Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

And now, this woman, this mother, with her heartbreakingly eager, crooked smile and the barely veiled hope in her eyes. I cringed a little at the position of power I’d been granted, and all because I had won at the genetic lottery that had determined my sex.

I could never read the thoughts in the general’s eyes, but I knew this much about his wife: If I was going to have an adversary in this – whatever this was – it would not be her.

“Sit down, Amir jan,” she said. “Soraya, get him a chair, bachem . And wash one of those peaches. They’re sweet and fresh.”

“Nay, thank you,” I said. “I should get going. My father’s waiting.”

“Oh?” Khanum Taheri said, clearly impressed that I’d done the polite thing and declined the offer. “Then here, at least have this.” She threw a handful of kiwis and a few peaches into a paper bag and insisted I take them. “Carry my Salaam to your father. And come back to see us again.”

“I will. Thank you, Khala jan,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Soraya looking away.

“I THOUGHT YOU WERE GETTING COKES,” Baba said, taking the bag of peaches from me. He was looking at me in a simultaneously serious and playful way. I began to make something up, but he bit into a peach and waved his hand. “Don’t bother, Amir. Just remember what I said.”

THAT NIGHT IN BED, I thought of the way dappled sunlight had danced in Soraya’s eyes, and of the delicate hollows above her collarbone. I replayed our conversation over and over in my head. Had she said I heard you write or I heard you’re a writer ? Which was it? I tossed in my sheets and stared at the ceiling, dismayed at the thought of six laborious, interminable nights of yelda until I saw her again.

IT WENT ON LIKE THAT for a few weeks. I’d wait until the general went for a stroll, then I’d walk past the Taheris’ stand. If Khanum Taheri was there, she’d offer me tea and a kolcha and we’d chat about Kabul in the old days, the people we knew, her arthritis. Undoubtedly, she had noticed that my appearances always coincided with her husband’s absences, but she never let on. “Oh you just missed your Kaka,” she’d say. I actually liked it when Khanum Taheri was there, and not just because of her amiable ways; Soraya was more relaxed, more talkative with her mother around. As if her presence legitimized whatever was happening between us – though certainly not to the same degree that the general’s would have. Khanum Taheri’s chaperoning made our meetings, if not gossip-proof, then less gossip-worthy, even if her borderline fawning on me clearly embarrassed Soraya.

One day, Soraya and I were alone at their booth, talking. She was telling me about school, how she too was working on her general education classes, at Ohlone Junior College in Fremont.

“What will you major in?”

“I want to be a teacher,” she said.

“Really? Why?”

“I’ve always wanted to. When we lived in Virginia, I became ESL certified and now I teach at the public library one night a week. My mother was a teacher too, she taught Farsi and history at Zarghoona High School for girls in Kabul.”

A potbellied man in a deerstalker hat offered three dollars for a five-dollar set of candlesticks and Soraya let him have it. She dropped the money in a little candy box by her feet. She looked at me shyly. “I want to tell you a story,” she said, “but I’m a little embarrassed about it.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s kind of silly.”

“Please tell me.”

She laughed. “Well, when I was in fourth grade in Kabul, my father hired a woman named Ziba to help around the house. She had a sister in Iran, in Mashad, and, since Ziba was illiterate, she’d ask me to write her sister letters once in a while. And when the sister replied, I’d read her letter to Ziba. One day, I asked her if she’d like to learn to read and write. She gave me this big smile, crinkling her eyes, and said she’d like that very much. So we’d sit at the kitchen table after I was done with my own schoolwork and I’d teach her Alef-beh . I remember looking up sometimes in the middle of homework and seeing Ziba in the kitchen, stirring meat in the pressure cooker, then sitting down with a pencil to do the alphabet homework I’d assigned to her the night before.

“Anyway, within a year, Ziba could read children’s books. We sat in the yard and she read me the tales of Dara and Sara – slowly but correctly. She started calling me Moalem Soraya, Teacher Soraya.” She laughed again. “I know it sounds childish, but the first time Ziba wrote her own letter, I knew there was nothing else I’d ever want to be but a teacher. I was so proud of her and I felt I’d done something really worthwhile, you know?”

“Yes,” I lied. I thought of how I had used my literacy to ridicule Hassan. How I had teased him about big words he didn’t know.

“My father wants me to go to law school, my mother’s always throwing hints about medical school, but I’m going to be a teacher. Doesn’t pay much here, but it’s what I want.”

“My mother was a teacher too,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “My mother told me.” Then her face reddened with a blush at what she had blurted, at the implication of her answer, that “Amir Conversations” took place between them when I wasn’t there. It took an enormous effort to stop myself from smiling.

“I brought you something.” I fished the roll of stapled pages from my back pocket. “As promised.” I handed her one of my short stories.

“Oh, you remembered,” she said, actually beaming. “Thank you!” I barely had time to register that she’d addressed me with “ tu” for the first time and not the formal “ shoma ,” because suddenly her smile vanished. The color dropped from her face, and her eyes fixed on something behind me. I turned around. Came face-to-face with General Taheri.

“Amir jan. Our aspiring storyteller. What a pleasure,” he said. He was smiling thinly.

“ Salaam , General Sahib,” I said through heavy lips.

He moved past me, toward the booth. “What a beautiful day it is, nay?” he said, thumb hooked in the breast pocket of his vest, the other hand extended toward Soraya. She gave him the pages.

“They say it will rain this week. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He dropped the rolled pages in the garbage can. Turned to me and gently put a hand on my shoulder. We took a few steps together.

“You know, bachem , I have grown rather fond of you. You are a decent boy, I really believe that, but-” he sighed and waved a hand “-even decent boys need reminding sometimes. So it’s my duty to remind you that you are among peers in this flea market.” He stopped. His expressionless eyes bore into mine. “You see, everyone here is a storyteller.” He smiled, revealing perfectly even teeth. “Do pass my respects to your father, Amir jan.”

He dropped his hand. Smiled again.

“WHAT’S WRONG?” Baba said. He was taking an elderly woman’s money for a rocking horse.

“Nothing,” I said. I sat down on an old TV set. Then I told him anyway.

“Akh, Amir,” he sighed.

As it turned out, I didn’t get to brood too much over what had happened.

Because later that week, Baba caught a cold.

IT STARTED WITH A HACKING COUGH and the sniffles. He got over the sniffles, but the cough persisted. He’d hack into his handkerchief, stow it in his pocket. I kept after him to get it checked, but he’d wave me away. He hated doctors and hospitals. To my knowledge, the only time Baba had ever gone to a doctor was the time he’d caught malaria in India.

Then, two weeks later, I caught him coughing a wad of bloodstained phlegm into the toilet.