Amsterdam 2012 (5 page)

The air cleared a bit, and I could see we were entering a park that appeared to be a staging area for emergency vehicles—ambulances, police cars, and triage units.
 
A first aid station was already set up, slipping oxygen masks over people’s faces, cleaning and bandaging wounds.
 
In the west, the sun glowed, a phosphorescent pink globe.
 
Someone handed us water bottles and dust masks.
 
The water must’ve been clean, but it tasted like ash.

Completely disoriented, we walked until we could move without bumping other people.
 
Police had already blockaded the streets.
 
Cars were at a standstill.
 
Fighter jets circled the skies, helicopters buzzed overhead.
 
We passed a bearded man who was singing and clapping, “My Arab brothers!
 
My Arab brothers!
 
Victory!
 
Victory!”
 
Four guys grabbed him and I thought,
My God they’re going to kill him
, but cops descended on the group in a flash, grabbing wrists and yanking them behind their backs.
  

We were several miles from our flat.
 
The tube was shut down.
 
Buses were routed away from the city center.
 
We saw people on bikes, riding in the middle of the road.
 
I tried several payphones, but nothing was working.
 
We had no choice but to walk back to the South Bank.

When we got to the flat, we turned on the news in the living room.
  
At about 4:50 PM coordinated bombs had gone off in and around the
Soho
district.
 
The first went off at
Tottenham
Court Road Tube in London.
 
Two more exploded within a minute of each other on two other London Underground trains.
 
A fourth bomb exploded on a bus, ripping off the roof on the top deck, and destroying the backend, which vaulted into the air.
 
Nobody on the bus survived.
 
The surrounding buildings were damaged by fragments, and the vibrations broke windows over a four block area.

The newscaster reported eighty-six deaths, hundreds wounded.
 
The city was under a Code Red Alert.
 

Within hours of the bombings, riots broke out in
Walthamstow
in East London and in the
Bethnal
Green area, just north of the Tower of London.
 
Street fighting began between Jewish and Muslim youth.
 
Pakistani Muslims were taking to the streets in Leeds,
Burnley
, Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester, and Oldham.

Amazingly, no leaders from the Muslim community stepped forward to condemn the violence.
 
One imam interviewed on television shook his head and said it was “sad and inevitable.”
 
Another demanded the British government “control paranoia over terrorism.”
 
Muslims on the street were all on the side of the Islamists, and said the British deserved it.
 
“So what if a few Londoners die?” asked one man.
 
“Go to Iraq.
 
Go to Palestine.
 
Thousands of innocent women and children have been killed.”
 
“Jews control British companies,” explained another, “they’re fair targets.”
 
“Britain should be punished,” said yet another.
 
And a woman in a headscarf said, “I think it is good there are groups like Al Qaeda.
 
It keeps them awake at night.”
 
By ‘them’ I guess she meant the British government.
 
Or Britain’s non-Muslim population.
 
Or Americans.

Around 8 PM our roommate, a skinny, ruddy-faced redhead, stumbled in, his head bleeding.
 
As we jumped up, he collapsed on the couch where we had been sitting.
 
I ran to the bathroom for antiseptic and bandages.
 
“It’s a
friggin
’ war zone out there,” he said as I cleaned his wound.
 
He smelled rank as if someone had doused him with vinegar and vomit, and it was hard to work on him.
 
“Tanks all over the place.
 
They’re burning synagogues, burning schools, hoards of them like rats, beating up any white Londoner they see, screaming stuff like, ‘Fuck Christian Pigs.
 
We’re taking over Britain.’
 
Can you believe the ungrateful bastards?
 
Half of ‘
em
are
supported by our government.
 
Deport them or kill ‘
em
—that’s what I say.
 
Pour me a drink, will you?”
 
I wasn’t about to tell him that wasn’t such a good idea with a head injury.
 
Peter poured a whiskey and handed it to him.
 
The young Brit wasn’t embarrassed at all to spout off in front of us.
 
“It’s fucking
Londonistan
—that’s what we are.
 
The fucking media is so busy ranting against American foreign
policy,
they don’t see we’re being taken over by Muslim fascists.
 
Our chicken-livered government invited these rats in, and now won’t do anything about it—too fucking worried about offending their fucking precious Muslim electorate.
 
They’re killing us with political correctness.
 
They’re scared of a Nazi backlash, but let me tell you, the Nazis look pretty good to me right now.”
 

The next day was full of demonstrations.
 
Hundreds of thousands filled the streets, and the city was virtually closed down.
 
Dozens of mosques were torched.
 
Our sense of adventure began to flag and I had to admit I was getting scared.
 
That and my mother’s increasingly apoplectic e-mails convinced Peter and me to return home.
 

By evening the airports were reopened.
 
We decided to try to get a flight out the next morning.

#

We arrived at Heathrow by 7 AM.
 
It was mobbed.
 
We spent two hours in line to get our tickets.
 
The soonest flight we could get out on was 1:35 PM.
 
We used up two of those hours getting through security.
 
All
luggage
had to be checked in.
 
Guards walked down the line with black garbage bags.
 
