The Kite Runner (26 page)

Then the end. That, I’ll take to my grave:

I was on the ground laughing, Assef straddling my chest, his face a mask of lunacy, framed by snarls of his hair swaying inches
from my face. His free hand was locked around my throat. The other, the one with the brass knuckles, cocked above his shoulder.
He raised his fist higher, raised it for another blow.

Then:
“
Bas.”
A thin voice.

We both looked.

“Please, no more.”

I remembered something the orphanage director had said when he’d opened the door to me and Farid. What had been his name?
Za-man?
He’s
inseparable from that thing,
he had said.
He tucks it in the
waist of his pants everywhere he goes.

“No more.”

Twin trails of black mascara, mixed with tears, had rolled down his cheeks, smeared the rouge. His lower lip trembled. Mucus
seeped from his nose.
“
Bas,”
he croaked.

His hand was cocked above his shoulder, holding the cup of the slingshot at the end of the elastic band which was pulled all
the way back. There was something in the cup, something shiny and yellow. I blinked the blood from my eyes and saw it was
one of the brass balls from the ring in the table base. Sohrab had the slingshot pointed to Assef ’s face.

“No more, Agha. Please,” he said, his voice husky and trembling. “Stop hurting him.”

Assef ’s mouth moved wordlessly. He began to say something, stopped. “What do you think you’re you doing?” he finally said.

“Please stop,” Sohrab said, fresh tears pooling in his green eyes, mixing with mascara.

“Put it down, Hazara,” Assef hissed. “Put it down or what I’m doing to him will be a gentle ear twisting compared to what
I’ll do to you.”

The tears broke free. Sohrab shook his head. “Please, Agha,” he said. “Stop.”

“Put it down.”

“Don’t hurt him anymore.”

“Put it down.”

“Please.”

“PUT IT DOWN!”

“
Bas.”

“PUT IT DOWN!” Assef let go of my throat. Lunged at Sohrab.

The slingshot made a
thwiiiiit
sound when Sohrab released the cup. Then Assef was screaming. He put his hand where his left eye had been just a moment ago.
Blood oozed between his fingers. Blood and something else, something white and gel-like.
That’s
called vitreous fluid,
I thought with clarity.
I’ve
read that somewhere. Vitreous fluid.

Assef rolled on the carpet. Rolled side to side, shrieking, his hand still cupped over the bloody socket.

“Let’s go!” Sohrab said. He took my hand. Helped me to my feet. Every inch of my battered body wailed with pain. Behind us,
Assef kept shrieking.

“OUT! GET IT OUT!” he screamed.

Teetering, I opened the door. The guards’ eyes widened when they saw me and I wondered what I looked like. My stomach hurt
with each breath. One of the guards said something in Pashtu and then they blew past us, running into the room where Assef
was still screaming. “OUT!”

“
Bia,”
Sohrab said, pulling my hand. “Let’s go!”

I stumbled down the hallway, Sohrab’s little hand in mine. I took a final look over my shoulder. The guards were huddled over
Assef, doing something to his face. Then I understood: The brass ball was still stuck in his empty eye socket.

The whole world rocking up and down, swooping side to side, I hobbled down the steps, leaning on Sohrab. From above, Assef
’s screams went on and on, the cries of a wounded animal. We made it outside, into daylight, my arm around Sohrab’s shoulder,
and I saw Farid running toward us.

“
Bismillah!
Bismillah!”
he said, eyes bulging at the sight of me. He slung my arm around his shoulder and lifted me. Carried me to the truck, running.
I think I screamed. I watched the way his sandals pounded the pavement, slapped his black, calloused heels. It hurt to breathe.
Then I was looking up at the roof of the Land Cruiser, in the backseat, the upholstery beige and ripped, listening to the
ding-ding-ding
signaling an open door. Running footsteps around the truck. Farid and Sohrab exchanging quick words. The truck’s doors slammed
shut and the engine roared to life. The car jerked forward and I felt a tiny hand on my forehead. I heard voices on the street,
some shouting, and saw trees blurring past in the window. Sohrab was sobbing. Farid was still repeating,
“
Bismillah!
Bismillah!”

