KITE RUNNER 11 страница

home. I was screaming, calling my father all kinds of names, saying he couldn’t keep me locked up forever, that I wished he were dead. ” Fresh tears squeezed out between her lids. “I actually said that to

him, that I wished he were dead.

“When he brought me home, my mother threw her arms around me and she was crying too. She was saying things but I couldn’t understand any of it because she was slurring her words so badly. So my

father took me up to my bedroom and sat me in front of the dresser mirror. He handed me a pair of scissors and calmly told me to cut off all my hair. He watched while I did it.

“I didn’t step out of the house for weeks. And when I did, I heard whispers or imagined them everywhere I went. That was four years ago and three thousand miles away and I’m still hearing them. ”

“Fuck ‘em, ” I said.

She made a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “When I told you about this on the phone the night of khastegari, I was sure you’d change your mind. ”

“No chance of that, Soraya. ”

She smiled and took my hand. “I’m so lucky to have found you. You’re so different from every Afghan guy I’ve met. ”

“Let’s never talk about this again, okay? ”

“Okay. ”

I kissed her cheek and pulled away from the curb. As I drove, I wondered why I was different. Maybe it was because I had been raised by men; I hadn’t grown up around women and had never been

exposed firsthand to the double standard with which Afghan society sometimes treated them. Maybe it was because Baba had been such an unusual Afghan father, a liberal who had lived by his own

rules, a maverick who had disregarded or embraced societal customs as he had seen fit.

But I think a big part of the reason I didn’t care about Soraya’s past was that I had one of my own. I knew all about regret.

SHORTLY AFTER BABA’S DEATH, Soraya and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Fremont, just a few blocks away from the general and Khala Jamila’s house. Soraya’s parents bought us a

brown leather couch and a set of Mikasa dishes as housewarming presents. The general gave me an additional present, a brand new IBM typewriter. In the box, he had slipped a note written in Farsi:

Amir jan,

I hope you discover many tales on these keys.

General Iqbal Taheri

I sold Baba’s VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I would drive to his gravesite every Friday, and, sometimes, I’d find a fresh bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know

Soraya had been there too.

Soraya and I settled into the routines--and minor wonders-- of married life. We shared toothbrushes and socks, passed each other the morning paper. She slept on the right side of the bed, I preferred

the left. She liked fluffy pillows, I liked the hard ones. She ate her cereal dry, like a snack, and chased it with milk.

I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its

saving grace was a considerable one: When everyone left at 6 P. M. and shadows began to crawl between aisles of plastic-covered sofas piled to the ceiling, I took out my books and studied. It was in the

Pine-Sol-scented office of that furniture warehouse that I began my first novel.

Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her father’s chagrin, in the teaching track.

“I don’t know why you’re wasting your talents like this, ” the general said one night over dinner. “Did you know, Amir jan, that she earned nothing but A’s in high school? ” He turned to her. “An intelligent girl

like you could become a lawyer, a political scientist. And, ‘Inshallah’, when Afghanistan is free, you could help write the new constitution. There would be a need for young talented Afghans like you. They

might even offer you a ministry position, given your family name. ”

I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening. “I’m not a girl, Padar. I’m a married woman. Besides, they’d need teachers too. ”

“Anyone can teach. ”

“Is there any more rice, Madar? ” Soraya said.

After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala Jamila tried to console Soraya. “He means well, ” she said. “He just wants you to be successful. ”

“So he can boast about his attorney daughter to his friends. Another medal for the general, ” Soraya said.

“Such nonsense you speak! ”

“Successful, ” Soraya hissed. “At least I’m not like him, sitting around while other people fight the Shorawi, waiting for when the dust settles so he can move in and reclaim his posh little government

position. Teaching may not pay much, but it’s what I want to do! It’s what I love, and it’s a whole lot better than collecting welfare, by the way. ”

Khala Jamila bit her tongue. “If he ever hears you saying that, he will never speak to you again. ”

“Don’t worry, ” Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. “I won’t bruise his precious ego. ”

IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given

me. I sent query letters to a dozen agencies and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript. I mailed it the next

day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila insisted we pass it under the Koran. She told me that she was going to do nazr for me, a vow to have a sheep slaughtered and the

meat given to the poor if my book was accepted.

