Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  And if a miracle was too much to ask, Hasan prayed aloud that he might be taken away instead of his innocent child. He cycled the plea to his God in the back of his mind and repeated it over and over while he made the helpless motions of caring for her.

  Twenty-four hours after the fire, Hasan called upon their neighbors for a small loan to pay for gas so that another borrowed rolling wreck could be employed to take Zubaida and seek help in other places. He traded off some of the family possessions to raise the meager cash and set out with her toward the Afghanistan-Iran border, with a loose plan of making their way to one of the larger hospitals there. Surely, he thought, the doctors in such places would know what to do. Mohammed Hasan had served his country’s army in the long war against the Soviet invaders. He knew about the kinds of elaborate medical care that could be found, for the right people. No doubt one such place would have the right kind of medicine to save his daughter.

  By now, Zubaida was lost to a thick fog of fatigue after a full day and night of screaming her way through pain so intense that she would never have words to express any of it. Her parents kept drizzling cool water over her tortured flesh. The relief mostly came from the attention that they showered upon her and its effect of easing her terror. No matter what they did for her, the pain was unrelenting. The only thing that stopped her cries for brief periods was when sheer exhaustion overwhelmed her.

  This time they drove late at night, avoiding the worst of the desert heat while they rolled along over parched stretches of land. Once they reached Herat, they continued north until they crossed the border into Iran under a pitch black sky and headed for the small Iranian city of Moshad.

  At least the occasional Taliban roadblocks were manned by devotees who seemed to understand the girl’s plight and who felt no threat from her. They let the moaning child and the half-hysterical father pass on. The black-turbaned fanatics may not have understood a father’s unwillingness to leave his daughter’s fate up to Allah, but they were moved enough by her condition to shrug and allow her delusional father to continue his hopeless quest.

  Doctors in Moshad took a look at Zubaida, freshened her salve coating and referred them on to the capital city of Tehran, another five hundred miles away. That meant driving for another twelve hours. For Zubaida, nothing about traveling got any better.

  The hospital in Tehran accepted her for treatment, although there wasn’t much that they could do beyond rubbing her with other ointments in an attempt to ward off the worst of the infections and to keep the wounds from drying out.

  She was soon past any sense of time; the days and nights began to melt into one another. The single most constant force in her awareness was the rain of agony coming from her roasted nerve endings—whether it came as energetic screams or exhausted moans, the pain continued to burn inside of her and force its way back out.

  * * *

  Zubaida, all of her family, and everyone in the village of Farah knew that their depth of poverty rose straight from an entire generation of war with the invading Soviet forces. It was a conflict that didn’t end until 1989. Many of their local men died in the long struggle to repel the Soviet Army and defeat communism.

  But there was nothing to fill the vacuum after the Russian foreigners were finally driven away; the unifying power of a common enemy was lost to the splintered interests of many different Afghan militia factions. Soon the in-fighting between local warlords began.

  As for the effect on the general population, no matter who won the warlords’ bitter flare-ups, the result always ended up with the region being stripped of basic goods and services while its people were left to absorb the impact.

  Under those conditions, the rise of the Taliban followed the departure of the Soviets. Black-turbaned squads of long-bearded fanatics swept over the country of thirty million, using the name of Allah to imprison the female population and exercise twenty-four hour control over all of the men via a host of strict religious edicts. In that way, Zubaida’s family and everyone in Farah understood how the Taliban’s destructive influence on their region had drained away any international relief that might have been intended for them, long before any of it could reach the village. That relief included any medically valuable pain killers or antibiotics. More importantly for the Hasan family, the Soviet war and the Taliban rise to power had mutually succeeded in ending the education of females throughout Afghanistan for so long that in addition to the rare presence of doctors in the region, there were no trained nurses there at all.

  Hasan was fiercely proud of the fact that the nomadic people of Afghanistan have always been able to shrug off the presence of any large-scale government in their land. But now the blunt fact of his utter helplessness as a father in dealing with a single child’s catastrophe rose up in front of his eyes. It hung in the air before him and formed a poisonous Taliban presence that filled his home as surely as if a black-turbaned genie had just come swirling out of a foul puff of lantern smoke

  * * *

  In the isolation of their desert village, they had no way of knowing that halfway around the planet the grim reality of the Taliban was already the topic of a draft U.S. Presidential Directive. It was quietly being prepared in Washington, D.C. to authorize one last black-ops attempt to remove a certain obscure but worrisome Afghanistan-based Islamic terrorist named Osama Bin Laden.

  If that attempt failed, the Presidential Directive proposed that the next logical step would have to be nothing short of the complete removal of the Taliban regime from all positions of power in Afghanistan, because of their sympathy for Osama Bin Laden’s anti-U.S. campaign.

  At about the same time that Zubaida was burned, the last of nineteen Islamic suicide hijackers arrived inside the United States and began final flight training in preparation for the attack they planned for the coming September 11th.

