The Kite Runner (31 page)

Again I was met by silence. The Punjabi boy at the other end of the room stirred in his sleep and moaned something. “I like
your room,” I said, trying not to look at Sohrab’s bandaged wrists. “It’s bright, and you have a view.” Silence. A few more
awkward minutes passed, and a light sweat formed on my brow, my upper lip. I pointed to the untouched bowl of green pea
aush
on his nightstand, the unused plastic spoon. “You should try to eat something. Gain your
quwat
back, your strength. Do you want me to help you?”

He held my glance, then looked away, his face set like stone. His eyes were still lightless, I saw, vacant, the way I had
found them when I had pulled him out of the bathtub. I reached into the paper bag between my feet and took out the used copy
of the
Shahnamah
I had bought at the Persian bookstore. I turned the cover so it faced Sohrab. “I used to read this to your father when we
were children. We’d go up the hill by our house and sit beneath the pomegranate . . .” I trailed off. Sohrab was looking through
the window again. I forced a smile. “Your father’s favorite was the story of Rostam and Sohrab and that’s how you got your
name, I know you know that.” I paused, feeling a bit like an idiot. “Anyway, he said in his letter that it was your favorite
too, so I thought I’d read you some of it. Would you like that?”

Sohrab closed his eyes. Covered them with his arm, the one with the bruise.

I flipped to the page I had bent in the taxicab. “Here we go,” I said, wondering for the first time what thoughts had passed
through Hassan’s head when he had finally read the
Shahnamah
for himself and discovered that I had deceived him all those times. I cleared my throat and read. “‘Give ear unto the combat
of Sohrab against Rostam, though it be a tale replete with tears,’ ” I began. “‘It came about that on a certain day Rostam
rose from his couch and his mind was filled with forebodings. He bethought him . . .’ ” I read him most of chapter 1, up to
the part where the young warrior Sohrab comes to his mother, Tahmineh, the princess of Samengan, and demands to know the identity
of his father. I closed the book. “Do you want me to go on? There are battles coming up, remember? Sohrab leading his army
to the White Castle in Iran? Should I read on?”

He shook his head slowly. I dropped the book back in the paper bag. “That’s fine,” I said, encouraged that he had responded
at all. “Maybe we can continue tomorrow. How do you feel?”

Sohrab’s mouth opened and a hoarse sound came out. Dr. Nawaz had told me that would happen, on account of the breathing tube
they had slid through his vocal cords. He licked his lips and tried again. “Tired.”

“I know. Dr. Nawaz said that was to be expected—”

He was shaking his head.

“What, Sohrab?”

He winced when he spoke again in that husky voice, barely above a whisper. “Tired of everything.”

I sighed and slumped in my chair. There was a band of sunlight on the bed between us, and, for just a moment, the ashen gray
face looking at me from the other side of it was a dead ringer for Hassan’s, not the Hassan I played marbles with until the
mullah belted out the evening
azan
and Ali called us home, not the Hassan I chased down our hill as the sun dipped behind clay rooftops in the west, but the
Hassan I saw alive for the last time, dragging his belongings behind Ali in a warm summer downpour, stuffing them in the trunk
of Baba’s car while I watched through the rain-soaked window of my room.

He gave a slow shake of his head. “Tired of everything,” he repeated.

“What can I do, Sohrab? Please tell me.”

“I want—” he began. He winced again and brought his hand to his throat as if to clear whatever was blocking his voice. My
eyes were drawn again to his wrist wrapped tightly with white gauze bandages. “I want my old life back,” he breathed.

“Oh, Sohrab.”

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house
again.” He dragged his forearm across his eyes. “I want my old life back.”

I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands.
Your old life,
I thought.
My old life too. I played in the same yard,
Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead and a
stranger’s
jeep is parked in the driveway of our house, pissing oil all over the asphalt.
Our old life is gone, Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying.
It’s
just you and me now. Just you and me.

