Tiny Dancer (22 page)

Zubaida understood—sort of. She had played around with pulling long sheets off of a toilet paper roll, so she could picture the idea of holding onto the paper while you throw the roll over the top of a tree. The concept struck her as so utterly foreign and bizarre that at first she didn’t feel much of a reaction to the thought at all.

You hold one end and throw the roll over a tree or a bush. As soon as the roll hits the ground, you pick it up and hold the paper again and throw the roll back over the tree or bush. You repeat this as many times as you can, or until another target appears.

If a team of five girls is assisted by an unapologetically regressed Texas girl and everybody works with genuine cooperation, Rebecca guessed that much of an entire front yard could be majestically draped in just a few minutes.

When Rebecca began teasing the girls about how they should each take a role and go around the corner to a friend’s house and strike, Zubaida giggled along with the other girls. Nobody actually thought that she meant it, but they seemed to get the humor in it and their giggling was contagious. The idea itself still wasn’t doing much for Zubaida. She hated being the outsider and tried to get in on the joke, but when she made a mental picture of throwing perfectly good paper around in the air, it all just seemed pointless.

Still, the excitement kept making her giggle while she hurried along in the dark with Rebecca and the other girls, running across people’s front yards and around the corner of the block, to the victim’s house. She played along with the other girls at first, just imitating what they were doing with the paper rolls, even though she began to get the idea as soon as her friend Caitlin threw the first roll and everybody watched it land. After a while she realized that it was pretty funny after all, just to be in this impossible dream world where she and these other girls could run through the night and do this foolish wasting of paper. Pretty soon everyone was staggering around snorting with laughter that they attempted to suppress with varying levels of failure. She tossed her paper roll until her arm got tired.

What she didn’t realize was that Rebecca had saved the game’s real trigger, and that she planned to pull it just as soon as the paper streaks were thoroughly laced over the tops of everything in the front yard. Just when the girls began to run out of paper and the yard was thoroughly whitened, Rebecca let out a long, high whoop that scared the girls in the first instant and sent them into riotous laughter in the next.

When they saw her jump onto the porch and ring the doorbell, they didn’t have to be told to take off running and sprint back around the corner. By the time that the shrieking girls made it back to Peter and Rebecca’s house, Zubaida was laughing so hard that she could barely stay on her feet. She tried to run but mostly just staggered along laughing harder than she could remember doing in a long time, maybe harder than she had ever done. Within her realm of permitted existence, this level of public excitement and girlish play simply did not exist.

The girls tumbled into Rebecca’s living room half crazed with excitement and completely elated. None of the other girls had actually done this before, so for Zubaida as well as the others, this was their first chance in this life to deliberately create a great big sloppy mess and purposely draw attention to it—and then openly flee the adult authority before they can come barreling down onto you.

It was the high point of the sleepover and it would require some explaining to the other parents, but it was a powerful blast of pure adrenalin and girlhood camaraderie that Zubaida and each of the others were likely to never forget. Since it was an arranged strike and Rebecca had tipped off their “victim” that afternoon, the girls were spared the possible consequence of an outraged neighbor hammering at their door at night. Instead they spent the next couple of hours rehashing the experience and slowly drifted back down to earth.

Zubaida fell asleep easily with the rest of them. It felt the same way that it did back home when there was a houseful of visiting family members who sometimes stopped by and always had to be entertained, no matter how meager the fare might be. Experience had sharpened Zubaida’s ability to sense the presence of the other people in the house, even after the lights were out and everyone finally grew quiet.

It was almost as if she could feel the space that they occupied in the air. There was a solidness to the clannish feeling that the sleepover gave her; it was a familiar one. She pulled it up around herself like a warm blanket and took long breaths of the air that was filled by the other girls.

Behind her eyelids, now, whether she was awake or dreaming, the music was spending minutes at a time or even hours at a time playing away inside of her. Something always snapped it off, sooner or later, but the music always rebounded to help vitalize her during daylight and accompany her through the worst of her dreams at night. Even when her music came out timed to surreal scenes of her own destruction or images of her family’s demise, its very presence wrapped her in the welcome familiarity of something she clearly recognized about herself. The music kept her in touch with the Zubaida who would not let herself be forever haunted by evil dreams or waking suspicions.

Peter already knew about Rebecca’s taste in mischief, and later recalled specifically telling her “no TP-ing at the slumber party.” His mistake was that he left it at that, and then fell for it when he went along with being “granted the night off” to go see friends while Rebecca and the girls took over the house.

When he returned home that night, nothing appeared to be amiss and they were all peacefully asleep. It was only the next morning at breakfast with Rebecca and the girls that he began hearing little digs from his wife about how he was a stick in the mud—and he noticed that the girls all seemed to think that Rebecca’s comments were hysterical. Before long the whole group was too goofy for him to get any sense out of them at all.

He got up from the table and walked outside, then went around the corner to check his hunch about where the victim’s house might be, and there was the crime scene. Their friends were light-hearted enough to play along with a gag like that, but when he looked at the intricate web of paper streaks covering most of the yard’s surfaces, he could also see that the joke would wear thin fast if he didn’t get it cleaned up.

He weighed the idea of going back and telling the girls that they’d had their fun, and now the responsible thing to do was to go back there and clean it all up. It was the mature thing. It was the big kid thing to do. He spent a few seconds visualizing the chore of organizing and enforcing a girl-y yard cleanup.