  * * *

  One week after the burns, Zubaida’s pain was down to a more bearable level most of the time, but the enflamed nerve endings always raged again whenever her dressings needed to be changed. Before long, screams and silence became her only language. She clung to her life without painkillers inside a ruined body that would surely never dance again. Now, the music that had always carried her through every difficult experience remained silent, as it had been from the moment that the orange teeth bit into her. Since then, she hadn’t heard a note.

  Sometimes she could sink into mere sobs and go back to crying like any other little girl, but most of the time the pain insisted on tearing through her mouth with every change of dressing and every scraping of the infected wounds.

  The Iranian doctors spent twenty days giving her the best medicines that they could make available, while Zubaida teetered in and out of her nightmare world. But the medicines they could offer and facilities they possessed simply weren’t enough to fight back the raging infections that had begun to attack her raw and open wounds.

  Eventually, the doctors agreed that that they were making no headway with her.

  The hospital was crowded and the need for space was severe. So they informed Mohammed Hasan that they had done everything they could for his suffering child, but it was impossible for this little girl to live much longer through the waves of infection that were now sweeping through her. Despite the doctors’ greater resources and higher levels of training than those back in Herat, their ultimate response was the same as the others—take your daughter back home and pray for death to ease her suffering.

  * * *

  Huge, unseen forces, whose power had been steadily building for over twenty years, now swirled invisibly throughout their homeland and spilled across the borders and spread all over the planet. No one on either end of the unseen storm could know how powerfully those waves were about to impact on one suffering Afghani girl huddled in an isolated desert village with her stunned and aching family.

  Toward the end of July, suicide pilot Mohammed Atta contacted Osama Bin Laden by courier and asked for another several weeks t
o complete his squad’s flight training. It is apparent that his request was granted—on July 27th, the CIA noted that the mounting intelligence “chatter” concerning rumors of imminent attacks on America had abruptly fallen silent.

  Nobody knew why.

  * * *

  Hasan took Zubaida back to their home village of Farah, but he still couldn’t make himself follow the doctors’ suggestions about praying for her to die. Even though Hasan was a Muslim, he didn’t share the fanatic ways of the fundamentalists. Not only was he opposed to their vicious control over the population, but in an hour such as this one, he couldn’t share in the belief that the same God who allowed this to happen to Hasan’s defenseless daughter would take any better care of Zubaida in the afterlife than He had in this world.

  Instead, Hasan continued his litany for the only end that he could desire—some sort of miracle to save his suffering child. It was a faltering prayer, propped between his refusal to embrace extreme religion and his rejection of the superstitions that pervade much of the desert nomad culture. Just as he never believed in the militant fringes of Islamic faith, he also never found comfort in any of the age-old beliefs prevalent in that part of the world: to look upon the moon during the third night of a new moon is to bring bad luck. A woman carrying an unborn child must not touch her body during an eclipse, or the child will bear a mark on the part of the body that was touched. If she carries a knife during an eclipse, the child will be scarred in any part of the body where the knife touches the mother.

  Hasan knew that his more superstitious wife had avoided all such behaviors, and even so, their little girl was slowly being covered in infected scar tissue which grew more pronounced with every passing day—what good had the age-old superstitious “precautions” done? He struggled to remain faithful to his God even as he acknowledged that the realm of superstition hadn’t done anything to help the family, either.

  Hasan realized that he remained his daughter’s only hope. He had to be willing to fight as hard as she herself was fighting. So as soon as he and Zubaida arrived back in home in Farah after the twenty-day stay in the Tehran hospital, he arranged for the local folk doctor to make daily visits and rub Zubaida with homemade ointments in a continuing effort to fight off infection in her wounds.

  The ointments seemed to work well enough to keep the worst at bay, but they lacked the power to bring her into a healing state. Zubaida couldn’t eat well enough to sustain herself, so her flesh began to wither. The infections held her in a grip of low-grade fevers. Meanwhile the scar tissue covering most of her face and torso continued to grow thicker with every passing day, wrapping her in tight bands of stiff flesh that was beginning to bind her like fibrous ropes.

  But whether it was Divine Intervention, blind luck, or simply the result of one girl’s steely will to live, in the three weeks that had passed since the fire consumed so much of Zubaida before leaving her to her guaranteed death, she continued to cling to life with an unyielding grip nobody could explain.

  Gradually with the passing days, Zubaida plunged into a place where dreams, nightmares, and waking life all melted together under the late summer sun. Desert heat was a lifelong reality for her that usually went unnoticed—now it was a constant torment. Her scarring wounds itched almost as badly as they hurt, at least until she made any attempt to move. Then the simple act of turning over on her sleeping pad sent fresh shocks of pain shooting through her.

  Family members tended to her, floating in and out of her awareness like ghosts until every part of the day and night was impossibly foreign to her. All the more so, since she found that she had lost her music. There was no desire to sing left in her, and she certainly couldn’t do any dancing. The very urges, the feelings, had disappeared. The worst of it was the thick silence in her head where her constant companion of rhythms and melodies always used to be.

