Crowds hiving the streets of refugee camps in Lebanon the West Bank waving Palestinian flags distributing sweets bull’s-eye America and no Rambo to save the day this time.
Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
Wassenaar, Theo’s boyhood neighborhood: a hushed cosmos of rolling lawns, white villas, ambassadorial residences, gravel drives, thatched roofs, stone lanterns, porcelain tea cups, good books, sturdy gates.
Your own sister.
Émile Zola once proclaimed.
Pink ribbons. Blond pigtails.
An HS2000 the Turk teen selling it to you referring to the merchandise as.
Look: Monsieur Vincent is approaching the inn, evening sky gyring purple, black, and yelloworange, wobbly buildings blousing at him.
Theo’s clan distended with socialists trailing aristocratic pedigrees.
You spoke for five minutes it was a relatively simple exchange.
Dear Theo: She has never seen what is good, and so how can she be that? — Undoingly V.
Better this by far, he supposes, than the other thing.
They told you to meet him in Vondelpark near the bridge leading to the gazebo on the small island in the middle of the pond.
Monsieur Vincent shuffling, bowed unremarkably, palming his upper abdomen as if with niggling heartburn.
Theo’s uncle refused to sign the loyalty oath required by the Nazis during the War, joined the Resistance, forged papers, hid Jews, and, days before the War’s conclusion, was executed among the lunar dunes near the North Sea.
Polymer-framed magazine-fed striker-fired he explained with obvious pride.
The Ravoux family, proprietors, relaxing over a bottle of Merlot on their café terrace after the weekend’s hustle, fixes on him faltering up the street.
Theo’s grandfather tossed into a concentration camp for working on an underground newspaper while abetting Jews, and his instinctive reaction upon being released in 1944: to resume his illegal activities straightaway.
Cost-effective reliable innovative.
Madame Ravoux half-rising from her wicker chair.
How, Sunday mornings, Theo’s family parked around the living-room fireplace to read aloud, not from the Bible, but from Voltaire.
Originally used by law enforcement in Croatia.
Dear Theo: It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day. —V., undone
Jellyfish music: the stuff you hear everywhere these days.
A product you can trust.
Monsieur Vincent, she saying, suspended above her seat, we were anxious. We are happy to see you return. Have you perhaps had some sort of difficulty?
How they tuned in at 9:45 a. m. to the radio station featuring a member from the Society of Humanists discussing how one might live a spiritual life sans the dual barbiturates of God and His Chump Off The Old Blank.
Allah Akbar the Turk teen saying before mixing among other pedestrians along the path and evaporating.
No, I heard Monsieur Vincent’s voice responding, but I have—
Jellyfish music, and, next, lung-tensingly: Arcade Fire.
Carpet pilot.
But I have—
Theo’s article for The Healthy Smoker this morning will call attention to a bracing—
Pube face dune coon.
I have—
— a bracing statistic: by 2015, fifty-two percent of Amsterdam’s population will be of foreign origin, the majority Muslim.
Papa Ganoush.
Monsieur Vincent was unable to introduce a period to his sentence-in-progress.
The same being the fate for Europe in general. 2015.
Waiting in the doorway thinking about how you already knew what you were going to write before you began how it spilled from the very center of your Mohammedness.
How I sometimes believed that I sometimes believed.
All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, Voltaire penning, but no one is born with a knowledge of God.
Your sister’s lower lip puffing.
Monsieur Vincent crossed the hall laboriously, laboriously commenced his climb to his room.
Theo’s article will argue no religion or minority should be immune to censure or ridicule.
Blood smear or lipstick smear it was difficult to tell which in the flickery late-night streetlights.
The golden age has not passed, Signac once observing as we explored the carcass of the Roman amphitheatre in Arles. It lies in the future.
Why should we accept such racist notions as the one presuming Westerners are the only people capable of dissenting from their traditions, Muslims somehow too backward to think for themselves?
Graping like a tick feeding on the corner of her mouth.
The Potato Eaters: I sometimes judged that I had accomplished so much.
Noticing how the authorities have failed to—
9mm.
I sometimes judged that I hadn’t.
— have failed to confront the Islamic danger here, Ayaan saying, glass of wine poised before her lips, helps me better understand, I think, why so many Dutch collaborated with the Nazis.
The inside measurement of the gun barrel.
Artist being, not a profession, but a condition.
Jarring blue eyes.
Open letter to Hirsi Ali you wrote in the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful—
The peasant family — three women, two men — sitting around a table in a murky room lit only by a single overhead lamp, everything thick-brushed bistre and bitumen highlighted with a weird soapy green.
Lieuwe balled up in bed, delighted—
Shedding your Western clothes your faithless friends.
Noses and knuckles knobby as the tubers the peasants are eating.
You Europeans do not appreciate what you have, she saying softly. This is your real weakness.
There is no aggression except against the aggressors.
Skin the color of dusty unpeeled potatoes.
You seem incapable of asking yourselves if tolerance has limits, and, if so, what those limits might look like.
Dear Mrs. Hirsi Ali since your appearance in the Dutch political arena you have been constantly busy criticizing Muslims you are not the first not the last to have joined the crusade against us.