Infidel

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  That night a mosque under construction in Utrecht was burned down. The country was raging; in terms of Dutch history, this event was seismic. Emotions were frighteningly high. But I was numb. Since Theo’s death, I had felt stunned. It was like a short circuit had happened: some thinking part of me blinked off.

  I just did what I was told. I did things I ordinarily never would. I spent the next two and a half months alone with bodyguards. I had almost no contact with friends or even my colleagues in Parliament. I appeared calm. I agreed to everything. It was as if I had lost my will.

  I could be killed; that was part of it. I was frightened. I have no desire to die. And I was also very grateful to these people who were protecting me, because it was no small thing they were doing. Even if I was angry that nobody had protected Theo, I wanted to do what these men told me, because it seemed like they knew what they were doing, and they might be saving my life.

  Still, if my mind had been operating properly back then, I would have seen that after Theo’s murder, the security services went into some kind of overdrive. They had seen threats on the Internet building up against Theo. But they hadn’t properly tried to persuade him to accept a security detail, because they thought that if they did, they would have had to protect “everybody.” The DKDB was mandated to protect only royalty, diplomats, and members of Parliament. The justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, had said on the news, “We can’t have one half of the population protecting the other half of the population.”

  Now Theo was dead, and the country was in deep crisis. The security services were seeing threats everywhere. Nobody knew anything then about the scale of the conspiracy to assassinate Theo. If I had been killed in those immediate few days, Holland could perhaps even have gone up in flames as citizens took up arms against each other—what all governments fear could happen. So I suppose the order was given: “Keep her safe, no matter what.”

  * * *

  Theo’s funeral was to take place a week after he was killed. The security people told me that if I insisted on attending, they would make arrangements for it, but they said it could put other people in danger. I decided I couldn’t possibly go. I had to live with the guilt that Theo died because he made Submission with me; I couldn’t put other lives at risk.

  But I wanted somehow to see Theo and say good-bye. The bodyguards agreed to take me to the hospital morgue in Amsterdam, with lots of cars, lots of armed men. Theo’s best friend, Theodor Holman, and his producer, Gijs van Westerlaken, were in the room with Theo’s body when I got there. There was no mark of any violence. Theo was dressed as he always was, in a roll-neck sweater and baggy trousers. I looked for any sign of cruelty, but his face was smooth; there wasn’t even a bruise or a pimple. He had a little sardonic half-smile on his closed lips. He seemed peaceful, the only time I had ever known him to be quiet. I touched his shoulder, kissed his forehead. I told him, “I’m so sorry for what I did.”

  Theodor Holman said, “No, Ayaan. If he were alive Theo would be hurt, hearing you say that. He wouldn’t have wanted to die in his bed. He felt like a knight on horseback about Submission. He died in a battle for free expression, and that’s what he lived for. It would have been much worse if he was eaten away by cancer or got in a stupid car accident. This was a meaningful death. He was my friend, and I don’t want you feeling sorry that Theo died like this.”

  It was kind of Theodor, to try to make me feel better. I said good-bye to Theo. He himself didn’t believe in a Hereafter. I no longer believed in a Hereafter. And so this was it, I thought: this is the end.

  Afterward, I had coffee with Theodor and Gijs in the hospital waiting room. They made jokes, trying to cheer me up; they had their own way of dealing with the loss of their dear and eccentric friend. They told me that they and Theo’s other friends had been trying to contact me, but Iris must have given them a wrong number, they said, because it always answered, “Air Force Base Woensdrecht.”

  “So that’s where I’m being kept,” I thought. Woensdrecht Air Base, near the Belgian border. As we were getting ready to leave, I told the senior bodyguard, “I know where we’re going. It’s Woensdrecht.” He just stared at me and said, “Not any more.” He was angry when he found out that Theodor had my number. “Who gave you permission to give out that information?” From then on, nobody was allowed to have a phone number for me.

