Tiny Dancer (20 page)

All the old images of turmoil that had haunted her during the months of searching for medical help had returned in force. Tortured plots ran unfettered through her tortured mind about suffering family members, about her own post-burn agonies, and of wandering lost and alone in forbidding and dangerous place. She woke up feeling relieved that the night was over, even as she could feel that what her body needed was to lay back down and get some rest.

Even so, her new peer group at school remained so important to her—and the process of learning to speak English and to absorb the rudiments of reading and writing remained so exciting to her—that she was able to keep stuffing the turmoil down inside of herself. Everything usually went smoothly during school hours. It was only when she felt the ominous weight of another round of surgery approaching that her emotional load became too heavy to conceal in class.

On Friday, November 22, Kerrie Benson noticed that Zubaida seemed more distant and unattached, both to her lessons and to her classmates. Benson knew that Zubaida was scheduled for another surgery on the coming Monday, but couldn’t tell if that was what was bothering her or not. The day ended and Zubaida went home before she had a chance to talk with her about it. Benson decided that if the depressed attitude remained after Zubaida returned to school, she would press to get to the bottom of it.

On Monday, November 25, Peter Grossman and his team prepped Zubaida for surgery early in the morning. Once Charles Neal placed her under anesthesia again, Dr. Peter administered a series of some eighty steroid injections to the scar tissue on her front and rear sections of her torso to help break down the scars. Then he went to work on fine-tuning the balance of Zubaida’s facial features. While Zubaida wandered the dreamless terrain of sedation, Dr. Peter entered back into his operative state in the fourth dimension of time, making every surgical choice and move with an eye toward its effect on the patient today, next month, and next year.

He made an incision along the lower eyelid to release the area of tension there. Once that was done, he made an incision near the upper eyelid and worked on the nearby tendon to improve the placement and function of the eyelid. Then he carefully grafted a full-thickness graft to the open area under the eyelid, covering about three square centimeters. Next the left eyelid was adjusted for symmetry with the right. With a “Z plasty” to her torso to reduce the scarification there, he cut away another two and a half square centimeters of scarred flesh, then placed a patch over her eye and applied the post-surgical dressings to each of the areas.

Her recovery in the hospital was unusually quick this time, spurred on by visits from Emily and her mom, and “get well” cards from the kids in her class. Zubaida was still enduring her long transformation in the land of the Others, but she no longer felt alone among them.

* * *

At the same time that Zubaida was undergoing her surgery, the November 25th edition of Newsweek was hitting the stands, reporting that Al Qaeda was “alive and killing,” and that Osama bin Laden was working hard behind the scenes in an attempt to weaken the alliance between the United States and its European partners.

Also on that day, eighteen United Nations inspectors arrived in Baghdad for a final attempt to ascertain whether or not Saddam Hussein was in compliance with the seventeen U.N. directives previously issued to Iraq regarding Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

November 25th was also declared as an international “day of protest” against violence toward women, and it was noted that “honor killings,” forced female circumcisions and public stoning, even in such modern times, were still active forces of destruction in the world. It was noted that neither the world’s governing bodies nor the leaders of the major religions seemed to have any idea of how to combat the constantly recurring instances of inhumanity flaring all over the globe. At that point, nothing that they were doing was answering the question of what to do about the human condition.

* * *

Three days later, Zubaida joined Peter and Rebecca at the home of Richard Grossman and his wife at their ranch in Hidden Valley, California. Rebecca marveled at Zubaida’s studied coolness while she took in the luxury of the sprawling ranch house and grounds. She had watched Zubaida do it often enough that she recognized it as one of Zubaida’s main coping mechanisms. She seemed to feel in some way that for her to express amazement or to show that she was in any way impressed by American luxuries was demeaning to her. She made it a point to pretend that there was nothing going on around her that she hadn’t seen before, whether or not that was true.

She still wore a patch over her right eye after Peter’s latest work on her, but the concern shown by her classmates while she was in the hospital had softened her attitude quite a bit. Peter’s father, Richard Grossman, made it a special point to dote on her with grandfatherly concern, and Peter and Rebecca both watched with relief while Zubaida warmed up to the attention.

But whenever people’s attention turned away from her for a few minutes, she seemed to fall into some invisible pit. She was still only three days out from her latest surgery and still wearing a patch over one eye; much of the time her mood remained bleak. Even though a occasional spark came into her eyes at one moment or another, she spent most of that day in an increasing funk that the food and festivities couldn’t alleviate. There was little of the lighthearted happiness that she had begun to show anytime she went to school—she had been out of class since the Friday before, and knew that she would be out until the coming week. The long days before she would see her new friends again stretched out in front of her.

Her father’s clear directive was that she should contribute to her family’s future by learning everything she possibly could in America so that she could come back and teach them, and that was powerful enough to keep her motivated for school. But at home with Peter and Rebecca, or at “Grandpa Richard’s” home, it was safe to let her guard down. For much of that Thanksgiving day, the anger and frustration that she usually managed to keep to herself in class kept leaking out. By the end of the day, Rebecca was eager for her to return to school so that Zubaida could enjoy a few hours of allowing herself to feel happiness—and everyone else could take a deep breath.

Chapter Nine

Zubaida’s eldest sister, Nacima
, had already married and was living away from home, by the time Zubaida was flown to America. Nacima and her husband had been driven from their home by the U.S.-led war on the Taliban into an Iranian refugee camp near the Afghanistan border in the town of Zabol. They were the only members of Zubaida’s family who lived there, but Nacima’s hometown of Farah was so remote that it was actually easier to communicate with someone inside the camp than in Farah. Zabol is enough of a city to have some small municipal services and a few telephone lines that functioned sporadically amid the ebb and flow of insurgent combat.

