Tiny Dancer (10 page)

Threats, in the
Pashtun-Wali
, are an altogether different matter.

* * *

Throughout the four days that elapsed between Zubaida’s first round of surgery and the second, the international war of words persisted between leaders of extremist Christian, Jewish, and Muslim organizations around the globe. The verbal sparring alternated with surprise attacks from every side: bombs, bullets and sabotage.

At the end of that four day period—and at about the same time that Zubaida was being anesthetized, early on the morning of June 18th—an international conference of astronomers was getting underway at the Carnegie Institution in Washington. Part of the conference involved the ongoing search for intelligent life anywhere in the Universe. The relentless pursuit of intelligent life now reached out across distances so great that they are better expressed by the amount of the time it would take a single beam of light to reach them.

The starlight touching down upon the surface of Earth today left those impossibly far places back during the age of the dinosaurs, before there were any mammals, long before the earliest humans. Throughout all of the eons and ages, before and during all of the concerns of humanity, it has been speeding in this direction. It has been on its way here all during everyone’s life who ever lived until today, and during every one of the shifting political and religious Causes for which so many have proven willing to destroy humanity. That little bit of light has been racing toward this planet, perhaps on a search for intelligent life of its own. Depending where it landed, the answer to whether it found any or not remained wide open.

Meanwhile, more and more people down on the surface of the planet were feeling essentially that these new arriving bits of starlight were getting here just in time for there to still be anybody around to see them land, such was the state of the human condition.

* * *

For Zubaida’s second round of surgeries, Peter Grossman and his medical team went through the delicate process of harvesting skin grafts from Zubaida’s unburned skin, splitting the thickness of some of the grafts to double their surface area, and then stitching each one into place over the large bare areas left by the first round of surgery.

His choices as to whether to use a full graft or a split graft on any given area were determined by the needs of each burn site. A full thickness graft will allow itself to stretch and mold to the rest of the body while the healing process continues. However, although a split graft will be effective enough to seal a wound with tissue that the body doesn’t reject, it won’t do much more than that—one of the properties that a graft loses when it is split is the ability to stretch with the surrounding flesh.

For that reason, every moment of Peter Grossman’s surgeries upon Zubaida actually took place in four dimensions—while the usual three dimensions were enough to define the surgical site on any patient, he was also operating in the fourth dimension of time, in choosing the thickness of each graft and the direction of its placement. He visualized each graft through the dimension of time by including all of the known stages of a body’s recovery, as well as the expected patterns of healing along with his surgical considerations for every wound site. While he split skin and sculpted flesh, the real medium of his art was in visualizing and manipulating the healing process over large amounts of time.

He had to look at each burn area and do more than merely see what lay open and brightly lit in front of him; he had to accurately visualize how that wound might be expected to look in a week, a month, a year, ten years. He had to visualize each graft’s function in its particular location, long after the wound itself has healed. How would the grafted skin move with the body’s motion? How would it react while the rest of her continued growing?

Zubaida didn’t have enough unburned skin to provide Grossman’s preferred level of skin grafting, so he went into the operating room knowing that every square millimeter of each graft was vital to her recovery, both in the short run as a defense against infection and in the long run as an integrated part of her healed flesh.

The list of potential mistakes was nearly endless, as far as those severely limited grafts were concerned. If he allowed any single one of those mistakes to take place, it would represent an error made under the glare of international attention as well as the critical eye of Zubaida’s anxious father.

Meanwhile, Mohammed Hasan waited only a few steps down the hall from the operating room. He was determined to see for himself that everything was all right with the frail daughter. Out of respect for Zubaida’s fierce grasp on her life, he had taken her halfway around the planet, but Dr. Peter had made Hasan a promise. And in Hasan’s world, a man does not forgive himself for breaking a promise, and he is not easily forgiven by anyone else, either. Hasan knew that if Dr. Peter didn’t do what he said he was going to do for Zubaida, he would never agree to return to Afghanistan without her, leaving her here alone in the presence of the Others.

It didn’t matter about all the signed papers that the Americans loved to wave around. Those weren’t real promises. When a man says to you, I can arrange possible miracles for your suffering child, you just have to sign this paper that promises you will give me your child. You are never expected to follow that insane demand to give your child away. When you have to save your daughter, there could be no honor in anything other than doing or saying whatever had to be done or said in order to secure miracles for her.

Dr. Peter’s promises were made directly to Hasan—man to man and eye to eye—the way that Hasan knew that a real promise must be done. Dr. Peter was not compelled to operate on Zubaida; he could have walked away and gone back to live in his American castle and dine on the finest foods and anoint himself with whatever kinds of oils that rich Americans smooth across their skin. Instead, he looked Hasan in the eyes and instructed the translator to insist that it was possible to carve the remains of his daughter out of her suffocating scar mask. It was the kind of promise people must always keep, no matter what: the kind that they never had to make in the first place.

And so those American documents were nothing more than pieces of paper with funny scribbling that goes the wrong way across the page. Hasan’s signature on those papers was nothing more than ransom forced from a father who cannot walk away from any chance to save his child.

If the American papers burned as well as camel dung, they might be good for feeding a cooking fire. Other than that, they were worthless to him if these people failed his daughter.

* * *

All of Dr. Peter’s work went according to the treatment plan, for the first and second round of surgeries, and after the second round, Zubaida had enough grafting in place that he was able to unwrap her swaddling bandages, six days after the first surgery began. It would be Hasan’s only look at the beginnings of his daughter’s transformation before he had to depart for home the following day.