  * * *

  The night after I saw Theo’s body in the morgue, I was taken to a police training center in Hoogerheide, near Woensdrecht. I slept in one of the cubicles for the trainees, with my nightmares and more woolen blankets, which made my head swell and my eyes water. On Monday morning I would have to move again; the police recruits would be arriving for their training, and they might see me. I was beginning to reel from all the moving around and not sleeping, and I pleaded to be allowed to stay. But the senior guard said, “No. We can’t trust all these recruits. They’re not policemen yet.”

  Early on Monday morning, the guards moved me to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Jozias van Aartsen, the Liberal caucus leader, had been the foreign minister, so he arranged for me to sit in an office there, which would be secure and free of the pressure of the press. My parliamentary assistant, Iris, was allowed to come and see me; other than that, I had only a phone and a TV.

  They told me not to send e-mail, claiming it could be traced. (A few days later, they took away my cell phone—they said it, too, could be traced.) I summoned up the curiosity to ask, “Are you sure these people have the ability to do this kind of thing?” Islamic radicals in Holland seemed to me to be young disaffected immigrants—rather low-tech—and, I thought, you’d have to be pretty organized to buy the equipment to trace a cell phone. But the guards said, “We can’t rule it out.” It became a kind of mantra. “We’re not ruling out anything.”

  I sat in that office, reading every letter in every newspaper, watching TV, trying to access my e-mail. Eight North African men had been arrested in Amsterdam; there was talk of a terrorist cell. Four mosques had burned over the weekend, and two churches. A Muslim primary school in Uden, close to Eindhoven, had been set on fire and burned down on Sunday night.

  Theo was going to be cremated the next day. It was all I could think about.

  That evening I was taken to the office of the junior minister for European affairs, which was on another floor in the Foreign Ministry building. Behind this office was a tiny bedroom, with a bathroom and a narrow bed. The junior minister left—he was very courteous—and the guards stayed outside. I was to sleep here. I pleaded to be allowed to sleep in my own house—it was just around the corner—but the guards said it wouldn’t be secure.

  The guards’ behavior with me had changed completely. There was something urgent, very serious, in the air. I felt it, too. They thought I couldn’t be allowed to know too much about my situation. The stakes were much higher than just me.

  I lay awake all night sneezing from the woolen blankets, my mouth and tongue and throat alive with itching. Every evil possibility went through my head: the guards, just outside my door; the fear; mosques burning; Theo, dead.

  The next day, Tuesday, I watched Theo’s funeral ceremony live on TV. It was very moving. Bram Peper, the former minister of the interior and ex-husband of Neelie Kroes, spoke well. He said that Theo’s death was a worse shock than a political assassination because it was the murder of someone with no political ambitions, who never desired to take office. Theo’s father was humble but dignified in his sadness. Theo’s mother was in a fighting mood. In her speech, she said that I had no reason to feel guilty about Theo’s murder: he had been threatened for fifteen years. She called me by my first name and addressed me directly. She said that I must continue with my mission. I was touched that she thought of me at such a time. I felt so sorry for her, and for Theo’s father, who broke down in tears, and most of all for the twelve-year-old son who would have to live without his father, murdered so cruelly.

  I wrote a letter to Theo’s family a few days later.
The security people read the letter before they delivered it, looking for clues that might betray my whereabouts.

  * * *

  On Wednesday morning, the news opened with the police besieging an apartment building in The Hague, just a short walk from where I was sleeping. Someone inside the apartment threw a hand grenade at the police and wounded several officers. The neighborhood was evacuated. The airspace over the whole city was closed to civilian flights while special forces moved in. No one knew what was happening; it felt like The Hague was under siege.

  For several days, Neelie Kroes and Jozias van Aartsen had been talking with various security people about what I should do next. They had decided that, as in 2002, when I began receiving death threats, I should make a brief trip to a foreign country. I could get some rest, give myself a chance to mourn, and lie low until the dust settled—by which time, presumably, all the various agencies would have come to some kind of agreement about just how dangerous the threats on my life were, and exactly how to approach them.

