Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2)

by Ruth Francisco

  Salima notices three professorial-looking men awkwardly getting up from a table, alarmed, clearly confused, wearing turtlenecks and tweed.

  “Didn't you see them, you fool?” the man hisses as he releases her. “They're right next door.”

  “Who?”

  “The bloody Landweer, that's who. With a bunch of Kroots. They're doing a neighborhood sweep.”

  Salima didn't need to ask for what. The Landweer could burst into anyone's house looking for anything contraband—a banned book, alcohol, contraceptives, make-up, guns, radios, computers. Some could be bribed not to tear up the place. Others, frustrated at not finding something, seemed to enjoy making a mess. They could arrest you or hand you a warning, depending on their mood. If they were lucky, they found you harboring refugees.

  “Get out of here. Fast,” the man commands, pushing Salima toward the door.

  “Wait,” says the woman. “Maybe she can help.”

  He gives Salima a skeptical look. “How?”

  The black woman comes up to Salima and takes her hand. “How good of an actress are you? You think you could pretend to have a broken foot?”

  “I think so.” Salima figures the three professorial men are refugees. They can't be found there. Her heart pounds, excited, anxious to help.

  “Here's the deal,” says the man. “Bike around back and fall from your bike. Nasira will run out of the house, and ask the Landweer for help.”

  Salima nods, figuring that Nasira must be the black woman. She scampers down the steps. She checks her basket. One bag left. She unstaples the top and pulls apart the brown paper. Cherries. Perfect. She straddles the bike, pushes off, and wobbles around the corner. Two Landweer officers sit in a car, watching the alley to make sure no one tries to escape from the back.

  The front tire of her bike bounces over a curb and twists. She falls, elbows and head slamming into the brick pavement. She doesn't have to pretend it hurts. Nasira dashes down the back steps to her side, stepping all over the spilled cherries. “Allah protect us. Oh, you poor child. Are you hurt?”

  Salima groans, masticated red cherries seeping out of the corners of her mouth. Nasira screams and runs across the street to the Landweer. “Please help. I need to get her to the hospital. I think she's punctured a lung.” The men slowly get out of their car, unconcerned, until they see the pavement covered with red. One dashes to Salima's side, his eyes widening with pleasure at catching a beautiful young girl unveiled.

  In an instant, the same man, whose job it is to torment and spread misery, desires to be a hero. He yells to the other man, sending him to the house where the other Landweer officers are conducting a raid. The Landweer scramble outside, see the maroon red pavement, and rush to her side. Everyone is yelling and running in circles. Arguing about whether to replace her veil—“She is indecent”—or give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—“She is dying and all you care about is her fucking veil?”

  Out the front, three slightly arthritic professors and one young Resistant sneak across the street and around the corner into a van, which slowly drives in the other direction.

  Salima's knight in shining armor apparently has taken a course in CPR. While the others radio for an ambulance, and make sure no one sees her unveiled face, he clears her mouth of clotted blood and gives her mouth-to-mouth.

  Only to taste sweet cherries.

  She recovers quickly after that, and they send her on her way with a warning not to eat in public.

  It is Salima's first kiss.

  Padded Room

  Salima locks her bike in the narrow alley beside her house and goes inside. She hears a guitar, lightly plucked, a sad tune in a minor key. A Turkish folk song.

  She follows the tune to the terrace that overlooks the courtyard. Rafik glances up and sees her, and continues to play. He's not singing, but picking each string slowly, listening hard to each note, as if counting vibrations. When he is done, he sets the guitar on the coffee table, and extends his hand, pulling her close.

  “What's wrong, Mungo?” she asks.

  Rafik's smile twitches, melting into grimness. She hasn't called him Mungo in a long time. Mongoose. When she was young, he read her Rikki-Tikki-Tavi while she sat on his lap. Being a perceptive child, she immediately saw a similarity. Rafik was her family's mongoose, ever watchful, protecting them from snakes. He even looked a bit like a mongoose, with his alert face, ears back, his large watchful eyes. Her father had laughed when she named Rafik after the Indian hero, and soon the rest of the family was calling him Mungo, too. Even his buddies at the station called him Mungo. Hearing it again reminds him of another time.