It was about then that I passed out.

TWENTY-THREE

Faces poke through the haze, linger, fade away. They peer down, ask me questions. They all ask questions. Do I know who I
am? Do I hurt anywhere? I know who I am and I hurt everywhere. I want to tell them this but talking hurts. I know this because
some time ago, maybe a year ago, maybe two, maybe ten, I tried to talk to a child with rouge on his cheeks and eyes smeared
black. The child. Yes, I see him now. We are in a car of sorts, the child and I, and I don’t think Soraya’s driving because
Soraya never drives this fast. I want to say something to this child—it seems very important that I do. But I don’t remember
what I want to say, or why it might have been important. Maybe I want to tell him to stop crying, that everything will be
all right now. Maybe not. For some reason I can’t think of, I want to thank the child.

Faces. They’re all wearing green hats. They slip in and out of view. They talk rapidly, use words I don’t understand. I hear
other voices, other noises, beeps and alarms. And always more faces. Peering down. I don’t remember any of them, except for
the one with the gel in his hair and the Clark Gable mustache, the one with the Africa stain on his cap. Mister Soap Opera
Star. That’s funny. I want to laugh now. But laughing hurts too.

I fade out.

SHE SAYS HER NAME IS AISHA, “like the prophet’s wife.” Her graying hair is parted in the middle and tied in a ponytail, her
nose pierced with a stud shaped like the sun. She wears bifocals that make her eyes bug out. She wears green too and her hands
are soft. She sees me looking at her and smiles. Says something in English. Something is jabbing at the side of my chest.

I fade out.

A MAN IS STANDING at my bedside. I know him. He is dark and lanky, has a long beard. He wears a hat—what are those hats called?
Pakol
s? Wears it tilted to one side like a famous person whose name escapes me now. I know this man. He drove me somewhere a few
years ago. I know him. There is something wrong with my mouth. I hear a bubbling sound.

I fade out.

MY RIGHT ARM BURNS. The woman with the bifocals and sun-shaped stud is hunched over my arm, attaching a clear plastic tubing
to it. She says it’s “the Potassium.” “It stings like a bee, no?” she says. It does. What’s her name? Something to do with
a prophet. I know her too from a few years ago. She used to wear her hair in a ponytail. Now it’s pulled back, tied in a bun.
Soraya wore her hair like that the first time we spoke. When was that? Last week?

Aisha! Yes.

There is something wrong with my mouth. And that thing jabbing at my chest.

I fade out.

WE ARE IN THE SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS of Baluchistan and Baba is wrestling the black bear. He is the Baba of my childhood,
Toophan
agha,
the towering specimen of Pashtun might, not the withered man under the blankets, the man with the sunken cheeks and hollow
eyes. They roll over a patch of green grass, man and beast, Baba’s curly brown hair flying. The bear roars, or maybe it’s
Baba. Spittle and blood fly; claw and hand swipe. They fall to the ground with a loud thud and Baba is sitting on the bear’s
chest, his fingers digging in its snout. He looks up at me and I see. He’s me. I am wrestling the bear.

I wake up. The lanky, dark man is back at my bedside. His name is Farid, I remember now. And with him is the child from the
car. His face reminds me of the sound of bells. I am thirsty.

I fade out.

I keep fading in and out.

THE NAME OF THE MAN with the Clark Gable mustache turned out to be Dr. Faruqi. He wasn’t a soap opera star at all, but a head-and-neck
surgeon, though I kept thinking of him as someone named Armand in some steamy soap set on a tropical island.

Where am I?
I wanted to ask. But my mouth wouldn’t open. I frowned. Grunted. Armand smiled; his teeth were blinding white.

“Not yet, Amir,” he said, “but soon. When the wires are out.” He spoke English with a thick, rolling Urdu accent.

Wires?

Armand crossed his arms; he had hairy forearms and wore a gold wedding band. “You must be wondering where you are, what happened
to you. That’s perfectly normal, the postsurgical state is always disorienting. So I’ll tell you what I know.”

I wanted to ask him about the wires. Postsurgical? Where was Aisha? I wanted her to smile at me, wanted her soft hands in
mine.

