Toward the end of July, suicide pilot Mohammed Atta contacted Osama Bin Laden by courier and asked for another several weeks to complete his squad’s flight training. It is apparent that his request was granted—on July 27th, the CIA noted that the mounting intelligence “chatter” concerning rumors of imminent attacks on America had abruptly fallen silent.
Nobody knew why.
* * *
Hasan took Zubaida back to their home village of Farah, but he still couldn’t make himself follow the doctors’ suggestions about praying for her to die. Even though Hasan was a Muslim, he didn’t share the fanatic ways of the fundamentalists. Not only was he opposed to their vicious control over the population, but in an hour such as this one, he couldn’t share in the belief that the same God who allowed this to happen to Hasan’s defenseless daughter would take any better care of Zubaida in the afterlife than He had in this world.
Instead, Hasan continued his litany for the only end that he could desire—some sort of miracle to save his suffering child. It was a faltering prayer, propped between his refusal to embrace extreme religion and his rejection of the superstitions that pervade much of the desert nomad culture. Just as he never believed in the militant fringes of Islamic faith, he also never found comfort in any of the age-old beliefs prevalent in that part of the world:
to look upon the moon during the third night of a new moon is to bring bad luck. A woman carrying an unborn child must not touch her body during an eclipse, or the child will bear a mark on the part of the body that was touched. If she carries a knife during an eclipse, the child will be scarred in any part of the body where the knife touches the mother.
Hasan knew that his more superstitious wife had avoided all such behaviors, and even so, their little girl was slowly being covered in infected scar tissue which grew more pronounced with every passing day—what good had the age-old superstitious “precautions” done? He struggled to remain faithful to his God even as he acknowledged that the realm of superstition hadn’t done anything to help the family, either.
Hasan realized that he remained his daughter’s only hope. He had to be willing to fight as hard as she herself was fighting. So as soon as he and Zubaida arrived back in home in Farah after the twenty-day stay in the Tehran hospital, he arranged for the local folk doctor to make daily visits and rub Zubaida with homemade ointments in a continuing effort to fight off infection in her wounds.
The ointments seemed to work well enough to keep the worst at bay, but they lacked the power to bring her into a healing state. Zubaida couldn’t eat well enough to sustain herself, so her flesh began to wither. The infections held her in a grip of low-grade fevers. Meanwhile the scar tissue covering most of her face and torso continued to grow thicker with every passing day, wrapping her in tight bands of stiff flesh that was beginning to bind her like fibrous ropes.
But whether it was Divine Intervention, blind luck, or simply the result of one girl’s steely will to live, in the three weeks that had passed since the fire consumed so much of Zubaida before leaving her to her guaranteed death, she continued to cling to life with an unyielding grip nobody could explain.
Gradually with the passing days, Zubaida plunged into a place where dreams, nightmares, and waking life all melted together under the late summer sun. Desert heat was a lifelong reality for her that usually went unnoticed—now it was a constant torment. Her scarring wounds itched almost as badly as they hurt, at least until she made any attempt to move. Then the simple act of turning over on her sleeping pad sent fresh shocks of pain shooting through her.
Family members tended to her, floating in and out of her awareness like ghosts until every part of the day and night was impossibly foreign to her. All the more so, since she found that she had lost her music. There was no desire to sing left in her, and she certainly couldn’t do any dancing. The very urges, the feelings, had disappeared. The worst of it was the thick silence in her head where her constant companion of rhythms and melodies always used to be.
Thoughts that should have passed through her like waves of song now echoed inside an emptiness that had no more music in it that the sound of a cold chisel on hard stone. She was no longer a little girl; she was an organism made of pain.
* * *
In the United States on September 4th of 2001, the President’s Principals Committee had their first meeting regarding international reports of the grim threat of attacks by a Muslim extremist organization calling itself Al Qaeda, “the Base,” under the direction of an obscenely rich son of Arab privilege named Osama Bin Laden. The National Security Council’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard Clark, pleaded for intense White House resolve in hunting down Al Qaeda fighters. He expressed his gut fear that there were major attacks upon the American homeland coming in the very near future.
In Afghanistan on September 9th, the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud consented to a personal interview with two Arab “journalists” who had been waiting in his camp for days in order to see him. The pair were undercover Al Qaeda operatives, and entered his tent carrying a fake camera rigged with high explosives. The suicide bomb killed Massoud and his staff.
On September 10th, the National Security Agency’s Deputy Director Stephen Hadley told the CIA to prepare for a series of covert actions against Al Qaeda. By this time, America’s international security warning system was, as the 9/11 Commission’s Report would later put it, “
blinking red… “
* * *
The news of September 11th attacks on America didn’t reach into the remote areas of Afghanistan right away. Even if it had, there was no way that Zubaida or her family could have any idea of the impact that the aftermath would make upon them.
Summer passed into fall, and although the men in the village of Farah had heard reports of American soldiers building up their numbers inside of Afghanistan, local people were only aware of the Americans in the form of occasional U.S. Army convoys passing by on the way to Herat. They didn’t feel any particular threat; it was all part of some far-away politician’s problem.
Three months after Zubaida’s accident, the sole sliver of good news for her was that the pain was tapering off to tolerable levels. She was never free of it, but the wrenching agony had finally left her. Whatever discomfort remained with her seemed pale next to that.
Her music, however, was long gone. She didn’t expect herself to dance or sing, but it surprised her that she couldn’t even hear any notes. Nowhere in her mind was the invisible radio that had always supplied her with accompaniment to her daily life, song after song after song. The hollow place in her heart was all that remained where warm and flowing music should have been.