  Now the snakes are many and far more menacing.

  “Come sit,” he says, taking her hand and pulling her over to a chair. He looks at her with such gentleness, she can hardly bear it. “We need to talk.”

  “What's wrong?” She fears she's done something wrong, and braces for a long line of sins to flash in front of her eyes. But she sees nothing, her conscience clear.

  Rafik turns her hand over and kisses her palm. “I am so sorry, liefje. It shouldn't be like this.”

  “What is it?” Salima waits, mind spinning, trembling with anxiety.

  “I wanted you to hear it from me first.” He takes several breaths before continuing. “Your friend Joury . . . .” He stops, unable to continue.

  Her hand jerks away and flies to the front of her neck.

  He nods slowly. “The Bloed van God made a complaint to the mutaween.” He pauses, then continues. “They say they have witnesses who have seen Joury and her friend Lamya secretly dating non-Muslim men. It gets worse.” He rubs his hand over his face. “Apparently, they were meeting strange men in elevators, asking them if they were interested in having a girlfriend. If the men seemed interested, they set a time to meet again at the same elevator. They would ask the man to bring a van. They would then go back to their apartments.”

  “To have sex?”

  “Mostly to talk and flirt. To drink beer. Both girls claim to be virgins, but admit to doing everything except penetration.”

  Salima breaks into a sweat, filled with dread. “What will happen to them?”

  “The mutaween spared their lives only because a court-appointed doctor said their hymens are intact. They gave them back to their fathers to punish. Lamya was beaten and sent to a work camp.”

  “And Joury?”

  “Her father is furious. He is completely embarrassed. It makes him look as if he can't control his own household. He has locked her in her room.”

  “For how long?”

  Rafik looks up slowly into Salima's eyes. “For the rest of her life.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Her father sentenced her to be confined to a room of darkness until she is claimed by death.”

  “How can he do that?” Salima sputters.

  “It is written in the Quran. 'If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, take the evidence from four witnesses amongst you against them; and if they testify, confine them to houses until death do claim them'.”

  “She's his daughter!” Salima can't keep the anger from shaking her voice. It isn't Rafik's fault, she knows, but she wants to hit him. Over and over until she draws blood. “That's worse than a caged animal. Can't you do something?”

  “I will go talk to him with two members from our mosque. I don't think it will do any good.”

  “I'd like to stick a knife in one of those mutaween and rip out his liver.”

  Rafik's mouth twitches, trying not to smile. “It was her father who passed the sentence. Not the mutaween.”

  He is not defending them, merely correcting her. She knows he dislikes the mutaween. He hates having to enforce sharia law, locking up someone arrested for carrying a banned book or showing a bit of hair under a headscarf. There is much tension between the civil police and the mutaween.

  “I am so sorry.” Rafik takes both of her hands and kisses them, his bristly mustache tickling her knuckles. “You
didn't know what she was doing, did you, Salima? Wait, don't tell me. Just tell me that you weren't involved. Please.”

  “I wasn't involved,” Salima says, jerking away, feeling accused.

  “Please choose your friends carefully, Salima. If you were arrested for such a thing, I would lose my job. Jana would be sent to a work camp. I don't have the authority of Joury's dad. You would be stoned to death.” He pulls Salima's chin toward him so he can look her directly in the eyes. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Fury overtakes her, the unfairness of it, the horror of it. She runs up stairs and slams her door.

  She paces in tight circles, hitting her thighs with her fists. She should have stopped Joury. How could she be so reckless? Was the idea of marriage so bleak that she was willing to risk everything?

  Joury probably never imagined her father would lock her away forever. A sentence worse than death.

  Against Rafik's advice, Salima goes to Joury's house and asks to speak with her. Howling, clearly human, comes from upstairs. At first her mother tells Salima that Joury is sick with a contagious virus and can't see her. But then she breaks down crying. “Go, never come back. Forget you ever knew my daughter.”

