Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  Chapter Seventeen

  Zubaida was a tiny dancer who specialized in dancing on a tightrope, now. But she moved with levels of self-assurance she had never known during all the strange days since the fire. She was filled with energy by the overflow of amazement and delight from her family and neighbors. To be among the old faces and places of her home town made her feel happy down inside of herself in countless little ways that no foreign country can ever offer to a guest who has left a loving home behind.

  The tightrope part of her act was to keep herself within bounds of the social restrictions placed upon girls of near-marriageable age, especially among women who must serve, and to find those isolated times and places when it was safe for her to set the energy loose and let it pour through every bit of her, the way it’s supposed to for a woman who must dance.

  There really wasn’t anyone to stop her, after a certain point. If she was out with her sisters or at least brother, she could wander their area’s familiar turf with far more ease than formal customs might demand. There were no Taliban enforcers now, and the village men had better things to concern themselves over than rambunctious girls, and so she could get away with all sorts of things provided that she followed fairly close to the limits of accepted behavior.

  She could break away from a walking group and hop up onto a thick mud wall and dance on the balls of her feet from one crumbling brick or stone to the next, until she leaped into the air and landed squarely on balance and then scooted back into place with the rest of them. Usually nobody tried to stop her. She realized that a dignified young Muslim woman is not expected to do such things, but most of the time those things weren’t enough to prompt a dangerous reaction, and so that thin margin between what will be tolerated and what will not became the tightrope itself. She danced along its rounded edge everywhere she went. The sense of challenge served her like a ballerina’s full-length mirror because the constant flirtation with disapproval showed her reflection whenever it caused subtle expressions of surprise or even shock—it showed in countless tiny things that people did, things that they might not even realize they were doing. The warm friction of the reactions that she generated was part of what she inhaled right along with each breath of ordinary air. The sense that it nourished her was strong.

  The elders made a real fuss over her when she first arrived, crying and shrieking with joy and disbelief. Many stared at her as if they were seeing a true miracle, utterly astounding to their eyes. She came home to the loving embrace of everyone in sight, each one eager for anything she chose to tell about her journey. This sudden diet of concentrated attention was a nectar to her, and the affirmative responses from everyone around her were strong enough to send her energy level spiraling.

  All of those things fueled her tightrope dance, energizing her constant process of testing the borders without stepping too far beyond them. She was sustained so well by that self-imposed challenge that she made it through the intense homecoming period with ease, stepping back into her family and her town and her civilization.

  The dancing itself was good—easier than ever, with her last scars healing well. Throughout those first days after her homecoming, she loved to surprise people with how much she had grown in the past year, as well as how well she could move, now. The reactions were so strong that it was like showing people unbelievable magic tricks. They cried out in happy disbelief. In turn, their reactions turned everyone else’s attention to her, to the point that it felt like warm light shining through her, all the way inside and back out again.

  It filled her so perfectly that whenever she had the opportunity to give in to the urge to move, the contentment set her free within herself. If she chose, she could let her body do the dancing and watch the room swirl away around her until everything dissolved into a musical blur.

  Even though Rebecca spent less than a year in the very sort of parental role she craved, she already went through the “sending her off to college” phase when she had to release Zubaida at the airport. In the days and weeks afterward, she found herself suffering the same types of withdrawal that an empty-nester feels when the last young one has left home.

  She went through stage of pacing through the house and suddenly noticing how big and how empty it feels, even though the empty nest should have been years in the future. She passed by the room that she and Peter had always called “the guest room” before Zubaida arrived, but it had become her room the moment that she filled it with her presence. It was still Zubaida’s room.

  But it was during those first few days at home alone, while Peter was still off in Afghanistan, that she suffered the miscarriage that was to claim their first child long before it would have been born. At that point, the feeling of isolation and loss was overwhelming, leaving her angry and hurting. Within the space of a few days, she had bid goodbye to Zubaida without knowing if they would ever see each other again, sent her husband off to a very dangerous part of the world, and now, the crushing defeat of losing her unborn child with her husband far away. There had been nothing else to do but call him and deal the same blow to him. They would each have to go through the initial shock and disappointment separately before they could be together and deal with the blow as a couple.

  “It’s true, I’m not one to sit around and cry,” she said later. “My way of handling stress is much more to work it off by throwing myself into things.” There was plenty to do with all the correspondence generated by Zubaida’s recent media appearances. More than just fan mail, among the correspondence were scores of small donations sent in by people who heard of her story and wanted to contribute in some way toward helping guarantee a future for her. The account for Zubaida’s foundation was steadily growing, almost entirely on small donations from ordinary people all over the country. Peter would come home to find her in motion. As it was for Zubaida, this was the state she preferred.

