The Submission - Amy Waldman [75]
“Did I do the right thing not to go back to Bangladesh?” she wept. “Tell me I did the right thing.”
“You did what I would have done,” he said.
When she finished crying, she felt emptied of fight, tired enough to sleep for days. Nasruddin left her to go thread peace through the building. An hour later, he returned. To stay without worry, he warned, she must leave her neighbors alone.
“There is a right way to handle problems,” he said. “You must learn it.”
“But how am I supposed to live next door to such a man?”
“I will work on him,” Nasruddin said, “but you must leave him to God’s judgment.”
“I am grateful,” she muttered. Embarrassed and angry, too, but this she kept to herself. The sense that she had been outdone by malevolent forces nagged at her. Her father would have been braver.
“What did you say? How did you do it?” she asked.
“I told them the truth,” Nasruddin said. Her father had died, and she had been mad with grief.
The Rally to Protect Sacred Ground kicked off on a balmy Saturday morning in a plaza opposite the site. The members of both the Memorial Defense Committee and Save America from Islam were there, gathered in a cordoned-off area in front of the stage. Behind them stretched a crowd of thousands: women holding signs that said NO TOLERANCE FOR THE INTOLERANT or ISLAM KILLS or NO VICTORY GARDEN or KHAN IS A CON; fathers hoisting small children on their shoulders; men in camouflage who may or may not have been veterans. There were hundreds of relatives of the attack victims there—Sean had called many of them personally to ask them to come. The crowd overflowed the small plaza, spilled along the sidewalk, out into the street, around and between the buses that had chauffeured protesters from across the country. News choppers huffed overhead.
Debbie Dawson was kitted out in tight black pants and yet another T-shirt she had designed, this one reading “Kaffir and Proud.” Two buff men in Ray-Bans, blue blazers, and khaki pants trailed her through the crowd. When she stopped to give interviews or greet supporters, they positioned themselves on either side of her, facing out, feet planted in a wide stance, arms never fully relaxed. Bodyguards, Sean realized. She looked like she was having the time of her life.
Taking the stage for his speech, Sean surveyed the swelling crowd. Maybe all the nut jobs had gathered near the front; there seemed to be a lot of them. An obese man in suspenders held a poster that showed a pig eating a Quran. Three women hoisted a banner that said NUKE ’EM ALL AND LET ALLAH SORT ’EM OUT. A pimpled teenager dressed in black with Harry Potter glasses held a sign reading THEY CAN HAVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT BECAUSE WE HAVE THE SECOND, with a crude drawing of a gun aimed at the face of a turbaned man. Human loose ends: an irregular army that Sean hadn’t summoned and couldn’t decommission.
His idea of whiting out Claire Burwell’s face to paint in a question mark, which had seemed so creative, looked creepy when a hundred and fifty of the posters were being waved at him. The SAFI posters of Khan—a line drawn through his face or a target superimposed on it—didn’t look much better. The police were encircling one man who, with the selective application of lighter fluid to his poster, had managed to ignite Khan’s beard.
Every time Sean had given a speech since the attack—some ninety in all—he had been convinced that to lose a loved one in this way was a privilege as well as a curse. The overfed, overeager faces listening to him hungered for what couldn’t be bought, and he pitied them for the desire to go somewhere deeper, be part of something larger. Horrible as the attack was, everyone wanted a little of its ash on their hands.
But this mass, the largest he had ever addressed, radiated neither reverence nor yearning. Patrick once had shown him how the back