  Now, while the siege of the apartment building in The Hague was still under way, my guards told me that I would be leaving for the United States. They drove me home; I had three hours to pack.

  I didn’t know what to bring; the security people just said I would be going to the United States. Would it be hot or cold? My brain had simply stopped functioning. I randomly shoved every piece of clothing I owned and dozens of books into suitcases and, when I ran out of suitcases, huge plastic zip bags. The whole thing was irrational, but nobody was there to tell me so. The guards just wordlessly crammed the bags into their armored cars.

  I was driven to Valkenburg Air Base, near The Hague, where we parked on the runway. Facing us was a military transport and surveillance aircraft, an Orion. As I walked up the jetway, I told myself, like a schoolteacher, “Pay attention. This is a unique experience.” I felt oddly disembodied, completely calm. All the shutters had been pulled down on the windows, and I was told not to go near them or the doors. The plane was full of soldiers in uniform; two DKDB bodyguards were still with me. The senior guard was Pete, whom I had asked for and trusted.

  The pilots invited me to watch the takeoff from the cockpit. They explained their job and the technology of the airplane; I asked a few polite questions. It was very cold. They said I could lie down on one of the two flip-down beds, so high up on the wall that I couldn’t roll over without my knees or shoulders hitting the ceiling. I lay there, thinking about Theo and the enormous guilt I would forever feel.

  We landed at the air base in Portland, Maine. Two Dutch policemen, who usually dealt with criminals in the Dutch Witness Protection Program came to pick us up. They didn’t treat me personally like a criminal; I was a member of Parliament under protection, not the usual drug dealer. But they treated the situation authoritatively, as they were used to—they were the experts. They determined what I could and couldn’t do.

  I was still frightened—they could see me looking around, startled at the slightest noise—and they tried to calm me down. First they took me to a nondescript roadside motel, where I showered and tried to sleep while a couple of the guards took my passport and dealt with officially entering me into the country.

  Then we drove to Andover, Massachusetts. Again they got rooms in the same kind of dismal motel, surrounded by highways in an industrial area, with hardly any human beings. It was freezing cold. The security people had decided that I should become completely anonymous in this typically American place, where no Dutch person would recognize me. We ended up staying there for weeks.

  All I wanted was to follow the news in Holland. I wanted to know what had happened to Theo’s family, to his son, to Parliament; how the police siege in The Hague had ended. But there was no news about Holland in America, and my guards had removed the phone from my hotel room. They might not have been treating me precisely as they would a criminal, but they were at the very least treating me like a child, as if I were oblivious to the danger I faced. I argued with Koos, the man from Witness Protection. I wanted to phone; I wanted to talk with my friends. But he replied that they were in charge of my safety, and this was for my own protection. Nor was I allowed to go on the Internet; that, too, could be traced. I thought surely no one could trace me if I went only on news sites, but there were rules, apparently: no Internet.

  Thankfully, my guard Pete was from the DKDB, not Witness Protection; he had been with the police for more than twenty years and knew the difference between what was life-threatening and what wasn’t. Pete insisted that someone check out the Boston Library and see if I could log on to the Internet there. He said, “We’re responsible for her safety, but it’s no good to anyone if she has a breakdown.”

  While Koos went to Boston, Pete passed me his own phone and told me to be careful what I said. He walked to the other end of the room while I called Johanna, Iris, my friend Geeske. We talked guardedly about my going somewhere for a short while. They told me the news in Holland; the siege in The Hague had ended and seven people had been arrested around the country on suspicion of links with some kind of terrorist group.

  When Koos got back, he reported, “It’s no good. Boston is teeming with Dutch people and all kinds of Europeans. We can’t rule anything out. You’re not going.”

  The next day the guards decided to take me to a shopping mall to buy fake glasses. But Americans are so curious; they pepper you with questions, even for simple transactions in shops. The guards said, “Just tell them your name is Jill Steele and you’re from South Africa.”