“Please, no nazn, Khala jan, ” I said, kissing her face. “Just do ‘zakat’, give the money to someone in need, okay? No sheep killing. ”

Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it. “But just because I have an agent doesn’t mean I’ll get published. If Martin

sells the novel, then we’ll celebrate. ”

A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a published novelist. When I told Soraya, she screamed. We had a celebration dinner with Soraya’s parents that night. Khala Jamila made kofta--meatballs and white rice--and white ferni. The general, a sheen of moisture in his eyes, said that he was proud of

me. After General Taheri and his wife left, Soraya and I celebrated with an expensive bottle of Merlot I had bought on the way home--the general did not approve of women drinking alcohol, and Soraya

didn’t drink in his presence.

“I am so proud of you, ” she said, raising her glass to mine. “Kaka would have been proud too. ”

“I know, ” I said, thinking of Baba, wishing he could have seen me.

Later that night, after Soraya fell asleep--wine always made her sleepy--I stood on the balcony and breathed in the cool summer air. I thought of Rahim Khan and the little note of support he had written

me after he’d read my first story. And I thought of Hassan. Some day, ‘Inshallah’, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much

goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

The novel was released in the summer of that following year, 1989, and the publisher sent me on a five-city book tour. I became a minor celebrity in the Afghan community. That was the year that the

Shorawi completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. It should have been a time of glory for Afghans. Instead, the war raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the Soviet puppet

government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees kept flocking to Pakistan. That was the year that the cold war ended, the year the Berlin Wall came down. It was the year of Tiananmen Square. In the midst

of it all, Afghanistan was forgotten. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake after the Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch.

That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have a child.

THE IDEA OF FATHERHOOD unleashed a swirl of emotions in me. I found it frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating all at the same time. What sort of father would I make, I wondered. I

wanted to be just like Baba and I wanted to be nothing like him.

But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of blood, Soraya grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irritable. By then, Khala Jamila’s initially subtle hints had become overt, as in

“Kho dega! ” So! “When am I going to sing alahoo for my little nawasa? ” The general, ever the Pashtun, never made any queries--doing so meant alluding to a sexual act between his daughter and a man,

even if the man in question had been married to her for over four years. But his eyes perked up when Khala Jamila teased us about a baby.

“Sometimes, it takes a while, ” I told Soraya one night.

“A year isn’t a while, Amir! ” she said, in a terse voice so unlike her. “Something’s wrong, I know it. ”

“Then let’s see a doctor. ”

DR. ROSEN, a round-bellied man with a plump face and small, even teeth, spoke with a faint Eastern European accent, some thing remotely Slavic. He had a passion for trains--his office was littered

with books about the history of railroads, model locomotives, paintings of trains trundling on tracks through green hills and over bridges. A sign above his desk read, LIFE IS A TRAIN. GET ON BOARD.

He laid out the plan for us. I’d get checked first. “Men are easy, ” he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. “A man’s plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other

hand... well, God put a lot of thought into making you. ” I wondered if he fed that bit about the plumbing to all of his couples.

“Lucky us, ” Soraya said.

Dr. Rosen laughed. It fell a few notches short of genuine. He gave me a lab slip and a plastic jar, handed Soraya a request for some routine blood tests. We shook hands. “Welcome aboard, ” he said,

as he showed us out.

I PASSED WITH FLYING COLORS.

The next few months were a blur of tests on Soraya: Basal body temperatures, blood tests for every conceivable hormone, urine tests, something called a “Cervical Mucus Test, ” ultrasounds, more blood

tests, and more urine tests. Soraya underwent a procedure called a hysteroscopy--Dr. Rosen inserted a telescope into Soraya’s uterus and took a look around. He found nothing. “The plumbing’s clear, ”

he announced, snapping off his latex gloves. I wished he’d stop calling it that--we weren’t bathrooms. When the tests were over, he explained that he couldn’t explain why we couldn’t have kids. And,

apparently, that wasn’t so unusual. It was called “Unexplained Infertility. ”

Then came the treatment phase. We tried a drug called Clomiphene, and hMG, a series of shots which Soraya gave to herself. When these failed, Dr. Rosen advised in vitro fertilization. We received a

polite letter from our HMO, wishing us the best of luck, regretting they couldn’t cover the cost.

