Tiny Dancer (11 page)

In his last moments with Zubaida, he could see her fear and uncertainty so clearly in her eyes, but at the same time he saw that her usual air of steady calmness was much stronger, now. Fire couldn’t kill her; neither would the Others. She would soak up whatever Western magic that Dr. Peter and his staff performed for her, then return back home and grow up to a life that might come close to something normal. Surely there would be no decent arranged marriage for her, since Dr. Peter made it clear that they could never perfectly restore her features. As damaged goods, she would most likely have to work all her life, probably at some form of manual labor. So it was good that she would now have both hands and that at least her face wouldn’t scare people and draw crowds.

Hasan was not from a culture that made him feel ashamed for crying in front of every one of the Americans who were there to help him and Zubaida while he bid them goodbye.

Then with a final hug and a few whispered words of reassurance to his daughter, he went away with Dr. Mike and another translator to begin the seventeen hour series of flights back home.

For Zubaida, the crash back to cold earth came within hours after her father left, just before she was released to go recuperate with her host family. With all the uncertainty stretching out ahead of her, she was tempted to seize on an overly rosy view of things to make herself feel safe. After all, she had very little post-operative pain, and although the long term surgical process had been explained to her, when she saw her restored features in the mirror, she seized on the hope that the hard part was over—maybe the rest would simply involve taking a lot of medicine or something.

Denial and gravity are both invisible forces, equally strong. When Dr. Peter broke through hers and made it clear that while everything had gone very well, there were
still
all the other corrective procedures left to do, surgeries and recoveries over and over for many months yet to come—she felt like somebody pushed her off a cliff.

* * *

By the time that the second set of operations were completed, the first alarms were beginning to be raised by the charitable NGO regarding public knowledge about Zubaida’s case. Like Dr. Smith, they not only feared being swamped with desperate people and having their own system clogged by too many numbers, they worried over what sort of acceptable answer they could give irate applicants who might demand to know, “why so much for one girl?”

On June 22nd, Colonel Joe R. Schroeder at Army Central Command in Florida wrote to Colonel Robert Frame in Kabul trying to answer the question as well. He told him,
“This has been a wonderful collaboration of many people from widely varied backgrounds, pulling together toward a common goal. The girl’s plight was so compelling that it seemed to enlist all who saw her pictures.”
Schroeder also wrote to Peter Grossman: “
Some I have been told are critical that so much effort was expended on one little girl when there are so many other needy people. There are always critics and there are always people in great need. I am just thankful that we collectively did not turn a blind eye to one so hopeless and that we collectively could do something.”

Robert Frame knew what Schroeder was talking about, but he also realized that as true as the words were, they weren’t going to be enough to silence the kind of people who get high on righteous outrage. He wrote to Peter and Rebecca Grossman, who had also heard the question, “why so much for one child?” Like everybody else, they couldn’t deny that it was a natural concern and that some people—maybe a lot of people—were likely to find cause to object over Zubaida’s case.

They already knew that the only true answers anybody could give to the question “why Zubaida?” were: (a) because she happened to be there; (b) because the right other people also happened to be there; and (c) because, most of all, when it is not possible to save all of them, you do the next best thing and save them one at a time.

And somebody will either understand that or they won’t.

* * *

In spite of the experience that Mike Smith had already accumulated as a military physician living in Afghanistan, he still found that when he accompanied Mohammed Hasan on the long flight from Los Angeles back to that struggling country, the very act of walking off the plane at the end filled him with the sensation of stepping off a deep drop down into a powerfully different world.

The stepping off point from Planet West to Planet East began at the long final layover in Dubai, in the United Arab Republics. There the gaudy metropolis recently constructed over the historic city mixes with some of the most strange and ancient elements of Middle Eastern culture, swirling them among countless concrete and plaster constructs of the multi-billion dollar international establishment. There wasn’t much to appreciate here at the intersection of two vastly different cultures, since the sheer power of major oil money had already overwhelmed the core elements of the region. The resulting ambiance always stuck him as Las Vegas without the boobs.

The journey was completed and the door slammed behind them at the instant that they stepped off the plane in Kabul. There, the effects of fifteen years of internal chaos across the country were evident everywhere he looked. The airport was jammed to overflowing and ringing with the din of hundreds of shouting voices while huge crowds pushed and shoved for every square foot in the place. Guards repeatedly waded into squabbling knots of people just to get them to form into ragged lines.

The presence of all things American was long gone. All of the languages around him were
Arabic, Farsi, Pushto, Dari.
He heard no English in the clamor. Now it was Mohammed Hasan who was on home turf. He was the one with culture and language squarely on his side. Here, Dr. Mike Smith was merely one of the highly suspicious Western military whose value to the local population had yet to be proven. He knew that he and his few military escorts would be squashed like flies if a crowd chose to turn on them. He thought of the old punch-line, “
What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemo-Sabe?”

But Hasan’s reaction to their arrival surprised him. The man began to cry for his daughter, as if the arrival back into his familiar world somehow punctuated the fact that he had been left with no choice but to leave Zubaida behind.

For Mohammed Hasan, the reason for his heavy emotions were even simpler than that. There was no guaranteeing whether or not her body would adapt to all the surgeries she was yet to face, or if her strength could hold up under so many surgical assaults. At the same time, back in Afghanistan, the post-Taliban rebels now roamed a country where the only real law enforcement was in the few major cities. Hasan and the rest of the family had a host of their own potential dangers surrounding them. Common sense made it clear that there was a very good chance that, one way or the other, he had said good-bye to Zubaida for the last time.

