Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (14 page)

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, t
hey 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.
T
here 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 18
th
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 t
wo 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.