The kite runner Khaled Hosseini

Prev Next

“Baba?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for the fireworks,” I said. A thank-you, but only a halfhearted one.

“Get some rest,” Baba said, walking toward his room.

The other present Baba gave me--and he didn’t wait around for me to open this one--was a wristwatch. It had a blue face with gold hands in the shape of lightning bolts. I didn’t even try it on. I tossed it on the pile of toys in the corner. The only gift I didn’t toss on that mound was Rahim Khan’s leather-bound notebook. That was the only one that didn’t feel like blood money.

I sat on the edge of my bed, turned the notebook in my hands, thought about what Rahim Khan had said about Homaira, how his father’s dismissing her had been for the best in the end. She would have suffered. Like the times Kaka Homayoun’s projector got stuck on the same slide, the same image kept flashing in my mind over and over: Hassan, his head downcast, serving drinks to Assef and Wali. Maybe it would be for the best. Lessen his suffering. And mine too. Either way, this much had become clear: One of us had to go.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Later that afternoon, I took the Schwinn for its first and last spin. I pedaled around the block a couple of times and came back. I rolled up the driveway to the backyard where Hassan and Ali were cleaning up the mess from last night’s party. Paper cups, crumpled napkins, and empty bottles of soda littered the yard. Ali was folding chairs, setting them along the wall. He saw me and waved.

“Salaam, All,” I said, waving back.

He held up a finger, asking me to wait, and walked to his living quarters. A moment later, he emerged with something in his hands. “The opportunity never presented itself last night for Hassan and me to give you this,” he said, handing me a box. “It’s mod est and not worthy of you, Amir agha. But we hope you like it still. Happy birthday.”

A lump was rising in my throat. “Thank you, Ali,” I said. I wished they hadn’t bought me anything. I opened the box and found a brand new _Shahnamah_, a hardback with glossy colored illustrations beneath the passages. Here was Ferangis gazing at her newborn son, Kai Khosrau. There was Afrasiyab riding his horse, sword drawn, leading his army. And, of course, Rostam inflicting a mortal wound onto his son, the warrior Sohrab. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Hassan said your copy was old and ragged, and that some of the pages were missing,”

Ali said. “All the pictures are hand-drawn in this one with pen and ink,” he added proudly, eyeing a book neither he nor his son could read.

“It’s lovely,” I said. And it was. And, I suspected, not inexpensive either. I wanted to tell Ali it was not the book, but I who was unworthy. I hopped back on the bicycle. “Thank Hassan for me,” I said.

I ended up tossing the book on the heap of gifts in the corner of my room. But my eyes kept going back to it, so I buried it at the

bottom. Before I went to bed that night, I asked Baba if he’d seen my new watch anywhere.

THE NEXT MORNING, I waited in my room for Ali to clear the breakfast table in the kitchen. Waited for him to do the dishes, wipe the counters. I looked out my bedroom window and waited until Ali and Hassan went grocery shopping to the bazaar, pushing the empty wheelbarrows in front of them.

Then I took a couple of the envelopes of cash from the pile of gifts and my watch, and tiptoed out. I paused before Baba’s study and listened in. He’d been in there all morning, making phone calls. He was talking to someone now, about a shipment of rugs

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

due to arrive next week. I went downstairs, crossed the yard, and entered Ali and Hassan’s living quarters by the loquat tree. I lifted Hassan’s mattress and planted my new watch and a handful of Afghani bills under it.

I waited another thirty minutes. Then I knocked on Baba’s door and told what I hoped would be the last in a long line of shameful lies.

THROUGH MY BEDROOM WINDOW, I watched Ali and Hassan push the wheelbarrows loaded with meat, _naan_, fruit, and vegetables up the driveway. I saw Baba emerge from the house and walk up to Ali. Their mouths moved over words I couldn’t hear. Baba pointed to the house and Ali nodded. They separated. Baba came back to the house; Ali followed Hassan to their hut.

A few moments later, Baba knocked on my door. “Come to my office,” he said. “We’re all going to sit down and settle this thing.”

I went to Baba’s study, sat in one of the leather sofas. It was thirty minutes or more before Hassan and Ali joined us.

THEY’D BOTH BEEN CRYING; I could tell from their red, puffed up eyes. They stood before Baba, hand in hand, and I wondered how and when I’d become capable of causing this kind of pain.

Baba came right out and asked. “Did you steal that money? Did you steal Amir’s watch, Hassan?”

Hassan’s reply was a single word, delivered in a thin, raspy voice: “Yes.”

I flinched, like I’d been slapped. My heart sank and I almost blurted out the truth. Then I understood: This was Hassan’s final sacrifice for me. If he’d said no, Baba would have believed him because we all knew Hassan never lied. And if Baba believed him, then I’d be the accused; I would have to explain and I would be revealed for what I really was.

Baba would never, ever forgive me. And that led to another understanding: Hassan knew He knew I’d seen everything in that alley, that I’d stood there and done nothing.

He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time. I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone, and I wanted to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake. I wasn’t worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon. Baba would dismiss them, there would be some pain, but life would move on. I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Except Baba stunned me by saying, “I forgive you.”

Forgive? But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing.

Hadn’t Baba sat me on his lap and said those words to me? Then how could he just forgive Hassan? And if Baba could forgive that, then why couldn’t he forgive me for not being the son he’d always wanted? Why--“We are leaving, Agha sahib,” Ali said.

“What?” Baba said, the color draining from his face.

“We can’t live here anymore,” Ali said.

“But I forgive him, Ali, didn’t you hear?” said Baba.

“Life here is impossible for us now, Agha sahib. We’re leaving.” Ali drew Hassan to him, curled his arm around his son’s shoulder. It was a protective gesture and I knew whom Ali was protecting him from. Ali glanced my way and in his cold, unforgiving look, I saw that Hassan had told him. He had told him everything, about what Assef and his friends had done to him, about the kite, about me. Strangely, I was glad that someone knew me for who I really was; I was tired of pretending.

“I don’t care about the money or the watch,” Baba said, his arms open, palms up. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this... what do you mean ‘impossible’?”

“I’m sorry, Agha sahib, but our bags are already packed. We have made our decision.”

Baba stood up, a sheen of grief across his face. “Ali, haven’t I provided well for you?

Haven’t I been good to you and Hassan? You’re the brother I never had, Ali, you know that. Please don’t do this.”

“Don’t make this even more difficult than it already is, Agha sahib,” Ali said. His mouth twitched and, for a moment, I thought I saw a grimace. That was when I understood the depth of the pain I had caused, the blackness of the grief I had brought onto everyone, that not even Ali’s paralyzed face could mask his sorrow. I forced myself to look at Hassan, but his head was downcast, his shoulders slumped, his finger twirling a loose string on the hem of his shirt.

Baba was pleading now. “At least tell me why. I need to know!”

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Ali didn’t tell Baba, just as he didn’t protest when Hassan confessed to the stealing. I’ll never really know why, but I could imagine the two of them in that dim little hut, weeping, Hassan pleading him not to give me away. But I couldn’t imagine the restraint it must have taken Ali to keep that promise.

“Will you drive us to the bus station?”

“I forbid you to do this!” Baba bellowed. “Do you hear me? I forbid you!”

“Respectfully, you can’t forbid me anything, Agha sahib,” Ali said. “We don’t work for you anymore.”

“Where will you go?” Baba asked. His voice was breaking.

“Hazarajat.”

“To your cousin?”

“Yes. Will you take us to the bus station, Agha sahib?”

Then I saw Baba do something I had never seen him do before: He cried. It scared me a little, seeing a grown man sob. Fathers weren’t supposed to cry. “Please,” Baba was saying, but Ali had already turned to the door, Hassan trailing him. I’ll never forget the way Baba said that, the pain in his plea, the fear.

IN KABUL, it rarely rained in the summer. Blue skies stood tall and far, the sun like a branding iron searing the back of your neck. Creeks where Hassan and I skipped stones all spring turned dry, and rickshaws stirred dust when they sputtered by. People went to mosques for their ten raka’ts of noontime prayer and then retreated to whatever shade they could find to nap in, waiting for the cool of early evening. Summer meant long school days sweating in tightly packed, poorly ventilated classrooms learning to recite ayats from the Koran, struggling with those tongue-twisting, exotic Arabic words.

It meant catching flies in your palm while the mullah droned on and a hot breeze brought with it the smell of shit from the outhouse across the schoolyard, churning dust around the lone rickety basketball hoop.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

But it rained the afternoon Baba took Ali and Hassan to the bus station. Thunderheads rolled in, painted the sky iron gray. Within minutes, sheets of rain were sweeping in, the steady hiss of falling water swelling in my ears.

Baba had offered to drive them to Bamiyan himself, but Ali refused. Through the blurry, rain-soaked window of my bedroom, I watched Ali haul the lone suitcase carrying all of their belongings to Baba’s car idling outside the gates. Hassan lugged his mattress, rolled tightly and tied with a rope, on his back. He’d left all of his toys behind in the empty shack--I discovered them the next day, piled in a corner just like the birthday presents in my room.

Slithering beads of rain sluiced down my window. I saw Baba slam the trunk shut.

Already drenched, he walked to the driver’s side. Leaned in and said something to Ali in the backseat, perhaps one last-ditch effort to change his mind. They talked that way awhile, Baba getting soaked, stooping, one arm on the roof of the car. But when he straightened, I saw in his slumping shoulders that the life I had known since I’d been born was over. Baba slid in. The headlights came on and cut twin funnels of light in the rain. If this were one of the Hindi movies Hassan and I used to watch, this was the part where I’d run outside, my bare feet splashing rainwater. I’d chase the car, screaming for it to stop. I’d pull Hassan out of the backseat and tell him I was sorry, so sorry, my tears mixing with rainwater. We’d hug in the downpour. But this was no Hindi movie. I was sorry, but I didn’t cry and I didn’t chase the car. I watched Baba’s car pull away from the curb, taking with it the person whose first spoken word had been my name. I caught one final blurry glimpse of Hassan slumped in the back seat before Baba turned left at the street corner where we’d played marbles so many times.

I stepped back and all I saw was rain through windowpanes that looked like melting silver.

TEN

_March 1981_

A young woman sat across from us. She was dressed in an olive green dress with a black shawl wrapped tightly around her face against the night chill. She burst into prayer every time the truck jerked or stumbled into a pothole, her “Bismillah!” peaking with each of the truck’s shudders and jolts. Her husband, a burly man in baggy pants and sky blue turban, cradled an infant in one arm and thumbed prayer beads with his free hand. His lips moved in silent prayer. There were others, in all about a dozen, including Baba and me, sitting with our suitcases between our legs, cramped with these strangers in the tarpaulin-covered cab of an old Russian truck.

My innards had been roiling since we’d left Kabul just after two in the morning. Baba never said so, but I knew he saw my car sickness as yet another of my array of weakness--I saw it on his embarrassed face the couple of times my stomach had

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

clenched so badly I had moaned. When the burly guy with the beads--the praying woman’s husband--asked if I was going to get sick, I said I might. Baba looked away.

The man lifted his corner of the tarpaulin cover and rapped on the driver’s window, asked him to stop. But the driver, Karim, a scrawny dark-skinned man with hawk-boned features and a pencil-thin mustache, shook his head.

“We are too close to Kabul,” he shot back. “Tell him to have a strong stomach.”

Baba grumbled something under his breath. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but suddenly I was salivating, the back of my throat tasting bile. I turned around, lifted the tarpaulin, and threw up over the side of the moving truck. Behind me, Baba was apologizing to the other passengers. As if car sickness was a crime. As if you weren’t supposed to get sick when you were eighteen. I threw up two more times before Karim agreed to stop, mostly so I wouldn’t stink up his vehicle, the instrument of his livelihood.

Karim was a people smuggler--it was a pretty lucrative business then, driving people out of Shorawi-occupied Kabul to the relative safety of Pakistan. He was taking us to Jalalabad, about 170 kilometers southeast of Kabul, where his brother, Toor, who had a bigger truck with a second convoy of refugees, was waiting to drive us across the Khyber Pass and into Peshawar.

We were a few kilometers west of Mahipar Falls when Karim pulled to the side of the road. Mahipar--which means “Flying Fish”--was a high summit with a precipitous drop overlooking the hydro plant the Germans had built for Afghanistan back in 1967. Baba and I had driven over the summit countless times on our way to Jalalabad, the city of cypress trees and sugarcane fields where Afghans vacationed in the winter.

I hopped down the back of the truck and lurched to the dusty embankment on the side of the road. My mouth filled with saliva, a sign of the retching that was yet to come. I stumbled to the edge of the cliff overlooking the deep valley that was shrouded in dark ness. I stooped, hands on my kneecaps, and waited for the bile. Somewhere, a branch snapped, an owl hooted. The wind, soft and cold, clicked through tree branches and stirred the bushes that sprinkled the slope. And from below, the faint sound of water tumbling through the valley.

Standing on the shoulder of the road, I thought of the way we’d left the house where I’d lived my entire life, as if we were going out for a bite: dishes smeared with kofta piled in the kitchen sink; laundry in the wicker basket in the foyer; beds unmade; Baba’s business suits hanging in the closet. Tapestries still hung on the walls of the living room and my mother’s books still crowded the shelves in Baba’s study. The signs of our elopement were subtle: My parents’ wedding picture was gone, as was the grainy photograph of my grandfather and King Nader Shah standing over the dead deer. A few items of clothing were missing from the closets. The leather-bound notebook Rahim Khan had given me five years earlier was gone.

In the morning, Jalaluddin--our seventh servant in five years--would probably think we’d gone out for a stroll or a drive. We hadn’t told him. You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

any more--for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend. I thought of the singer Ahmad Zahir, who had played the accordion at my thirteenth birthday. He had gone for a drive with some friends, and someone had later found his body on the side of the road, a bullet in the back of his head. The rafiqs, the comrades, were everywhere and they’d split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn’t.

The tricky part was that no one knew who belonged to which. A casual remark to the tailor while getting fitted for a suit might land you in the dungeons of Poleh-charkhi.

Complain about the curfew to the butcher and next thing you knew, you were behind bars staring at the muzzle end of a Kalashnikov. Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their home, people had to speak in a calculated manner--the rafiqs were in the classrooms too; they’d taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.

What was I doing on this road in the middle of the night? I should have been in bed, under my blanket, a book with dog-eared pages at my side. This had to be a dream.

Had to be. Tomorrow morning, I’d wake up, peek out the window: No grim-faced Russian soldiers patrolling the sidewalks, no tanks rolling up and down the streets of my city, their turrets swiveling like accusing fingers, no rubble, no curfews, no Russian Army Personnel Carriers weaving through the bazaars. Then, behind me, I heard Baba and Karim discussing the arrangement in Jalalabad over a smoke. Karim was reassuring Baba that his brother had a big truck of “excellent and first-class quality,” and that the trek to Peshawar would be very routine. “He could take you there with his eyes closed,” Karim said. I overheard him telling Baba how he and his brother knew the Russian and Afghan soldiers who worked the checkpoints, how they had set up a

“mutually profitable” arrangement. This was no dream. As if on cue, a MiG suddenly screamed past overhead. Karim tossed his cigarette and produced a hand gun from his waist. Pointing it to the sky and making shooting gestures, he spat and cursed at the MiG.

I wondered where Hassan was. Then the inevitable. I vomited on a tangle of weeds, my retching and groaning drowned in the deafening roar of the MiG. WE PULLED UP to the checkpoint at Mahipar twenty minutes later. Our driver let the truck idle and hopped down to greet the approaching voices. Feet crushed gravel. Words were exchanged, brief and hushed. A flick of a lighter. “Spasseba.”

Another flick of the lighter. Someone laughed, a shrill cackling sound that made me jump. Baba’s hand clamped down on my thigh. The laughing man broke into song, a slurring, off-key rendition of an old Afghan wedding song, delivered with a thick Russian accent:

Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man, ahesta boro.

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Boot heels clicked on asphalt. Someone flung open the tarpaulin hanging over the back of the truck, and three faces peered in. One was Karim, the other two were soldiers, one Afghan, the other a grinning Russian, face like a bulldog’s, cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. Behind them, a bone-colored moon hung in the sky. Karim and the Afghan soldier had a brief exchange in Pashtu. I caught a little of it--something about Toor and his bad luck. The Russian soldier thrust his face into the rear of the truck. He was humming the wedding song and drumming his finger on the edge of the tailgate.

Even in the dim light of the moon, I saw the glazed look in his eyes as they skipped from passenger to passenger. Despite the cold, sweat streamed from his brow. His eyes settled on the young woman wearing the black shawl. He spoke in Russian to Karim without taking his eyes off her. Karim gave a curt reply in Russian, which the soldier returned with an even curter retort. The Afghan soldier said some thing too, in a low, reasoning voice. But the Russian soldier shouted something that made the other two flinch. I could feel Baba tightening up next to me. Karim cleared his throat, dropped his head. Said the soldier wanted a half hour with the lady in the back of the truck.

The young woman pulled the shawl down over her face. Burst into tears. The toddler sitting in her husband’s lap started crying too. The husband’s face had become as pale as the moon hovering above. He told Karim to ask “Mister Soldier Sahib” to show a little mercy, maybe he had a sister or a mother, maybe he had a wife too. The Russian listened to Karim and barked a series of words.

“It’s his price for letting us pass,” Karim said. He couldn’t bring himself to look the husband in the eye.

“But we’ve paid a fair price already. He’s getting paid good money,” the husband said.

Karim and the Russian soldier spoke. “He says... he says every price has a tax.”

That was when Baba stood up. It was my turn to clamp a hand on his thigh, but Baba pried it loose, snatched his leg away. When he stood, he eclipsed the moonlight. “I want you to ask this man something,” Baba said. He said it to Karim, but looked directly at the Russian officer. “Ask him where his shame is.”

They spoke. “He says this is war. There is no shame in war.”

“Tell him he’s wrong. War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”

Do you have to always be the hero? I thought, my heart fluttering. Can’t you just let it go for once? But I knew he couldn’t--it wasn’t in his nature. The problem was, his nature was going to get us all killed.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

The Russian soldier said something to Karim, a smile creasing his lips. “Agha sahib,”

Karim said, “these Roussi are not like us. They understand nothing about respect, honor.”

“What did he say?”

“He says he’ll enjoy putting a bullet in you almost as much as...” Karim trailed off, but nodded his head toward the young woman who had caught the guard’s eye. The soldier flicked his unfinished cigarette and unholstered his handgun. So this is where Baba dies, I thought. This is how it’s going to happen. In my head, I said a prayer I had learned in school.

“Tell him I’ll take a thousand of his bullets before I let this indecency take place,” Baba said. My mind flashed to that winter day six years ago. Me, peering around the corner in the alley. Kamal and Wali holding Hassan down. Assef’s buttock muscles clenching and unclenching, his hips thrusting back and forth. Some hero I had been, fretting about the kite. Sometimes, I too wondered if I was really Baba’s son.

The bulldog-faced Russian raised his gun.

“Baba, sit down please,” I said, tugging at his sleeve. “I think he really means to shoot you.”

Baba slapped my hand away. “Haven’t I taught you anything?” he snapped. He turned to the grinning soldier. “Tell him he’d better kill me good with that first shot. Because if I don’t go down, I’m tearing him to pieces, goddamn his father!”

The Russian soldier’s grin never faltered when he heard the translation. He clicked the safety on the gun. Pointed the barrel to Baba’s chest. Heart pounding in my throat, I buried my face in my hands.

The gun roared.

It’s done, then. I’m eighteen and alone. I have no one left in the world. Baba’s dead and now I have to bury him. Where do I bury him? Where do I go after that?

But the whirlwind of half thoughts spinning in my head came to a halt when I cracked my eyelids, found Baba still standing. I saw a second Russian officer with the others. It was from the muzzle of his upturned gun that smoke swirled. The soldier who had meant to shoot Baba had already holstered his weapon. He was shuffling his feet. I had never felt more like crying and laughing at the same time.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

The second Russian officer, gray-haired and heavyset, spoke to us in broken Farsi. He apologized for his comrade’s behavior. “Russia sends them here to fight,” he said. “But they are just boys, and when they come here, they find the pleasure of drug.” He gave the younger officer the rueful look of a father exasperated with his misbehaving son.

“This one is attached to drug now. I try to stop him...” He waved us off.

Moments later, we were pulling away. I heard a laugh and then the first soldier’s voice, slurry and off-key, singing the old wedding song.

WE RODE IN SILENCE for about fifteen minutes before the young woman’s husband suddenly stood and did something I’d seen many others do before him: He kissed Baba’s hand.

TOOR’S BAD LUCK. Hadn’t I overheard that in a snippet of conversation back at Mahipar?

We rolled into Jalalabad about an hour before sunrise. Karim ushered us quickly from the truck into a one-story house at the intersection of two dirt roads lined with flat one-story homes, acacia trees, and closed shops. I pulled the collar of my coat against the chill as we hurried into the house, dragging our belongings. For some reason, I remember smelling radishes.

Once he had us inside the dimly lit, bare living room, Karim locked the front door, pulled the tattered sheets that passed for curtains. Then he took a deep breath and gave us the bad news:

His brother Toor couldn’t take us to Peshawar. It seemed his truck’s engine had blown the week before and Toor was still waiting for parts.

“Last week?” someone exclaimed. “If you knew this, why did you bring us here?”

I caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of my eye. Then a blur of something zipping across the room, and the next thing I saw was Karim slammed against the wall, his sandaled feet dangling two feet above the floor. Wrapped around his neck were Baba’s hands.

“I’ll tell you why,” Baba snapped. “Because he got paid for his leg of the trip. That’s all he cared about.” Karim was making guttural choking sounds. Spittle dripped from the corner of his mouth.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“Put him down, Agha, you’re killing him,” one of the passengers said.

“It’s what I intend to do,” Baba said. What none of the others in the room knew was that Baba wasn’t joking. Karim was turning red and kicking his legs. Baba kept choking him until the young mother, the one the Russian officer had fancied, begged him to stop.

Karim collapsed on the floor and rolled around fighting for air when Baba finally let go.

The room fell silent. Less than two hours ago, Baba had volunteered to take a bullet for the honor of a woman he didn’t even know. Now he’d almost choked a man to death, would have done it cheerfully if not for the pleas of that same woman.

Something thumped next door. No, not next door, below.

“What’s that?” someone asked.

“The others,” Karim panted between labored breaths. “In the basement.”

“How long have they been waiting?” Baba said, standing over Karim.

“Two weeks.”

“I thought you said the truck broke down last week.”

Karim rubbed his throat. “It might have been the week before,” he croaked.

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long for the parts?” Baba roared. Karim flinched but said nothing. I was glad for the darkness. I didn’t want to see the murderous look on Baba’s face.

THE STENCH OF SOMETHING DANK, like mildew, bludgeoned my nostrils the moment Karim opened the door that led down the creaky steps to the basement. We descended in single file. The steps groaned under Baba’s weight. Standing in the cold basement, I felt watched by eyes blinking in the dark. I saw shapes huddled around the room, their silhouettes thrown on the walls by the dim light of a pair of kerosene lamps.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

A low murmur buzzed through the basement, beneath it the sound of water drops trickling somewhere, and, something else, a scratching sound.

Baba sighed behind me and dropped the bags.

Karim told us it should be a matter of a couple of short days before the truck was fixed.

Then we’d be on our way to Peshawar. On to freedom. On to safety.

The basement was our home for the next week and, by the third night, I discovered the source of the scratching sounds. Rats.

ONCE MY EYES ADJUSTED to the dark, I counted about thirty refugees in that basement. We sat shoulder to shoulder along the walls, ate crackers, bread with dates, apples. That first night, all the men prayed together. One of the refugees asked Baba why he wasn’t joining them. “God is going to save us all. Why don’t you pray to him?”

Baba snorted a pinch of his snuff. Stretched his legs. “What’ll save us is eight cylinders and a good carburetor.” That silenced the rest of them for good about the matter of God.

It was later that first night when I discovered that two of the people hiding with us were Kamal and his father. That was shocking enough, seeing Kamal sitting in the basement just a few feet away from me. But when he and his father came over to our side of the room and I saw Kamal’s face, really saw it...

He had withered--there was simply no other word for it. His eyes gave me a hollow look and no recognition at all registered in them. His shoulders hunched and his cheeks sagged like they were too tired to cling to the bone beneath. His father, who’d owned a movie theater in Kabul, was telling Baba how, three months before, a stray bullet had struck his wife in the temple and killed her. Then he told Baba about Kamal. I caught only snippets of it: Should have never let him go alone... always so handsome, you know... four of them... tried to fight... God... took him... bleeding down there... his pants... doesn’t talk any more... just stares...

THERE WOULD BE NO TRUCK, Karim told us after we’d spent a week in the rat-infested basement. The truck was beyond repair.

“There is another option,” Karim said, his voice rising amid the groans. His cousin owned a fuel truck and had smuggled people with it a couple of times. He was here in Jalalabad and could probably fit us all.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Everyone except an elderly couple decided to go.

We left that night, Baba and I, Kamal and his father, the others. Karim and his cousin, a square-faced balding man named Aziz, helped us get into the fuel tank. One by one, we mounted the idling truck’s rear deck, climbed the rear access ladder, and slid down into the tank. I remember Baba climbed halfway up the ladder, hopped back down and fished the snuffbox from his pocket. He emptied the box and picked up a handful of dirt from the middle of the unpaved road. He kissed the dirt. Poured it into the box. Stowed the box in his breast pocket, next to his heart.

PANIC.

You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you’re breathing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a strangled croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. But you have to breathe to scream.

Panic.

The basement had been dark. The fuel tank was pitch-black. I looked right, left, up, down, waved my hands before my eyes, didn’t see so much as a hint of movement. I blinked, blinked again. Nothing at all. The air wasn’t right, it was too thick, almost solid.

Air wasn’t supposed to be solid. I wanted to reach out with my hands, crush the air into little pieces, stuff them down my windpipe. And the stench of gasoline. My eyes stung from the fumes, like someone had peeled my lids back and rubbed a lemon on them.

My nose caught fire with each breath. You could die in a place like this, I thought. A scream was coming. Coming, coming...

And then a small miracle. Baba tugged at my sleeve and some thing glowed green in the dark. Light! Baba’s wristwatch. I kept my eyes glued to those fluorescent green hands. I was so afraid I’d lose them, I didn’t dare blink.

Slowly I became aware of my surroundings. I heard groans and muttered prayers. I heard a baby cry, its mother’s muted soothing. Someone retched. Someone else cursed the Shorawi. The truck bounced side to side, up and down. Heads banged against metal.

“Think of something good,” Baba said in my ear. “Something happy.”

Something good. Something happy. I let my mind wander. I let it come:

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Friday afternoon in Paghman. An open field of grass speckled with mulberry trees in blossom. Hassan and I stand ankle-deep in untamed grass, I am tugging on the line, the spool spinning in Hassan’s calloused hands, our eyes turned up to the kite in the sky.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything--that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast. A breeze stirs the grass and Hassan lets the spool roll. The kite spins, dips, steadies. Our twin shadows dance on the rippling grass. From somewhere over the low brick wall at the other end of the field, we hear chatter and laughter and the chirping of a water fountain. And music, some thing old and familiar, I think it’s Ya Mowlah on rubab strings. Someone calls our names over the wall, says it’s time for tea and cake.

I didn’t remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

THE REST OF THAT RIDE is scattered bits and pieces of memory that come and go, most of it sounds and smells: MiGs roaring past overhead; staccatos of gunfire; a donkey braying nearby; the jingling of bells and mewling of sheep; gravel crushed under the truck’s tires; a baby wailing in the dark; the stench of gasoline, vomit, and shit.

What I remember next is the blinding light of early morning as I climbed out of the fuel tank. I remember turning my face up to the sky, squinting, breathing like the world was running out of air.

I lay on the side of the dirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.

“We’re in Pakistan, Amir,” Baba said. He was standing over me. “Karim says he will call for a bus to take us to Peshawar.”

I rolled onto my chest, still lying on the cool dirt, and saw our suitcases on either side of Baba’s feet. Through the upside down V between his legs, I saw the truck idling on the side of the road, the other refugees climbing down the rear ladder. Beyond that, the dirt road unrolled through fields that were like leaden sheets under the gray sky and disappeared behind a line of bowl-shaped hills. Along the way, it passed a small village strung out atop a sun baked slope.

My eyes returned to our suitcases. They made me sad for Baba. After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life: one disappointing son and two suitcases.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Someone was screaming. No, not screaming. Wailing. I saw the passengers huddled in a circle, heard their urgent voices. Someone said the word “fumes.” Someone else said it too. The wail turned into a throat-ripping screech.

Baba and I hurried to the pack of onlookers and pushed our way through them. Kamal’s father was sitting cross-legged in the center of the circle, rocking back and forth, kissing his son’s ashen face.

“He won’t breathe! My boy won’t breathe!” he was crying. Kamal’s lifeless body lay on his father’s lap. His right hand, uncurled and limp, bounced to the rhythm of his father’s sobs. “My boy! He won’t breathe! Allah, help him breathe!”

Baba knelt beside him and curled an arm around his shoulder. But Kamal’s father shoved him away and lunged for Karim who was standing nearby with his cousin. What happened next was too fast and too short to be called a scuffle. Karim uttered a surprised cry and backpedaled. I saw an arm swing, a leg kick. A moment later, Kamal’s father was standing with Karim’s gun in his hand.

“Don’t shoot me!” Karim cried.

But before any of us could say or do a thing, Kamal’s father shoved the barrel in his own mouth. I’ll never forget the echo of that blast. Or the flash of light and the spray of red.

I doubled over again and dry-heaved on the side of the road.

ELEVEN

Fremont, California. 1980s

Baba loved the idea of America.

It was living in America that gave him an ulcer.

I remember the two of us walking through Lake Elizabeth Park in Fremont, a few streets down from our apartment, and watching boys at batting practice, little girls giggling on the swings in the playground. Baba would enlighten me with his politics during those walks with long-winded dissertations. “There are only three real men in this world, Amir,”

he’d say. He’d count them off on his fingers: America the brash savior, Britain, and Israel. “The rest of them--” he used to wave his hand and make a phht sound “--they’re like gossiping old women.”

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

The bit about Israel used to draw the ire of Afghans in Fremont who accused him of being pro-Jewish and, de facto, anti Islam. Baba would meet them for tea and rowt cake at the park, drive them crazy with his politics. “What they don’t understand,” he’d tell me later, “is that religion has nothing to do with it.” In Baba’s view, Israel was an island of

“real men” in a sea of Arabs too busy getting fat off their oil to care for their own. “Israel does this, Israel does that,” Baba would say in a mock-Arabic accent. “Then do something about it! Take action. You’re Arabs, help the Palestinians, then!”

He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a “big-toothed cretin.” In 1980, when we were still in Kabul, the U.S. announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow.

“Wah wah!” Baba exclaimed with disgust. “Brezhnev is massacring Afghans and all that peanut eater can say is I won’t come swim in your pool.” Baba believed Carter had unwittingly done more for communism than Leonid Brezhnev. “He’s not fit to run this country. It’s like putting a boy who can’t ride a bike behind the wheel of a brand new Cadillac.” What America and the world needed was a hard man. A man to be reckoned with, someone who took action instead of wringing his hands. That someone came in the form of Ronald Reagan. And when Reagan went on TV and called the Shorawi “the Evil Empire,” Baba went out and bought a picture of the grinning president giving a thumbs up. He framed the picture and hung it in our hallway, nailing it right next to the old black-and-white of himself in his thin necktie shaking hands with King Zahir Shah.

Most of our neighbors in Fremont were bus drivers, policemen, gas station attendants, and unwed mothers collecting welfare, exactly the sort of blue-collar people who would soon suffocate under the pillow Reganomics pressed to their faces. Baba was the lone Republican in our building.

But the Bay Area’s smog stung his eyes, the traffic noise gave him headaches, and the pollen made him cough. The fruit was never sweet enough, the water never clean enough, and where were all the trees and open fields? For two years, I tried to get Baba to enroll in ESL classes to improve his broken English. But he scoffed at the idea.

“Maybe I’ll spell ‘cat’ and the teacher will give me a glittery little star so I can run home and show it off to you,” he’d grumble.

One Sunday in the spring of 1983, I walked into a small bookstore that sold used paperbacks, next to the Indian movie theater just west of where Amtrak crossed Fremont Boulevard. I told Baba I’d be out in five minutes and he shrugged. He had been working at a gas station in Fremont and had the day off. I watched him jaywalk across Fremont Boulevard and enter Fast & Easy, a little grocery store run by an elderly Vietnamese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen. They were gray-haired, friendly people; she had Parkinson’s, he’d had his hip replaced. “He’s like Six Million Dollar Man now,” she always said to me, laughing toothlessly. “Remember Six Million Dollar Man, Amir?”

Then Mr. Nguyen would scowl like Lee Majors, pretend he was running in slow motion.

I was flipping through a worn copy of a Mike Hammer mystery when I heard screaming and glass breaking. I dropped the book and hurried across the street. I found the Nguyens behind the counter, all the way against the wall, faces ashen, Mr. Nguyen’s arms wrapped around his wife. On the floor: oranges, an overturned magazine rack, a broken jar of beef jerky, and shards of glass at Baba’s feet.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

It turned out that Baba had had no cash on him for the oranges. He’d written Mr.

Nguyen a check and Mr. Nguyen had asked for an ID. “He wants to see my license,”

Baba bellowed in Farsi. “Almost two years we’ve bought his damn fruits and put money in his pocket and the son of a dog wants to see my license!”

“Baba, it’s not personal,” I said, smiling at the Nguyens. “They’re supposed to ask for an ID.”

“I don’t want you here,” Mr. Nguyen said, stepping in front of his wife. He was pointing at Baba with his cane. He turned to me.

“You’re nice young man but your father, he’s crazy. Not welcome anymore.”

“Does he think I’m a thief?” Baba said, his voice rising. People had gathered outside.

They were staring. “What kind of a country is this? No one trusts anybody!”

“I call police,” Mrs. Nguyen said, poking out her face. “You get out or I call police.”

“Please, Mrs. Nguyen, don’t call the police. I’ll take him home. Just don’t call the police, okay? Please?”

“Yes, you take him home. Good idea,” Mr. Nguyen said. His eyes, behind his wire-rimmed bifocals, never left Baba. I led Baba through the doors. He kicked a magazine on his way out. After I’d made him promise he wouldn’t go back in, I returned to the store and apologized to the Nguyens. Told them my father was going through a difficult time. I gave Mrs. Nguyen our telephone number and address, and told her to get an estimate for the damages. “Please call me as soon as you know. I’ll pay for everything, Mrs. Nguyen. I’m so sorry.” Mrs. Nguyen took the sheet of paper from me and nodded. I saw her hands were shaking more than usual, and that made me angry at Baba, his causing an old woman to shake like that.

“My father is still adjusting to life in America,” I said, by way of explanation.

I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of _naan_ he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

But I didn’t tell them. I thanked Mr. Nguyen for not calling the cops. Took Baba home.

He sulked and smoked on the balcony while I made rice with chicken neck stew. A year

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

and a half since we’d stepped off the Boeing from Peshawar, and Baba was still adjusting.

We ate in silence that night. After two bites, Baba pushed away his plate.

I glanced at him across the table, his nails chipped and black with engine oil, his knuckles scraped, the smells of the gas station--dust, sweat, and gasoline--on his clothes. Baba was like the widower who remarries but can’t let go of his dead wife. He missed the sugarcane fields of Jalalabad and the gardens of Paghman. He missed people milling in and out of his house, missed walking down the bustling aisles of Shor Bazaar and greeting people who knew him and his father, knew his grandfather, people who shared ancestors with him, whose pasts intertwined with his.

For me, America was a place to bury my memories.

For Baba, a place to mourn his.

“Maybe we should go back to Peshawar,” I said, watching the ice float in my glass of water. We’d spent six months in Peshawar waiting for the INS to issue our visas. Our grimy one-bedroom apartment smelled like dirty socks and cat droppings, but we were surrounded by people we knew--at least people Baba knew. He’d invite the entire corridor of neighbors for dinner, most of them Afghans waiting for visas. Inevitably, someone would bring a set of tabla and someone else a harmonium. Tea would brew, and who ever had a passing singing voice would sing until the sun rose, the mosquitoes stopped buzzing, and clapping hands grew sore.

“You were happier there, Baba. It was more like home,” I said.

“Peshawar was good for me. Not good for you.”

“You work so hard here.”

“It’s not so bad now,” he said, meaning since he had become the day manager at the gas station. But I’d seen the way he winced and rubbed his wrists on damp days. The way sweat erupted on his forehead as he reached for his bottle of antacids after meals.

“Besides, I didn’t bring us here for me, did I?”

I reached across the table and put my hand on his. My student hand, clean and soft, on his laborer’s hand, grubby and calloused. I thought of all the trucks, train sets, and bikes he’d bought me in Kabul. Now America. One last gift for Amir.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Just one month after we arrived in the U.S., Baba found a job off Washington Boulevard as an assistant at a gas station owned by an Afghan acquaintance--he’d started looking for work the same week we arrived. Six days a week, Baba pulled twelve-hour shifts pumping gas, running the register, changing oil, and washing windshields. I’d bring him lunch sometimes and find him looking for a pack of cigarettes on the shelves, a customer waiting on the other side of the oil-stained counter, Baba’s face drawn and pale under the bright fluorescent lights. The electronic bell over the door would ding-dong when I walked in, and Baba would look over his shoulder, wave, and smile, his eyes watering from fatigue.

The same day he was hired, Baba and I went to our eligibility officer in San Jose, Mrs.

Dobbins. She was an overweight black woman with twinkling eyes and a dimpled smile.

She’d told me once that she sang in church, and I believed her--she had a voice that made me think of warm milk and honey. Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. “Thank you but I don’t want,” Baba said. “I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don’t like it free money.”

Mrs. Dobbins blinked. Picked up the food stamps, looked from me to Baba like we were pulling a prank, or “slipping her a trick” as Hassan used to say. “Fifteen years I been doin’ this job and nobody’s ever done this,” she said. And that was how Baba ended those humiliating food stamp moments at the cash register and alleviated one of his greatest fears: that an Afghan would see him buying food with charity money. Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor.

THAT SUMMER OF 1983, I graduated from high school at the age of twenty, by far the oldest senior tossing his mortarboard on the football field that day. I remember losing Baba in the swarm of families, flashing cameras, and blue gowns. I found him near the twenty-yard line, hands shoved in his pockets, camera dangling on his chest. He disappeared and reappeared behind the people moving between us: squealing blue-clad girls hugging, crying, boys high-fiving their fathers, each other. Baba’s beard was graying, his hair thinning at the temples, and hadn’t he been taller in Kabul? He was wearing his brown suit--his only suit, the same one he wore to Afghan weddings and funerals--and the red tie I had bought for his fiftieth birthday that year. Then he saw me and waved. Smiled. He motioned for me to wear my mortarboard, and took a picture of me with the school’s clock tower in the background. I smiled for him--in a way, this was his day more than mine. He walked to me, curled his arm around my neck, and gave my brow a single kiss. “I am moftakhir, Amir,” he said. Proud. His eyes gleamed when he said that and I liked being on the receiving end of that look.

He took me to an Afghan kabob house in Hayward that night and ordered far too much food. He told the owner that his son was going to college in the fall. I had debated him briefly about that just before graduation, and told him I wanted to get a job. Help out, save some money, maybe go to college the following year. But he had shot me one of his smoldering Baba looks, and the words had vaporized on my tongue.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

After dinner, Baba took me to a bar across the street from the restaurant. The place was dim, and the acrid smell of beer I’d always disliked permeated the walls. Men in baseball caps and tank tops played pool, clouds of cigarette smoke hovering over the green tables, swirling in the fluorescent light. We drew looks, Baba in his brown suit and me in pleated slacks and sports jacket. We took a seat at the bar, next to an old man, his leathery face sickly in the blue glow of the Michelob sign overhead. Baba lit a cigarette and ordered us beers. “Tonight I am too much happy,” he announced to no one and everyone. “Tonight I drinking with my son. And one, please, for my friend,” he said, patting the old man on the back. The old fellow tipped his hat and smiled. He had no upper teeth.

Baba finished his beer in three gulps and ordered another. He had three before I forced myself to drink a quarter of mine. By then he had bought the old man a scotch and treated a foursome of pool players to a pitcher of Budweiser. Men shook his hand and clapped him on the back. They drank to him. Someone lit his cigarette. Baba loosened his tie and gave the old man a handful of quarters. He pointed to the jukebox. “Tell him to play his favorite songs,” he said to me. The old man nodded and gave Baba a salute.

Soon, country music was blaring, and, just like that, Baba had started a party.

At one point, Baba stood, raised his beer, spilling it on the sawdust floor, and yelled,

“Fuck the Russia!” The bar’s laughter, then its full-throated echo followed. Baba bought another round of pitchers for everyone.

When we left, everyone was sad to see him go. Kabul, Peshawar, Hayward. Same old Baba, I thought, smiling.

I drove us home in Baba’s old, ochre yellow Buick Century. Baba dozed off on the way, snoring like a jackhammer. I smelled tobacco on him and alcohol, sweet and pungent.

But he sat up when I stopped the car and said in a hoarse voice, “Keep driving to the end of the block.”

“Why, Baba?”

“Just go.” He had me park at the south end of the street. He reached in his coat pocket and handed me a set of keys. “There,” he said, pointing to the car in front of us. It was an old model Ford, long and wide, a dark color I couldn’t discern in the moon light. “It needs painting, and I’ll have one of the guys at the station put in new shocks, but it runs.”

I took the keys, stunned. I looked from him to the car.

“You’ll need it to go to college,” he said.

I took his hand in mine. Squeezed it. My eyes were tearing over and I was glad for the shadows that hid our faces. “Thank you, Baba.”

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

We got out and sat inside the Ford. It was a Grand Torino. Navy blue, Baba said. I drove it around the block, testing the brakes, the radio, the turn signals. I parked it in the lot of our apartment building and shut off the engine. “Tashakor, Baba jan,” I said. I wanted to say more, tell him how touched I was by his act of kindness, how much I appreciated all that he had done for me, all that he was still doing. But I knew I’d embarrass him. “Tashakor,” I repeated instead.

He smiled and leaned back against the headrest, his forehead almost touching the ceiling. We didn’t say anything. Just sat in the dark, listened to the tink-tink of the engine cooling, the wail of a siren in the distance. Then Baba rolled his head toward me. “I wish Hassan had been with us today,” he said.

A pair of steel hands closed around my windpipe at the sound of Hassan’s name. I rolled down the window. Waited for the steel hands to loosen their grip.

I WOULD ENROLL in junior college classes in the fall, I told Baba the day after graduation. He was drinking cold black tea and chewing cardamom seeds, his personal trusted antidote for hang over headaches.

“I think I’ll major in English,” I said. I winced inside, waiting for his reply.

“English?”

“Creative writing.”

He considered this. Sipped his tea. “Stories, you mean. You’ll make up stories.” I looked down at my feet.

“They pay for that, making up stories?”

“If you’re good,” I said. “And if you get discovered.”

“How likely is that, getting discovered?”

“It happens,” I said.

He nodded. “And what will you do while you wait to get good and get discovered? How will you earn money? If you marry, how will you support your khanum?”

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

I couldn’t lift my eyes to meet his. “I’ll... find a job.”

“Oh,” he said. “Wah wah! So, if I understand, you’ll study several years to earn a degree, then you’ll get a chatti job like mine, one you could just as easily land today, on the small chance that your degree might someday help you get... discovered.” He took a deep breath and sipped his tea. Grunted something about medical school, law school, and “real work.”

My cheeks burned and guilt coursed through me, the guilt of indulging myself at the expense of his ulcer, his black fingernails and aching wrists. But I would stand my ground, I decided. I didn’t want to sacrifice for Baba anymore. The last time I had done that, I had damned myself.

Baba sighed and, this time, tossed a whole handful of car damom seeds in his mouth.

SOMETIMES, I GOT BEHIND the wheel of my Ford, rolled down the windows, and drove for hours, from the East Bay to the South Bay, up the Peninsula and back. I drove through the grids of cottonwood-lined streets in our Fremont neighborhood, where people who’d never shaken hands with kings lived in shabby, flat one-story houses with barred windows, where old cars like mine dripped oil on blacktop driveways. Pencil gray chain-link fences closed off the backyards in our neighborhood. Toys, bald tires, and beer bottles with peeling labels littered unkempt front lawns. I drove past tree-shaded parks that smelled like bark, past strip malls big enough to hold five simultaneous Buzkashi tournaments. I drove the Torino up the hills of Los Altos, idling past estates with picture windows and silver lions guarding the wrought-iron gates, homes with cherub fountains lining the manicured walkways and no Ford Torinos in the drive ways.

Homes that made Baba’s house in Wazir Akbar Khan look like a servant’s hut.

I’d get up early some Saturday mornings and drive south on Highway 17, push the Ford up the winding road through the mountains to Santa Cruz. I would park by the old lighthouse and wait for sunrise, sit in my car and watch the fog rolling in from the sea. In Afghanistan, I had only seen the ocean at the cinema. Sitting in the dark next to Hassan, I had always wondered if it was true what I’d read, that sea air smelled like salt.

I used to tell Hassan that someday we’d walk on a strip of seaweed-strewn beach, sink our feet in the sand, and watch the water recede from our toes. The first time I saw the Pacific, I almost cried. It was as vast and blue as the oceans on the movie screens of my childhood.

Sometimes in the early evening, I parked the car and walked up a freeway overpass.