The town is located alongside the ancient caravan roads winding through the region and only about a third of its residents have running water or electricity, and farming and grazing are difficult to sustain there because of the lack of available water. The presence of huge rock surfaces on the ground prevent farming and drilling, but at least the camp was relatively safe from military battles. Existence for the refugees there was as bare bones as it can get.

In the month of December, 2002, Peter and Rebecca used a telephone number that Mohammed Hasan had given Zubaida during their first telephone call, reaching Nacima inside the camp through indirect means. They helped Zubaida to call her sister once every week. Although the results were always hit or miss with the unreliable satellite connections and spotty local phone service, sometimes the calls actually got all the way through. The number would ring at the home of one of the permanent homes in the area, so when someone answered, Zubaida would speak to them in
Dari
and explain enough of her situation to enlist their help and persuade them to locate her sister in the camp. That person would then run down the street and fetch Nacima back to the house so that Zubaida could call again later that same day and speak with her. It was the only direct contact that she ever had with anyone in her family except for those rare phone calls that her father was able to place to Peter and Rebecca’s home from the U.N. office in Kandahar.

Nacima, however, left the camp to visit the family home in Farah often enough that she could occasionally relay messages from them back to Zubaida, helping to provide her with some sense of still being in touch with her family. At first, the calls had a visibly positive effect on Zubaida and lightened her spirits like few other things could. But when Nacima heard that there had been a custody dispute over Zubaida and that she had left the host family’s home under cloudy circumstances, Nacima also took the position that Zubaida should return to Afghanistan right away without finishing the surgeries. To her, the whole impossible enterprise that was going on over in America seemed doomed to fail. Nacima’s hardscrabble experience and barren view of the world undoubtedly made it seem as if Zubaida was trapped in some kind of highly unreliable and potentially dangerous situation. She had seen enough of her little sister’s suffering and didn’t want to allow anything else to happen to her.

At first, Nacima’s position only raised Zubaida’s level of internal conflict even higher. So both Peter and Rebecca were relieved when Nacima made a trip to Farah and informed her father that she had been telling Zubaida she should come home. Mohammed Hasan immediately took a hard stand against that idea and sent Nacima back to the camp with a stern message and his orders to relay that message back to Zubaida. He had no desire for her to end the stay in America before the surgeries were complete. Most of all, he reiterated his strong desire for Zubaida to soak up every bit of learning in school that she possibly could during her time in America. Speaking to her through Nacima, he assured Zubaida that what she was doing was not only right for her but was going to be vitally important to the rest of her family, as well.

It was those words from her father that did the trick. Not only did Zubaida have the cultural desire to honor the wishes of the man of the house, but this advice was coming to her from a father who had spent a year and bankrupted the family in order to seek help for her. She knew without having to think about it that she was only alive because of his dogged persistence. He not only commanded great authority over her view of the world, so that his desire to see her remain in America held great sway over her, but his assurances that she was in the process of learning things that would prove vital to her entire family helped to raise her sense of herself back up to a tolerable level.

So it was that a single indirect message relayed to Zubaida by her eldest sister had the power to do for her what no one else could. After that, Peter and Rebecca began to see a slow and steady upward arc to Zubaida’s levels of tolerance and an equally steady lowering of her need to explode over ordinary annoyances.

It was as if, after a long period of time when there were only occasional glimpses of sunlight in an otherwise dark world, a consistent source of light had finally entered her heart. They greeted the change with great relief, which was only temporarily dampened when they got the word that because of the NGO’s concerns over Zubaida’s fate, there was going to be a visit to their home from a social worker who would evaluate Zubaida’s situation and who had the power to force them to return her to Afghanistan if the social worker came away with the impression that Zubaida’s interests weren’t being served.

But after the months of hearing their actions criticized and their motives suspected, their confidence that they were doing the right thing and that anyone who looked at the situation with unprejudiced eyes would see it the same way was finally validated. The social worker left convinced that Zubaida should stay right where she was until Peter Grossman declared her surgical process to be complete, and furthermore, that the loving and supportive home into which they had brought her was not merely a luxurious environment, but a healthy and healing place for her to be.

Peter and Rebecca both breathed a long sigh of relief. This entire enterprise had been forced to exist on a day-to-day extension of temporary permissions from the various agencies who held authority of Zubaida’s immigration status. This official recognition of the positive power of their work on Zubaida’s behalf—as well as Mohammed Hasan’s unwavering commitment to making sure that Zubaida took absolutely everything from this adventure that she possibly could—finally gave them the luxury of knowing that their quest to give Zubaida a viable future was not going to be prematurely interrupted.

This was just before the holiday season got underway. It was the best present that either of them would receive that year. The noticeable rise in Zubaida’s spirits and her willingness to be cooperative, as well as her tendency to display affection toward them took a welcome turn for the better.

* * *

The mundane problems were as important as the larger ones—Zubaida’s many months of being unable to close her mouth or eat properly before Peter began his work, had left her baby teeth in extensive decay. So Rebecca took her in for a full round of dental work and paid for it herself, just as she and Peter were doing with Zubaida’s personal therapy. It was simpler than working to gain permission to fund the work through the Children’s Burn Foundation, which had already provided hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The worst of the baby teeth were eventually pulled so that the healthy adult teeth could grow in later, while the others were drilled and filled until the large areas of tooth decay were completely removed. When it was done, Zubaida found that the added comfort of a healthy bite and of teeth that didn’t hurt anymore gave her relief from the nagging background pain in her jaws. The ache had become such a constant presence in her life that most of the time she no longer noticed it. With that pain gone and a normal bite restored, a general wave of relaxation spread through the rest of her body. It felt good to be able to bite down and clench her teeth together. It made the rest of her body feel stronger.