Pictures from that day are also mutual testimony to Zubaida’s spirit as well as of the acceptance and openness of the other kids. Her classmates had been given a language of tolerance and support to use with this strange girl. Teacher Kerrie Benson, with the help of the class parents, used it to find a familiar and accepting way for the students to look at her, while Zubaida’s drive to be an active part of a group carried her into the good graces of the others.
The Others.
Peter filled his off-hours in going over logistics with Rebecca, setting up Zubaida’s return to her family. The State Department offered to arrange for an escort to accompany her back home, but Peter determined that after coming so far with her on this journey, he would finish it with her as well. By this time, the NGO that helped to bring Zubaida out of Afghanistan had moved on to other cases, so Peter and Rebecca took on all of the planning necessary for Zubaida’s return themselves.
So far, Peter had taken the enormous risk of insisting that his father agree to expose their practice to the kind of scrutiny and criticism that was virtually guaranteed if anything unexpected went wrong during her time here. Then, with the surgeries well underway and the medical risk finally shrinking, he and Rebecca took her into their home and spread the risk to their personal lives. No doubt they would have come under attack if any sort of major accident had befallen Zubaida while she was under their care, or if she had been interested in making good on her threats to harm herself.
Over the course of a year, they had run that gauntlet with nothing worse than day-to-day difficulties. Now there was one remaining risk, to personally escort her home and hand her over to the parents who had entrusted her into Peter’s care and eventually into his home. The trip actually presented a series of risks, not the least of which was the simple fact that Afghanistan was still a contested country dominated by Muslims, some of whom were extreme in their fundamentalism and in their hatred of all things Jewish.
So of course they would love to meet a man on their home turf with the last name of Grossman who was messing about with the health of a young girl from their country.
But he needed to look Zubaida’s mother and father in the eyes while he gave them back their child, so that they could see for themselves that Zubaida had never been without care and protection. He and Rebecca hadn’t intended to become surrogate parents at the outset, but it was as if events were designed to push them into it. Now with the bond between them and Zubaida as strong as it was, they wanted to offer a clear gesture to the Hasan family that they hoped Zubaida would always be a part of their lives and that they had no intention of abandoning her just because they were returning her to her homeland.
If Peter and Rebecca could impress that message deeply enough upon her parents, perhaps it would cause them to use extra care in how they handled this next phase of Zubaida’s life. Now that the Taliban was gone from power, schooling was legal for girls again, provided that the parents had the will to secure their education. Perhaps if the Hasans were going to be interested in keeping up the relationship with their generous American friends, they would think carefully before allowing Zubaida’s continuing education to fail, and especially before allowing her to be traded off to a husband.
Since Peter was dealing with a set of parents with whom he shared no common language, he felt certain that the strongest message he could give them was with his own presence, when he and Zubaida stepped off the plane back in her country. He got a message to Mohammed during Mohammed’s last scheduled call from the Embassy phone, telling him to take his wife to the closest city of Herat, where Peter would arrange for them to pick up tickets to fly to Kabul and meet them. There, Peter would leave Zubaida with her family, who would fly back to Herat together and then ride in a hired car for the seven-hour trip back to their home.
Rebecca would have been glad to endure the long trip with both of them, but she wasn’t supposed to be flying, at that time. After years of disappointment in their quest to have a baby—and after discovering a small taste of the joy and burden of parenthood through Zubaida’s unexpected presence in their lives—Rebecca had just learned that she was pregnant.
On June 24th, three days before their departure, Peter and Rebecca allowed a camera crew from ABC’s “Primetime Thursday” to virtually move into their home and stay until they left or the airport. The crew had also arranged to accompany them on the trip and film the highlights for their show.
Zubaida had become so indifferent to cameras by that point that she ignored the crew’s presence most of the time, as if all the commotion was just part of life in America. If they wanted to interview her, she was usually willing to talk. Afterward she went back to whatever she was doing and ignored them again.
Peter and Rebecca both surprised themselves with the impact that was being made on both of them by having to release this girl and send her away, when they could do little more than hope for the best. After the appearances on national television, the Burn Center’s web site had been flooded with hundreds of small donations from individuals who were moved by Zubaida’s story. Peter and Rebecca immediately used the money to establish a fund that could help pay for her education in Afghanistan, or someday bring her back to the U.S. if she needed more medical treatment. But they still had no clear idea of how to actually get that money into her hands. An aggressive black market and the country’s chaotic state made money transfers difficult. And with no mail delivery to the village of Farah, and cash being the only useable medium of exchange, they were left with the prospect of trying to send funds halfway around the world into a war-torn country that was overrun by warlords and hungry people. The idea of dispatching a messenger cross-country to deliver a bag of cash to the Hasan family was absurd, and even once the funds could be delivered to them, how could anyone in America guarantee that the money would be used to further Zubaida’s education and not some other purpose?