Nothing could have prepared him for that first moment of revelation. He looked on with growing astonishment while Zubaida’s dressings were gently removed. Even though it had been carefully explained to him that this was only the beginning of a long process and that Zubaida would undergo such surgeries many more times before she could return home to live again, all of that paled when the bandages were finally off and he saw what Dr. Peter and his team of expert physicians and surgeons had done so far.

His daughter Zubaida sat on the table in front of him, shivering from her body’s first exposure to the air. In so many ways she looked dreadful, still bone-thin and sickly, but even though the marks of scarring were still all over her, her face and neck were completely free of the twisted scar tissue. Her normal face was clearly recognizable, and her left arm was free from her torso. Dr. Grossman demonstrated the arm for Hasan as well as Zubaida when he gently took her left arm and extended it all the way out to the side and back again.

Hasan blinked in astonishment. His ancient tribal soul screamed that this was impossible, it was an illusion, it was evil magic. But his real-word eyes welled with tears and his throat seized up. The wonderful truth of it was sitting right there in front of him.

A spark of hopeful surprise shot through Zubaida’s eyes. Dr. Peter offered her a small mirror, and when she looked into it, her eyes popped open in wonder. The she looked up at her father and smiled.

Mohammed Hasan began to cry, touching his hand to his heart in a traditional Afghan gesture of gratitude. He hugged Peter Grossman and heaped thanks onto him without waiting for the interpreter.

Even though Zubaida was still shivering from the removal of the insulating bandages, she continued to look around the room with a happy smile. That first brief gaze into the mirror told her everything she needed to know.

They did magic on her, after all. Not perfect magic, but the results astonished her. She looked as if she had been sewn together out of patches—
but she could clearly recognize herself.
The monster was gone.

She could move both of her arms, she could close her eyes, and for the first time since the fire came to punish her for dancing, she could even hear a little bit of the old music. Hundreds of strange sensations inside of her re-carved face and reborn body prevented her from being able to concentrate on the melody in the brief moment that it flashed through her—and she certainly couldn’t move to it—but it was there, like an echo from the next valley over.

She kept smiling even though it hurt her to move her stitched up features. She smiled to welcome back a face that she could finally recognize as her own and because her heart was exploding and she couldn’t hold it back if she tried.

Chapter Four

There was never any denying
the strength of the wave that carried Zubaida along, whether the players could explain it or not. Before she went to America, during those last days before Dr. Mike Smith left Afghanistan to accompany her to America, he wrote a letter to Peter Grossman that contained all of the following concerns.

Writing from Kabul, he talked of how Hasan insisted on accompanying Zubaida to America because it was simply not practical for his son Daud to go in his place. Smith liked the plan, since the older family man was far less likely to try to defect while in America than a young and unattached male. An immigration controversy would, in the words of a prophetic saying, cause heads to roll.

He also detailed Zubaida’s medical condition as it pertained to the travel arrangements, then went on to request that privacy screens be used at the airports so that she would not be made an object of idle curiosity.

He then wrote fondly of Zubaida’s generally calm demeanor, and of the close and trusting relationship that she displayed with her father. He talked of her willingness to laugh and be playful, despite her condition, and how she voluntarily interacted with others instead of withdrawing.

Dr. Smith also informed Peter that he was going to have to administer a complete round of vaccinations to her, because although her father insisted that she had “all her shots,” medical records were nonexistent in Afghanistan at that time and there was no way to know for sure about it, especially given the family’s poverty.

In addition, Smith expressed relief at how well the visa situation was going, now that Michael Gray at the State Department had gotten involved, then he went on to make sure that the Foundation funds were in place to pay for the airline tickets and noted that the NGO was busy conducting a search in Los Angeles for a suitable host family for Zubaida.

Smith concluded by expressing his concern that she must be guaranteed familiar language and customs around her, throughout her recoveries. Otherwise, a cold-water culture shock would merely present one more assault upon a system that surely didn’t need another.

It was clear before the letter even ended that this case had personal interest for him, just as it did for the others who came to the story before he did.

But he ended by confiding that he was growing more concerned about a potential backlash with the public or with public officials, especially in the Middle East. He said that there had already been inquiries, asking in effect, “why is so much being done for one little girl, in a land where so many thousands are desperate for medical aid?”

Smith’s concerns were prophetic; the question “why so much?” was one that everyone involved in Zubaida’s case was going to hear, over and over.

* * *

Mohammed Hasan was not so foolish as to be blind to the power that he would hold, right up until the instant that he got back aboard an airplane. He didn’t have to actually do anything so inconceivable as actually defect; all he had to do was realize that they knew he could defect if he really wanted to. These were people it would be easy to bluff in marketplace dickering—so easy to read. Everybody was always eager, too eager, to answer all of his questions whenever he asked about returning back home. If he could just keep them from getting to comfortable with the idea that he was actually going to quietly walk out of Zubaida’s hospital room and return to the airport with them, that they would be eager to keep him happy. And as long as they were, he could squeeze the very best of care for Zubaida out of all of them.

It was the last gift that he could give to her, and it would have to be enough.

A few days after her second set of operations, he quietly gave away his power by cooperating with his hosts, kissing his daughter goodbye and returning to the airport without any fuss. Dr. Mike Smith accompanied him, and Hasan had to wonder if that was to strong-arm him if he tried to bolt at the last minute. But Hasan had no such desire. His wife and family needed him, back there in a place that was nothing at all like the playground of indulgence that he glimpsed in this part of America. Those who feared that he would bolt like a donkey and run for sanctuary knew nothing about him.