  Joury is not allowed to talk to anyone, not even when she is given food through a slot at the base of her door. She tried to kill herself, so the room has been padded. She is allowed no television and has nothing to read except the Quran. She has nothing to do but stare at the walls. In darkness. She will never hear another human voice. Her total world is the sound of her own breathing.

  As Salima leaves, she looks up at Joury's window, which has been boarded over with plywood. She picks up a handful of pebbles and throws them.

  The howling stops for a few moments, then starts up again, softer. Waiting for more. Almost hopeful.

  Salima picks up another handful and throws again. The howling stops. A muted banging on the window. “Salima!” A muffled call, as if down a deep well.

  Salima throws another stone. Vicious banging, and then a howling ensues, rising in pitch to a strangled, gagging screech. The worst sound Salima has ever heard.

  Horrified, she runs down the street.

  Spray Paint

  Salima sits on the edge of her bed. Laura Dekker frowns at her, her black construction paper hijab curled from age and humidity. Turned up like a wimple. Coward, she seems to say.

  “I don't see you doing anything,” Salima retorts.

  She gets up and goes downstairs to the utility room—brooms, detergents, cleaners. Tools undisturbed for years. Cans of paint. She wonders if the old can will still spray, and checks to see if the nozzle is clean. It is. Pieter always took care of things like that.

  She recalls buying the paint with her father.

  It had been fun, wandering up and down the narrow isles of an old hardware store, used by coffee merchants in the 18th century as a warehouse. Smelling of burlap and sawdust, it was the kind of place her father adored, filled with bins of oddly shaped brackets and fittings, heirloom seeds, cast iron pans, and antique parts for machines no longer manufactured. In back was an old paint mixer that squirted out thin streams of pigment, then shook the cans, vibrating like cartoon character about to blow his top. And on the side, a shelf of spray paint.

  Pieter bought two cans. He didn't want to run out.

  They bought the paint for her first bicycle. Red, she had insisted, her favorite color. Pieter liked restoring things. He loved things that looked old but functioned like new. He had found an old frame, sanded off the rust, painted it, then decked it out with the latest carbon fiber gears and chain, and a stainless steel bell. She had loved her bike. Her first taste of independence.

  Then someone stole it. The day Pieter was killed. Taken from the train station, even though she had locked it.

  She shakes the can for a long time, and tries it out on newspaper. Blood red spews across the headlines. The tip of her index finger is red. She reminds herself to wear a plastic glove.

  The clock inches toward midnight. Rafik is at work, and Jana went to bed hours ago. Salima puts on a black shalwar kameez and niqab, covered head-to-toe in black.

  She slips out of the house, the can of spray paint in a brown paper bag, her left hand in a plastic glove. At least the Islamists would approve of that, she thinks, smiling to herself—doing something bad with her left hand. She heads down Lauriergracht. Wherever she sees the perfect little Islamic family staring at her from a propaganda poster, she stops and sprays a gigantic red 'V' across the poster. 'V' for vrijheid, for freedom.

  For a moment she admires the dripping blood red paint. She paints with the blood of her father.

  She runs around the corner, her heart beating in her throat. She peeks back to see if anyone saw her. No one. Water laps gently against the canal walls.

  Darting down the alley, she sees another poster. BRAND UW BOERKA! she writes. Burn your burkas. That's for Joury.

  She scampers on, in the shadows, breathless and exhilarated. GELIJKHEID, VRIJHEID! Equality, liberty.

  Each time she gets away with it, she gets angrier and bolder. ISLAM ZUIGT! Islam sucks.

  A hand out of nowhere grabs her.

  She drops the can of spray paint, which clatters to the ground. A man yanks her arm behind her back, and shoves her down a narrow dark alley, filled with garbage cans, bikes, and subterranean stairways. He pushes her into a doorway, up against a cold brick wall.

  “Are you crazy?” he whispers hotly. “Do you know what they'll do to you if you are caught?”