Armand frowned, cocked one eyebrow in a slightly self-important way. “You are in a hospital in Peshawar. You’ve been here
two days. You have suffered some very significant injuries, Amir, I should tell you. I would say you’re very lucky to be alive,
my friend.” He swayed his index finger back and forth like a pendulum when he said this. “Your spleen had ruptured, probably—and
fortunately for you—a delayed rupture, because you had signs of early hemorrhage into your abdominal cavity. My colleagues
from the general surgery unit had to perform an emergency splenectomy. If it had ruptured earlier, you would have bled to
death.” He patted me on the arm, the one with the IV, and smiled. “You also suffered seven broken ribs. One of them caused
a pneumothorax.”

I frowned. Tried to open my mouth. Remembered about the wires.

“That means a punctured lung,” Armand explained. He tugged at a clear plastic tubing on my left side. I felt the jabbing again
in my chest. “We sealed the leak with this chest tube.” I followed the tube poking through bandages on my chest to a container
half-filled with columns of water. The bubbling sound came from there.

“You had also suffered various lacerations. That means ‘cuts.’”

I wanted to tell him I knew what the word meant; I was a writer. I went to open my mouth. Forgot about the wires again.

“The worst laceration was on your upper lip,” Armand said. “The impact had cut your upper lip in two, clean down the middle.
But not to worry, the plastics guys sewed it back together and they think you will have an excellent result, though there
will be a scar. That is unavoidable.

“There was also an orbital fracture on the left side; that’s the eye socket bone, and we had to fix that too. The wires in
your jaws will come out in about six weeks,” Armand said. “Until then it’s liquids and shakes. You will lose some weight and
you will be talking like Al Pacino from the first
Godfather
movie for a little while.” He laughed. “But you have a job to do today. Do you know what it is?”

I shook my head.

“Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.” He laughed again.

Later, after Aisha changed the IV tubing and raised the head of the bed like I’d asked, I thought about what had happened
to me. Ruptured spleen. Broken teeth. Punctured lung. Busted eye socket. But as I watched a pigeon peck at a bread crumb on
the windowsill, I kept thinking of something else Armand/Dr. Faruqi had said:
The impact had
cut your upper lip in two,
he had said,
clean down the middle.
Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

FARID AND SOHRAB came to visit the next day. “Do you know who we are today? Do you remember?” Farid said, only half-jokingly.
I nodded.

“
Al
hamdullellah!”
he said, beaming. “No more talking nonsense.”

“Thank you, Farid,” I said through jaws wired shut. Armand was right—I did sound like Al Pacino from
The Godfather.
And my tongue surprised me every time it poked in one of the empty spaces left by the teeth I had swallowed. “I mean, thank
you. For everything.”

He waved a hand, blushed a little. “
Bas,
it’s not worthy of thanks,” he said. I turned to Sohrab. He was wearing a new outfit, light brown
pirhan-tumban
that looked a bit big for him, and a black skullcap. He was looking down at his feet, toying with the IV line coiled on the
bed.

“We were never properly introduced,” I said. I offered him my hand. “I am Amir.”

He looked at my hand, then to me. “You are the Amir agha Father told me about?” he said.

“Yes.” I remembered the words from Hassan’s letter.
I have told
much about you to Farzana jan and Sohrab, about us growing up together
and playing games and running in the streets. They laugh at the stories of
all the mischief you and I used to cause!
“I owe you thanks too, Sohrab jan,” I said. “You saved my life.”

He didn’t say anything. I dropped my hand when he didn’t take it. “I like your new clothes,” I mumbled.

“They’re my son’s,” Farid said. “He has outgrown them. They fit Sohrab pretty well, I would say.” Sohrab could stay with him,
he said, until we found a place for him. “We don’t have a lot of room, but what can I do? I can’t leave him to the streets.
Besides, my children have taken a liking to him.
Ha,
Sohrab?” But the boy just kept looking down, twirling the line with his finger.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Farid said, a little hesitantly. “What happened in that house? What happened between you and the
Talib?”

“Let’s just say we both got what we deserved,” I said.

