The Kite Runner (4 page)

Later that night, curled up in bed, I read Rahim Khan’s note over and over. It read like this:

Amir jan,

I enjoyed your story very much.
Mashallah,
God has granted you a special talent. It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents
is a donkey. You have written your story with sound grammar and interesting style. But the most impressive thing about your
story is that it has irony. You may not even know what that word means. But you will someday. It is something that some writers
reach for their entire careers and never attain. You have achieved it with your first story.

My door is and always will be open to you, Amir jan. I shall hear any story you have to tell. Bravo.

Your friend,

Rahim

Buoyed by Rahim Khan’s note, I grabbed the story and hurried downstairs to the foyer where Ali and Hassan were sleeping on
a mattress. That was the only time they slept in the house, when Baba was away and Ali had to watch over me. I shook Hassan
awake and asked him if he wanted to hear a story.

He rubbed his sleep-clogged eyes and stretched. “Now? What time is it?”

“Never mind the time. This story’s special. I wrote it myself,” I whispered, hoping not to wake Ali. Hassan’s face brightened.

“Then I
have
to hear it,” he said, already pulling the blanket off him.

I read it to him in the living room by the marble fireplace. No playful straying from the words this time; this was about
me! Hassan was the perfect audience in many ways, totally immersed in the tale, his face shifting with the changing tones
in the story. When I read the last sentence, he made a muted clapping sound with his hands.

“
Mashallah,
Amir agha. Bravo!” He was beaming.

“You liked it?” I said, getting my second taste—and how sweet it was—of a positive review.

“Some day,
Inshallah,
you will be a great writer,” Hassan said. “And people all over the world will read your stories.”

“You exaggerate, Hassan,” I said, loving him for it.

“No. You will be great and famous,” he insisted. Then he paused, as if on the verge of adding something. He weighed his words
and cleared his throat. “But will you permit me to ask a question about the story?” he said shyly.

“Of course.”

“Well . . .” he started, broke off.

“Tell me, Hassan,” I said. I smiled, though suddenly the insecure writer in me wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear it.

“Well,” he said, “if I may ask, why did the man kill his wife? In fact, why did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears? Couldn’t
he have just smelled an onion?”

I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid, hadn’t even occurred to me. I moved my lips soundlessly.
It appeared that on the same night I had learned about one of writing’s objectives, irony, I would also be introduced to one
of its pitfalls: the Plot Hole. Taught by Hassan, of all people. Hassan who couldn’t read and had never written a single word
in his entire life. A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear,
What does he know, that illiterate
Hazara?
He’ll
never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?

“Well,” I began. But I never got to finish that sentence.

Because suddenly Afghanistan changed forever.

FIVE

Something roared like thunder. The earth shook a little and we heard the
rat-a-tat-tat
of gunfire. “Father!” Hassan cried. We sprung to our feet and raced out of the living room. We found Ali hobbling frantically
across the foyer.

“Father! What’s that sound?” Hassan yelped, his hands outstretched toward Ali. Ali wrapped his arms around us. A white light
flashed, lit the sky in silver. It flashed again and was followed by a rapid staccato of gunfire.

“They’re hunting ducks,” Ali said in a hoarse voice. “They hunt ducks at night, you know. Don’t be afraid.”

A siren went off in the distance. Somewhere glass shattered and someone shouted. I heard people on the street, jolted from
sleep and probably still in their pajamas, with ruffled hair and puffy eyes. Hassan was crying. Ali pulled him close, clutched
him with tenderness. Later, I would tell myself I hadn’t felt envious of Hassan. Not at all.

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour,
but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us
then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.
Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended.
Our
way of life. If not quite yet, then at least it was the beginning of the end. The end, the
official
end, would come first in April 1978 with the communist coup d’état, and then in December 1979, when Russian tanks would roll
into the very same streets where Hassan and I played, bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew and marking the start of
a still ongoing era of bloodletting.

Just before sunrise, Baba’s car peeled into the driveway. His door slammed shut and his running footsteps pounded the stairs.
Then he appeared in the doorway and I saw something on his face. Something I didn’t recognize right away because I’d never
seen it before: fear. “Amir! Hassan!” he exclaimed as he ran to us, opening his arms wide. “They blocked all the roads and
the telephone didn’t work. I was so worried!”

We let him wrap us in his arms and, for a brief insane moment, I was glad about whatever had happened that night.

THEY WEREN’T SHOOTING ducks after all. As it turned out, they hadn’t shot much of anything that night of July 17, 1973. Kabul
awoke the next morning to find that the monarchy was a thing of the past. The king, Zahir Shah, was away in Italy. In his
absence, his cousin Daoud Khan had ended the king’s forty-year reign with a bloodless coup.

I remember Hassan and I crouching that next morning outside my father’s study, as Baba and Rahim Khan sipped black tea and
listened to breaking news of the coup on Radio Kabul.

“Amir agha?” Hassan whispered.

“What?”

