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.
After she awakened from anesthesia, he made sure she was in good condition and then sent her off to the recovery room to finish waking up. Since she was still too groggy for conversation, he wouldn’t know how she was really feeling until she was back in her hospital room and he walked in the door.
Then he would see if she was going to acknowledge him or if he would have to coax her out of her anger once more over the fact that these things hurt in recovery despite all of Peter’s magic. She might climb into his lap and call him “Dad” and be a needy little love bug. She might pretend that he wasn’t in the room. Or she might cover herself with that invisible turtle shell of indifference that was already familiar to him, the one that surely worked well in the village marketplaces to prevent others from observing feelings and spotting vulnerabilities.
Peter’s mother, Sandy Francis, was divorced from his father Richard back when Peter was in his early teens. She had long since married her current husband, Mitch, but the couple lived close enough to regularly visit with the new threesome at her son’s house. Since Sandy had been married to one surgeon and was the mother of another, she especially appreciated the high level of risk her son had assumed when he took on Zubaida’s case. Sandy didn’t need anyone to tell her how easily this noble experiment could get off track, and not just because of anything that might go wrong; there was enough danger from the suspicions of those who merely thought that something might be wrong. She knew that whenever any case gets wide public attention, there will always be a percentage of troubled souls who will project their own inner demons onto what they believe a child such as Zubaida is actually experiencing. Such people are capable of seeing themselves as heroes ready to sacrifice anything to prevent justice from being thwarted, without realizing that they are simply projecting the troubles that they think they see. Such people sometimes find lawyers to represent them for free, just to give the attorney a crack at a “deep pockets” surgeon and his medical practice.
And so her delight existed on a number of levels once she had a chance to get to know Zubaida and to see for herself how well Peter was managing her recovery, and how thoroughly he was documenting every surgical and medical step that was taken. It was enough to convince Sandy that not only was Zubaida safe, but that for the time being, so was her son.
Before long, Zubaida became comfortable enough with Sandy to lovingly refer to her as “Grandma Sandy,” even though she had a conceptual problem about what to call Mitch. Since Zubaida came from a land virtually without divorce, a step-parent was a rare and unusual thing.
Zubaida and Mitch got off to a rocky start the first time that he walked into the room. He had just begun growing a beard, and when Zubaida took her first look at his whiskered face, she ran to Rebecca whimpering in fear that he was Taliban. She remained upset by his appearance and didn’t calm down until he left.
Mitch decided to go home and shave, saving the whole beard thing for some other time, and Zubaida decided that the name “Mitch” fit him better than “Grandpa,” which she reserved for Dr. Richard. With that mutual understanding established, Zubaida was able to relax in Sandy’s presence and to feel safe in coming over to her house for private visits with ”Grandma Sandy.” Zubaida had no compunction about constantly flattering Sandy with remarks about how young-looking and beautiful that her Grandma Sandy was, in order to make sure that the snacks kept coming. Grandma Sandy wasn’t above keeping quiet about the fact that Zubaida would have gotten the snacks anyway—a little flattery never hurt.
One night when Zubaida was there for a sleep-over, Sandy finally realized how deeply the girl had bonded with Peter and Rebecca. During one quiet moment of conversation, Zubaida leaned close to Sandy and confided, “You know, Grandma, Peter is a Jew.” She said it as if she were sharing a dangerous secret.
Sandy felt her heart sink. Could anti-Semitism have already made such a large impact upon this young girl? She felt her chest tighten when she responded.
“Yes, I know that he’s a Jew.”
Zubaida nearly whispered it. “They don’t like Jews in my country.”
Sandy’s heart sank a little farther. “Is that true?” She waited for the anti-Semitic remark, whatever it was going to be.
“Yes,” Zubaida affirmed with a confident nod. Then a little smile moved across her face. “But don’t worry, I take care of him.”
She didn’t appear to be bragging; she simply spoke with the same quiet depth of determination that carried her through the process of surviving her burns. Sandy had already heard about Zubaida’s proposal that she and Peter and Rebecca should all go live in Afghanistan together. So from that point of view, it only made sense that Zubaida stood ready to defend her Jewish second father.
Sandy stared back at her in open wonder at the mixture of forces that were playing upon this one child, who could seem wounded and frail in one moment and then like a block of iron in the next. She reached over and hugged her.
