Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2)

by Ruth Francisco

  “All women, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, must cover their heads, faces, and bodies in public. Younger females, under the age of maturity, may wear only a headscarf. Punishment for inappropriate dress is public flogging.

  “In addition, non-Muslim schools will be shuttered. It is better to have no students at all then educate future imperialists. Non-Muslims on the streets in groups of more than three will be arrested. Non-Muslims are not allowed to own or to operate an automobile unless granted special permits. Non-Muslims are banned from being in the following parts of Amsterdam: Slatervaart, De Baarsjes, Geuzeveld/Slotermeer, Oud-West, Oost-Watergraafsmeer, Bos en Lommer, and Osdrop. Non-Muslims are to abide by a nine o’clock curfew.

  “All of those who do not want to live under these laws will have one month to leave.”

  “Will we have to convert, Mom?” Katrien asks.

  Jana and Pieter look at one another, and then at Rafik.

  “Will Dad lose his job?”

  For fifteen years Pieter has been a professor of Photonic Materials at the Institute for Nanolithography, at the Science Center in the University of Amsterdam. He is head of global semiconductor research and semiconductor lithography—the prime manufacturing technology for making the memory chips and processors used in PCs, smart phones and tablets.

  Rafik rubs his face. “That's a pretty good bet, even if you convert. You too, Jana. Without an Internet, there isn't much use for web designers. I'm afraid both of your jobs will be banned.”

  “What about the university?” Jana asks.

  “They will close it for a while. When Shiite fundamentalists took over Iran in 1979, the universities were closed for two years. I imagine classes will be scaled down considerably when they reopen. Concentrating on Islamic studies. Open to Muslims only.”

  “Men only?” Jana puts a hand on Katrien's shoulder.

  “Probably.”

  Fawaz Jneid takes a drink of water, his face sweaty under camera lights. He continues. “We hope, inshallah, to live together in harmony. Any act of sabotage or resistance will be dealt with swiftly and without mercy, according to sharia law.”

  In one five minute speech, the most liberal country in the world has become the most conservative. He finishes with an Islamic prayer and a final Allahu Akbar.

  Everyone in the room is silent.

  Rafik clears his throat. “I know it's not much to celebrate, but today I was made chief of police for the local precinct.”

  “Because you're Muslim?” Katrien asks.

  Rafik's heavy hand gently caresses her hair, and tucks a lock round her ear. He looks at Jana. “As long as I have a job, you will have half of my salary.”

  “Rafik, that isn't necessary,” says Pieter.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Headscarf

  Katrien and Joury sit on the floor in Katrien's bedroom, rummaging through a large box, whipping out scarves, flinging them around the room like demented magicians. Huge paisleys from India, Mondrian geometrics, silk screen reproductions of impressionist paintings. Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, and Salvatore Ferragamo purchased from Gucci, Selfridges, and Harrods. Silk. Chiffon. Pashmina.

  The room looks like a tropical wonderland, scarves covering every surface. An orgy of scarves.

  “These were all your grandmother's?” Joury asks.

  “She bought one whenever she traveled . . . like souvenirs. Look . . . some she made. See the edges? She bought material and stitched them by hand.” Katrien shows Joury the narrow roll hem, the stitches so neat and even.

  Katrien worries about school, which resumes tomorrow. Girls are not required to go, but may attend girls-only madrassahs until age sixteen. No further education is permitted. She does not need to wear a burka over her uniform. Only a headscarf. Until she gets her period.

  “Maybe we should go with something not too flashy,” advises Joury.

  “They're all so pretty.”

  “I know. How about this one?” Joury selects a solid royal blue scarf with a wavy weave.

  Katrien sniffs the fabric—it smells of her grandmother's perfume—then lays it over her hair. Her bushy dark curls resist, trying to escape, springing out around her forehead, behind her ears. Her hair will not be tamed. She stands to look in the mirror over her bureau. “I look like a mental patient.”

  Joury giggles. “Fold it into a triangle. When you put it over your head, leave one end longer than the other. Pin it under your chin, then take the longer side, hold it like this under the pin, lift it sideways over the pin, and tuck it under your ear.”