“I can’t give you that,” I said.

“I wish you hadn’t—”

“Please don’t say that.”

“—wish you hadn’t . . . I wish you had left me in the water.”

“Don’t ever say that, Sohrab,” I said, leaning forward. “I can’t bear to hear you talk like that.” I touched his shoulder
and he flinched. Drew away. I dropped my hand, remembering ruefully how in the last days before I’d broken my promise to him
he had finally become at ease with my touch. “Sohrab, I can’t give you your old life back, I wish to God I could. But I can
take you with me. That was what I was coming in the bathroom to tell you. You have a visa to go to America, to live with me
and my wife. It’s true. I promise.”

He sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. I wished I hadn’t said those last two words. “You know, I’ve done a lot of
things I regret in my life,” I said, “and maybe none more than going back on the promise I made you. But that will never happen
again, and I am so very profoundly sorry. I ask for your
bakhshesh,
your forgiveness. Can you do that? Can you forgive me? Can you believe me?” I dropped my voice. “Will you come with me?”

As I waited for his reply, my mind flashed back to a winter day from long ago, Hassan and I sitting on the snow beneath a
leafless sour cherry tree. I had played a cruel game with Hassan that day, toyed with him, asked him if he would chew dirt
to prove his loyalty to me. Now I was the one under the microscope, the one who had to prove my worthiness. I deserved this.

Sohrab rolled to his side, his back to me. He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, just as I thought he might have
drifted to sleep, he said with a croak, “I am so
khasta.
” So very tired.

I sat by his bed until he fell asleep. Something was lost between Sohrab and me. Until my meeting with the lawyer, Omar Faisal,
a light of hope had begun to enter Sohrab’s eyes like a timid guest. Now the light was gone, the guest had fled, and I wondered
when it would dare return. I wondered how long before Sohrab smiled again. How long before he trusted me. If ever.

So I left the room and went looking for another hotel, unaware that almost a year would pass before I would hear Sohrab speak
another word.

IN THEEND, Sohrab never accepted my offer. Nor did he decline it. But he knew that when the bandages were removed and the
hospital garments returned, he was just another homeless Hazara orphan. What choice did he have? Where could he go? So what
I took as a yes from him was in actuality more of a quiet surrender, not so much an acceptance as an act of relinquishment
by one too weary to decide, and far too tired to believe. What he yearned for was his old life. What he got was me and America.
Not that it was such a bad fate, everything considered, but I couldn’t tell him that. Perspective was a luxury when your head
was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

And so it was that, about a week later, we crossed a strip of warm, black tarmac and I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan
to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.

ONE DAY, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in Fremont. I was standing in the Westerns section when a guy next
to me, sipping Coke from a 7-Eleven cup, pointed to
The Magnificent Seven
and asked me if I had seen it. “Yes, thirteen times,” I said. “Charles Bronson dies in it, so do James Coburn and Robert Vaughn.”
He gave me a pinch-faced look, as if I had just spat in his soda. “Thanks a lot, man,” he said, shaking his head and muttering
something as he walked away. That was when I learned that, in America, you don’t reveal the ending of the movie, and if you
do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.

In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab,
what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba’s friends—second and third cousins milling in and out of the house—wanted
to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the
bacheh film,
the Guy in the film, become
kamyab
and fulfill his dreams, or was he
nah-kam,
doomed to wallow in failure?

Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know.

If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say.

Does anybody’s?

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.
Zendagi migzara,
Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end,
kamyab, nah-kam,
crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of
kochi
s.

I wouldn’t know how to answer that question. Despite the matter of last Sunday’s tiny miracle.

WE ARRIVED HOME about seven months ago, on a warm day in August 2001. Soraya picked us up at the airport. I had never been
away from Soraya for so long, and when she locked her arms around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how
much I had missed her. “You’re still the morning sun to my
yelda,
” I whispered.

“What?”

“Never mind.” I kissed her ear.

