Hasan gladly accepted it, even though he had no idea how he could ever repay such a fortune. All he knew was that with this sum, he could transport his dying daughter to the southern city of Kandahar, where there was a small U.S. military presence in the wake of the terrorist attacks on America. That meant that there would have to be fabulous American doctors, did it not? There would be surgeons with the great skills that ex-soldier Hasan knew would accompany any such powerful military force. Perhaps there would be someone among them who knew if there was anything at all that could be done for her.
Hasan’s neighbors warned him that any military force has strict policies about not getting involved with the problems of the local population. But Hasan also remembered that Americans were rumored to sometimes show unpredictable bouts of generosity if they felt convinced that you meant no harm. It was worth the risk of another try. So he set about planning the trip to Kandahar, determined to use every last penny of the fabulous collective loan in a last desperate search for help.
Even in his remote village, he had heard stories about that pack of Muslim extremists who recently flew huge airliners into some very important buildings in America. Local gossip had it that the very word “Muslim” had become a curse to American ears. Some of his more cynical neighbors cautioned him that it would not matter to the Americans that he was no fanatic and that he hated the Taliban even more than they did. He was a Muslim, therefore he would be a suspect to American eyes.
Hasan had never dealt with an American before, and wasn’t even sure what one looked like. But even in his remote village, passing travelers brought stories of American army units that were pouring into Afghanistan’s mountain regions to seek out the phantom Bin Laden and flush out more of the Taliban resistance.
Some in his village warned him that it was madness to approach the Americans. They had come to fight, using all sorts of secret weapons—what reason was there for them to offer help to a man such as him? Plus, the leader of the suicide attackers in America also went by the name of Mohammed. So did that mean that Hasan’s very name would draw American wrath down upon him, in revenge? Worst of all, if the Americans were anything like the Taliban “Soldiers of God,” Hasan knew they might well decide that the best thing would be to shoot him and his daughter, right there on the spot.
Yet Mohammed Hasan had to ask himself if that would be any worse than watching his girl slowly die, knowing that she would surely take her father and her grieving mother along with her anyway.
The city of Kandahar lies on the southeastern edge of Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border. It remained one of the major Taliban holdouts in mid-2002 and represented the most urban collection of fundamentalist Muslims in the country. He could not expect to find local sympathy for his lost cause of a daughter. But he could make his best attempt to approach the U.S. military. He knew that the Americans were more like the familiar Russians, when it came to the way they treat their women. At least they wouldn’t question his simple motive for trying so long and hard to save this one little girl, with so many other children to support at home.
* * *
The anonymous American Green Beret wants to remain that way—not only because he broke a standing rule about getting involved in the medical problems of the local population when there was barely enough military clinic space for the U.S. sick and wounded—but more importantly, because he doesn’t want to replace his quiet act of kindness with a media spotlight. His Special Forces work depends on anonymity.
Others in his military unit confirm that he was walking in the marketplace in Kandahar one day, when he spotted one of the local men walking along with a little girl who appeared to be the man’s daughter. The soldier might not have noticed them at all, except that the scarf wrapped over the top of the girl’s head slipped for just a moment—revealing a hideously scarred face. He looked again and noticed that the girl was painfully thin, even by local standards, but despite her condition, she was so alert that she seemed to sense him looking at her. She raised her eyes to meet his and stared directly back at him. Such a response from a female child is almost unheard of, in that land of silenced children and suppressed women. Nevertheless, the young girl’s gaze met his eyes with a mixture of curiosity and defiance.
It was all too much for him to pass by and ignore.
He spoke enough of the language to mix with gestures and ask the man what happened to the girl. Then he listened while the man explained that the girl was indeed his daughter, that she had been terribly burned several months ago, and that he brought her to Kandahar as part of a long journey to seek help for her.
The anonymous American soldier asked what was being done for her.
“Nothing,” her father replied. Every doctor whom he had taken her to see judged her condition to be hopeless. He introduced himself as Mohammed Hasan, and his daughter as Zubaida. The soldier noticed Hasan’s constant references to the prophet “Ali,” which revealed him to be a member of the relatively peaceful Shiite Muslims, not one of the violent Sunni Muslims from the fundamentalist Sunni Triangle region who lust for the death of all things Western.
Mohammed Hasan explained that he brought Zubaida all the way to Kandahar in a last bid to seek help for her, and that he had attempted to apply for some kind of help from the Americans at the military base there. They were turned away at the gates; the trip had been a waste. In the seven months since the girl’s accident, her father told of selling most of the family’s meager possessions and borrowing money from his collective neighbors to pay for their journeys throughout the region to seek help.
The soldier knew that any borrowed sum was a huge amount for a rural desert Muslim, one he was unlikely to be able to repay. The Green Beret marveled at that—in a land and a culture that places a notoriously low value on females, this struggling father had ransomed his entire life in the attempt to help his little girl.
He looked down at little Zubaida once again—beyond the frail body and the wounded expression in her eyes, there was also a defiant streak that confirmed her strong spark of life. The sergeant found that idea of walking off and leaving the child to her fate was more than he could stand. He took the local man’s arm and, acting in defiance of standing orders, told him to bring his daughter and follow him. Whether it would wind up in costing a promotion or even landing him in the brig, the sergeant could not walk away from that spark in the dying girl’s eyes.
That was when the first domino fell. It sent a wave of reaction down a long and improvised domino chain. There would be many more of them yet to fall before Zubaida would finally be underway in her impossibly strange journey, and the chain would eventually reach halfway around the world—as far away from her home as she could go without leaving the planet.