  Thoughts that should have passed through her like waves of song now echoed inside an emptiness that had no more music in it that the sound of a cold chisel on hard stone. She was no longer a little girl; she was an organism made of pain.

  * * *

  In the United States on September 4th of 2001, the President’s Principals Committee had their first meeting regarding international reports of the grim threat of attacks by a Muslim extremist organization calling itself Al Qaeda, “the Base,” under the direction of an obscenely rich son of Arab privilege named Osama Bin Laden. The National Security Council’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard Clark, pleaded for intense White House resolve in hunting down Al Qaeda fighters. He expressed his gut fear that there were major attacks upon the American homeland coming in the very near future.

  In Afghanistan on September 9th, the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud consented to a personal interview with two Arab “journalists” who had been waiting in his camp for days in order to see him. The pair were undercover Al Qaeda operatives, and entered his tent carrying a fake camera rigged with high explosives. The suicide bomb killed Massoud and his staff.

  On September 10th, the National Security Agency’s Deputy Director Stephen Hadley told the CIA to prepare for a series of covert actions against Al Qaeda. By this time, America’s international security warning system was, as the 9/11 Commission’s Report would later put it, “blinking red… “

  * * *

  The news of September 11th attacks on America didn’t reach into the remote areas of Afghanistan right away. Even if it had, there was no way that Zubaida or her family could have any idea of the impact that the aftermath would make upon them.

  Summer passed into fall, and although the men in the village of Farah had heard reports of American soldiers building up their numbers inside of Afghanistan, local people were only aware of the Americans in the form of occasional U.S. Army convoys passing by on the way to Herat. They didn’t feel any particular threat; it was all part of some far-away politician’s problem.

  Three months after Zubaida’s accident, the sole sliver of good news for her was that the pain was tapering off to tolerable levels. She was never free of it, but the wrenching agony had finally left her. Whatever discomfort remained with her seemed pale next to that.

  Her music, however, was long gone. She didn’t expect herself to dance or sing, but it surprised her that she couldn’t even hear any notes. Nowhere in her mind was the invisible radio that had always supplied her with accompaniment to her daily life, song after song after song. The hollow place in her heart was all that remained where warm and flowing music should have been.

  She was even beginning to forget what it felt like to have the music inside of her.

  Now that the pain had subsided, however, Zubaida had plenty of time to consider what this accident had cost her position in the family structure. Even at her young age, she had long since become the family’s “alpha” child, assuming a role of responsibility at home that was greater than her years. Now her embarrassment over her appearance was not as great as her feeling of guilt that she could no longer be of use—her roster of daily chores had once been a substantial contribution to everyone’s well being. Not only was she of no use anymore, her constant need of help was a heavy drain on energy and resources that no one in the family or their struggling village could afford to waste.

  The only defense left to her mental state was to slow her thoughts down to the point that time seemed to race by in front of her. That altered state became her full time place of refuge.

  Most of her open wounds were closed or closing, but the normal skin that had once been there was steadily being replaced by stiff scar tissue. Sometimes, if she moved too quickly, one of the healing areas would break open with a fresh surge of fiery pain, and the recovery had to begin all over again. Her left arm was now so stiff that she had to keep it tucked up against her chest, since any other position pulled at her chest wounds. Eventually the sticky healing flesh glued her arm into place.

  The arm stayed there, crooked up against her left side, until the stiff s
car tissue thickened so much that the entire limb became welded to her torso.

  The healing skin of her neck and lower face was now covered over with scar tissue that continued to grow, but the tissue’s inability to stretch also caused it to gradually pull her head farther and farther down onto her chest. Finally, her chin rested there and became sealed in that position. Since her head couldn’t move any farther downward, the out of control scar tissue then began to pull down on her face, her eyes, her jaw, her lower lip.

  By the time three months passed, Zubaida’s condition had degraded to a state so severe that most people living in the world’s developed nations will never see anything like it—the masses of scar tissue surrounding her and binding up her body had progressed to a stage that is simply never allowed to develop in places that have adequate medical care. Just as the famed “Elephant Man” had been betrayed by his own bones and cartilage when they grew out of control and distorted him beyond recognition, Zubaida’s flesh was now playing a similar trick on her by wrapping her in that growing blanket of unbending scar tissue.

  Eventually, her mouth was pulled so far downward that she could no longer close it enough to chew her food—her mother had to mash it up for her. The difficulty in eating had already caused her to lose a fourth of her body weight, and there was no sign that she would be able to gain it back.

  Zubaida herself had no clear idea why she wouldn’t let herself give in to death. She could feel it tugging at her; it just seemed too foreign to embrace. The strongest urge inside of her was to somehow get back on her feet and pitch in with the family. It didn’t matter to her that she had older siblings, Zubaida’s boundless energy had always made her invaluable to the family’s day-to-day living. She couldn’t imagine them being left without her.