Tiny Dancer (27 page)

Calls went out.

It was a heady list: Raymond Short, the head of Military Civil affairs in Afghanistan; Central Command in Florida; the charitable Non-Government Organization who sponsored her; and the U.S. State Department. Word ricocheted between them that Mohammad Hasan was beginning to have anxiety attacks about his daughter’s fate while she was out there among the Others. His concerns were not so much over her medical condition, because he had been provided with post-surgery pictures a few months earlier, and he admitted that the last time that he spoke to her, she sounded well and strong. His fears centered on nightmares of having lost her to the foreign world of the Others.

And while Hasan wanted his daughter to learn everything about America that she could, and to learn to speak English well, he was lately beginning to fear that the longer she stayed away the less likely she might be to find her way back home to them. He feared that the temptations of the Western world might permanently estrange her from the family and from her own culture.

Since Hasan couldn’t provide phone numbers, his query didn’t go directly to Peter and Rebecca’s house or to the Grossman Burn Center. It was routed through military channels to the NGO. Hasan’s simple query about his daughter’s condition sent the domino chain into a series of concentric loops.

Now the NGO became officially nervous. They wondered what kind of loose cannon Hasan might turn out to be, recalling that Dr. Mike Smith told them about having to work to keep Hasan from bolting off to explore, back in the U.S.—apparently, Hasan only remained under control because Smith convinced him that if he created an international incident, his daughter’s welfare would be severely jeopardized.

But with Zubaida ensconced in her recovery process off in America, Hasan had discovered that it was much easier to accept the idea of losing his daughter for an entire year than it was to accept the hard reality of the Zubaida-shaped hole in his life. Worries were beginning to plague him, and back at home in Farah he was far from any source of information and left with too much time on his hands.

From the point of view of the NGO staff, the major problem with Mohammed Hasan was that the man was so proactive. He was liable to just show up at any American military or embassy office and start telling whatever story he wanted to give out about his daughter’s unique charity situation. With the press hanging around looking for scandals to decry, it was only a matter of time before some sort of major uproar commenced, with voice after voice crying out,
“What about me?”

The experienced humanitarian workers at the NGO realized that this would be a surefire guarantee of turning a beautiful expression of human concern into a political firestorm. It could limit cooperation between international Non-Governmental Organizations by adding elements of mutual suspicion that could only slow down the flow of victim relief—and ultimately accomplish nothing good for anyone.

* * *

Once Zubaida got the chance to speak with her father from Kandahar after so much time without any communication from home, she was able to jump back into her new American schoolgirl life with a lighter heart. She was glad that Peter talked her father and all of the other American adults out of making her go back home right away. Even though she felt anxious to see everyone in her village, when she thought about going back home right then, she knew in her heart it wasn’t time. Peter hadn’t even finished doing all the work necessary to give her back her full range of motion yet.

Her English was much stronger, but she still understood the language far better than she could speak it. The thin, reedy American words seemed to stick in her brain when she tried to put them together. But she could sit back and listen to a conversation and get most of it, when adults were speaking, and she usually understood everything that the other kids said. She confused her spoken words often enough, but she knew that she could do a lot better at it, given a little more time. And she could sense that the language might help her in countless ways. Such a thing would surely be a real addition to her
power.

She talked over all of that with her father, basking in the messages of goodwill sent to her from the family. But despite the gregarious traits among her country’s women, it was not in Zubaida’s own nature to talk about her feelings, so she said very little about Peter and Rebecca other than to assure her father she was being treated well. She kept silent about her relief over having several more months with her surrogate parents and her new friends. The sense of relief grew when Peter and her father agreed that she could go home in June or July, which would allow her to finish the year at school and to keep on polishing her English. Her father even assured Peter that her mother understood and agreed.

This left her more time to enjoy this new feeling of being so much more smoothed out within herself, and to share those feelings with all of her new friends at school, or with Mom and Dad at home. And it didn’t strike her as being the least bit strange to refer Rebecca and Peter in that way, or the house where they all lived.

Later, she sat on the floor in front of the sofa while Rebecca sat behind her and brushed her hair. For once, she could let someone get that close behind her and not feel overwhelmed by a creepy feeling of having one of the Others in your weak spot. But the whole set of bad feelings that went along with the idea of the Others was beginning to crumble. The Others were out there, all right, but seldom ever got close to her, she realized now. This new home was a safe place. She accepted that, all the way down into her most suspicious marketplace self. Whatever Mom and Dad were, they were not the Others. Whatever else this place might be, it was her home for now.

Zubaida was busy learning, just as she had been instructed to do on behalf of her family. And the simple fact of her second home in America taught her that there was yet another kind of human being in this world. Even though this kind was not of her people, they were also not among the dangerous Others.

How to explain that?

For some reason, this kind of human being could be trusted. Zubaida had no answer as to why people would do such things as Rebecca and Peter and all of them had done for her, other than that they were obviously dedicated to living lives of decency and honor. And they clearly desired, as much as possible, to live their lives in peace.

The idea of a peaceful but determined warrior is built into every Afghan’s consciousness by the stories that are told to children from their earliest days, and by their constant exposure to people’s spoken references to the long Afghan tradition of repelling foreign invaders. Zubaida could picture this other kind of human being in that form: the peaceful warriors.

