“Don't worry, Salima. It's a private party. Erol's father is a general. Even if we get caught, no one will do anything.”
A glass elevator takes them up a shaft filled with palm trees, ferns, and vines. It opens to a marble foyer. Salima follows Joury inside and adds her burka to a huge dunghill of black burkas.
Color, music, noise. Dancing! Katy Perry singing, “I kissed a girl and I liked it, the taste of cherry Chapstick,” and boys and girls shaking their shoulders and hips, singing along, “It felt so wrong, it felt so right. Don't mean I'm in love tonight,” then everyone screaming at the top of their voices, “I kissed a girl and I liked it,” jumping up and down, rolling their hair in circles.
A square glass chandelier hangs like a disco ball in the middle of the room. White leather couches shoved to the edges, curtains drawn tight. Tables piled high with food, catered by Niko Nazar—petit fours, quiches, pastries. A huge pink punchbowl, bottles of beer, wine, and Akvavit.
“Come on, Salima. Let's dance!” Joury grabs her hand and Salima begins shaking and moving her hips with the others, singing as loud as she can, “Us girls we are so magical, Soft skin, red lips, so kissable. Hard to resist, so touchable.”
How could all of Amsterdam not hear them?
Boys and girls touching, lounging, leaning against one another, dancing close, necking on couches, sneaking off to foreign corners, hand-in-hand. Breasts, hips, and hair. Naked arms, naked legs. Pouting red lips. The girls wear short tight skirts, low necklines, spangles and jewelry. High heel shoes. Things they must have hidden from before the Occupation. Everything was supposed to have been burned.
Salima sees a boy who must be Erol, their host, clean-cut and chisel-faced. He seems to be the only one not going crazy, possessed by pagan gods. He walks like an impresario, between squirming wiggling couples, managing never to touch anyone. He motions to the servers to bring more punch, or to help a girl to the bathroom.
Salima doesn't know why she is frightened of him, but she is. He likes power. He enjoys making his friends completely vulnerable and at his mercy. All he has to do is make one call, and the mutaween will sweep in and arrest everyone. The boys will get a scolding, maybe a few lashings, the girls, their virtue stained, a one-way ticket to Chop-Chop Square. Or the work camps.
Everyone knows how dangerous it is. It makes them desperate and wild.
A cute boy who calls himself Aydin asks Salima if she would like some punch, and she walks over to the refreshment table with him. It is too loud to talk. She yells her name when he asks, and he repeats back, “Samantha?” She nods yes. What the hell. She isn't herself tonight.
Aydin and she dance. He is slightly awkward, looking at her, a goofy grin on his face, trying to be cool, failing cheerfully. Boys aren't allowed to look at girls, and he can't stop gawking. When he brushes up against her, she smells his adolescent sweat, bitter like ammonia. Is that his penis? OMG!
Across the room, she sees Joury necking with a boy on the couch. Does she know him? Joury turns and kisses the boy on the other side of her, and puts her hand on his crotch. Salima looks away.
A quiet girl whom Salima knows from mosque looks delirious, spinning and flinging herself around the dance floor, head wobbling, completely out of it. Drunk? Twirling in a frenzy.
So much desperation. Salima senses it from everyone. As if this may be the first and last time in their lives they'll have fun. With only the vaguest notion of what fun is. The girls are crazier than the boys. Clinging, grabbing, throwing themselves out of planes. Off cliffs. Out of trees. It makes her cringe.
She is a good girl. What is she doing here?
She excuses herself to use the bathroom, and walks down a long hallway with recessed lighting. The old familiar odor of marijuana seeps out from under closed doors. One door is cracked open and she peeks inside. Boys watching a porno film—a man in a mask with a whip, a girl tied up, ass to the ceiling, moaning.
A red alert, louder than a bomb shelter siren, screams in Salima's ears. No one else hears it. She hastens back down the hall where she last saw Joury. Joury is gone. They have to get out! Now!
She pushes aside bodies, darts around hot embraces, panicked, looking for Joury's short red dress. She really doesn't want to have to open all the bedroom doors looking for her.
