Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) Read online

  AMSTERDAM 2020

  a novel

  by Ruth Francisco

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2015 by Ruth Francisco

  All rights reserved

  Also by Ruth Francisco

  Camp Sunshine

  Sunshine Highway

  Amsterdam 2012

  Primal Wound

  The Pigtailed Heart

  Hungry Moon

  The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

  Good Morning, Darkness

  Confessions of a Deathmaiden

  For children

  Buster in Venice

  PART 1

  One, March 2020

  Invisible Women

  Late morning in Amsterdam. On the edge of the IJ.

  A moist gray mesh hangs in the air, the temperature is in the low fifties. I stand gazing out at the black water, watching steady ponderous clouds roll in from the IJsselmeer.

  I close my eyes and listen to the gulls, to the women haggling with the fish monger, to the slapping of waves against the boats and the canal walls. I feel a sudden vertigo, and imagine I feel the earth turning to the west, spinning in reverse. As if time were going backwards.

  Longing and memory will not reverse time. I know that. Still, I look for answers. Something to explain why I stand in a modern city dressed head-to-toe in black, face covered except for my eyes. Why none of the shoppers scurrying past chatter on cellphones, why no airplanes whiz overhead, why no one texts while standing in line, why the coffee houses are closed, why soldiers, dressed in gray Islamic Republic of Holland uniforms, carry Kalashnikov rifles, manufactured in Croatia. Why they stand on every corner. Watching us women. Eying us with disdain and curiosity.

  Every morning barges come up the IJ loaded with fish and vegetables. The largest fresh food market is here on the docks, close to where the NEMO Science Center used to be. Tour boats have been replaced by fishing trawlers laden with freshwater fish from the Markermeer and IJsselmeer, and saltwater fish brought in from the North Sea. Smaller boats bring vegetables and cheese from Friesland. Women gather at the docks, dragging wire carts to buy whatever they need. Not whatever they need—whatever they can afford. They struggle to find their purses under their cloaks, struggle to see the correct currency through the fabric over their faces, struggle to keep their flowing garments from getting caught under wheels and feet.

  The cloaks take all grace out of the female form. We pass by in our abayas and burkas, indistinguishable blobs. Sexless and invisible.

  We like it like that.

  No, that isn't true. We don't like it. Not one bit. But let's say it has its advantages.

  I sidle up to a woman somewhat taller than me, in line for fresh herring. As I make room in my basket, I casually flip back the edge of my abaya to reveal the pink cuff of my jersey underneath, quickly pulling it down again. She steps on my foot, lifting the edge of her burka as she apologizes. I look down. Her sock is pink.

  “Lina,” I say.

  “Rosalie,” she says.

  Cloaks of Obscurity

  Soon after the Occupation began, the Islamic Council passed strict laws concerning women's clothing. We learned to wear the hijab, or headscarf, required of all females over the age of five. We learned to wear the niqab, a veil over the head and face with a slit for the eyes. After puberty, all females must cover their hair and faces in public, and when in the presence of a male who is not a relative. We learned to wear the burka, a billowy tent that covers all of a woman's body, sometimes including the eyes, which are covered with a mesh screen. We learned to wear the abaya, a cloak worn over our clothes in public, which covers the head and shoulders, and goes all the way to the ground, worn with a veil. But a woman cannot ride a bike in any of these costumes, so the Islamic Council allows the shalwar kameez, loose black trousers that are worn with a long black tunic and niqab.

  The Islamic Council's intention is clear. To repress women, to make them fully aware they are slaves, to remind them they have no rights other than those granted by the Islamic Authority and the males in their lives. Covered up and hindered. Erased. Blotted out, no longer temptations. No longer threats.

  Yet we have adopted the abaya and the burka for our own uses.

  What the Islamic Council does not realize is that it has sanctioned the best possible way to form organized resistance.