She was even beginning to forget what it felt like to have the music inside of her.
Now that the pain had subsided, however, Zubaida had plenty of time to consider what this accident had cost her position in the family structure. Even at her young age, she had long since become the family’s “alpha” child, assuming a role of responsibility at home that was greater than her years. Now her embarrassment over her appearance was not as great as her feeling of guilt that she could no longer be of use—her roster of daily chores had once been a substantial contribution to everyone’s well being. Not only was she of no use anymore, her constant need of help was a heavy drain on energy and resources that no one in the family or their struggling village could afford to waste.
The only defense left to her mental state was to slow her thoughts down to the point that time seemed to race by in front of her. That altered state became her full time place of refuge.
Most of her open wounds were closed or closing, but the normal skin that had once been there was steadily being replaced by stiff scar tissue. Sometimes, if she moved too quickly, one of the healing areas would break open with a fresh surge of fiery pain, and the recovery had to begin all over again. Her left arm was now so stiff that she had to keep it tucked up against her chest, since any other position pulled at her chest wounds. Eventually the sticky healing flesh glued her arm into place.
The arm stayed there, crooked up against her left side, until the stiff scar tissue thickened so much that the entire limb became welded to her torso.
The healing skin of her neck and lower face was now covered over with scar tissue that continued to grow, but the tissue’s inability to stretch also caused it to gradually pull her head farther and farther down onto her chest. Finally, her chin rested there and became sealed in that position. Since her head couldn’t move any farther downward, the out of control scar tissue then began to pull down on her face, her eyes, her jaw, her lower lip.
By the time three months passed, Zubaida’s condition had degraded to a state so severe that most people living in the world’s developed nations will never see anything like it—the masses of scar tissue surrounding her and binding up her body had progressed to a stage that is simply never allowed to develop in places that have adequate medical care. Just as the famed “Elephant Man” had been betrayed by his own bones and cartilage when they grew out of control and distorted him beyond recognition, Zubaida’s flesh was now playing a similar trick on her by wrapping her in that growing blanket of unbending scar tissue.
Eventually, her mouth was pulled so far downward that she could no longer close it enough to chew her food—her mother had to mash it up for her. The difficulty in eating had already caused her to lose a fourth of her body weight, and there was no sign that she would be able to gain it back.
Zubaida herself had no clear idea why she wouldn’t let herself give in to death. She could feel it tugging at her; it just seemed too foreign to embrace. The strongest urge inside of her was to somehow get back on her feet and pitch in with the family. It didn’t matter to her that she had older siblings, Zubaida’s boundless energy had always made her invaluable to the family’s day-to-day living. She couldn’t imagine them being left without her.
She also felt her family’s grief for her. When she overheard her parents give in to thoughts of complete despair, she felt shamed to be the cause of it. It was nearly as humiliating as the reactions of visitors when they gasped at her appearance.
But even all of that wasn’t enough to soften Zubaida’s grip on life. Her innate drive to hurry up and get better didn’t actually work—and didn’t even prevent her condition from growing worse—but it was enough to keep her alive.
She felt herself filled with the determination that if Death wanted her, it would have to come and drag her away. She didn’t question where the strength came from; it felt as much a part of her as the urge to breathe. It was as if the music that she no longer possessed had left just enough of its essence inside of her to continue fueling her with the power of its life force, even if she could no longer hear a single note.
* * *
When America’s 9/11 Commission later issued their Report on the events of that day, one of its primary conclusions was that in the post-9/11 era, individual citizens need to accept responsibility for their own well-being. It must ultimately rest with each one of them, and it’s unwise to rely upon government resources to save them in times of disaster.
It was a lesson that Afghanistan’s desert people learned centuries ago. Nowhere was the warning more apparent than the Afghan village of Farah, in the house of Zubaida Hasan.
With the coming of mid-winter, scorching desert heat was replaced by the bitter cold air that rolls down from the towering mountains to the north. They spill out of a vast range of snowy peaks bisecting all of Afghanistan: the daunting Hindu Kush. The word “Kush” comes from Persian, meaning “killers,” and it perfectly describes that high and jagged range of barren peaks. The extraordinary stamina needed to cross that range is an apt symbol for that toughness of spirit which Afghanistan’s tribal people have embodied through centuries of struggle.
On the high desert plain in Farah, Mohammed Hasan and his wife Bador agreed that there had to be some reason that their daughter was still alive, even if they couldn’t fathom it. They resolved that as long as Zubaida was willing to fight so hard for her life, then they would continue to fight along with her. They kept her out of sight whenever the Taliban were around, knowing that the fanatics would have no sympathy for a father’s quest to save a single female child after she had been injured to the point of being socially useless. Then whenever the coast was clear, they went to work at scraping up every cent they could borrow from friends and neighbors so that Mohammed could take her on one more pilgrimage to one more city, always in the hope of finding a doctor who might know what to do for her.
The family was being torn apart from the stress of caring for her. It was killing all of them to live with her while she slowly wasted away, unable to eat enough to sustain her. The scar tissue on her face had contracted to the point that she could no longer close her eyes—she slept with them open. She could no longer close her mouth completely. The scar tissue was also strangling her from the inside by contorting her windpipe. Clearly the determined struggle that Zubaida had mounted up to this point was nevertheless doomed to fail.
By now everyone in the region had heard about the tragic “miracle” of Zubaida’s refusal to die, and even though nobody had the wherewithal to help on their own, a number of them responded to the Hasan family’s pleas for help to pool together tiny amounts. Eventually they raised the fabulous sum of ten million
afghanis
, worth a little more than three thousand U.S. dollars at that time.