Finally she finds her, smoking grass with two boys in a small glassed-in garden off the hallway. “We have to go,” she whispers hotly in Joury's ear.
“Why? The party is just getting started.”
“Please, Joury, let's go. I mean it.”
“You're such a prude, Salima.”
“No, I'm not. I just want to leave.”
“Leave then. I'm staying.”
By some miracle she finds her own burka in the pile by the door. She looks up and sees Erol studying her, twenty feet away, as if trying to memorize her face. For the first time, she wonders if there are security cameras taping all of this.
She throws on her burka, avoids the elevator, running down the stairs outside, a voice whimpering in her brain—I am a good girl.
Two miles to Jordon, to her home. She runs in the shadows, in the dark, lifting the hem of her burka around her waist. She avoids the major canals, running through Vondelpark and Leidsebosie, staying under the trees. She zigzags over the canals and through alleys. Whenever she sees someone, she pulls up in a doorway and freezes. No one is supposed to be out. There is a curfew. But people are everywhere, like mice darting in and out of the alleys, under the shadow of a hawk. Those who see her are as frightened of her as she is of them.
When she gets home, she turns the key, fingers on the cold brass knob. She opens the door to safety.
#
She sees Joury at mosque the next day. Nothing horrible happened at the party.
“Why did you panic? You looked like you saw a ghost. You're such a sissy. It was just a party.” Joury laughs at her. That is when Joury tells her that her father has arranged a marriage for her. “He's fifty-two. I will be his third wife.”
“Why does he want another wife? A fifteen-year-old? What a pervert!”
Joury shrugs. “It's political. My father wants a contact in Rotterdam. That's where the power is.”
“So he's selling his daughter?”
“Daughters don't matter. But—” she gives Salima a wink, and hands her a cigarette “—until I get married, I plan to have some fun. You game?”
“What if you get caught?”
“Fuck, I don't care. The work camps can't be any worse than fucking an old man.”
The sudden indifference in her voice worries Salima most. Beyond desperation. As if nothing matters.
Seven, 18 March 2020
A Day on the Train
The next morning I dash out of the house as if on borrowed time.
I take a bus to the Red Light District and pick up the Syrian family at the theater. They look rested. Spook has provided a breakfast of bread, jam, and cheese, for which I am grateful. He's even managed eggs for the girls. He has given them the first two proper meals they've had in a week and their cheeks already have more color.
I thank Spook, and the five of us slip into the alley. The day is sunny. Puddles from last night's storm dot the road. Overnight the trees have started to sprout leaves, a misty web of green over the gray branches.
I walk ahead, pretending not to know them, carrying one of their bags under my burka. They follow.
We take a short bus ride to Central Station. I go to the ticket window and buy five round-trip tickets. The family is only traveling one way, but a one-way ticket looks suspicious. If questioned, they are to say they are visiting relatives in the countryside.
I quickly hand them their tickets, and we stand on a platform waiting for a train to take us north.
The train station is never a safe place, full of hard stares and quick side glances. Any burka could be a spy, any man behind a newspaper. Every raised voice, every running footstep puts me on edge. I force myself to relax, stroking the
hair of one of the girls, playing the part of a doting aunt.
When we board the train, we see several IRH soldiers in the first compartment. They are playing cards and look bored, not on duty. I don't think they'll bother us. We wobble down the corridor and find a compartment with two women in burkas, sitting by the window. As soon as the girls settle in, the women open the baskets on their laps and give them fresh sweet rolls. Wide-eyed and hesitant, the girls wait for their mother to nod that it's okay. They thank the women, and silently nibble their bread.
Suddenly an IRH officer opens the door of the compartment and shouts “ID, alstublieft!” We pull out our ID cards. He looks at them and at us, comparing the photos with our faces, looking again. The women by the window lift their veils. They are old and very Dutch looking. He studies each of us hard, as if deciding whether to arrest us or not. Perhaps waiting for one of us to point an accusing finger. Finally he hands back our IDs and says, “Bedankt. Hebe een goede reis.”