And so there was nothing else to do but for Peter to go over to the other side of the planet, so that Mohammed Hasan would know by Peter’s very presence that he had come just to look him in the eyes.
Two days before leaving, Zubaida had to say goodbye to her best friend Emily, whose family was moving out of the state. She openly wept when it was time for Emily to get back into her mother’s car, and the two girls hugged like sisters being torn apart. Zubaida’s ability to present an extroverted personality despite her scars and injuries had served as a beacon leading Emily away from her own self-consciousness about the dog bite scar on her forehead. No matter what sort of self doubts that Emily might suffer in the future, she would never have to wonder whether having a visible scar was enough to ruin her social life or prevent her from being accepted. Adults could speak encouraging words all day long, but they only dissolved into fuzzy static; Zubaida was a peer who lived out that lesson right in front of Emily’s eyes throughout the course of the school year.
Zubaida grieved for their parting as she would for any beloved member of her clan. She hated to think of life without her friend. Now the reality of leaving hit home with her and there was no way to ignore it. Her feelings were grating at her most of all over the prospect of losing Peter and Rebecca. Even worse than losing Emily, two more of her clan were being torn from her life and it made no difference at all that she understood and accepted the realities of it. Hers was a heart built for holding the clan together, not for watching it split into pieces.
If Peter and Rebecca were not her real mom and dad, they were at least a mother and father figure inside of her clan of loved ones. In similar ways, so were her friends from school, and Peter and Rebecca’s parents, and even the familiar and attentive staff at the hospital. They were her American clan, and Zubaida could no more leave them behind without feeling the pain of it than she was able to forget her own family while she was in America. Every member of her American clan had tiny images of themselves buried inside of her memory, filling out her concept of herself in ways nobody could have predicted before it all bega
n.
To her, it was as if these Americans had some kind of Pashtun Wali of their own, even though she knew that the members of her American clan came from different religions and that several were born in far off countries. The Americans nevertheless seemed to share some common ideal that guided them, similar to the way that her culture guided its people through the ancient customs of the desert tribes.
And for all of those reasons, she reached her last day in America without ever having met any of the Others, and she had no idea how she could explain that to the villagers back at home.
Chapter Sixteen
Rebecca drove Peter and Zubaida to the Los Angeles Airport, where the three huddled together inside the terminal for a quiet goodbye. Rebecca was in tears while she whispered good bye and squeezed Zubaida between her and Peter, but Zubaida stood stunned with sadness and hardly able to speak. As it was her custom, she held most of her emotions in check until she could sort them later.
Zubaida couldn’t have known how close her reactions were to Rebecca’s own. Rebecca held herself to a few sniffles and a catch in the throat. Neither of these two females were willing to come off to the world as a sentimental type, and both avoided maudlin behavior. But soon afterward, Zubaida found herself sitting at her window seat alone with her feelings.
The plane took off and she watched the ground fall away. Meanwhile Rebecca was making the long drive home from the airport without Peter and Zubaida, moving north along the miles of Pacific beach line and back to their beautiful empty house. After she got back and had to listen to her own footsteps echo throughout the house, no amount of focusing on the good that was accomplished during that past year lifted the heavy sadness. The triumph that Zubaida made of her entire stay in America was real cause for joy, but the sharp sting of loss remained. She also felt her sense of isolation being sharpened by her fears for Peter’s safety in the Middle East. He was traveling to Afghanistan on a purely humanitarian mission, but that often failed to dissuade zealous assailants.
It took nineteen hours for Peter and Zubaida to fly from California to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and Zubaida repeatedly turned to Peter and said that she was going to miss Rebecca very much. She didn’t elaborate, but after being quiet for awhile, she would come back to remarking how much she would miss Rebecca.
In the oil-rich architectural wonderland of Dubai, the pair stopped over just long enough to go have dinner in town, then they returned to their hotel for a short night before returning to the airport early the next morning. After the three-hour flight to Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, they would find a place to stay near the airport and meet with Zubaida’s mother and father there at last.
It was on that last leg of the trip that Peter found his own emotional weight beginning to feel heavy. The tightness in his throat grabbed him the hardest when he realized that he had been wondering whether he would be relieved to finish his mission with Zubaida, because of how difficult and unpredictable she could sometimes be. But now as their time together drew to an end, he was hit by the full force of the strong bonds between them. It was as if he were a father about to give away his daughter to a husband, saying good-bye while she went off to live in some far away place.
They landed at the Kabul International Airport to find that the sole terminal was a shabby, two story building with a six-story control tower. The entire place had been heavily damaged during the fighting to repel the Taliban forces, who made Kabul one of their last strongholds. Now, compared to the fresh-built opulence of Dubai, Kabul was the bombed out ugly sister. Cracks and potholes dotted the tarmac. Ceiling tiles were missing inside the terminal building and signs of disrepair were all around.
