Michael starts in talking about how Muslims will make up a majority in Europe by 2050. “It's simply a matter of demographics. For a culture to sustain itself, the fertility rate must be 2.11. Look at Europe. France has a fertility rate of 1.8, England 1.6, Greece, 1.3, Germany 1.3 Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1. With a fertility rate lower than 1.3, it is impossible to reverse a population decline. But the average fertility rate among Muslims is 8.1. In the Netherlands and Belgium, fifty percent of the babies born are Muslim. The fifty-two million Muslims now in Euope will fuck their way to a Muslim continent. I'm not saying this to be provocative. It's just the truth. In a few decades, Europe will be Muslim.”
His diatribe just sits there for a few moments, until Diane says, “Did you know that 22 percent of all Nobel Laureates are Jews, but represent only 0.2 percent of the world population? Muslims, on the other hand, won only 0.01 percent of the Nobel prizes, yet represent 23 percent of the world population.”
“You are a racist,” says Michael.
“I merely stated a fact,” she says, standing, tilting her chin upward. “Besides, Islam is not a race.” She flips her very pretty blond hair, picks up her tray, and saunters to a table of girls.
Kazan feels Laszlo's body tense as the boys turn their attention to him, the only Jew around right now.
Laszlo eats slowly, deliberately, changing the grip on his fork. “She has a point,” he says. “Maybe if they spent less time defending their invisible friend, their minds would have room for creative and scientific exploration.
Absolutely the wrong thing to say to these two. But it does make them get up and switch tables.
Around midnight, Kazan notices Laszlo hasn't come to bed. He climbs out of bed and wanders the corridors of the dormitory, hoping to find him in one of the lounges. He walks past the resident, who is watching television in his room, and down the stairs into the quad.
Flood lights on the main villa makes it look like a wedding cake among the dark hills. The cold air stings his lungs. His thick socks freeze instantly on the cold ground.
Laszlo sits in a snowbank, face bloodied, staring up at the stars. He doesn't respond when Kazan calls his name.
Kazan kneels beside him, and sees he is conscious. He is shivering, his lips gray. “You making snow angels? I thought you didn't believe in them.”
Laszlo doesn't even blink.
“Com'on. You've got to get up. You can't stay here all night.” Kazan takes his hands, pulls him up, and hauls him upstairs to bed.
“You know those assholes write poetry?” Laszlo whispers, as Kazan rolls him onto his bed. “They're all into it. They have competitions. They quote it to each other, tears in their eyes. All about 'the blaze of truth,' and 'the land of glory has shed its humiliation, and put on the rainment of splendor.' They love that word rainment. Poetry and fucking videos of beheadings. Osama bin Laden wrote like a thousand poems.”
“I didn't know that.” Kazan takes off his shoes and tucks him in. He doesn't think Laszlo really means to equate Michael and Khalid with bin Laden. He's just blowing off steam.
Laszlo doesn't inform on Michael and Khalid, and refuses to let Kazan say anything. But somehow everyone knows. They look at his black eye and know. He becomes introverted, and more truculent, his comments so biting Kazan feels them pierce his skin. Kazan cracks jokes and tries to be funny. To jolt him out of his foul mood. Nothing gets through to him.
Part of him says that he doesn't have time to worry about Laszlo's mental health—he is studying hard for his International Baccalaureate diploma, and is worried his French isn't good enough—but he makes sure to spend at least an hour a day with him, hiking or studying together. He doesn't know what more he can do.
Finally he goes to Professor Heimlich and asks him to have a talk with Laszlo. Could he maybe ask the guidance counselor to call him in? “We know all about it,” Professor Heimlich says, patting Kazan on the shoulder. “Laszlo is getting the help he needs.”
“What help? What does that mean? Drugs?”
“I cannot discuss his situation with you, Kazan. You know that.”
“But he isn't getting any better. Please. He's my best friend. He's brilliant.”
“I'm quite aware how brilliant he is. He is dealing with some issues, some decisions he has to make. He has to make his own choices.”
“What choices? Why won't he talk to me about it?”
What Laszlo chooses to do is spend a good deal of his time at Volkshaus Pub, drinking beer and getting drunk. It doesn't take much for him. After one sip, his personality seems to change.