He was provided with enough cash to get all the way back to Farah and still have enough left over to take care of the family’s basic needs for a couple of weeks while they figured out their next steps. They had already had a year to adjust to the lack of Zubaida’s help around the house with the chores. Now, however, dealing with his daughter’s absence would be much more like the way things would have been if she had not been able to shake off Death. That knowledge pushed his stretched emotions still farther.

Smith saw to it that Hasan made his next link of transportation to get all the way back out to Farah, hundreds of miles to the southwest. By the following day, he was already writing to Peter Grossman to remind him that he hoped to stay in the loop about Zubaida’s condition over time. He mentioned that he had already shown Zubaida’s before-and-after photos to a few colleagues, who were universally astonished, and he asked for Peter to forward one particular photo of Zubaida with her father. In it, she is giving him a radiant smile and their expressions seem to capture the heart of their relationship. The image offers something of an answer to the question of where he found the determination to carry out that long and expensive search for help.

Dr. Smith also told Peter and Rebecca about burly Special Forces types who looked over the photos and ended up beaming like kids.

* * *

Zubaida’s face-to-face confrontation with American life had been held in suspension while she was in the controlled environment of the hospital. Peter’s brother Jeff visited her and decorated her room with balloons and hearts, taking on the “Uncle Jeff” role with joy. His kindness coupled with that of the attentive staff at the center shielded her from some of the strangeness of her situation. But once she landed in the host family’s home, many of the very same measures that the family had taken in order to help Zubaida adjust seemed just as strange to her as the more American elements of the family’s life.

She could understand their language, but to her ears it was so heavily accented that while it could convey information, it offered no sense of comfort to her. Alone now in the host family’s house, her father’s absence suddenly became real to her. She felt the ice cold realization that he had not stepped away to do some errand; he had climbed back onto the big airplane and gone all the way home, a distance so far she could not comprehend it—to rejoin the rest of her family.

The cultural environment of her hosts’ home was strongly influenced by the mother’s Afghan heritage, but instead it seemed to be something of a living taunt: close enough to being familiar that it spoke to her, but strange enough to constantly remind her that she was alone in a place where everything was different, down to the tiniest details. The emptiness that she felt all around her seemed to mock her for the absence of any loved ones or anything truly familiar. .

Back at the hospital, the room may have been surrounded by the Others, but it was small and tightly controlled and closed away to outsiders so that she felt safe enough from the world there. And so far Dr. Peter had kept his promise about not hurting her. At least, there was some comfort when Dr. Peter was around, making the hospital more appealing for that reason, too.

Now she found herself trapped inside of the home of smiling strangers who seemed eager to be kind to her, but who spoke with such foreign accents and lived such American lives that they barely seemed real to her.

Suddenly the long course of treatments stretching in front of her reached into infinity. She realized that she couldn’t do it. Despite all of the strength she had been able to summon in order to survive long enough to reach this place, she now found herself empty of the power to endure another year of this strangeness. The “is, but is not” world of her hosts was a clear example of the kind of hospitality that is coin of the realm among the Afghan people. It should have warmed her heart. But the family’s environment was overwhelming, and the intended comforts were no more nourishing to her than lumps of wax that have been molded to look like pieces of fruit.

She was able to move her arms again, but she couldn’t do anything with them. She could walk, but there was nowhere to go without supervision. She could talk, but not to anyone she knew or to anyone her own age who spoke her language. She could eat, if they chose to bring her food, she could sleep, if they chose to allow her to sleep, but there was practically nothing that she could do herself.

The wide mood swings started in again, the way that they did during the first weeks after the fire. She found herself feeling all right while she was occupied with some little thing, but then a moment of the smallest frustration would make all the poison come blasting out of her, the same way that her blackened flesh had once forced screams of pain from her throat. Now the pain came in the form of frustration at her state of utter helplessness and the sense of isolation, mixed with a sick dread of suspicion that this chain of events would not be done with her until her entire life was cut up into tiny bits and scattered to the wind.

The only way to exert her will upon the world was with shrieking outbursts of temper. She learned that the sudden emotion outbursts struck most people so hard that they frequently did whatever it was that she wanted at the moment, just to make her stop. The power was similar to that of an infant lying in a crib, trying to get attention, and her will to live had already proven itself ready to grasp at anything that might help her.

While the slow summer days drifted by, whether she was in her isolation in the host family’s home or in their structured outings among the Others, Zubaida found that even this humble form of infantile power was better than having none and submitting to being an invisible pawn among these strangers.

Once again, it was good to make them see her.

And so it was a familiar thing to Zubaida when the host parents began to step away into a corner and discuss her in whispers. She sometimes managed to catch enough that she felt like she had a pretty clear idea of what was going on. She recognized it from the whispered conversations of desperation that she had often heard from her mother and father back when all she could do was to lie in her burn bed, trying to hold still, trying not to cry out and to keep silent, and not being able to do any of it.

It was clear to her; they were asking themselves how badly the accident had damaged her—and whether it might even have affected her mind.

They were wondering if she was crazy.

* * *

By July 3rd of 2002, Zubaida had completed three weeks of recovery following her first two sets of operations. So early that morning, she was prepped for her third round of surgery, then placed under anesthesia while Peter Grossman and his team prepared to take her the next step.