We could carry on our purses, but everything inside had to be dumped except wallets and personal documents, which could be carried in clear plastic bags.
 
No cosmetics, pencils, or pens.
 
No one objected.

It was eerily quiet standing in line, as if we were filing into a funeral.
 
Everyone was jittery.
 
A few Pakistani families stood off to one side looking terrified.
 
No one went near them.

It made me think of Anne Frank at Auschwitz, standing barefoot behind a barbed-wire fence, emaciated and in rags, her huge eyes watching the smoking crematories, the SS guards in watchtowers, the groups of gypsy girls and Hungarian children herded into the gas chambers.
 
Did she wonder, as I did, how people could wait in line so patiently for something guaranteed to be miserable?

#

On the plane Peter fell asleep almost immediately.
 
I suppose dealing with my anxiety wore him out.
 
Or maybe jetlag was finally catching up to him.
 
He shifted in his sleep and leaned his head on my shoulder.
 
Rays of sunlight glistened on his long lashes.
 
I recalled something Susan
Sontag
once wrote: “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
 
I wondered what I might have that was masculine.
 
I hoped it was courage.

I thought of
Marjon
and how her confidence and grace had attracted me.
 
Suddenly I began to sweat, breathing rapidly, then shivers and shakes.
 
I hadn’t let myself think about her or the murders except in an abstract way, but now, in the forced confinement of the airplane seat, the horror of it pressed down on me.
 
I thought I was having a heart attack.
 
I saw the discarded corpses, the streaks of drying blood, the hands and elbows askew in hideous unnatural angles, eyes and mouths contorted in surprise and pain.
 

I imagined
Marjon
answering the door, delighted to greet more guests.
 
Three gunmen burst in.
 
She sees the eyes of the lead gunman, sure and steady as if responding to a question she hasn’t asked.
 
He nudges her chest with the point of his machinegun, the other two men darting around on either side of him, advancing a few steps, the three taking no more than a few seconds to assess the number of people, then shooting, not wasting any bullets, using hand guns, one bullet per person.
 
Then calmly slicing off their heads.
 
Whispering Islamic prayers.
 

A ritual killing, they said.
 
Religious ritual is a sacrament, a means of knowing and experiencing God.
 
I wondered how cutting off someone’s head could bring them closer to God, and if it did, what kind of god would that be.

Again I thought of Anne Frank, the day the Nazis came for her family, charging up the rickety narrow stairs behind the bookcase—she must’ve heard their heavy boots, must’ve known it couldn’t mean anything other than the end—springing into their tiny rooms, jabbing with their guns, dragging them out, not even giving them time to grab their coats.

In the end, all that hiding did no good.

#

For some reason, I hadn’t been able to talk to Peter about my visit to Anne Frank’s house.
 
Something in me wanted to protect the experience, as if it were too personal to discuss freely.
 
Maybe I was afraid he wouldn’t understand.

We arrived at the museum well before 9 AM.
 
I knew from guide books that the lines to get in were usually long.
 
When I saw a Dutch woman walking officiously toward the museum, I stopped her before she got her key out of her handbag, and begged to be allowed into the museum before it opened.
 
“I need to hear the silence,” I pleaded.
 
“I need to feel the rooms as Anne did.
 
I need to feel her aloneness.
 
Please.”
 
The woman looked at her watch, then at me again, a weary blank stare that said I was not the first young woman to make this request.
 
She nodded and told me to follow her.

The building was incredibly narrow.
 
It felt like stepping into a gigantic cider press.
 
I imagined the walls pushing in on me.
 
I hurried past the display cases of her letters and photos to the bookcase and the stairs hidden behind.
 
I pulled myself up the steep stairs, closing my eyes, smelling dust and something sweet like the lingering scent of onions.
 
I wondered how the Franks could have prepared meals without the aroma of food giving them away.

The rooms had no furniture—so small, so narrow.
 
It felt as if the Franks had just left, the beds and chairs recently removed to make room for a new tenant.
 
Anne had described everything so precisely—descriptions I memorized as a girl—I could nearly see the bed she lay in, the table where she studied shorthand and Algebra.
 
I could see the kitchen table and the pots and pans.
 
I could smell the soup cooking on the stove.
 

I looked out the window in the bathroom where Anne and her sister took their Sunday baths.
 
I imagined her pressing her face to the pane, peering into the canal, trying to see as far as she could, feeling with her eyes every curb, every tree, every detail, jumping with delight to see a neighbor or a squirrel.
 
I imagined her yearning, and the flush of hope shooting up her neck, her cheeks blushing, as she fantasized about walking along the canal, perhaps on the way to meet a boyfriend, to be kissed and held.
  

It is hard to describe the effect the Frank House had on me—as if I had witnessed the suffering and torment of a sister, and this house was all that remained of her.
 
I left feeling raw and vulnerable and forewarned.
 

As if Anne were trying to tell me something.
 

#

Halfway over the Atlantic Peter roused, groaning as he untangled himself from an uncomfortable sleeping position.
 
He sat up and turned to me.
 
He could always read me so well.
 
He put his arms around me and held me tightly.
 
“I’ll never let anything happen to you,” he said.