Zubaida had described it right, in a through-the-looking-glass way and with a child’s plainspoken manner, when she reassured Peter’s mother that there was no worry about Peter’s safety in her homeland. She would take care of him.
So she had. The greetings he received while they moved about the city together, whether on the open street or in the few meetings that they had with various officials, were all done with high regard. Sometimes that was because the people there already knew something of the story. Other times, it was just the reactions of people who take their cue from the Afghan girl’s obvious familiarity with, and affection for, the American doctor. Thus even in situations where Peter might have been vulnerable under other conditions, the American with the Jewish name was never threatened, suffered no harm, and Zubaida had taken care of him there.
It was so good for him to be able to take a deep breath and let it all go, to let the plane carry him home while he rested up and tried to restore some of his energy. He needed to be with Rebecca as badly as she wanted him back at home. If desire could fuel a jet, the flight would have landed much sooner.
* * *
That same day of July 5th, 2003 was also the day that Taiwan became the final territory to be removed from the World Health Organization’s list of SARS-affected areas. This was a vitally important bit of reassurance against the prospect of a pandemic, for a world that had become so interconnected by air travel that a virulent disease can come bubbling up out of some place that nobody’s ever heard of and quickly spread to all sorts of places everybody knows well. For better or worse, the civilizations of the world were now so inextricably connected that things going on in one part of the world invariably made an impact on virtually every place else, sooner or later.
Various ideas regarding what it would be best to do about the human condition were bandied about by glossy media pundits, seasoned political negotiators and religious leaders of every persuasion. They talked and threatened and bellowed and screamed in an ever rising tower of babble that produced only chaos, and then they pointed to the chaos and pronounced it a miracle.
Meanwhile, underneath the clamor and din, an actual miracle quietly descended, in the way that actual miracles tend to do, when Zubaida and her entourage returned to the village of Farah. She was home again after more than a year in America, two years since the girl that they once knew was consumed in fire. The story of what had been done to restore her made it such an incredible experience for everyone who witnessed the before-and-after, that their unstoppable reports were enough to occupy the gossip networks of the entire region.
The local people who were old enough to have survived the decades of war were also people who had seen more than twenty years of constant raids and retaliations, beginning with being “taught a lesson” by the Soviet invaders for failing to convert to communism, to the back-breaking “tributes” demanded by the feuding warlords, and finally to the nonstop demands of the screaming Taliban enforcers. So far, however, even the oldest and wisest of the villagers knew nothing more about these Americans than the fact that their soldiers were currently in the region.
Out in Farah, the local people had only seen U.S. soldiers when their jeeps drove in and out of the village to deliver messages to Hasan about his daughter. All the villagers heard his stories about the kindness of the American soldiers in the ancient city of Kandahar, and of how well they conducted themselves toward Hasan and his daughter even though the residents of Farah were only common people. These American soldiers behaved like common people themselves, and they supported Hasan and his daughter out of their own soldiers’ pay, for weeks at a time, before the military hospital began to help them.
How could they do that? Are all American soldiers rich?
Beginning with those first American soldiers, then the Civil Affairs people, then the military doctors, then the political powers that be, the villagers heard Mohammed’s story time and time again, all about how more Americans kept getting involved until the miracle was at last made plain, there for all to see, and Zubaida Hasan walked among them once again. She was whole again. The burned thing that she had once been was long gone.
One after another, the villagers got their chances to speak with Zubaida. Sometimes when they asked her questions she would ignore them, pretending that she couldn’t hear anything that was said to her. But at other times, when the mood struck her, she would tell long stories that were very hard to believe. When she spoke out that way, it hardly mattered what she told them. She became the medium and the medium was the message. They heard her clear voice and they saw the same old spark in eyes—so quick to fire—while she wove her story.
Even though it was impossible for them to conceive of how much her frame of reference was forever altered by her unique journey , none could fail to see that she stood up straight among them, now. She looked them directly in the eyes, even though she was still not yet twelve years of age. They looked back at her and saw that she was Zubaida Hasan returned to them, not some imposter. Whatever those mysterious Americans had done, there was no trickery.
They knew she came back home voluntarily, too, even though she was said to have lived in American splendor. They knew that she had been alone, a single small female child in the land of the Others, and that with her parents’ consent she had been held in that country with its Western ways all through the year.
Nevertheless, here she was back with them. Not only was she healed and restored to a degree that looked more like the product of witchcraft than mere science and medicine, but she had survived a year among the Others and come away unharmed. Most heartening of all, for the villagers—and living proof that the so-called “irresistible lure” of America is a myth—she was home again with her family, right there in Farah. Anyone could see that she was in good shape and all was well. The story was so perfectly resolved that the rest of the villagers felt free to get back to the relentless daily grind of struggling for life in a broken economy.
Zubaida herself had no particular message to give to the people who pressed her with their curiosity and their endless questions. She was, after all, the message itself: an “alive and well” message, able to do whatever she wanted and free to make mischief. So amid an Afghan culture that reveres generosity and heroism, when Zubaida’s amazed visitors looked at her and remembered how she had been, they saw touchable evidence of the American heart.
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.