A good hour later, Peter had most of the yard finished and had spent so much time climbing around in the tree branches that he knew it would be okay to skip his workout at the gym. The science of the operating room was far more predictable than the art of the long-term relationship, but he already knew that with Rebecca, a little bit of willingness to spontaneously compromise was a workable peace-keeping skill.

Chapter Ten

Bador

Bador had eight other children
at the time of Zubaida’s accident, seven of them still at home. They ranged in age from her married eldest daughter Raima, who was with Bador when the fire struck Zubaida, down to her youngest toddler. Zubaida had always been her trusty middle child. But while Zubaida was so far away in America, Bador seldom indulged in the luxury of allowing her heart to ache for her daughter. The fears that she imagined on her daughter’s behalf would, if she let them, multiply until they tortured her.

Bador was accepting of her culture’s patriarchal conception of the adult female as the household caretaker, but under Taliban rule she was also a physical prisoner inside her home, in that she could never leave it without a male chaperone. She was fortunate that her husband Mohammed, despite his first name, had never been a religious zealot and didn’t bother to impose strict behavioral codes upon her. The cultural restrictions had been tight enough without that, ever since the fundamentalist Taliban takeover.

In her brief years of growing up, Bador never heard of something called a “Taliban,” but she already lived amid an invisible thicket of traditions and peer expectations. One such custom required girls to submit to being traded as a family asset via arranged marriages, despite the modern era’s accepted customs. These forced unions were consummated late in the bride’s childhood, in a practice still found in various civilizations around the globe.

Women in the cities lived less restrictive lives, but the time-honored family ways of the Afghan tribes left most women of the primarily rural population mired in the traditional household role for want of education. More recently, the holy regime of the Taliban clerics had cut off every other alternative for the nation’s female population. They not only sealed the exits but violent public retribution was inflicted upon any and all transgressors.

However, at the end of 2002, right about the time that Zubaida was off in America learning how to fit into the local holiday celebrations of the equally foreign Christmas and Chanukah, the U.S. military and a coalition of supporting nations forcibly ejected the Taliban rulers from power in Afghanistan. The remaining resistance was driven north toward Kabul, away from the central core of the country where Zubaida’s home village of Farah is located. Throughout most of the country, the Taliban’s fundamentalist control over Afghanistan’s government was shattered. But during their five years in power from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban set back the cause of women in Afghanistan to a place more backward and misogynistic than any nation known to history.

While the extreme fundamentalist rule of the country was enforced in the name of Islam, the actual practice was completely at odds with Islam’s teachings. Ever since the fourteenth century, Islam has declared the equality of women in all matters, at home and in the marketplace. It is specifically written in the Koran that women are permitted to buy and sell in the marketplace as readily as males, and entitled to enjoy the protections of society at large from teachings of deadly anti-female bias.

Men shall have a benefit from what they earn,

and women shall have a benefit from what they earn.

(Koran, 4:32)

However, the reality of the lives that faced Bador’s daughters under the Taliban’s years of control proved that the Taliban clerics were as dedicated to these particular precepts of Islam as a Nazi church-goer to the teachings of Jesus. Many civilizations have failed to respect the rights of women, but nowhere else in history has there been such systematic abuse of half of an entire population.

Perhaps such levels of repression can only take root under the guise of religious piety—they immediately began to lose their strength at the moment that the Taliban rulers fell from power.
Voice Of America
released a report on the various effects upon Afghanistan’s women resulting from the repressive restrictions during the Taliban years. There was a dramatic rise in major depression, chronic anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among women, who were universally denied almost all forms of healthcare.

Bador found that this not only affected herself and her other daughters, but also had a negative impact on her sons when she was too sick to run the household in her husband’s absence. Treatment for illness was almost always of the home remedy variety. All of the female doctors had been driven from the profession, and many were so financially paralyzed by lack of opportunity that they were reduced to begging and prostitution. Male doctors were only allowed to examine women with another male family member present, and they couldn’t examine them under their clothing at all. It didn’t matter much—even if the doctor found a need for surgery, he wouldn’t be permitted to operate on a female, anyway.

In what turned out to be a holocaust imposed on the entire female population of a country of more than 25 million people, medical, dental, and reproductive health deteriorated severely among all of Afghanistan’s women. The process was begun in the time of the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, which destroyed the country’s fragile infrastructure, then continued through the 1990s while the regional warlords fought for pieces of what the Soviets had shattered. The final clampdown came when control was seized by the army of the murderous Taliban regime.

After that, results were typical. Totalitarian governments that smash all opposing voices are known to be highly efficient means of controlling society; once the Taliban seized control from the local warlords, anarchy ended and order was imposed.

It was a quiet order, and strange.

Since the Taliban banned women from work, and there were 50 to 60 thousand widowed women in the city of Kabul alone, children became the only bread earners for many of those widowed families. Under the Taliban rule, boys and girls as young as eight and nine begged and sold their bodies in the street in the attempt to provide enough food for their families. During that same period there was also a long list of forced marriages, upon girls as young as eight or nine years of age—often to those same members of the Taliban militia who had installed themselves in power in the name of bringing the heavenly ways of Allah to the nation’s people.

According to sources such as Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization, throughout the time of Taliban rule there were increasing numbers of women in Afghanistan who not only suffered depression, but also major bouts of neurosis. Further, many of them suffered much more severe forms of mental illness such as deep breaks into schizophrenia and psychosis.