She described moments when Zubaida appeared to be gripped by manic energy so strong that she could not sit still. In those moods, the girl seemed to take some special delight in pulling mischievous little pranks and annoyances. She pressed them long past the point that such things were funny or even tolerable, and any attempt to prevent the behavior sent her into a fury.
It was the fury that frightened them. How deep did such anger run inside of this girl? How far would her fury carry her in destructive behavior? Had Zubaida ever been a violent child before her accident? Did anyone know the answer to that? Had anyone even checked? Because after what they had seen of Zubaida’s behavior inside of their home, they felt forced to stop and ask themselves, just as they were now asking Rebecca—do you know how deeply disturbed this child might actually be? Did anyone know if she had a violent past? The fact that Zubaida seemed so comfortable with her expressions of anger made them wonder why that was so.
How could they not ask themselves whether they and their toddler were safe with Zubaida in their home? How could she not ask that of the Grossmans, now?
Zubaida’s benefit, Rebecca made a conscious effort to keep a pleasant expression on her face while she took in the grim report. Conflicting emotions ran through her without bringing any idea of what she could do with this depressing news. She felt eager for the chance to talk it over with Peter after he got home in the evening, but in the meantime, she could only hope that this woman was having a hard day or something—perhaps she was presenting the situation in terms more bleak than real. Because otherwise, whether Rebecca was hearing an accurate and fair version of things or not, it seemed clear that feelings at the host home were running to such a very negative place within these first few weeks. It raised the question of whether or not this child be able to ride out a year with the family.
Later that night, after Rebecca had a chance to repeat what she had been told to Peter, they decided that the only way to get more insight into what was going on with Zubaida would be to invite her to come and stay with them for a weekend. It would give her hosts a little break, which they seemed to need, and provide a fairly relaxed and natural way for them to spend some private personal time with her and try to get a handle on the truth.
At that time, Zubaida’s next round of surgeries was scheduled for August 13th, still a couple of weeks away, so they called and made arrangements for her to come and spend the next weekend with them at their home, without the hosts, without the NGO reps, without any interpreters. It would just be Peter, Rebecca, Zubaida, and their small zoo of domestic animals. Rebecca didn’t have any idea if she would possess any answers once she came out the other side of the experience, but everything she had seen of the strength inside of the child served to convince her that she couldn’t listen to the kind of report that had been brought to them, without getting personally involved in the search for the truth.
On the day that Zubaida arrived for the weekend, carrying her little tote bag, she was sullen in the host mother’s presence and acted as if she was at Peter and Rebecca’s because she had been expelled from her hosts’ home. But Rebecca noticed that as soon as they were alone together, Zubaida’s mood brightened considerably. For the rest of her stay, she remained well behaved to the point that Rebecca was struck by how different Zubaida was with them, compared to the sort of descriptions that came from the host family. She had noticed Zubaida’s spark on other occasions, but now she got the chance to form a clear impression of her personality. It didn’t take long. Within a few hours of arriving, Zubaida felt safe enough to drop her sullen defenses. The lack of ability to converse seemed to make touch even more important to the girl, and she soon became affectionate with both Peter and Rebecca and was clearly eager to feel close.
Peter and Rebecca both found that they reveled in their brief role as foster parents to her. They had been talking about having children of their own for quite some time, but had not yet been able to get pregnant. They both felt like their house had a very nice full feeling when Zubaida was around. Her need for constant attention and reinforcement also played into their desire to care for a child, and they each realized that they loved the way it felt.
Zubaida herself had no prior experience in dealing with a blonde, but before that first weekend was over she realized that they are more or less like regular people. As for everything else about her time with her American doctor and his wife, she felt a certain relief in being away from the “almost-but-not-quite” environment of her hosts’ home. In a purely American environment, the uniform strangeness of everything was somehow reassuring. It was honest; it didn’t try to make her feel that she was not among the Others. At the Grossmans’ place, with no common language and few common rituals to force closeness upon them, Zubaida found it easier to accept the kindnesses shown to her, instead of the resistance that she felt at the host family’s house where she felt like she was expected to behave as if their lives were not also impossibly strange to her.
Once she was back there with them after the visit with Peter and Rebecca, she withdrew and plunged into isolation and boredom. There wasn’t much else to do but wait for her body to be ready for the next set of operations. After those first good feelings that she was able to share with Peter and Rebecca, she rejected what she perceived to be the negative attitudes that she felt directed toward her in the home of her hosts. She began to make her resentments clearly known.
Life in that house continued in this manner right up until the time for her next procedures of reconstructive surgery and skin grafting. Four separate rounds of operations were to be scheduled throughout the month of August, with the first one beginning early on the morning of August 13th.