  July 6th was the first day back together for Peter and Rebecca. It was a Sunday, so at least they had that little window of time to themselves before he had to take up his work again early on Monday morning. The day was theirs, away from everyone else now, from the public and the patients and the nonstop obligations, and they both agreed that after coming so close to parenthood, they did not want to quit. They would try for another child as soon as possible.

  After that, the days began their march through the unending tasks and obligations that bordered them, played out against a backdrop of separation pains that were prone to strike without notice. They both continued referring the guest room as “Zubaida’s room.” Rebecca found herself occasionally waking up with a start, fearing that she was late for getting Zubaida up and off to school. She and Peter would be walking somewhere together and they would both spot girls who, from a distance, looked just like her.

  There was no longer such a thing as a simple trip to a department store; instead it was a place mined with those sudden pangs that snag like fish hooks. A clothing display for young girls had just the right outfit for the one who was not there. A random piece of merchandise became the very thing that you would like to buy for the one who was not there. An innocent visit to a restaurant produced a menu with just the right dish for the one who was not there, and there were still more opportunities to mistakenly see the one who was not there among a crowd of strangers.

  Before returning Zubaida to Afghanistan, Peter had persuaded his father to donate the satellite phone from his boat, then he had it specially adapted so that it could only call their home number. He had left it with Zubaida as a way of assuring her that she would always be able to reach them. All three of them were surprised at how much the brief, static-laced conversations came to mean to them. It was also a real test of Zubaida’s English, to have to express herself to them over the phone without the aid of facial expressions and hand gestures to speed them through a conversation.

  Slightly more than two months later, events took another sharp turn—Rebecca learned that she was pregnant again and she and Peter
excitedly began to plan once more for their first child by birth. Rebecca decided that she should be the one to tell Zubaida, since she wanted to be as careful as possible to present the event to Zubaida as that of gaining another sibling for her. She would not be replaced in their hearts.

  When Rebecca decided the time was right and told her the news, it was at a point when she and Peter already knew that they were expecting a girl. Rebecca explained that it would be almost like a having a sister in another part of the world, that there would be just that much more of a secondary family waiting for Zubaida if the time came that she was able to return.

  It was always hard to gauge Zubaida’s emotions in the immediate moment. Over the long-distance line, it was even more so. She responded quietly, congratulating them in a tone of voice that might or might not have been enthusiasm. To Rebecca, it sounded like a slight extension of a voice tone she had been noticing in Zubaida for the past couple of weeks, long before the news of their baby was a factor. She tried to get Zubaida to tell her if anything else was wrong, but Zubaida’s struggle to put emotions into English, plus the crackly connection and Zubaida’s tendency to minimize emotions until she had time to sit with them for awhile, all combined to leave Rebecca with no idea of what Zubaida’s real thoughts or feelings about having an American “sister” might be.

  Perhaps, she hoped, Zubaida had just been feeling sickly over the past couple of weeks, adjusting to the change in the food, the water. Nothing more serious than that. Perhaps she was fine about the news and would even sound contented and strong again, when they spoke the following week at the arranged time.

  In every phone call, she assured Rebecca and Peter that it was good to be home. And while she missed seeing them and missed her friends from school, she never said a word about wanting to leave her home in Afghanistan and return to California. She was a child of her clan. There was no long vacation in Wonderland that could erase that from her past or cancel it out of her very way of seeing the world. She still thought that it would be very nice if Peter and Rebecca came to live next door to them, but she was a child of Afghanistan and despite her brief flirtation with declaring herself “an American, now.” She was an Afghan.

  For her, the problem began to appear when she danced along the tightrope, pushing the social rules for every scrap of rambunctious energy she could get away with expressing—watching her reflection in people’s reactions. Before long, the tightrope began to feel thin, so thin it nearly cut her feet. But what was really shrinking was her own tolerance for the limitations placed on her, back inside of a Middle Ages level of existence in the village of Farah, in the middle of Farah Province, on the high plains of Afghanistan.

  There was no problem with rejoining her family; they were familiar with her outspoken personality and they adapted to her easily enough, in their way of being together. And there was no real problem with finding opportunities to dance and be musical and feel glad to be alive.

  It was everything else.

  The only other girls who were there as companions for her were girls who had never seen anything more sophisticated than whatever sights they spotted during quick family trips in and out of Herat. It was the closest city, seven hours away by car—when there was a car—or a few days by camel if the weather was good. Their frame of reference for conversation was so tiny by comparison to Zubaida’s that she discovered that friends and neighbors, whom she loved as much as she always had in the past, nonetheless become boring. She knew it was unacceptable for a girl in her society to feel that way toward others, that it would considered to be arrogant and disrespectful toward the gifts of friendship that these people represented. She didn’t doubt it.

  But her eyes had seen, her ears had heard, and her lips could speak the language. She had spent a year of her life deep inside of the land of the Others, and not only lived to tell the tale, not only come home unscathed and miraculously healed, but she never even came across any of the Others at all. The evils of America failed to materialize, even though she was there for such a long time. What did materialize, however, and with increasing frequency during every day that she spent there, was choice. Choices, actually.

