But the families also have respect for this process, so I’m confident that they’re not doing the interrupting. The families deserve dignity as they seek the right memorial, so anyone disrupting these proceedings clearly has no respect for them.”
The logic, however convoluted, seemed to work; the audience calmed. Paul nodded at Mo to continue. Double deodorant or not, he was perspiring, too. He tried to pick up where he had left off. “The gardens predate Islam, so perhaps the gardens we read about in the Quran were based on what existed at the time, maybe the gardens Mohammad saw when he traveled to Damascus. Maybe man wrote the Quran in response to his context: compared to the desert, gardens seemed heavenly, and so that’s the heaven they created. That became their model for paradise.”
The worry that he had said something unwise licked at him, but like a football player who has fumbled, he could only keep after the ball. “My point”—what was his point?—“my point, my point is that the Garden, with all of these influences—this mix of influences is what makes it American.” With the light shining he could see only Rubin’s face, and Rubin looked confused. He should wrap up.
The virgins, the seventy-two virgins, should he address that … seventy-two versions of the truth. No, it would only make things worse. The flaw, the setup, in the process—he saw it now: he wouldn’t have a chance to answer the speakers who came after him. How to personalize it, make them see what they were doing to him. They wouldn’t care, he couldn’t count on that. Make them see what they were doing to themselves. But hurry: the sweat staging on his forehead soon would sting his eyes.
“What history do you want to write with this memorial?” he asked, then, still unable to recover his prepared remarks, unable to remember what, after his influences, he planned to discuss, he could think of nothing more to say, so his speech ended abruptly, like a sentence without a period, and because no one realized that he was