  Joury's long eyelashes brush Katrien's cheek, her dark eyes full of mischief. They turn and look into the mirror together. “You still look like a mental patient,” says Joury.

  “Why do we have to wear these damn things, anyhow?”

  “Because one glimpse of our hair drives men into a sexual frenzy. When the sun warms our hair it releases pheromones, which stimulate the primitive parts of their brains and turns them into animals.”

  “If hair drives men crazy, then Mevr. Brouwer ought to shave her mustache.”

  Joury squeals in laughter. Mevr. Brouwer used to be their math teacher. A supremely ugly woman. It is hard to imagine her as an object of desire.

  Katrien looks again in the mirror. She barely recognizes herself. She looks tamed, restrained, streamlined, deflated. “I have too much hair. I should just shave it off.”

  “You don't have to wear it inside, except at school. And if men outside the family visit your home.”

  “So many rules.”

  “It's not so bad. You'll get used to it.”

  Katrien isn't sure. She doesn't like the cloth over her ears. It makes her scalp itch, her neck sweat. She pulls it off and throws it on the bed.

  “What about her?” asks Joury, pointing to a poster of Laura Dekker over Katrien's bed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the mutaween come in here, they'd rip her down.” Joury looks almost titillated by the prospect, which annoys Katrien.

  Laura Dekker, who set off to circumnavigate the world by herself when she was fifteen in a 38-foot Jeanneau Gin Fizz ketch named Guppy, is Katrien's idol. Half of the sailing community in The Netherlands saw her off, including Katrien and her father, standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the docks of Den Osse in Zeeland. All after a court battle with the Child Welfare Office, which had tried to prevent her from leaving. Katrien followed every leg of Laura's trip, reading her weekly blog in the Algemeen Dagblad—from her official start in Gibraltar to the Canary Islands to Cape Verde to Sint Maarten through the Panama Canal to the Marquesas Islands to Australia and around the Cape of Good Hope. After seventeen months, Laura arrived in Simpson Bay, Sint Maarten on 21 January 2012. When the war broke out, she was sailing from Tahiti to New Zealand.

  Her blog has stopped. The Internet is down. Yet every night Katrien dreams about her, hoping she is sailing, wind blowing in her hair. Hoping she hasn't been stopped in some country overtaken by Islamists.

  “I'll make her a headscarf.” Katrien finds a piece of black construction paper in her desk drawer, and uses scissors to cut a form, eying Laura's head as she cuts. She sticks tape on the back of the cutout, and presses it firmly around Laura's head.

  “That's pretty good,” says Joury giggling. “It really looks like she's wearing a headscarf.”

  “I hope it blows off in the wind,” says Katrien.

  The two girls look at the poster. Laura's expression, which had seemed defiant and scornful—Landlubbers are assholes!—now looks downright militant.

  “Where do you think she is now?”

  Katrien shrugs. Stay on the sea, Laura, she silently pleads.

  She looks around the room. What a mess. She begins picking up the scarves and tossing them back in the box, then leaves it. “I'm hungry. Let's get something to eat.”

  #

  When Joury's mother comes to pick her up, she is wearing a full burka with a veil.

  Before the Occu
pation, Joury's parents were moderate Muslims, who spoke out against Islamic extremism. Her mother was loads of fun. She ran her own toy manufacturing company, and invited children into her factory to test toys. She even had a special room which she rented out cheaply for birthday parties. Everyone adored her. Every month she gets more conservative. Since women can no longer vote or hold jobs, except teaching girls and nursing in women's wards, Joury's mother stays home. She wears her burka even in the mosque, like the old women from Yemen, and will only take off the veil when she is in her own house.

  It makes Joury rebellious and a little crazy. Which worries Katrien.

  From the time Joury was four, her mother talked about her going to university to become a doctor. She bought her a microscope when she was eight, and had a special savings account for medical school. Now she wants Joury to marry at sixteen. “A woman's place is in the home.”

  The two girls watch as Joury's mother scans the room, making sure they haven't been trying on lipstick or something equally disgusting. “Time to go, Joury. Get your things. Ahmed is waiting for us.” Ahmed is her driver. She won't drive any more. Won't leave the house unless escorted by a male relative. She peppers every sentence with, “Alhamdullilah.” Like Tourettes. It makes Joury giggle. Which makes Katrien giggle. Which makes Joury's mother scowl.

