Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (8 page)

It does, however, make it easier to get places.

Salima enters her
madrassah,
and takes her seat in the very same classroom she left on the day of the Jenever Theater massacre.  The model of Petra still sits on a table, pushed in the corner. 

Salima wears a dark green head scarf with sixteen other girls.  Her classes are limited to studying and reciting long passages of the Quran, Dutch language study, Arabic, Islamic studies, and home economics.  Although it is illegal, her mother and Rafik homeschool her in a more liberal curriculum—English, math, science, history.  They hide her text books behind the wardrobe.

She and the other children hand in a weekly checklist their parents have signed confirming their daughter does her daily ablutions and prayers.

Her teacher's name is Leila, a reserved middle-aged Egyptian, who once taught mathematics at the University of Amsterdam.  When women teachers were no longer allowed to teach at the university level, she took a job at a
madrassah
.  She is kind, but often loses patience with the young girls, who have considerable difficulty learning Arabic.  Her own enthusiasm for rote teaching is limited, and every once in a while, she will stray from the set curriculum.

“You want these girls to be good wives.  How can they be good wives if they can't balance a checkbook or look after the family's finances?”  The principal agrees with her, but will not let her use any math textbooks.  She sneaks in mathematics during cooking classes—measurements, ratios, algebra, even geometry—her eyes twinkling with enthusiasm.  She finds math beautiful.  The girls know what she is doing, and keep it secret.  For her birthday, they made her a pie, decorated with cranberries with 3.141592 written across the crust.

The girls hear loud footsteps in the hallway.  Men's shoes, loud and recognizable.  The door swings open, and two men in black caftans, black fezzes, and long gray beards walk in, followed by two IRH soldiers.  “Leila Massri?” says one of the
mutatween.
  He looks around the room and at the girls with equal measures of disdain and contempt. 

“Yes?” responds Leila.

The soldiers walk behind the desk, yank her arms behind her back, handcuff her, and drag her out of the room. 

The girls are stricken.  Salima risks a glance at Joury, who looks mortified, her attention fixed on the empty doorway.  Who talked?  Who told her father about the math?  Each of them is filled with guilt.  They shouldn't have asked so many questions.  They had asked their teacher about the war.  They asked her about science.  They asked her about history.  She always tried to answer honestly before bringing them back to the Quran.  It is their fault.  They shouldn't have been so curious.

And now they have no teacher.

The second
mutawa
stays behind and circles slowly around the room, looking at the girls.  He taps one girl on the head with a ruler, and says, “too much hair showing,” and she tucks in her stray curls.  He tells another one her skirt is too short, and scolds another for wearing nail polish.  He then spots the model of red clay in the back of the classroom.  “What's this?” he demands.

“The ancient city of Petra,” says Salima, immediately realizing she should have lied.  She should have said it was Mecca.

He glares at her for her boldness, then says, with a snarl of disgust, “A pagan city.”  He strides to the doorway and calls for one of the IRH soldiers to come back.  He points to the model city.  “Destroy that heathen den of sin and vice.”  The soldier hesitates, looking for the first time at the girls' faces, seeing their horror.  Maybe he has a little sister.  Would he break her dolls?  “Now,” commands the
mutawa,
as if afraid of  catching something.  The soldier stands over the model city, and brings down the butt of his AK-47.  A dozen strokes and it is nothing but crumbs.

The principal walks in ten minutes after the
mutaween
depart with Leila.  She leans on her palms on the front desk and sighs, slowly regarding the girls.  “I will be taking over your class until we find a replacement.  Leila was arrested because she is suspected of working for the Resistance.  It was not because of anything she did here . . .  anything she taught you.  You are not to blame in any way.”

A single question floats in the brains of each of the girls.  What will happen to her?  But no one dares ask.

Salima later learns that Leila had refused to ask the children to “Raise your hands if your parents drink alcohol at home,” an attempt by the Islamic Council to exploit the children's inherent honesty and manipulate them to inform on their parents. 

The rest of the day they study Dutch grammer.  The principal senses now is not the time to discuss Islam.

The girls are let out a half hour before the boys' school down the street—to give the girls time to get home without any kind of interaction with the boys.

Joury's mother won't let her walk in the street, and picks her up.  Salima walks home alone.  Ambling.

She turns onto
Madelievenstraat, and sees a boy sitting on her steps.

Salima has never much liked her neighbor Deniz—he is fat and spoiled and a bit of a bully—but she is flattered he waits for her.  He isn't supposed to talk to girls, but can't seem to help seeking her out.  Salima doesn't mind.  She finds him a little pathetic. 

When she sits down beside him, he opens his hand.  “Look what I have.”

“It looks like a plastic key covered with gold spray paint,” she says flatly.

“They handed them out in school today.  They told us that if we go to war and are lucky enough to die, this key will get us into heaven.”

She arches an eyebrow.  “You really want to go to a heaven that lets you in with a key that looks like it came out of a gumball machine?”

“Sure.  Everyone gets to live in mansions with great food, streets filled with gold and diamonds, rivers of milk and honey, beautiful gardens with flowers and fruit trees, and seventy-two virgins for every warrior.”

“You hardly dare talk to me.  What in hell would you do with seventy-two virgins?”

“I'd fuck them, one after another.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I will.  If you're fourteen, you can go to war, and they'll give your family a bonus.  My mom won't let me, I bet.  Not until I'm older.  But I can hardly wait.”

“You're an idiot.  They only give golden keys to kids from poor families.”

“Fuck you.”

“Practicing your charm for your virgins?”

“Fuck you, Salima.  There's a fountain in heaven where you can drink as much booze as you want and you'll never get drunk.”