  “Cut off my hand. Bury me alive. I don't give a fuck any more.”

  He pins her against the wall, his forearm against her chest. “You're a girl!” He releases her and staggers back, aghast.

  “It's not contageous.”

  “Hou je mond!” He grabs her again, drags her down another alley, and over to a narrow canal.

  “Don't throw me in,” she pleads.

  “Lower your voice. Don't you think you've caused enough trouble tonight? We're going to have to move.”

  He pushes her onto an old barge, and raps a code on the door, which opens. He shoves her inside.

  Two more men sit inside, and the biggest woman Salima has ever seen in her life. All spring up from one end of a long table, hands on weapons. The woman is unveiled; her spikey white-blond hair looks electrified. She has large course features, and her nose has been broken once or twice.

  “What's this?” demands the large woman.

  “I found her defacing posters.”

  “Why'd you bring her here?” asks a thin man with brown curly hair. Moroccan, Salima guesses.

  “Another ten minutes, and she would've gotten arrested. She can't be on the streets. I brought her here.”

  The woman looks Salima up and down, and lifts her left wrist. Her hand is nearly twice as large as Salima's. “Foolish. But smart enough to wear a kapotje.” She calls the glove a condom. The men chuckle. “Take off your veil and let me look at you.”

  Salima takes off her veil, her dark curls springing out in every direction.

  “Why are you defacing posters?”

  “I hate the Islamists. I hate being a woman. I hate this regime. They murdered my father. They sealed my best friend in a dark room for the rest of her life.”

  “And what do you think you'll accomplish with grafitti?”

  “If other people feel the same way, it lets them know they aren't alone.”

  She hands Salima a bottle of wine. Salima doesn't even blink, but tilts back and drinks deeply. The woman nods appreciatively. She motions for Salima to sit. The men sit apart at the other end, eating and drinking. Letting the women work it out.

  “Tomorrow the Landweer will be crawling all over this neighborhood,” says the woman, her annoyance showing. “That is what you have accomplished. Until tonight, this area has been pretty much ignored. We will have to move the barge, which means we have to let everyone in our group know. Both of these things put us at risk for exposure. Do
you understand?”

  “I'm sorry. I couldn't think of anything else to do.”

  “You are sorry,” the woman repeats, disgusted. She glances over at the three men, who pretend to be completely absorbed in their food, whispering about something else. “How would you like to work with us?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a minute,” interrupts the thin dark man. “How can you know we can trust her?”

  The woman looks at the other two, who shrug, mouths full.

  “My name is—”

  “No,” barks the woman, her palm in Salima's face. “We only use false names here. Your name is Lina. You do not need to know our names yet. Here, take these and pass them out. Stuff them into mailboxes and under doors.” The woman hands her a stack of fliers. At first glance they look like pages from Al Jazeera—the font is the same, the paper the same weight and texture. “The real news,” says the woman, “not as Islamic propagandists would like you to believe. Good luck and be careful. Do not ever talk about what you are doing, including to your own family. Do not get caught.”

  The man who mugged her in the alley leads her off the boat. He shows her a small piece of paper in the corner of the window with a little pig's tail on it. “If you see that, you'll know the barge is one of ours. My name is Pim.”

  Under the streetlamp, she sees the young man clearly for the first time, his mop of flaxen hair, red face, rough facial features of a Van Gogh peasant, but with pale blue eyes and a gap between his two front teeth. He looks a little older than she, nineteen or twenty, his body filled out like a boy who has done a man's work from a young age—farming or fishing or fighting. “Does your group have a name? Or is that secret, too?”

  “Sure, it's secret. But you can know it.” He checks over his shoulder. “We call ourselves the Watergeuzen. Every group has a name. We gotta have a little fun.”

  He gives her a gap-toothed smile. He looks like the goat god Pan, she decides. He is a little shorter than she, but powerfully strong. She likes him. His strong squarish hands seem so—she looks for the right word—so honest, so competent. For a moment, she wonders what it would be like to be kissed by him. “How do I find you again?” she asks.