It worries Kazan. He thinks nothing in the world is worse than seeing a friend sink into despair and not be able to do something about it. He gets stomach cramps and tosses in bed, unable to sleep. He doesn't know what to do. He needs to study. His concentration is off. Exams are coming up.
The next afternoon during biology lab, Kazan takes an Ehrlenmeyer flask from the refrigerator, sprinkles several dozen cooled and dopey fruit flies onto a glass slide, eyes them under a microscope, and patiently separates the red-eyed fruit flies from the green, blue, and yellow. He counts, makes notation, then taps them into four separate flasks with bottoms smeared with fresh agar. He glances at Michael Chalhoub on the other side of the room, leans over to Laszlo, and whispers into his ear. Laszlo's lips twitch into a smirk.
Kazan lifts an Ehrlenmeyer flask by its narrow neck and taps the side. Red eyes, warming up, zip from one side to the other. The flask quietly disappears into his book bag.
Michael and Khalid spend their evenings in the Muslim Prayer Room talking with their friends. It is easy to sneak into their bedroom.
“Jesus, how long have you had these,” asks Laszlo, “they're like mush.”
“I got them from the kitchen composter.”
“The riper the better.”
“Get it on the wall all around the headboard, all down the side. That's good.”
“Let's do the bathroom, too.”
Laszlo laughs, and smears banana around the base of the toilet and around the mirror. The textured off-white walls barely show the mushy fruit.
Kazan then takes the Ehrlenmeyer flask from his bag, uncorks it, and shakes it over Michael's bed, and in the bathroom. They dash out of their room and close the door.
Michael's scream wakes them the next morning. Kazan bolts up and looks over at Laszlo who holds up a finger, signaling to wait. They don't want to be the first ones at the scene of the crime. More screams and curses. Laszlo grins, and the two of them get out of bed, bumping shoulders with other boys as they stumble into the hall, tugging on their pajamas.
Several dozen boys crowd outside Michael and Khalid's room—“Fucking fruitflies everywhere! Get them off me! Fuck! They're everywhere. Jesus Christ!”
“What happened?” asks Kazan.
“Chubby's B.O. is so bad he's got fruitflies.”
“Smells like garbage in here.”
“Smells like Chubby's farts.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” screams Michael, and the louder he curses, the more the boys laugh.
Kazan looks at Laszlo, who lifts his chin, then ambles back to their room to get dressed for breakfast.
It's the only thing anyone talks about. Bananas are a particularly popular breakfast item that morning.
“Have you heard of a Chia Pet?” Kazan tears off the top of a banana and takes a bite, watching across the refectory as Michael gets pelted with banana peels. “They were big in America in the 1990s. You put these tiny chia seeds in holes in a clay sculpture, spritz it with water, and the seeds spout and grow over night. You get like a furry green animal.”
Laszlo's eyes light up for the first time in a month. “Where do you get chia seeds?”
“Any healthfood store. They're supposed to be really good for you.”
“He'll have spies watching his room.”
Kazan thinks for a moment. “He takes his laptop to the library to do his homework, right?”
“Sure. He sit
s by the spiral staircase so he can oggle the girls walking up the stairs.”
“What a perv. We only need a second. I'll get one of the girls to ask him to help her with her homework.”
Kazan buys an eighth of a kilo of chia seeds at the healthfood store. While Heidi distracts Michael, Laszlo sprinkles chia seeds between the keys on Michael's laptop, lightly sprays the keyboard with water, and wipes off the keys.
The next day, Michael comes back from morning class to check his computer. “What the fuck? Who the fuck did this crap? Jesus!”
Again, the boys on the floor hear the commotion and, with tight smiles of anticipation, converge on Michael's room. They take one look at his computer and howl with laughter. His keyboard is covered with a pretty green lawn growing up between the keys.
“You learning to play golf on your keyboard, Chubby?”
“Haven't you heard of virtual golf?”
“The crud must grow from his filthy hands.”
“He never washes, you know. That's why he uses his left hand to wipe himself.”
Michael pushes them away as they take cellphone pictures and post them on Twitter. One picture is posted with a pithy haiku.
