Tiny Dancer (23 page)

During the initial takeover by the Taliban in Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, almost all of the children witnessed acts of violence, while two-thirds of them saw dead bodies or parts of bodies. Nearly half reported seeing many people killed at one time, during various rocket and artillery attacks.

Ninety percent of the children interviewed believed that they were going to die at the time of those attacks.

Bador was still in her thirties when her daughter Zubaida fell into the fire, and already the physical struggle of her daily life had left her gaunt in the face and tired in her body. Pains of age filled her movements; tweaks and stabs pierced her in this or that joint whenever she had to move around much. Nevertheless, that daily chase after her large family’s needs was based upon her children—the only source of hope that she could have for living into old age with any security at all.

There was no such thing as any form of governmental relief for elderly citizens in a land where the infrastructure had long since been pulverized, and the Mosques were too poor to help the throngs of needy ones. She and her husband had to fill the house with children and do their best to raise them all the way up to adulthood because the future held nothing else for them. Their younger generation was an expression of hope by the parents for a living insurance plan against the miseries and infirmities of an impoverished old age.

But Bador felt herself being aged far ahead of the calendar throughout Zubaida’s long spell at home during the months before they sent her to America. During those months, she discovered that everyone in the family already pulled so much of her strength out of her each day that the extra time and energy demanded by Zubaida’s condition was draining Bador down to the bone. The exhaustion left her in such an empty state that migraine headaches began to plague her and arthritis taunted her joints.

She didn’t have to exaggerate her symptoms to convince anybody in the household that she was ailing; everyone saw that she worked from morning until night and that she did her best to take care of them, even if she was beginning to let certain things pile up a little too often. Sometimes people took the hint and catered to Bador a little bit; other times they clucked their sympathy without bothering to actually pitch in and do anything for her.

As a woman who must serve, Bador wasn’t particularly offended by their failure to help carry her load for her. To take offense, she would first need to hold the expectation that such a thing was going to happen in the first place. She knew better. But she also knew that there could be some measure of security in a position of service, since many of the ones served possessed no such skills. That was important to her. If those being served ever learned to do for themselves, Bador would become expendable.

If she became expendable, her status would slide downward from that of an indispensable family head to that of a mere convenience who does a few chores around the house. From there, it was a short slip to general uselessness, and then the smallest of steps to the status of a full-time family burden, one who only awaits death.

Even Bador’s damaged daughter held a higher spot on the scale than that. Zubaida was refusing to wait for death. She clung to life with an iron grip and fought back the prospect of death every day that she survived. Bador took inspiration from her daughter.

Even though no one willingly occupies the place of the family burden, Bador could feel herself being pushed toward that grim place. A woman who must serve is frightened when her body, tall and broad-shouldered and strong as a tree root, begins to fight with her all of the time, raising painful objections to tasks that were once undertaken with ease. Not only is her physical strength her solace in life, but the services that her strength allows her to offer to the world can justify her very existence.

When she felt the frost in her bones creeping up inside of her, even under the thick desert heat, she had no choice but to wonder whether she could manage to raise enough of her offspring to adulthood before her aching body lay itself down like a sick animal. Her only consolation against that dismal prospect was simply that dying young and worn out would still be better than dying in poverty without children.

The thing that Bador grasped with an iron grip as strong as her daughter’s hold on life was the simple goal of never becoming useless to the family, never becoming an empty ghost of a person who had once filled her days with the products of her skills but who now waits only to be cleaned and fed.

A woman who must serve is seldom given the necessary level of simple consideration throughout her usual day, such as that which silently assures others regarding their basic human worth while they go about their lives. Instead, she must stand resolute under the continual inner torment of knowing that there is something almost sacrilegious about becoming so self-absorbed that she causes others to be unduly concerned about her.

She can even speak of suicide in front of the family and express a longing for her own death, in order to attempt to communicate something of her distress. Such talk rises from a long custom—so long as it is done in a style so melodramatic that everyone understands that she is exaggerating and doesn’t really intend to cause her own demise. In this way, to shout something like “I want to die!” is accepted as her expression of general distress—while ignored at the same time as any actual announcement of her intentions. Such a woman knows, and her audience knows as well, that what she is describing with such a statement is merely her level of feeling, not an intention. Her audience also knows that they have the privilege of either acknowledging her feelings or ignoring them altogether, without being concerned that anyone will actually trip over her body later.

Therefore, as a woman who must serve, Bador was a juggler, of a sort. She had to continually balance the fact that her only guaranteed means of temporary relief from her daily burden was to be too sick to work—or at least too sick to work at full capacity—against the reality that she could only have so many symptoms before she slipped in her social rank and began the dreaded downward slide, steadily closing the distance between herself and uselessness.

* * *

Mohammed: A Father’s Point Of View

One of the men in the
bazaar
who did not know Mohammed Hasan asked him how a father could stoop so low as to take his burned and scarred little daughter through the marketplaces of the cities that they travel to for medical help, just so she might be used to gain sympathy from others and gather a few coins from their pity. Sometimes Hasan answered the challenges, stiff in his defiance. Most other times, he kept the wise things that he had learned to himself…

When it is God’s will—
Enshallah—
that your young dancing daughter is forced to exist inside of a melted shell of burned flesh, her face destroyed and her arms nearly useless, one look at her will assure you that it must also be
Enshallah
that she survives.