* * *
On that same date, The Times Of India reported that elsewhere in the region, “Indian space scientists believe the moon is within reach for the country’s space program, and they expect to launch an unmanned lunar probe within five years.” It was portrayed as a joyful celebration of that country’s new technological capabilities.The combined government and military forces of that gigantic but impoverished nation were fixed in their view that the answer to the question of what to do about the human condition was an issue of deliverable mega-tonnage.
International defense experts expressed their grave concerns that the resulting developments in Indian rocket technology would not only feed the military’s long-held goal of producing a homegrown intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Pakistan, Afghanistan, and virtually anywhere in the explosive Middle East, but tempt them to use it as a negotiating tool with other governments not known for reasonable cooperation or reliable follow through.
Critics of the plan decried the huge expenditures required for such a feat. They not only questioned its scientific value, but challenged the practical value as well, considering that the giant country’s population remained in dire need of basic medical help and educational opportunity.
None of the pundits quoted in the article held out any hope that there would be enough dissenters protesting India’s space program to actually affect the outcome of events. Those intercontinental ballistic missiles appeared to be already on their way, while the climate of confrontation continued to ferment and the Indian government weighed in on what to do about the human condition.
* * *
Zubaida’s life throughout the month of August took place mostly inside of the hospital. She complained that it seemed like as soon as she recovered enough to be sent back to the host family’s home for a few days, she was picked up and whisked back to the hospital. No one could argue. The first procedure of the month was when Peter Grossman carved away the constrictive tissue around her right ear and reconstructed what was left into a near-normal appendage. In that operation and in the rest of that month’s surgeries, part of the process was to inject large amount of steroids into her burn scars, gradually causing them to shrink.
On August 16th, three days after Zubaida’s first set of procedures, Peter d
id a series of new skin grafts. Some were the full thickness grafts that can stretch and grow with the rest of the body; others were split-thickness grafts whose temporary function was mostly to seal the wounds and allow them to heal.
On August 22nd, he replaced some infected skin grafts around her underarm area and on her trunk.
On the 26th, he had to repeat the last skin grafting procedure to replace some of the grafts that didn’t take. So borrowing from the precious few square inches of unburned skin on her back, Dr. Peter mined the limited resource for new sections of pliable tissue to seal the tracks left by the burn scars.
But while the month progressed, the physical toll on Zubaida came to be matched by the emotional toll that the combination of the surgeries and the strangeness of her life was taking on her. Confrontations with her host family became daily or even hourly occurrences. Sometimes they seemed to be nearly constant—which had to be true for everybody involved.
Also in August, The Wall Street Journal published an article called “The War on Women,” warning of the pernicious spread of Sharia, a radical form of Islamic law, as a mirror of the recently ousted Taliban laws in Afghanistan. The article highlighted one Sharia appellate court’s decision to uphold a sentence of death by stoning for a women caught having sex outside of wedlock. There was no such consequence for the man involved, and the worldwide growth of discriminatory Sharia law was decried by upholders of contemporary civil law—or as proponents of Sharia would view them, minions of Evil. And so went the struggle within the world of mortal laws regarding the problem of what to do about the human condition.
* * *
Within a couple of weeks after Zubaida’s release from the hospital following her final operations for the month of August, Rebecca answered the phone one day to hear one of the NGO officers tell her that the host family was becoming overwhelmed by the emotional problems that they were having with Zubaida. She relayed these concerns to Peter, but beyond absorbing the additional anxiety over the complaints, there was little they could do besides hope that the hosts would continue to understand that Zubaida’s behavior couldn’t realistically be held to ordinary standards.
It was an especially volatile situation for everyone concerned, since at this point she was only halfway through the surgical plan. A host family was vital to the terms of her presence in the country; the State Department was firm in only allowing her to remain in the U.S. under specific conditions. Without a host family she would quickly be whisked back to Afghanistan and left to take her chances with the village healers. Worse, the NGO that initially sponsored her was so overwhelmed with work that nobody ever got around to finding a properly qualified backup family in anticipation of something like the current situation. That alone carried the potential to derail everything, because for all their trouble they had been left with no alternatives.
The plan was for Zubaida to have the last week of August, the entire month of September, and the first ten days of October away from the hospital, to help get her strength back up for the second half of the process. Since that gave her more than six weeks for physical and psychological recovery, Peter and Rebecca hoped that things would naturally calm down. Maybe peace at home would be possible once Zubaida had a chance to remain comfortable for days at a time without being hauled back into surgery.
But over the following days, Peter and Rebecca both repeatedly heard from the concerned NGO officer. The stories about Zubaida that were now coming back from the host family had reached alarming levels. Some of her behavior was innocent enough on the surface of it. For example, she displayed a continuing habit of wandering away from the house and going for long walks without telling anyone, since the ability to walk again was a joy to her and it was her lifelong independent habit of walking alone through the ruins of Farah that made the appeal of long walks so strong to her now. After so much extreme confinement, it felt so good to be free, to walk and walk and walk and not have to answer anybody’s questions.
