KITE RUNNER 12 страница

“I thought about writing you and telling you before, but I wasn’t sure you wanted to know. Was I wrong? ”

The truth was no. The lie was yes. I settled for something in between. “I don’t know. ”

He coughed another patch of blood into the handkerchief. When he bent his head to spit, I saw honey-crusted sores on his scalp. “I brought you here because I am going to ask something of you. I’m

going to ask you to do something for me. But before I do, I want to tell you about Hassan. Do you understand? ”

“Yes, ” I murmured.

“I want to tell you about him. I want to tell you everything. You will listen? ”

I nodded.

Then Rahim Khan sipped some more tea. Rested his head against the wall and spoke.

SIXTEEN

There were a lot of reasons why I went to Hazarajat to find Hassan in 1986. The biggest one, Allah forgive me, was that I was lonely. By then, most of my friends and relatives had either been killed or

had escaped the country to Pakistan or Iran. I barely knew anyone in Kabul anymore, the city where I had lived my entire life. Everybody had fled. I would take a walk in the Karteh Parwan section--where

the melon vendors used to hang out in the old days, you remember that spot? --and I wouldn’t recognize anyone there. No one to greet, no one to sit down with for chai, no one to share stories with, just

Roussi soldiers patrolling the streets. So eventually, I stopped going out to the city. I would spend my days in your father’s house, up in the study, reading your mother’s old books, listening to the news,

watching the communist propaganda on television. Then I would pray natnaz, cook something, eat, read some more, pray again, and go to bed. I would rise in the morning, pray, do it all over again.

And with my arthritis, it was getting harder for me to maintain the house. My knees and back were always aching--I would get up in the morning and it would take me at least an hour to shake the stiffness

from my joints, especially in the wintertime. I did not want to let your father’s house go to rot; we had all had many good times in that house, so many memories, Amir jan. It was not right--your father had

designed that house himself; it had meant so much to him, and besides, I had promised him I would care for it when he and you left for Pakistan. Now it was just me and the house and... I did my best. I

tried to water the trees every few days, cut the lawn, tend to the flowers, fix things that needed fixing, but, even then, I was not a young man anymore.

But even so, I might have been able to manage. At least for a while longer. But when news of your father’s death reached me... for the first time, I felt a terrible loneliness in that house. An unbearable

emptiness.

So one day, I fueled up the Buick and drove up to Hazarajat. I remembered that, after Ali dismissed himself from the house, your father told me he and Hassan had moved to a small village just outside

Bamiyan. Ali had a cousin there as I recalled. I had no idea if Hassan would still be there, if anyone would even know of him or his whereabouts. After all, it had been ten years since Ali and Hassan had left

your father’s house. Hassan would have been a grown man in 1986, twenty-two, twenty-three years old. If he was even alive, that is--the Shorawi, may they rot in hell for what they did to our watan, killed so

many of our young men. I don’t have to tell you that.

But, with the grace of God, I found him there. It took very little searching--all I had to do was ask a few questions in Bamiyan and people pointed me to his village. I do not even recall its name, or whether

it even had one. But I remember it was a scorching summer day and I was driving up a rutted dirt road, nothing on either side but sunbaked bushes, gnarled, spiny tree trunks, and dried grass like pale

straw. I passed a dead donkey rotting on the side of the road. And then I turned a corner and, right in the middle of that barren land, I saw a cluster of mud houses, beyond them nothing but broad sky and

mountains like jagged teeth.

The people in Bamiyan had told me I would find him easily--he lived in the only house in the village that had a walled garden. The mud wall, short and pocked with holes, enclosed the tiny house--which

was really not much more than a glorified hut. Barefoot children were playing on the street, kicking a ragged tennis ball with a stick, and they stared when I pulled up and killed the engine. I knocked on the

wooden door and stepped through into a yard that had very little in it save for a parched strawberry patch and a bare lemon tree. There was a tandoor in the corner in the shadow of an acacia tree and I

saw a man squatting beside it. He was placing dough on a large wooden spatula and slapping it against the walls of the ‘tandoor’. He dropped the dough when he saw me. I had to make him stop kissing

my hands.

