The Kite Runner (13 page)

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.”

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 hangover 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
?”

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 cardamom 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 Tori-nos in the driveways. 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 eyes could see. BMWs. Saabs. Porsches. Cars
I’d never seen in Kabul, where most people drove Russian Volgas, old Opels, or Iranian Paikans.

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 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
Roussi
s
—
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 blind-sided 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
kolcha
s, 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 eyebrows.
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.”

“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 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.”