My face pressed against the fence, I’d try to count the blinking red taillights inching along, stretching as far as my eyestould see. BMWs. Saabs. Porsches. Cars I’d never seen in Kabul, where most people drove Russian Volgas, old Opels, or Iranian Paikans.

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Almost two years had passed since we had arrived in the U.S., and I was still marveling at the size of this country, its vastness. Beyond every freeway lay another freeway, beyond every city another city hills beyond mountains and mountains beyond hills, and, beyond those, more cities and more people.

Long before the Roussi army marched into Afghanistan, long before villages were burned and schools destroyed, long before mines were planted like seeds of death and children buried in rock-piled graves, Kabul had become a city of ghosts for me. A city of harelipped ghosts.

America was different. America was a river, roaring along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.

If for nothing else, for that, I embraced America.

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, the summer of 1984--the summer I turned twenty-one--Baba sold his Buick and bought a dilapidated ’71 Volkswagen bus for $550 from an old Afghan acquaintance who’d been a high-school science teacher in Kabul. The neighbors’ heads turned the afternoon the bus sputtered up the street and farted its way across our lot. Baba killed the engine and let the bus roll silently into our designated spot. We sank in our seats, laughed until tears rolled down our cheeks, and, more important, until we were sure the neighbors weren’t watching anymore. The bus was a sad carcass of rusted metal, shattered windows replaced with black garbage bags, balding tires, and upholstery shredded down to the springs. But the old teacher had reassured Baba that the engine and transmission were sound and, on that account, the man hadn’t lied.

On Saturdays, Baba woke me up at dawn. As he dressed, I scanned the classifieds in the local papers and circled the garage sale ads. We mapped our route--Fremont, Union City, Newark, and Hayward first, then San Jose, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Campbell if time permitted. Baba drove the bus, sipping hot tea from the thermos, and I navigated. We stopped at garage sales and bought knickknacks that people no longer wanted. We haggled over old sewing machines, one-eyed Barbie dolls, wooden tennis rackets, guitars with missing strings, and old Electrolux vacuum cleaners. By midafternoon, we’d filled the back of the VW bus with used goods. Then early Sunday mornings, we drove to the San Jose flea market off Berryessa, rented a spot, and sold the junk for a small profit: a Chicago record that we’d bought for a quarter the day before might go for $1, or $4 for a set of five; a ramshackle Singer sewing machine purchased for $10 might, after some bargaining, bring in $25.

By that summer, Afghan families were working an entire section of the San Jose flea market. Afghan music played in the aisles of the Used Goods section. There was an unspoken code of behavior among Afghans at the flea market: You greeted the guy

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

across the aisle, you invited him for a bite of potato bolani or a little qabuli, and you chatted. You offered tassali, condolences, for the death of a parent, congratulated the birth of children, and shook your head mournfully when the conversation turned to Afghanistan and the Roussis--which it inevitably did. But you avoided the topic of Saturday. Because it might turn out that the fellow across the isle was the guy you’d nearly blindsided at the freeway exit yesterday in order to beat him to a promising garage sale.

The only thing that flowed more than tea in those aisles was Afghan gossip. The flea market was where you sipped green tea with almond kolchas, and learned whose daughter had broken off an engagement and run off with her American boyfriend, who used to be Parchami--a communist--in Kabul, and who had bought a house with under-the-table money while still on welfare. Tea, Politics, and Scandal, the ingredients of an Afghan Sunday at the flea market.

I ran the stand sometimes as Baba sauntered down the aisle, hands respectfully pressed to his chest, greeting people he knew from Kabul: mechanics and tailors selling hand-me-down wool coats and scraped bicycle helmets, alongside former ambassadors, out-of-work surgeons, and university professors.

One early Sunday morning in July 1984, while Baba set up, I bought two cups of coffee from the concession stand and returned to find Baba talking to an older, distinguished-looking man. I put the cups on the rear bumper of the bus, next to the REAGAN/BUSH

FOR ’84 sticker.

“Amir,” Baba said, motioning me over, “this is General Sahib, Mr. Iqbal Taheri. He was a decorated general in Kabul. He worked for the Ministry of Defense.”

Taheri. Why did the name sound familiar? The general laughed like a man used to attending formal parties where he’d laughed on cue at the minor jokes of important people. He had wispy silver-gray hair combed back from his smooth, tanned forehead, and tufts of white in his bushy eye brows. He smelled like cologne and wore an iron-gray three-piece suit, shiny from too many pressings; the gold chain of a pocket watch dangled from his vest.

“Such a lofty introduction,” he said, his voice deep and cultured. “_Salaam, bachem_.”

Hello, my child.

“_Salaam_, General Sahib,” I said, shaking his hand. His thin hands belied a firm grip, as if steel hid beneath the moisturized skin.

“Amir is going to be a great writer,” Baba said. I did a double take at this. “He has finished his first year of college and earned A’s in all of his courses.”

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“Junior college,” I corrected him.

“_Mashallah_,” General Taheri said. “Will you be writing about our country, history perhaps? Economics?”

“I write fiction,” I said, thinking of the dozen or so short stories I had written in the leather-bound notebook Rahim Khan had given me, wondering why I was suddenly embarrassed by them in this man’s presence.

“Ah, a storyteller,” the general said. “Well, people need stories to divert them at difficult times like this.” He put his hand on Baba’s shoulder and turned to me. “Speaking of stories, your father and I hunted pheasant together one summer day in Jalalabad,” he said. “It was a marvelous time. If I recall correctly, your father’s eye proved as keen in the hunt as it had in business.”

Baba kicked a wooden tennis racket on our tarpaulin spread with the toe of his boot.

“Some business.”

General Taheri managed a simultaneously sad and polite smile, heaved a sigh, and gently patted Baba’s shoulder. “Zendagi migzara,” he said. Life goes on. He turned his eyes to me. “We Afghans are prone to a considerable degree of exaggeration, bachem, and I have heard many men foolishly labeled great. But your father has the distinction of belonging to the minority who truly deserves the label.” This little speech sounded to me the way his suit looked: often used and unnaturally shiny.

“You’re flattering me,” Baba said.

“I am not,” the general said, tilting his head sideways and pressing his hand to his chest to convey humility. “Boys and girls must know the legacy of their fathers.” He turned to me. “Do you appreciate your father, bachem? Do you really appreciate him?”

“Balay, General Sahib, I do,” I said, wishing he’d not call me “my child.”

“Then congratulations, you are already halfway to being a man,” he said with no trace of humor, no irony, the compliment of the casually arrogant.

“Padar jan, you forgot your tea.” A young woman’s voice. She was standing behind us, a slim-hipped beauty with velvety coal black hair, an open thermos and Styrofoam cup in her hand. I blinked, my heart quickening. She had thick black eyebrows that touched in the middle like the arched wings of a flying bird, and the gracefully hooked nose of a princess from old Persia--maybe that of Tahmineh, Rostam’s wife and Sohrab’s mother

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

from the _Shahnamah_. Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away.

“You are so kind, my dear,” General Taheri said. He took the cup from her. Before she turned to go, I saw she had a brown, sickle-shaped birthmark on the smooth skin just above her left jawline. She walked to a dull gray van two aisles away and put the thermos inside. Her hair spilled to one side when she kneeled amid boxes of old records and paperbacks.

“My daughter, Soraya jan,” General Taheri said. He took a deep breath like a man eager to change the subject and checked his gold pocket watch. “Well, time to go and set up.” He and Baba kissed on the cheek and he shook my hand with both of his. “Best of luck with the writing,” he said, looking me in the eye. His pale blue eyes revealed nothing of the thoughts behind them.

For the rest of that day, I fought the urge to look toward the gray van.

IT CAME TO ME on our way home. Taheri, I knew I’d heard that name before.

“Wasn’t there some story floating around about Taheri’s daughter?” I said to Baba, trying to sound casual.

“You know me,” Baba said, inching the bus along the queue exiting the flea market.

“Talk turns to gossip and I walk away.”

“But there was, wasn’t there?” I said.

“Why do you ask?” He was looking at me coyly.

I shrugged and fought back a smile. “Just curious, Baba.”

“Really? Is that all?” he said, his eyes playful, lingering on mine. “Has she made an impression on you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Please, Baba.”

He smiled, and swung the bus out of the flea market. We headed for Highway 680. We drove in silence for a while. “All I’ve heard is that there was a man once and things...

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

didn’t go well.” He said this gravely, like he’d disclosed to me that she had breast cancer.

“I hear she is a decent girl, hardworking and kind. But no khastegars, no suitors, have knocked on the general’s door since.” Baba sighed. “It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir,” he said.

LYING AWAKE IN BED that night, I thought of Soraya Taheri’s sickle-shaped birthmark, her gently hooked nose, and the way her luminous eyes had fleetingly held mine. My heart stuttered at the thought of her. Soraya Taheri. My Swap Meet Princess.

TWELVE

In Afghanistan, _yelda_ is the first night of the month of _Jadi_, the first night of winter, and the longest night of the year. As was the tradition, Hassan and I used to stay up late, our feet tucked under the kursi, while Ali tossed apple skin into the stove and told us ancient tales of sultans and thieves to pass that longest of nights. It was from Ali that I learned the lore of _yelda_, that bedeviled moths flung themselves at candle flames, and wolves climbed mountains looking for the sun. Ali swore that if you ate water melon the night of _yelda_, you wouldn’t get thirsty the coming summer.

When I was older, I read in my poetry books that _yelda_ was the starless night tormented lovers kept vigil, enduring the endless dark, waiting for the sun to rise and bring with it their loved one. After I met Soraya Taheri, every night of the week became a _yelda_ for me. And when Sunday mornings came, I rose from bed, Soraya Taheri’s brown-eyed face already in my head. In Baba’s bus, I counted the miles until I’d see her sitting barefoot, arranging cardboard boxes of yellowed encyclopedias, her heels white against the asphalt, silver bracelets jingling around her slender wrists. I’d think of the shadow her hair cast on the ground when it slid off her back and hung down like a velvet curtain. Soraya. Swap Meet Princess. The morning sun to my yelda.

I invented excuses to stroll down the aisle--which Baba acknowledged with a playful smirk--and pass the Taheris’ stand. I would wave at the general, perpetually dressed in his shiny overpressed gray suit, and he would wave back. Sometimes he’d get up from his director’s chair and we’d make small talk about my writing, the war, the day’s bargains. And I’d have to will my eyes not to peel away, not to wander to where Soraya sat reading a paperback. The general and I would say our good-byes and I’d try not to slouch as I walked away.

Sometimes she sat alone, the general off to some other row to socialize, and I would walk by, pretending not to know her, but dying to. Sometimes she was there with a portly middle-aged woman with pale skin and dyed red hair. I promised myself that I would talk to her before the summer was over, but schools reopened, the leaves

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

reddened, yellowed, and fell, the rains of winter swept in and wakened Baba’s joints, baby leaves sprouted once more, and I still hadn’t had the heart, the dil, to even look her in the eye.

The spring quarter ended in late May 1985. I aced all of my general education classes, which was a minor miracle given how I’d sit in lectures and think of the soft hook of Soraya’s nose.

Then, one sweltering Sunday that summer, Baba and I were at the flea market, sitting at our booth, fanning our faces with news papers. Despite the sun bearing down like a branding iron, the market was crowded that day and sales had been strong--it was only 12:30 but we’d already made $160. I got up, stretched, and asked Baba if he wanted a Coke. He said he’d love one.

“Be careful, Amir,” he said as I began to walk. “Of what, Baba?”

“I am not an ahmaq, so don’t play stupid with me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Remember this,” Baba said, pointing at me, “The man is a Pashtun to the root. He has nang and namoos.” Nang. Namoos. Honor and pride. The tenets of Pashtun men.

Especially when it came to the chastity of a wife. Or a daughter.

“I’m only going to get us drinks.”

“Just don’t embarrass me, that’s all I ask.”

“I won’t. God, Baba.”

Baba lit a cigarette and started fanning himself again.

I walked toward the concession booth initially, then turned left at the T-shirt stand--where, for $5, you could have the face of Jesus, Elvis, Jim Morrison, or all three, pressed on a white nylon T-shirt. Mariachi music played overhead, and I smelled pickles and grilled meat.

I spotted the Taheris’ gray van two rows from ours, next to a kiosk selling mango-on-a-stick. She was alone, reading. White ankle-length summer dress today. Open-toed sandals. Hair pulled back and crowned with a tulip-shaped bun. I meant to simply walk

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

by again and I thought I had, except suddenly I was standing at the edge of the Taheris’

white tablecloth, staring at Soraya across curling irons and old neckties. She looked up.

“Salaam,” I said. “I’m sorry to be mozahem, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Salaam.”

“Is General Sahib here today?” I said. My ears were burning. I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye.

“He went that way,” she said. Pointed to her right. The bracelet slipped down to her elbow, silver against olive.

“Will you tell him I stopped by to pay my respects?” I said.

“I will.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, and my name is Amir. In case you need to know. So you can tell him. That I stopped by. To... pay my respects.”

“Yes.”

I shifted on my feet, cleared my throat. “I’ll go now. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Nay, you didn’t,” she said.

“Oh. Good.” I tipped my head and gave her a half smile. “I’ll go now.” Hadn’t I already said that? “Khoda hãfez.”

“Khoda hãfez.”

I began to walk. Stopped and turned. I said it before I had a chance to lose my nerve:

“Can I ask what you’re reading?”

She blinked.

100

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

I held my breath. Suddenly, I felt the collective eyes of the flea market Afghans shift to us. I imagined a hush falling. Lips stop ping in midsentence. Heads turning. Eyes narrowing with keen interest.

What was this?

Up to that point, our encounter could have been interpreted as a respectful inquiry, one man asking for the whereabouts of another man. But I’d asked her a question and if she answered, we’d be... well, we’d be chatting. Me a mojarad, a single young man, and she an unwed young woman. One with a history, no less. This was teetering dangerously on the verge of gossip material, and the best kind of it. Poison tongues would flap. And she would bear the brunt of that poison, not me--I was fully aware of the Afghan double standard that favored my gender. Not Did you see him chatting with her? but Wooooy!

Did you see how she wouldn’t let him go? What a lochak!

By Afghan standards, my question had been bold. With it, I had bared myself, and left little doubt as to my interest in her. But I was a man, and all I had risked was a bruised ego. Bruises healed. Reputations did not. Would she take my dare?

She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. “Have you read it?” she said.

I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. “It’s a sad story.”

“Sad stories make good books,” she said.

“They do.”

“I heard you write.”

How did she know? I wondered if her father had told her, maybe she had asked him. I immediately dismissed both scenarios as absurd. Fathers and sons could talk freely about women. But no Afghan girl--no decent and mohtaram Afghan girl, at least--queried her father about a young man. And no father, especially a Pashtun with nang and namoos, would discuss a mojarad with his daughter, not unless the fellow in question was a khastegar, a suitor, who had done the honorable thing and sent his father to knock on the door.

Incredibly, I heard myself say, “Would you like to read one of my stories?”

101

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“I would like that,” she said. I sensed an unease in her now, saw it in the way her eyes began to flick side to side. Maybe checking for the general. I wondered what he would say if he found me speaking for such an inappropriate length of time with his daughter.

