The Kite Runner (30 page)

“You’ve been to Afghanistan,” I said. “You know how improbable that is.”

“I know,” he said. “But let’s suppose it’s clear that the child has no surviving parent. Even then, the INS thinks it’s good
adoption practice to place the child with someone in his own country so his heritage can be preserved.”

“What heritage?” I said. “The Taliban have destroyed what heritage Afghans had. You saw what they did to the giant Buddhas
in Bamiyan.”

“I’m sorry, I’m telling you how the INS works, Amir,” Omar said, touching my arm. He glanced at Sohrab and smiled. Turned
back to me. “Now, a child has to be legally adopted according to the laws and regulations of his own country. But when you
have a country in turmoil, say a country like Afghanistan, government offices are busy with emergencies, and processing adoptions
won’t be a top priority.”

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. A pounding headache was settling in just behind them.

“But let’s suppose that somehow Afghanistan gets its act together,” Omar said, crossing his arms on his protruding belly.
“It still may not permit this adoption. In fact, even the more moderate Muslim nations are hesitant with adoptions because
in many of those countries, Islamic law,
Shari’a,
doesn’t recognize adoption.”

“You’re telling me to give it up?” I asked, pressing my palm to my forehead.

“I grew up in the U.S., Amir. If America taught me anything, it’s that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl
Scouts’ lemonade jar. But, as your lawyer, I have to give you the facts,” he said. “Finally, adoption agencies routinely send
staff members to evaluate the child’s milieu, and no reasonable agency is going to send an agent to Afghanistan.”

I looked at Sohrab sitting on the bed, watching TV, watching us. He was sitting the way his father used to, chin resting on
one knee.

“I’m his half uncle, does that count for anything?”

“It does if you can prove it. I’m sorry, do you have any papers or anyone who can support you?”

“No papers,” I said, in a tired voice. “No one knew about it. Sohrab didn’t know until I told him, and I myself didn’t find
out until recently. The only other person who knows is gone, maybe dead.” “Hmm.”

“What are my options, Omar?”

“I’ll be frank. You don’t have a lot of them.”

“Well, Jesus, what can I do?”

Omar breathed in, tapped his chin with the pen, let his breath out. “You could still file an orphan petition, hope for the
best. You could do an independent adoption. That means you’d have to live with Sohrab here in Pakistan, day in and day out,
for the next two years. You could seek asylum on his behalf. That’s a lengthy process and you’d have to prove political persecution.
You could request a humanitarian visa. That’s at the discretion of the attorney general and it’s not easily given.” He paused.
“There is another option, probably your best shot.”

“What?” I said, leaning forward.

“You could relinquish him to an orphanage here, then file an orphan petition. Start your I-600 form and your home study while
he’s in a safe place.”

“What are those?”

“I’m sorry, the I-600 is an INS formality. The home study is done by the adoption agency you choose,” Omar said. “It’s, you
know, to make sure you and your wife aren’t raving lunatics.”

“I don’t want to do that,” I said, looking again at Sohrab. “I promised him I wouldn’t send him back to an orphanage.”

“Like I said, it may be your best shot.”

We talked a while longer. Then I walked him out to his car, an old VW Bug. The sun was setting on Islamabad by then, a flaming
red nimbus in the west. I watched the car tilt under Omar’s weight as he somehow managed to slide in behind the wheel. He
rolled down the window. “Amir?”

“Yes.”

“I meant to tell you in there, about what you’re trying to do? I think it’s pretty great.”

He waved as he pulled away. Standing outside the hotel room and waving back, I wished Soraya could be there with me.

SOHRAB HAD TURNED OFF THE TV when I went back into the room. I sat on the edge of my bed, asked him to sit next to me. “Mr.
Faisal thinks there is a way I can take you to America with me,” I said.

“He does?” Sohrab said, smiling faintly for the first time in days. “When can we go?”

“Well, that’s the thing. It might take a little while. But he said it can be done and he’s going to help us.” I put my hand
on the back of his neck. From outside, the call to prayer blared through the streets.

“How long?” Sohrab asked.

“I don’t know. A while.”

Sohrab shrugged and smiled, wider this time. “I don’t mind. I can wait. It’s like the sour apples.”