The practice got no support from the people responsible for her well being. More ominously, they told of times when Zubaida would become so inconsolably upset that she would grab one of the kitchen knives and threaten to kill herself, sometimes in defiance of some typical domestic disagreement.
At that point neither Peter nor Rebecca could stay out of the picture any longer. They invited the host family to bring Zubaida over for another weekend stay, to try to see for themselves what the situation really was with her.
Their offer was met with receptive ears. Zubaida was there the next weekend. The moment she and her host mother arrived, it was clear to Rebecca that the tensions were high between the pair; the air between them felt brittle. The woman made no effort to conceal her relief to have a couple of days off. Zubaida appeared so glum and closed down in the host mother’s presence that Rebecca felt a sudden rush of concern over what she was getting herself into.
It was a great relief for her to see how much Zubaida relaxed once again after the host mother was finally gone. The change was almost immediate. By the time Peter got home from the hospital, the two were getting along well. Zubaida had learned a very few words of English, but not enough to be useful in conversation. Without an interpreter, they made a game out of communicating with the same sorts of gestures and non-verbal sounds that everybody uses when they don’t share a language but need to make themselves understood. The process allowed Zubaida as much self-expression as she wanted to use. That seemed to suit her well. The extra energy involved in the most basic acts of communication helped to focus the flighty energies of a girl who was alternately timid and defiant.
For their first outing together, they took her bowling, since the simple sport doesn’t require much conversation. Zubaida was only mildly interested in the challenge of rolling the ball down the wooden lane, but seemed very impressed by the echoing sounds of multiple bowlers rolling out their games and by the mechanical pin changers working like robots. It was her first opportunity to interact with an American pastime in a uniquely Western setting, but the lesson for the couple was that hands-on experience was good for her. In an environment of people who sounded to her like they had motors in their mouths, chugging out whole clouds of nonsense syllables, she began to take real pleasure in just grabbing a big, heavy ball in her hands and rolling it down a long, flat lane to try to knock over some wooden pins.
Zubaida knew for certain that the Taliban would hate to see her out in public playing this big, silly game—plus, she had already turned ten years of age and so was expected to spend most of her life hiding indoors from now on, and this knowledge gave any noisy public sport a lot of extra appeal to her.
The next day, Peter and Rebecca drove her out to a small public beach set inside of a Malibu cove, to play in the waves that break on the curved spit of sand which forms the horseshoe-shaped beach. Zubaida seemed to open up and drink in the environment. She splashed in the surf and ran around in the sand with them, while Peter and Rebecca delighted in seeing her come to life and jump around like any other kid. It was clear the sheer physicality of the activity was good for her after the long convalescence. They felt like they were watching an entire section of her healing process taking place in a single afternoon, as if some strong force that had been invisibly accumulating inside of her and only needed some invisible element contained in the waves or perhaps the seashore air in order for it all to be released. Watching her run and twist and leap on the sand, it was easy to forget for a second or two that the little girl they were playing with was unlike any other.
By the end of that day, though, Rebecca was already beginning to pick up a number of disturbing signs—little things—clues to what might have been going on at the host family’s house. The more comfortable that Zubaida became in their presence, the more that the pleasant artifice of manners tended to occasionally slip for a moment or two. A simple point of conflict such as, “Can we walk in this direction?” “No, we need to go the other way,” could be greeted with the same
sort of petulant face and slump in body language that could be typical of many girls her age, but it was hard not to notice that for some time following any point of minor conflict, Zubaida seemed to be struck by a whole series of little inspirations about how to best provoke annoyance in anyone who happened to be around. Little bits of mischief began to stream out of her, and they were frequently pushed a few notches too far.
There was nothing endearing about it. Passive hostility became the main presence in the room. It wasn’t enough to lessen Rebecca’s desire to spend more time with Zubaida, but it was easy to imagine how destructive such generally defiant behavior could be—especially if it got ramped up a few more levels, the way the hosts had described it.
That didn’t change the fact that after Zubaida went back to her host family, Peter and Rebecca both talked of how satisfying they found the brief experience as surrogate parents. They were trying to have a child of their own, and their frustration up to that point only served to sharpen their appreciation for having a child around. Both realized that Zubaida’s visits had likely been just as good for them as for her.
All of that made it a much more daunting prospect to have to sit by and idly pray that things didn’t blow up over at the host family’s house. They had seen her capacity for asserting her will by provoking annoyed reactions, but they were unaware of anything that appeared to be genuinely dangerous to her or anyone else.
They wondered, could the hosts be exaggerating? And if they were telling the truth, could it be that they had somehow provoked these responses from Zubaida themselves, perhaps without even realizing it?
Tiny Dancer Page 10
