The Submission - Amy Waldman [138]
“What William tells me has no bearing here. I’m interested in what you believe.”
There was an uncomfortably long silence. “Wouldn’t you assume that any non-Muslim who entered this competition thinks the attack was wrong? Why are you treating me differently? Why are you asking more of me?”
“Because you’re asking more of us!” she said. “You want us to trust you even though you won’t answer questions about your design—what it means, where it came from.”
“But you’re only asking those questions because you don’t trust me.”
“And I don’t trust you because you won’t answer, so we’re stuck.” She smiled, and to her surprise so did he. If they could recognize, even laugh at, this bind, she thought, her antagonism easing, they could escape it.
“It’s just that—it’s hard for me to have you design the memorial if I don’t know what you think.”
“It’s a question of faith, isn’t it.”
This silenced her. She reached her arm back, wanting the wall’s solidity. Khan had turned his chair slightly to the side, seeking still more room for his legs, so they were no longer looking directly at each other. She studied him from a three-quarter angle. The historian on the jury, ever the pedant, once commented on how the Germans, even those who hadn’t been born when Hitler died, kept finding new ways to apologize to the Jews, to atone. Individuals innocent of a crime could still feel or bear collective responsibility for it. It was for some sign of accepting this responsibility that she searched Khan’s face.
“Can’t you see you’re only hurting yourself?” she said. “If you want me to fight for you—you wouldn’t know this, but I was the only juror who didn’t waver when we learned your name—I need to know more. I need you to, if not denounce, distance yourself from some of these ideas, or just make some accommodation in your design. This isn’t about you. It’s about the religion.”
Even in profile she could see the jerk of shock. He turned his chair to face her, its legs catching in the frayed carpet, and asked:
“How would you feel if I justified what happened to your husband by saying it wasn’t about him but about his country and its policies—damn shame he got caught up in it, that’s all—but you know, he got what he deserved because he paid taxes to the American government. I get what I deserve because I happen to share a religion with a few crazies?”
Claire went taut. “Damn shame.” “What he deserved.” The words seemed to strike the fragile bones of her ear, even as she wasn’t exactly sure what he had said: she had been thinking and listening at the same time, which made it hard to hear. But this, at last, had to be what he really thought. It pained her, sickened her, to think that perhaps vile Alyssa Spier was right, that Khan did see Cal as mere collateral damage in a war America had brought on itself, that he believed Cal, generous, good-natured Cal, bore responsibility, guilt, simply because he was American. She jerked to her feet like a mishandled marionette, grabbed her purse, and in one unbroken gesture reached the door, flung it open, stepped through, and slammed it behind her. In the hall, unable to find the elevator, she wandered down corridors and scurried past occupied offices until she spotted an exit sign—the stairs, that would do—and bore toward it as if to head-butt her way out. She opened the door to a dank stairwell and began the bleak mechanics of descent.
Down the stairs, back in time, until she came upon herself and Cal standing in front of Picasso’s Weeping Woman at the Tate in London. Claire could still visualize the portrait today—the blue in her hair, the red in her hat, that ghastly, skull-like area around the mouth—more clearly, in fact, than she could see the husband who had stood next to her.
“Kind of ruins it that Picasso was so horrible, doesn’t it,” Claire had said. “He probably made Dora