The Submission - Amy Waldman [137]
“My son, like any child, forms and forgets attachments very easily,” she said. At Khan’s surprised look, she tried to backpedal. “I just need to know what it is—even for William, when he’s older. Can’t you understand—”
“Maybe this will help,” he said, extracting a narrow white pad and a pen from the inside of his jacket pocket. He drew two intersecting lines and asked, “What’s this?”
Claire studied it. “A cross?”
He turned it diagonally. “And this?”
“An X.”
He drew a square around the cross and turned it back to her. “And now?”
“Not sure—a window maybe?”
More lines. “A checkerboard?” she said. “Or maybe Manhattan—it looks like a grid.”
“It’s all of those things, or maybe none of them. It’s lines on a plane, just like the Garden,” he continued. “Lines on a plane. Geometry doesn’t belong to a single culture. The grid is the quintessential modernist form, as I’m sure that Times critic grasps. It barely appeared in art before the twentieth century, then suddenly it’s everywhere. Mondrian wasn’t a Muslim. Mies, Agnes Martin, LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt—none of them were. I can’t help the associations you bring because I am.”
“The problem isn’t just the associations I bring but those your fellow Muslims might bring. They’ll read it a certain way—”
“Is that what all your Muslim friends tell you?”
Claire swallowed. “I think it would be helpful if you just came out and said that it’s not meant for martyrs, or whatever the worst-case scenario is. Or make some change to the Garden to calm the fears. Take out the canals, so your opponents won’t be able to say it’s the paradise in the Quran. ‘Gardens beneath which rivers flow,’ or whatever the line is.”
“You want me to change the Garden,” he said slowly.
“Just some symbolic change, as much to show you are eager to find common ground, that you’re flexible, as for any substantive reason.”
“You want me to take out the canals because it reminds you of a line in the Quran,” he said, as if he hadn’t understood.
“It’s just an idea.”
“Asma Anwar got up there and talked about how the paradise of the Quran was for people like her husband—and now, we can only hope, for her. You can’t say you want to honor her memory, then insist on erasing anything that reminds you of the paradise she spoke of.”
“So it is meant to evoke that paradise.”
“I didn’t say that,” Khan said. His jaw was clenched. “I said it’s insulting to her to want to purge the Garden of anything that you’ve decided evokes that paradise.”
“These distinctions are too fine for this country, given what’s happened. Can’t you see that it’s natural for people to be afraid?”
“As natural as a garden,” Khan said. The line was too perfect: she wanted to tear at it.
“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to be comfortable with the design for my husband’s memorial,” Claire said with exasperation. “Your design becomes more threatening if you won’t change it: it tells me there’s something there, something hidden, you want to preserve. Followers of your religion have caused enormous pain. Caused me enormous pain. And for all of us, it’s very difficult to sort out what Islam actually means or encourages. What Muslims believe. A lot of Muslims who would never commit terrorism still support it, for political reasons if not religious ones. Or they pretend it wasn’t Muslims at all who did this. So it’s not unreasonable for me to ask where on that continuum you sit. To learn at the hearing that you’ve never denounced the attack—I’ll be honest, that was upsetting. Why haven’t you?”
“I guess no one ever asked me to.” No flippancy in the voice, but there in the words.
“And if I ask you now?”
“Same principle, Mrs. Burwell.” His use of her married name grated. She was barely older than him.
“Which is what?” she flared up. “What is the principle behind refusing to say a terrorist attack was wrong, or that you don’t believe in the theology that spawned it?”
“And what is the principle behind