The Kite Runner (32 page)

“Yes, Agha sahib,” the younger of the guards replied. “How could I forget?”

I had read about the Hazara massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif in the papers. It had happened just after the Taliban took over Mazar, one of the last cities to fall. I remembered Soraya handing me the article over breakfast, her face bloodless.

“Door-to-door. We only rested for food and prayer,” the Talib said. He said it fondly, like a man telling of a great party he’d attended. “We left the bodies in the streets, and if their families tried to sneak out to drag them back into their homes, we’d shoot them too. We left them in the streets for days. We left them for the dogs. Dog meat for dogs.”

He crushed his cigarette. Rubbed his eyes with tremulous hands. “You come from America?”

“Yes.”

“How is that whore these days?”

I had a sudden urge to urinate. I prayed it would pass. “I’m looking for a boy.”

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“Isn’t everyone?” he said. The men with the Kalashnikovs laughed. Their teeth were stained green with naswar.

“I understand he is here, with you,” I said. “His name is Sohrab.”

“I’ll ask you something: What are you doing with that whore? Why aren’t you here, with your Muslim brothers, serving your country?”

“I’ve been away a long time,” was all I could think of saying. My head felt so hot. I pressed my knees together, held my bladder.

The Talib turned to the two men standing by the door. “That’s an answer?” he asked them.

“Nay, Agha sahib,” they said in unison, smiling.

He turned his eyes to me. Shrugged. “Not an answer, they say.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “There are those in my circle who believe that abandoning watan when it needs you the most is the same as treason. I could have you arrested for treason, have you shot for it even. Does that frighten you?”

“I’m only here for the boy.”

“Does that frighten you?”

“Yes.”

“It should,” he said. He leaned back in the sofa. Crushed the cigarette.

I thought about Soraya. It calmed me. I thought of her sickleshaped birthmark, the elegant curve of her neck, her luminous eyes. I thought of our wedding night, gazing at each other’s reflection in the mirror under the green veil, and how her cheeks blushed when I whispered that I loved her. I remembered the two of us dancing to an old Afghan song, round and round, everyone watching and clapping, the world a blur of flowers, dresses, tuxedos, and smiling faces.

The Talib was saying something.

“Pardon?”

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“I said would you like to see him? Would you like to see my boy?” His upper lip curled up in a sneer when he said those last two words.

“Yes.”

The guard left the room. I heard the creak of a door swinging open. Heard the guard say something in Pashtu, in a hard voice. Then, footfalls, and the jingle of bells with each step. It reminded me of the Monkey Man Hassan and I used to chase down in Shar e-Nau. We used to pay him a rupia of our allowance for a dance. The bell around his monkey’s neck had made that same jingling sound.

Then the door opened and the guard walked in. He carried a stereo--a boom box--on his shoulder. Behind him, a boy dressed in a loose, sapphire blue pirhan-tumban followed.

The resemblance was breathtaking. Disorienting. Rahim Khan’s Polaroid hadn’t done justice to it.

The boy had his father’s round moon face, his pointy stub of a chin, his twisted, seashell ears, and the same slight frame. It was the Chinese doll face of my childhood, the face peering above fanned-out playing cards all those winter days, the face behind the mosquito net when we slept on the roof of my father’s house in the summer. His head was shaved, his eyes darkened with mascara, and his cheeks glowed with an unnatural red. When he stopped in the middle of the room, the bells strapped around his anklets stopped jingling. His eyes fell on me. Lingered. Then he looked away. Looked down at his naked feet.

One of the guards pressed a button and Pashtu music filled the room. Tabla, harmonium, the whine of a dil-roba. I guessed music wasn’t sinful as long as it played to Taliban ears. The three men began to clap.

“Wah wah! _Mashallah_!” they cheered.

Sohrab raised his arms and turned slowly. He stood on tiptoes, spun gracefully, dipped to his knees, straightened, and spun again. His little hands swiveled at the wrists, his fingers snapped, and his head swung side to side like a pendulum. His feet pounded the floor, the bells jingling in perfect harmony with the beat of the tabla. He kept his eyes closed.

“_Mashallah_!” they cheered. “Shahbas! Bravo!” The two guards whistled and laughed.

