The Kite Runner (23 page)

A short, thin, balding man with a shaggy gray beard opened the door. He wore a ragged tweed jacket, a skullcap, and a pair
of eyeglasses with one chipped lens resting on the tip of his nose. Behind the glasses, tiny eyes like black peas flitted
from me to Farid. “
Salaam
alaykum,
” he said.

“
Salaam
alaykum,”
I said. I showed him the Polaroid. “We’re searching for this boy.”

He gave the photo a cursory glance. “I am sorry. I have never seen him.”

“You barely looked at the picture, my friend,” Farid said. “Why not take a closer look?”

“
Lotfan,”
I added. Please.

The man behind the door took the picture. Studied it. Handed it back to me. “Nay, sorry. I know just about every single child
in this institution and that one doesn’t look familiar. Now, if you’ll permit me, I have work to do.” He closed the door.
Locked the bolt.

I rapped on the door with my knuckles. “Agha! Agha, please open the door. We don’t mean him any harm.”

“I told you. He’s not here,” his voice came from the other side. “Now, please go away.”

Farid stepped up to the door, rested his forehead on it. “Friend, we are not with the Taliban,” he said in a low, cautious
voice. “The man who is with me wants to take this boy to a safe place.”

“I come from Peshawar,” I said. “A good friend of mine knows an American couple there who run a charity home for children.”
I felt the man’s presence on the other side of the door. Sensed him standing there, listening, hesitating, caught between
suspicion and hope. “Look, I knew Sohrab’s father,” I said. “His name was Hassan. His mother’s name was Farzana. He called
his grandmother
Sasa.
He knows how to read and write. And he’s good with the slingshot. There’s hope for this boy, Agha, a way out. Please open
the door.”

From the other side, only silence.

“I’m his half uncle,” I said.

A moment passed. Then a key rattled in the lock. The man’s narrow face reappeared in the crack. He looked from me to Farid
and back. “You were wrong about one thing.”

“What?”

“He’s
great
with the slingshot.”

I smiled.

“He’s inseparable from that thing. He tucks it in the waist of his pants everywhere he goes.”

THE MAN WHO LETUS IN introduced himself as Zaman, the director of the orphanage. “I’ll take you to my office,” he said.

We followed him through dim, grimy hallways where barefoot children dressed in frayed sweaters ambled around. We walked past
rooms with no floor covering but matted carpets and windows shuttered with sheets of plastic. Skeleton frames of steel beds,
most with no mattress, filled the rooms.

“How many orphans live here?” Farid asked.

“More than we have room for. About two hundred and fifty,” Zaman said over his shoulder. “But they’re not all
yateem.
Many of them have lost their fathers in the war, and their mothers can’t feed them because the Taliban don’t allow them to
work. So they bring their children here.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand and added ruefully, “This place is better
than the street, but not that much better. This building was never meant to be lived in—it used to be a storage warehouse
for a carpet manufacturer. So there’s no water heater and they’ve let the well go dry.” He dropped his voice. “I’ve asked
the Taliban for money to dig a new well more times than I remember and they just twirl their rosaries and tell me there is
no money. No money.” He snickered.

He pointed to a row of beds along the wall. “We don’t have enough beds, and not enough mattresses for the beds we do have.
Worse, we don’t have enough blankets.” He showed us a little girl skipping rope with two other kids. “You see that girl? This
past winter, the children had to share blankets. Her brother died of exposure.” He walked on. “The last time I checked, we
have less than a month’s supply of rice left in the warehouse, and, when that runs out, the children will have to eat bread
and tea for breakfast
and
dinner.” I noticed he made no mention of lunch.

He stopped and turned to me. “There is very little shelter here, almost no food, no clothes, no clean water. What I have in
ample supply here is children who’ve lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones. We’re filled
beyond capacity and every day I turn away mothers who bring their children.” He took a step toward me. “You say there is hope
for Sohrab? I pray you don’t lie, Agha. But . . . you may well be too late.”

“What do you mean?”

Zaman’s eyes shifted. “Follow me.”

WHAT PASSED FOR THE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE was four bare, cracked walls, a mat on the floor, a table, and two folding chairs. As
Zaman and I sat down, I saw a gray rat poke its head from a burrow in the wall and flit across the room. I cringed when it
sniffed at my shoes, then Zaman’s, and scurried through the open door.