Chapter Two
In the months since the fire
came to punish her for dancing, Zubaida’s masses of scar tissue continued to tighten until most of her facial and bodily features took on the smoothed-out edges of a melted wax sculpture. Beneath the layers of molten flesh she was a mass of broken shards. Over time, her views of the world and of herself were repeatedly shattered by the continuing process of scar damage to her body and by the more painful blows to her self-esteem.
The difference between the small tribal village of Farah and the distant city of Kandahar was apparent to her as soon as she and her father arrived; Farah was a place of few mirrors, so she seldom had to look at her reflection. But in Kandahar, her own shocking appearance confronted her on every corner. Even when there was no glass around, her appearance didn’t need mirrors to mock her—she caught her reflection in the reactions of strangers wherever they went on the ancient city’s endless twisting streets. She and her father became stranded in a crowd of gawking spectators when they walked through the
bazaar
.
In a cross-fade of assaults, the physical pain was beginning to leave her at the same time that it was replaced by a throbbing sense of isolation. So far, she had survived to within a few weeks of her tenth birthday, but with that coming of age she would traditionally have to retreat into a domestic life intended to prepare her for marriage—something that Zubaida knew she was too grotesque to expect. She would lose the outer world at the same time that the potential world of a valued mother’s home and hearth became closed to her.
Now the ancient mud walls that she had played on all of her life seemed to manifest themselves inside of her. The walls rose to form a maze with dead end traps in every direction, driving her backward in shrinking circles into a breathing space that grew smaller by the day. She still couldn’t feel the music running through her anymore; she could only feel the need for it—sometimes, for an instant, she would think that she heard a few notes, or even felt a hint of it throbbing in her muscles, but as quickly as she noticed it, the feeling was gone. It left her wondering if she had actually felt anything at all.
And in that way the fire continued to rob her of the same thing, over and over again. Then the anger would explode out of her. Her whole body became a nozzle for rage that spewed out of her in a high-pressure mix of fear and longing and grief over everything that had been stolen from her. She could see that it shocked people when she emotionally exploded, especially when her outbursts followed a brief moment when she had been able to react to others with wit or humor.
In those tiny moments, the good moments, she could tell that people recognized her again, even if they only got a glimpse. She practically recognized herself. But then some new physical pain always yanked at her attention or the emotional pain crushed down upon her like a landslide burying a house, filling her with the sense that she was being robbed in broad daylight by an arrogant attacker.
Then the people around her, who had just recognized their old Zubaida during one of her moments of clarity, would be all the more astonished when she began to scream or cry or even strike out at them in the extremes of her frustration. To Zubaida, it seemed clear enough. Since she had no control over any aspect of her life, the only form of strength left to her was in the power to shock herself and others. Back at home in Farah, she had already overheard her parents fearfully speculating as to whether or not she was losing her mind. Now, alone in Kandahar with her father, she felt that question from him, too, while he watched her react to the city.
But the walls still kept springing up inside of her. No answer came to assure her that she was not losing her mind, merely the realization that she was powerless against her freakish condition. It didn’t seem to make any difference that it all felt so wrong to her—some awful, invisible Thing had her in a constrictor’s grip and was slowly crushing her into nothingness.
All of her shattered ideas of what anything and everything were supposed to be lay in slivers all around her, broken images piled ankle deep. “Trust us,” the adults kept telling her. “We’re trying to help you,” they lied. Every time the adults said they were going to help her, they tortured her by peeling at her skin. Sometimes they talked to her father as if she wasn’t even there, as they had done when they told him that she had no chance to live.
Her father had repeatedly assured her that they came to this place of chaos to find help for her, but she could see that most people were only interested in staring at her with giggling fascination. Even the American soldier who stopped her father to ask about her seemed to stare at her. She could feel a strong need to defy them in some way, but didn’t know how. Something deep inside of her utterly rejected this awful predicament. She had no choice but to accept what had been done to her body, but she needed to shriek in protest over her social isolation. The shrieks exploded silently inside. She only managed to hold them in for fear of setting off a pack of Taliban and drawing them onto her like starving dogs. Her need to keep herself safe remained in place, even as her own reflection told her that she had been killed already and that it didn’t matter how hard she fought to stay in a world where nothing was left for her.
Still, Zubaida was not going to go quietly. In private, her screams of rage were sometimes louder than her cries of pain had ever been. As soon as they were safely out of this chaotic city and safely back home, she would let everybody keep right on wondering whether or not she was losing her mind.
What did such words even mean, with things as they were? It was good to shock and frighten people.
It was good to make them see her.
* * *
Mohammed Hasan followed along with his daughter behind the American soldier, who seemed willing to help them in some way. They walked the streets of old Kandahar, long reputed to be named for its founder Alexander of Macedon and dating back over 2,300 years. Even though Hasan was a stranger to the city, he could tell that they heading roughly toward the American base. There was nothing else that he could do for Zubaida, now, but follow this soldier in trust and hope. When the call to prayer echoed from the minarets of the Kherqa Sharif, one of the most sacred shrines in Afghanistan, he was surprised that the American paused to allow him to kneel. He wondered if the American was aware that the Shrine contains a cloak believed to have belonged to the Prophet himself—was
that
why a Westerner would show respect for the prayer call?
He wasn’t sure how to deal with these Americans. They had the power to make you rich or to turn your home to rubble. They jumped back and forth between showing respect and being murderous, and did it according to rules that were baffling to him.