“Sour apples?”

“One time, when I was really little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard
like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I’d just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn’t have become sick. So now,
whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”

“Sour apples,” I said. “
Mashallah,
you’re just about the smartest little guy I’ve ever met, Sohrab jan.” His ears reddened with a blush.

“Will you take me to that red bridge? The one with the fog?” he said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Absolutely.”

“And we’ll drive up those streets, the ones where all you see is the hood of the car and the sky?”

“Every single one of them,” I said. My eyes stung with tears and I blinked them away.

“Is English hard to learn?”

“I say, within a year, you’ll speak it as well as Farsi.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” I placed a finger under his chin, turned his face up to mine. “There
is
one other thing, Sohrab.”

“What?”

“Well, Mr. Faisal thinks that it would really help if we could . . . if we could ask you to stay in a home for kids for a
while.”

“Home for kids?” he said, his smile fading. “You mean an orphanage?”

“It would only be for a little while.”

“No,” he said. “No, please.”

“Sohrab, it would be for just a little while. I promise.”

“You promised you’d never put me in one of those places, Amir agha,” he said. His voice was breaking, tears pooling in his
eyes. I felt like a prick.

“This is different. It would be here, in Islamabad, not in Kabul. And I’d visit you all the time until we can get you out
and take you to America.”

“Please! Please, no!” he croaked. “I’m scared of that place. They’ll hurt me! I don’t want to go.”

“No one is going to hurt you. Not ever again.”

“Yes they will! They always say they won’t but they lie. They lie! Please, God!”

I wiped the tear streaking down his cheek with my thumb. “Sour apples, remember? It’s just like the sour apples,” I said softly.

“No it’s not. Not that place. God, oh God. Please, no!” He was trembling, snot and tears mixing on his face.

“
Shhh.”
I pulled him close, wrapped my arms around his shaking little body. “
Shhh.
It’ll be all right. We’ll go home together. You’ll see, it’ll be all right.”

His voice was muffled against my chest, but I heard the panic in it. “Please promise you won’t! Oh God, Amir agha! Please
promise you won’t!”

How could I promise? I held him against me, held him tightly, and rocked back and forth. He wept into my shirt until his tears
dried, until his shaking stopped and his frantic pleas dwindled to indecipherable mumbles. I waited, rocked him until his
breathing slowed and his body slackened. I remembered something I had read somewhere a long time ago:
That’s
how children deal with terror. They fall asleep.

I carried him to his bed, set him down. Then I lay in my own bed, looking out the window at the purple sky over Islamabad.

THE SKY WAS A DEEP BLACK when the phone jolted me from sleep. I rubbed my eyes and turned on the bedside lamp. It was a little
past 10:30 P.M.; I’d been sleeping for almost three hours. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Call from America.” Mr. Fayyaz’s bored voice.

“Thank you,” I said. The bathroom light was on; Sohrab was taking his nightly bath. A couple of clicks and then Soraya:
“
Salaam!”
She sounded excited.

“Hi.”

“How did the meeting go with the lawyer?”

I told her what Omar Faisal had suggested. “Well, you can forget about it,” she said. “We won’t have to do that.”

I sat up. “
Rawsti?
Why, what’s up?”

“I heard back from Kaka Sharif. He said the key was getting Sohrab into the country. Once he’s in, there are ways of keeping
him here. So he made a few calls to his INS friends. He called me back tonight and said he was almost certain he could get
Sohrab a humanitarian visa.”

“No kidding?” I said. “Oh thank God! Good ol’ Sharif jan!”

“I know. Anyway, we’ll serve as the sponsors. It should all happen pretty quickly. He said the visa would be good for a year,
plenty of time to apply for an adoption petition.”

“It’s really going to happen, Soraya, huh?”

“It looks like it,” she said. She sounded happy. I told her I loved her and she said she loved me back. I hung up.

“Sohrab!” I called, rising from my bed. “I have great news.” I knocked on the bathroom door. “Sohrab! Soraya jan just called
from California. We won’t have to put you in the orphanage, Sohrab. We’re going to America, you and I. Did you hear me? We’re
going to America!”

I pushed the door open. Stepped into the bathroom.

Suddenly I was on my knees, screaming. Screaming through my clenched teeth. Screaming until I thought my throat would rip
and my chest explode.

Later, they said I was still screaming when the ambulance arrived.

TWENTY-FIVE

They won’t let me in.

I see them wheel him through a set of double doors and I follow. I burst through the doors, the smell of iodine and peroxide
hits me, but all I have time to see is two men wearing surgical caps and a woman in green huddling over a gurney. A white
sheet spills over the side of the gurney and brushes against grimy checkered tiles. A pair of small, bloody feet poke out
from under the sheet and I see that the big toenail on the left foot is chipped. Then a tall, thickset man in blue presses
his palm against my chest and he’s pushing me back out through the doors, his wedding band cold on my skin. I shove forward
and I curse him, but he says you cannot be here, he says it in English, his voice polite but firm. “You must wait,” he says,
leading me back to the waiting area, and now the double doors swing shut behind him with a sigh and all I see is the top of
the men’s surgical caps through the doors’ narrow rectangular windows.

He leaves me in a wide, windowless corridor crammed with people sitting on metallic folding chairs set along the walls, others
on the thin frayed carpet. I want to scream again, and I remember the last time I felt this way, riding with Baba in the tank
of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with the other refugees. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise
up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here,
my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other
reality tonight. I close my eyes and my nostrils fill with the smells of the corridor, sweat and ammonia, rubbing alcohol
and curry. On the ceiling, moths fling themselves at the dull gray light tubes running the length of the corridor and I hear
the papery flapping of their wings. I hear chatter, muted sobbing, sniffling, someone moaning, someone else sighing, elevator
doors opening with a
bing,
the operator paging someone in Urdu.

I open my eyes again and I know what I have to do. I look around, my heart a jackhammer in my chest, blood thudding in my
ears. There is a dark little supply room to my left. In it, I find what I need. It will do. I grab a white bedsheet from the
pile of folded linens and carry it back to the corridor. I see a nurse talking to a policeman near the restroom. I take the
nurse’s elbow and pull, I want to know which way is west. She doesn’t understand and the lines on her face deepen when she
frowns. My throat aches and my eyes sting with sweat, each breath is like inhaling fire, and I think I am weeping. I ask again.
I beg. The policeman is the one who points.

I throw my makeshift
jai-namaz,
my prayer rug, on the floor and I get on my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, my tears soaking through the sheet. I
bow to the west. Then I remember I haven’t prayed for over fifteen years. I have long forgotten the words. But it doesn’t
matter, I will utter those few words I still remember:
La illaha il Allah,
Muhammad u rasul ullah.
There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger. I see now that Baba was wrong, there is a God, there always had been.
I see Him here, in the eyes of the people in this corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those
who have lost God will find Him, not the white
masjid
with its bright diamond lights and towering minarets. There is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that
He forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only
to turn to Him now in my hour of need, I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is. I bow
to the west and kiss the ground and promise that I will do
zakat,
I will do
namaz,
I will fast during Ramadan and when Ramadan has passed I will go on fasting, I will commit to memory every last word of His
holy book, and I will set on a pilgrimage to that sweltering city in the desert and bow before the Ka’bah too. I will do all
of this and I will think of Him every day from this day on if He only grants me this one wish: My hands are stained with Hassan’s
blood; I pray God doesn’t let them get stained with the blood of his boy too.

I hear a whimpering and realize it is mine, my lips are salty with the tears trickling down my face. I feel the eyes of everyone
in this corridor on me and still I bow to the west. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I’d always
feared they would.

A STARLESS, BLACK NIGHT falls over Islamabad. It’s a few hours later and I am sitting now on the floor of a tiny lounge off
the corridor that leads to the emergency ward. Before me is a dull brown coffee table cluttered with newspapers and dog-eared
magazines—an April 1996 issue of
Time;
a Pakistani newspaper showing the face of a young boy who was hit and killed by a train the week before; an entertainment
magazine with smiling Lollywood actors on its glossy cover. There is an old woman wearing a jade green
shalwar-kameez
and a crocheted shawl nodding off in a wheelchair across from me. Every once in a while, she stirs awake and mutters a prayer
in Arabic. I wonder tiredly whose prayers will be heard tonight, hers or mine. I picture Sohrab’s face, the pointed meaty
chin, his small seashell ears, his slanting bamboo-leaf eyes so much like his father’s. A sorrow as black as the night outside
invades me, and I feel my throat clamping.

