Kite Runner
I was standing in the doorway. For a moment, I didn't understand. There were other people, peering out of their own doorways around me, and I was going to go to them and ask what they were all looking at, but a couple seconds later, I realized it. I don't remember very clearly, what happened next. I walked into the street – some of the neighbors called my name, and one of them went out into the street to walk beside me. I might have forgotten, but I would have liked to thank them for not grabbing me and pulling me away. I wanted to see.
The man who carried the gun was laughing. That's what I remember most. He saw me walking towards him, and he just laughed in my face.
"Stupid boy! Stupid, filthy Hazara! Look at them! Look at them, remember that this is what you are, you stupid animal!" Laughing like a monkey. That's what I remember.
He walked away, leaving them lying on the road. I remember that my father looked sad. Not scared, not angry, just sad, like he would have wished to do one more thing, trim the last rosebush or wash one last sheet before he died. My mother looked scared. I wasn't sure whether to be ashamed or sorry for this: that my mother died frightened of death, while my father took it and shook its hand.
It was very quiet. After the gunshots, after the shattering echoes, I remember that no one said a word. No birds were singing; the city noises from downtown had been muffled.
I touched my mother's cheek. It was very cold, and I would have gone to fetch her a blanket, but there was someone standing behind me who would not let me move. I did not cry. I did not even whimper. I brushed Baba's thumb, and then I stood and walked away. I don't know where I walked. That's as much as I remember.
It might have been many days later, or perhaps only minutes. The neighbors took care of me for a bit – they fed me a dinner or two, let me sleep in their extra rooms, brought me tea and naan bread in bed. I don't remember eating much of it.
And then I found myself in the car, and we drove for a long time; it was very dark outside. When the car stopped, I got out, and the neighbor took me inside a building. It was larger than the first house I lived in with Baba and Madar. It was much smaller than Amir agha's house, and not nearly as nice and well kept.
The man who greeted us said that he was called Zaman. He wore a skullcap, and the left lens of his glasses was chipped. He told me that he would teach me arithmetic, since I already knew how to read. The neighbor spoke to him for a long time, and then left, and Zaman took me to see the rest of the house. I was surprised to find many other children there. They were all skinny and dirty, and at first I was afraid of them, but then a boy who was taller than me came and said that we were all family here, and that he would take care of me. He was gone the next day.
I learned to survive at the orphanage. Zaman was a kind man – he taught us new things every day, and made sure we all had enough food. Truthfully, life at the orphanage was not very bad – hunger was a constant presence, as well as cold, but every child who was there knew that things would only be made worse by bad behavior. We were friendly to each other – there were others like me, whose parents had been killed by the Taliban. Plenty of Hazaras, but Pashtun too, and despite what was going on outside, inside the orphanage there was no war.
New children arrived every day – some were gone quickly, some stayed. I learned to be quiet. I stayed by myself, ate what was given to me, learned what was taught to me, and took nothing that wasn't mine. I had no friends, but then neither did anyone else. It was best not to make strong bonds, for your best friend might be there one day and gone the next.
There was a tired old swing set in the back yard of the house. It was rusty and rotted and there was only one thin board strung between two chains that served as a swing, and for most children the appeal of the deflated basketball was higher.
I would perch atop the swing set, above everyone else, and survey the tiny, weed-infested yard as if it was my kingdom, and I was a great king who ruled with a gentle but firm hand. I would draw up plans for new cities in my head, sketch routes for new roads, even decide which of my fellow orphans would make a good chief advisor or high ambassador.
Since food and water was scarce, I made due with knowledge to quench my thirst. At noon, or sometimes late at night, Zaman would draw us all into the biggest room in the tiny house, and teach us something. One day it was ocean currents, the next it was Ancient Philosophy. Each lesson was barely enough to keep me alive.
One day, when I was settled in my usual seat, I saw a small family hurrying up to the doors of the orphanage. There were two women, clothed in burqas that hid their faces, and stumbling along between them was a young girl, with long, curling dark hair and wide, bright eyes. Tear tracks stained her cheeks.
I crawled down and went into the house to meet them, as was my custom. I had made it my duty to welcome every newcomer, as the tall boy had done to me when I had arrived, dazed and afraid.
"Have you ever been to Kandahar, hamshira? No? It's lovely," Zaman was saying, "What gardens! And the grapes!" The shorter woman, the one I assumed to be the young girl's mother, was seated in a chair on the opposite side of his desk. Her daughter and the other woman had left the room.
They talked for a while. I only half listened. It was a habit, picked up from the others. There was always a chance that we would catch a scrap of news from the world outside that Zaman had not already explained. As I sat, against the wall beside the doorway, the woman began to cry.
"God bless you. God bless you, brother," she said to him through her tears, and then she left. I went out into the bigger room now, to see the girl.
She was standing there, having wasted all of her tears long ago. I leaned against the doorframe and watched as Zaman explained the rules of the house to her, which were not many. There is always a certain kind of satisfying superiority one feels when they have experience in a place, and are facing someone who doesn't. By now, I knew the orphanage inside and out, and this poor little girl knew nothing. Someone would have to tell her.
Zaman left and she remained standing there, clutching a package of chewing gum to her chest, and breathing loudly through her nose. Every few seconds her breath caught and she gasped a little, and then recovered.
"Salaam, hamshira," I said quietly. My voice was raspy from lack of use. The girl flinched, and her eyes shifted nervously toward me, though her head didn't move.
"What's your name?" I asked.
The girl watched me for a moment, wide-eyed and trembling. "Aziza," she said in a half-whisper. This brought another wave of gasping sobs and tears, but these were silent, and she swallowed and hurriedly wiped them away.
"Pleased to meet you, Aziza jan," I said.