And yet you know that in the eyes of others, the very fact that she remains impossibly alive and aware within her tormented and agonized state is a direct reflection upon you—perhaps Allah has elected to inflict some extra degree of punishment in addition to the flames themselves?

And you understand that the misery of this thing is never going to be done with you and with your family, if you allow anyone to assume that this terrible thing happened to your daughter because one of the Hasan household somehow offended Allah.

Perhaps it was your daughter?

Perhaps it was you.

When you say to the world that you are a laborer, but there is no labor to consume you, and when it is God’s will that your wife and children plus your daughter who no longer dances must still eat every day or starve, then you are a weakling and a coward and a deserter of your own family unless you fend for your wife and for all those whom you have created. You will do whatever you must, to be certain that your family survives. You will respect your obligations by seizing upon any opportunity, no matter how small or how daunting it may appear to be. You will do this continually, day to day, month to month.

It does not matter if your grief for your daughter who once danced like a butterfly is raining upon you. You only pray that whatever you have to do, whatever stories you may have to invent in order to pull your family through one more day, they will not be unforgivable things.

And you will certainly never dare to point out to God or to any of his clerics here on Earth—rather you will simply ruminate within your own mind—that it was His will which thrust this situation upon you and
made your extreme behavior necessary in the first place.

Even if Zubaida has become a blight upon the face that you show to the world, she is still your dancing daughter. You can still paint her face back onto her skull with your mind and you can see her there in front of you, buried under her prison of melted flesh. In that moment, your very bone marrow feels the truth that if you had to kill a man with your bare hands to keep him from taunting your daughter, from ever again tormenting anyone in the family by implying that Zubaida somehow deserved her fate—you could do it in an instant.

And why not? God willing, when a civilized man attacks a mongrel, it is the civilized man who walks away.

So you fight to survive every single day. Make it known in the marketplace that you will take any job at all. Anything. Then you roll with the motion of Allah’s curse upon your daughter like a good camel rider rolls with the motion of the beast. You make sure that everyone knows: if they allow Mohammed Hasan to suffer hunger, they will be condemning his burned daughter Zubaida to the same fate.

Enshallah,
their hard hearts will be moved by the unbelievable sight of a small human being who still lives, hideously melted, months after the flash fire that devoured her—and for her sake, they will perhaps offer work opportunities to you that might otherwise go to others.

If you get a bad feeling in your stomach about doing something like that, or if you get a tight feeling of guilt in the back of your head, then you simply call up the picture of the doctors at the hospitals who sent your dancing daughter back home to you and who told you that there was nothing else to do but to
pray for her to die
. With that memory, you let the anger fuel you.

And because you know that you will never have an opportunity to flush that anger away, all at one time, by throttling the arrogant stink of a doctor until his neck bones break like the neck of a hen, you will hold the anger close instead, deep inside of your heart, and allow it smolder. You will also allow its power to make you bold while you move into the marketplace and when you stand up and demand special consideration, even from among so many other desperate men.

When you feel weak and cursed, you will release the power of your hidden anger and feel it lift up your jaw and stiffen your spine. It will make you so determined that even if some would rise up to taunt you and imply that you have drawn this terrible thing down upon yourself, nevertheless you will remain bold among them and you will overcome any resistance they present.

You will do it every day for the rest of your life, if you have to, because you cannot bring home a bagful of excuses for Bador to feed to the children. It was never the family’s fault that their meager resources should be consumed by the needs of your damaged daughter, just as it was not hers.

Is the blame yours, then? It does not matter. You were not made a beggar by the power of guilt; you were made a beggar by your daughter’s tragedy. Therefore you will beg for work, when there is work, and you will simply beg when there is no work to be had. You will do that, because you are a man and this is your family.

You will gather your strength from your sense of manhood and stand before anyone who might be able to help you and then you will grovel until they do just that. You will cry like a child, if that is what it takes to move their help in your direction, so that you can go home to your family with your hands full, one more time. Your primary allegiance is to them, even before your allegiance to the clan—and the clan would have little to do with a man who failed to make every possible effort to care for his own.

You may be mocked for debasing yourself, but you would be shunned if you failed your family and you would be cursed if you failed your daughter.

And so it shall be for you.
Enshallah.

Chapter Eleven

One of the big topics of
the season for Zubaida was the concept of Santa Claus. She had no trouble at all in sharing her classmates’ excitement over a special day where you get things for free just because you have been a good girl. She didn’t like the fact that Santa looked like a fat religious cleric to her with his long beard and red suit, since religious clerics had never brought good news to her home town or to her family. But once she realized that you don’t have to be a Christian to buy into the Santa Claus story and that the myth of Santa doesn’t have him rewarding children on a religious basis, she saw no reason not to join in with the other girls’ anticipation. She especially liked the part about Santa having some kind of magical powers, and wondered if they might include the ability to grant wishes.

She gave it her best try, in a note that she had a friend help her write because she was old enough to suspect that it might work better if it was written in English. Rebecca found it just before Christmas: