The Kite Runner (12 page)

“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. 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
anymore . . . 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.

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 something 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:

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, something 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 sunbaked 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.

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 back-pedaled. 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 longwinded 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 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.

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 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 whoever 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.

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.

HAT 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.

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
moonlight. “It needs painting, and I’ll have one of the guys at the station put in new shocks, but it runs.”