"What's your name?" she shot back, a hard edge to her shaking voice.
"Sohrab. After the hero from the story in the Shahnamah. You know it? If thou art indeed my father, than hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son...no?"
She shook her head. "I never read from the Shahnamah. My father doesn't approve of...of stories." She smiled sadly.
"It was my father's favorite story," I murmured, stepping away from the doorframe. "I'll have to tell you sometime. Come on, I'll show you around."
0o0o0o0o0o
I went back to Kabul, twenty-seven years later. Much had changed since I had lived there as a young boy. I had been in America for twenty-four years now, with Amir and Soraya. I had studied at a University; I was an architect now, with a job in the city at a top-notch firm. When I was nineteen, Laila, Tariq, Zalmai, Aziza and baby Mariam moved to our neighborhood in San Francisco. They lived in a small flat three houses down from ours. Aziza was seventeen then, Zalmai fourteen and Mariam ten. Amir agha went khasteghari when I was twenty-three and Aziza twenty. We were married the next year.
Now, I am driving down the dusty road from Peshawar. There are no fake beards now, no forged ID's, no hiding in the back of a fuel truck as Amir had when he had left Kabul so many years ago. Times had changed, times are always changing. Kabul was the same at first - the same streets, the orphanage in the Karteh-seh district with the tired swing set in the back yard. There were no children there now; the city itself seemed deserted.
I drove into the Wazir Akbar Khan district with mixed emotions - I hadn't been here since the day the Taliban had killed my mother and father, and part of me wanted to turn around and leave. But the other part was hungry for just one glimpse of the house where I had grown up, where the fading memories of days spent in the garden with Hassan, and Rahim Khan reading me stories from the Shahnamah, still brought on waves of sorrow and regret.
Amir's house (I never thought of it as my own, even as a small child living in the shack in the garden) was much the same. The Taliban had occupied it after my father was gone, and they had left it in sad disarray, but the outside of the tall, intricate building was mostly unchanged. I parked the car in the street in front of the house and climbed out.
No one seemed to be living there now - many of the houses up and down the street had an abandoned look to them. I walked up to the front door and put a hand on the wide brass knob. It was so cold that I jerked away the first time, surprised. Dust coated the underside of the handle, and it came away on my fingers, gray and feathery. I tried again, gently closing my fingers around the dull metal. It was easier to open the door than I expected - it was unlocked and hanging slightly off of its hinges. I slipped through, into blackness, something inside me reluctant to disturb whatever memories remained here.
The only light came from the wide, floor-to-ceiling windows at the back of the hall. The tile floor was as I remembered - each piece of stone handpicked by my grandfather. It was dusty; a coat of grime dulled the floor and the walls, chunks of plaster rested in the corners, having falling from the high dome.
I ascended the stairs, the smell of tobacco smoke and leather drifting around me, reminding me of my childhood. I peeked into each room, trying to conjure up what it felt like when I was young, when the house seemed so much bigger and there was so much activity. It had lost most of it's magic over the years, and with the layer of dust covering every surface, it became harder and harder to draw up the warm images.
I left the house soon after, gently closing the door behind me and feeling the almost imperceptible lifting of weight off of my slender shoulders. Dust settled on my wrists, and for a moment I stood there, my spine pressed against the door, with a finger to my wrist, poised to brush off the gray film, but instead feeling the pulse of blood through my veins.
The polyester hummed as I slid into the front seat of the Jeep and jabbed keys into the ignition. Once again, I was torn between turning around and driving away, and pursuing the same memories that I had come here to find. For the second time, the latter won out, so I revved the engine and the car trundled forward. I didn't know exactly where I was headed until I found myself there, guided by the faint lines that were traced in the maps of my mind. The car sputtered to a stop, I climbed out, and I was walking again, these steps shorter and with a sharper purpose. The tree stood on the same hill that had been described to me so many times as a young boy. It might have been past fruit-bearing age by this time, or perhaps it was just a late bloomer, but no bulging red ornaments adorned its gnarled branches now. The tree was gray and had the look of a delicate silver statue; modern art, even.
I stopped a few feet away and looked up at it, a pallid relief against an even more pallid sky, with my hands in my pockets and my eyes narrowed. I searched for a feeling about the place, something to remind me of the old days, but all I could feel was a cold wind, and something akin to hunger growling in the pit of my stomach. It wasn't that didn't bring back the memories that I thirsted for - no, they were even now spilling into my head like clean water from a crystal pitcher, but they seemed to flow right past into nothingness, for they didn't matter so much anymore. Here I was, walking the ground where my father's feet walked, ages ago when this land was still beautiful and the soil was thick and brown instead of red. But all I saw was my father, hare-lipped Hassan, the stupid Hazara, with pomegranate juice dripping off of his face, and blood on his knees, and the shadow of Amir standing at the base of the tree, screaming, "Hit me, Hassan! Hit me, god damn you!" That was the image that filled my head and left no room for pleasanter thoughts.
Blood-smell wafted around me as I stepped hesitantly forward, and scrutinized the gray trunk of the tree. I ran my fingers over it, circled it, looking. When I found them, the words scrawled in the bark like runes in a stone from ancient times, I stopped and allowed myself to breathe a little bit before blinking away the fog in front of my eyes and looking down. Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul, was printed in tiny, cramped handwriting, barely visible in the gray bark that had all but swallowed up the tiny letters. I ran my fingers over them again - "Hit me back! Get up, hit me!" - like a blind man reading brail. And then below it, in slightly more discernible script, Hassan and Sohrab, the next sultans of Kabul, and a small but distinct note, To remember Amir. "You're a coward! Nothing but a goddamn coward!" And then, my father, croaking, "There. Are you satisfied? Do you feel better?" And the red pomegranate juice dripping off his face.