The Submission - Amy Waldman [141]
That last sentence reverberated in Mo, for even he no longer knew where the line between his ambitions and principles lay. It was that line Laila had been searching for, and her fear that she had mistaken one for the other that ruined them.
Still floating from place to place, he had landed, for a few days, in a hotel room. He switched off its television, his choice clear: to fight for his garden as it was or withdraw. There was no middle ground. It wouldn’t be hard to change the design—take down the walls, perhaps; set the canals loose to meander. A garden was just a garden. And yet he knew he would refuse to change a thing, even if that refusal doomed his submission. They would have to take the Garden as they had first seen it or not take it at all.
His lawyer had read the hearing transcripts, the interviews, the bylaws of the competition jury. “No one’s showed you’re in any way ‘unsuitable, ’ and no one has brought forth a single legitimate ground for killing the design,” Reiss told Mo. “If they try, a lawsuit would be very viable with all the Islamophobic talk Rubin permitted at the hearing. People get millions for tripping on a pothole. You’ve had your reputation tarnished, your design denied—”
“This isn’t about money,” Mo said.
“Just remember the law is your friend,” Reiss said. “If you decide to stick it out, and they try to move ahead with any other design, you can sue for injunctive relief and block them from going forward with anything else. Maybe one day passions will settle enough for your memorial to be built.”
So he could use his country’s own laws against it, judo his way to victory, force his vision onto a people who seemed more foreign to him by the day. He could live, indefinitely, this waiting life, from which love, home, even work had been stripped away. Emmanuel Roi, concerned that the controversy was interfering with “the practice of architecture,” had put Mo in a quarantine from which he was to deal with neither clients nor contractors. Thomas talked, too often, of their own practice—“We’ll have more business than we know what to do with once the Garden is being built”—but the words sounded tinny, forced.
He called Laila for advice.
“Don’t listen to Malik,” she said. “You can’t blame yourself for Asma’s death.” It was more accurate to say he couldn’t blame himself alone, he thought. Historical events, as much as skylines, were collaborations.
“Don’t give up.” There was pleading in her voice. “If you give up it’s like Asma died for nothing.”
The footage of her last hour replayed as often in his mind as it did on every TV channel, Asma’s small frame the axle of a pinwheeling crowd whose dangerous democracy confirmed Mo in his solitariness. Laila clutching Asma’s son, the sun in her face eclipsed. It was shock Mo had felt at first, but fear that stalked him now: the sense that if it could happen to Asma, it could happen to him, no matter how many precautions he took. Should he chance his own death to make hers worthwhile, sacrifice himself for a memorial his country might never embrace? Or preserve himself for the work, his best work, ahead?
“I just have one thing to add,” he heard Claire Burwell say. “Mr. Khan says he shouldn’t have to say what the Garden is, or where it came from, and he’s right.” She looked directly at the cameras. “But I want him to.”
On his second morning in Kabul, Mo had called his embassy to say he was