The Kite Runner (2 page)

What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew—Ali had told us countless times. We just wanted to hear
Ali sing.

He’d clear his throat and begin:

On a high mountain I stood,

And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.

O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,

Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.

Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even
time could break.

Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof,
we spoke our first words.

Mine was
Baba.

His was
Amir.
My name.

Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975—and all that followed—was already laid
in those first words.

THREE

Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands. If the story had been about anyone else,
it would have been dismissed as
laaf,
that Afghan tendency to exaggerate—sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances
were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school. But no one ever doubted the veracity of any story about Baba.
And if they did, well, Baba did have those three parallel scars coursing a jagged path down his back. I have imagined Baba’s
wrestling match countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I can never tell Baba from the bear.

It was Rahim Khan who first referred to him as what eventually became Baba’s famous nickname,
Toophan agha,
or “Mr. Hurricane.” It was an apt enough nickname. My father was a force of nature, a towering Pashtun specimen with a thick
beard, a wayward crop of curly brown hair as unruly as the man himself, hands that looked capable of uprooting a willow tree,
and a black glare that would “drop the devil to his knees begging for mercy,” as Rahim Khan used to say. At parties, when
all six-foot-five of him thundered into the room, attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

Baba was impossible to ignore, even in his sleep. I used to bury cotton wisps in my ears, pull the blanket over my head, and
still the sounds of Baba’s snoring—so much like a growling truck engine—penetrated the walls. And my room was across the hall
from Baba’s bedroom. How my mother ever managed to sleep in the same room as him is a mystery to me. It’s on the long list
of things I would have asked my mother if I had ever met her.

In the late 1960s, when I was five or six, Baba decided to build an orphanage. I heard the story through Rahim Khan. He told
me Baba had drawn the blueprints himself despite the fact that he’d had no architectural experience at all. Skeptics had urged
him to stop his foolishness and hire an architect. Of course, Baba refused, and everyone shook their heads in dismay at his
obstinate ways. Then Baba succeeded and everyone shook their heads in awe at his triumphant ways. Baba paid for the construction
of the two-story orphanage, just off the main strip of Jadeh Maywand south of the Kabul River, with his own money. Rahim Khan
told me Baba had personally funded the entire project, paying for the engineers, electricians, plumbers, and laborers, not
to mention the city officials whose “mustaches needed oiling.”

It took three years to build the orphanage. I was eight by then. I remember the day before the orphanage opened, Baba took
me to Ghargha Lake, a few miles north of Kabul. He asked me to fetch Hassan too, but I lied and told him Hassan had the runs.
I wanted Baba all to myself. And besides, one time at Ghargha Lake, Hassan and I were skimming stones and Hassan made his
stone skip eight times. The most I managed was five. Baba was there, watching, and he patted Hassan on the back. Even put
his arm around his shoulder.

We sat at a picnic table on the banks of the lake, just Baba and me, eating boiled eggs with
kofta
sandwiches—meatballs and pickles wrapped in
naan.
The water was a deep blue and sunlight glittered on its looking glass–clear surface. On Fridays, the lake was bustling with
families out for a day in the sun. But it was midweek and there was only Baba and me, us and a couple of longhaired, bearded
tourists—“hippies,” I’d heard them called. They were sitting on the dock, feet dangling in the water, fishing poles in hand.
I asked Baba why they grew their hair long, but Baba grunted, didn’t answer. He was preparing his speech for the next day,
flipping through a havoc of handwritten pages, making notes here and there with a pencil. I bit into my egg and asked Baba
if it was true what a boy in school had told me, that if you ate a piece of eggshell, you’d have to pee it out. Baba grunted
again.

I took a bite of my sandwich. One of the yellow-haired tourists laughed and slapped the other one on the back. In the distance,
across the lake, a truck lumbered around a corner on the hill. Sunlight twinkled in its side-view mirror.

“I think I have
saratan,
” I said. Cancer. Baba lifted his head from the pages flapping in the breeze. Told me I could get the soda myself, all I had
to do was look in the trunk of the car.

Outside the orphanage, the next day, they ran out of chairs. A lot of people had to stand to watch the opening ceremony. It
was a windy day, and I sat behind Baba on the little podium just outside the main entrance of the new building. Baba was wearing
a green suit and a caracul hat. Midway through the speech, the wind knocked his hat off and everyone laughed. He motioned
to me to hold his hat for him and I was glad to, because then everyone would see that he was
my
father,
my
Baba. He turned back to the microphone and said he hoped the building was sturdier than his hat, and everyone laughed again.
When Baba ended his speech, people stood up and cheered. They clapped for a long time. Afterward, people shook his hand. Some
of them tousled my hair and shook my hand too. I was so proud of Baba, of us.

But despite Baba’s successes, people were always doubting him. They told Baba that running a business wasn’t in his blood
and he should study law like his father. So Baba proved them all wrong by not only running his own business but becoming one
of the richest merchants in Kabul. Baba and Rahim Khan built a wildly successful carpet-exporting business, two pharmacies,
and a restaurant.

When people scoffed that Baba would never marry well—after all, he was not of royal blood—he wedded my mother, Sofia Akrami,
a highly educated woman universally regarded as one of Kabul’s most respected, beautiful, and virtuous ladies. And not only
did she teach classic Farsi literature at the university, she was a descendant of the royal family, a fact that my father
playfully rubbed in the skeptics’ faces by referring to her as “my princess.”