I need air.

I get up and open the windows. The air coming through the screen is musty and hot—it smells of overripe dates and dung. I
force it into my lungs in big heaps, but it doesn’t clear the clamping feeling in my chest. I drop back on the floor. I pick
up the
Time
magazine and flip through the pages. But I can’t read, can’t focus on anything. So I toss it on the table and go back to staring
at the zigzagging pattern of the cracks on the cement floor, at the cobwebs on the ceiling where the walls meet, at the dead
flies littering the windowsill. Mostly, I stare at the clock on the wall. It’s just past 4 A.M. and I have been shut out of
the room with the swinging double doors for over five hours now. I still haven’t heard any news.

The floor beneath me begins to feel like part of my body, and my breathing is growing heavier, slower. I want to sleep, shut
my eyes and lie my head down on this cold, dusty floor. Drift off. When I wake up, maybe I will discover that everything I
saw in the hotel bathroom was part of a dream: the water drops dripping from the faucet and landing with a
plink
into the bloody bathwater; the left arm dangling over the side of the tub, the blood-soaked razor sitting on the toilet tank—the
same razor I had shaved with the day before—and his eyes, still half open but lightless. That more than anything. I want to
forget the eyes.

Soon, sleep comes and I let it take me. I dream of things I can’t remember later.

SOMEONE IS TAPPING ME on the shoulder. I open my eyes. There is a man kneeling beside me. He is wearing a cap like the men
behind the swinging double doors and a paper surgical mask over his mouth—my heart sinks when I see a drop of blood on the
mask. He has taped a picture of a doe-eyed little girl to his beeper. He unsnaps his mask and I’m glad I don’t have to look
at Sohrab’s blood anymore. His skin is dark like the imported Swiss chocolate Hassan and I used to buy from the bazaar in
Shar-e-Nau; he has thinning hair and hazel eyes topped with curved eyelashes. In a British accent, he tells me his name is
Dr. Nawaz, and suddenly I want to be away from this man, because I don’t think I can bear to hear what he has come to tell
me. He says the boy had cut himself deeply and had lost a great deal of blood and my mouth begins to mutter that prayer again:

La illaha il Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah.

They had to transfuse several units of red cells—
How will I tell Soraya?

Twice, they had to revive him—
I will do
namaz,
I will do
zakat.

They would have lost him if his heart hadn’t been young and strong—
I will fast.

He is alive.

Dr. Nawaz smiles. It takes me a moment to register what he has just said. Then he says more but I don’t hear him. Because
I have taken his hands and I have brought them up to my face. I weep my relief into this stranger’s small, meaty hands and
he says nothing now. He waits.

THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT is
L
-shaped and dim, a jumble of bleeping monitors and whirring machines. Dr. Nawaz leads me between two rows of beds separated
by white plastic curtains. Sohrab’s bed is the last one around the corner, the one nearest the nurses’ station where two nurses
in green surgical scrubs are jotting notes on clipboards, chatting in low voices. On the silent ride up the elevator with
Dr. Nawaz, I had thought I’d weep again when I saw Sohrab. But when I sit on the chair at the foot of his bed, looking at
his white face through the tangle of gleaming plastic tubes and IV lines, I am dry-eyed. Watching his chest rise and fall
to the rhythm of the hissing ventilator, a curious numbness washes over me, the same numbness a man might feel seconds after
he has swerved his car and barely avoided a head-on collision.

I doze off, and, when I wake up, I see the sun rising in a buttermilk sky through the window next to the nurses’ station.
The light slants into the room, aims my shadow toward Sohrab. He hasn’t moved.

“You’d do well to get some sleep,” a nurse says to me. I don’t recognize her—there must have been a shift change while I’d
napped. She takes me to another lounge, this one just outside the ICU. It’s empty. She hands me a pillow and a hospital-issue
blanket. I thank her and lie on the vinyl sofa in the corner of the lounge. I fall asleep almost immediately.

