KITE RUNNER 13 страница

heard he’s in an orphanage somewhere in Karteh Seh. Amir jan--” then he was coughing again. When he stopped, he looked older than a few moments before, like he was aging with each coughing fit.

“Amir jan, I summoned you here because I wanted to see you before I die, but that’s not all. ”

I said nothing. I think I already knew what he was going to say.

“I want you to go to KabuL I want you to bring Sohrab here, ” he said.

I struggled to find the right words. I’d barely had time to deal with the fact that Hassan was dead.

“Please hear me. I know an American pair here in Peshawar, a husband and wife named Thomas and Betty Caldwell. They are Christians and they run a small charity organization that they manage with

private donations. Mostly they house and feed Afghan children who have lost their parents. I have seen the place. It’s clean and safe, the children are well cared for, and Mr. and Mrs. Caldwell are kind

people. They have already told me that Sohrab would be welcome to their home and--”

“Rahim Khan, you can’t be serious. ”

“Children are fragile, Amir Jan. Kabul is already full of broken children and I don’t want Sohrab to become another. ”

“Rahim Khan, I don’t want to go to Kabul. I can’t! ” I said.

“Sohrab is a gifted little boy. We can give him a new life here, new hope, with people who would love him. Thomas agha is a

good man and Betty khanum is so kind, you should see how she treats those orphans. ”

“Why me? Why can’t you pay someone here to go? I’ll pay for it if it’s a matter of money. ”

“It isn’t about money, Amir! ” Rahim Khan roared. “I’m a dying man and I will not be insulted! It has never been about money with me, you know that. And why you? I think we both know why it has to be

you, don’t we? ”

I didn’t want to understand that comment, but I did. I understood it all too well. “I have a wife in America, a home, a career, and a family. Kabul is a dangerous place, you know that, and you’d have me

risk everything for... “ I stopped.

“You know, ” Rahim Khan said, “one time, when you weren’t around, your father and I were talking. And you know how he always worried about you in those days. I remember he said to me, ‘Rahim, a

boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything. ’ I wonder, is that what you’ve become? ”

I dropped my eyes.

“What I’m asking from you is to grant an old man his dying wish, ” he said gravely.

He had gambled whh that comment. Played his best card. Or so I thought then. His words hung in limbo between us, but at least he’d known what to say. I was still searching for the right words, and I was

the writer in the room. Finally, I settled for this:

“Maybe Baba was right. ”

“I’m sorry you think that, Amir. ”

I couldn’t look at him. “And you don’t? ”

“If I did, I would not have asked you to come here. ”

I toyed with my wedding ring. “You’ve always thought too highly of me, Rahim Khan. ”

“And you’ve always been far too hard on yourself. ” He hesitated. “But there’s something else. Something you don’t know. ”

“Please, Rahim Khan--”

“Sanaubar wasn’t Ali’s first wife. ”

Now I looked up.

“He was married once before, to a Hazara woman from the Jaghori area. This was long before you were born. They were married for three years. ”

“What does this have to do with anything? ”

“She left him childless after three years and married a man in Khost. She bore him three daughters. That’s what I am trying to tell you. ”

I began to see where he was going. But I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I had a good life in California, pretty Victorian home with a peaked roof, a good marriage, a promising writing career, in-laws who loved me. I didn’t need any of this shit.

“Ali was sterile, ” Rahim Khan said.

“No he wasn’t. He and Sanaubar had Hassan, didn’t they? They had Hassan--”

“No they didn’t, ” Rahim Khan said.

“Yes they did! ”

“No they didn’t, Amir. ”

“Then who--”

“I think you know who. ”

I felt like a man sliding down a steep cliff, clutching at shrubs and tangles of brambles and coming up empty-handed. The room was swooping up and down, swaying side to side. “Did Hassan know? ” I

said through lips that didn’t feel like my own. Rahim Khan closed his eyes. Shook his head.

“You bastards, ” I muttered. Stood up. “You goddamn bastards! ” I screamed. “All of you, you bunch of lying goddamn bastards! ”

“Please sit down, ” Rahim Khan said.

“How could you hide this from me? From him? ” I bellowed. “Please think, Amir Jan. It was a shameful situation. People would talk. All that a man had back then, all that he was, was his honor, his name,

and if people talked... We couldn’t tell anyone, surely you can see that. ” He reached for me, but I shed his hand. Headed for the door.

“Amir jan, please don’t leave. ”

I opened the door and turned to him. “Why? What can you possibly say to me? I’m thirty-eight years old and I’ve Just found out my whole life is one big fucking lie! What can you possibly say to make

things better? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing! ”

And with that, I stormed out of the apartment.