“What did you mean it may be too late?” I said.

“Would you like some
chai
? I could make some.”

“Nay, thank you. I’d rather we talk.”

Zaman tilted back in his chair and crossed his arms on his chest. “What I have to tell you is not pleasant. Not to mention
that it may be very dangerous.”

“For whom?”

“You. Me. And, of course, for Sohrab, if it’s not too late already.”

“I need to know,” I said.

He nodded. “So you say. But first I want to ask you a question: How badly do you want to find your nephew?”

I thought of the street fights we’d get into when we were kids, all the times Hassan used to take them on for me, two against
one, sometimes three against one. I’d wince and watch, tempted to step in, but always stopping short, always held back by
something.

I looked at the hallway, saw a group of kids dancing in a circle. A little girl, her left leg amputated below the knee, sat
on a ratty mattress and watched, smiling and clapping along with the other children. I saw Farid watching the children too,
his own mangled hand hanging at his side. I remembered Wahid’s boys and . . . I realized something: I would not leave Afghanistan
without finding Sohrab. “Tell me where he is,” I said.

Zaman’s gaze lingered on me. Then he nodded, picked up a pencil, and twirled it between his fingers. “Keep my name out of
it.”

“I promise.”

He tapped the table with the pencil. “Despite your promise, I think I’ll live to regret this, but perhaps it’s just as well.
I’m damned anyway. But if something can be done for Sohrab . . . I’ll tell you because I believe you. You have the look of
a desperate man.” He was quiet for a long time. “There is a Talib official,” he muttered. “He visits once every month or two.
He brings cash with him, not a lot, but better than nothing at all.” His shifty eyes fell on me, rolled away. “Usually he’ll
take a girl. But not always.”

“And you allow this?” Farid said behind me. He was going around the table, closing in on Zaman.

“What choice do I have?” Zaman shot back. He pushed himself away from the desk.

“You’re the director here,” Farid said. “Your job is watch over these children.”

“There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

“You’re selling children!” Farid barked.

“Farid, sit down! Let it go!” I said. But I was too late. Because suddenly Farid was leaping over the table. Zaman’s chair
went flying as Farid fell on him and pinned him to the floor. The director thrashed beneath Farid and made muffled screaming
sounds. His legs kicked a desk drawer free and sheets of paper spilled to the floor.

I ran around the desk and saw why Zaman’s screaming was muffled: Farid was strangling him. I grasped Farid’s shoulders with
both hands and pulled hard. He snatched away from me. “That’s enough!” I barked. But Farid’s face had flushed red, his lips
pulled back in a snarl. “I’m killing him! You can’t stop me! I’m killing him,” he sneered.

“Get off him!”

“I’m killing him!” Something in his voice told me that if I didn’t do something quickly I’d witness my first murder.

“The children are watching, Farid. They’re watching,” I said. His shoulder muscles tightened under my grip and, for a moment,
I thought he’d keep squeezing Zaman’s neck anyway. Then he turned around, saw the children. They were standing silently by
the door, holding hands, some of them crying. I felt Farid’s muscles slacken. He dropped his hands, rose to his feet. He looked
down on Zaman and dropped a mouthful of spit on his face. Then he walked to the door and closed it.

Zaman struggled to his feet, blotted his bloody lips with his sleeve, wiped the spit off his cheek. Coughing and wheezing,
he put on his skullcap, his glasses, saw both lenses had cracked, and took them off. He buried his face in his hands. None
of us said anything for a long time.

“He took Sohrab a month ago,” Zaman finally croaked, hands still shielding his face.

“You call yourself a director?” Farid said.

Zaman dropped his hands. “I haven’t been paid in over six months. I’m broke because I’ve spent my life’s savings on this orphanage.
Everything I ever owned or inherited I sold to run this godforsaken place. You think I don’t have family in Pakistan and Iran?
I could have run like everyone else. But I didn’t. I stayed. I stayed because of
them.
” He pointed to the door. “If I deny him one child, he takes ten. So I let him take one and leave the judging to Allah. I
swallow my pride and take his goddamn filthy . . . dirty money. Then I go to the bazaar and buy food for the children.”