Maybe Peter and Rebecca, her doctors, her teachers, her friends at school, were all part of this newly discovered group of people. What else could explain it? This presented her with the same eye-opening revelation that has greeted so many before her—the people of her newly discovered group came in a range of different faces and skin colors—so how was she supposed to tell them from the Others?

“I’m so glad that you can stay here until summertime and finish your school year,”
Rebecca said while she brushed at her hair.
“Even though I know you miss your parents and all your brothers and sisters.”

“I not going back,”
Zubaida quietly said.

Rebecca looked around to her face and saw a dreamy-looking smile playing on her face. Ordinarily, she would have thought that the expression was simply the result of Rebecca’s gentle hair brushing, but despite Zubaida’s fondness for saying shocking things, these strange words caught Rebecca’s attention.

“Well, actually, we have about three months left, then you’re going back home to Afghanistan.”

“I not from Afghanistan anymore. I American now.”

“But what about your family?”

“They can come here.”

“They can’t come here, Zubaida. We can’t even keep you here after your last operation is done. We all know that, right?”

Zubaida turned away, made her face go blank
. “I know.”

“And you do want to see your parents and your—“

“Yes!”
Zubaida yelled, trying to close her out.

“Then what can we—“

“You and Peter come back to Afghanistan with me!”

“You mean go back there to live?”

“Yes!”

“But Peter has to work here, for all the other people who need his help like you did. And our home is here. All of our families, our friends…”

Zubaida’s shoulders slumped while she watched the happy picture of having Rebecca and Peter live next door to her family in Farah crumble like campfire ashes.

On March 18th, 2003, Zubaida turned eleven years old with forty of the kids from school and about twenty sets of parents. They were at a giant backyard pool party and general picnic blow out, American style. By this point, her English was good enough to allow her to barrel right into the day’s activities along with the other kids without communication glitches. She had mastered a style of dress for herself that took in the local California schoolgirl look but gave it her own colorful twist, the same way that the women of Afghan tribes had done to accent their appearances for many centuries prior to fanatic religious rule.

To a stranger, the celebration could have easily appeared to be an ordinary outdoor party for any American girl’s birthday celebration. Since Zubaida saw herself most clearly in the way others reacted to her, she had already perfected the subtle mannerisms of the local girls—right down to the proper rolling of the eyes and releasing of a tired sigh whenever a grown-up said something incredibly stupid. This helped her to guarantee that the feedback from the other girls remained as positive and approving as possible. That approval was gasoline in her engine. She felt it feed her and make her stronger. With enough approval, she felt certain that she could do pretty much anything she wanted to.

Photographs of that day show a girl who appears to be completely at home and assimilated into the American culture, even though it is so different from her own that she might as well be visiting another planet. The pictures appear to contradict any notion that on the day they were taken she had only been in the U.S. for a mere eight months.

* * *

Two days, later, on March 20th, forces of the United States military invaded Iraq, coupled with British combat soldiers and a smattering of smaller support troupes from other allied countries. The goal was to remove Saddam Hussein from power, dead or alive, along with his entire administration and governmental system. Military intelligence thus employed hundreds of tons of laser-guided, proximity fused, GPS-positioned high explosives in answer to the question of what to do about the human condition.

Meanwhile Zubaida’s future plunged back into a desert sandstorm of dangerous possibilities. If the Taliban forces holding up in the caves of Afghanistan’s huge and rugged mountain ranges regrouped for an assault to retake Afghanistan, Zubaida’s village could disappear overnight. Like everyone in the region, Zubaida knew that Farah sat on the ancient “Silk Road” convoy trail between the ancient cities of Kandahar and Herat. Thus even if the Taliban didn’t destroy the village, the return of their rule would completely negate Zubaida’s future. And since her restored appearance would never be one hundred percent normal, she would still have negligible social value without an education. Everyone involved in getting her to the United States was eager to see her safely returned home and to finally be out from under the huge political risk that she represented, but it was also generally agreed that she could not be simply dropped back into the arms of anti-female tyrants.

There was nothing to do but wait it out. Eight days later, on March 28th, Zubaida was back at the Grossman Burn Center, once more under the fictitious name of Sarah Lewis to conceal her from curiosity seekers and tabloid paparazzi. She complained to Charles Neal again about the sleeping gas and hoped out loud that he had done something to make it smell better this time. She grudgingly accepted his apologetic explanation that he needed to use the medicine that was in the funny smelling gas, and that he could only promise that she would be asleep very quickly and wouldn’t smell it for long.

The sun was barely up that morning before Peter Grossman began the day’s procedures with Zubaida. Before he was done, there would be four separate surgeries plus another three sets of steroid injections, with dozens in each set, delivered to the worst of her scar areas.

He began with a fine-tuning release of her right earlobe with a two and a half square centimeter flap cut and rotated under the ear to give a more normal appearance. Moving to the second procedure, he performed a set of two “Z-plasty” cuts that allowed him to rearrange sixteen square centimeters of the lower right side of her neck. He then adjusted the pull of the scarring on her left forearm which had resulted from being separated from the torso scars, rearranging twenty-nine square centimeters of flesh.

The last of the day’s surgeries involved releasing the pull of scarring around her navel, also topped off with the artful placement of dozens of tiny injections of steroid solution into the places where the scars might tend to thicken, helping to assure the continued breakdown of the scar tissue and denying it the chance to develop further.