Word went out that Zubaida had to be transported to the closest medical clinic in Herat, roughly a hundred and twenty miles away, an impossible trip either by foot or by camel for one so badly injured. But one of the families related to the Hasans was fortunate enough to own an old car that sometimes ran. They agreed to attempt to drive Zubaida and Mohammed to Herat, if he could fill the nearly empty tank and pay for all of the trip and pay something for the wear on the vehicle.
Rare transportation on that isolated desert plain often came from Soviet military vehicles that were left abandoned after one or another of their many lost battles with the native people. The population around Farah had offered some of the fiercest resistance to the Soviets when the U.S.S.R. spent the entire decade of the 1980s trying to take over the homeland. It was that uncompromising fierceness that eventually sent the Russians packing for home, empty handed.
This time, the best vehicle that Hasan could lay his hands on was a simple, aged civilian automobile. Their neighbor drove the family while Hasan held Zubaida’s shrieking form flat on the back seat and her mother rode in front. The trip was made in a pell-mell dash that took nearly seven hours. It sent the burned girl into fresh shrieks every time the truck bed bounced over the rutted dirt road. Zubaida’s trance of pain was too cruel to allow her the release of passing out, so her mother continually cried and begged Allah to intervene, or to at least let Zubaida fall unconscious and give her some relief.
But Zubaida’s ability to maintain a strangle-hold on life, surprising as it was after those around her began to give her up for dead, didn’t appear to include the option of relief from consciousness. Some part of her that was more ancient that the mud-walled village ruins was sending her the continuous, unspoken message that in order to remain alive, she had to stay alert. She was in that desperate and primal state where her instincts filled her nervous system with the fear that once she let go of the world and allowed herself to sleep, there would be no stopping the downward slide. So with every ounce of alertness left to her, she felt every bump while they pushed along through the relentless desert until the hot day descended into a mercifully cool night.
When they finally arrived at the clinic in Herat, Hasan pulled out the small wad of currency that represented much of his family’s cash and pressed it into the hands of a doctor, begging him to save his little girl. His passion for her well-being may have been a surprise to the staff at the clinic, since the region’s growing fundamentalism following its takeover by the Taliban forces was accompanied by commensurate losses in the social standing of females—female children in particular.
The kind of deep concern that Hasan showed for his little girl was more typically reserved for sons. Under Taliban fundamentalism, many parents would be expected to simply abandon their dying daughter in the wilderness, or, if the family patriarch was of a more kindly nature, dispose of her in some quick and painless method like a stealthy bullet to the head and then bury the body with respect.
A female child, after all, does little to protect her parents from poverty in their old age when she is taken away at marriage and sealed behind thick walls.
Still, the doctors agreed to do the best that they could. Despite their lack of essential supplies, they realized that the charred skin had to be scraped and washed if Zubaida was to have any chance of surviving the infections that would inevitably follow. And so even though they had no anesthesia to offer her, there was nothing else to do but peel away her blistered and oozing skin.
That procedure began less than eight hours after the accident, but Zubaida found that she still had plenty of energy left for shrieking with every cell of her body while the skin was flayed off of her. The staff had to hold her down just as they would a torture victim. From Zubaida’s standpoint there was no difference.
She found that the initial pain had not diminished at all, and now—impossibly—it became worse when they pulled the burned skin away. In the deeper areas of her burns, where the flesh of her chest was essentially destroyed, the nerve endings were also gone. Therefore her pain in those spots wasn’t as bad as it was across her neck, throat and arms. There, the burns had left live nerve endings beneath the scorched flesh. Those singed nerves were now sending their awful messages to her brain, forcing the agony to once again seek escape from her mouth. It blasted up out of her with every new shriek like a steam through a tight valve.
Once the torture session was finally over, there was nothing left in the little clinic’s arsenal to offer her as treatment other than to rub her with salve to keep the raw flesh somewhat protected. They released her back into her father’s care. The kindly doctor, moved by the father’s unusual concern for his female child, took Hasan aside and warned him that these injuries were certainly not survivable. Death could come tonight or death could come tomorrow; it might even wait for a week or two. But the only remaining question was how much of a nightmare that Hasan’s little girl would have to endure before death inevitably claimed her.
The doctor urged Hasan to take his daughter home and to pray for her death to quickly claim her.
Hasan did take Zubaida back home after sharing the dreadful prognosis with his wife, but no matter how deep her agony, he could not find it in himself to pray for her to be taken, lost to the family. He and Bador directed the rest of the family not to pray for her death at all. Instead, they were to beg for Zubaida to be spared in some way, in any way. To be granted a miracle.
And if a miracle was too much to ask, Hasan prayed aloud that he might be taken away instead of his innocent child. He cycled the plea to his God in the back of his mind and repeated it over and over while he made the helpless motions of caring for her.
Twenty-four hours after the fire, Hasan called upon their neighbors for a small loan to pay for gas so that another borrowed rolling wreck could be employed to take Zubaida and seek help in other places. He traded off some of the family possessions to raise the meager cash and set out with her toward the Afghanistan-Iran border, with a loose plan of making their way to one of the larger hospitals there. Surely, he thought, the doctors in such places would know what to do. Mohammed Hasan had served his country’s army in the long war against the Soviet invaders. He knew about the kinds of elaborate medical care that could be found, for the right people. No doubt one such place would have the right kind of medicine to save his daughter.