We sit in nervous anticipation, waiting for the train to start, four women, a man, and two young girls. It is improper for me to look at a man I am not related to, so I look at the children. They are small boned, like their parents, long torsos with short legs. Their skin is grayish, their faces exquisite with huge eyes, long delicate noses, full lips. Their hair, dark brown and wavy, is cut below their shoulders. Even in a country such as Holland, which claims almost every nationality for citizens, they look different. So similar to each other, so different from the rest of us. Obviously far from home.
I imagine them in their village in Syria, an arid rolling landscape of olive trees and vineyards, of white stucco cottages, ancient stone walls, and fierce red sunsets. Men squatting in clusters, drinking tea and smoking, while the women do chores, and children scamper about making up games. I imagine them happy.
As the train rattles alive, the older women chat with each other. Senora Caputi sits on my right. She watches me watch the girls. She leans close and asks me if I have children. Her question surprises me—she has seen me without my veil, and knows my approximate age. Then I realize in her village, women probably married very young.
“No,” I answer, wondering if I will live long enough to have children. Would I want to bring children into this world?
She takes my hand, leans in close, and whispers her story to me. I feel the dampness of her breath on my cheek, and the movement of her veil gently fluttering against my veil. Curtains in a gentle summer breeze.
It is dangerous for me to hear her story, but I know she needs to tell it. In case something should happen to her. She wants me to know why I am risking my life. It is all she has to give me in return.
She tells me her family had lived in the ancestral province of Deir al-Zour in northeastern Syria for hundreds of years, the oldest Christian community in the world. Even before the UNI army invaded from Iraq, rebel troops were fighting President Bashar al-Assad's regime, al Qaeda, and ISIS. Armed Arabs flowed in from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. All fighting for power, targeting Christians for sport. It started with kidnappings and forced conversions. Daughters stolen and made into sex slaves. Soon their towns became war zones. They packed all of their possessions on the rooftop of a truck and fled to Turkey, where they tried to keep ahead of the UNI army. They lost everything to bandits in a refugee camp. They have been running for eight months.
“I miss my home so much,” she says, her voice trembling. “I know it is not modern to be so attached to the land. People move all the time, sell everything they have, leave their houses and land as if driving away from a hotel. But our land is a person, our trees are family. God will protect and provide for us, I know. But without our home, without the sun as it rises over the mountains, I feel like a ghost. The air has no oxygen. The sun doesn't even feel like the same sun.”
A crushing pressure squeezes my heart—there is nothing to say. My lips kiss the hair of the eldest daughter. Signora Caputi slumps, breathing softly, grateful.
Her misery is shared. Confided. Understood. It is the least I can do.
The train chugs past the windmills of Zaandam and into the farmland of Purmerend. Miles of grassy green fields framed by narrow canals. Tidy neat blocks of forest, alleys of plane trees.
Cows and sheep graze, swishing their tails contentedly.
#
As a child I read about the underground railroad during the United States Civil War, and imagined it was like a subway, running underneath plantations and cotton fields, burrowed beneath the cities. I wondered how so many tunnels could be dug and not be detected? All that dirt! How did they dispose of it? How did they keep the tunnels from flooding? How many years did it take? I imagined half-naked slaves crouching low and scampering through endless, dimly lit tunnels—light bulbs hanging from moist dripping roofs, flickering, the sound of canons and musket fire above—then boarding a train, which I imagined to be something like a string of box cars in a coal mine.
Then I was told the underground railroad was neither underground nor a railroad, but a network of safe houses, barns, attics, and empty warehouses. Composed of people who risked their lives to help other people escape. That seemed even more complex and impossible. Who could possibly organize such a thing?
Even as a young girl, I was impressed. It seemed like important work. Exciting work. I never imagined it would be my life.
#
After an hour, brakes screech and the train jerks to a stop in the middle of farm land. IRH soldiers charge up and down outside hollering commands, swinging enormous flashlights under the train. I pretend to be calm, but my heart is beating madly. Signora Caputi looks terrified.
