The Submission - Amy Waldman [125]
But on this day the son showed surprising wisdom. “Mom’s crazy,” he said to his father. “You can’t fire him. Besides, everything they say about Muslims they once said about Catholics—they didn’t trust us, either.”
Nasruddin looked at him with gratitude. Perhaps he had been wrong about the young man.
“It’s only the ones with the big beards you have to worry about,” Junior went on. Perhaps not. Nasruddin left the store to the sound of a knife tearing flesh.
He had tried to silence Asma once and been wrong. How could he make her listen now?
“For whom do you write?” he asked the white woman, who had given neither her name nor publication. “There have already been many stories. I think it is enough.”
“The Post,” the white woman said. “Just trying to get a sense of the woman behind the story, her life story, you know, all that.”
“How long has she been here?” he asked his daughter in Bengali.
“Forty-five minutes.”
“What has she asked?”
“Oh, lots, she’s very nice, where Asma is from and about Inam and why they came to America and how they got here and all of that.” Tasleen kept switching back and forth between Bengali and English, as she did at home.
“Use your Bengali,” he muttered in Bengali. He didn’t want the journalist to glean clues from his questions.
“But Baba, you’re always telling me to use my English,” his daughter said, in English. This was true, indeed was the core of an ongoing argument between him and his wife. She worried that Tasleen would lose her Bengali, making it harder for her to find a good Bangladeshi husband. He worried that Tasleen’s poor grades in English would make it harder for her to get into a good college. But her tone, her deliberate missing of his meaning—when had his obedient little girl turned into an impertinent teenager with this American attitude? And when had she started wearing lipstick? Time flew and left bird droppings. He would have to talk to his wife.
He dared not ask his daughter whether Asma had said anything about her immigration status, but this was his worry—that she would draw the government’s attention to her illegality.
“Do you have a card?” he asked the woman.
He glanced at the name, Alyssa Spier, and pocketed the card. He was jumpy the rest of the day and all through the night. He said a prayer and tried but failed to sleep. When his wife woke him, unsmiling, for the predawn Ramadan meal he brushed her off, backed the van out of the driveway, and hurried it through the still-dark streets to his friend Hari Patel’s newsstand. The papers had not arrived yet, and neither had Hari. At last he came, and they waited together, Nasruddin pacing back and forth, almost as nervous as he had been at Tasleen’s delivery. Then came the truck. Its driver hoisted and tossed a stack of Posts that thumped down a few feet away. Hari rushed to cut the binding, but Nasruddin didn’t need him to finish to see, on the cover, a photograph of Asma—laughing, head reared back and teeth exposed, as if she found hilarious the word written in huge capital letters across her face.
ILLEGAL
Once again, Paul found himself in the governor’s pied-à-terre at an ungodly hour. This time he had company: Kyle, Bitman’s chief of staff; Harold Dybek, the attorney general; and, from an oversize oil painting above them, the governor’s late husband and his late, aloof Afghan hound.
“Good morning, all.” The governor bustled in with what Paul knew to be her post-workout glow, today set off by a navy-blue suit. “Let’s look a little more alive—it’s not that early.”
She then subjected Kyle to a detailed inquisition about the public comments, which now numbered in the thousands. He, along with Lanny, had been tallying opinions and extracting representative samplings for the governor and jurors to read. They were running six-to-one against Khan, Kyle told her. A type-A asshole with a sailor’s mouth, he seemed unusually docile today.
“The hearing does seem to have influenced opinions in Khan’s favor,” Paul ventured. “His discussion of his design seems to have softened the opposition