Zaland's liberation from this hell came when Babrak Karmal, the president installed by the Soviets after their invasion in 1979, decided to free the prisoners as a public relations gesture. His family dispersed throughout different European countries. Zaland was in Germany when he received a phone call from his wife, who had made her way to the United States with their children. Eventually, she and Zaland were reunited in Santa Barbara, California, and Zaland began to use his experience as a welder to take what jobs he could, while his wife worked in a boutique.

"It was very hard," he says simply. "I got so shy because it was so hard to learn the language. The welding was good for me, because I worked from a blueprint; I did not need to talk with anybody to do it. But I did not work on my art for a long time, because after welding all day it was not enjoyable."

His wife persuaded him to turn to art again, however. When they moved in the 1980s to the Washington, D.C. area, he again exhibited some of his metal sculptures, while still working maintenance and engineering jobs during the day. Life seemed to have returned to some semblance of normalcy-until 1995, when his wife of 38 years was killed in an automobile accident.

At that point, Zaland admits, he began to lose his faith in Islam. Now, he says, he believes only in a religion of humanism. "There is just us, just people, nobody else," he says. "And if there is a higher energy, a power, it is not interested in humans."

But he is happy to be here in Florida, even though, he laughs ruefully, he is "the only Afghan in Sarasota and Bradenton," his relationship with a woman who helped bring him here later ended, and he has recently been fighting prostate cancer. He has found good friends, he says, and loves to look at the bridges that bind the area's keys together.

"Everything is so easy, and it's such a beautiful country," he says. "Whatever you are looking for, at the pet store, the grocery store, anywhere, you can find." He has, in fact, found a place to display his sculptures, at downtown's Sonnet Gallery. Currently he's doing sketches for several upcoming works, including one titled "Tora Bora" (after that mountainous region of Afghanistan) and another tied to the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

And although he says he has no plans to return to Afghanistan, he holds out hope for his troubled country's future, especially now that the United States is playing such a major role there. "God bless the United States," he says. "If not for them, we would never get our country back."