Dr. Peter’s promises were made directly to Hasan—man to man and eye to eye—the way that Hasan knew that a real promise must be done. Dr. Peter was not compelled to operate on Zubaida; he could have walked away and gone back to live in his American castle and dine on the finest foods and anoint himself with whatever kinds of oils that rich Americans smooth across their skin. Instead, he looked Hasan in the eyes and instructed the translator to insist that it was possible to carve the remains of his daughter out of her suffocating scar mask. It was the kind of promise people must always keep, no matter what: the kind that they never had to make in the first place.
And so those American documents were nothing more than pieces of paper with funny scribbling that goes the wrong way across the page. Hasan’s signature on those papers was nothing more than ransom forced from a father who cannot walk away from any chance to save his child.
If the American papers burned as well as camel dung, they might be good for feeding a cooking fire. Other than that, they were worthless to him if these people failed his daughter.
* * *
All of Dr. Peter’s work went according to the treatment plan, for the first and second round of surgeries, and after the second round, Zubaida had enough grafting in place that he was able to unwrap her swaddling bandages, six days after the first surgery began. It would be Hasan’s only look at the beginnings of his daughter’s transformation before he had to depart for home the following day.
Nothing could have prepared him for that first moment of revelation. He looked on with growing astonishment while Zubaida’s dressings were gently removed. Even though it had been carefully explained to him that this was only the beginning of a long process and that Zubaida would undergo such surgeries many more times before she could return home to live again, all of that paled when the bandages were finally off and he saw what Dr. Peter and his team of expert physicians and surgeons had done so far.
His daughter Zubaida sat on the table in front of him, shivering from her body’s first exposure to the air. In so many ways she looked dreadful, still bone-thin and sickly, but even though the marks of scarring were still all over her, her face and neck were completely free of the twisted scar tissue. Her normal face was clearly recognizable, and her left arm was free from her torso. Dr. Grossman demonstrated the arm for Hasan as well as Zubaida when he gently took her left arm and extended it all the way out to the side and back again.
Hasan blinked in astonishment. His ancient tribal soul screamed that this was impossible, it was an illusion, it was evil magic. But his real-word eyes welled with tears and his throat seized up. The wonderful truth of it was sitting right there in front of him.
A spark of hopeful surprise shot through Zubaida’s eyes. Dr. Peter offered her a small mirror, and when she looked into it, her eyes popped open in wonder. The she looked up at her father and smiled.
Mohammed Hasan began to cry, touching his hand to his heart in a traditional Afghan gesture of gratitude. He hugged Peter Grossman and heaped thanks onto him without waiting for the interpreter.
Even though Zubaida was still shivering from the removal of the insulating bandages, she continued to look around the room with a happy smile. That first brief gaze into the mirror told her everything she needed to know.
They did magic on her, after all. Not perfect magic, but the results astonished her. She looked as if she had been sewn together out of patches—but she could clearly recognize herself. The monster was gone.
She could move both of her arms, she could close her eyes, and for the first time since the fire came to punish her for dancing, she could even hear a little bit of the old music. Hundreds of strange sensations inside of her re-carved face and reborn body prevented her from being able to concentrate on the melody in the brief moment that it flashed through her—and she certainly couldn’t move to it—but it was there, like an echo from the next valley over.
She kept smiling even though it hurt her to move her stitched up features. She smiled to welcome back a face that she could finally recognize as her own and because her heart was exploding and she couldn’t hold it back if she tried.
Chapter Four
There was never any denying the strength of the wave that carried Zubaida along, whether the players could explain it or not. Before she went to America, during those last days before Dr. Mike Smith left Afghanistan to accompany her to America, he wrote a letter to Peter Grossman that contained all of the following concerns.
Writing from Kabul, he talked of how Hasan insisted on accompanying Zubaida to America because it was simply not practical for his son Daud to go in his place. Smith liked the plan, since the older family man was far less likely to try to defect while in America than a young and unattached male. An immigration controversy would, in the words of a prophetic saying, cause heads to roll.
He also detailed Zubaida’s medical condition as it pertained to the travel arrangements, then went on to request that privacy screens be used at the airports so that she would not be made an object of idle curiosity.
He then wrote fondly of Zubaida’s generally calm demeanor, and of the close and trusting relationship that she displayed with her father. He talked of her willingness to laugh and be playful, despite her condition, and how she voluntarily interacted with others instead of withdrawing.
Dr. Smith also informed Peter that he was going to have to administer a complete round of vaccinations to her, because although her father insisted that she had “all her shots,” medical records were nonexistent in Afghanistan at that time and there was no way to know for sure about it, especially given the family’s poverty.
In addition, Smith expressed relief at how well the visa situation was going, now that Michael Gray at the State Department had gotten involved, then he went on to make sure that the Foundation funds were in place to pay for the airline tickets and noted that the NGO was busy conducting a search in Los Angeles for a suitable host family for Zubaida.
Smith concluded by expressing his concern that she must be guaranteed familiar language and customs around her, throughout her recoveries. Otherwise, a cold-water culture shock would merely present one more assault upon a system that surely didn’t need another.
It was clear before the letter even ended that this case had personal interest for him, just as it did for the others who came to the story before he did.
But he ended by confiding that he was growing more concerned about a potential backlash with the public or with public officials, especially in the Middle East. He said that there had already been inquiries, asking in effect, “why is so much being done for one little girl, in a land where so many thousands are desperate for medical aid?”
Smith’s concerns were prophetic; the question “why so much?” was one that everyone involved in Zubaida’s case was going to hear, over and over.
* * *
Mohammed Hasan was not so foolish as to be blind to the power that he would hold, right up until the instant that he got back aboard an airplane. He didn’t have to actually do anything so inconceivable as actually defect; all he had to do was realize that they knew he could defect if he really wanted to. These were people it would be easy to bluff in marketplace dickering—so easy to read. Everybody was always eager, too eager, to answer all of his questions whenever he asked about returning back home. If he could just keep them from getting to comfortable with the idea that he was actually going to quietly walk out of Zubaida’s hospital room and return to the airport with them, that they would be eager to keep him happy. And as long as they were, he could squeeze the very best of care for Zubaida out of all of them.
It was the last gift that he could give to her, and it would have to be enough.
A few days after her second set of operations, he quietly gave away his power by cooperating with his hosts, kissing his daughter goodbye and returning to the airport without any fuss. Dr. Mike Smith accompanied him, and Hasan had to wonder if that was to strong-arm him if h
e tried to bolt at the last minute. But Hasan had no such desire. His wife and family needed him, back there in a place that was nothing at all like the playground of indulgence that he glimpsed in this part of America. Those who feared that he would bolt like a donkey and run for sanctuary knew nothing about him.
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 r
elationship. 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. .
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