The Talib in white was tilting his head back and forth with the music, his mouth half-open in a leer.

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Sohrab danced in a circle, eyes closed, danced until the music stopped. The bells jingled one final time when he stomped his foot with the song’s last note. He froze in midspin.

“Bia, bia, my boy,” the Talib said, calling Sohrab to him. Sohrab went to him, head down, stood between his thighs. The Talib wrapped his arms around the boy. “How talented he is, nay, my Hazara boy!” he said. His hands slid down the child’s back, then up, felt under his armpits. One of the guards elbowed the other and snickered. The Talib told them to leave us alone.

“Yes, Agha sahib,” they said as they exited.

The Talib spun the boy around so he faced me. He locked his arms around Sohrab’s belly, rested his chin on the boy’s shoulder. Sohrab looked down at his feet, but kept stealing shy, furtive glances at me. The man’s hand slid up and down the boy’s belly.

Up and down, slowly, gently.

“I’ve been wondering,” the Talib said, his bloodshot eyes peering at me over Sohrab’s shoulder. “Whatever happened to old Babalu, anyway?”

The question hit me like a hammer between the eyes. I felt the color drain from my face.

My legs went cold. Numb.

He laughed. “What did you think? That you’d put on a fake beard and I wouldn’t recognize you? Here’s something I’ll bet you never knew about me: I never forget a face. Not ever.” He brushed his lips against Sohrab’s ear, kept his eye on me. “I heard your father died. Tsk-tsk. I always did want to take him on. Looks like I’ll have to settle for his weakling of a son.” Then he took off his sunglasses and locked his bloodshot blue eyes on mine.

I tried to take a breath and couldn’t. I tried to blink and couldn’t. The moment felt surreal--no, not surreal, absurd--it had knocked the breath out of me, brought the world around me to a standstill. My face was burning. What was the old saying about the bad penny? My past was like that, always turning up. His name rose from the deep and I didn’t want to say it, as if uttering it might conjure him. But he was already here, in the flesh, sitting less than ten feet from me, after all these years. His name escaped my lips:

“Assef.”

“Ainir jan.”

“What are you doing here?” I said, knowing how utterly foolish the question sounded, yet unable to think of anything else to say.

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“Me?” Assef arched an eyebrow “I’m in my element. The question is what are you doing here?”

“I already told you,” I said. My voice was trembling. I wished it wouldn’t do that, wished my flesh wasn’t shrinking against my bones.

“The boy?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’ll pay you for him,” I said. “I can have money wired.”

“Money?” Assef said. He tittered. “Have you ever heard of Rockingham? Western Australia, a slice of heaven. You should see it, miles and miles of beach. Green water, blue skies. My parents live there, in a beachfront villa. There’s a golf course behind the villa and a little lake. Father plays golf every day. Mother, she prefers tennis--Father says she has a wicked backhand. They own an Afghan restaurant and two jewelry stores; both businesses are doing spectacularly.” He plucked a red grape. Put it, lovingly, in Sohrab’s mouth. “So if I need money, I’ll have them wire it to me.” He kissed the side of Sohrab’s neck. The boy flinched a little, closed his eyes again. “Besides, I didn’t fight the Shorawi for money. Didn’t join the Taliban for money either. Do you want to know why I joined them?”

My lips had gone dry. I licked them and found my tongue had dried too.

“Are you thirsty?” Assef said, smirking.

“I think you’re thirsty.”

“I’m fine,” I said. The truth was, the room felt too hot suddenly--sweat was bursting from my pores, prickling my skin. And was this really happening? Was I really sitting across from Assef?

“As you wish,” he said. “Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, how I joined the Taliban. Well, as you may remember, I wasn’t much of a religious type. But one day I had an epiphany. I had it in jail. Do you want to hear?”

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I said nothing.

“Good. I’ll tell you,” he said. “I spent some time in jail, at Poleh-Charkhi, just after Babrak Karmal took over in 1980. I ended up there one night, when a group of Parc hami soldiers marched into our house and ordered my father and me at gun point to follow them. The bastards didn’t give a reason, and they wouldn’t answer my mother’s questions. Not that it was a mys tery; everyone knew the communists had no class.