Farid dropped his eyes.

“What happens to the children he takes?” I asked.

Zaman rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. “Sometimes they come back.”

“Who is he? How do we find him?” I said.

“Go to Ghazi Stadium tomorrow. You’ll see him at halftime. He’ll be the one wearing black sunglasses.” He picked up his broken
glasses and turned them in his hands. “I want you to go now. The children are frightened.”

He escorted us out.

As the truck pulled away, I saw Zaman in the side-view mirror, standing in the doorway. A group of children surrounded him,
clutching the hem of his loose shirt. I saw he had put on his broken glasses.

TWENTY-ONE

We crossed the river and drove north through the crowded Pashtunistan Square. Baba used to take me to Khyber Restaurant there
for kabob. The building was still standing, but its doors were padlocked, the windows shattered, and the letters
K
and
R
missing from its name.

I saw a dead body near the restaurant. There had been a hanging. A young man dangled from the end of a rope tied to a beam,
his face puffy and blue, the clothes he’d worn on the last day of his life shredded, bloody. Hardly anyone seemed to notice
him.

We rode silently through the square and headed toward the Wazir Akbar Khan district. Everywhere I looked, a haze of dust covered
the city and its sun-dried brick buildings. A few blocks north of Pashtunistan Square, Farid pointed to two men talking animatedly
at a busy street corner. One of them was hobbling on one leg, his other leg amputated below the knee. He cradled an artificial
leg in his arms. “You know what they’re doing? Haggling over the leg.”

“He’s selling his leg?”

Farid nodded. “You can get good money for it on the black market. Feed your kids for a couple of weeks.”

TO MY SURPRISE, most of the houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan district still had roofs and standing walls. In fact, they were
in pretty good shape. Trees still peeked over the walls, and the streets weren’t nearly as rubble-strewn as the ones in Karteh-Seh.
Faded streets signs, some twisted and bullet-pocked, still pointed the way.

“This isn’t so bad,” I remarked.

“No surprise. Most of the important people live here now.”

“Taliban?”

“Them too,” Farid said.

“Who else?”

He drove us into a wide street with fairly clean sidewalks and walled homes on either side. “The people behind the Taliban.
The real brains of this government, if you can call it that: Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis,” Farid said. He pointed northwest.
“Street 15, that way, is called Sarak-e-Mehmana.” Street of the Guests. “That’s what they call them here, guests. I think
someday these guests are going to pee all over the carpet.”

“I think that’s it!” I said. “Over there!” I pointed to the landmark that used to serve as a guide for me when I was a kid.
If you ever get lost,
Baba used to say,
remember that our street is the one with the pink house
at the end of it.
The pink house with the steeply pitched roof had been the neighborhood’s only house of that color in the old days. It still
was.

Farid turned onto the street. I saw Baba’s house right away.

WE FIND THE LITTLE TURTLE
behind tangles of sweetbrier in the
yard. We
don’t
know how it got there and
we’re
too excited to care. We
paint its shell a bright red,
Hassan’s
idea, and a good one: This way,
we’ll
never lose it in the bushes. We pretend
we’re
a pair of daredevil explorers
who’ve
discovered a giant prehistoric monster in some distant jungle and
we’ve
brought it back for the world to see. We set it down in the wooden
wagon Ali built Hassan last winter for his birthday, pretend
it’s
a giant
steel cage. Behold the fire-breathing monstrosity! We march on the grass
and pull the wagon behind us, around apple and cherry trees, which become
skyscrapers soaring into clouds, heads poking out of thousands of
windows to watch the spectacle passing below. We walk over the little
semilunar bridge Baba has built near a cluster of fig trees; it becomes a
great suspension bridge joining cities, and the little pond below, a foamy
sea. Fireworks explode above the
bridge’s
massive pylons and armed soldiers
salute us on both sides as gigantic steel cables shoot to the sky. The little
turtle bouncing around in the cab, we drag the wagon around the
circular redbrick driveway outside the wrought-iron gates and return the
salutes of the
world’s
leaders as they stand and applaud. We are Hassan
and Amir, famed adventurers and the
world’s
greatest explorers, about to
receive a medal of honor for our courageous feat . . .