“What’s a ‘republic’?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” On Baba’s radio, they were saying that word, “republic,” over and over again.

“Amir agha?”

“What?”

“Does ‘republic’ mean Father and I will have to move away?”

“I don’t think so,” I whispered back.

Hassan considered this. “Amir agha?”

“What?”

“I don’t want them to send me and Father away.”

I smiled. “
Bas,
you donkey. No one’s sending you away.”

“Amir agha?”

“What?”

“Do you want to go climb our tree?”

My smile broadened. That was another thing about Hassan. He always knew when to say the right thing—the news on the radio
was getting pretty boring. Hassan went to his shack to get ready and I ran upstairs to grab a book. Then I went to the kitchen,
stuffed my pockets with handfuls of pine nuts, and ran outside to find Hassan waiting for me. We burst through the front gates
and headed for the hill.

We crossed the residential street and were trekking through a barren patch of rough land that led to the hill when, suddenly,
a rock struck Hassan in the back. We whirled around and my heart dropped. Assef and two of his friends, Wali and Kamal, were
approaching us.

Assef was the son of one of my father’s friends, Mahmood, an airline pilot. His family lived a few streets south of our home,
in a posh, high-walled compound with palm trees. If you were a kid living in the Wazir Akbar Khan section of Kabul, you knew
about Assef and his famous stainless-steel brass knuckles, hopefully not through personal experience. Born to a German mother
and Afghan father, the blond, blue-eyed Assef towered over the other kids. His well-earned reputation for savagery preceded
him on the streets. Flanked by his obeying friends, he walked the neighborhood like a Khan strolling through his land with
his eager-to-please entourage. His word was law, and if you needed a little legal education, then those brass knuckles were
just the right teaching tool. I saw him use those knuckles once on a kid from the Karteh-Char district. I will never forget
how Assef ’s blue eyes glinted with a light not entirely sane and how he grinned, how he
grinned,
as he pummeled that poor kid unconscious. Some of the boys in Wazir Akbar Khan had nicknamed him Assef
Goshkhor,
or Assef “the Ear Eater.” Of course, none of them dared utter it to his face unless they wished to suffer the same fate as
the poor kid who had unwittingly inspired that nickname when he had fought Assef over a kite and ended up fishing his right
ear from a muddy gutter. Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi
equivalent does not exist: “sociopath.”

Of all the neighborhood boys who tortured Ali, Assef was by far the most relentless. He was, in fact, the originator of the
Babalu jeer,
Hey,
Babalu, who did you eat today? Huh? Come on, Babalu, give us a smile!
And on days when he felt particularly inspired, he spiced up his badgering a little,
Hey, you flat-nosed Babalu, who did you eat today? Tell us,
you slant-eyed donkey!

Now he was walking toward us, hands on his hips, his sneakers kicking up little puffs of dust.

“Good morning,
kuni
s!” Assef exclaimed, waving. “Fag,” that was another of his favorite insults. Hassan retreated behind me as the three older
boys closed in. They stood before us, three tall boys dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Towering over us all, Assef crossed his
thick arms on his chest, a savage sort of grin on his lips. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that Assef might not
be entirely sane. It also occurred to me how lucky I was to have Baba as my father, the sole reason, I believe, Assef had
mostly refrained from harassing me too much.

He tipped his chin to Hassan. “Hey, Flat-Nose,” he said. “How is Babalu?”

Hassan said nothing and crept another step behind me.

“Have you heard the news, boys?” Assef said, his grin never faltering. “The king is gone. Good riddance. Long live the president!
My father knows Daoud Khan, did you know that, Amir?”

“So does my father,” I said. In reality, I had no idea if that was true or not.

“ ‘So does my father,’ ” Assef mimicked me in a whining voice. Kamal and Wali cackled in unison. I wished Baba were there.

“Well, Daoud Khan dined at our house last year,” Assef went on. “How do you like that, Amir?”

I wondered if anyone would hear us scream in this remote patch of land. Baba’s house was a good kilometer away. I wished we’d
stayed at the house.

“Do you know what I will tell Daoud Khan the next time he comes to our house for dinner?” Assef said. “I’m going to have a
little chat with him, man to man,
mard
to
mard.
Tell him what I told my mother. About Hitler. Now, there was a leader. A great leader. A man with vision. I’ll tell Daoud
Khan to remember that if they had let Hitler finish what he had started, the world be a better place now.”

“Baba says Hitler was crazy, that he ordered a lot of innocent people killed,” I heard myself say before I could clamp a hand
on my mouth.

Assef snickered. “He sounds like my mother, and she’s German; she should know better. But then they want you to believe that,
don’t they? They don’t want you to know the truth.”

I didn’t know who “they” were, or what truth they were hiding, and I didn’t want to find out. I wished I hadn’t said anything.
I wished again I’d look up and see Baba coming up the hill.

“But you have to read books they don’t give out in school,” Assef said. “I have. And my eyes have been opened. Now I have
a vision, and I’m going to share it with our new president. Do you know what it is?”