#
Michael Chalhoub and Khalid Chahine never discover who is pulling all these pranks. They become known to everyone as Chubby and Chin-Chin, which means penis in Japanese.
Their computers are favorite targets. Life-size photos of foreheads are pasted to the top of their laptops, so it looks as if someone is using their computers, throwing them into rages. They find faux milk spills made from dried glue on their keyboards. And faux poop. Khalid can't get any icons on his computer to work. Nobody can figure it out until he takes it to the dorm's computer geek. “You've been punked,” he says, smiling with admiration. “Someone took a screen shot of your windows home screen without any programs up, reset your background screen, and hid the task bar, rendering your home page inactive.” He fixes it in a minute.
Someone lays bubble-wrap on the floor of the dorm kitchen, so when Khalid sneaks in the dark for his 2 AM snack, he steps on it. Gunfire. His hollering wakes the whole floor, and they find him cringing under a table, waiting out the attack. Bubble-wrap shots become the latest fad, scaring students around every corner, until Headmaster Bollinger bans it.
One cold morning, Michael goes out to his car. Someone has covered it with wet cotton balls, which froze to the car overnight. He has to wait until afternoon when the temperature gets above freezing to take them off. Another time he goes to start his car, and it won't go anywhere, the back tires spinning. Someone had jacked up the back and slipped a cinderblock under the rear axle.
Laszlo's mood improves dramatically.
Kool-Aid
When Kazan arrives in Amsterdam for the first time to attend Faruk's engagement party, the first thing he notices isn't the charming tottering houses and canals, but all the women walking about in headscarves and burkas. It doesn't make sense to him. Why do they wear burkas in the freest country in the world?
He hasn't seen his family in five years. He enters a house crowded with relatives. Where did they all come from? Most he's never met—never knew existed—uncles and aunts and cousins, all who converge on the house, all who seem to know him, peppering him with compliments. He meets his two youngest sisters, Seda and Yasmin, four and two, for the first time.
The house is luxurious, a modern rectangle of glass and steal, a million miles from the dirt floor house he grew up in. Rabia and all of the other women seem perfectly at ease with the new luxury, wearing silk and gold bangles. Even Nil, his great aunt, an old woman who never wears anything but black, seems perfectly comfortable ordering about the servants, putting her feet up on damask ottomans, sipping tea.
They speak Turkish in the house, with some English tossed in. He hears no Dutch.
He is relieved to see his Uncle Hamza, a stocky, gregarious man whom Kazan hasn't seen since he was a boy. Uncle Hamza has always been much easier to talk to than his father. He has lived in Amsterdam for thirty-five years, the first in the family to embrace Western culture. His two daughters live in California. His wife died of breast cancer several years ago, and he has not remarried, but has a Swedish girlfriend. The girlfriend does not attend family gatherings.
Kazan takes a walk with Uncle Hamza around the Artis Zoo in Plantage. He asks him why the women in the family are so religious all of a sudden. “They never prayed five times a day or veiled.” His uncle laughs and gives Kazan a long passionate hug. “The women were very uncomfortable when they first moved here. They didn't know Dutch, their English was poor. Everything was strange and new to them. They felt isolated. Several Turkish women invited them to the local mosque, and they started going regularly. The Muslim women are very supportive of one another.”
“They drank the Kool-Aid,” says Kazan.
Uncle Hamza frowns. “You mustn't say things like that here, Kazan. The Muslims here are more conservative than in Turkey. If they heard you . . . it would be very bad for your father.”
“You've got to be kidding.”
“How old are you now?”
“Eighteen.”
“One more year of school?” Hamza shakes his head. “There is little kidding in the Muslim community here, unfortunately.”
“But why do they come then? It's like going to Italy and refusing to eat anything but Chinese food. You're starving yourself of the greatest thing the culture has to offer. In Italy, it's food. In Holland, it's freedom.”
“They have a liberal immigration policy.” Hamza stops to admire the egrets around a pond. “But it's not just that. Sometimes it takes being ripped away from your culture to really appreciate it.”
“You didn't.”