“Let me look at you, ” I said. He stepped away. He was so tall now--I stood on my toes and still just came up to his chin. The Bamiyan sun had toughened his skin, and turned it several shades darker than

I remembered, and he had lost a few of his front teeth. There were sparse strands of hair on his chin. Other than that, he had those same narrow green eyes, that scar on his upper lip, that round face, that

affable smile. You would have recognized him, Amir jan. I am sure of it.

We went inside. There was a young light-skinned Hazara woman, sewing a shawl in a corner of the room. She was visibly expecting. “This is my wife, Rahim Khan, ” Hassan said proudly. “Her name is

Farzana jan. ” She was a shy woman, so courteous she spoke in a voice barely higher than a whisper and she would not raise her pretty hazel eyes to meet my gaze. But the way she was looking at

Hassan, he might as well have been sitting on the throne at the ‘Arg’.

“When is the baby coming? ” I said after we all settled around the adobe room. There was nothing in the room, just a frayed rug, a few dishes, a pair of mattresses, and a lantern.

“‘Inshallah’, this winter, ” Hassan said. “I am praying for a boy to carry on my father’s name. ”

“Speaking of Ali, where is he? ”

Hassan dropped his gaze. He told me that Ali and his cousin--who had owned the house--had been killed by a land mine two years before, just outside of Bamiyan. A land mine. Is there a more Afghan

way of dying, Amir jan? And for some crazy reason, I became absolutely certain that it had been Ali’s right leg--his twisted polio leg--that had finally betrayed him and stepped on that land mine. I was

deeply saddened to hear Ali had died. Your father and I grew up together, as you know, and Ali had been with him as long as I could remember. I remember when we were all little, the year Ali got polio

and almost died. Your father would walk around the house all day crying.

Farzana made us shorwa with beans, turnips, and potatoes. We washed our hands and dipped fresh ‘naan’ from the tandoor into the shorwa--it was the best meal I had had in months. It was then that I

asked Hassan to move to Kabul with me. I told him about the house, how I could not care for it by myself anymore. I told him I would pay him well, that he and his ‘khanum’ would be comfortable. They

looked to each other and did not say anything. Later, after we had washed our hands and Farzana had served us grapes, Hassan said the village was his home now; he and Farzana had made a life for

themselves there.

“And Bamiyan is so close. We know people there. Forgive me, Rahim Khan. I pray you understand. ”

“Of course, ” I said. “You have nothing to apologize for. I understand. ”

It was midway through tea after shorwa that Hassan asked about you. I told him you were in America, but that I did not know much more. Hassan had so many questions about you. Had you married?

Did you have children? How tall were you? Did you still fly kites and go to the cinema? Were you happy? He said he had befriended an old Farsi teacher in Bamiyan who had taught him to read and write.

If he wrote you a letter, would I pass it on to you? And did I think you would write back? I told him what I knew of you from the few phone conversations I had had with your father, but mostly I did not know

how to answer him. Then he asked me about your father. When I told him, Hassan buried his face in his hands and broke into tears. He wept like a child for the rest of that night.

They insisted that I spend the night there. Farzana fixed a cot for me and left me a glass of well water in case I got thirsty. All night, I heard her whispering to Hassan, and heard him sobbing.

In the morning, Hassan told me he and Farzana had decided to move to Kabul with me.

“I should not have come here, ” I said. “You were right, Hassan jan. You have a zendagi, a life here. It was presumptuous of me to just show up and ask you to drop everything. It is me who needs to be

forgiven. ”

“We don’t have that much to drop, Rahim Khan, ” Hassan said. His eyes were still red and puffy. “We’ll go with you. We’ll help you take care of the house. ”

“Are you absolutely sure? ”

He nodded and dropped his head. “Agha sahib was like my second father... God give him peace. ”

They piled their things in the center of a few worn rags and tied the corners together. We loaded the bundle into the Buick. Hassan stood in the threshold of the house and held the Koran as we all kissed

it and passed under it. Then we left for Kabul. I remember as I was pulling away, Hassan turned to take a last look at their home.

