The Submission - Amy Waldman [130]
The woman’s scream pierced the air so violently that Nasruddin’s hair tried to leap from his scalp in fright. It had come from Asma’s direction, but he couldn’t tell who it was—nothing in a woman’s speaking voice could predict her scream, and the sound was met quickly by its own echo, wave after wave of echo, coming at Nasruddin from all directions. Not an echo, he realized, but other women screaming in response, in fear.
“She is hurt!” someone shouted in Bengali. “Find a doctor!”
Nasruddin pushed his boxes into the arms of the man next to him and shoved his way through. The crowd parted to reveal Asma, her skin a sickly gray-brown. She saw him and opened her mouth as if she had something important to tell him, but no words came out, at least none that he could hear. Her body bent to one side, then slowly she began to fold like a shirt being put in a box. So thick was the humanity around her that she did not topple, as she otherwise would have; instead she slumped, half upright, against a wall of shifting, juddering flesh. But her eyes had closed and her head was lolling unnaturally and her grip on Abdul had begun to slip. He was bawling now. Laila tried to grab the boy and one of Asma’s arms even as she shrieked, “Help me, she’s fainting! Hold her up!”
“No, lay her down!” someone shouted in Bengali.
“Keep her up!”
“Lay her down!”
The words raced back and forth through the crowd.
“Get a doctor!”
“The boy!”
“A doctor!”
“Air!”
And then someone, a woman, screamed, in Bengali, “Blood! She is bleeding! Blood!” and the crowd grew panicked and fearful and began to move in a hundred different directions at once so that it went nowhere, constrained by its oppositions yet full of movement, like water beneath which a crocodile is devouring its prey. Screams, more screams, some very close, some far away, ricocheted in air, seemed to collide with one another.
“Lay her down!” Nasruddin commanded, even as the crowd jostled in front of him and he again lost sight of her. “Gently! Gently! And find Dr. Chowdhury!”
“Dr. Chowdhury!” the call went back through the crowd. “Dr. Chowdhury!”
Nasruddin didn’t care where he laid his hands, whom he peeled back to push through. Bangladeshis wheeled in annoyance then, recognizing him, murmured apology before turning back to stare. Useless men crowded around Asma like balky, mooning cows. Nasruddin whipped them with his voice: “Move aside! You think this is a test match? If you are not a doctor, move back. If you can’t help, move away.”
“She was stabbed!” came a shout. Still he couldn’t reach her. “Stabbed!” Panicked men and women tried to run and banged into one another, not knowing whether their movements took them farther from danger or brought them closer to it. Nasruddin was slicing time as finely as his wife cut ginger, trying to remember, freeze, anything he had seen—had a white man in a black coat been standing behind Asma before Nasruddin lost sight of her?—while still seeing what was in front of him: a white woman putting her black coat over Asma to shelter her from shock. He was living in the past and present at once: the white man, he was tall, but everyone seemed tall next to Asma; or was his coat blue; or was there even a white man at all, or was that just Nasruddin’s vision of who might be capable of this? He strove to remember that last moment he had seen Asma, but the truth was he had lost sight of her just before the stabbing; he was of no use; then he was in the future, now, too—whoever had done this was still among them, no one was safe, how could he protect his people without