  In plain sight, invisible women scamper around the city and country, delivering messages, secreting out refugees, hiding bombs, guns, and documents under their burkas. No male dares stop a woman and ask her to show her face or reveal what lies under her voluminous black garments.

  Men, too, wear the burka, pretending to be women while they trade contraband on the black market. It makes me laugh. The Islamic Council never seems to question why so many more women are out and about during the day than men. Perhaps they imagine all the men are in the mosques praying.

  Thus, the greatest symbol of our repression has become our greatest asset.

  Hide and Seek is no longer a children's game.

  The Assignment

  Two soldiers step closer to the women, peering over our shoulders. As if looking for something, their grips tighten on their machine guns. Curious to see if there are oysters today? Or fresh eel? Perhaps they have received a tip about someone smuggling in banned products. Maybe they hope to snag a bottle of Akvavit for later.

  Everyone breaks the law nowadays. Even those who enforce the law. Especially them.

  I sense something gray and ominous wash over me, like a heavy cloud of poison gas, drifting from a crop duster. I turn and see a black Mercedes creeping around the edge of the market. The mutaween, the religious police, ready to arrest any woman for even the slightest infraction—too much hair showing under her headscarf, touching a man who is not a relation, wearing shoes with too much heel. Looking too boldly as they pass. Wearing mascara and eyeliner. They will even arrest you for running. A woman must never bring attention to herself.

  My new friend and I shuffle away from the line toward the edge of the dock. Small empty fishing boats bang against the pilings.

  “How many this time?” I ask.

  “Four,” replies Rosalie. “A couple with two daughters, eight and five.”

  I nod. Eight is when the Islamic Council has decided all girls should be circumcised. Many parents try to hide their daughters. Or flee.

  “They are Christians,” Rosalie adds, “from Syria.”

  I nod again. “Shouldn't we break them up? It's less risky.”

  “No. It's important to keep families together.”

  I have been told that Rosalie and her family came as refugees to Holland in 2005, leaving their extended family in Sudan. Most who stayed died in sectarian fighting. She knows about families and war. “What's the plan?”

  Rosalie flicks imaginary lint off my shoulder, leaning in close. “Meet them on Waalseilandsgracht by the bridge at ten PM. They will be coming on a herring boat. Pick them up and take them north to Enkhuizen. Someone will meet you by the shore in a trawler.”

  “Do I go with them?”

  “Not this time. As soon as they land in Urk, someone will pick them up and take them to Creil.”

  Creil lies in a farming region northeast from Amsterdam, across the IJsselmeer. A neat little town of trim brick houses with lace curtains. It would be faster to go by land over one of the dikes that span the sea, the A7 in the North over the Afsluitdijk, or th
e N302 over the Houtribdijk further south, but both are heavily guarded. The twenty mile boat ride takes ninety minutes.

  “How did the refugees come?” I ask, glimpsing over Rosalie's shoulder. An IRH soldier has stopped a shopper and is going through her bag. We are still clear.

  “Across the German border in the South. They made it on foot to Nijmegen, then on barge to Utrecht.”

  “They took the Varken Weg?”

  “Yes.”

  Before the Occupation, The Netherlands, a country of 17 million people, had a population of about 25 million pigs. Europe’s leading exporter of pork and pork products. Huge hog farms, each with 10,000 or more pigs, covered southeastern Holland in an area near the German border known as De Peel.

  It was more densely populated with pigs than anywhere else on the planet.

  When the Islamic Council banned the export and raising of pigs, and ordered farmers to destroy their herds, the farmers cleverly buried the pigs in a two-hundred yard strip over their lands. They posted signs with pink pigs that read “Varken Begraven” every hundred feet. Buried Pigs. Muslims will not step foot there.

  What the Islamic Council didn't realize was the pig cemeteries create a road connecting towns in The Netherlands to Belgium and Germany. The Dutch use the Varken Weg, the Pig Road, to move undetected through fields and checkpoints.

  Perhaps the most brilliant and successful plan of the Resistance.