  I was a black woman in a baseball cap with four big white men around her, wanting to buy clear glasses with no prescription, with a ridiculous story about South Africa. I could feel everybody in that shopping mall scrutinizing me.

  The next day was my thirty-fifth birthday. I had planned a party in Holland, with dozens of friends. Now, just a few of my closest friends would meet without me to talk about what I should do next. Meanwhile I had nothing to do. I had a laptop with me, but couldn’t write. I had books, but I couldn’t seem to take anything in.

  Pete could tell things were not well with me. He said once, “The way they define keeping you safe, we might as well lock you in a World War Two bunker on the beach and pass plates of food through the door.” I said, “That would be an improvement. I’d be on the beach in Holland, and I could invite friends for tea.”

  Pete’s solution was physical exercise. Physical exhaustion was the only cure for sleeplessness, fear, and worry, he said. He drove me to a huge sports center and made me work out on machines. He was right; it helped.

  In Holland, questions were building about my whereabouts. Since Theo’s murder I had more or less disappeared from the face of the earth. My friends were told I wanted to be alone, but they didn’t buy it; they knew that at such a time I would want to be with them or, at the very least, phone. In the absence of any information, all kinds of conspiracy theories sprouted. Some people said that I had been killed and my murder was being hushed up by the authorities.

  After I had been in the United States for about ten days, the security people authorized Neelie Kroes to call me. She and Jozias van Aartsen were trying to make arrangements to see me, but so far the security people were saying it was impossible. I realized that she and Jozias had no idea how far away I was.

  Henk Kamp, the minister of defense, called me, too. He said, “I’ll come and see you and we’ll go for a walk in the Zutphen forest.” I said, “Henk, don’t you know that I’m nowhere near the Zutphen forest?” It was like I was a one-woman state of emergency; even the minister of defense didn’t know where I was.

  Months later, when I saw Henk again and everything was back to normal, I asked him how he could have been kept in ignorance of my whereabouts. He told me, “Only the minister of justice was supposed to know where you were. Piet Hein Donner told the rest of the cabinet, ‘Please don’t ask about her location,’ so we didn’t.”

  Piet Hein Donner is not a bad man. He’s not a strong leader,
but he’s a very decent person—just from some other era, and he doesn’t micro-manage his department. I expect Donner gave the order “Keep her safe” and let his civil servants deal with it. Those men had never been confronted with this kind of situation, but their jobs were at stake. So they made me utterly, utterly safe. I’m sure they meant well.

  * * *

  After two long and empty weeks passed, Neelie called again at the end of November. She told me I would be allowed to go back to Holland for a few days, to talk to a few people about my situation and see when I could be allowed to go back for good. I was so relieved.

  On November 27, after twenty-five days in hiding, we drove to the Portland, Maine, airport in a heavy rain.

  We landed at Eindhoven Air Base, and then I was driven around for what seemed like hours in a convoy. The cars all stopped on the side of a highway and I was moved into a much smaller, nondescript car. Koos, from the Witness Protection Program, drove me to a house in the countryside, somewhere near Zelhem.

  When it was time to meet Neelie and Van Aartsen for dinner, I was driven out in the small Volkswagen; again, we switched to a convoy of BMWs in a country clearing. It was dark. Finally I arrived at a brick building somewhere in the middle of the woods. All the lights were out. The entryway stank of urine. One of the guards said it was the smell of the old holding cells; this was a disused police station. There was no electricity, just little plate-warmer candles for lights. Blotting paper was taped over all the windows. A table was laid with a paper cloth, some sandwiches, and a couple of bottles of water and juice.

  We were in Holland, the fifteenth or sixteenth largest economy in the world, and I was meeting a European Union commissioner and the leader of a governing party here, skulking around in this weird Boy Scout fantasy. I’m grateful that I’ve been protected, grateful to be alive—but there was something excessive about all this security.