The Submission - Amy Waldman [117]
Even without direct orders, her legs moved where she needed them to go: to the right of the stage, up the stairs, one by one, into the chair. A few moments later Nasruddin sat next to her.
“Please give your name,” the woman running the hearing chirped.
“Asma, wife of Inam Haque. His job was to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms.”
Nasruddin translated, but left out the bathroom cleaning.
She plunged on: “My husband was from Bangladesh. I am from Bangladesh. My son”—she beamed—“he is two years old, born three weeks after the attack. He is one hundred percent American. My husband worked. He paid taxes. He sent money to his family in Bangladesh—eleven relatives—and to mine. Do you know how little that left for us to live on? But we managed. Inam was not an uneducated man. He finished high school in Bangladesh, then got his university degree. But there were no good jobs there unless you bought one. He preferred to start at the bottom here because he believed it was possible to work your way up. There you were stuck. The politics, the corruption. Here there was none of that. People helped you. Even the Jewish people.”
Nasruddin shot her a look. She knew enough English to grasp he was editing her. But there was no stopping. Her voice shook because she kept forgetting to breathe, but she also had the strange sensation of wanting to giggle, as if she were twelve again, with her father, riding a bicycle rickshaw through Dhaka’s packed streets for the first time, barely holding on, laughing from fear and exhilaration.
“My husband was a man of peace because he was a Muslim. That is our tradition. That is what our Prophet, peace be upon him, taught. You care for widows and orphans, as Mr. Nasruddin has done for me and my child. You have mixed up these bad Muslims, these bad people, and Islam. Millions of people all over the world have done good things because Islam tells them to. There are so many more Muslims who would never think of taking a life. You talk about paradise as a place for bad people. But that is not what we believe. That is not who the garden is for. The gardens of paradise are for men like my husband, who never hurt anyone.” She took a breath. “We do not tell you what it means to be Christian, or what the rules of your Heaven are.” This went untranslated by Nasruddin.
“I think a garden is right,” she continued, “because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together. How can you pretend we and our traditions are not part of this place? Does my husband matter less than all of your relatives?”
The faces in the audience were melting into one another, which was a comfort.
“You don’t like this architect because he is Muslim,” she continued. “An American designed our parliament in Dhaka. He was also named Kahn. Louis Kahn. He designed our parliament.”
Her father had taken her there when she was twelve years old, showed her the massive, stoic building rising from the water, taken her inside to see the light slanting in, walked her across the vast, sedate lawns, which were a respite from a frantic city. He had told her about the American who had designed it, and how Bangladeshis had come to see it as the most powerful symbol of their new democracy. That democracy’s defects were partly why Nasruddin and Inam, and also Asma, had ended up in New York; what Kahn designed her father pronounced too good for the politicians. And yet the complex’s beauty, its strength, endured, as if it were ignorant of all the broken promises, or believed they might still be fulfilled.
“We were grateful for that building,” she continued. “We are grateful. We have all tried to give back to America. But also, I want to know, my son—he is Muslim, but he is also American. Or isn’t he? You tell me: What should I tell my son?”
Outrage, strong as acid, was filling her, threatening to spill over and burn everyone in the room.
“You should be ashamed!” she