  Nature has quickly reclaimed the untended land. In eight years, it has become an area of dense scrub and young trees. Birch, English oak, European beech, sycamore, Norway maple, and Scots pine shade a narrow path that runs down the middle. The woods are full of escaped pigs, which have, in one generation, devolved into huge long-tusked brindle boar. No one knows where they came from, but they guard their narrow forest with porcine ferocity. Sometimes they trample the camps of IRH soldiers nearby.

  The boar are not members of the Resistance. Not really, although I like to think of them as our allies. The boar are merely hungry.

  “The family will rest on an abandoned pig farm in Creil for a week,” Rosalie continues. “Another group will take them to Delfzijl, then smuggle them onto a fishing trawler across the North Sea to Esbjerg.”

  Abandoned pig factories and barns provide a network of safe houses, where people can rest before moving on. The IRH soldiers won't come near the old swine yards—as if afraid of contagion, as if pig's blood might seep onto their skin, banning them from heaven. It helps us to think of them as silly and fearful. It takes away some of their power.

  “Any questions?” asks Rosalie.

  My eyes drift across the gray water to the mosque at the edge of Osterdokseiland, where the main library, Centrale Bibliotheek Amsterdam, used to be. A new minaret of stainless steel thrusts up at the gloomy sky. “No.”

  I point to a crate of wriggling gray fish being hoisted off a fishing boat. “The mackerel is reasonably priced today.”

  “It is,” Rosalie says, “but I don't have a coupon.”

  “Here, take mine. I'm not in the mood for fish.”

  Her long fingers gratefully accept the coupon.

  I look down the row of black burkas, hands darting out with money and coupons, accepting newspaper-wrapped fish. Several boats down, two IRH soldiers push their way on board, and start throwing crates around. We call them Kroots, beets, because of the red turbans they wear. They've caught the scent of contraband. The fisherman protests, and gets a rifle butt smacked across his face.

  Black robes scatter like armies of fiddler crabs.

  I turn to Rosalie. “You've never seen me.”

  “You've never seen me,” she replies.

  I slip down the boardwalk and melt into the crowd.

  Pim

  It takes me forty minutes to walk through the medieval center of the city to Lindengracht where Pim lives. I bend my head towards the ground, walking quickly, with a sense of purpose. It is best not to be noticed. I do not glance up at passersby. Or pause to admire the stillness of the canals. The pink hollyhocks growing up a brick wall.

  The streets are patrolled by mutaween, IRH soldiers, and a citizen militia who ride around in black Toyotas, toting AK-47s. They call themselves Bloed van God, the Blood of God. They make sure women wear their veils properly, do not wear makeup, do not walk in public with men who are not relatives or their husbands. They measure men's beards to make sure they are the proper length—a single clenched fist.

  I see new posters plastered on the bus shelters: a smiling bearded man with his burka-clad wife, a daughter in a headscarf, and a son, pushed in front because he's special. The perfect family. We assume the wife is smiling, too. Who knows? But her happiness doesn't matter. The caption reads: COMMUNITY, CHARITY, PROSPERITY. BE A GOOD MUSLIM. Islamic Propaganda designed to encourage the Dutch to become good citizens of the Islamic Republic of Holland.

  A bus stops, and I impulsively hop on through the rear door and sit in the back seats allocated to women. I get off in two stops. No one follows.

  I turn onto Lindengracht, a filled-in canal on the east side of the Jordan District.

  Pim lives above a butcher shop. In the ground floor window hang chickens and goats, stripped of their skin. A line of women in black snakes out the door. Even from the sidewalk, it smells of fresh blood. I know he chose the place figuring it was safe to operate over a halal meat shop, with people coming and going, no one wanting to stay long. The best hiding spots are in plain sight. Still, I wonder how he can stand it.

  I knock twice, pause, three times quickly, then two bangs. Someone I don't recognize opens the door. For a moment I am terrified.

  “As-salam alaykum,” I say, head bowed.