I dream I am back in the lounge downstairs. Dr. Nawaz walks in and I rise to meet him. He takes off his paper mask, his hands
suddenly whiter than I remembered, his nails manicured, he has neatly parted hair, and I see he is not Dr. Nawaz at all but
Raymond Andrews, the little embassy man with the potted tomatoes. Andrews cocks his head. Narrows his eyes.

IN THE DAYTIME, the hospital was a maze of teeming, angled hallways, a blur of blazing-white overhead fluorescence. I came
to know its layout, came to know that the fourth-floor button in the east wing elevator didn’t light up, that the door to
the men’s room on that same floor was jammed and you had to ram your shoulder into it to open it. I came to know that hospital
life has a rhythm, the flurry of activity just before the morning shift change, the midday hustle, the stillness and quiet
of the late-night hours interrupted occasionally by a blur of doctors and nurses rushing to revive someone. I kept vigil at
Sohrab’s bedside in the daytime and wandered through the hospital’s serpentine corridors at night, listening to my shoe heels
clicking on the tiles, thinking of what I would say to Sohrab when he woke up. I’d end up back in the ICU, by the whooshing
ventilator beside his bed, and I’d be no closer to knowing.

After three days in the ICU, they withdrew the breathing tube and transferred him to a ground-level bed. I wasn’t there when
they moved him. I had gone back to the hotel that night to get some sleep and ended up tossing around in bed all night. In
the morning, I tried to not look at the bathtub. It was clean now, someone had wiped off the blood, spread new floor mats
on the floor, and scrubbed the walls. But I couldn’t stop myself from sitting on its cool, porcelain edge. I pictured Sohrab
filling it with warm water. Saw him undressing. Saw him twisting the razor handle and opening the twin safety latches on the
head, sliding the blade out, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. I pictured him lowering himself into the water,
lying there for a while, his eyes closed. I wondered what his last thought had been as he had raised the blade and brought
it down.

I was exiting the lobby when the hotel manager, Mr. Fayyaz, caught up with me. “I am very sorry for you,” he said, “but I
am asking for you to leave my hotel, please. This is bad for my business, very bad.”

I told him I understood and I checked out. He didn’t charge me for the three days I’d spent at the hospital. Waiting for a
cab outside the hotel lobby, I thought about what Mr. Fayyaz had said to me that night we’d gone looking for Sohrab:
The thing about you Afghanis is that . . .
well, you people are a little reckless.
I had laughed at him, but now I wondered. Had I actually gone to sleep after I had given Sohrab the news he feared most?

When I got in the cab, I asked the driver if he knew any Persian bookstores. He said there was one a couple of kilometers
south. We stopped there on the way to the hospital.

SOHRAB’S NEW ROOM had cream-colored walls, chipped, dark gray moldings, and glazed tiles that might have once been white.
He shared the room with a teenaged Punjabi boy who, I later learned from one of the nurses, had broken his leg when he had
slipped off the roof of a moving bus. His leg was in a cast, raised and held by tongs strapped to several weights.

Sohrab’s bed was next to the window, the lower half lit by the late-morning sunlight streaming through the rectangular panes.
A uniformed security guard was standing at the window, munching on cooked watermelon seeds—Sohrab was under twenty-four-hours-a-day
suicide watch. Hospital protocol, Dr. Nawaz had informed me. The guard tipped his hat when he saw me and left the room.

Sohrab was wearing short-sleeved hospital pajamas and lying on his back, blanket pulled to his chest, face turned to the window.
I thought he was sleeping, but when I scooted a chair up to his bed his eyelids fluttered and opened. He looked at me, then
looked away. He was so pale, even with all the blood they had given him, and there was a large purple bruise in the crease
of his right arm.

“How are you?” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was looking through the window at a fenced-in sandbox and swing set in the hospital garden. There was
an arch-shaped trellis near the playground, in the shadow of a row of hibiscus trees, a few green vines climbing up the timber
lattice. A handful of kids were playing with buckets and pails in the sandbox. The sky was a cloudless blue that day, and
I saw a tiny jet leaving behind twin white trails. I turned back to Sohrab. “I spoke to Dr. Nawaz a few minutes ago and he
thinks you’ll be discharged in a couple of days. That’s good news, nay?”