GINGERLY, I WALKED up the driveway where tufts of weed now grew between the sun-faded bricks. I stood outside the gates of
my father’s house, feeling like a stranger. I set my hands on the rusty bars, remembering how I’d run through these same gates
thousands of times as a child, for things that mattered not at all now and yet had seemed so important then. I peered in.

The driveway extension that led from the gates to the yard, where Hassan and I took turns falling the summer we learned to
ride a bike, didn’t look as wide or as long as I remembered it. The asphalt had split in a lightning-streak pattern, and more
tangles of weed sprouted through the fissures. Most of the poplar trees had been chopped down—the trees Hassan and I used
to climb to shine our mirrors into the neighbors’ homes. The ones still standing were nearly leafless. The Wall of Ailing
Corn was still there, though I saw no corn, ailing or otherwise, along that wall now. The paint had begun to peel and sections
of it had sloughed off altogether. The lawn had turned the same brown as the haze of dust hovering over the city, dotted by
bald patches of dirt where nothing grew at all.

A jeep was parked in the driveway and that looked all wrong: Baba’s black Mustang belonged there. For years, the Mustang’s
eight cylinders roared to life every morning, rousing me from sleep. I saw that oil had spilled under the jeep and stained
the driveway like a big Rorschach inkblot. Beyond the jeep, an empty wheelbarrow lay on its side. I saw no sign of the rosebushes
that Baba and Ali had planted on the left side of the driveway, only dirt that spilled onto the asphalt. And weeds.

Farid honked twice behind me. “We should go, Agha. We’ll draw attention,” he called.

“Just give me one more minute,” I said.

The house itself was far from the sprawling white mansion I remembered from my childhood. It looked smaller. The roof sagged
and the plaster was cracked. The windows to the living room, the foyer, and the upstairs guest bathroom were broken, patched
haphazardly with sheets of clear plastic or wooden boards nailed across the frames. The paint, once sparkling white, had faded
to ghostly gray and eroded in parts, revealing the layered bricks beneath. The front steps had crumbled. Like so much else
in Kabul, my father’s house was the picture of fallen splendor.

I found the window to my old bedroom, second floor, third window south of the main steps to the house. I stood on tiptoes,
saw nothing behind the window but shadows. Twenty-five years earlier, I had stood behind that same window, thick rain dripping
down the panes and my breath fogging up the glass. I had watched Hassan and Ali load their belongings into the trunk of my
father’s car.

“Amir agha,” Farid called again.

“I’m coming,” I shot back.

Insanely, I wanted to go in. Wanted to walk up the front steps where Ali used to make Hassan and me take off our snow boots.
I wanted to step into the foyer, smell the orange peel Ali always tossed into the stove to burn with sawdust. Sit at the kitchen
table, have tea with a slice of
naan,
listen to Hassan sing old Hazara songs.

Another honk. I walked back to the Land Cruiser parked along the sidewalk. Farid sat smoking behind the wheel.

“I have to look at one more thing,” I told him.

“Can you hurry?”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Go, then.” Then, just as I was turning to go: “Just forget it all. Makes it easier.”

“To what?”

“To go on,” Farid said. He flicked his cigarette out of the window. “How much more do you need to see? Let me save you the
trouble: Nothing that you remember has survived. Best to forget.”

“I don’t want to forget anymore,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

WE HARDLY BROKE A SWEAT, Hassan and I, when we hiked up the hill just north of Baba’s house. We scampered about the hilltop
chasing each other or sat on a sloped ridge where there was a good view of the airport in the distance. We’d watch airplanes
take off and land. Go running again.

Now, by the time I reached the top of the craggy hill, each ragged breath felt like inhaling fire. Sweat trickled down my
face. I stood wheezing for a while, a stitch in my side. Then I went looking for the abandoned cemetery. It didn’t take me
long to find it. It was still there, and so was the old pomegranate tree.

I leaned against the gray stone gateway to the cemetery where Hassan had buried his mother. The old metal gates hanging off
the hinges were gone, and the headstones were barely visible through the thick tangles of weeds that had claimed the plot.
A pair of crows sat on the low wall that enclosed the cemetery.