  She forces Joury to wear a burka even though she's too young. As her mother drags her out of the house, Joury lifts her veil and sticks her tongue out at Katrien.

  The Purge

  Katrien has never been to a Carnival celebration, but this is how she imagines it. Lots of noise. People in the streets. Spontaneous bonfires. Gunfire.

  She climbs onto her bike, and spins madly through the streets, her teeth jarring as her wheels bounce on the bricks, hurtling up Prinsengracht, standing on her peddles up over the bridge, swerving around other bikes, cars parked on both sides of the street, shoved up on sidewalks, obstructing the shuffle of nervous pedestrians. She tears down Leliegracht, hunched over her red-ribboned handlebars, three more bridges to Singel, past the statue of the writer Multatuli, toppled on his side, past Villa Zeezicht, which used to have the best apple pie in the city, up past Westindisch Huis, where the West India Company privateers hid Spanish silver, then over to Spuistrasse, and up to Prins Hendrikkade.

  She bikes through alleys of broken lamps, brick buildings covered with bullet holes, spilled blood turned into brown stains. She passes crumbled bricks of century old churches, past broken windows of Jewish businesses, shuttered coffee houses still smelling of hash. She darts around gangs of thugs, heads wrapped in black, shouting Allahu Akbar, smashing glass windows, smashing Delft pottery, blue and white, so delicate, so fun to smash, slashing paintings and antique vases.

  Everywhere she passes slogans laminated on windows of closed stores, quotations from the Quran. Warnings. AS TO THE THIEF, MALE OR FEMALE, CUT OFF HIS HANDS (Quran 5:38). THE ONLY TRUE FAITH IN GOD'S SIGHT IS ISLAM (Quran 3:19). Or a poster of a woman in a burka. MY SISTER, GUARD YOUR VEIL MY BROTHER, GUARD YOUR EYES.

  Horns honk in her frenzied wake, her calf muscles burning, her cold ears tingling. She bikes over the Open Havenfront. The closer she gets to Centraal Station, the more people she sees, thousands and thousands, women in burkas, like crows, men waving green crescent flags, youths pounding their fists in the air, shaking empty machine guns.

  She locks her bike at the train station, then runs as fast as she can, swimming downstream, through billowing burkas, pushing yards of black cloth out of her face.

  She sees ghostly shadows—Pieter and Rafik's angry faces, arguing hotly last night. “At least make sure Jana and Katrien are out of the city.” “Jana won't leave.” “Nothing will stop them. You're not going to win. You have no weapons, no army. You can't hide a million books.” “Somebody has to stand up to them. They cannot destroy all of our books. Not the library.”

  The Islamic Council decided the central library will be made to a mosque under a new program of mosque construction. All of the books, other than Islamic texts, and a handful of other noncontroversial books, must go. The library is to be gutted. Imam Fawaz Jneid pledges to build new mosques wherever a church or synagogue stands, plus hundreds of others. “Our goal is to have one mosque for every thousand people by the end of the year.” That means 800 mosques for Amsterdam, up from the 44 current ones.

  Katrien doesn't know what any of this will mean. To her family. To her life. Only that her father is standing up for what he believes in. She wants to be with him, by his side.

  Somewhere someone shouts slogans in Arabic through a bullhorn. A baby cries. People shout. A soldier with panic in his voice demands the crowd move away.

  The bridge between the two islands, Stationplein and Oosterdokskade, is solid bodies. Katrien grabs handfuls of black cloth and pulls herself through. She nearly loses her headscarf, tugging it frantically, ducking, hand on her head, determinedly pushing forward.

  She stumbles onto the boardwalk and sees smoke billowing into the sky. The crowd shuffles toward the enormous fire like moths to a flame. Centrale Bibliotheek looms above, obscured by the mix of smoke and gray drizzle. She runs, swerving, ducking, darting—it seems so far—until she breaks through the wall of people.

  The bonfire burns hot, and the crowd gives it a wide margin, their faces glowing, luminous, red from the heat. They chant, “Allahu Akbar, La ilaha illa-Llah.” God is great, there is no god but God. Dancing orange flames reflect in their eyes, feeding their passion.