  “Salam yourself,” he says gruffly. “Pim is upstairs.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief, my face hot under my veil.

  Just last month I went to deliver new IDs and food coupons to two Internet hackers who lived in a house in Oud Zuid, south of Vondelpark. When I knocked, two Landweer answered the door. The Landweer are a paramilitary force set up by the Islamic Council to fight the Resistance. Like Hitler's Gestapo. They wear dark blue uniforms and caps, with light blue shirts. Everyone is frightened of them. Without missing a beat, I handed them a jihad recruiting flier, and started an amiable conversation, telling them how I had tried to get the owner of the house to come to Friday prayer, but had not been successful. The Landweer were predictably annoyed. They have astonishingly little interest in the faith they so happily kill and torture for. They told me no one was at home, and to go on my way. The two hackers were executed at Chop-Chop Square the following Friday.

  I try hard not to think of our losses. There are too many.

  I climb the stairs and find Pim working with tweezers on a listening device, his blond hair hanging over his eyes, his nimble fingers quickly knitting his magic. He is wearing corduroy pants and a shirt patched at the elbows with red thread.

  “Lina! Come in. Hoe gaat het?”

  “How did you know it was me?” I pull off my hijab and shake out my curly dark hair.

  “You really aren't invisible, you know. You take the stairs two at a time. I don't know how you can do it in that black sack.”

  I laugh.

  Pim and I are good friends. My heart's brother, I would do anything for him. He’s cute and funny, and I know he'd like to be more than friends. Perhaps I would like that, too. But none of us can risk romance.

  Amiable and soft-hearted, he has an irrepressible talent for looking on the bright side of things. Once, before the ban on cafés, Pim and some friends were sitting on a terrace drinking beer, when a bomb went off in the canal, sending a geyser over the tables. When he retells the story, he recalls the sudden shower as, “astonishingly refreshing,” and says the evening of mortar shells and tracers, “added a festive air to our little party.” He cannot be flustered.

  He always makes me feel things aren't as bad as I know them to be.

  Before the Occupation, Pim was an exterminator of h
ousehold pests—rats, mice, roaches—of which any city built on water has plenty. He knows intimately all the nooks and crannies of Amsterdam—abandoned warehouses, back storerooms, little houses tucked away in hidden cull-due-sacs—which come in handy in his new line of work. Everyone comes to him for favors. A garage to hide a car, a tank of airplane fuel or gasoline, he'll find it. He can get you a Genoa salami or bottle of whiskey you might need to bribe an official.

  He has never gotten caught. Not yet, anyway. His freckled Frisian farm boy good looks make him appear above deception, and like me, he has a good nose for danger.

  “Who's your new butler?” I ask.

  “Oh, him? That's Alfons, a bomb maker from Sweden. He was dropped in last week. I'm helping him. What's up?”

  I'm dying to know more, but I am in a hurry. I tell Pim I need a van for tonight. “Only for three hours. I have a package to pick up.”

  “I can get you a newspaper van—” he turns off the high intensity work light and pushes back from the table “—if you can get it back to De Waarheid by midnight, so they can load up for delivery.”

  “I just pull into the lot?”

  “Yup. We have two guys on the loading dock. They sometimes add fliers to the papers,” he adds, grinning.

  “I always wondered how those got in there.” The Islamic Council goes crazy whenever they discover retractions have been delivered with their propaganda rags. Printed on pink newsprint, the fliers tell readers what's really going on. So far, the Islamic Council hasn't caught anyone.

  “Just be sure to leave a full tank,” says Pim.

  “No problem.” It's my turn to smirk. I have my own contacts for gasoline. “One other thing.”

  “What?” Pim arches an eyebrow and his mouth pouts. “Oh—” he slumps when he guesses, in mock despair “—you need a driver.”

  “Yes,” I say smiling. Pim may hem and haw, and make any number of excuses, but I know eventually he'll agree to go with me. I need him because women aren't allowed to drive.