EIGHTEEN

The sun had almost set and left the sky swathed in smothers of purple and red. I walked down the busy, narrow street that led away from Rahim Khan’s building. The street was a noisy lane in a maze of

alleyways choked with pedestrians, bicycles, and rickshaws. Billboards hung at its corners, advertising Coca-Cola and cigarettes; Hollywood movie posters displayed sultry actresses dancing with

handsome, brown-skinned men in fields of marigolds.

I walked into a smoky little samovar house and ordered a cup of tea. I tilted back on the folding chair’s rear legs and rubbed my face. That feeling of sliding toward a fall was fading. But in its stead, I felt

like a man who awakens in his own house and finds all the furniture rearranged, so that every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign now. Disoriented, he has to reevaluate his surroundings, reorient

himself.

How could I have been so blind? The signs had been there for me to see all along; they came flying back at me now: Baba hiring Dr. Kumar to fix Hassan’s harelip. Baba never missing Hassan’s

birthday. I remembered the day we were planting tulips, when I had asked Baba if he’d ever consider getting new servants. Hassan’s not going anywhere, he’d barked. He’s staying right here with us,

where he belongs. This is his home and we’re his family. He had wept, wept, when Ali announced he and Hassan were leaving us.

The waiter placed a teacup on the table before me. Where the table’s legs crossed like an X, there was a ring of brass balls, each walnut-sized. One of the balls had come unscrewed. I stooped and

tightened it. I wished I could fix my own life as easily. I took a gulp of the blackest tea I’d had in years and tried to think of Soraya, of the general and Khala Jamila, of the novel that needed finishing. I tried

to watch the traffic bolting by on the street, the people milling in and out of the little sweetshops. Tried to listen to the Qawali music playing on the transistor radio at the next table. Anything. But I kept

seeing Baba on the night of my graduation, sitting in the Ford he’d just given me, smelling of beer and saying, I wish Hassan had been with us today.

How could he have lied to me all those years? To Hassan? He had sat me on his lap when I was little, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, There is only one sin. And that is theft... When you tell a

lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. Hadn’t he said those words to me? And now, fifteen years after I’d buried him, I was learning that Baba had been a thief. And a thief of the worst kind, because the

things he’d stolen had been sacred: from me the right to know I had a brother, from Hassan his identity, and from Ali his honor. His nang. His namoos.

The questions kept coming at me: How had Baba brought himself to look Ali in the eye? How had Ali lived in that house, clay in and day out, knowing he had been dishonored by his master in the single

worst way an Afghan man can be dishonored?

And how was I going to reconcile this new image of Baba with the one that had been imprinted on my mind for so long, that of him in his old brown suit, hobbling up the Taheris’ driveway to ask for

Soraya’s hand?

Here is another cliché my creative writing teacher would have scoffed at; like father, like son. But it was true, wasn’t it? As it turned out, Baba and I were more alike than I’d ever known. We had both

betrayed the people who would have given their lives for us. And with that came this realization: that Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too.

Rahim Khan said I’d always been too hard on myself. But I wondered. True, I hadn’t made Ali step on the land mine, and I hadn’t brought the Taliban to the house to shoot Hassan. But I had driven

Hassan and Ali out of the house. Was it too far-fetched to imagine that things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t? Maybe Baba would have brought them along to America. Maybe Hassan would

have had a home of his own now, a job, a family, a life in a country where no one cared that he was a Hazara, where most people didn’t even know what a Hazara was. Maybe not. But maybe so.

I can’t go to Kabul, I had said to Rahim Khan. I have a wife in America, a home, a career, and a family. But how could I pack up and go back home when my actions may have cost Hassan a chance at

those very same things?

I wished Rahim Khan hadn’t called me. I wished he had let me live on in my oblivion. But he had called me. And what Rahim Khan revealed to me changed things. Made me see how my entire life, long

before the winter of 1975, dating back to when that singing Hazara woman was still nursing me, had been a cycle of lies, betrayals, and secrets.

There is a way to be good again, he’d said.

A way to end the cycle.

With a little boy. An orphan. Hassan’s son. Somewhere in Kabul.

ON THE RICKSHAW RIDE back to Rahim Khan’s apartment, I remembered Baba saying that my problem was that someone had always done my fighting for me. I was thirty-eight flow. My hair was

receding and streaked with gray, and lately I’d traced little crow’s-feet etched around the corners of my eyes. I was older now, but maybe not yet too old to start doing my own fighting. Baba had lied about

a lot of things as it turned out but he hadn’t lied about that.

I looked at the round face in the Polaroid again, the way the sun fell on it. My brother’s face. Hassan had loved me once, loved me in a way that no one ever had or ever would again. He was gone now,

but a little part of him lived on. It was in Kabul.

Waiting.

I FOUND RAHIM KHAN praying ‘namaz’ in a corner of the room. He was just a dark silhouette bowing eastward against a bloodred sky. I waited for him to finish.