I shook my head. He’d tell me anyway; Assef always answered his own questions.

His blue eyes flicked to Hassan. “Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been, always will be. We are the true
Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our
watan.
They dirty our blood.” He made a sweeping, grandiose gesture with his hands. “Afghanistan for Pashtuns, I say. That’s my vision.”

Assef shifted his gaze to me again. He looked like someone coming out of a good dream. “Too late for Hitler,” he said. “But
not for us.”

He reached for something from the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ll ask the president to do what the king didn’t have the
quwat
to do. To rid Afghanistan of all the dirty,
kasseef
Hazaras.”

“Just let us go, Assef,” I said, hating the way my voice trembled. “We’re not bothering you.” “We’re not bothering you.”

“Oh, you’re bothering me,” Assef said. And I saw with a sinking heart what he had fished out of his pocket. Of course. His
stainless-steel brass knuckles sparkled in the sun. “You’re bothering me very much. In fact, you bother me more than this
Hazara here. How can you talk to him, play with him, let him touch you?” he said, his voice dripping with disgust. Wali and
Kamal nodded and grunted in agreement. Assef narrowed his eyes. Shook his head. When he spoke again, he sounded as baffled
as he looked. “How can you call him your ‘friend’?”

But
he’s
not my friend!
I almost blurted.
He’s
my servant!
Had I really thought that? Of course I hadn’t. I hadn’t. I treated Hassan well, just like a friend, better even, more like
a brother. But if so, then why, when Baba’s friends came to visit with their kids, didn’t I ever include Hassan in our games?
Why did I play with Hassan only when no one else was around?

Assef slipped on the brass knuckles. Gave me an icy look. “You’re part of the problem, Amir. If idiots like you and your father
didn’t take these people in, we’d be rid of them by now. They’d all just go rot in Hazarajat where they belong. You’re a disgrace
to Afghanistan.”

I looked in his crazy eyes and saw that he meant it. He
really
meant to hurt me. Assef raised his fist and came for me.

There was a flurry of rapid movement behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hassan bend down and stand up quickly.
Assef ’s eyes flicked to something behind me and widened with surprise. I saw that same look of astonishment on Kamal and
Wali’s faces as they too saw what had happened behind me.

I turned and came face to face with Hassan’s slingshot. Hassan had pulled the wide elastic band all the way back. In the cup
was a rock the size of a walnut. Hassan held the slingshot pointed directly at Assef ’s face. His hand trembled with the strain
of the pulled elastic band and beads of sweat had erupted on his brow.

“Please leave us alone, Agha,” Hassan said in a flat tone. He’d referred to Assef as “Agha,” and I wondered briefly what it
must be like to live with such an ingrained sense of one’s place in a hierarchy.

Assef gritted his teeth. “Put it down, you motherless Hazara.”

“Please leave us be, Agha,” Hassan said.

Assef smiled. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but there are three of us and two of you.”

Hassan shrugged. To an outsider, he didn’t look scared. But Hassan’s face was my earliest memory and I knew all of its subtle
nuances, knew each and every twitch and flicker that ever rippled across it. And I saw that he was scared. He was scared plenty.

“You are right, Agha. But perhaps you didn’t notice that I’m the one holding the slingshot. If you make a move, they’ll have
to change your nickname from Assef ‘the Ear Eater’ to ‘One-Eyed Assef,’ because I have this rock pointed at your left eye.”
He said this so flatly that even I had to strain to hear the fear that I knew hid under that calm voice.

Assef ’s mouth twitched. Wali and Kamal watched this exchange with something akin to fascination. Someone had challenged their
god. Humiliated him. And, worst of all, that someone was a skinny Hazara. Assef looked from the rock to Hassan. He searched
Hassan’s face intently. What he found in it must have convinced him of the seriousness of Hassan’s intentions, because he
lowered his fist.

“You should know something about me, Hazara,” Assef said gravely. “I’m a very patient person. This doesn’t end today, believe
me.” He turned to me. “This isn’t the end for you either, Amir. Someday, I’ll make you face me one on one.” Assef retreated
a step. His disciples followed.

“Your Hazara made a big mistake today, Amir,” he said. They then turned around, walked away. I watched them walk down the
hill and disappear behind a wall.

Hassan was trying to tuck the slingshot in his waist with a pair of trembling hands. His mouth curled up into something that
was sup posed to be a reassuring smile. It took him five tries to tie the string of his trousers. Neither one of us said much
of anything as we walked home in trepidation, certain that Assef and his friends would ambush us every time we turned a corner.
They didn’t and that should have comforted us a little. But it didn’t. Not at all.

FOR THE NEXT COUPLE of years, the words
economic development
and
reform
danced on a lot of lips in Kabul. The constitutional monarchy had been abolished, replaced by a republic, led by a president
of the republic. For a while, a sense of rejuvenation and purpose swept across the land. People spoke of women’s rights and
modern technology.