I lean close, pressing my lips to where I think her ear is. “They are looking for smugglers,” I say. “You are on holiday, and are a little annoyed that your sister will be kept waiting. You can hardly wait to see her and all the improvements on the farm that she's written to you about.” I point out the window at the straight rows of vegetables, a windmill in the distance. “Your sister is pregnant with her first child, and you are bringing her two presents—a jacket you've knitted for the baby, and a family heirloom, a rattle your grandfather made long ago in Napoli out of wood from his olive orchard.”
This imaginary scenario immediately relaxes her eyes. Sudden crow's feet mean she's smiling. She squeezes my hand gratefully.
The soldiers bang their palms on the side of the train, ordering everyone to get out. They check IDs while the whole train is searched. In twenty minutes we climb aboard again. The soldiers don't find anything.
We finally reach Enkhuizen. Adjacent lots are crammed with thousands of bikes, toppled over one another. It is easy to think things have not changed.
We head to the waterfront. A chilling wind blows hard, and we hold onto our garments, trying to blend in with the farmers and their families with their baskets of chickens and produce. I buy a plastic mesh bag, and fill it with a chicken and apples. We would stand out without a bag of purchases.
The ferry pulls in. It is painted yellow, green, and white, with two decks, and two glassed-in cabins with bench seating. The upper deck is for viewing on a fine day. It's empty.
We settle in on the ferry, not together, but within sight of each other. The girls take out their half-eaten rolls and nibble at the edges, trying to make them last as long as possible.
The ferry pulls out into the IJsselmeer. White caps slam against the hull, spray douses the windows. The girls grab onto one another, wide-eyed. It's probably their first water ride.
I leave the family and walk to the deck outside. I close my eyes, cold salt air moist on my face, and I am eleven again, sailing on the Allegro with my father off the coast of Zeeland. White sails whip in a brisk wind, the hull pounding through the surf. Above, a cotton field of clouds breaks open, the sun warm on my face. Pieter grins—utterly fearless—at the wheel, his red windbreaker blowing flat against his chest. I hank the jib, hair blowing, feet slipping, with only a single line and the momentum of the boat to keep me from fal
ling into the sea. On the brink of terror and absolute freedom.
How alive I felt. How free.
Cold spray flagellates my face, punishing me for my memories. I couldn't have saved him, but that doesn't matter. It's something I live with.
Chilled, I return to the cabin.
When we reach Urk, I slip a vacation brochure out of my bag, and whisper to Signora Caputi to follow me and to move as if she knows where she's going. IRH soldiers watch us closely as we step ashore into a small waiting room.
No one looks like our contact, but I sense no danger. We walk outside to the lot where people lock their bikes. I notice a young man in a blue scarf and red gloves. I wear a red scarf and blue mittens.
He smiles and comes up to us and taps my brochure. “Hello. It's so wonderful to see you again. How was your trip?”
I know Resistants meet these boats every day. They must've heard we missed the first ferry, and sent someone around again. I say the pass words. “Rough seas are followed by calm waters.”
“And the sun comes out after it rains. Come,” he says, “everyone can hardly wait to see you. What? A chicken? You are too kind. Ada will be so pleased.” He kisses the girls, shakes the husband's hand vigorously, and carries the bags to a car. We all get in.
The young man drives through town, circles around a building, then lets me out. I walk back to a little restaurant across from the ferry boat. I sit and drink coffee until just before the ferry leaves. I cross the street and get on.
Two hours and I'll be back in Amsterdam. Just before curfew.
Homework
As soon as the train pulls in, I unlock one of the several bikes our group keeps at Central Station, and peddle over to Pim's. “What happened after you left us?” I demand breathlessly, as I hang up my burka to dry.
“When I went back to get the van, two more Landweer Tourans showed up.” Pim leans on his elbows, eating roggebrood and hagelslag for breakfast. I smile, amused at how grown Dutch men love to smother their toast with chocolate sprinkles. “They were going door-to-door looking for witnesses, but it was raining so hard, I doubt anyone saw much. After a while, the two backup cars left with the third man, who seemed to be in charge.”
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