The Submission - Amy Waldman [135]
“I came back because I was nothing outside this family,” she said. “And you will be nothing.”
“Maybe nothing is what I’m meant to be,” he shot back.
“I lost one son,” she said. “I don’t want to lose another.” She paused, resumed stitching. Small fingers, steady hand. This, too, he would remember.
“Why would you lose me?”
“You can’t be half in a family. You’re in, or you’re out. You want to go on living here like some pacifist suddenly too good to fight, but still eating our food, warming your feet, while the rest of us go get bloody in the war. It doesn’t work that way, Sean.”
“Let me sleep on it, Ma,” he said abruptly. “We’ll talk in the morning.” He held his hand out to her, and she looked at him with suspicion, then let him help her from the chair. He switched off the lamp, and they moved together through the dark.
24
Manila walls, worn corporate carpet, no window—the room might once have been a supply closet. Claire wondered whether Paul Rubin had deliberately procured the smallest possible space at his old bank in which to cage her with Mohammad Khan. She and he were seated, in uncomfortable proximity, across a narrow metal table, the walls too near their backs.
“Take your time,” Rubin commanded from the doorway. Here was the forceful man who once ran this bank, Claire thought. Too often of late he had vanished, had withdrawn from the messy process of leading. But Asma Anwar’s death had resurrected the natural chairman. The morning after the murder he had called and, sounding both shaken and brusque, ordered her to meet with Khan to hash out her ambivalence. He had indulged it long enough, he said, just as he had indulged Khan’s stubbornness. She needed to get to a place of certainty; Khan, one of flexibility. When Paul shut the door, Claire wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it lock.
Khan’s comfort with his physical self, long and lean, struck her forcibly in this small space. When she had last seen him, at the end of the public hearing, he had looked exhausted, depleted. His confidence had been restored, and somehow this unnerved her. They were so close they had no choice but to look directly into each other’s eyes, as they had in her dream of him. Except in the dream his face held warmth, the desire to explain. Here it simply withheld. His affect was dispassionate, as if the news of this contretemps had reached everyone but the man who prompted it.
“I’m so sorry about Asma Anwar,” she began.
“I am, too,” he said, his look intent.
“Had you met her?” Claire asked. “After the hearing, I mean. Did you speak to her at all?” She didn’t like herself for feeling competitive with a dead woman, but she couldn’t help it: she wanted to know if Khan had thanked Asma for her support, as he never had Claire.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t call her.” Claire glimpsed regret, maybe even embarrassment, in his face, which consoled her, until she thought to be ashamed herself: she hadn’t reached out to Asma, a fellow widow, one facing deportation, either. Those last images of Asma—her green salwar kameez like a blade of grass—came to her now.
“To have terror touch this process, of all things: it’s very hard,” she said. The words sounded forced, static: they didn’t begin to capture how the killing had shaken her. The threats she had received surged back to life, even though she knew that, in her privilege and isolation, she was well defended. At night, her heart thudding, she thought about that little boy, an orphan; the noun perched like a vulture over her own children, already halfway there. Her self-pity at being a widowed mother evaporated at the prospect of not being able to mother at all. Perhaps Khan was afraid, too. But he had no children.
“We don’t know who killed her, so we can’t say what it means,” Khan said. The statement, perfectly rational, peeved her for its very rationality. The who almost didn’t matter when the what—his memorial, everything that happened in response—was so clear.
“To be honest, it makes me uncomfortable about posing questions