When we got to Kabul, I discovered that Hassan had no intention of moving into the house. “But all these rooms are empty, Hassan jan. No one is going to live in them, ” I said.

But he would not. He said it was a matter of ihtiram, a matter of respect. He and Farzana moved their things into the hut in the backyard, where he was born. I pleaded for them to move into one of the

guest bedrooms upstairs, but Hassan would hear nothing of it. “What will Amir agha think? ” he said to me. “What will he think when he comes back to Kabul after the war and finds that I have assumed his

place in the house? ” Then, in mourning for your father, Hassan wore black for the next forty days.

I did not want them to, but the two of them did all the cooking, all the cleaning. Hassan tended to the flowers in the garden, soaked the roots, picked off yellowing leaves, and planted rosebushes. He

painted the walls. In the house, he swept rooms no one had slept in for years, and cleaned bathrooms no one had bathed in. Like he was preparing the house for someone’s return. Do you remember the

wall behind the row of corn your father had planted, Amir jan? What did you and Hassan call it, “the Wall of Ailing Corn”? A rocket destroyed a whole section of that wall in the middle of the night early that

fall. Hassan rebuilt the wall with his own hands, brick by brick, until it stood’ whole again. I do not know what I would have done if he had not been there. Then late that fall, Farzana gave birth to a stillborn

baby girl. Hassan kissed the baby’s lifeless face, and we buried her in the backyard, near the sweetbrier bushes. We covered the little mound with leaves from the poplar trees. I said a prayer for her.

Farzana stayed in the hut all day and wailed--it is a heartbreaking sound, Amir jan, the wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you never hear it.

Outside the walls of that house, there was a war raging. But the three of us, in your father’s house, we made our own little haven from it. My vision started going by the late 1980s, so I had Hassan read

me your mother’s books. We would sit in the foyer, by the stove, and Hassan would read me from ‘Masnawi’ or ‘Khayyá m’, as Farzana cooked in the kitchen. And every morning, Hassan placed a flower

on the little mound by the sweetbrier bushes.

In early 1990, Farzana became pregnant again. It was that same year, in the middle of the summer, that a woman covered in a sky blue burqa knocked on the front gates one morning. When I walked up

to the gates, she was swaying on her feet, like she was too weak to even stand. I asked her what she wanted, but she would not answer.

“Who are you? ” I said. But she just collapsed right there in the driveway. I yelled for Hassan and he helped me carry her into the house, to the living room. We lay her on the sofa and took off her burqa.

Beneath it, we found a toothless woman with stringy graying hair and sores on her arms. She looked like she had not eaten for days. But the worst of it by far was her face. Someone had taken a knife to it

and... Amir jan, the slashes cut this way and that way. One of the cuts went from cheekbone to hairline and it had not spared her left eye on the way. It was grotesque. I patted her brow with a wet cloth and

she opened her eyes. “Where is Hassan? ” she whispered.

“I’m right here, ” Hassan said. He took her hand and squeezed it.

Her good eye rolled to him. “I have walked long and far to see if you are as beautiful in the flesh as you are in my dreams. And you are. Even more. ” She pulled his hand to her scarred face. “Smile for

me. Please. ”

Hassan did and the old woman wept. “You smiled coming out of me, did anyone ever tell you? And I wouldn’t even hold you. Allah forgive me, I wouldn’t even hold you. ”

None of us had seen Sanaubar since she had eloped with a band of singers and dancers in 1964, just after she had given birth to Hassan. You never saw her, Amir, but in her youth, she was a vision.

She had a dimpled smile and a walk that drove men crazy. No one who passed her on the street, be it a man or a woman, could look at her only once. And now...

Hassan dropped her hand and bolted out of the house. I went after him, but he was too fast. I saw him running up the hill where you two used to play, his feet kicking up plumes of dust. I let him go. I sat

with Sanaubar all day as the sky went from bright blue to purple. Hassan still had not come back when night fell and moonlight bathed the clouds. Sanaubar cried that coming back had been a mistake,

maybe even a worse one than leaving. But I made her stay. Hassan would return, I knew.

