The Kite Runner (18 page)

“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.

“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, something
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 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.

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.

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 lying on it with Aflatoon’s head nestled on her chest, her legs buried under the worn pillows. She was
half-watching 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 look pale,” Soraya repeated, placing the stack of papers on the table.

“I have to go to Pakistan.”

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 long-distance line, saw him with his lips slightly parted, head tilted
to one 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, Madar jan. 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.

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.