“Maybe I’ll bring you one someday,” I said. I was about to say more when the woman I’d seen on occasion with Soraya came walking up the aisle. She was carrying a plastic bag full of fruit. When she saw us, her eyes bounced from Soraya to me and back. She smiled.

“Amir jan, good to see you,” she said, unloading the bag on the tablecloth. Her brow glistened with a sheen of sweat. Her red hair, coiffed like a helmet, glittered in the sunlight--I could see bits of her scalp where the hair had thinned. She had small green eyes buried in a cabbage-round face, capped teeth, and little fingers like sausages. A golden Allah rested on her chest, the chain burrowed under the skin tags and folds of her neck. “I am Jamila, Soraya jan’s mother.”

“Salaam, Khala jan,” I said, embarrassed, as I often was around Afghans, that she knew me and I had no idea who she was.

“How is your father?” she said.

“He’s well, thank you.”

“You know, your grandfather, Ghazi Sahib, the judge? Now, his uncle and my grandfather were cousins,” she said. “So you see, we’re related.” She smiled a cap-toothed smile, and I noticed the right side of her mouth drooping a little. Her eyes moved between Soraya and me again.

I’d asked Baba once why General Taheri’s daughter hadn’t married yet. No suitors, Baba said. No suitable suitors, he amended. But he wouldn’t say more--Baba knew how lethal idle talk could prove to a young woman’s prospects of marrying well. Afghan men, especially those from reputable families, were fickle creatures. A whisper here, an insinuation there, and they fled like startled birds. So weddings had come and gone and no one had sung ahesta boro for Soraya, no one had painted her palms with henna, no one had held a Koran over her headdress, and it had been General Taheri who’d danced with her at every wedding.

And now, this woman, this mother, with her heartbreakingly eager, crooked smile and the barely veiled hope in her eyes. I cringed a little at the position of power I’d been granted, and all because I had won at the genetic lottery that had determined my sex.

I could never read the thoughts in the general’s eyes, but I knew this much about his wife: If I was going to have an adversary in this--whatever this was--it would not be her.

102

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“Sit down, Amir jan,” she said. “Soraya, get him a chair, hachem. And wash one of those peaches. They’re sweet and fresh.”

“Nay, thank you,” I said. “I should get going. My father’s waiting.”

“Oh?” Khanum Taheri said, clearly impressed that I’d done the polite thing and declined the offer. “Then here, at least have this.” She threw a handful of kiwis and a few peaches into a paper bag and insisted I take them. “Carry my Salaam to your father.

And come back to see us again.”

“I will. Thank you, Khala jan,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Soraya looking away.

“I THOUGHT YOU WERE GETTING COKES,” Baba said, taking the bag of peaches from me. He was looking at me in a simultaneously serious and playful way. I began to make some thing up, but he bit into a peach and waved his hand, “Don’t bother, Amir.

Just remember what I said.”

THAT NIGHT IN BED, I thought of the way dappled sunlight had danced in Soraya’s eyes, and of the delicate hollows above her collarbone. I replayed our conversation over and over in my head. Had she said I heard you write or I heard you’re a writer? Which was it? I tossed in my sheets and stared at the ceiling, dismayed at the thought of six laborious, interminable nights of yelda until I saw her again.

IT WENT ON LIKE THAT for a few weeks. I’d wait until the general went for a stroll, then I’d walk past the Taheris’ stand. If Khanum Taheri was there, she’d offer me tea and a kolcha and we’d chat about Kabul in the old days, the people we knew, her arthritis. Undoubtedly, she had noticed that my appearances always coincided with her husband’s absences, but she never let on. “Oh you just missed your Kaka,” she’d say. I actually liked it when Khanum Taheri was there, and not just because of her amiable ways; Soraya was more relaxed, more talkative with her mother around. As if her presence legitimized whatever was happening between us--though certainly not to the same degree that the general’s would have. Khanum Taheri’s chaperoning made our meetings, if not gossip-proof, then less gossip-worthy, even if her borderline fawning on me clearly embarrassed Soraya.

One day, Soraya and I were alone at their booth, talking. She was telling me about school, how she too was working on her general education classes, at Ohlone Junior College in Fremont.

103

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“What will you major in?”

“I want to be a teacher,” she said.

“Really? Why?”

“I’ve always wanted to. When we lived in Virginia, I became ESL certified and now I teach at the public library one night a week. My mother was a teacher too, she taught Farsi and history at Zarghoona High School for girls in Kabul.”

A potbellied man in a deerstalker hat offered three dollars for a five-dollar set of candlesticks and Soraya let him have it. She dropped the money in a little candy box by her feet. She looked at me shyly. “I want to tell you a story,” she said, “but I’m a little embarrassed about it.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s kind of silly.”

“Please tell me.”

She laughed. “Well, when I was in fourth grade in Kabul, my father hired a woman named Ziba to help around the house. She had a sister in Iran, in Mashad, and, since Ziba was illiterate, she’d ask me to write her sister letters once in a while. And when the sister replied, I’d read her letter to Ziba. One day, I asked her if she’d like to learn to read and write. She gave me this big smile, crinkling her eyes, and said she’d like that very much. So we’d sit at the kitchen table after I was done with my own schoolwork and I’d teach her Alef-beh. I remember looking up sometimes in the middle of homework and seeing Ziba in the kitchen, stirring meat in the pressure cooker, then sitting down with a pencil to do the alphabet homework I’d assigned to her the night before.

“Anyway, within a year, Ziba could read children’s books. We sat in the yard and she read me the tales of Dara and Sara--slowly but correctly. She started calling me Moalem Soraya, Teacher Soraya.” She laughed again. “I know it sounds childish, but the first time Ziba wrote her own letter, I knew there was nothing else I’d ever want to be but a teacher. I was so proud of her and I felt I’d done something really worthwhile, you know?”

“Yes,” I lied. I thought of how I had used my literacy to ridicule Hassan. How I had teased him about big words he didn’t know.

104

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“My father wants me to go to law school, my mother’s always throwing hints about medical school, but I’m going to be a teacher. Doesn’t pay much here, but it’s what I want.”

“My mother was a teacher too,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “My mother told me.” Then her face red dened with a blush at what she had blurted, at the implication of her answer, that “Amir Conversations” took place between them when I wasn’t there. It took an enormous effort to stop myself from smiling.

“I brought you something.” I fished the roll of stapled pages from my back pocket. “As promised.” I handed her one of my short stories.

“Oh, you remembered,” she said, actually beaming. “Thank you!” I barely had time to register that she’d addressed me with “tu” for the first time and not the formal “shoma,”

because suddenly her smile vanished. The color dropped from her face, and her eyes fixed on something behind me. I turned around. Came face-to-face with General Taheri.

“Amir jan. Our aspiring storyteller. What a pleasure,” he said. He was smiling thinly.

“Salaam, General Sahib,” I said through heavy lips.

He moved past me, toward the booth. “What a beautiful day it is, nay?” he said, thumb hooked in the breast pocket of his vest, the other hand extended toward Soraya. She gave him the pages.

“They say it will rain this week. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He dropped the rolled pages in the garbage can. Turned to me and gently put a hand on my shoulder. We took a few steps together.

“You know, bachem, I have grown rather fond of you. You are a decent boy, I really believe that, but--” he sighed and waved a hand “--even decent boys need reminding sometimes. So it’s my duty to remind you that you are among peers in this flea market.”

He stopped. His expressionless eyes bore into mine. “You see, everyone here is a storyteller.” He smiled, revealing perfectly even teeth. “Do pass my respects to your father, Amir jan.”

He dropped his hand. Smiled again.

105

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“WHAT’S WRONG?” Baba said. He was taking an elderly woman’s money for a rocking horse.

“Nothing,” I said. I sat down on an old TV set. Then I told him anyway.

“Akh, Amir,” he sighed.

As it turned out, I didn’t get to brood too much over what had happened.

Because later that week, Baba caught a cold.

IT STARTED WITH A HACKING COUGH and the sniffles. He got over the sniffles, but the cough persisted. He’d hack into his handkerchief, stow it in his pocket. I kept after him to get it checked, but he’d wave me away. He hated doctors and hospitals. To my knowledge, the only time Baba had ever gone to a doctor was the time he’d caught malaria in India.

Then, two weeks later, I caught him coughing a wad of blood-stained phlegm into the toilet.

“How long have you been doing that?” I said.

“What’s for dinner?” he said.

“I’m taking you to the doctor.”

Even though Baba was a manager at the gas station, the owner hadn’t offered him health insurance, and Baba, in his recklessness, hadn’t insisted. So I took him to the county hospital in San Jose. The sallow, puffy-eyed doctor who saw us introduced himself as a second-year resident. “He looks younger than you and sicker than me,”

Baba grumbled. The resident sent us down for a chest X-ray. When the nurse called us back in, the resident was filling out a form.

“Take this to the front desk,” he said, scribbling quickly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A referral.” Scribble scribble.

106

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“For what?”

“Pulmonary clinic.”

“What’s that?”

He gave me a quick glance. Pushed up his glasses. Began scribbling again. “He’s got a spot on his right lung. I want them to check it out.”

“A spot?” I said, the room suddenly too small.

“Cancer?” Baba added casually.

“Possible. It’s suspicious, anyway,” the doctor muttered.

“Can’t you tell us more?” I asked.

“Not really. Need a CAT scan first, then see the lung doctor.” He handed me the referral form. “You said your father smokes, right?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. Looked from me to Baba and back again. “They’ll call you within two weeks.”

I wanted to ask him how I was supposed to live with that word, “suspicious,” for two whole weeks. How was I supposed eat, work, study? How could he send me home with that word?

I took the form and turned it in. That night, I waited until Baba fell asleep, and then folded a blanket. I used it as a prayer rug. Bowing my head to the ground, I recited half-forgotten verses from the Koran--verses the mullah had made us commit to memory in Kabul--and asked for kindness from a God I wasn’t sure existed. I envied the mullah now, envied his faith and certainty.

Two weeks passed and no one called. And when I called them, they told me they’d lost the referral. Was I sure I had turned it in? They said they would call in another three

107

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

weeks. I raised hell and bargained the three weeks down to one for the CAT scan, two to see the doctor.

The visit with the pulmonologist, Dr. Schneider, was going well until Baba asked him where he was from. Dr. Schneider said Russia. Baba lost it.

“Excuse us, Doctor,” I said, pulling Baba aside. Dr. Schneider smiled and stood back, stethoscope still in hand.

“Baba, I read Dr. Schneider’s biography in the waiting room. He was born in Michigan.

Michigan! He’s American, a lot more American than you and I will ever be.”

“I don’t care where he was born, he’s Roussi,” Baba said, grimacing like it was a dirty word. “His parents were Roussi, his grandparents were Roussi. I swear on your mother’s face I’ll break his arm if he tries to touch me.”

“Dr. Schneider’s parents fled from Shorawi, don’t you see? They escaped!”

But Baba would hear none of it. Sometimes I think the only thing he loved as much as his late wife was Afghanistan, his late country. I almost screamed with frustration.

Instead, I sighed and turned to Dr. Schneider. “I’m sorry, Doctor. This isn’t going to work out.”

The next pulmonologist, Dr. Amani, was Iranian and Baba approved. Dr. Amani, a soft-spoken man with a crooked mustache and a mane of gray hair, told us he had reviewed the CAT scan results and that he would have to perform a procedure called a bronchoscopy to get a piece of the lung mass for pathology. He scheduled it for the following week. I thanked him as I helped Baba out of the office, thinking that now I had to live a whole week with this new word, “mass,” an even more ominous word than

“suspicious.” I wished Soraya were there with me.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. Baba’s was called “Oat Cell Carcinoma.” Advanced. Inoperable. Baba asked Dr. Amani for a prognosis. Dr. Amani bit his lip, used the word “grave.” “There is chemotherapy, of course,” he said. “But it would only be palliative.”

“What does that mean?” Baba asked.

Dr. Amani sighed. “It means it wouldn’t change the outcome, just prolong it.”

108

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“That’s a clear answer, Dr. Amani. Thank you for that,” Baba said. “But no chemo-medication for me.” He had the same resolved look on his face as the day he’d dropped the stack of food stamps on Mrs. Dobbins’s desk.

“But Baba--”

“Don’t you challenge me in public, Amir. Ever. Who do you think you are?”

THE RAIN General Taheri had spoken about at the flea market was a few weeks late, but when we stepped out of Dr. Amani’s office, passing cars sprayed grimy water onto the sidewalks. Baba lit a cigarette. He smoked all the way to the car and all the way home.

As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, “I wish you’d give the chemo a chance, Baba.”

Baba pocketed the keys, pulled me out of the rain and under the building’s striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with the hand holding the cigarette. “Bas! I’ve made my decision.”

“What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?” I said, my eyes welling up.

A look of disgust swept across his rain-soaked face. It was the same look he’d give me when, as a kid, I’d fall, scrape my knees, and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that brought it on now. “You’re twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown man! You...” he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the canvas awning. “What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”

He opened the door. Turned back to me. “And one more thing. No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one. I don’t want anybody’s sympathy.” Then he disappeared into the dim lobby. He chain-smoked the rest of that day in front of the TV. I didn’t know what or whom he was defying. Me? Dr. Amani? Or maybe the God he had never believed in.

FOR A WHILE, even cancer couldn’t keep Baba from the flea market. We made our garage sale treks on Saturdays, Baba the driver and me the navigator, and set up our display on Sundays. Brass lamps. Baseball gloves. Ski jackets with broken zippers.

Baba greeted acquaintances from the old country and I haggled with buyers over a

109

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

dollar or two. Like any of it mattered. Like the day I would become an orphan wasn’t inching closer with each closing of shop.

Sometimes, General Taheri and his wife strolled by. The general, ever the diplomat, greeted me with a smile and his two-handed shake. But there was a new reticence to Khanum Taheri’s demeanor. A reticence broken only by her secret, droopy smiles and the furtive, apologetic looks she cast my way when the general’s attention was engaged elsewhere.

I remember that period as a time of many “firsts”: The first time I heard Baba moan in the bathroom. The first time I found blood on his pillow. In over three years running the gas station, Baba had never called in sick. Another first.

By Halloween of that year, Baba was getting so tired by mid-Saturday afternoon that he’d wait behind the wheel while I got out and bargained for junk. By Thanksgiving, he wore out before noon. When sleighs appeared on front lawns and fake snow on Douglas firs, Baba stayed home and I drove the VW bus alone up and down the peninsula.

Sometimes at the flea market, Afghan acquaintances made remarks about Baba’s weight loss. At first, they were complimentary. They even asked the secret to his diet.

But the queries and compliments stopped when the weight loss didn’t. When the pounds kept shedding. And shedding. When his cheeks hollowed. And his temples melted. And his eyes receded in their sockets.

Then, one cool Sunday shortly after New Year’s Day, Baba was selling a lampshade to a stocky Filipino man while I rummaged in the VW for a blanket to cover his legs with.

“Hey, man, this guy needs help!” the Filipino man said with alarm. I turned around and found Baba on the ground. His arms and legs were jerking.

“Komak!” I cried. “Somebody help!” I ran to Baba. He was frothing at the mouth, the foamy spittle soaking his beard. His upturned eyes showed nothing but white.

People were rushing to us. I heard someone say seizure. Some one else yelling, “Call 911!” I heard running footsteps. The sky darkened as a crowd gathered around us.