He came back the next morning, looking tired and weary, like he had not slept all night. He took Sanaubar’s hand in both of his and told her she could cry if she wanted to but she needn’t, she was home

now, he said, home with her family. He touched the scars on her face, and ran his hand through her hair.

Hassan and Farzana nursed her back to health. They fed her and washed her clothes. I gave her one of the guest rooms upstairs. Sometimes, I would look out the window into the yard and watch

Hassan and his mother kneeling together, picking tomatoes or trimming a rosebush, talking. They were catching up on all the lost years, I suppose. As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or

why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

It was Sanaubar who delivered Hassan’s son that winter of 1990. It had not started snowing yet, but the winter winds were blowing through the yards, bending the flowerbeds and rustling the leaves. I

remember Sanaubar came out of the hut holding her grandson, had him wrapped in a wool blanket. She stood beaming under a dull gray sky tears streaming down her cheeks, the needle-cold wind

blowing her hair, and clutching that baby in her arms like she never wanted to let go. Not this time. She handed him to Hassan and he handed him to me and I sang the prayer of Ayat-ul-kursi in that little

boy’s ear.

They named him Sohrab, after Hassan’s favorite hero from the ‘Shahnamah’, as you know, Amir jan. He was a beautiful little boy, sweet as sugar, and had the same temperament as his father. You

should have seen Sanaubar with that baby, Amir jan. He became the center of her existence. She sewed clothes for him, built him toys from scraps of wood, rags, and dried grass. When he caught a fever,

she stayed up all night, and fasted for three days. She burned isfand for him on a skillet to cast out nazar, the evil eye. By the time Sohrab was two, he was calling her Sasa. The two of them were

inseparable.

She lived to see him turn four, and then, one morning, she just did not wake up. She looked calm, at peace, like she did not mind dying now. We buried her in the cemetery on the hill, the one by the

pomegranate tree, and I said a prayer for her too. The loss was hard on Hassan--it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place. But it was even harder on little Sohrab. He kept

walking around the house, looking for Sasa, but you know how children are, they forget so quickly.

By then--that would have been 1995--the Shorawi were defeated and long gone and Kabul belonged to Massoud, Rabbani, and the Mujahedin. The infighting between the factions was fierce and no one

knew if they would live to see the end of the day. Our ears became accustomed to the whistle of falling shells, to the rumble of gunfire, our eyes familiar with the sight of men digging bodies out of piles of

rubble. Kabul in those days, Amir jan, was as close as you could get to that proverbial hell on earth. Allah was kind to us, though. The Wazir Akbar Khan area was not attacked as much, so we did not have

it as bad as some of the other neighborhoods.

On those days when the rocket fire eased up a bit and the gunfighting was light, Hassan would take Sohrab to the zoo to see Marjan the lion, or to the cinema. Hassan taught him how to shoot the

slingshot, and, later, by the time he was eight, Sohrab had become deadly with that thing: He could stand on the terrace and hit a pinecone propped on a pail halfway across the yard. Hassan taught him to

read and write--his son was not going to grow up illiterate like he had. I grew very attached to that little boy--I had seen him take his first step, heard him utter his first word. I bought children’s books for

Sohrab from the bookstore by Cinema Park--they have destroyed that too now--and Sohrab read them as quickly as I could get them to him. He reminded me of you, how you loved to read when you were

little, Amir jan. Sometimes, I read to him at night, played riddles with him, taught him card tricks. I miss him terribly.

In the wintertime, Hassan took his son kite running. There were not nearly as many kite tournaments as in the old days--no one felt safe outside for too long--but there were still a few scattered

tournaments. Hassan would prop Sohrab on his shoulders and they would go trotting through the streets, running kites, climbing trees where kites had dropped. You remember, Amir Jan, what a good kite

runner Hassan was? He was still just as good. At the end of winter, Hassan and Sohrab would hang the kites they had run all winter on the walls of the main hallway. They would put them up like paintings.

I told you how we all celebrated in 1996 when the Taliban rolled in and put an end to the daily fighting. I remember coming home that night and finding Hassan in the kitchen, listening to the radio. He had

a sober look in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, and he just shook his head. “God help the Hazaras now, Rahim Khan sahib, ” he said.