Then I told him I was going to Kabul. Told him to call the Caldwells in the morning.

“I’ll pray for you, Amir jan, ” he said.

NINETEEN

Again, the car sickness. By the time we drove past the bulletriddled sign that read THE KHYBER PASS WELCOMES YOU, my mouth had begun to water. Something inside my stomach churned and

twisted. Farid, my driver, threw me a cold glance. There was no empathy in his eyes.

“Can we roll down the window? ” I asked.

He lit a cigarette and tucked it between the remaining two fingers of his left hand, the one resting on the steering wheel. Keeping his black eyes on the road, he stooped forward, picked up the

screwdriver lying between his feet, and handed it to me. I stuck it in the small hole in the door where the handle belonged and turned it to roll down my window.

Farid gave me another dismissive look, this one with a hint of barely suppressed animosity, and went back to smoking his cigarette. He hadn’t said more than a dozen words since we’d departed from

Jamrud Fort.

“Tashakor, ” I muttered. I leaned my head out of the window and let the cold midafternoon air rush past my face. The drive through the tribal lands of the Khyber Pass, winding between cliffs of shale and

limestone, was just as I remembered it--Baba and I had driven through the broken terrain back in 1974. The arid, imposing mountains sat along deep gorges and soared to jagged peaks. Old fortresses,

adobe-walled and crumbling, topped the crags. I tried to keep my eyes glued to the snowcapped Hindu Kush on the north side, but each time my stomach settled even a bit, the truck skidded around yet

another turn, rousing a fresh wave of nausea.

“Try a lemon. ”

“What? ”

“Lemon. Good for the sickness, ” Farid said. “I always bring one for this drive. ”

“Nay, thank you, ” I said. The mere thought of adding acidity to my stomach stirred more nausea. Farid snickered. “It’s not fancy like American medicine, I know, just an old remedy my mother taught me. ”

I regretted blowing my chance to warm up to him. “In that case, maybe you should give me some. ”

He grabbed a paper bag from the backseat and plucked a half lemon out of it. I bit down on it, waited a few minutes. “You were right. I feel better, ” I lied. As an Afghan, I knew it was better to be

miserable than rude. I forced a weak smile.

“Old watani trick, no need for fancy medicine, ” he said. His tone bordered on the surly. He flicked the ash off his cigarette and gave himself a self-satisfied look in the rearview mirror. He was a Tajik, a

lanky, dark man with a weather-beaten face, narrow shoulders, and a long neck punctuated by a protruding Adam’s apple that only peeked from behind his beard when he turned his head. He was

dressed much as I was, though I suppose it was really the other way around: a rough-woven wool blanket wrapped over a gray pirhan-tumban and a vest. On his head, he wore a brown pakol, tilted slightly

to one side, like the Tajik hero Ahmad Shah Massoud--referred to by Tajiks as “the Lion of Panjsher. ”

It was Rahim Khan who had introduced me to Farid in Peshawar. He told me Farid was twenty-nine, though he had the wary, lined face of a man twenty years older. He was born in Mazar-i-Sharif and

lived there until his father moved the family to Jalalabad when Farid was ten. At fourteen, he and his father had joined the jihad against the Shorawi. They had fought in the Panjsher Valley for two years

until helicopter gunfire had torn the older man to pieces. Farid had two wives and five children. “He used to have seven, ” Rahim Khan said with a rueful look, but he’d lost his two youngest girls a few years

earlier in a land mine blast just outside Jalalabad, the same explosion that had severed toes from his feet and three fingers from his left hand. After that, he had moved his wives and children to Peshawar.

“Checkpoint, ” Farid grumbled. I slumped a little in my seat, arms folded across my chest, forgetting for a moment about the nausea. But I needn’t have worried. Two Pakistani militia approached our

dilapidated Land Cruiser, took a cursory glance inside, and waved us on.

Farid was first on- the list of preparations Rahim Khan and I made, a list that included exchanging dollars for Kaldar and Afghani bills, my garment and pakol--ironically, I’d never worn either when I’d

actually lived in Afghanistan--the Polaroid of Hassan and Sohrab, and, finally, perhaps the most important item: an artificial beard, black and chest length, Shari’a friendly--or at least the Taliban version of

Shari’a. Rahim Khan knew of a fellow in Peshawar who specialized in weaving them, sometimes for Western journalists who covered the war.

Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly. But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I’d change my mind. I was afraid I’d deliberate,

ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going. I was afraid the appeal of my life in America would draw me back, that I would wade back into that great, big river and let myself forget, let the

things I had learned these last few days sink to the bottom. I was afraid that I’d let the waters carry me away from what I had to do. From Hassan. From the past that had come calling. And from this one last

chance at redemption. So I left before there was any possibility of that happening. As for Soraya, telling her I was going back to Afghanistan wasn’t an option. If I had, she would have booked herself on the

next flight to Pakistan.