Hassan had said in his letter that the pomegranate tree hadn’t borne fruit in years. Looking at the wilted, leafless tree,
I doubted it ever would again. I stood under it, remembered all the times we’d climbed it, straddled its branches, our legs
swinging, dappled sunlight flickering through the leaves and casting on our faces a mosaic of light and shadow. The tangy
taste of pomegranate crept into my mouth.

I hunkered down on my knees and brushed my hands against the trunk. I found what I was looking for. The carving had dulled,
almost faded altogether, but it was still there: “Amir and Hassan. The Sultans of Kabul.” I traced the curve of each letter
with my fingers. Picked small bits of bark from the tiny crevasses.

I sat cross-legged at the foot of the tree and looked south on the city of my childhood. In those days, treetops poked behind
the walls of every house. The sky stretched wide and blue, and laundry drying on clotheslines glimmered in the sun. If you
listened hard, you might even have heard the call of the fruit seller passing through Wazir Akbar Khan with his donkey:
Cherries! Apricots! Grapes!
In the early evening, you would have heard
azan,
the
mueszzin
’s call to prayer from the mosque in Shar-e-Nau.

I heard a honk and saw Farid waving at me. It was time to go.

WE DROVE SOUTH AGAIN, back toward Pashtunistan Square. We passed several more red pickup trucks with armed, bearded young
men crammed into the cabs. Farid cursed under his breath every time we passed one.

I paid for a room at a small hotel near Pashtunistan Square. Three little girls dressed in identical black dresses and white
scarves clung to the slight, bespectacled man behind the counter. He charged me $75, an unthinkable price given the run-down
appearance of the place, but I didn’t mind. Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed
your kids was another.

There was no hot running water and the cracked toilet didn’t flush. Just a single steel-frame bed with a worn mattress, a
ragged blanket, and a wooden chair in the corner. The window overlooking the square had broken, hadn’t been replaced. As I
lowered my suitcase, I noticed a dried bloodstain on the wall behind the bed.

I gave Farid some money and he went out to get food. He returned with four sizzling skewers of kabob, fresh
naan,
and a bowl of white rice. We sat on the bed and all but devoured the food. There
was
one thing that hadn’t changed in Kabul after all: The kabob was as succulent and delicious as I remembered.

That night, I took the bed and Farid lay on the floor, wrapped himself with an extra blanket for which the hotel owner charged
me an additional fee. No light came into the room except for the moonbeams streaming through the broken window. Farid said
the owner had told him that Kabul had been without electricity for two days now and his generator needed fixing. We talked
for a while. He told me about growing up in Mazar-i-Sharif, in Jalalabad. He told me about a time shortly after he and his
father joined the jihad and fought the
Shorawi
in the Panjsher Valley. They were stranded without food and ate locust to survive. He told me of the day helicopter gunfire
killed his father, of the day the land mine took his two daughters. He asked me about America. I told him that in America
you could step into a grocery store and buy any of fifteen or twenty different types of cereal. The lamb was always fresh
and the milk cold, the fruit plentiful and the water clear. Every home had a TV, and every TV a remote, and you could get
a satellite dish if you wanted. Receive over five hundred channels.

“Five hundred?” Farid exclaimed.

“Five hundred.”

We fell silent for a while. Just when I thought he had fallen asleep, Farid chuckled. “Agha, did you hear what Mullah Nasruddin
did when his daughter came home and complained that her husband had beaten her?” I could feel him smiling in the dark and
a smile of my own formed on my face. There wasn’t an Afghan in the world who didn’t know at least a few jokes about the bumbling
mullah.

“What?”

“He beat her too, then sent her back to tell the husband that Mullah was no fool: If the bastard was going to beat his daughter,
then Mullah would beat his wife in return.”

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a
robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes. “Did you hear about
the time Mullah had placed a heavy bag on his shoulders and was riding his donkey?” I said.

“No.”

“Someone on the street said why don’t you put the bag on the donkey? And he said, ‘That would be cruel, I’m heavy enough already
for the poor thing.’”

We exchanged Mullah Nasruddin jokes until we ran out of them and we fell silent again.

“Amir agha?” Farid said, startling me from near sleep.

“Yes?”

“Why are you here? I mean, why are you
really
here?”

“I told you.”

“For the boy?”