Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  Behind her eyelids, now, whether she was awake or dreaming, the music was spending minutes at a time or even hours at a time playing away inside of her. Something always snapped it off, sooner or later, but the music always rebounded to help vitalize her during daylight and accompany her through the worst of her dreams at night. Even when her music came out timed to surreal scenes of her own destruction or images of her family’s demise, its very presence wrapped her in the welcome familiarity of something she clearly recognized about herself. The music kept her in touch with the Zubaida who would not let herself be forever haunted by evil dreams or waking suspicions.

  Peter already knew about Rebecca’s taste in mischief, and later recalled specifically telling her “no TP-ing at the slumber party.” His mistake was that he left it at that, and then fell for it when he went along with being “granted the night off” to go see friends while Rebecca and the girls took over the house.

  When he returned home that night, nothing appeared to be amiss and they were all peacefully asleep. It was only the next morning at breakfast with Rebecca and the girls that he began hearing little digs from his wife about how he was a stick in the mud—and he noticed that the girls all seemed to think that Rebecca’s comments were hysterical. Before long the whole group was too goofy for him to get any sense out of them at all.

  He got up from the table and walked outside, then went around the corner to check his hunch about where the victim’s house might be, and there was the crime scene. Their friends were light-hearted enough to play along with a gag like that, but when he looked at the intricate web of paper streaks covering most of the yard’s surfaces, he could also see that the joke would wear thin fast if he didn’t get it cleaned up.

  He weighed the idea of going back and telling the girls that they’d had their fun, and now the responsible thing to do was to go back there and clean it all up. It was the mature thing. It was the big kid thing to do. He spent a few seconds visualizing the chore of organizing and enforcing a girl-y yard cleanup.

  A good hour later, Peter had most of the yard finished and had spent so much time climbing around in the tree branches that he knew it would be okay to skip his workout at the gym. The science of the operating room was far more predictable than the art of the long-term relationship, but he already knew that with Rebecca, a little bit of willingness to spontaneously compromise was a workable peace-keeping skill.

  Chapter Ten

  Bador

  Bador had eight other children at the time of Zubaida’s accident, seven of them still at home. They ranged in age from her married eldest daughter Raima, who was with Bador when the fire struck Zubaida, down to her youngest toddler. Zubaida had always been her trusty middle child. But while Zubaida was so far away in America, Bador seldom indulged in the luxury of allowing her heart to ache for her daughter. The fears that she imagined on her daughter’s behalf would, if she let them, multiply until they tortured her.

  Bador was accepting of her culture’s patriarchal conception of the adult female as the household caretaker, but under Taliban rule she was also a physical prisoner inside her home, in that she could never leave it without a male chaperone. She was fortunate that her husband Mohammed, despite his first name, had never been a religious zealot and didn’t bother to impose strict behavioral codes upon her. The cultural restrictions had been tight enough without that, ever since the fundamentalist Taliban takeover.

  In her brief years of growing up, Bador never heard of something called a “Taliban,” but she already lived amid an invisible thicket of traditions and peer expectations. One such custom required girls to submit to being traded as a family asset via arranged marriages, despite the modern era’s accepted customs. These forced unions were consummated late in the bride’s childhood, in a practice still found in various civilizations around the globe.

  Women in the cities lived less restrictive lives, but the time-honored family ways of the Afghan tribes left most women of the primarily rural population mired in the traditional household role for want of education. More recently, the holy regime of the Taliban clerics had cut off every other alternative for the nation’s female population. They not only sealed the exits but violent public retribution was inflicted upon any and all transgressors.

  However, at the end of 2002, right about the time that Zubaida was off in America learning how to fit into the local holiday celebrations of the equally foreign Christmas and Chanukah, the U.S. military and a coalition of supporting nations forcibly ejected the Taliban rulers from power in Afghanistan. The remaining resistance was driven north toward Kabul, away from the central core of the country where Zubaida’s home village of Farah is located. Throughout most of the country, the Taliban’s fundamentalist control over Afghanistan’s government was shattered. But during their five years in power from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban set back the cause of women in Afghanistan to a place more backward and misogynistic than any nation known to history.

  While the extreme fundamentalist rule of the country was enforced in the name of Islam, the actual practice was completely at odds with Islam’s teachings. Ever since the fourteenth century, Islam has declared the equality of women in all matters, at home and in the marketplace. It is specifically written in the Koran that women are permitted to buy and sell in the marketplace as readily as males, and entitled to enjoy the protections of society at large from teachings of deadly anti-female bias.

  Men shall have a benefit from what they earn,

  and women shall have a benefit from what they earn.