We used the advance I had received for my novel to pay for it. IVF proved lengthy, meticulous, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. After months of sitting in waiting rooms reading magazines like

Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest, after endless paper gowns and cold, sterile exam rooms lit by fluorescent lights, the repeated humiliation of discussing every detail of our sex life with a total

stranger, the injections and probes and specimen collections, we went back to Dr. Rosen and his trains.

He sat across from us, tapped his desk with his fingers, and used the word “adoption” for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.

Soraya broke the news to her parents the weekend after our last visit with Dr. Rosen. We were sitting on picnic chairs in the Taheris’ backyard, grilling trout and sipping yogurt dogh. It was an early

evening in March 1991. Khala Jamila had watered the roses and her new honeysuckles, and their fragrance mixed with the smell of cooking fish. Twice already, she had reached across her chair to

caress Soraya’s hair and say, “God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. ”

Soraya kept looking down at her hands. She was tired, I knew, tired of it all. “The doctor said we could adopt, ” she murmured.

General Taheri’s head snapped up at this. He closed the barbecue lid. “He did? ”

“He said it was an option, ” Soraya said.

We’d talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best. “I know it’s silly and maybe vain, ” she said to me on the way to her parents’ house, “but I can’t help it. I’ve always dreamed that I’d

hold it in my arms and know my blood had fed it for nine months, that I’d look in its eyes one day and be startled to see you or me, that the baby would grow up and have your smile or mine. Without that... Is

that wrong? ”

“No, ” I had said.

“Am I being selfish? ”

“No, Soraya. ”

“Because if you really want to do it... ”

“No, ” I said. “If we’re going to do it, we shouldn’t have any doubts at all about it, and we should both be in agreement. It wouldn’t be fair to the baby otherwise. ”

She rested her head on the window and said nothing else the rest of the way.

Now the general sat beside her. “Bachem, this adoption... thing, I’m not so sure it’s for us Afghans. ” Soraya looked at me tiredly and sighed.

“For one thing, they grow up and want to know who their natural parents are, ” he said. “Nor can you blame them. Sometimes, they leave the home in which you labored for years to provide for them so

they can find the people who gave them life. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that. ”

“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.

FIFTEEN

Three hours after my flight landed in Peshawar, I was sitting on shredded upholstery in the backseat of a smoke-filled taxicab. My driver, a chain-smoking, sweaty little man who introduced himself as

Gholam, drove nonchalantly and recklessly, averting collisions by the thinnest of margins, all without so much as a pause in the incessant stream of words spewing from his mouth:

?? terrible what is happening in your country, yar. Afghani people and Pakistani people they are like brothers, I tell you. Muslims have to help Muslims so... ”

I tuned him out, switched to a polite nodding mode. I remembered Peshawar pretty well from the few months Baba and I had spent there in 1981. We were heading west now on Jamrud road, past the

Cantonment and its lavish, high-walled homes. The bustle of the city blurring past me reminded me of a busier, more crowded version of the Kabul I knew, particularly of the KochehMorgha, or Chicken

Bazaar, where Hassan and I used to buy chutney-dipped potatoes and cherry water. The streets were clogged with bicycle riders, milling pedestrians, and rickshaws popping blue smoke, all weaving

through a maze of narrow lanes and alleys. Bearded vendors draped in thin blankets sold animalskin lampshades, carpets, embroidered shawls, and copper goods from rows of small, tightly jammed

stalls. The city was bursting with sounds; the shouts of vendors rang in my ears mingled with the blare of Hindi music, the sputtering of rickshaws, and the jingling bells of horse-drawn carts. Rich scents,

both pleasant and not so pleasant, drifted to me through the passenger window, the spicy aroma of pakora and the nihari Baba had loved so much blended with the sting of diesel fumes, the stench of rot,

garbage, and feces.

A little past the redbrick buildings of Peshawar University, we entered an area my garrulous driver referred to as “Afghan Town. ” I saw sweetshops and carpet vendors, kabob stalls, kids with dirtcaked

hands selling cigarettes, tiny restaurants--maps of Afghanistan painted on their windows--all interlaced with backstreet aid agencies. “Many of your brothers in this area, yar. They are opening businesses,

but most of them are very poor. ” He tsk’ed his tongue and sighed. “Anyway, we’re getting close now. ”

I thought about the last time I had seen Rahim Khan, in 1981. He had come to say good-bye the night Baba and I had fled Kabul. I remember Baba and him embracing in the foyer, crying softly. When

Baba and I arrived in the U. S., he and Rahim Khan kept in touch. They would speak four or five times a year and, sometimes, Baba would pass me the receiver. The last time I had spoken to Rahim Khan

had been shortly after Baba’s death. The news had reached Kabul and he had called. We’d only spoken for a few minutes and lost the connection.