“I know you will.”
She couldn’t think of any other response that seemed to matter.
Chapter Thirteen
Zubaida’s mother was well aware of the nagging question about her daughter’s education. What real chance would she have to continue to learn, once she came home? Once the Taliban forces were overwhelmed in Afghanistan and their hold on the government collapsed, schools throughout the country were technically free to open, whether they had mosque affiliation or not. By law, they were now free to once agai
n include females among their students and to teach non-religious subjects.
The reality was not so simple. Most of the qualified female teachers had long since fled the country, and the profession was ignored by most males, so that the personnel shortage was acute. Throughout the country, there was scant availability of texts and learning materials, and the wrecked national economy didn’t bode well for a quick fix on that front. Rural areas such as Farah would be the last to receive attention from the government, and the mosques could offer little more than the rudiments of religious instruction. Science, mathematics, history, geography—the fields that challenge and develop young minds and train them for better livelihoods—none of that was going to be available in Farah for many months, perhaps many years to come.
There was nothing for Bador to do but endure the frustration of seeing her children continue to grow up uneducated. Everyone was free to go to school, provided that they could get themselves to one. But even if she cared to test the relaxed restrictions upon a woman’s public movements, what was she to do about getting her children to school? Even if she went mad and gathered them all up and walked them many miles to the nearest school and enrolled them there, what were they to do, then? The city is not their home; they have no relatives there. Were they supposed to sleep in the streets and beg for their meals whenever they were not in class?
With the Taliban gone, Bador could start making craft objects and take them to the marketplace to sell, but the time that it would take for her to create an inventory and then accumulate enough money to do anything with it would be a long stretch, during which her children would continue falling farther and farther behind. It was especially true for her daughters, who otherwise had only the tiniest grasp of control over their lives. It meant that they would be slipping farther into the likelihood that their time in this world would be a lot like Bador’s, existing upon a diet of rocks within the life of a woman who must serve.
That was absolutely unacceptable to her, even though her world allowed her nothing to do but live with it. Her generation of women had been assaulted by a combination of religion, politics and warfare in repeated waves during their lives, forced to exist under enforced ignorance. There was no way anyone could reverse the effects of that, simply by changing some far-away government authorities and coming out here to post a different set of laws. The law and new set of rulers was the latest of the dozens and dozens of new proclamations of general law that the trade route areas of Afghanistan had witnessed down through the centuries, always coming from that never-ending parade of foreign invaders.
With the scant tools available to her, Bador couldn’t form any sort of effective plan as to how to overcome those dark forces that any mother in her position could sense, pushing her children toward insecure and undignified lives of servitude—and taking her old age and her husband’s final years right along with it. But it was not her place to figure it out. She rocked through her days and nights with the unending ache that came from holding it all inside of herself—because whatever role had been assigned to her by the coincidence of her birth into a particular time and place, Bador’s chosen true place in this life was as the protector of her family’s desire. The mood whip was there for her, if needed, to poke her children away from despair and prod them into hunting for honorable opportunities to escape poverty, finding their way amid desiccated regional opportunities. The challenge was to do it without falling into the rampant smuggling trades or getting pressed into the local militia of the region’s dominant warlord, forced into conflicts benefiting no one but the warlord himself.
The intolerable prospect hovered in the air in front of her, mocking her attempts to reason her way through the problem. She didn’t have enough education herself to be able to school her children at home. Neither did the other women that she knew. Some of them had learned a few things about reading and writing, but none knew any teaching methods and lacked the most basic educational aids. Bador knew that this left her children with the likelihood that they would learn alphabet by huddling in a circle and watching somebody draw letters in the dirt with a stick.
And how far would such learning take them, once they tried to go out and compete for a livelihood in the marketplace? Bador’s blood pounded until her head began to throb in rhythm and her eyes began to feel too big for the sockets. She couldn’t let herself feel most of her anger and frustration; the force of it would tear her to pieces. But she could feel its caustic upshot on her health when another of the migraines began coming to flatten out her day.
After all, she knew exactly how her daughters were going to feel, once they realized that they were trapped inside of their own servant situations, living day after day and year after year as women who must serve. Bador realized that her husband was in no position to secure some kind of important job that would allow them to move to a city where schooling would be available, and she would not harangue her husband to achieve something that he had no capacity to do.