  (Koran, 4:32)

  However, the reality of the lives that faced Bador’s daughters under the Taliban’s years of control proved that the Taliban clerics were as dedicated to these particular precepts of Islam as a Nazi church-goer to the teachings of Jesus. Many civilizations have failed to respect the rights of women, but nowhere else in history has there been such systematic abuse of half of an entire population.

  Perhaps such levels of repression can only take root under the guise of religious piety—they immediately began to lose their strength at the moment that the Taliban rulers fell from power. Voice Of America released a report on the various effects upon Afghanistan’s women resulting from the repressive restrictions during the Taliban years. There was a dramatic rise in major depression, chronic anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among women, who were universally denied almost all forms of healthcare.

  Bador found that this not only affected herself and her other daughters, but also had a negative impact on her sons when she was too sick to run the household in her husband’s absence. Treatment for illness was almost always of the home remedy variety. All of the female doctors had been driven from the profession, and many were so financially paralyzed by lack of opportunity that they were reduced to begging and prostitution. Male doctors were only allowed to examine women with another male family member present, and they couldn’t examine them under their clothing at all. It didn’t matter much—even if the doctor found a need for surgery, he wouldn’t be permitted to operate on a female, anyway.

  In what turned out to be a holocaust imposed on the entire female population of a country of more than 25 million people, medical, dental, and reproductive health deteriorated severely among all of Afghanistan’s women. The process was begun in the time of the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, which destroyed the country’s fragile infrastructure, then continued through the 1990s while the regional warlords fought for pieces of what the Soviets had shattered. The final clampdown came when control was seized by the army of the murderous Taliban regime.

  After that, results were typical. Totalitarian governments that smash all opposing voices are known to be highly efficient means of controlling society; once the Taliban seized control from the local warlords, anarchy ended and order was imposed.

  It was a quiet order, and strange.

  Since the Taliban banned women from work, and there were 50 to 60 thousand widowed women in the city o
f Kabul alone, children became the only bread earners for many of those widowed families. Under the Taliban rule, boys and girls as young as eight and nine begged and sold their bodies in the street in the attempt to provide enough food for their families. During that same period there was also a long list of forced marriages, upon girls as young as eight or nine years of age—often to those same members of the Taliban militia who had installed themselves in power in the name of bringing the heavenly ways of Allah to the nation’s people.

  According to sources such as Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization, throughout the time of Taliban rule there were increasing numbers of women in Afghanistan who not only suffered depression, but also major bouts of neurosis. Further, many of them suffered much more severe forms of mental illness such as deep breaks into schizophrenia and psychosis.

  During the initial takeover by the Taliban in Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, almost all of the children witnessed acts of violence, while two-thirds of them saw dead bodies or parts of bodies. Nearly half reported seeing many people killed at one time, during various rocket and artillery attacks.

  Ninety percent of the children interviewed believed that they were going to die at the time of those attacks.

  Bador was still in her thirties when her daughter Zubaida fell into the fire, and already the physical struggle of her daily life had left her gaunt in the face and tired in her body. Pains of age filled her movements; tweaks and stabs pierced her in this or that joint whenever she had to move around much. Nevertheless, that daily chase after her large family’s needs was based upon her children—the only source of hope that she could have for living into old age with any security at all.

  There was no such thing as any form of governmental relief for elderly citizens in a land where the infrastructure had long since been pulverized, and the Mosques were too poor to help the throngs of needy ones. She and her husband had to fill the house with children and do their best to raise them all the way up to adulthood because the future held nothing else for them. Their younger generation was an expression of hope by the parents for a living insurance plan against the miseries and infirmities of an impoverished old age.

  But Bador felt herself being aged far ahead of the calendar throughout Zubaida’s long spell at home during the months before they sent her to America. During those months, she discovered that everyone in the family already pulled so much of her strength out of her each day that the extra time and energy demanded by Zubaida’s condition was draining Bador down to the bone. The exhaustion left her in such an empty state that migraine headaches began to plague her and arthritis taunted her joints.

  She didn’t have to exaggerate her symptoms to convince anybody in the household that she was ailing; everyone saw that she worked from morning until night and that she did her best to take care of them, even if she was beginning to let certain things pile up a little too often. Sometimes people took the hint and catered to Bador a little bit; other times they clucked their sympathy without bothering to actually pitch in and do anything for her.

  As a woman who must serve, Bador wasn’t particularly offended by their failure to help carry her load for her. To take offense, she would first need to hold the expectation that such a thing was going to happen in the first place. She knew better. But she also knew that there could be some measure of security in a position of service, since many of the ones served possessed no such skills. That was important to her. If those being served ever learned to do for themselves, Bador would become expendable.

  If she became expendable, her status would slide downward from that of an indispensable family head to that of a mere convenience who does a few chores around the house. From there, it was a short slip to general uselessness, and then the smallest of steps to the status of a full-time family burden, one who only awaits death.