Baba’s spittle turned red. He was biting his tongue. I kneeled beside him and grabbed his arms and said I’m here Baba, I’m here, you’ll be all right, I’m right here. As if I could soothe the convulsions out of him. Talk them into leaving my Baba alone. I felt a wetness on my knees. Saw Baba’s bladder had let go. Shhh, Baba jan, I’m here. Your son is right here.

110

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

THE DOCTOR, white-bearded and perfectly bald, pulled me out of the room. “I want to go over your father’s CAT scans with you,” he said. He put the films up on a viewing box in the hallway and pointed with the eraser end of his pencil to the pictures of Baba’s cancer, like a cop showing mug shots of the killer to the victim’s family. Baba’s brain on those pictures looked like cross sections of a big walnut, riddled with tennis ball-shaped gray things.

“As you can see, the cancer’s metastasized,” he said. “He’ll have to take steroids to reduce the swelling in his brain and antiseizure medications. And I’d recommend palliative radiation. Do you know what that means?”

I said I did. I’d become conversant in cancer talk.

“All right, then,” he said. He checked his beeper. “I have to go, but you can have me paged if you have any questions.”

“Thank you.”

I spent the night sitting on a chair next to Baba’s bed.

THE NEXT MORNING, the waiting room down the hall was jammed with Afghans. The butcher from Newark. An engineer who’d worked with Baba on his orphanage. They filed in and paid Baba their respects in hushed tones. Wished him a swift recovery.

Baba was awake then, groggy and tired, but awake.

Midmorning, General Taheri and his wife came. Soraya followed. We glanced at each other, looked away at the same time. “How are you, my friend?” General Taheri said, taking Baba’s hand.

Baba motioned to the IV hanging from his arm. Smiled thinly. The general smiled back.

“You shouldn’t have burdened yourselves. All of you,” Baba croaked.

“It’s no burden,” Khanum Taheri said.

“No burden at all. More importantly, do you need anything?” General Taheri said.

“Anything at all? Ask me like you’d ask a brother.”

111

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

I remembered something Baba had said about Pashtuns once. We may be hardheaded and I know we’re far too proud, but, in the hour of need, believe me that there’s no one you’d rather have at your side than a Pashtun.

Baba shook his head on the pillow. “Your coming here has brightened my eyes.” The general smiled and squeezed Baba’s hand. “How are you, Amir jan? Do you need anything?”

The way he was looking at me, the kindness in his eyes... “Nay thank you, General Sahib. I’m...“ A lump shot up in my throat and my eyes teared over. I bolted out of the room.

I wept in the hallway, by the viewing box where, the night before, I’d seen the killer’s face.

Baba’s door opened and Soraya walked out of his room. She stood near me. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans. Her hair was down. I wanted to find comfort in her arms.

“I’m so sorry, Amir,” she said. “We all knew something was wrong, but we had no idea it was this.”

I blotted my eyes with my sleeve. “He didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No.” I tried to smile. She put her hand on mine. Our first touch. I took it. Brought it to my face. My eyes. I let it go. “You’d better go back inside. Or your father will come after me.”

She smiled and nodded. “I should.” She turned to go. “Soraya?”

“Yes?”

“I’m happy you came, It means... the world to me.”

THEY DISCHARGED BABA two days later. They brought in a specialist called a radiation oncologist to talk Baba into getting radiation treatment. Baba refused. They

112

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

tried to talk me into talking him into it. But I’d seen the look on Baba’s face. I thanked them, signed their forms, and took Baba home in my Ford Torino.

That night, Baba was lying on the couch, a wool blanket covering him. I brought him hot tea and roasted almonds. Wrapped my arms around his back and pulled him up much too easily. His shoulder blade felt like a bird’s wing under my fingers. I pulled the blanket back up to his chest where ribs stretched his thin, sallow skin.

“Can I do anything else for you, Baba?”

“Nay, bachem. Thank you.”

I sat beside him. “Then I wonder if you’ll do something for me. If you’re not too exhausted.”

“What?”

“I want you to go khastegari. I want you to ask General Taheri for his daughter’s hand.”

Baba’s dry lips stretched into a smile. A spot of green on a wilted leaf. “Are you sure?”

“More sure than I’ve ever been about anything.”

“You’ve thought it over?”

“Balay, Baba.”

“Then give me the phone. And my little notebook.”

I blinked. “Now?”

“Then when?”

I smiled. “Okay.” I gave him the phone and the little black notebook where Baba had scribbled his Afghan friends’ numbers.

He looked up the Taheris. Dialed. Brought the receiver to his ear. My heart was doing pirouettes in my chest.

113

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“Jamila jan? Salaam alaykum,” he said. He introduced himself. Paused. “Much better, thank you. It was so gracious of you to come.” He listened for a while. Nodded. “I’ll remember that, thank you. Is General Sahib home?” Pause. “Thank you.”

His eyes flicked to me. I wanted to laugh for some reason. Or scream. I brought the ball of my hand to my mouth and bit on it. Baba laughed softly through his nose.

“General Sahib, Salaam alaykum... Yes, much much better... Balay... You’re so kind.

General Sahib, I’m calling to ask if I may pay you and Khanum Taheri a visit tomorrow morning. It’s an honorable matter... Yes... Eleven o’clock is just fine. Until then. Khoda hãfez.”

He hung up. We looked at each other. I burst into giggles. Baba joined in.

BABA WET HIS HAIR and combed it back. I helped him into a clean white shirt and knotted his tie for him, noting the two inches of empty space between the collar button and Baba’s neck. I thought of all the empty spaces Baba would leave behind when he was gone, and I made myself think of something else. He wasn’t gone. Not yet. And this was a day for good thoughts. The jacket of his brown suit, the one he’d worn to my graduation, hung over him--too much of Baba had melted away to fill it anymore. I had to roll up the sleeves. I stooped and tied his shoelaces for him.

The Taheris lived in a flat, one-story house in one of the residential areas in Fremont known for housing a large number of Afghans. It had bay windows, a pitched roof, and an enclosed front porch on which I saw potted geraniums. The general’s gray van was parked in the driveway.

I helped Baba out of the Ford and slipped back behind the wheel. He leaned in the passenger window. “Be home, I’ll call you in an hour.”

“Okay, Baba,” I said. “Good luck.”

He smiled.

I drove away. In the rearview mirror, Baba was hobbling up the Taheris’ driveway for one last fatherly duty.

114

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

I PACED THE LIVING ROOM of our apartment waiting for Baba’s call. Fifteen paces long. Ten and a half paces wide. What if the general said no? What if he hated me? I kept going to the kitchen, checking the oven clock.

The phone rang just before noon. It was Baba.

“Well?”

“The general accepted.”

I let out a burst of air. Sat down. My hands were shaking. “He did?”

“Yes, but Soraya jan is upstairs in her room. She wants to talk to you first.”

“Okay.”

Baba said something to someone and there was a double click as he hung up.

“Amir?” Soraya’s voice. “Salaam.”

“My father said yes.”

“I know,” I said. I switched hands. I was smiling. “I’m so happy I don’t know what to say.”

“I’m happy too, Amir. I... can’t believe this is happening.”

I laughed. “I know.”

“Listen,” she said, “I want to tell you something. Something you have to know before...”

“I don’t care what it is.”

“You need to know. I don’t want us to start with secrets. And I’d rather you hear it from me.”

“If it will make you feel better, tell me. But it won’t change anything.”

115

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

There was a long pause at the other end. “When we lived in Virginia, I ran away with an Afghan man. I was eighteen at the time... rebellious... stupid, and... he was into drugs...

We lived together for almost a month. All the Afghans in Virginia were talking about it.

“Padar eventually found us. He showed up at the door and... made me come home. I was hysterical. Yelling. Screaming. Saying I hated him...

“Anyway, I came home and--” She was crying. “Excuse me.” I heard her put the phone down. Blow her nose. “Sorry,” she came back on, sounding hoarse. “When I came home, I saw my mother had had a stroke, the right side of her face was paralyzed and...

I felt so guilty. She didn’t deserve that.

“Padar moved us to California shortly after.” A silence followed.

“How are you and your father now?” I said.

“We’ve always had our differences, we still do, but I’m grateful he came for me that day.

I really believe he saved me.” She paused. “So, does what I told you bother you?”

“A little,” I said. I owed her the truth on this one. I couldn’t lie to her and say that my pride, my iftikhar, wasn’t stung at all that she had been with a man, whereas I had never taken a woman to bed. It did bother me a bit, but I had pondered this quite a lot in the weeks before I asked Baba to go khastegari. And in the end the question that always came back to me was this: How could I, of all people, chastise someone for their past?

“Does it bother you enough to change your mind?”

“No, Soraya. Not even close,” I said. “Nothing you said changes anything. I want us to marry.”

She broke into fresh tears.

I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them.

THIRTEEN

When we arrived at the Taheris’ home the next evening--for lafz, the ceremony of

“giving word”--I had to park the Ford across the street. Their driveway was already

116

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

jammed with cars. I wore a navy blue suit I had bought the previous day, after I had brought Baba home from _khastegari_. I checked my tie in the rearview mirror.

“You look khoshteep,” Baba said. Handsome.

“Thank you, Baba. Are you all right? Do you feel up to this?”

“Up to this? It’s the happiest day of my life, Amir,” he said, smiling tiredly.

I COULD HEAR CHATTER from the other side of the door, laughter, and Afghan music playing softly--it sounded like a classical ghazal by Ustad Sarahang. I rang the bell. A face peeked through the curtains of the foyer window and disappeared. “They’re here!” I heard a woman’s voice say. The chatter stopped. Someone turned off the music.

Khanum Taheri opened the door. “_Salaam alaykum_,” she said, beaming. She’d permed her hair, I saw, and wore an elegant, ankle-length black dress. When I stepped into the foyer, her eyes moistened. “You’re barely in the house and I’m crying already, Amir jan,” she said. I planted a kiss on her hand, just as Baba had instructed me to do the night before.

She led us through a brightly lit hallway to the living room. On the wood-paneled walls, I saw pictures of the people who would become my new family: A young bouffant-haired Khanum Taheri and the general--Niagara Falls in the background; Khanum Taheri in a seamless dress, the general in a narrow-lapelled jacket and thin tie, his hair full and black; Soraya, about to board a wooden roller coaster, waving and smiling, the sun glinting off the silver wires in her teeth. A photo of the general, dashing in full military outfit, shaking hands with King Hussein of Jordan. A portrait of Zahir Shah.

The living room was packed with about two dozen guests seated on chairs placed along the walls. When Baba entered, everybody stood up. We went around the room, Baba leading slowly, me behind him, shaking hands and greeting the guests. The general--still in his gray suit--and Baba embraced, gently tapping each other on the back. They said their Salaams in respectful hushed tones.

The general held me at arm’s length and smiled knowingly, as if saying, “Now, this is the right way--the Afghan way--to do it, _bachem_.” We kissed three times on the cheek.

We sat in the crowded room, Baba and I next to each other, across from the general and his wife. Baba’s breathing had grown a little ragged, and he kept wiping sweat off his forehead and scalp with his handkerchief. He saw me looking at him and managed a strained grin. I’m all right,” he mouthed.

117

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

In keeping with tradition, Soraya was not present.

A few moments of small talk and idle chatter followed until the general cleared his throat. The room became quiet and everyone looked down at their hands in respect.

The general nodded toward Baba.

Baba cleared his own throat. When he began, he couldn’t speak in complete sentences without stopping to breathe. “General Sahib, Khanum Jamila jan... it’s with great humility that my son and I... have come to your home today. You are... honorable people... from distinguished and reputable families and... proud lineage. I come with nothing but the utmost ihtiram... and the highest regards for you, your family names, and the memory...

of your ancestors.” He stopped. Caught his breath. Wiped his brow. “Amirjan is my only son... my only child, and he has been a good son to me. I hope he proves... worthy of your kindness. I ask that you honor Amir jan and me... and accept my son into your family.”

The general nodded politely.

“We are honored to welcome the son of a man such as yourself into our family,” he said.

“Your reputation precedes you. I was your humble admirer in Kabul and remain so today. We are honored that your family and ours will be joined.

“Amirjan, as for you, I welcome you to my home as a son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. I hope that you will come to see your Khala Jamila and me as a second set of parents, and I pray for your and our lovely Soraya jan’s happiness. You both have our blessings.”

Everyone applauded, and with that signal, heads turned toward the hallway. The moment I’d waited for.

Soraya appeared at the end. Dressed in a stunning winecolored traditional Afghan dress with long sleeves and gold trimmings. Baba’s hand took mine and tightened.

Khanum Taheri burst into fresh tears. Slowly, Soraya caine to us, tailed by a procession of young female relatives.

She kissed my father’s hands. Sat beside me at last, her eyes downcast.

The applause swelled.

118

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

ACCORDING TO TRADITION, Soraya’s family would have thrown the engagement party the Shirini-khori---or “Eating of the Sweets” ceremony. Then an engagement period would have followed which would have lasted a few months. Then the wedding, which would be paid for by Baba.

We all agreed that Soraya and I would forgo the Shirini-khori. Everyone knew the reason, so no one had to actually say it: that Baba didn’t have months to live.

Soraya and I never went out alone together while preparations for the wedding proceeded--since we weren’t married yet, hadn’t even had a Shirini-khori, it was considered improper. So I had to make do with going over to the Taheris with Baba for dinner. Sit across from Soraya at the dinner table. Imagine what it would be like to feel her head on my chest, smell her hair. Kiss her. Make love to her.

Baba spent $35,000, nearly the balance of his life savings, on the awroussi, the wedding ceremony. He rented a large Afghan banquet hail in Fremont--the man who owned it knew him from Kabul and gave him a substantial discount. Baba paid for the

??chi las, our matching wedding bands, and for the diamond ring I picked out. He bought my tuxedo, and my traditional green suit for the nika--the swearing ceremony.

For all the frenzied preparations that went into the wedding night--most of it, blessedly, by Khanum Taheri and her friends-- I remember only a handful of moments from it.

I remember our nika. We were seated around a table, Soraya and I dressed in green--the color of Islam, but also the color of spring and new beginnings. I wore a suit, Soraya (the only woman at the table) a veiled long-sleeved dress. Baba, General Taheri (in a tuxedo this time), and several of Soraya’s uncles were also present at the table. Soraya and I looked down, solemnly respectful, casting only sideway glances at each other.

The mullah questioned the witnesses and read from the Koran. We said our oaths.

Signed the certificates. One of Soraya’s uncles from Virginia, Sharif jan, Khanum Taheri’s brother, stood up and cleared his throat. Soraya had told me that he had lived in the U.S. for more than twenty years. He worked for the INS and had an American wife. He was also a poet. A small man with a birdlike face and fluffy hair, he read a lengthy poem dedicated to Soraya, jotted down on hotel stationery paper. “Wah wah, Sharifjan!” everyone exclaimed when he finished.

I remember walking toward the stage, now in my tuxedo, Soraya a veiled pan in white, our hands locked. Baba hobbled next to me, the general and his wife beside their daughter. A procession of uncles, aunts, and cousins followed as we made our way through the hail, parting a sea of applauding guests, blinking at flashing cameras. One of Soraya’s cousins, Sharif jan’s son, held a Koran over our heads as we inched along.