The driver pulled up to a narrow building at a busy corner where two winding streets intersected. I paid the driver, took my lone suitcase, and walked up to the intricately carved door. The building had

wooden balconies with open shutters--from many of them, laundry was hanging to dry in the sun. I walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor, down a dim hallway to the last door on the right. Checked

the address on the piece of stationery paper in my palm. Knocked.

Then, a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be Rahim Khan opened the door.

A CREATIVE WRITING TEACHER at San Jose State used to say about cliché s: “Avoid them like the plague. ” Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought

cliché s got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on. But the aptness of the cliché d saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. For example, the “elephant in the room” saying.

Nothing could more correctly describe the initial moments of my reunion with Rahim Khan.

We sat on a wispy mattress set along the wall, across the window overlooking the noisy street below. Sunlight slanted in and cast a triangular wedge of light onto the Afghan rug on the floor. Two folding

chairs rested against one wall and a small copper samovar sat in the opposite corner. I poured us tea from it.

“How did you find me? ” I asked.

“It’s not difficult to find people in America. I bought a map of the U. S., and called up information for cities in Northern California, ” he said. “It’s wonderfully strange to see you as a grown man. ”

I smiled and dropped three sugar cubes in my tea. He liked his black and bitter, I remembered. “Baba didn’t get the chance to tell you but I got married fifteen years ago. ” The truth was, by then, the

cancer in Baba’s brain had made him forgetful, negligent.

“You are married? To whom? ”

“Her name is Soraya Taheri. ” I thought of her back home, worrying about me. I was glad she wasn’t alone.

“Taheri... whose daughter is she? ”

I told him. His eyes brightened. “Oh, yes, I remember now. Isn’t General Taheri married to Sharif jan’s sister? What was her name... ”

“Jamila jan. ”

“Balay! ” he said, smiling. “I knew Sharif jan in Kabul, long time ago, before he moved to America. ”

“He’s been working for the INS for years, handles a lot of Afghan cases. ”

“Haiiii, ” he sighed. “Do you and Soraya jan have children? ”

“Nay. ”

“Oh. ” He slurped his tea and didn’t ask more; Rahim Khan had always been one of the most instinctive people I’d ever met.

I told him a lot about Baba, his job, the flea market, and how, at the end, he’d died happy. I told him about my schooling, my books--four published novels to my credit now. He smiled at this, said he had

never had any doubt. I told him I had written short stories in the leather-bound notebook he’d given me, but he didn’t remember the notebook.

The conversation inevitably turned to the Taliban.

“Is it as bad as I hear? ” I said.

“Nay, it’s worse. Much worse, ” he said. “They don’t let you be human. ” He pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy eyebrow. “I was at a soccer game in Ghazi

Stadium in 1998. Kabul against Mazar-i-Sharif, I think, and by the way the players weren’t allowed to wear shorts. Indecent exposure, I guess. ” He gave a tired laugh. “Anyway, Kabul scored a goal and the

man next to me cheered loudly. Suddenly this young bearded fellow who was patrolling the aisles, eighteen years old at most by the look of him, he walked up to me and struck me on the forehead with the

butt of his Kalashnikov. ‘Do that again and I’ll cut out your tongue, you old donkey! ’ he said. ” Rahim Khan rubbed the scar with a gnarled finger. “I was old enough to be his grandfather and I was sitting

there, blood gushing down my face, apologizing to that son of a dog. ”

I poured him more tea. Rahim Khan talked some more. Much of it I knew already, some not. He told me that, as arranged between Baba and him, he had lived in Baba’s house since 1981--this I knew

about. Baba had “sold” the house to Rahim Khan shortly before he and I fled Kabul. The way Baba had seen it those days, Afghanistan’s troubles were only a temporary interruption of our way of life--the

days of parties at the Wazir Akbar Khan house and picnics in Paghman would surely return. So he’d given the house to Rahim Khan to keep watch over until that day.