  Even Bador’s damaged daughter held a higher spot on the scale than that. Zubaida was refusing to wait for death. She clung to life with an iron grip and fought back the prospect of death every day that she survived. Bador took inspiration from her daughter.

  Even though no one willingly occupies the place of the family burden, Bador could feel herself being pushed toward that grim place. A woman who must serve is frightened when her body, tall and broad-shouldered and strong as a tree root, begins to fight with her all of the time, raising painful objections to tasks that were once undertaken with ease. Not only is her physical strength her solace in life, but the services that her strength allows her to offer to the world can justify her very existence.

  When she felt the frost in her bones creeping up inside of her, even under the thick desert heat, she had no choice but to wonder whether she could manage to raise enough of her offspring to adulthood before her aching body lay itself down like a sick animal. Her only consolation against that dismal prospect was simply that dying young and worn out would still be better than dying in poverty without children.

  The thing that Bador grasped with an iron grip as strong as her daughter’s hold on life was the simple goal of never becoming useless to the family, never becoming an empty ghost of a person who had once filled her days with the products of her skills but who now waits only to be cleaned and fed.

  A woman who must serve is seldom given the necessary level of simple consideration throughout her usual day, such as that which silently assures others regarding their basic human worth while they go about their lives. Instead, she must stand resolute under the continual inner torment of knowing that there is something almost sacrilegious about becoming so self-absorbed that she causes others to be unduly concerned about her.

  She can even speak of suicide in front of the family and express a longing for her own death, in order to attempt to communicate something of her distress. Such talk rises from a long custom—so long as it is done in a style so melodramatic that everyone understands that she is exaggerating and doesn’t really intend to cause her own demise. In this way, to shout something like “I want to die!” is accepted as her expression of general distress—while ignored at the same time as any actual announcement of her intentions. Such a woman knows, and her audience knows as well, that what she is describing with such a statement is merely her level of feeling, not an intention. Her audience also knows that they have the privilege of either acknowledging her feelings or ignoring them altogether, without being concerned that anyone will actually trip over her body later.

  Therefore, as a woman who must serve, Bador was a juggler, of a sort. She had to continually balance the fact that her only guaranteed means of temporary relief from her daily burden was to be too sick to work—or at least too sick to work at full capacity—against the reality that she could only have so many symptoms before she slipped in her social rank and began the dreaded downward slide, steadily closing the distance between herself and uselessness.

  * * *

  Mohammed: A Father’s Point Of View

  One of the men in the bazaar who did not know Mohammed Hasan asked him how a father could stoop so low as to take his burned and scarred little daughter through the marketplaces of the cities that they travel to for medical help, just so she might be used to gain sympathy from others and gather a few coins from their pity. Sometimes Hasan answered the challenges, stiff in his defiance. Most other times, he kept the wise things that he had learned to himself…

  When it is God’s will—Enshallah—that your young dancing daughter is forced to exist inside of a melted shell of burned flesh, her face destroyed and her arms nearly useless, one look at her will assure you that it must also be Enshallah that she survives.

  And yet you know that in the eyes of others, the very fact that she remains impossibly alive and aware within her tormented and agonized state is a direct reflection upon you—perhaps Allah has elected to inflict some extra degree of punishment in addition to the flames themselves?

  And you understand that the misery of this thing is never going to be done with you and wi
th your family, if you allow anyone to assume that this terrible thing happened to your daughter because one of the Hasan household somehow offended Allah.

  Perhaps it was your daughter?

  Perhaps it was you.

  When you say to the world that you are a laborer, but there is no labor to consume you, and when it is God’s will that your wife and children plus your daughter who no longer dances must still eat every day or starve, then you are a weakling and a coward and a deserter of your own family unless you fend for your wife and for all those whom you have created. You will do whatever you must, to be certain that your family survives. You will respect your obligations by seizing upon any opportunity, no matter how small or how daunting it may appear to be. You will do this continually, day to day, month to month.

  It does not matter if your grief for your daughter who once danced like a butterfly is raining upon you. You only pray that whatever you have to do, whatever stories you may have to invent in order to pull your family through one more day, they will not be unforgivable things.

  And you will certainly never dare to point out to God or to any of his clerics here on Earth—rather you will simply ruminate within your own mind—that it was His will which thrust this situation upon you and made your extreme behavior necessary in the first place.

  Even if Zubaida has become a blight upon the face that you show to the world, she is still your dancing daughter. You can still paint her face back onto her skull with your mind and you can see her there in front of you, buried under her prison of melted flesh. In that moment, your very bone marrow feels the truth that if you had to kill a man with your bare hands to keep him from taunting your daughter, from ever again tormenting anyone in the family by implying that Zubaida somehow deserved her fate—you could do it in an instant.