Still—Bador also knew that her husband was a private man who seldom confided everything that was going on in his life, not to her or to anyone else. And clearly, something very big was going on in the life of Mohammed Hasan, son of Darwish. Perhaps whatever it might be was the result of his long trips to Kandahar?
In truth, Bador had a whole set of remarkable new events to consider. Did she not see with her own eyes that the American military sent four soldiers in two jeeps, just to bring her husband someplace for a telephone call to the United States? And did she not see her husband safely returned to her the following day, glowing in his face and telling of how he had spoken with their daughter and he could assure everyone of her health and happiness? He had heard with his own ears that she missed the family and would be happy to come home.
And was he not escorted back to his village like a tribal chief?
Bador Hasan was married to a man who obviously knew a lot more than he was telling. He had somehow managed, through his sheer tenacity and stubborn, unyielding will power, to find hope for renewing Zubaida’s life. He brought this gift of their daughter’s salvation back home to Bador in honor of their family, and in so doing he saved his wife’s heart from permanent despair, just as surely as he had saved his daughter from her terrible fate.
Now when Bador entered the marketplace for a little food shopping, it was all she could do to keep from smiling. The one public place where Bador and the other women were always allowed to go, even during worst of the Taliban years, was the marketplace, there was nothing dull or rusty about her marketplace sensibilities. Any woman of the house knows that in the marketplace, when you receive an offer, you must always be confident that the giver has more to offer, if you can extract it. In the marketplace, all the other market-goers are your opponents. If you do not study the arts of bluffing, pushing, and haggling, you cannot hope to beat the other opponents. You will have failed yourself and cheated your family.
For centuries, millions of people have believed that an honorable woman never willingly squanders the family resources in that way. What she does is to develop a highly refined sense of opportunity and, when opportunity is detected, she presses to get the necessary action out of whomever is allowed to go out and deal with it.
Her husband had done so well for the family on Zubaida’s behalf, but Bador did not run her household by being a fool, and so she could not fail to realize that there was more, that there had to be more, behind all of that. So her Mohammed was just going to have to do much better. She had no idea how he might achieve such a thing and no particular interest in the details. Those factors are for the men to work out on their own, all the more so since they often regard their family matriarch as a woman who lies around the house and waits for something to do.
Bador knew that she couldn’t achieve anything by confronting Mohammed with demands. Confrontation would only cause him to plant his feet and do nothing at all for her. As usual, her power was best expressed through the wielding of mood. With fangs so thin
that victims seldom felt them at all, a woman who must serve can inject silent poison into the victim’s day. She needs only to deny the victim, in this case her husband, any peace or satisfaction in his home life.
The mastery that such a woman displays will be most evident in the fact that she continues to appear to be doing her best to move from one task to the next in the proper manner. Nothing, however, will ever be quite as it should be. Nothing will arrive on time, nothing will be warm enough to eat or cool enough to drink or soft enough to sleep on or clean enough to wear. Nothing will sit quite straight or stand without falling over.
And for all of those reasons, there would quite simply be no peace for her husband Mohammed Hasan, son of Darwish, proud veteran of the Soviet war, until he found some way to get something done about educating their sons and their daughters.
Every one of Bador’s inflictions of minor pain would be carried out with a smile and with the appearance of being one of those woman who never does anything other than to busily go about her work with the best of intentions while keeping a sharp eye out for even more work to do.
Bador was already familiar with the blessing of that lesson—that revelation, really, which will eventually come to all women who must serve: There are many different kinds of power, some obvious, some not. All of them have their uses.
* * *
Throughout the first half of April, Zubaida could feel herself moving in a steady, upward curve. It wasn’t as if her nightmares completely disappeared or her waking fears dissolved, rather she became steadily stronger when it came to dealing with them. The sense of strength itself caused some of her fears to recede, and even though the ones that remained still seized her from time to time, she was usually able to pull herself out of a truly dark mood before it gripped her. Usually, the daily drama at school had nothing to do with her and was just something that some other girl whipped up. That gave Zubaida the chance to join the rest of the girls in speculating as to what the troublemaker’s problem was, and whether anything could be done to help her.
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