The wedding song, ahesta boro, blared from the speakers, the same song the Russian soldier at the Mahipar checkpoint had sung the night Baba and I left Kabul: Make morning into a key and throw it into the well,

119

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly. Let the morning sun forget to rise in the east, Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

I remember sitting on the sofa, set on the stage like a throne, Soraya’s hand in mine, as three hundred or so faces looked on. We did Ayena Masshaf, where they gave us a mirror and threw a veil over our heads, so we’d be alone to gaze at each other’s reflection. Looking at Soraya’s smiling face in that mirror, in the momentary privacy of the veil, I whispered to her for the first time that I loved her. A blush, red like henna, bloomed on her cheeks.

I picture colorful platters of chopan kabob, sholeh-goshti, and wild-orange rice. I see Baba between us on the sofa, smiling. I remember sweat-drenched men dancing the traditional attan in a circle, bouncing, spinning faster and faster with the feverish tempo of the tabla, until all but a few dropped out of the ring with exhaustion. I remember wishing Rahim Khan were there.

And I remember wondering if Hassan too had married. And if so, whose face he had seen in the mirror under the veil? Whose henna-painted hands had he held?

AROUND 2 A.M., the party moved from the banquet hall to Baba’s apartment. Tea flowed once more and music played until the neighbors called the cops. Later that night, the sun less than an hour from rising and the guests finally gone, Soraya and I lay together for the first time. All my life, I’d been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

IT WAS SORAYA who suggested that she move in with Baba and me.

“I thought you might want us to have our own place,” I said.

“With Kaka jan as sick as he is?” she replied. Her eyes told me that was no way to start a marriage. I kissed her. “Thank you.”

Soraya dedicated herself to taking care of my father. She made his toast and tea in the morning, and helped him in and out of bed. She gave him his pain pills, washed his clothes, read him the international section of the newspaper every afternoon, She cooked his favorite dish, potato shorwa, though he could scarcely eat more than a few spoonfuls, and took him out every day for a brief walk around the block. And when he became bedridden, she turned him on his side every hour so he wouldn’t get a bedsore.

120

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

One day, I came home from the pharmacy with Baba’s morphine pills. Just as I shut the door, I caught a glimpse of Soraya quickly sliding something under Baba’s blanket.

“Hey, I saw that! What were you two doing?” I said.

“Nothing,” Soraya said, smiling.

“Liar.” I lifted Baba’s blanket. “What’s this?” I said, though as soon as I picked up the leather-bound book, I knew. I traced my fingers along the gold-stitched borders. I remembered the fire works the night Rahim Khan had given it to me, the night of my thirteenth birthday, flares sizzling and exploding into bouquets of red, green, and yellow.

“I can’t believe you can write like this,” Soraya said.

Baba dragged his head off the pillow. “I put her up to it. I hope you don’t mind.”

I gave the notebook back to Soraya and left the room. Baba hated it when I cried.

A MONTH AFTER THE WEDDING, the Taheris, Sharif, his wife Suzy, and several of Soraya’s aunts came over to our apartment for dinner. Soraya made sabzi challow--white rice with spinach and lamb. After dinner, we all had green tea and played cards in groups of four. Soraya and I played with Sharif and Suzy on the coffee table, next to the couch where Baba lay under a wool blanket. He watched me joking with Sharif, watched Soraya and me lacing our fingers together, watched me push back a loose curl of her hair. I could see his internal smile, as wide as the skies of Kabul on nights when the poplars shivered and the sound of crickets swelled in the gardens.

Just before midnight, Baba asked us to help him into bed. Soraya and I placed his arms on our shoulders and wrapped ours around his back. When we lowered him, he had Soraya turn off the bedside lamp. He asked us to lean in, gave us each a kiss.

“I’ll come back with your morphine and a glass of water, Kaka jan,” Soraya said.

“Not tonight,” he said. “There is no pain tonight.”

“Okay,” she said. She pulled up his blanket. We closed the door. Baba never woke up.

THEY FILLED THE PARKING SPOTS at the mosque in Hayward. On the balding grass field behind the building, cars and SUVs parked in crowded makeshift rows. People had to drive three or four blocks north of the mosque to find a spot.

121

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

The men’s section of the mosque was a large square room, covered with Afghan rugs and thin mattresses placed in parallel lines. Men filed into the room, leaving their shoes at the entrance, and sat cross-legged on the mattresses. A mullah chanted surrahs from the Koran into a microphone. I sat by the door, the customary position for the family of the deceased. General Taheri was seated next to me.

Through the open door, I could see lines of cars pulling in, sunlight winking in their windshields. They dropped off passengers, men dressed in dark suits, women clad in black dresses, their heads covered with traditional white hijabs.

As words from the Koran reverberated through the room, I thought of the old story of Baba wrestling a black bear in Baluchistan. Baba had wrestled bears his whole life.

Losing his young wife. Raising a son by himself. Leaving his beloved homeland, his watan. Poverty. Indignity. In the end, a bear had come that he couldn’t best. But even then, he had lost on his own terms.

After each round of prayers, groups of mourners lined up and greeted me on their way out. Dutifully, I shook their hands. Many of them I barely knew I smiled politely, thanked them for their wishes, listened to whatever they had to say about Baba.

??helped me build the house in Taimani...“ bless him...

??no one else to turn to and he lent me...”

“...found me a job... barely knew me...”

“...like a brother to me...”

Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people’s lives. My whole life, I had been “Baba’s son.” Now he was gone. Baba couldn’t show me the way anymore; I’d have to find it on my own.

The thought of it terrified me.

Earlier, at the gravesite in the small Muslim section of the cemetery, I had watched them lower Baba into the hole. The ??mul Iah and another man got into an argument over which was the correct ayat of the Koran to recite at the gravesite. It might have turned ugly had General Taheri not intervened. The mullah chose an ayat and recited it, casting the other fellow nasty glances. I watched them toss the first shovelful of dirt into the grave. Then I left. Walked to the other side of the cemetery. Sat in the shade of a red maple.

122

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Now the last of the mourners had paid their respects and the mosque was empty, save for the mullah unplugging the microphone and wrapping his Koran in green cloth. The general and I stepped out into a late-afternoon sun. We walked down the steps, past men smoking in clusters. I heard snippets of their conversations, a soccer game in Union City next weekend, a new Afghan restaurant in Santa Clara. Life moving on already, leaving Baba behind.

“How are you, bachem?” General Taheri said.

I gritted my teeth. Bit back the tears that had threatened all day. “I’m going to find Soraya,” I said.

“Okay.”

I walked to the women’s side of the mosque. Soraya was standing on the steps with her mother and a couple of ladies I recognized vaguely from the wedding. I motioned to Soraya. She said something to her mother and came to me.

“Can we walk?” I said.

“Sure.” She took my hand.

We walked in silence down a winding gravel path lined by a row of low hedges. We sat on a bench and watched an elderly couple kneeling beside a grave a few rows away and placing a bouquet of daisies by the headstone. “Soraya?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to miss him.”

She put her hand on my lap. Baba’s chila glinted on her ring finger. Behind her, I could see Baba’s mourners driving away on Mission Boulevard. Soon we’d leave too, and for the first time ever, Baba would be all alone.

Soraya pulled me to her and the tears finally came.

BECAUSE SORAYA AND I never had an engagement period, much of what I learned about the Taheris I learned after I married into their family. For example, I learned that,

123

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

once a month, the general suffered from blinding migraines that lasted almost a week.

When the headaches struck, the general went to his room, undressed, turned off the light, locked the door, and didn’t come out until the pain subsided. No one was allowed to go in, no one was allowed to knock. Eventually, he would emerge, dressed in his gray suit once more, smelling of sleep and bedsheets, his eyes puffy and bloodshot. I learned from Soraya that he and Khanum Taheri had slept in separate rooms for as long as she could remember. I learned that he could be petty, such as when he’d take a bite of the _qurma_ his wife placed before him, sigh, and push it away. “I’ll make you something else,” Khanum Taheri would say, but he’d ignore her, sulk, and eat bread and onion. This made Soraya angry and her mother cry. Soraya told me he took antide pressants. I learned that he had kept his family on welfare and had never held a job in the U.S., preferring to cash government-issued checks than degrading himself with work unsuitable for a man of his stature--he saw the flea market only as a hobby, a way to socialize with his fellow Afghans. The general believed that, sooner or later, Afghanistan would be freed, the monarchy restored, and his services would once again be called upon. So every day, he donned his gray suit, wound his pocket watch, and waited.

I learned that Khanum Taheri--whom I called Khala Jamila now--had once been famous in Kabul for her enchanting singing voice. Though she had never sung professionally, she had had the talent to--I learned she could sing folk songs, ghazals, even raga, which was usually a man’s domain. But as much as the general appreciated listening to music--he owned, in fact, a considerable collection of classical ghazal tapes by Afghan and Hindi singers--he believed the performing of it best left to those with lesser reputations. That she never sing in public had been one of the general’s conditions when they had married. Soraya told me that her mother had wanted to sing at our wedding, only one song, but the general gave her one of his looks and the matter was buried. Khala Jamila played the lotto once a week and watched Johnny Carson every night. She spent her days in the garden, tending to her roses, geraniums, potato vines, and orchids.

When I married Soraya, the flowers and Johnny Carson took a backseat. I was the new delight in Khala Jamila’s life. Unlike the general’s guarded and diplomatic manners--he didn’t correct me when I continued to call him “General Sahib”--Khala Jamila made no secret of how much she adored me. For one thing, I listened to her impressive list of maladies, something the general had long turned a deaf ear to. Soraya told me that, ever since her mother’s stroke, every flutter in her chest was a heart attack, every aching joint the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, and every twitch of the eye another stroke.

I remember the first time Khala Jamila mentioned a lump in her neck to me. “I’ll skip school tomorrow and take you to the doctor,” I said, to which the general smiled and said, “Then you might as well turn in your books for good, bachem. Your khala’s medical charts are like the works of Rumi: They come in volumes.”

But it wasn’t just that she’d found an audience for her monologues of illness. I firmly believed that if I had picked up a rifle and gone on a murdering rampage, I would have still had the benefit of her unblinking love. Because I had rid her heart of its gravest malady. I had relieved her of the greatest fear of every Afghan mother: that no honorable khastegar would ask for her daughter’s hand. That her daughter would age

124

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

alone, husbandless, childless. Every woman needed a husband. Even if he did silence the song in her.

And, from Soraya, I learned the details of what had happened in Virginia.

We were at a wedding. Soraya’s uncle, Sharif, the one who worked for the INS, was marrying his son to an Afghan girl from Newark. The wedding was at the same hall where, six months prior, Soraya and I had had our awroussi. We were standing in a crowd of guests, watching the bride accept rings from the groom’s family, when we overheard two middle-aged women talking, their backs to us.

“What a lovely bride,” one of them said, “Just look at her. So maghbool, like the moon.”

“Yes,” the other said. “And pure too. Virtuous. No boyfriends.”

“I know. I tell you that boy did well not to marry his cousin.”

Soraya broke down on the way home. I pulled the Ford off to the curb, parked under a streetlight on Fremont Boulevard.

“It’s all right,” I said, pushing back her hair. “Who cares?”

“It’s so fucking unfair,” she barked.

“Just forget it.”

“Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.”

I wiped a tear from her jawline, just above her birthmark, with the pad of my thumb.

“I didn’t tell you,” Soraya said, dabbing at her eyes, “but my father showed up with a gun that night. He told... him... that he had two bullets in the chamber, one for him and one for himself if I didn’t come home. I was screaming, calling my father all kinds of names, saying he couldn’t keep me locked up forever, that I wished he were dead.” Fresh tears squeezed out between her lids. “I actually said that to him, that I wished he were dead.

125

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“When he brought me home, my mother threw her arms around me and she was crying too. She was saying things but I couldn’t understand any of it because she was slurring her words so badly. So my father took me up to my bedroom and sat me in front of the dresser mirror. He handed me a pair of scissors and calmly told me to cut off all my hair.

He watched while I did it.

“I didn’t step out of the house for weeks. And when I did, I heard whispers or imagined them everywhere I went. That was four years ago and three thousand miles away and I’m still hearing them.”

“Fuck ‘em,” I said.

She made a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “When I told you about this on the phone the night of khastegari, I was sure you’d change your mind.”

“No chance of that, Soraya.”

She smiled and took my hand. “I’m so lucky to have found you. You’re so different from every Afghan guy I’ve met.”

“Let’s never talk about this again, okay?”

“Okay.”

I kissed her cheek and pulled away from the curb. As I drove, I wondered why I was different. Maybe it was because I had been raised by men; I hadn’t grown up around women and had never been exposed firsthand to the double standard with which Afghan society sometimes treated them. Maybe it was because Baba had been such an unusual Afghan father, a liberal who had lived by his own rules, a maverick who had disregarded or embraced societal customs as he had seen fit.

But I think a big part of the reason I didn’t care about Soraya’s past was that I had one of my own. I knew all about regret.

SHORTLY AFTER BABA’S DEATH, Soraya and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Fremont, just a few blocks away from the general and Khala Jamila’s house. Soraya’s parents bought us a brown leather couch and a set of Mikasa dishes as housewarming presents. The general gave me an additional present, a brand new IBM typewriter. In the box, he had slipped a note written in Farsi:

126

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Amir jan,

I hope you discover many tales on these keys.

General Iqbal Taheri

I sold Baba’s VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I would drive to his gravesite every Friday, and, sometimes, I’d find a fresh bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know Soraya had been there too.

Soraya and I settled into the routines--and minor wonders-- of married life. We shared toothbrushes and socks, passed each other the morning paper. She slept on the right side of the bed, I preferred the left. She liked fluffy pillows, I liked the hard ones. She ate her cereal dry, like a snack, and chased it with milk.

I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its saving grace was a considerable one: When everyone left at 6

P.M. and shadows began to crawl between aisles of plastic-covered sofas piled to the ceiling, I took out my books and studied. It was in the Pine-Sol-scented office of that furniture warehouse that I began my first novel.

Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her father’s chagrin, in the teaching track.

“I don’t know why you’re wasting your talents like this,” the general said one night over dinner. “Did you know, Amir jan, that she earned nothing but A’s in high school?” He turned to her. “An intelligent girl like you could become a lawyer, a political scientist.

And, _Inshallah_, when Afghanistan is free, you could help write the new constitution.

There would be a need for young talented Afghans like you. They might even offer you a ministry position, given your family name.”

I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening. “I’m not a girl, Padar. I’m a married woman. Besides, they’d need teachers too.”

“Anyone can teach.”

“Is there any more rice, Madar?” Soraya said.

127

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala Jamila tried to console Soraya. “He means well,” she said. “He just wants you to be successful.”

“So he can boast about his attorney daughter to his friends. Another medal for the general,” Soraya said.

“Such nonsense you speak!”

“Successful,” Soraya hissed. “At least I’m not like him, sitting around while other people fight the Shorawi, waiting for when the dust settles so he can move in and reclaim his posh little government position. Teaching may not pay much, but it’s what I want to do!

It’s what I love, and it’s a whole lot better than collecting welfare, by the way.”

Khala Jamila bit her tongue. “If he ever hears you saying that, he will never speak to you again.”

“Don’t worry,” Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. “I won’t bruise his precious ego.”

IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given me. I sent query letters to a dozen agencies and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript. I mailed it the next day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila insisted we pass it under the Koran.

She told me that she was going to do nazr for me, a vow to have a sheep slaughtered and the meat given to the poor if my book was accepted.

