The Submission - Amy Waldman [34]
He had brought her the news; perhaps this was why he became her protector. Eight months pregnant, she was dozing in her room when she heard frantic knocking on the door of their landlords, the Mahmouds. Mrs. Mahmoud, who had been on the phone all morning, put the receiver down, waddled to the door, and opened it to a panting Nasruddin. He was wearing his work overalls.
By now Asma had lumbered out.
“Has Inam called?” Nasruddin asked.
Mrs. Mahmoud was the owner not just of the viewless room they rented but of the phone they relied on. “No,” she said. She looked back over her shoulder at the cupboards, as if Inam might be hiding inside.
Nasruddin looked at Asma and said, too formally, “Please sit.” He waited until she was arranged on the couch, her swollen feet propped on a plush footstool by Mrs. Mahmoud.
“The buildings have fallen,” he said, and she knew.
In the haze that followed, Asma gave statements about Inam’s work, his schedule, his habits, his history, to consular officials, investigators hired by Inam’s employer, the police, the FBI, and the American Red Cross. She received all of these visitors and promptly forgot them, attuned only to an inner world of fragile and unpredictable rhythms. She caressed her distended belly compulsively, measuring her own life from kick to kick. Never had she prayed so deeply, never had she felt the contrast between the tranquillity within prayer and the disturbance outside so strongly. Her belly was far too big for her to bend, but she trusted God to sense her prostration.
Like Inam, Asma was in America illegally. All of this official attention, she was sure, would end with her deportation. Resigned to this, she held only two hopes: that she give birth first, so that her child would be an American citizen, and that Inam’s body be found, so the three of them could fly home together. In the meantime she subsisted on money from the mosque’s Widows and Orphans Fund, to which Inam had always contributed, and on the generosity of the Mahmouds. “Stay for as long as you need to, for free,” Mrs. Mahmoud said, knowing that Asma would soon return to Bangladesh.
When the baby came, Asma studied him, looking for Inam. Everyone said he was there, in the boy, “a perfect copy,” in Mrs. Mahmoud’s words, as though he had been made in a garment factory. But Inam’s face, though gentle, had been long and sallow. This baby had the vitality of Asma’s own father: the big eyes, the dark brows, the round face, the warm-hued skin. Even his reflexively gesticulating arms brought her father’s storytelling to mind. She looked harder for Inam, feeling it important to find him there. A perfect copy.
She named him Abdul Karim, Servant of the Most Generous. She hoped God would safeguard him. At night she huddled with him beneath thin blankets in an underheated apartment and whispered stories. She told him how she had suggested Inam as a groom to her parents, after her bad habit of opening her mouth at every meeting with prospective in-laws had doomed three other matches. Inam was six years older, his family poorer, but she couldn’t be picky. She remembered, vaguely, from childhood, his face being kind. He lived in America, and she wanted to live there, too. Her father she informed that she wouldn’t, like most wives, stay in Sandwip, pregnant, under her in-laws’ thumbs, waiting for her husband