The Submission - Amy Waldman [22]
In the city center workers toiled on the construction of a giant mosque, the scaffolding around its dome a spiky bird’s nest. A wooden walkway extended from the dome into the air and then wrapped, in the form of a staircase, around the minaret. Tiny workers made their way up and down the stairs, and in the absence of a crane, of any visible mechanical equipment at all, it was like watching a mosque being built four hundred years in the past.
The Hotel Inter Continental seemed of more recent epoch: it struck Mo, who was checking in, as drably Soviet. The drafty lobby bustled with a mélange of turbans and ties, Westerners and Afghans, all bathed in natural light since, not for the first time that day, the power had gone.
On a hard bed, Mo fell into a deep sleep. He was awakened before dawn by the call to prayer. The plume of the muezzin’s voice drifted into his room and swelled within him. Allah-hu akbar, God is the greatest: the celebratory words, the strangely mournful tone. The call dipped into valleys before climbing mountains and higher than mountains. It trellised up some unseen lattice, twined over Mo, pinned him in place although it was meant to rouse him. Sinuous, cavernous, the voice scaled to the edge of breaking, then firmed. It was lonely. It was masterful. In the darkness men rose, washed, bent to prayer. Mo trailed them in his imagination before slipping back into sleep.
To get to the American embassy, Mo endured three pat-downs, four checks of his identification, and a long wait before he received clearance. Across the street from the main building, rows of white trailers—housing for the embassy staff—gleamed like bathroom tiles in the sun. The official who was briefing the architects from the twelve firms competing for the bid explained that the new embassy would dwarf the current structure. It would squat along both sides of the road, which would be forever closed to “outsiders,” as the Afghans were defined.
Before Mo left New York, Roi, on speakerphone from Paris, had bloviated about the glory days of embassy architecture, when great modernists—Saarinen, Gropius, Breuer (all immigrants, Mo had noted to himself)—were sought out to design buildings that embodied American values like democracy and openness. But those days were long gone, despite the pretense of inviting top architects to compete. The only design value that mattered now was security: making sure the embassy didn’t get blown up. Public diplomacy would be conducted from behind nine-foot blast walls. Architecture, once an ambassador, was now a DynCorp guard menacing anyone who came too close.
In place of glass walls or sculptural buildings—the gestures, or follies, of a more innocent time—there was Standard Embassy Design: a build-by-numbers box that came in small, medium, and large. Fortresses on the cheap. Hardly how ROI had earned its reputation, yet Mo knew he wasn’t here for the artistic challenge. More than a hundred embassies and consulates around the globe were to be replaced, mostly for security reasons. Even a small piece of that work would be lucrative for ROI.
But the firm, Mo quickly concluded, had no chance of winning the embassy commission. ROI specialized in highly insecure buildings known for their transparency (“hide nothing, show everything”). Its rivals for the commission specialized in the quick and generic. So he daydreamed through monotonous talk of “defensive perimeters” and “pre-engineered design solutions” and imagined defying the guidelines to submit an embassy design copied from a Crusader castle. The location lacked height, but he could suggest building a hill, a promontory—a true “Design Against Terrorism” right in the middle of the city …
At the day’s end the architects were piled into a caravan of SUVs for a tour of Kabul, their “local context.” Along the way the driver pointed out the Russian Cultural Center, a decaying,