“The war is over, Hassan, ” I said. “There’s going to be peace, ‘Inshallah’, and happiness and calm. No more rockets, no more killing, no more funerals! ” But he just turned off the radio and asked if he

could get me anything before he went to bed.

A few weeks later, the Taliban banned kite fighting. And two years later, in 1998, they massacred the Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif.

SEVENTEEN

Rahim Khan slowly uncrossed his legs and leaned against the bare wall in the wary, deliberate way of a man whose every movement triggers spikes of pain. Outside, a donkey was braying and some

one was shouting something in Urdu. The sun was beginning to set, glittering red through the cracks between the ramshackle buildings.

It hit me again, the enormity of what I had done that winter and that following summer. The names rang in my head: Hassan, Sohrab, Ali, Farzana, and Sanaubar. Hearing Rahim Khan speak Ali’s name

was like finding an old dusty music box that hadn’t been opened in years; the melody began to play immediately: Who did you eat today, Babalu? Who did you eat, you slant-eyed Babalu? I tried to conjure

Ali’s frozen face, to really see his tranquil eyes, but time can be a greedy thing--sometimes it steals all the details for itself.

“Is Hassan still in that house now? ” I asked.

Rahim Khan raised the teacup to his parched lips and took a sip. He then fished an envelope from the breast pocket of his vest and handed it to me. “For you. ”

I tore the sealed envelope. Inside, I found a Polaroid photograph and a folded letter. I stared at the photograph for a full minute.

A tall man dressed in a white turban and a green-striped chapan stood with a little boy in front of a set of wrought-iron gates. Sunlight slanted in from the left, casting a shadow on half of his rotund face.

He was squinting and smiling at the camera, showing a pair of missing front teeth. Even in this blurry Polaroid, the man in the chapan exuded a sense of self-assuredness, of ease. It was in the way he

stood, his feet slightly apart, his arms comfortably crossed on his chest, his head titled a little toward the sun. Mostly, it was in the way he smiled. Looking at the photo, one might have concluded that this

was a man who thought the world had been good to him. Rahim Khan was right: I would have recognized him if I had bumped into him on the street. The little boy stood bare foot, one arm wrapped around

the man’s thigh, his shaved head resting against his father’s hip. He too was grinning and squinting.

I unfolded the letter. It was written in Farsi. No dots were omitted, no crosses forgotten, no words blurred together--the handwriting was almost childlike in its neatness. I began to read:

In the name of Allah the most beneficent, the most merciful, Amir agha, with my deepest respects,

Farzana jan, Sohrab, and I pray that this latest letter finds you in good health and in the light of Allah’s good graces. Please offer my warmest thanks to Rahim Khan sahib for carrying it to you. I am

hopeful that one day I will hold one of your letters in my hands and read of your life in America. Perhaps a photograph of you will even grace our eyes. I have told much about you to Farzana jan and Sohrab,

about us growing up together and playing games and running in the streets. They laugh at the stories of all the mischief you and I used to cause!

Amir agha,

Alas the Afghanistan of our youth is long dead. Kindness is gone from the land and you cannot escape the killings. Always the killings. In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadium, in the

markets, it is a part of our lives here, Amir agha. The savages who rule our watan don’t care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzana Jan to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and

‘naan’. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his

wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on

her leg for days but what could I do except stand and watch my wife get beaten? If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly! Then what would happen to my Sohrab? The streets are

full enough already of hungry orphans and every day I thank Allah that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

I wish you could see Sohrab. He is a good boy. Rahim Khan sahib and I have taught him to read and write so he does not grow up stupid like his father. And can he shoot with that slingshot! I take

Sohrab around Kabul sometimes and buy him candy. There is still a monkey man in Shar-e Nau and if we run into him, I pay him to make his monkey dance for Sohrab. You should see how he laughs! The

two of us often walk up to the cemetery on the hill. Do you remember how we used to sit under the pomegranate tree there and read from the ‘Shahnamah’? The droughts have dried the hill and the tree

hasn’t borne fruit in years, but Sohrab and I still sit under its shade and I read to him from the ‘Shahnamah’. It is not necessary to tell you that his favorite part is the one with his namesake, Rostam and

Sohrab. Soon he will be able to read from the book himself. I am a very proud and very lucky father.