“Please, no nazn, Khala jan,” I said, kissing her face. “Just do _zakat_, give the money to someone in need, okay? No sheep killing.”

Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it. “But just because I have an agent doesn’t mean I’ll get published. If Martin sells the novel, then we’ll celebrate.”

A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a published novelist.

When I told Soraya, she screamed.

We had a celebration dinner with Soraya’s parents that night. Khala Jamila made kofta--meatballs and white rice--and white ferni. The general, a sheen of moisture in his eyes, said that he was proud of me. After General Taheri and his wife left, Soraya and I

128

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

celebrated with an expensive bottle of Merlot I had bought on the way home--the general did not approve of women drinking alcohol, and Soraya didn’t drink in his presence.

“I am so proud of you,” she said, raising her glass to mine. “Kaka would have been proud too.”

“I know,” I said, thinking of Baba, wishing he could have seen me.

Later that night, after Soraya fell asleep--wine always made her sleepy--I stood on the balcony and breathed in the cool summer air. I thought of Rahim Khan and the little note of support he had written me after he’d read my first story. And I thought of Hassan.

Some day, _Inshallah_, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

The novel was released in the summer of that following year, 1989, and the publisher sent me on a five-city book tour. I became a minor celebrity in the Afghan community.

That was the year that the Shorawi completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. It should have been a time of glory for Afghans. Instead, the war raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the Soviet puppet government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees kept flocking to Pakistan. That was the year that the cold war ended, the year the Berlin Wall came down. It was the year of Tiananmen Square. In the midst of it all, Afghanistan was forgotten. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake after the Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch.

That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have a child.

THE IDEA OF FATHERHOOD unleashed a swirl of emotions in me. I found it frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating all at the same time. What sort of father would I make, I wondered. I wanted to be just like Baba and I wanted to be nothing like him.

But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of blood, Soraya grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irritable. By then, Khala Jamila’s initially subtle hints had become overt, as in “Kho dega!” So! “When am I going to sing alahoo for my little nawasa?” The general, ever the Pashtun, never made any queries--doing so meant alluding to a sexual act between his daughter and a man, even if the man in question had been married to her for over four years. But his eyes perked up when Khala Jamila teased us about a baby.

“Sometimes, it takes a while,” I told Soraya one night.

129

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

“A year isn’t a while, Amir!” she said, in a terse voice so unlike her. “Something’s wrong, I know it.”

“Then let’s see a doctor.”

DR. ROSEN, a round-bellied man with a plump face and small, even teeth, spoke with a faint Eastern European accent, some thing remotely Slavic. He had a passion for trains-

-his office was littered with books about the history of railroads, model locomotives, paintings of trains trundling on tracks through green hills and over bridges. A sign above his desk read, LIFE IS A TRAIN. GET ON BOARD.

He laid out the plan for us. I’d get checked first. “Men are easy,” he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. “A man’s plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises.

You ladies, on the other hand... well, God put a lot of thought into making you.” I wondered if he fed that bit about the plumbing to all of his couples.

“Lucky us,” Soraya said.

Dr. Rosen laughed. It fell a few notches short of genuine. He gave me a lab slip and a plastic jar, handed Soraya a request for some routine blood tests. We shook hands.

“Welcome aboard,” he said, as he showed us out.

I PASSED WITH FLYING COLORS.

The next few months were a blur of tests on Soraya: Basal body temperatures, blood tests for every conceivable hormone, urine tests, something called a “Cervical Mucus Test,” ultrasounds, more blood tests, and more urine tests. Soraya underwent a procedure called a hysteroscopy--Dr. Rosen inserted a telescope into Soraya’s uterus and took a look around. He found nothing. “The plumbing’s clear,” he announced, snapping off his latex gloves. I wished he’d stop calling it that--we weren’t bathrooms.

When the tests were over, he explained that he couldn’t explain why we couldn’t have kids. And, apparently, that wasn’t so unusual. It was called “Unexplained Infertility.”

Then came the treatment phase. We tried a drug called Clomiphene, and hMG, a series of shots which Soraya gave to herself. When these failed, Dr. Rosen advised in vitro fertilization. We received a polite letter from our HMO, wishing us the best of luck, regretting they couldn’t cover the cost.

We used the advance I had received for my novel to pay for it. IVF proved lengthy, meticulous, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. After months of sitting in waiting

130

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

rooms reading magazines like Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest, after endless paper gowns and cold, sterile exam rooms lit by fluorescent lights, the repeated humiliation of discussing every detail of our sex life with a total stranger, the injections and probes and specimen collections, we went back to Dr. Rosen and his trains.

He sat across from us, tapped his desk with his fingers, and used the word “adoption”

for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.

Soraya broke the news to her parents the weekend after our last visit with Dr. Rosen.

We were sitting on picnic chairs in the Taheris’ backyard, grilling trout and sipping yogurt dogh. It was an early evening in March 1991. Khala Jamila had watered the roses and her new honeysuckles, and their fragrance mixed with the smell of cooking fish. Twice already, she had reached across her chair to caress Soraya’s hair and say,

“God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”

Soraya kept looking down at her hands. She was tired, I knew, tired of it all. “The doctor said we could adopt,” she murmured.

General Taheri’s head snapped up at this. He closed the barbecue lid. “He did?”

“He said it was an option,” Soraya said.

We’d talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best. “I know it’s silly and maybe vain,” she said to me on the way to her parents’ house, “but I can’t help it.

I’ve always dreamed that I’d hold it in my arms and know my blood had fed it for nine months, that I’d look in its eyes one day and be startled to see you or me, that the baby would grow up and have your smile or mine. Without that... Is that wrong?”

“No,” I had said.

“Am I being selfish?”

“No, Soraya.”

“Because if you really want to do it...”

“No,” I said. “If we’re going to do it, we shouldn’t have any doubts at all about it, and we should both be in agreement. It wouldn’t be fair to the baby otherwise.”

She rested her head on the window and said nothing else the rest of the way.

131

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Now the general sat beside her. “Bachem, this adoption... thing, I’m not so sure it’s for us Afghans.” Soraya looked at me tiredly and sighed.

“For one thing, they grow up and want to know who their natural parents are,” he said.

“Nor can you blame them. Sometimes, they leave the home in which you labored for years to provide for them so they can find the people who gave them life. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Soraya said.

“I’ll say one more thing,” he said. I could tell he was getting revved up; we were about to get one of the general’s little speeches. “Take Amir jan, here. We all knew his father, I know who his grandfather was in Kabul and his great-grandfather before him, I could sit here and trace generations of his ancestors for you if you asked. That’s why when his father--God give him peace--came khastegari, I didn’t hesitate. And believe me, his father wouldn’t have agreed to ask for your hand if he didn’t know whose descendant you were. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, and when you adopt, you don’t know whose blood you’re bringing into your house.

“Now, if you were American, it wouldn’t matter. People here marry for love, family name and ancestry never even come into the equation. They adopt that way too, as long as the baby is healthy, everyone is happy. But we are Afghans, bachem.”

“Is the fish almost ready?” Soraya said. General Taheri’s eyes lingered on her. He patted her knee. “Just be happy you have your health and a good husband.”

“What do you think, Amir jan?” Khala Jamila said.

I put my glass on the ledge, where a row of her potted geraniums were dripping water. “I think I agree with General Sahib.”

Reassured, the general nodded and went back to the grill.

We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the general his, and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. It wasn’t meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

132

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

A FEW MONTHS LATER, we used the advance for my second novel and placed a down payment on a pretty, two-bedroom Victorian house in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. It had a peaked roof, hardwood floors, and a tiny backyard which ended in a sun deck and a fire pit. The general helped me refinish the deck and paint the walls.

Khala Jamila bemoaned us moving almost an hour away, especially since she thought Soraya needed all the love and support she could get--oblivious to the fact that her well-intended but overbearing sympathy was precisely what was driving Soraya to move.

SOMETIMES, SORAYA SLEEPING NEXT TO ME, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard.

And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

FOURTEEN

_June 2001_

I lowered the phone into the cradle and stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t until Aflatoon startled me with a bark that I realized how quiet the room had become. Soraya had muted the television.

“You look pale, Amir,” she said from the couch, the same one her parents had given us as a housewarming gift for our first apartment. She’d been tying on it with Aflatoon’s head nestled on her chest, her legs buried under the worn pillows. She was halfwatching a PBS special on the plight of wolves in Minnesota, half-correcting essays from her summer-school class--she’d been teaching at the same school now for six years. She sat up, and Aflatoon leapt down from the couch. It was the general who had given our cocker spaniel his name, Farsi for “Plato,” because, he said, if you looked hard enough and long enough into the dog’s filmy black eyes, you’d swear he was thinking wise thoughts.

There was a sliver of fat, just a hint of it, beneath Soraya’s chin now The past ten years had padded the curves of her hips some, and combed into her coal black hair a few streaks of cinder gray. But she still had the face of a Grand Ball princess, with her bird-in-flight eyebrows and nose, elegantly curved like a letter from ancient Arabic writings.

“You took pale,” Soraya repeated, placing the stack of papers on the table.

“I have to go to Pakistan.”

133

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

She stood up now. “Pakistan?”

“Rahim Khan is very sick.” A fist clenched inside me with those words.

“Kaka’s old business partner?” She’d never met Rahim Khan, but I had told her about him. I nodded.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Amir.”

“We used to be close,” I said. “When I was a kid, he was the first grown-up I ever thought of as a friend.” I pictured him and Baba drinking tea in Baba’s study, then smoking near the window, a sweetbrier-scented breeze blowing from the garden and bending the twin columns of smoke.

“I remember you telling me that,” Soraya said. She paused. “How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. He wants to see me.”

“Is it...”

“Yes, it’s safe. I’ll be all right, Soraya.” It was the question she’d wanted to ask all along-

-fifteen years of marriage had turned us into mind readers. “I’m going to go for a walk.”

“Should I go with you?”

“Nay, I’d rather be alone.”

I DROVE TO GOLDEN GATE PARK and walked along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of the park. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon; the sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp San Francisco breeze. I sat on a park bench, watched a man toss a football to his son, telling him to not sidearm the ball, to throw over the shoulder. I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails. They floated high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills.

I thought about a comment Rahim Khan had made just before we hung up. Made it in passing, almost as an afterthought. I closed my eyes and saw him at the other end of the scratchy longdistance line, saw him with his lips slightly parted, head tilted to one

134

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

side. And again, something in his bottomless black eyes hinted at an unspoken secret between us. Except now I knew he knew. My suspicions had been right all those years.

He knew about Assef, the kite, the money, the watch with the lightning bolt hands. He had always known.

Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up. Said it in passing, almost as an afterthought.

A way to be good again.

WHEN I CAME HOME, Soraya was on the phone with her mother. “Won’t be long, Madarjan. A week, maybe two... Yes, you and Padar can stay with me.”

Two years earlier, the general had broken his right hip. He’d had one of his migraines again, and emerging from his room, bleary-eyed and dazed, he had tripped on a loose carpet edge. His scream had brought Khala Jamila running from the kitchen. “It sounded like a jaroo, a broomstick, snapping in half,” she was always fond of saying, though the doctor had said it was unlikely she’d heard anything of the sort. The general’s shattered hip--and all of the ensuing complications, the pneumonia, blood poisoning, the protracted stay at the nursing home--ended Khala Jamila’s long-running soliloquies about her own health. And started new ones about the general’s. She’d tell anyone who would listen that the doctors had told them his kidneys were failing. “But then they had never seen Afghan kidneys, had they?” she’d say proudly. What I remember most about the general’s hospital stay is how Khala Jamila would wait until he fell asleep, and then sing to him, songs I remembered from Kabul, playing on Baba’s scratchy old transistor radio.

The general’s frailty--and time--had softened things between him and Soraya too. They took walks together, went to lunch on Saturdays, and, sometimes, the general sat in on some of her classes. He’d sit in the back of the room, dressed in his shiny old gray suit, wooden cane across his lap, smiling. Sometimes he even took notes.

THAT NIGHT, Soraya and I lay in bed, her back pressed to my chest, my face buried in her hair. I remembered when we used to lay forehead to forehead, sharing afterglow kisses and whispering until our eyes drifted closed, whispering about tiny, curled toes, first smiles, first words, first steps. We still did sometimes, but the whispers were about school, my new book, a giggle over someone’s ridiculous dress at a party. Our lovemaking was still good, at times better than good, but some nights all I’d feel was a relief to be done with it, to be free to drift away and forget, at least for a while, about the futility of what we’d just done. She never said so, but I knew sometimes Soraya felt it too. On those nights, we’d each roll to our side of the bed and let our own savior take us away. Soraya’s was sleep. Mine, as always, was a book.

135

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

I lay in the dark the night Rahim Khan called and traced with my eyes the parallel silver lines on the wall made by moonlight pouring through the blinds. At some point, maybe just before dawn, I drifted to sleep. And dreamed of Hassan running in the snow, the hem of his green chapan dragging behind him, snow crunching under his black rubber boots. He was yelling over his shoulder: For you, a thousand times over!

A WEEK LATER, I sat on a window seat aboard a Pakistani International Airlines flight, watching a pair of uniformed airline workers remove the wheel chocks. The plane taxied out of the terminal and, soon, we were airborne, cutting through the clouds. I rested my head against the window. Waited, in vain, for sleep.

FIFTEEN

Three hours after my flight landed in Peshawar, I was sitting on shredded upholstery in the backseat of a smoke-filled taxicab. My driver, a chain-smoking, sweaty little man who introduced himself as Gholam, drove nonchalantly and recklessly, averting collisions by the thinnest of margins, all without so much as a pause in the incessant stream of words spewing from his mouth:

??terrible what is happening in your country, yar. Afghani people and Pakistani people they are like brothers, I tell you. Muslims have to help Muslims so...”

I tuned him out, switched to a polite nodding mode. I remembered Peshawar pretty well from the few months Baba and I had spent there in 1981. We were heading west now on Jamrud road, past the Cantonment and its lavish, high-walled homes. The bustle of the city blurring past me reminded me of a busier, more crowded version of the Kabul I knew, particularly of the KochehMorgha, or Chicken Bazaar, where Hassan and I used to buy chutney-dipped potatoes and cherry water. The streets were clogged with bicycle riders, milling pedestrians, and rickshaws popping blue smoke, all weaving through a maze of narrow lanes and alleys. Bearded vendors draped in thin blankets sold animalskin lampshades, carpets, embroidered shawls, and copper goods from rows of small, tightly jammed stalls. The city was bursting with sounds; the shouts of vendors rang in my ears mingled with the blare of Hindi music, the sputtering of rickshaws, and the jingling bells of horse-drawn carts. Rich scents, both pleasant and not so pleasant, drifted to me through the passenger window, the spicy aroma of pakora and the nihari Baba had loved so much blended with the sting of diesel fumes, the stench of rot, garbage, and feces.

A little past the redbrick buildings of Peshawar University, we entered an area my garrulous driver referred to as “Afghan Town.” I saw sweetshops and carpet vendors, kabob stalls, kids with dirtcaked hands selling cigarettes, tiny restaurants--maps of Afghanistan painted on their windows--all interlaced with backstreet aid agencies.

“Many of your brothers in this area, yar. They are opening businesses, but most of them are very poor.” He tsk’ed his tongue and sighed. “Anyway, we’re getting close now.”

136

“The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini

Prev Next