The Submission - Amy Waldman [37]
And how careful with herself, for she wasn’t just a millionaire but a secret one. Government largesse had made her rich; government fiat kept her illegal. She had the money to fly to Bangladesh and back a hundred times, but she couldn’t leave America because she might not be allowed back in. There were other relatives of the dead like her, Laila said—relatively well-off, illegal—but Asma did not know how many or who they were. Maybe they passed on the street every day, each of them hiding alone in the dark, fearful that the glimmer from their piles of gold would give them away. God wove a spiderweb to hide Mohammad, sheltering in a cave, from his pursuers. If He wanted to protect her, He would.
There was another reason Nasruddin counseled discretion: he didn’t want the community catching on to her newfound wealth or sending word of it back to Bangladesh. Someone could turn her in to the immigration authorities. Relatives back home could be kidnapped and held for ransom. The money had to stay hidden like a new roll of fat beneath her clothes. So even as financial advisers picked by Laila Fathi invested Asma’s million, she still lived like she was poor.
The most incremental increase in her spending attracted Mrs. Mahmoud’s notice. “You bought brinjal?” she sniffed when eggplants had gone up nine cents a pound. Or “Celebrating, are we?” when Asma, trying to return Mrs. Mahmoud’s all-too-frequent hospitality, offered her some chocolates wrapped in purple foil. They had cost $2.20. Asma told the Mahmouds that the subcontractor had given her a little more money and she planned to stay in America. Their evident displeasure soon yielded to pity. Asma needed to make her money last as long as possible, they said. She would stay with them and pay only fifty dollars a month for her room. To accept felt dishonest, when she could pay more, but Asma saw no choice. Maybe listening to Mrs. Mahmoud talk could be a form of payment.
The status of her dead husband remained as provisional as her own. Nasruddin told her there was to be a memorial to the victims, but that an anti-immigrant group wanted Inam and other illegal immigrants left off it. To include them, the group claimed, would condone their “lawbreaking” and make them equivalent to citizens. The prospect of her husband’s exclusion gnawed at Asma. It would be the final repudiation of his existence—as if he had lived only in her imagination. He had to be named, for in that name was a life.
When the anti-immigrant group held a small protest near city hall, she and the Mahmouds watched it on the local news. Mr. Mahmoud translated. The angry man being cheered by the crowd, he explained, was a popular radio talk-show host, Lou Sarge, who had become ever more popular by assailing Islam. He frightened Asma, with his skin too white and hair too black.
“Respect for the law is what makes America, America,” Sarge roared. “If we put illegals on the memorial, we will be spitting in the face of the law-abiding Americans, including legal immigrants, who died. The illegal immigrants who died came here seeking opportunity, but if they had stayed home they would still be alive. Isn’t that the greatest opportunity of all?”
Asma ground her fists into the sofa cushions, furious that there was no one to speak for her husband, for the army of workers who cleaned and cooked and bowed and scraped and when the day came died as if it were just another way to please. But the next day, the mayor said he thought all of the dead, illegal or not, should be listed, and soon the governor and the chairman of the memorial jury agreed. Inam would take his place as a permanent resident on whatever memorial came to