Amir agha,

Rahim Khan sahib is quite ill. He coughs all day and I see blood on his sleeve when he wipes his mouth. He has lost much weight and I wish he would eat a little of the shorwa and rice that Farzana Jan

cooks for him. But he only takes a bite or two and even that I think is out of courtesy to Farzana jan. I am so worried about this dear man I pray for him every day. He is leaving for Pakistan in a few days to

consult some doctors there and, ‘Inshallah’, he will return with good news. But in my heart I fear for him. Farzana jan and I have told little Sohrab that Rahim Khan sahib is going to be well. What can we do?

He is only ten and he adores Rahim Khan sahib. They have grown so close to each other. Rahim Khan sahib used to take him to the bazaar for balloons and biscuits but he is too weak for that now.

I have been dreaming a lot lately, Amir agha. Some of them are nightmares, like hanged corpses rotting in soccer fields with bloodred grass. I wake up from those short of breath and sweaty. Mostly,

though, I dream of good things, and praise Allah for that. I dream that Rahim Khan sahib will be well. I dream that my son will grow up to be a good person, a free person, and an important person. I dream

that lawla flowers will bloom in the streets of Kabul again and rubab music will play in the samovar houses and kites will fly in the skies. And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land

of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.

May Allah be with you always.

-Hassan

I read the letter twice. I folded the note and looked at the photograph for another minute. I pocketed both. “How is he? ” I asked.

“That letter was written six months ago, a few days before I left for Peshawar, ” Rahim Khan said. “I took the Polaroid the day before I left. A month after I arrived in Peshawar, I received a telephone call

from one of my neighbors in Kabul. He told me this story: Soon after I took my leave, a rumor spread that a Hazara family was living alone in the big house in Wazir Akbar Khan, or so the Taliban claim. A

pair of Talib officials came to investigate and interrogated Hassan. They accused him of lying when Hassan told them he was living with me even though many of the neighbors, including the one who

called me, supported Hassan’s story. The Talibs said he was a liar and a thief like all Hazaras and ordered him to get his family out of the house by sundown. Hassan protested. But my neighbor said the

Talibs were looking at the big house like--how did he say it? --yes, like ‘wolves looking at a flock of sheep. ’ They told Hassan they would be moving in to supposedly keep it safe until I return. Hassan

protested again. So they took him to the street--”

“No, ” I breathed.

“--and order him to kneel--”

“No. God, no. ”

“--and shot him in the back of the head. ”

“--Farzana came screaming and attacked them--”

“No. ”

“--shot her too. Self-defense, they claimed later--”

But all I could manage was to whisper “No. No. No” over and over again.

I KEPT THINKING OF THAT DAY in 1974, in the hospital room, Just after Hassan’s harelip surgery. Baba, Rahim Khan, Ali, and I had huddled around Hassan’s bed, watched him examine his new lip in

a handheld mirror. Now everyone in that room was either dead or dying. Except for me.

Then I saw something else: a man dressed in a herringbone vest pressing the muzzle of his Kalashnikov to the back of Hassan’s head. The blast echoes through the street of my father’s house. Hassan

slumps to the asphalt, his life of unrequited loyalty drifting from him like the windblown kites he used to chase.

“The Taliban moved into the house, ” Rahim Khan said. “The pretext was that they had evicted a trespasser. Hassan’s and Farzana’s murders were dismissed as a case of self-defense. No one said a

word about it. Most of it was fear of the Taliban, I think. But no one was going to risk anything for a pair of Hazara servants. ”

“What did they do with Sohrab? ” I asked. I felt tired, drained. A coughing fit gripped Rahim Khan and went on for a long time. When he finally looked up, his face was flushed and his eyes bloodshot. “I

⇐ Предыдущая 7 8 9 10 111213 14 15 16 Следующая ⇒