Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  She reacted the same way she would respond if a beautiful and rare bird perched right on her windowsill, to avoid scaring it away. Only this time the rare bird was Zubaida’s music—in the new quiet of her mind and the new ease to her thoughts, the former sputters of returning music were replaced with a full dose. It happened without warning. The long-gone music simply reappeared inside of her, just as if it had come rising up out of a low fog. She didn’t want to make a single move that might scare it away.

  No big deal. She had learned the American words well enough to console herself with their sentiments. Tense up and music tends to disappear; relax and it gets better. So no big deal. Following her own advice, she relaxed all the way down inside of herself, spreading all of her physical energy evenly through her body so that every muscle was relaxed, even though she remained poised to move at the same time. She took deep, even breaths to keep herself calm and balanced, and then let her old friend move through her in waves of music that she heard inside of herself like a radio that comes from everywhere.

  Parts of the music were slippery and just moved through her in the form of musical sounds, but other parts were sticky and grabbed at her feet or her legs or her hips or hands until they had to move in response. She kept the movements small, nothing so dramatic as to startle off her welcome visitor, just enough to allow the music to run through her while she undulated ever so slightly to the rhythms.

  She couldn’t jump around much or do any fancy twists, but she could let the music flow through her and trace the motion of its waves with her body. She realized that she needed to avoid exuberant moves until she was better healed, but she would have avoided them anyway, at that moment, just to keep from seeming too happy about the return of her music. The ways of the marketplace were clear enough in her memory—she knew that the best way to prevent anyone from taking away something as precious as this was to keep all of her emotions to herself until the coast was clear.

  Before too long, she found herself eavesdropping on Peter and Rebecca while they talked about how much this new medicine was helping her. She picked up enough of their English to understand that they were saying that they both thought she seemed happier and more content, and that they thought it was because of the doctors and the medicine and all of the therapist’s talk, talk, talk.

  She didn’t see it that way at all.

  Zubaida’s personality was better because the music was back again, constantly running through and reminding her that she was herself. And she was better because the surgical scars around her torso were finally healing enough to allow her to move her body along with the music, so long as she kept things gentle. This much was enough to remind her why this painful journey was worth doing in the first place.

  Amid all the uncertainty around her, she knew that as long as she had her music and she could send its ripples through her body, she could be Zubaida in this world. No matter if the circumstances were familiar or completely strange, she could remain strong when strength was needed. She could endure all sorts of trials and remain composed throughout, because with her music and dance she carried a potent weapon against despair. Perhaps this weapon would, one day, even provide some kind of protection against developing that deadly cold blue depression which so often gripped her mother—who did not dance.

  Zubaida knew that without her music, she would be of no use to anybody because in such a case her spirit would be so low that no one would want her around, anyway. Who could blame them? She wouldn’t want to have to live around somebody who was dead inside, and that is what she would be. Not that most of the men would concern themselves with that as long as she kept up with her chores, but it would be very hard to have female friends if she was dead inside unless they were dead inside, too.

  The idea of a bunch of dead friends caused a shiver to run up her spine. She shook off the fear that accompanied the shiver by incorporating the movement into a series of waves that she sent up and down her spine in time to the melody. The instant that she shook off the fear-wave, a rush of elation filled her.

  This was it. She had just demonstrated it to herself, although without intending to; this shiver-dance was an instance of her power in action. It allowed her to pass a burst of fear all the way through herself, without taking any harm from it, by translating the fear into physical motion and then playing it out in time to the music.

  Now while she looked out from inside of the beautiful silence where her rampaging thoughts used to be, she could sense the attraction that she was feeling to all sorts of details about life in this world. Sources of fascination seemed to shine at her from every direction. She was content to wait until later to break out into long leaps over large pieces of furniture and throw the high kicks and the twisting jumps that she had always loved to hurl at the world with her body.

  Such things could wait, for the time being, because she was certain that they were coming back to her. She knew it now. And she was sure that the hour for all of that wasn’t so far away, because she could already sway and slowly spin to the music in her head. She could carve the air with graceful hands and fanned fingertips. It was enough to prove to her own doubts and fears that she had real reasons to be glad inside her heart.

  She was going to be all right, not only because her music was back but because she was already such a surgical veteran that she had inherited a little bit of Peter’s ability to see three dimensional objects and people through the fourth dimension of time—she could visualize her own healing process. And she could see herself steadily regaining her movement, her power, as time went on.

  A quiet sense of happiness spread all through her. This one wasn’t so strong that it made her feel any need to run and scream and jump around. She didn’t feel compelled to stomp her happiness all around the house or to shriek it in the face of anyone she came across. She just let the happiness run through her until she felt all smoothed out inside.