  Choice after choice after choice, everywhere she looked. One hundred different varieties of anything you can think of—and not just choices in merchandise, either, since the addiction to material things can be switched off with a simple change in attitude and expectation.

  The choices that tormented her were in the nature of acceptable behavior and of personal expectation. The casual everyday freedom of behavior that she enjoyed with her friends on a typical California weekend was something she had taken for granted at the time. She was so busy acting as if nothing astounded and confused her that it took all of her concentration to hide how astounded and confused she was. With that, she tended not to notice how much of herself she was free to express until she arrived back in her home village and felt the constraints slip back into place.

  They were not excessive restraints, compared to other girls her age. Nobody was out to punish her for anything. But the choices were gone, choices of behavior and most importantly, the choices available to her future. Before the fire, the future was too remote for her little girl’s frame of reference. She lived from day to day with the other children of her village and tried not to think about a future that could not hope to be anything but grim, the future of a woman who must serve. Zubaida touched that future every time she felt her mother’s strong grip and calloused hands.

  At least, back then, she had been able to make the choice to ignore any thoughts of her future, whenever they loomed. Now even that humble choice was gone. She couldn’t ignore thinking of her future because she had learned how. And now she was learning what a tough skill that it is to un-remember.

  Leftover American choices tormented her like voices from dreams. Choices that she never fully thought through and choices that she had only heard other people mention—casually, she recalled, how casually they contemplated obtaining this or that next miracle in the parade of miracles that were their lives.

  Most of all, she felt the tormented by the loss of the choice to spend her life helping other people in some way, doing something similar to the way that she had been helped. No one had to tell her how vital such a thing would be, how important to the world, to herself. The choice was gone now and Zubaida could feel its loss the way a new mother feels the loss of an unborn child.

  She tried to keep up her spirits during her phone calls to Peter and Rebecca. Her gratitude to them was so strong that she wanted to keep up the appearance of being worth all the effort. But try as she might, the energy in her voice was lower each time, her pauses were longer, she had less to talk about—there was simply less to talk about in the first place.

  Fall came, and her father was unable to secure some form of transportation to get her and her sisters to the nearest school, miles away. She was facing the prospect of missing another year of her education. Her English began to slip away, since there was never anywhere to practice it, and the weekly calls were awkward and brief. The new words began to leave her. Now when she paused on the phone, it wasn’t because she was too shy to express a certain thought or emotion, but often just because she couldn’t think of how to say what she was thinking.

  It wasn’t just as if she had gone back through to the other side of the looking glass; it was more like she had slipped into a many-sided looking glass world where there was more than one alternate reality, but one strange reality after another. Even though this was not the land of the Others, it wasn’t the familiar old homestead, either. The place hadn’t changed; what she felt was the depth of the change in herself, much of which she wasn’t aware even of until the walls began to feel like they were pressing inward upon her.

  Now, although nothing had become completely foreign to her, nothing was truly familiar anymore, either. There was the warm familiarity of her caretaker role at home, and the family was glad enough to have her there in th
at way. But now when she went though the daily motions of this or that essential activity she found them strangely unsatisfying. The sense of fulfillment that she should have gained from her own sense of usefulness was barely there. She felt as if she was trying to scratch her back with a short stick—one that used to fit her long ago, before she grew so much.

  When the smell of despair began to follow her, she dealt with it by becoming as small and as focused as she could. She avoided thoughts of the future. She avoided the temptation to ask herself what she was going to do with her life, now that even the rural school in Afghanistan was denied to her. She made her attention span so tiny that there was only room for one little moment, then the next moment, then the next. She went from one little task to the task after that, trying to soak whatever joy she could from each passing moment without stopping to stand up and look around. The view was too grim, gray, and small for her to endure it. Nothing in it seemed to have enough room for her.

  Without the satellite phone, it would have begun to seem that somehow her entire journey in Wonderland among the Others was nothing more than some sort of dream, real as a desert mirage with its palm-shaded springs and its fat camels and sheep—the kind of thing seen by travelers parched with thirst, dreaming their final wishes, dying with a mouthful of hot sand. The phone, at least, saved her from that.

  She knew that Peter was wise to have the phone fixed so that it was only good for calling their phone number. With the part of herself that knew the ways of the marketplace, Zubaida saw how the village’s struggling people eyed that wondrous thing. They might not know how much it was worth, but they knew it was more money than they had, and Mohammed Hasan owed a number of people a great deal of money, after all. The satellite phone would have walked away by now, she had no doubt, if she and her father had not been so careful to spread the news far and wide that this was a special phone, made by the people who did this thing for Zubaida, and it would only call them, nobody else. The villagers were not so desperate as to dare to steal it in spite of that rumor, so the phone stayed with her.