Rahim Khan told me how, when the Northern Alliance took over Kabul between 1992 and 1996, different factions claimed different parts of Kabul. “If you went from the Shar-e-Nau section to Kerteh-

Parwan to buy a carpet, you risked getting shot by a sniper or getting blown up by a rocket--if you got past all the checkpoints, that was. You practically needed a visa to go from one neighborhood to the

other. So people just stayed put, prayed the next rocket wouldn’t hit their home. ” He told me how people knocked holes in the walls of their homes so they could bypass the dangerous streets and would

move down the block from hole to hole. In other parts, people moved about in underground tunnels.

“Why didn’t you leave? ” I said.

“Kabul was my home. It still is. ” He snickered. “Remember the street that went from your house to the Qishla, the military bar racks next to Istiqial School? ”

“Yes. ” It was the shortcut to school. I remembered the day Hassan and I crossed it and the soldiers had teased Hassan about his mother. Hassan had cried in the cinema later, and I’d put an arm around

him.

“When the Taliban rolled in and kicked the Alliance out of Kabul, I actually danced on that street, ” Rahim Khan said. “And, believe me, I wasn’t alone. People were celebrating at ‘Chaman’, at Deh-

Mazang, greeting the Taliban in the streets, climbing their tanks and posing for pictures with them. People were so tired of the constant fighting, tired of the rockets, the gunfire, the explosions, tired of

watching Gulbuddin and his cohorts firing on any thing that moved. The Alliance did more damage to Kabul than the Shorawi. They destroyed your father’s orphanage, did you know that? ”

“Why? ” I said. “Why would they destroy an orphanage? ” I remembered sitting behind Baba the day they opened the orphanage. The wind had knocked off his caracul hat and everyone had laughed, then

stood and clapped when he’d delivered his speech. And now it was just another pile of rubble. All the money Baba had spent, all those nights he’d sweated over the blueprints, all the visits to the

construction site to make sure every brick, every beam, and every block was laid just right...

“Collateral damage, ” Rahim Khan said. “You don’t want to know, Amir jan, what it was like sifting through the rubble of that orphanage. There were body parts of children... ”

“So when the Taliban came... ”

“They were heroes, ” Rahim Khan said. “Peace at last. ”

“Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price? ” A violent coughing fit gripped Rahim Khan and rocked his gaunt body back and forth. When he spat into his handkerchief, it immediately

stained red. I thought that was as good a time as any to address the elephant sweating with us in the tiny room.

“How are you? ” I asked. “I mean really, how are you? ”

“Dying, actually, ” he said in a gurgling voice. Another round of coughing. More blood on the handkerchief. He wiped his mouth, blotted his sweaty brow from one wasted temple to the other with his

sleeve, and gave me a quick glance. When he nodded, I knew he had read the next question on my face. “Not long, ” he breathed.

“How long? ”

He shrugged. Coughed again. “I don’t think I’ll see the end of this summer, ” he said.

“Let me take you home with me. I can find you a good doctor. They’re coming up with new treatments all the time. There are new drugs and experimental treatments, we could enroll you in one... ” I was

rambling and I knew it. But it was better than crying, which I was probably going to do anyway.

He let out a chuff of laughter, revealed missing lower incisors. It was the most tired laughter I’d ever heard. “I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great. That’s very

good. We’re a melancholic people, we Afghans, aren’t we? Often, we wallow too much in ghamkhori and self-pity. We give in to loss, to suffering, accept it as a fact of life, even see it as necessary.

Zendagi migzara, we say, life goes on. But I am not surrendering to fate here, I am being pragmatic. I have seen several good doctors here and they have given the same answer. I trust them and believe

them. There is such a thing as God’s will. ”

“There is only what you do and what you don’t do, ” I said.

Rahim Khan laughed. “You sounded like your father just now. I miss him so much. But it is God’s will, Amir jan. It really is. ” He paused. “Besides, there’s another reason I asked you to come here. I

wanted to see you before I go, yes, but something else too. ”

“Anything. ”

“You know all those years I lived in your father’s house after you left? ”

“Yes. ”

“I wasn’t alone for all of them. Hassan lived there with me. ”

“Hassan, ” I said. When was the last time I had spoken his name? Those thorny old barbs of guilt bore into me once more, as if speaking his name had broken a spell, set them free to torment me anew.

Suddenly the air in Rahim Khan’s little flat was too thick, too hot, too rich with the smell of the street.

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