“No. I'm too much of a hedonist. But I understand why they change.” Kazan looks at him blankly, so he continues. “Take your mother, for instance. She gets off the plane from a rural village in Turkey and sees nothing but noise and confusion and machines she doesn't know how to work, a language she doesn't know. It must be overwhelming. She clings to something that gives order to her life, rules among the chaos. To her, modern civilization is a shower of broken glass. It is easier for her to reject it than try to adapt to it. She clings to traditions she understands. The repression of Islam makes her feel safe.”
“What does father think about it? He likes modernism. He wants me to be an engineer. Why would he let them go medieval.”
“He doesn't see it like that. Family has always been important to him—as long as it doesn't interfere with business. He lets the women do as they please, and is happy they're fitting in.”
“That's crazy.”
When they rejoin the family Kazan feels cut off. When he was sent to Berchtold Academy at twelve, his family was taken from him, and now it seems they are taken again by an infection of the mind. His sisters look miserable. Melis, who had been so spontaneous and loving, always singing and dancing, now shuffles, eyes to the floor.
And Faruk—how can he stand it? Back from America with an American degree, he works at an American company. He flounces around, the life of the party, flirting with the women. He goes to mosque with the rest of the men, listens to an imam who would have him thrown out if he admitted what he was.
What about his future wife, Basma? She's obviously not happy. Four years older than Faruk. She works at a television station, a liberal Muslim, clearly not comfortable among the gossipy religious women. Why would she marry him? It seems bizarre to Kazan—that even a successful Muslim career woman cannot make her own choices in marriage. Her father has decided for her.
Kazan watches Basma for the longest time, until she finally feels his gaze. They stare at one another—her look inscrutable, almost defiant—as if to say, “we all have to compromise.”
That evening Kazan goes to mosque with his father, uncles, and brother. The room is filled, several hundred men, kneeling, facing Mecca, reciting the salat. Prostrate, in positions of submission.
He kneels
beside Faruk, his face to the rug. Faruk's clear tenor voice nearly sings the prayers.
Kazan breaks out in a sweat.
#
After a two-week visit, Kazan spends the rest of the summer in Zürich, working for Uncle Osman, as he has every summer since he was thirteen. Gradually the work gets more interesting. He takes a class in crystallography, and spends four weeks as an apprentice for a diamond polisher in Antwerp. He flies to London, and takes a special tour to an unmarked diamond house on Charterhouse Street, which receives hundreds of thousands of carats every week, arriving in armored trucks by night and day. Only an elect group of diamond traders are even allowed entrance. Inside, rows upon rows of long tables fill the rooms, where several hundred men, huddled under flex lamps, with tweezers and loupes, sort through mounds of diamonds, carefully arranged on spotless white paper. It is the greatest diamond house on earth.
Kazan loves the travel and independence. He feels at home in Europe, more than he ever felt in Turkey. The bustling sophistication suits him. Crossing busy streets, ordering meals, riding elevators, slipping through and around the solid architecture. He likes the way people dress, how women return his glance, or even smile. He loves learning bits of history that go with the older buildings. He likes the cafés and nightclubs. He loves all the choices—every ethnic food, every style of dress, a mix of old and new. He loves the trains.
He has never been so happy. He can hardly wait to finish his last year at Berchtold, so he can do this all the time.
Yet, at times, a certain uneasiness makes his skin tingle. As if he has won a prize that he does not deserve.
A calf, fattened up for the slaughter.
25 May 2012
Headmaster Joël Bollinger calls the middle and high school students into the main auditorium to tell them what is happening. Most students already know, having followed it on Twitter and Facebook. Nearly everyone has seen news footage of the riots in Amsterdam, London, and Paris.
“I'm sure many of you have already heard about the terrorist attact in Amsterdam two days ago. Apparently, several Islamists, possibly of Moroccan descent, burst in on a private dinner party, and killed four actors from the Jenever Theater Troupe, a group of satrical comedians, who widely lampoon Islam. News of the event has caused panic in Amsterdam and in many European cities. Mosques and madrassahs have been torched, businesses broken into. Large groups, both Muslim and anti-Muslim, are protesting in the streets of our major European cities.
Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) Page 23