“Sure, Deniz.”

Salima goes inside.  Jana isn't there. She has no cellphone to call her to tell her she's home.  There is nothing to watch on television except the news, talk shows with women in burkas discussing how to please their husbands, and a deathly dull program where imams discuss the Quran and the hadiths.  Girls are not encouraged to go out and play.  She goes up stairs into her mother's bedroom.

She lays on her mother's bed.  Pieter built it out of maple in the shape of a ship.  He carved waves on the sides, with dolphins and birds.  Elaborate scenes of pirates digging up treasure cover the headboard, with a ship's wheel at the top.  The bow rises at the foot of the bed.  It makes Salima feel like a mouse sleeping in a teacup.  She feels safe here, a place where she was cuddled and read to as a child.  A place for the imagination.

She feels close to her father here.

This is where Pieter told her stories about sailing around Cape Hoorn, where he taught her how to factor polynomials and plot parametric curves to figure the area of a pyramid.  She can't remember these things without remembering his body tumbling down the library steps, a red hibiscus blooming in his chest, his mouth a puckered 'O'.

She gets up and opens a secret drawer at the foot of the bed, and takes out a book. 
A Brief History of Time. 
She climbs back onto the ship bed, opens the book, and settles down to read.

“Black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the more they glow.”

It was no mistake that this book fell at her feet during the bonfire of books.  Every line is a special message, just for her.  Telling her how to make her way in the world.

“In general, quantum mechanics does not predict a single definite result for an observation.  Instead, it predicts a number of different possible outcomes and tells us how likely each of these is.”

Repeating the line over and over, it takes on a profundity that shakes her to her core.  She reads on, and eventually gets sleepy.

Just as she is about to nod off, her mind returns to the arrest of her teacher Leila, how the principal and the other students just seemed to accept that she was gone.  She wonders if it was true that Leila worked in the Resistance, and what she did.  She wonders about the “different possible outcomes” for her teacher.  For her father.  For herself.

Hans and Marta

“Oh, good God!  Is that you, Jana?”  Marta opens the door and sees Jana in a burka.  She doesn't recognize her until she sees Salima, standing behind her in a headscarf.  “It's all right.  They're friends,” she yells over her shoulder. 

Banging and scraping sounds come from upstairs; shoes thud down the main staircase. 

“Come in quickly,” she says to Jana.

Jana throws off her burka and gives Marta a huge hug.  Over Marta's shoulder, she notices a painting missing over the table in the entry hall.  A seventeenth-century oil by the Dutch painter Hendrick Ter Brugghen, a scantily clad devotee of Bacchus, welcoming visitors with fruit, wine, and a besotted smile, an inebriated monkey nibbling grapes on her lap.  Marta adored the painting, and it had been in her family for generations.

Marta catches Jana's gaze.  “Half the things are in hiding, the other half we're selling.  We only get a fraction of their value, but we make good use of it.  Who would have thought the head of the Landweer in Hoorn would be an aficionado of early Flemish painting?”

“You're doing all right, then?  I've been so worried about you.”

“As good as can be expected.  Hans lost his job with the VVV-kantoor, but there aren't any tourists anyhow.  Being rich always helps.”  She turns to Salima.  “Let me look at you.  You've grown.  You have your mother's eyes.  Lucky you.  You'll drive men mad one day with those eyes, Katrien.”

“My name is Salima, now.”

“Of course.  Salima.  That's a beautiful name.”

“Is Hans here?”

“No.”  It is the kind of
no
that invites no further inquiry.  “Are you hungry?  We were just about to sit down to lunch.”  Marta leads them into the kitchen.

Five men and one woman sit around the table looking pensive. They wear the unmistakable look of refugees—hungry, furtive, desperate.  Sudden appearances at the front door make them nervous. 

“These are friends,” says Marta. 

Salima yanks off her headscarf, as if it were covered with spiders.  They all sit down to eat.

As usual, Marta serves too much food—
stamppot,
mashed potatoes with kale and sausage, and plenty of red wine and fresh bread.  Years ago, Jana and Hans converted part of an old smuggling tunnel into a wine cellar, and filled it with hundreds of bottles.  It will be quite a while before the ban on alcohol will affect them. 

All the food and wine makes the refugees oddly listless, and they soon retire to their rooms upstairs.

“You are determined to stay?” Jana asks Marta.  Marta and Hans have refused to convert, and have to pay the
jizya
.  Things are much less strict outside the big cities.  Some rules have to be modified because there simply aren't enough Muslims to run the whole country.  However, police and school teachers all have to be Muslim.

“There's a lot we can do here.  We're already setting up a network to get Jews and atheists out.”

“We've been thinking about it, and we want to give you the
Allegro
,” says Jana.
 
Pieter would want Hans to have it.  Maybe you can use it . . . in your work.”  Jana takes the boat title out of her purse, and slides it across the table.

“Didn't he leave the boat to Salima?”

Jana takes Salima's hand, and nudges her to answer for herself.  “If the
Allegro
can save people, I want you to have her.”

Marta places one hand on each of the women's hands, closes her eyes in silent gratitude, and then sits back in her chair.  “Rafik is taking good care of you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Are you safe with him?  He never was particularly devout.”

“He goes to mosque now,” Jana explains.  “He is good with people.  He calms everyone down.  They need him.”

“I'm glad.  You always have a place here if you need it.”

Salima and Jana sleep in a small bedroom off the kitchen, that was once the servant's quarters.  All the guest cottages are full.  “Where are they all going to go?” Salima asks Jana, later when they are alone.