Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (9 page)

“Who?”

“The refugees.”

“It's better we don't know.  I'm sorry, Salima.  I wouldn't have brought you here if I had known Marta was doing this.  It's too dangerous.”

“Why are you apologizing?  We should hide someone in our secret annex.  We should help.”

“That's for us, if we need it.”

“We need it now to help refugees.”

“You are my priority, Salima.  I have to keep you safe.  You are all I have left.”

Salima stares at her mother, disgusted, pitying her.  After Pieter died, something went out of her mother.  She'd become fearful and cowering.  There was no fight in her anymore.  Salima doesn't know how to bring her back.

“I don't want to be safe.  I want to help.  I don't understand you.  Your grandparents were in the Dutch resistance during World War Two.  Dad's, too.  It's what we do.”

“I'm sorry, Salima.”

The Mask of Zorro

When Joury doesn't show up at mosque, Salima finds Joury's mother and asks if she is all right.  “Joury got her first period,” she explains.  “Women do not enter the mosque when they are menstruating.”

Two shocks.  Jealousy—that her friend got her menses before her—and alarm—that looming on the horizon is a black ship that will drop its black sails on top of her in a prison of fabric.  She dreads the many rules that come with becoming a woman. 

Within a few weeks, Salima, too, is on her way to the burka store.

It is funny how quickly stores change hands, she thinks.  A coffee shop, which once sold marijuana and hash, now sells tea.  A used CD store sells Qurans and religious books.  A web design studio sells Turkish rugs.  A liquor store sells dry goods.  A jewelry store sells jewelry. 

Muslim women love jewelry.

Joury's mother takes Joury and Salima to Magna Plaza, which faces the Royal Palace.  The candy-striped 19
th
century Neo-Renaissance Post Office was turned into a mall in the 1990s, one of the few places that hasn't changed since the Occupation.  Upper-class Muslim women adore Magna Plaza.  Wandering the expensive stores gives them some semblance of independence. 

Three stories of orange and white colonnades, around a sky-lit atrium.  The light is lemony, the air perfumed and buoyant. 

It is Jannah, the Muslim paradise, a garden of perpetual bliss, with fountains scented with camphor or ginger, rivers of milk and honey, and fruit dripping from every tree, where angels stand by to wait on you in every corner, to clothe you in sumptuous robes, bracelets, and perfumes, and lead you to gold couches where you will partake in exquisite banquets served in priceless vessels by immortal youths. 

Not quite, but as close as a mall can get.

Salima and Joury ride up and down the escalators, wandering around, enjoying the mild chatter of sales clerks and affluent customers.  They finally enter a store that used to be an Apple store. 

Salima's hands dance over all the fabrics.  Who knew black could have so many colors and textures?  Abayas
and burkas
are black.  Headscarves
come in many colors, squares and rectangles, nothing too flashy.  Face veils are black, some nearly sheer, others with silver beads that glitter around the face.  Trying to be sexy.

In a way, Salima finds it exciting, as if she were joining a secret society.

She tries on one that isn't too expensive.  “That one makes you look fat,” says Joury, joking.  Salima buys it, with a veil. 

Her excitement lasts until she walks out of the store. 

She sucks furiously at the cloth over her mouth, gasping for air.  She can't breathe  The air has no oxygen.  Her face becomes hot and moist from trapped moisture.  Her peripheral vision is gone, and it is hard to turn her head.  She panics.  Half of her senses seem to have been shut down.  H
er heart thumps loudly.

S
uddenly the world seems like a very scary place.  Two dimensional.  It seems as if she can only catch snapshots of the world, passing quickly before her eyes.  She stumbles along the brick sidewalk, her burka catching on bicycles and bushes, bumping into people—“Hey watch where you're going!”—snagging on a million things.

She gathers up her burka
and takes off running. 

“Salima, stop!” calls Joury  “You're not supposed to run!”  Joury chases her all the way back to her house.  She finds Salima panting on a chair, weeping, her new burka wadded up on the floor.

“I can't do it!  I'm going to cut my hair and dress like a boy.  This is horrible!”

“It'll be okay.  You'll get used to it.  You only have to wear it when you go outside.  Think of it this way.  No one knows who you are.”

Her tears stop abruptly, in sudden revelation.  “Like the mask of Zorro?”

“Yeah.”

“The mask of Zorro,” she repeats, imagining all the possibilities.

I Kissed a Girl

“Come on, Salima.  Don't be a pill.  Let's have some fun.”  Joury tugs Salima down the street.  She stumbles after, wary and excited.

Parties are illegal.  Music CDs are illegal, booze is illegal, mixing with the opposite sex is illegal, going unveiled is illegal.  Dancing is illegal.  Playing video games is illegal.  Playing cards is illegal.  Spin the Bottle is illegal. 

And kissing boys is definitely illegal.

“Come on, Salima.  Don't you want to live before you die?”

It is easy for Salima to sneak out of her house and meet Joury and Lamya.  All three pile into a van driven by a boy Salima has never seen before.  “Don't worry so much, Salima!” whispers Joury hotly.  While the van bumps along, Joury and Lamya change their shoes to high heels and put on lipstick. 

A wild nervous energy runs through Joury, on the edge of hysteria.  Almost as if she were on drugs.  But there are no drugs in Amsterdam anymore. 
Salima has never seen Joury look so feverish, so wild. 

Joury's idea of fun is anything that defies her parents and their notions of respectable behavior. 
At the mosque, Joury mouthes nonsense words during the prayers, and when she prostrates herself on her prayer rug, she contorts her face to make Salima laugh.  She tells Salima stories of how she and some friends put on their burkas without clothes underneath, and parade through the city, casting come hither glances at young men.  It gives them a thrill.

Salima is astonished—frightened—by her brazenness.  It seems so dangerous, even if her father does sit on the Islamic Council. 

On the other hand, Joury is cool.  Pretty, popular, funny, and wild.  All the girls fall under her spell.

They drive over to Nassaukade, down Singelgracht, past Vondelpark, past Museumplein, to the Oud Zuid.  Expensive stately brick mansions line wide canals with large grassy banks.  Fifteen-foot laurel hedges, tile roofs, and fountains.

The van stops at a mansion
on Jan Van Goyenkade.  It is a massive modern concrete building, faced in green slate with copper banisters and trim.  The roof is copper, mottled green with patina.  A modern interpretation of a Scottish castle.  Enormous weeping willows surround a circular driveway.  Like the other mansions nearby, they rent all of the docking spots in front of their house so the canal appears empty. 

“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.