Farid nodded, didn’t push it. It occurred to me that somewhere between the time we had left Peshawar for Afghanistan and now,
we had become friends. “I’ve been meaning to ask something too.”

“What?”

I didn’t want to ask. I was afraid of the answer. “Rahim Khan,” I said.

“He’s gone.”

My heart skipped. “Is he—”

“No, just . . . gone.” He handed me a folded piece of paper and a small key. “The landlord gave me this when I went looking
for him. He said Rahim Khan left the day after we did.”

“Where did he go?”

Farid shrugged. “The landlord didn’t know. He said Rahim Khan left the letter and the key for you and took his leave.” He
checked his watch. “I’d better go.
Bia,
Sohrab.”

“Could you leave him here for a while?” I said. “Pick him up later?” I turned to Sohrab. “Do you want to stay here with me
for a little while?”

He shrugged and said nothing.

“Of course,” Farid said. “I’ll pick him up just before evening
namaz.
”

THERE WERE THREE OTHER PATIENTS in my room. Two older men, one with a cast on his leg, the other wheezing with asthma, and
a young man of fifteen or sixteen who’d had appendix surgery. The old guy in the cast stared at us without blinking, his eyes
switching from me to the Hazara boy sitting on a stool. My roommates’ families—old women in bright
shalwar-kameez
es, children, men wearing skullcaps—shuffled noisily in and out of the room. They brought with them
pakora
s,
naan,
samosa
s,
biryani.
Sometimes people just wandered into the room, like the tall, bearded man who walked in just before Farid and Sohrab arrived.
He wore a brown blanket wrapped around him. Aisha asked him something in Urdu. He paid her no attention and scanned the room
with his eyes. I thought he looked at me a little longer than necessary. When the nurse spoke to him again, he just spun around
and left.

“How are you?” I asked Sohrab. He shrugged, looked at his hands.

“Are you hungry? That lady there gave me a plate of
biryani,
but I can’t eat it,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say to him. “You want it?”

He shook his head.

“Do you want to talk?”

He shook his head again.

We sat there like that for a while, silent, me propped up in bed, two pillows behind my back, Sohrab on the three-legged stool
next to the bed. I fell asleep at some point, and, when I woke up, daylight had dimmed a bit, the shadows had stretched, and
Sohrab was still sitting next to me. He was still looking down at his hands.

THAT NIGHT, after Farid picked up Sohrab, I unfolded Rahim Khan’s letter. I had delayed reading it as long as possible. It
read:

Amir jan,

Inshallah,
you have reached this letter safely. I pray that I have not put you in harm’s way and that Afghanistan has not been too unkind
to you. You have been in my prayers since the day you left.

You were right all those years to suspect that I knew. I did know. Hassan told me shortly after it happened. What you did
was wrong, Amir jan, but do not forget that you were a boy when it happened. A troubled little boy. You were too hard on yourself
then, and you still are—I saw it in your eyes in Peshawar. But I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no
goodness, does not suffer. I hope your suffering comes to an end with this journey to Afghanistan.

Amir jan, I am ashamed for the lies we told you all those years. You were right to be angry in Peshawar. You had a right to
know. So did Hassan. I know it doesn’t absolve anyone of anything, but the Kabul we lived in in those days was a strange world,
one in which some things mattered more than the truth.

Amir jan, I know how hard your father was on you when you were growing up. I saw how you suffered and yearned for his affections,
and my heart bled for you. But your father was a man torn between two halves, Amir jan: you and Hassan. He loved you both,
but he could not love Hassan the way he longed to, openly, and as a father. So he took it out on you instead—Amir, the socially
legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with
them. When he saw you, he saw himself. And his guilt. You are still angry and I realize it is far too early to expect you
to accept this, but maybe someday you will see that when your father was hard on you, he was also being hard on himself. Your
father, like you, was a tortured soul, Amir jan.

I cannot describe to you the depth and blackness of the sorrow that came over me when I learned of his passing. I loved him
because he was my friend, but also because he was a good man, maybe even a great man. And this is what I want you to understand,
that good,
real
good, was born out of your father’s remorse. Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building
the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true
redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.