  A hundred thousand books burn in the flames, pages curling, wafting into the air with bright red edges. The stack is as high as a city bus.

  “Allahu Akbar!”

  She leans down and picks up a book at her feet. A Brief History of Time. The only thing she can think of is, Why brief?

  She clutches the book to her chest, and looks for her father. There he is, on the steps, arm-in-arm with students and professors, chanting something she cannot make out. She waves and cries out to him, but he doesn't hear her.

  IRH soldiers push the students aside to allow boxes of books to be carried down the steps and dumped into the bonfire. The students lock arms, trying to keep them from passing, but the soldiers muscle through.

  So many books, it will take a week to burn them all. As each box of books is dumped into the fire, the crowd cheers, many reciting passages from the Quran.

  A soldier passes around a box of books for people to take one and throw it into the fire. Faces radiant with revenge. It is so much fun to burn things.

  Grand Mufti Fawaz Jneid has called for a peaceful transition, but the soldiers lose patience. One soldier jabs a student in the ribs. The student grabs the rifle barrel, and pushes the soldier down the steps. Everyone starts pushing and shoving, and Katrien can see her father shouting for them to stay calm, but cannot hear what he is saying. The soldiers get more aggressive, knocking heads with billy clubs. Students, knocked unconscious, tumble down the steps.

  Hysteria catches flame, igniting the crowd.

  A soldier panics. A machine gun rattles, and a half dozen students grab their bellies, blood dripping down their bodies. The crowd screams, and stampede away from the fire, but the throngs hold them in, and they push and fight.

  Katrien steps toward the fire, the only place where she won't get trampled. She sees her father, shouting, gesturing for the students to back away. Another machine gun rattles. His body jerks, his eyes widen, his body falling, stepped on by soldiers and fleeing students.

  She cries out and runs toward him, and suddenly feels herself lifted high into the air, as if the screams and heat of the fire were lifting her like a hot ember, high into the air and across the gray water into the darkness.

  Five, 18 March 2020

  The Package

  Waalseilandsgracht at night.

  Pim and I sit parked by the quay. A few boats bang against the docks, their owners in a tea shop on the other side of the road. The Islamic Council still enforces a curfew. But after eight long years,
many are willing to take a chance, especially along the riverside, slipping in and out of the shadows, exchanging contraband, seeking out a prostitute or a place to have an illegal beer. A place to joke, to commiserate, to share your grief. But in tonight's deluge, no one is out. Except us.

  Rain pummels down, battering the van roof. The windows are fogging. I wipe a peek hole, and can barely make out the boatyards of the Noord across the Het IJ. Along the canal, boats are jumping like panicked horses, waves churning and smashing against the sea walls. Dark shapes of barges appear through the scrim of water, their bow lights tiny flecks passing, swallowed up again by the dark. I worry we will miss them. I worry the fisherman will prefer to sit in his warm cottage in Spakenburg rather than risk his life for a few euros.

  The newspaper delivery van we sit in is black, with De Waarheid written in white script on the sides. A little conspicuous if anyone bothers thinking about it. There are no newsstands by the docks. At least it's black.

  “The money's all arranged?” Pim asks.

  “On delivery,” I say. “I have it right here.” I pat the pocket inside my tunic.

  “Niemands?”

  “Yes.” We call our financier Niemands, Nobody, a common Dutch name. Who finances your raids? Nobody. In case we break under interrogation. He still works for a bank, manipulating stocks, writing fake bonds, “borrowing” from safe deposit boxes, funneling money to all of the Resistance groups. None of us knows what bank he works for, or his real name. He is nobody.

  “Hear that?” says Pim. I crack open a window. A boat grinding into a lower gear putters toward us, a shadow puppet against the gray fog, slipping toward the dock without lights.

  I get out of the van, sneak across the road, and squat by the water's edge. I wear a black shalwar kameez and black hood.

  I draw a quick circle with a tiny flashlight.

  The fisherman at the helm of the boat raises his hand. He pulls up to the dock, tossing me a bow rope, which I figure-eight around the dock cleat. The boat motor sputters on idle. He doesn't intend to linger.