"But . . . please, sir . . . "
Being inside the walls of her own home, Petra was uncovered. Neither she, nor her mother, had anticipated the arrival of the taxman today. Indeed, they'd all been so distraught and overworked with the gathering of the very skimpy harvest, they'd not thought of much of anything but how they were going to eke out an existence over the winter. They had to hope others had had better luck this year. If it was a question of letting the Nazrani farmers eat, or taking the food to feed their own, the masters had no compunction about letting filthy Nazrani starve.
Though only nine, and though she feared hunger as much as the next, Petra was ashamed to see her father beg. She was ashamed of his dhimmi status, now that she'd grown and learned enough to understand what that meant. She was ashamed of her people who submitted to this humiliation. And, when the tax gatherer looked over at her—more accurately, so she saw, looked her over—she was ashamed of herself. She remembered something Sister Margerete had told her class:
"Mohammad consummated his marriage with his favorite wife, Aisha, when she was nine years old."
Petra hadn't quite understood what "consummated" meant.
"Mark down the boy for gathering to the janissaries," Rashid told the chief of his four guards. "Take the girl now.
"And next year, you filthy swine, when I come for our taxes and demand silver, you had best give me gold or you'll see yourselves joining your daughter on the auction block."
One of Rashid's guards went to Petra. He took handcuffs and a chain from a pouch that hung at his side. The cuffs he ratcheted shut around her wrists, tightly enough to make her wince. The chain he attached to the cuffs.
Hans lunged. "Get your hands off my sister!"
The guard with Petra ignored the boy; that's what the other guard was for. That other guard caught Hans halfway through his lunge, wrapping one arm around the boy's waist. He then put Hans' feet back on the floor, stood and slapped him across the face several times, hard enough to stun and draw blood. The guard then knocked the boy down as his mother wailed and his stoop-shouldered father hung his head in helpless shame.
Petra, who had begun to cry when the cuffs were put on her, screamed when she saw her brother hurt. A slap from Rashid—hard enough to hurt without damaging the merchandise—quieted her.
She was sobbing as they led her away for her first ride in an automobile.
A crowd gathered outside the Minden's hovel, curious but too frightened to help. After all, what help could they give in a country no longer their own?
Interlude
Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,
9 April, 2003
"No blood for oil! No blood for oil!"
It wasn't a huge crowd, gathered under the crooked-topped tower that was the town's most well-known symbol and landmark. No larger than one might expect in a small city like Kitzingen, the crowd, a mixture of Germans and Moslem guest workers and residents, legal or otherwise, chanted, "No to war . . . no war for oil . . ."
Of the Germans, some were principled pacifists, some leftists of various stripes. Some were just young boys gravitating to young girls. Of the Moslems, few if any had any connection to terrorism. They did, of course, have some connection to their fellow Moslems, wherever they might live. And some of those fellow Moslems had been and were plainly on the target list for the armed forces of the United States.
The television cameras ate it up.
The demonstrators had been more enthusiastic earlier in the year, back when it had still seemed possible to dissuade the United States from the illegal, immoral, imperialist venture its despised President seemed set on. That possibility had proved illusory.
Today was a particularly unpleasant one for them as all the newspapers were carrying photographs of the American military helping a less passive crowd in Baghdad pull down a giant statue of the dictator, Saddam Hussein. Most of the crowd found the pictures, as they found the easy American success and the Iraqis' rapturous welcome, "annoying."
Gabrielle von Minden was annoyed, certainly. She stood in the snowy cold of an early German spring holding a protest sign. It wasn't the cold that annoyed her though. Rather, like the rest of the crowd, what annoyed, or infuriated, was that their best hopes for an Anglo- American defeat in Iraq had been blighted. It was just so . . . unfair. Bastard Americans. How she hated those arrogant bastards.
No, that's not true, she corrected herself. I hate their government and the power they wield. The Americans I've known, even the soldiers, were mostly pretty nice people. I mustn't forget that; it is a government and a set of policies I loathe. I must not ever let myself begin to loathe an entire people.
That said, or thought, Gabrielle didn't feel the need for restraint in her message of protest. Lifting her sign high and waving it, she increased the volume of her chant, "Kein Blut für Oel. Kein Blut für Oel. Kein Blut . . . "