By now, Zubaida was lost to a thick fog of fatigue after a full day and night of screaming her way through pain so intense that she would never have words to express any of it. Her parents kept drizzling cool water over her tortured flesh. The relief mostly came from the attention that they showered upon her and its effect of easing her terror. No matter what they did for her, the pain was unrelenting. The only thing that stopped her cries for brief periods was when sheer exhaustion overwhelmed her.
This time they drove late at night, avoiding the worst of the desert heat while they rolled along over parched stretches of land. Once they reached Herat, they continued north until they crossed the border into Iran under a pitch black sky and headed for the small Iranian city of Moshad.
At least the occasional Taliban roadblocks were manned by devotees who seemed to understand the girl’s plight and who felt no threat from her. They let the moaning child and the half-hysterical father pass on. The black-turbaned fanatics may not have understood a father’s unwillingness to leave his daughter’s fate up to Allah, but they were moved enough by her condition to shrug and allow her delusional father to continue his hopeless quest.
Doctors in Moshad took a look at Zubaida, freshened her salve coating and referred them on to the capital city of Tehran, another five hundred miles away. That meant driving for another twelve hours. For Zubaida, nothing about traveling got any better.
The hospital in Tehran accepted her for treatment, although there wasn’t much that they could do beyond rubbing her with other ointments in an attempt to ward off the worst of the infections and to keep the wounds from drying out.
She was soon past any sense of time; the days and nights began to melt into one another. The single most constant force in her awareness was the rain of agony coming from her roasted nerve endings—whether it came as energetic screams or exhausted moans, the pain continued to burn inside of her and force its way back out.
* * *
Zubaida, all of her family, and everyone in the village of Farah knew that their depth of poverty rose straight from an entire generation of war with the invading Soviet forces. It was a conflict that didn’t end until 1989. Many of their local men died in the long struggle to repel the Soviet Army and defeat communism.
But there was nothing to fill the vacuum after the Russian foreigners were finally driven away; the unifying power of a common enemy was lost to the splintered interests of many different Afghan militia factions. Soon the in-fighting between local warlords began.
As for the effect on the general population, no matter who won the warlords’ bitter flare-ups, the result always ended up with the region being stripped of basic goods and services while its people were left to absorb the impact.
Under those conditions, the rise of the Taliban followed the departure of the Soviets. Black-turbaned squads of long-bearded fanatics swept over the country of thirty million, using the name of Allah to imprison the female population and exercise twenty-four hour control over all of the men via a host of strict religious edicts. In that way, Zubaida’s family and everyone in Farah understood how the Taliban’s destructive influence on their region had drained away any international relief that might have been intended for them, long before any of it could reach the village. That relief included any medically valuable pain killers or antibiotics. More importantly for the Hasan family, the Soviet war and the Taliban rise to power had mutually succeeded in ending the education of females throughout Afghanistan for so long that in addition to the rare presence of doctors in the region, there were no trained nurses there at all.
Hasan was fiercely proud of the fact that the nomadic people of Afghanistan have always been able to shrug off the presence of any large-scale government in their land. But now the blunt fact of his utter helplessness as a father in dealing with a single child’s catastrophe rose up in front of his eyes. It hung in the air before him and formed a poisonous Taliban presence that filled his home as surely as if a black-turbaned genie had just come swirling out of a foul puff of lantern smoke
* * *
In the isolation of their desert village, they had no way of knowing that halfway around the planet the grim reality of the Taliban was already the topic of a draft U.S. Presidential Directive. It was quietly being prepared in Washington, D.C. to authorize one last black-ops attempt to remove a certain obscure but worrisome Afghanistan-based Islamic terrorist named Osama Bin Laden.
If that attempt failed, the Presidential Directive proposed that the next logical step would have to be nothing short of the complete removal of the Taliban regime from all positions of power in Afghanistan, because of their sympathy for Osama Bin Laden’s anti-U.S. campaign.
At about the same time that Zubaida was burned, the last of nineteen Islamic suicide hijackers arrived inside the United States and began final flight training in preparation for the attack they planned for the coming September 11th.
* * *
One week after the burns, Zubaida’s pain was down to a more bearable level most of the time, but the enflamed nerve endings always raged again whenever her dressings needed to be changed. Before long, screams and silence became her only language. She clung to her life without painkillers inside a ruined body that would surely never dance again. Now, the music that had always carried her through every difficult experience remained silent, as it had been from the moment that the orange teeth bit into her. Since then, she hadn’t heard a note.
Sometimes she could sink into mere sobs and go back to crying like any other little girl, but most of the time the pain insisted on tearing through her mouth with every change of dressing and every scraping of the infected wounds.
The Iranian doctors spent twenty days giving her the best medicines that they could make available, while Zubaida teetered in and out of her nightmare world. But the medicines they could offer and facilities they possessed simply weren’t enough to fight back the raging infections that had begun to attack her raw and open wounds.
Eventually, the doctors agreed that that they were making no headway with her.
The hospital was crowded and the need for space was severe. So they informed Mohammed Hasan that they had done everything they could for his suffering child, but it was impossible for this little girl to live much longer through the waves of infection that were now sweeping through her. Despite the doctors’ greater resources and higher levels of training than those back in Herat, their ultimate response was the same as the others—
take your daughter back home and pray for death to ease her suffering.
* * *
Huge, unseen forces, whose power had been steadily building for over twenty years, now swirled invisibly throughout their homeland and spilled across the borders and spread all over the planet. No one on either end of the unseen storm could know how powerfully those waves were about to impact on one suffering Afghani girl huddled in an isolated desert village with her stunned and aching family.