The Submission - Amy Waldman [151]
“Before I died?” Claire’s laugh was brittle, but she turned back toward the screen.
Two canals bisected the garden, forming four squares. Khan walked, narrating. The camera’s focus was tight as he ticked off trees—cherry, almond, pear, apricot, walnut. Rows of Mediterranean cypresses, proud, self-contained. Plane trees of great girth. Steel trees, glinting and upside down, with roots like a distraught woman’s tangled hair in place of branches and leaves.
The pavilion sat, slightly elevated, at the center of the garden, a giant sculpture floating above land and water. Its design was simple, elegant: a flat roof, unadorned gray marble columns, sharp right angles. Inside, grilles of white marble cast elaborate geometric shadows, creating a series of contemplative spaces with benches. The canals flowed from beneath the pavilion, fed by a reservoir revealed, as if it were the source of all life, by an open circle within the floor.
Claire closed her eyes and heard the water rippling, Khan’s footsteps crunching, birds singing, chattering, telling their stories, maybe hers. She wished she could move into the scene before her. Cal felt closer than he had in twenty years. Seeing the Garden alive was a gift and a rebuke. She had, at first glimpse, made it an allegory for Cal’s perpetual optimism. In walking away from it, she had walked away from him. The real act of will was not in the creating of a garden but in the sustaining, the continuous stand against wildness. She had let herself be overtaken.
With shame in her face she turned to the cameraman. “Did you tell him?”
His own look was sheepish. “I wanted to, planned to,” he said. “But once he mentioned the garden, I thought … I was afraid … I thought he might not show it to me.”
Claire saw William, at that moment, not as a broad-shouldered young man but as the little boy to whom she had described, again and again, the magic of the Garden. He had traced its lines so many times with his hand. How strange it must have been to finally walk them. Garden, then no garden—too much, she grasped now, like father, then no father. He had been a troubled teenager, his poor grades and errant behavior so at odds with her own regimented adolescence that she didn’t know how to help him; she was never sure whether his problems owed to misfortune or an excess of fortune or both. She tried to talk to him about her own father’s death, how it had driven her to excel. He didn’t want to hear it. At last he pulled himself together enough to get into art school.
When he came to her and told her that he and his girlfriend, Molly, wanted to make a documentary about the memorial competition, she tried to dissuade him. But not as hard as she might have.
The camera strips the eye of its freedom, holds viewers hostage to its choices. The focus in the footage Claire saw was narrow at first, staying on Khan, on the garden’s details. But now the camera shifted away from him and panned the inside walls, and as it did, Claire heard an odd, primal sound. It took her a moment to realize she had made it. Across the walls, where the names should have been, flowed Arabic calligraphy.
“The names,” she whispered. “Where are they? What is that?”
“It’s the Quran,” William said.
The room wavered around Claire. This wasn’t a gift but a taunt. Doubt was all Khan deserved.
“I told you this film was a mistake,” she said.
“It’s a commission,” William pointed out. “I don’t think he had a choice.”
“We don’t know whose idea it was,” Molly reminded him. “His or the emir’s.”
“He must at least have agreed to it,” Claire said. “He was too independent—too unbending—to allow it otherwise. From what I saw of him, he wouldn’t do something he didn’t believe in for a patron any more than he would for the families.”
The footage paused, they sat in silence.
“We don’t know what it says,” Molly said abruptly. “Being in there—it was like being