Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Soraya said.

“I’ll say one more thing,” he said. I could tell he was getting revved up; we were about to get one of the general’s little speeches. “Take Amir jan, here. We all knew his father, I know who his grandfather was in Kabul and his great-grandfather before him, I could sit here and trace generations of his ancestors for you if you asked. That’s why when his father – God give him peace – came khastegari , I didn’t hesitate. And believe me, his father wouldn’t have agreed to ask for your hand if he didn’t know whose descendant you were. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem , and when you adopt, you don’t know whose blood you’re bringing into your house.

“Now, if you were American, it wouldn’t matter. People here marry for love, family name and ancestry never even come into the equation. They adopt that way too, as long as the baby is healthy, everyone is happy. But we are Afghans, bachem .”

“Is the fish almost ready?” Soraya said. General Taheri’s eyes lingered on her. He patted her knee. “Just be happy you have your health and a good husband.”

“What do you think, Amir jan?” Khala Jamila said.

I put my glass on the ledge, where a row of her potted geraniums were dripping water. “I think I agree with General Sahib.”

Reassured, the general nodded and went back to the grill.

We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the general his, and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. It wasn’t meant to be , Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

A FEW MONTHS LATER, we used the advance for my second novel and placed a down payment on a pretty, two-bedroom Victorian house in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. It had a peaked roof, hardwood floors, and a tiny backyard which ended in a sun deck and a fire pit. The general helped me refinish the deck and paint the walls. Khala Jamila bemoaned us moving almost an hour away, especially since she thought Soraya needed all the love and support she could get – oblivious to the fact that her well-intended but overbearing sympathy was precisely what was driving Soraya to move.

SOMETIMES, SORAYA SLEEPING NEXT TO ME, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

June 2001

I lowered the phone into the cradle and stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t until Aflatoon startled me with a bark that I realized how quiet the room had become. Soraya had muted the television.

“You look pale, Amir,” she said from the couch, the same one her parents had given us as a housewarming gift for our first apartment. She’d been lying on it with Aflatoon’s head nestled on her chest, her legs buried under the worn pillows. She was half-watching a PBS special on the plight of wolves in Minnesota, half-correcting essays from her summer-school class – she’d been teaching at the same school now for six years. She sat up, and Aflatoon leapt down from the couch. It was the general who had given our cocker spaniel his name, Farsi for “Plato,” because, he said, if you looked hard enough and long enough into the dog’s filmy black eyes, you’d swear he was thinking wise thoughts.

There was a sliver of fat, just a hint of it, beneath Soraya’s chin now. The past ten years had padded the curves of her hips some, and combed into her coal black hair a few streaks of cinder gray. But she still had the face of a Grand Ball princess, with her bird-in-flight eyebrows and nose, elegantly curved like a letter from ancient Arabic writings.

“You look pale,” Soraya repeated, placing the stack of papers on the table.

“I have to go to Pakistan.”

She stood up now. “Pakistan?”

“Rahim Khan is very sick.” A fist clenched inside me with those words.

“Kaka’s old business partner?” She’d never met Rahim Khan, but I had told her about him. I nodded.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Amir.”

“We used to be close,” I said. “When I was a kid, he was the first grown-up I ever thought of as a friend.” I pictured him and Baba drinking tea in Baba’s study, then smoking near the window, a sweetbrier-scented breeze blowing from the garden and bending the twin columns of smoke.

“I remember you telling me that,” Soraya said. She paused. “How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. He wants to see me.”

“Is it…”

“Yes, it’s safe. I’ll be all right, Soraya.” It was the question she’d wanted to ask all along – fifteen years of marriage had turned us into mind readers. “I’m going to go for a walk.”

“Should I go with you?”

“Nay, I’d rather be alone.”

I DROVE TO GOLDEN GATE PARK and walked along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of the park. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon; the sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp San Francisco breeze. I sat on a park bench, watched a man toss a football to his son, telling him to not sidearm the ball, to throw over the shoulder. I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails. They floated high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills.

I thought about a comment Rahim Khan had made just before we hung up. Made it in passing, almost as an afterthought. I closed my eyes and saw him at the other end of the scratchy long-distance line, saw him with his lips slightly parted, head tilted to one side. And again, something in his bottomless black eyes hinted at an unspoken secret between us. Except now I knew he knew. My suspicions had been right all those years. He knew about Assef, the kite, the money, the watch with the lightning bolt hands. He had always known.

Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up. Said it in passing, almost as an afterthought.

A way to be good again.

WHEN I CAME HOME, Soraya was on the phone with her mother. “Won’t be long, Madar jan. A week, maybe two… Yes, you and Padar can stay with me…”

Two years earlier, the general had broken his right hip. He’d had one of his migraines again, and emerging from his room, bleary-eyed and dazed, he had tripped on a loose carpet edge. His scream had brought Khala Jamila running from the kitchen. “It sounded like a jaroo , a broomstick, snapping in half,” she was always fond of saying, though the doctor had said it was unlikely she’d heard anything of the sort. The general’s shattered hip – and all of the ensuing complications, the pneumonia, blood poisoning, the protracted stay at the nursing home – ended Khala Jamila’s long-running soliloquies about her own health. And started new ones about the general’s. She’d tell anyone who would listen that the doctors had told them his kidneys were failing. “But then they had never seen Afghan kidneys, had they?” she’d say proudly. What I remember most about the general’s hospital stay is how Khala Jamila would wait until he fell asleep, and then sing to him, songs I remembered from Kabul, playing on Baba’s scratchy old transistor radio.

The general’s frailty – and time – had softened things between him and Soraya too. They took walks together, went to lunch on Saturdays, and, sometimes, the general sat in on some of her classes. He’d sit in the back of the room, dressed in his shiny old gray suit, wooden cane across his lap, smiling. Sometimes he even took notes.