Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

“How long have you been doing that?” I said.

“What’s for dinner?” he said.

“I’m taking you to the doctor.”

Even though Baba was a manager at the gas station, the owner hadn’t offered him health insurance, and Baba, in his recklessness, hadn’t insisted. So I took him to the county hospital in San Jose. The sallow, puffy-eyed doctor who saw us introduced himself as a second-year resident. “He looks younger than you and sicker than me,” Baba grumbled. The resident sent us down for a chest X ray. When the nurse called us back in, the resident was filling out a form.

“Take this to the front desk,” he said, scribbling quickly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A referral.” Scribble scribble .

“For what?”

“Pulmonary clinic.”

“What’s that?”

He gave me a quick glance. Pushed up his glasses. Began scribbling again. “He’s got a spot on his right lung. I want them to check it out.”

“A spot?” I said, the room suddenly too small.

“Cancer?” Baba added casually.

“Possible. It’s suspicious, anyway,” the doctor muttered.

“Can’t you tell us more?” I asked.

“Not really. Need a CAT scan first, then see the lung doctor.” He handed me the referral form. “You said your father smokes, right?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. Looked from me to Baba and back again. “They’ll call you within two weeks.”

I wanted to ask him how I was supposed to live with that word, “suspicious,” for two whole weeks. How was I supposed eat, work, study? How could he send me home with that word?

I took the form and turned it in. That night, I waited until Baba fell asleep, and then folded a blanket. I used it as a prayer rug. Bowing my head to the ground, I recited half-forgotten verses from the Koran – verses the mullah had made us commit to memory in Kabul – and asked for kindness from a God I wasn’t sure existed. I envied the mullah now, envied his faith and certainty.

Two weeks passed and no one called. And when I called them, they told me they’d lost the referral. Was I sure I had turned it in? They said they would call in another three weeks. I raised hell and bargained the three weeks down to one for the CAT scan, two to see the doctor.

The visit with the pulmonologist, Dr. Schneider, was going well until Baba asked him where he was from. Dr. Schneider said Russia. Baba lost it.

“Excuse us, Doctor,” I said, pulling Baba aside. Dr. Schneider smiled and stood back, stethoscope still in hand.

“Baba, I read Dr. Schneider’s biography in the waiting room. He was born in Michigan. Michigan ! He’s American, a lot more American than you and I will ever be.”

“I don’t care where he was born, he’s Roussi ,” Baba said, grimacing like it was a dirty word. “His parents were Roussi , his grandparents were Roussi . I swear on your mother’s face I’ll break his arm if he tries to touch me.”

“Dr. Schneider’s parents fled from Shorawi , don’t you see? They escaped!”

But Baba would hear none of it. Sometimes I think the only thing he loved as much as his late wife was Afghanistan, his late country. I almost screamed with frustration. Instead, I sighed and turned to Dr. Schneider. “I’m sorry, Doctor. This isn’t going to work out.”

The next pulmonologist, Dr. Amani, was Iranian and Baba approved. Dr. Amani, a soft-spoken man with a crooked mustache and a mane of gray hair, told us he had reviewed the CAT scan results and that he would have to perform a procedure called a bronchoscopy to get a piece of the lung mass for pathology. He scheduled it for the following week. I thanked him as I helped Baba out of the office, thinking that now I had to live a whole week with this new word, “mass,” an even more ominous word than “suspicious.” I wished Soraya were there with me.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. Baba’s was called “Oat Cell Carcinoma.” Advanced. Inoperable. Baba asked Dr. Amani for a prognosis. Dr. Amani bit his lip, used the word “grave.” “There is chemotherapy, of course,” he said. “But it would only be palliative.”

“What does that mean?” Baba asked.

Dr. Amani sighed. “It means it wouldn’t change the outcome, just prolong it.”

“That’s a clear answer, Dr. Amani. Thank you for that,” Baba said. “But no chemo medication for me.” He had the same resolved look on his face as the day he’d dropped the stack of food stamps on Mrs. Dobbins’s desk.

“But Baba-”

“Don’t you challenge me in public, Amir. Ever. Who do you think you are?”

THE RAIN General Taheri had spoken about at the flea market was a few weeks late, but when we stepped out of Dr. Amani’s office, passing cars sprayed grimy water onto the sidewalks. Baba lit a cigarette. He smoked all the way to the car and all the way home.

As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, “I wish you’d give the chemo a chance, Baba.”

Baba pocketed the keys, pulled me out of the rain and under the building’s striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with the hand holding the cigarette. “ Bas ! I’ve made my decision.”

“What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?” I said, my eyes welling up.

A look of disgust swept across his rain-soaked face. It was the same look he’d give me when, as a kid, I’d fall, scrape my knees, and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that brought it on now. “You’re twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown man! You…” he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the canvas awning. “What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”

He opened the door. Turned back to me. “And one more thing. No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one. I don’t want anybody’s sympathy.” Then he disappeared into the dim lobby. He chain-smoked the rest of that day in front of the TV. I didn’t know what or whom he was defying. Me? Dr. Amani? Or maybe the God he had never believed in.

FOR A WHILE, even cancer couldn’t keep Baba from the flea market. We made our garage sale treks on Saturdays, Baba the driver and me the navigator, and set up our display on Sundays. Brass lamps. Baseball gloves. Ski jackets with broken zippers. Baba greeted acquaintances from the old country and I haggled with buyers over a dollar or two. Like any of it mattered. Like the day I would become an orphan wasn’t inching closer with each closing of shop.

Sometimes, General Taheri and his wife strolled by. The general, ever the diplomat, greeted me with a smile and his two-handed shake. But there was a new reticence to Khanum Taheri’s demeanor. A reticence broken only by her secret, droopy smiles and the furtive, apologetic looks she cast my way when the general’s attention was engaged elsewhere.

I remember that period as a time of many “firsts”: The first time I heard Baba moan in the bathroom. The first time I found blood on his pillow. In over three years running the gas station, Baba had never called in sick. Another first.

By Halloween of that year, Baba was getting so tired by mid-Saturday afternoon that he’d wait behind the wheel while I got out and bargained for junk. By Thanksgiving, he wore out before noon. When sleighs appeared on front lawns and fake snow on Douglas firs, Baba stayed home and I drove the VW bus alone up and down the peninsula.

Sometimes at the flea market, Afghan acquaintances made remarks about Baba’s weight loss. At first, they were complimentary. They even asked the secret to his diet. But the queries and compliments stopped when the weight loss didn’t. When the pounds kept shedding. And shedding. When his cheeks hollowed. And his temples melted. And his eyes receded in their sockets.