After, she knelt to eye level with Sohrab. She took his hand and smiled at him. “
Salaam,
Sohrab jan, I’m your Khala Soraya. We’ve all been waiting for you.”

Looking at her smiling at Sohrab, her eyes tearing over a little, I had a glimpse of the mother she might have been, had her
own womb not betrayed her.

Sohrab shifted on his feet and looked away.

SORAYA HAD TURNED THE STUDY upstairs into a bedroom for Sohrab. She led him in and he sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets
showed brightly colored kites flying in indigo blue skies. She had made inscriptions on the wall by the closet, feet and inches
to measure a child’s growing height. At the foot of the bed, I saw a wicker basket stuffed with books, a locomotive, a watercolor
set.

Sohrab was wearing the plain white T-shirt and new denims I had bought him in Islamabad just before we’d left—the shirt hung
loosely over his bony, slumping shoulders. The color still hadn’t seeped back into his face, save for the halo of dark circles
around his eyes. He was looking at us now in the impassive way he looked at the plates of boiled rice the hospital orderly
placed before him.

Soraya asked if he liked his room and I noticed that she was trying to avoid looking at his wrists and that her eyes kept
swaying back to those jagged pink lines. Sohrab lowered his head. Hid his hands under his thighs and said nothing. Then he
simply lay his head on the pillow. Less than five minutes later, Soraya and I watching from the doorway, he was snoring.

We went to bed, and Soraya fell asleep with her head on my chest. In the darkness of our room, I lay awake, an insomniac once
more. Awake. And alone with demons of my own.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I slid out of bed and went to Sohrab’s room. I stood over him, looking down, and saw
something protruding from under his pillow. I picked it up. Saw it was Rahim Khan’s Polaroid, the one I had given to Sohrab
the night we had sat by the Shah Faisal Mosque. The one of Hassan and Sohrab standing side by side, squinting in the light
of the sun, and smiling like the world was a good and just place. I wondered how long Sohrab had lain in bed staring at the
photo, turning it in his hands.

I looked at the photo.
Your father was a man torn between two halves,
Rahim Khan had said in his letter. I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment
of Baba’s guilt. I looked at Hassan, showing those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face. Baba’s other half.
The unentitled, unprivileged half. The half who had inherited what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe,
in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son.

I slipped the picture back where I had found it. Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it.
Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering
its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

THE GENERAL AND KHALA JAMILA came over for dinner the following night. Khala Jamila, her hair cut short and a darker shade
of red than usual, handed Soraya the plate of almond-topped
maghout
she had brought for dessert. She saw Sohrab and beamed.
“
Mashallah!
Soraya jan told us how
khoshteep
you were, but you are even more handsome in person, Sohrab jan.” She handed him a blue turtleneck sweater. “I knitted this
for you,” she said. “For next winter.
Inshallah,
it will fit you.”

Sohrab took the sweater from her.

“Hello, young man,” was all the general said, leaning with both hands on his cane, looking at Sohrab the way one might study
a bizarre decorative item at someone’s house.

I answered, and answered again, Khala Jamila’s questions about my injuries—I’d asked Soraya to tell them I had been mugged—reassuring
her that I had no permanent damage, that the wires would come out in a few weeks so I’d be able to eat her cooking again,
that, yes, I would try rubbing rhubarb juice and sugar on my scars to make them fade faster.

The general and I sat in the living room and sipped wine while Soraya and her mother set the table. I told him about Kabul
and the Taliban. He listened and nodded, his cane on his lap, and
tsk
’ed when I told him of the man I had spotted selling his artificial leg. I made no mention of the executions at Ghazi Stadium
and Assef. He asked about Rahim Khan, whom he said he had met in Kabul a few times, and shook his head solemnly when I told
him of Rahim Khan’s illness. But as we spoke, I caught his eyes drifting again and again to Sohrab sleeping on the couch.
As if we were skirting around the edge of what he really wanted to know.