With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba
saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives
that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

When I was in fifth grade, we had a mullah who taught us about Islam. His name was Mullah Fatiullah Khan, a short, stubby
man with a face full of acne scars and a gruff voice. He lectured us about the virtues of
zakat
and the duty of
hadj;
he taught us the intricacies of performing the five daily
namaz
prayers, and made us memorize verses from the Koran—and though he never translated the words for us, he did stress, sometimes
with the help of a stripped willow branch, that we had to pronounce the Arabic words correctly so God would hear us better.
He told us one day that Islam considered drinking a terrible sin; those who drank would answer for their sin on the day of
Qiyamat,
Judgment Day. In those days, drinking was fairly common in Kabul. No one gave you a public lashing for it, but those Afghans
who did drink did so in private, out of respect. People bought their scotch as “medicine” in brown paper bags from selected
“pharmacies.” They would leave with the bag tucked out of sight, sometimes drawing furtive, disapproving glances from those
who knew about the store’s reputation for such transactions.

We were upstairs in Baba’s study, the smoking room, when I told him what Mullah Fatiullah Khan had taught us in class. Baba
was pouring himself a whiskey from the bar he had built in the corner of the room. He listened, nodded, took a sip from his
drink. Then he lowered himself into the leather sofa, put down his drink, and propped me up on his lap. I felt as if I were
sitting on a pair of tree trunks. He took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose, the air hissing through his mustache
for what seemed an eternity. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to hug him or leap from his lap in mortal fear.

“I see you’ve confused what you’re learning in school with actual education,” he said in his thick voice.

“But if what he said is true then does it make you a sinner, Baba?”

“Hmm.” Baba crushed an ice cube between his teeth. “Do you want to know what your father thinks about sin?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” Baba said, “but first understand this and understand it now, Amir: You’ll never learn anything of value
from those bearded idiots.”

“You mean Mullah Fatiullah Khan?”

Baba gestured with his glass. The ice clinked. “I mean all of them. Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys.”

I began to giggle. The image of Baba pissing on the beard of any monkey, self-righteous or otherwise, was too much.

“They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand.” He took a
sip. “God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands.”

“But Mullah Fatiullah Khan seems nice,” I managed between bursts of tittering.

“So did Genghis Khan,” Baba said. “But enough about that. You asked about sin and I want to tell you. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I said, pressing my lips together. But a chortle escaped through my nose and made a snorting sound. That got me giggling
again.

Baba’s stony eyes bore into mine and, just like that, I wasn’t laughing anymore. “I mean to speak to you man to man. Do you
think you can handle that for once?”

“Yes, Baba jan,” I muttered, marveling, not for the first time, at how badly Baba could sting me with so few words. We’d had
a fleeting good moment—it wasn’t often Baba talked to me, let alone on his lap—and I’d been a fool to waste it.

“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered. “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that
is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?”

“No, Baba jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

Baba heaved a sigh of impatience. That stung too, because he was not an impatient man. I remembered all the times he didn’t
come home until after dark, all the times I ate dinner alone. I’d ask Ali where Baba was, when he was coming home, though
I knew full well he was at the construction site, overlooking this, supervising that. Didn’t that take patience? I already
hated all the kids he was building the orphanage for; sometimes I wished they’d all died along with their parents.

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said. “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. Do you see?”

I did. When Baba was six, a thief walked into my grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. My grandfather, a respected
judge, confronted him, but the thief stabbed him in the throat, killing him instantly—and robbing Baba of a father. The townspeople
caught the killer just before noon the next day; he turned out to be a wanderer from the Kunduz region. They hanged him from
the branch of an oak tree with still two hours to go before afternoon prayer. It was Rahim Khan, not Baba, who had told me
that story. I was always learning things about Baba from other people.

“There is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir,” Baba said. “A man who takes what’s not his to take, be it a life or a
loaf of
naan . . .
I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him. Do you understand?”

I found the idea of Baba clobbering a thief both exhilarating and terribly frightening. “Yes, Baba.”

“If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating
pork. Now, hop down. All this talk about sin has made me thirsty again.”

I watched him fill his glass at the bar and wondered how much time would pass before we talked again the way we just had.
Because the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I
had
killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have
turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him. Not at all.

IN SCHOOL, we used to play a game called
Sherjangi,
or “Battle of the Poems.” The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a verse from a poem
and your opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my
class wanted me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of verses from Khayyám, Hãfez, or Rumi’s
famous
Masnawi.
One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, “Good.”

That was how I escaped my father’s aloofness, in my dead mother’s books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi,
Hãfez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When I had finished my mother’s books—not the boring history
ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the epics—I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week
from the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room.

Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting .
. . well, that wasn’t how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn’t read poetry—and God forbid they should ever write
it! Real men—real boys—played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young. Now
that
was something to be passionate about. In 1970, Baba took a break from the construction of the orphanage and flew to Tehran
for a month to watch the World Cup games on television, since at the time Afghanistan didn’t have TVs yet. He signed me up
for soccer teams to stir the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team, always in the
way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open lane. I shambled about the field on scraggy legs, squalled for passes
that never came my way. And the harder I tried, waving my arms over my head frantically and screeching, “I’m open! I’m open!”
the more I went ignored. But Baba wouldn’t give up. When it became abundantly clear that I hadn’t inherited a shred of his
athletic talents, he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate spectator. Certainly I could manage that, couldn’t I?
I faked interest for as long as possible. I cheered with him when Kabul’s team scored against Kandahar and yelped insults
at the referee when he called a penalty against our team. But Baba sensed my lack of genuine interest and resigned himself
to the bleak fact that his son was never going to either play or watch soccer.