They came from poor families with no name. The same dogs who weren’t fit to lick my shoes before the Shorawi came were now ordering me at gunpoint, Parchami flag on their lapels, making their little point about the fall of the bourgeoisie and acting like they were the ones with class. It was happening all over: Round up the rich, throw them in jail, make an example for the comrades.

“Anyway, we were crammed in groups of six in these tiny cells each the size of a refrigerator. Every night the commandant, a haif-Hazara, half-Uzbek thing who smelled like a rotting donkey, would have one of the prisoners dragged out of the cell and he’d beat him until sweat poured from his fat face. Then he’d light a cigarette, crack his joints, and leave. The next night, he’d pick someone else. One night, he picked me. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’d been peeing blood for three days. Kidney stones. And if you’ve never had one, believe me when I say it’s the worst imaginable pain. My mother used to get them too, and I remember she told me once she’d rather give birth than pass a kidney stone. Anyway, what could I do? They dragged me out and he started kick ing me. He had knee-high boots with steel toes that he wore every night for his little kicking game, and he used them on me. I was screaming and screaming and he kept kicking me and then, suddenly, he kicked me on the left kidney and the stone passed. Just like that! Oh, the relief!” Assef laughed. “And I yelled ‘Allah-u akbar’ and he kicked me even harder and I started laughing. He got mad and hit me harder, and the harder he kicked me, the harder I laughed. They threw me back in the cell laughing. I kept laughing and laughing because suddenly I knew that had been a message from God: He was on my side. He wanted me to live for a reason.

“You know, I ran into that commandant on the battlefield a few years later--funny how God works. I found him in a trench just outside Meymanah, bleeding from a piece of shrapnel in his chest. He was still wearing those same boots. I asked him if he remembered me. He said no. I told him the same thing I just told you, that I never forget a face. Then I shot him in the balls. I’ve been on a mission since.”

“What mission is that?” I heard myself say. “Stoning adulterers? Raping children?

Flogging women for wearing high heels? Massacring Hazaras? All in the name of Islam?” The words spilled suddenly and unexpectedly, came out before I could yank the leash. I wished I could take them back. Swallow them. But they were out. I had crossed a line, and whatever little hope I had of getting out alive had vanished with those words.

A look of surprise passed across Assef’s face, briefly, and disappeared. “I see this may turn out to be enjoyable after all,” he said, snickering. “But there are things traitors like you don’t understand.”

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“Like what?”

Assef’s brow twitched. “Like pride in your people, your customs, your language.

Afghanistan is like a beautiful mansion littered with garbage, and someone has to take out the garbage.”

“That’s what you were doing in Mazar, going door-to-door? Taking out the garbage?”

“Precisely.”

“In the west, they have an expression for that,” I said. “They call it ethnic cleansing.”

“Do they?” Assef’s face brightened. “Ethnic cleansing. I like it. I like the sound of it.”

“All I want is the boy.”

“Ethnic cleansing,” Assef murmured, tasting the words.

“I want the boy,” I said again. Sohrab’s eyes flicked to me. They were slaughter sheep’s eyes. They even had the mascara--I remembered how, on the day of Eid of qorban, the mullah in our backyard used to apply mascara to the eyes of the sheep and feed it a cube of sugar before slicing its throat. I thought I saw pleading in Sohrab’s eyes.

“Tell me why,” Assef said. He pinched Sohrab’s earlobe between his teeth. Let go.

Sweat beads rolled down his brow.

“That’s my business.”

“What do you want to do with him?” he said. Then a coy smile. “Or to him.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“How would you know? Have you tried it?”

“I want to take him to a better place.”

“Tell me why.”

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“That’s my business,” I said. I didn’t know what had emboldened me to be so curt, maybe the fact that I thought I was going to die anyway.

“I wonder,” Assef said. “I wonder why you’ve come all this way, Amir, come all this way for a Hazara? Why are you here? Why are you really here?”

“I have my reasons,” I said.

“Very well then,” Assef said, sneering. He shoved Sohrab in the back, pushed him right into the table. Sohrab’s hips struck the table, knocking it upside down and spilling the grapes. He fell on them, face first, and stained his shirt purple with grape juice. The table’s legs, crossing through the ring of brass balls, were now pointing to the ceiling.