The differences between this place and the place that they had just left earlier that morning were so dramatic that they encouraged the perception of having stepped back a few decades in time. It was, he realized, the first level of that time travel process which Zubaida was about to undergo once she returned, regressing all the while she and her parents traveled out and away from the small city and back toward the isolation of a remote desert village whose physical walls and cultural ways were built upon silent remains left by centuries of anonymous generations.
Peter was relieved when they were greeted inside the fractured terminal by a small team headed up by John Oerum of the United Nations, who would help them get through the chaotic baggage claim process. The airport’s single baggage carousel was out of order, so a mob quickly formed at the mouth of the baggage chute, where everything landed in a heap that the passengers had to straighten out themselves. Peter took the alternative of offering to hire one of the swarm of men who were there peddling freelance services, then let them battle the crowd. At least they could holler back and forth in a shared language.
As soon as the bags were retrieved from the dead carousel and Peter picked up his first suitcase, another crowd of men began shouting for his attention, pushing each other back and forth for the chance to carry it for him. The entire American team was dogged by a mob of would-be helpers all the way out of the airport. Despite Peter Grossman’s youthful appearance and athletic build, these men were determined to do anything short of breathing for him, in return for a few coins. If anyone in the party indicated that they wanted to ride out to the taxi stand, two or three of the men who have gladly tossed them into the nearest chair and carried it overhead all the way to the curb.
This aspect of the instant change from the opulence of oil-rich Dubai in Saudi Arabia to the overwhelming poverty in the capital city of Afghanistan hit like a thunderbolt. All Westerners were assumed to carry great sums of money, and moving among throngs of those who did not caused the small party to become living bait for anyone desperate for opportunity.
Official estimates at that time put Afghanistan’s population between twenty-five and thirty million; most of them existing from hand to mouth with limited success. Clearly, there was no possibility that Peter and his group could go anywhere in such an environment without attracting the appetites of the desperate ones.
There were men of all ages and sizes, and several different racial groups in the airport throng. The one obvious thing about them was that there were no criminals or vagrants or terrorists among them: a throng of men who will hover in anticipation for hours each day, in hopes of such a humble opportunity as fighting each other for paltry rewards. The patience, the raw perseverance, the boredom of every dragging day, all interrupted by the sudden flurries of clawing for scraps—sociopathic mentalities find no appeal in this kind of life. Too much time is lost in such work, for a zealot to tolerate the inactivity.
These had to be local men surrounding Peter and his group, husbands and fathers and grandfathers, family men left to carry out hardscrabble survival struggles after the decade of war with the Soviet invaders, the years of internal anarchy, and the Taliban takeover of the country. Things had grown progressively worse for these men and their families, especially during that long, strange silence that the Taliban enforcers tried to pass off as Peace.
It was plain to see that these men endured this level of struggle for the same reason; they were invested in the area: family, homes, friends, familiar territory, childhood memories, beloved shrines. When abundance was torn from them, they resolved to stay on and fight to live on scraps and maintain their decency, like men who have people at home.
As soon as Peter and the team got clear of the airport, the first landmark that he noticed was the local airplane graveyard—uncomfortably convenient in relation to the airstrip. There were too many planes and sections of wreckage lying around to count them all. The bluntness of life and death were far more apparent in this place, everywhere he looked. He and Zubaida and the rest of the group rode off into Kabul, which Zubaida found just as fascinating as Peter did. They each marveled at the contrasts, where the streets were congested with European vehicles driving along in a purely random fashion among sheep, camels, water buffalo, and the shepherds guiding their herd
s through the city.
They immediately sought out a UN ticket office to take care of the plane tickets for Zubaida’s parents, then went to secure a room and found a clean but very basic “guest house” that would allow both Americans and Afghan guests. Then they ended the day with a meeting between Peter, Zubaida, and members of an Afghanistan-based charitable NGO that had been set up by and Afghan-American friend named Captain Daoud, to begin discussing possible options for Zubaida’s future.
Peter had hoped that she would enjoy translating for him. They made a deal before they left California that she would be his interpreter in Afghanistan, since she could now communicate well in Farsi and English. She had gained experience at dealing with Farsi-speaking people during her journey because they are so much easier to find in America than speakers of her native Dari. Her Farsi skills had grown along with her English, so that when Peter first brought up the idea of her being his translator, she seemed eager for the chance.
But once inside the country, she became very clingy and nervous, refusing to speak Farsi at all. She told the people in their greeting party that she didn’t remember any Farsi, although Peter recalled her knowing a great deal of it a week earlier in California.
He recognized the withdrawal behavior as part of her frequent reaction to overwhelming circumstances, and felt sure that if he didn’t push her about it she would straighten herself out on her own. So they bid goodbye to Captain Daoud and others and made their way back to the guest house, then got into their beds early for the long rest that they were both going to need the following day.
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