  It was as if she had just stepped outside and met the rest of herself out on the street—and brought her back home to live. With that, it occurred to her that she hadn’t been seeing the other girls from school very much lately, so she wandered on out of her room to go ask Rebecca if she could arrange for a visit with Emily, her best friend from class, who sometimes still got depressed about the dog bite scar on her forehead. Zubaida figured Emily could probably use a little cheering up.

  She grabbed a phone and gave Emily a call, just to see what she was doing.

  Later that same month, she asked Peter to take her to the Father-Daughter dance at school. She seemed so proud to have her “dad” accompanying her along with the fathers of the other girls and looked so adorable in her frilly dress, Peter later described it as a turning point in the level of trust and comfort she demonstrated with him.

  * * *

  John Oerum, the Foreign Service Officer at the UN Assistance Mission in Kandahar, was initially unsure of what to make of the story told by a man calling himself Mohammed Hasan and claiming to be from the village of Farah, out in remote Farah Province. Hasan was requesting—no, demanding—that Oerum find some way to make a telephone call to the United States and talk to some American doctor who supposedly had Hasan’s ten year-old daughter living in his home, while he operated on her over and over. Oerum wasn’t up to speed on the story yet, but he knew a potential international incident when he smelled one.

  Calls went out.

  It was a heady list: Raymond Short, the head of Military Civil affairs in Afghanistan; Central Command in Florida; the charitable Non-Government Organization who sponsored her; and the U.S. State Department. Word ricocheted between them that Mohammad Hasan was beginning to have anxiety attacks about his daughter’s fate while she was out there among the Others. His concerns were not so much over her medical condition, because he had been provided with post-surgery pictures a few months earlier, and he admitted that the last time that he spoke to her, she sounded well and strong. His fears centered on nightmares of having lost her to the
foreign world of the Others.

  And while Hasan wanted his daughter to learn everything about America that she could, and to learn to speak English well, he was lately beginning to fear that the longer she stayed away the less likely she might be to find her way back home to them. He feared that the temptations of the Western world might permanently estrange her from the family and from her own culture.

  Since Hasan couldn’t provide phone numbers, his query didn’t go directly to Peter and Rebecca’s house or to the Grossman Burn Center. It was routed through military channels to the NGO. Hasan’s simple query about his daughter’s condition sent the domino chain into a series of concentric loops.

  Now the NGO became officially nervous. They wondered what kind of loose cannon Hasan might turn out to be, recalling that Dr. Mike Smith told them about having to work to keep Hasan from bolting off to explore, back in the U.S.—apparently, Hasan only remained under control because Smith convinced him that if he created an international incident, his daughter’s welfare would be severely jeopardized.

  But with Zubaida ensconced in her recovery process off in America, Hasan had discovered that it was much easier to accept the idea of losing his daughter for an entire year than it was to accept the hard reality of the Zubaida-shaped hole in his life. Worries were beginning to plague him, and back at home in Farah he was far from any source of information and left with too much time on his hands.

  From the point of view of the NGO staff, the major problem with Mohammed Hasan was that the man was so proactive. He was liable to just show up at any American military or embassy office and start telling whatever story he wanted to give out about his daughter’s unique charity situation. With the press hanging around looking for scandals to decry, it was only a matter of time before some sort of major uproar commenced, with voice after voice crying out, “What about me?”

  The experienced humanitarian workers at the NGO realized that this would be a surefire guarantee of turning a beautiful expression of human concern into a political firestorm. It could limit cooperation between international Non-Governmental Organizations by adding elements of mutual suspicion that could only slow down the flow of victim relief—and ultimately accomplish nothing good for anyone.

  * * *

  Once Zubaida got the chance to speak with her father from Kandahar after so much time without any communication from home, she was able to jump back into her new American schoolgirl life with a lighter heart. She was glad that Peter talked her father and all of the other American adults out of making her go back home right away. Even though she felt anxious to see everyone in her village, when she thought about going back home right then, she knew in her heart it wasn’t time. Peter hadn’t even finished doing all the work necessary to give her back her full range of motion yet.

  Her English was much stronger, but she still understood the language far better than she could speak it. The thin, reedy American words seemed to stick in her brain when she tried to put them together. But she could sit back and listen to a conversation and get most of it, when adults were speaking, and she usually understood everything that the other kids said. She confused her spoken words often enough, but she knew that she could do a lot better at it, given a little more time. And she could sense that the language might help her in countless ways. Such a thing would surely be a real addition to her power.

  She talked over all of that with her father, basking in the messages of goodwill sent to her from the family. But despite the gregarious traits among her country’s women, it was not in Zubaida’s own nature to talk about her feelings, so she said very little about Peter and Rebecca other than to assure her father she was being treated well. She kept silent about her relief over having several more months with her surrogate parents and her new friends. The sense of relief grew when Peter and her father agreed that she could go home in June or July, which would allow her to finish the year at school and to keep on polishing her English. Her father even assured Peter that her mother understood and agreed.

  This left her more time to enjoy this new feeling of being so much more smoothed out within herself, and to share those feelings with all of her new friends at school, or with Mom and Dad at home. And it didn’t strike her as being the least bit strange to refer Rebecca and Peter in that way, or the house where they all lived.

  Later, she sat on the floor in front of the sofa while Rebecca sat behind her and brushed her hair. For once, she could let someone get that close behind her and not feel overwhelmed by a creepy feeling of having one of the Others in your weak spot. But the whole set of bad feelings that went along with the idea of the Others was beginning to crumble. The Others were out there, all right, but seldom ever got close to her, she realized now. This new home was a safe place. She accepted that, all the way down into her most suspicious marketplace self. Whatever Mom and Dad were, they were not the Others. Whatever else this place might be, it was her home for now.

  Zubaida was busy learning, just as she had been instructed to do on behalf of her family. And the simple fact of her second home in America taught her that there was yet another kind of human being in this world. Even though this kind was not of her people, they were also not among the dangerous Others.

  How to explain that?

  For some reason, this kind of human being could be trusted. Zubaida had no answer as to why people would do such things as Rebecca and Peter and all of them had done for her, other than that they were obviously dedicated to living lives of decency and honor. And they clearly desired, as much as possible, to live their lives in peace.

  The idea of a peaceful but determined warrior is built into every Afghan’s consciousness by the stories that are told to children from their earliest days, and by their constant exposure to people’s spoken references to the long Afghan tradition of repelling foreign invaders. Zubaida could picture this other kind of human being in that form: the peaceful warriors.

  Maybe Peter and Rebecca, her doctors, her teachers, her friends at school, were all part of this newly discovered group of people. What else could explain it? This presented her with the same eye-opening revelation that has greeted so many before her—the people of her newly discovered group came in a range of different faces and skin colors—so how was she supposed to tell them from the Others?

  “I’m so glad that you can stay here until summertime and finish your school year,” Rebecca said while she brushed at her hair. “Even though I know you miss your parents and all your brothers and sisters.”

  “I not going back,” Zubaida quietly said.

  Rebecca looked around to her face and saw a dreamy-looking smile playing on her face. Ordinarily, she would have thought that the expression was simply the result of Rebecca’s gentle hair brushing, but despite Zubaida’s fondness for saying shocking things, these strange words caught Rebecca’s attention.

  “Well, actually, we have about three months left, then you’re going back home to Afghanistan.”

  “I not from Afghanistan anymore. I American now.”

  “But what about your family?”

  “They can come here.”

  “They can’t come here, Zubaida. We can’t even keep you here after your last operation is done. We all know that, right?”

  Zubaida turned away, made her face go blank. “I know.”

  “And you do want to see your parents and your—“

  “Yes!” Zubaida yelled, trying to close her out.

  “Then what can we—“

  “You and Peter come back to Afghanistan with me!”

  “You mean go back there to live?”

  “Yes!”

  “But Peter has to work here, for all the other people who need his help like you did. And our home is here. All of our families, our friends…”

  Zubaida’s shoulders slumped while she watched the happy picture of having Rebecca and Peter live next door to her family in Farah crumble like campfire ashes.

  On March 18th, 2003, Zubai
da turned eleven years old with forty of the kids from school and about twenty sets of parents. They were at a giant backyard pool party and general picnic blow out, American style. By this point, her English was good enough to allow her to barrel right into the day’s activities along with the other kids without communication glitches. She had mastered a style of dress for herself that took in the local California schoolgirl look but gave it her own colorful twist, the same way that the women of Afghan tribes had done to accent their appearances for many centuries prior to fanatic religious rule.

  To a stranger, the celebration could have easily appeared to be an ordinary outdoor party for any American girl’s birthday celebration. Since Zubaida saw herself most clearly in the way others reacted to her, she had already perfected the subtle mannerisms of the local girls—right down to the proper rolling of the eyes and releasing of a tired sigh whenever a grown-up said something incredibly stupid. This helped her to guarantee that the feedback from the other girls remained as positive and approving as possible. That approval was gasoline in her engine. She felt it feed her and make her stronger. With enough approval, she felt certain that she could do pretty much anything she wanted to.

  Photographs of that day show a girl who appears to be completely at home and assimilated into the American culture, even though it is so different from her own that she might as well be visiting another planet. The pictures appear to contradict any notion that on the day they were taken she had only been in the U.S. for a mere eight months.

  * * *

  Two days, later, on March 20th, forces of the United States military invaded Iraq, coupled with British combat soldiers and a smattering of smaller support troupes from other allied countries. The goal was to remove Saddam Hussein from power, dead or alive, along with his entire administration and governmental system. Military intelligence thus employed hundreds of tons of laser-guided, proximity fused, GPS-positioned high explosives in answer to the question of what to do about the human condition.