We had crossed the border and the signs of poverty were every where. On either side of the road, I saw chains of little villages sprouting here and there, like discarded toys among the rocks, broken

mud houses and huts consisting of little more than four wooden poles and a tattered cloth as a roof. I saw children dressed in rags chasing a soccer ball outside the huts. A few miles later, I spotted a

cluster of men sitting on their haunches, like a row of crows, on the carcass of an old burned-out Soviet tank, the wind fluttering the edges of the blankets thrown around them. Behind them, a woman in a

brown burqa carried a large clay pot on her shoulder, down a rutted path toward a string of mud houses.

“Strange, ” I said.

“What? ”

“I feel like a tourist in my own country, ” I said, taking in a goatherd leading a half-dozen emaciated goats along the side of the road.

Farid snickered. Tossed his cigarette. “You still think of this place as your country? ”

“I think a part of me always will, ” I said, more defensively than I had intended.

“After twenty years of living in America, ” he said, swerving the truck to avoid a pothole the size of a beach ball.

I nodded. “I grew up in Afghanistan. ” Farid snickered again.

“Why do you do that? ”

“Never mind, ” he murmured.

“No, I want to know. Why do you do that? ”

In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes. “You want to know? ” he sneered. “Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice back yard that

your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy

mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America. And I would bet my first son’s eyes that this is the first time you’ve ever worn a pakol. ”

He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth. “Am I close? ”

“Why are you saying these things? ” I said.

“Because you wanted to know, ” he spat. He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “That’s the real

Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That’s the Afghanistan I know. You? You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it. ”

Rahim Khan had warned me not to expect a warm welcome in Afghanistan from those who had stayed behind and fought the wars. “I’m sorry about your father, ” I said. “I’m sorry about your daughters,

and I’m sorry about your hand. ”

“That means nothing to me, ” he said. He shook his head. “Why are you coming back here anyway? Sell off your Baba’s land? Pocket the money and run back to your mother in America? ”

“My mother died giving birth to me, ” I said.

He sighed and lit another cigarette. Said nothing.

“Pull over. ”

“What? ”

“Pull over, goddamn it! ” I said. “I’m going to be sick. ” I tumbled out of the truck as it was coming to a rest on the gravel alongside the road.

BY LATE AFTERNOON, the terrain had changed from one of sun-beaten peaks and barren cliffs to a greener, more rural land scape. The main pass had descended from Landi Kotal through Shinwari

territory to Landi Khana. We’d entered Afghanistan at Torkham. Pine trees flanked the road, fewer than I remembered and many of them bare, but it was good to see trees again after the arduous drive

through the Khyber Pass. We were getting closer to Jalalabad, where Farid had a brother who would take us in for the night.

The sun hadn’t quite set when we drove into Jalalabad, capital of the state of Nangarhar, a city once renowned for its fruit and warm climate. Farid drove past the buildings and stone houses of the city’s

central district. There weren’t as many palm trees there as I remembered, and some of the homes had been reduced to roofless walls and piles of twisted clay.

Farid turned onto a narrow unpaved road and parked the Land Cruiser along a dried-up gutter. I slid out of the truck, stretched, and took a deep breath. In the old days, the winds swept through the

irrigated plains around Jalalabad where farmers grew sugarcane, and impregnated the city’s air with a sweet scent. I closed my eyes and searched for the sweetness. I didn’t find it.

“Let’s go, ” Farid said impatiently. We walked up the dirt road past a few leafless poplars along a row of broken mud walls. Farid led me to a dilapidated one-story house and knocked on the woodplank

door.

A young woman with ocean-green eyes and a white scarf draped around her face peeked out. She saw me first, flinched, spotted Farid and her eyes lit up. “Salaam alaykum, Kaka Farid! ”

“Salaam, Maryam jan, ” Farid replied and gave her something he’d denied me all day: a warm smile. He planted a kiss on the top of her head. The young woman stepped out of the way, eyeing me a

little apprehensively as I followed Farid into the small house.

The adobe ceiling was low, the dirt walls entirely bare, and the only light came from a pair of lanterns set in a corner. We took off our shoes and stepped on the straw mat that covered the floor. Along

one of the walls sat three young boys, cross-legged, on a mattress covered with a blanket with shredded borders. A tall bearded man with broad shoulders stood up to greet us. Farid and he hugged and

kissed on the cheek. Farid introduced him to me as Wahid, his older brother. “He’s from America, ” he said to Wahid, flicking his thumb toward me. He left us alone and went to greet the boys.

Wahid sat with me against the wall across from the boys, who had ambushed Farid and climbed his shoulders. Despite my protests, Wahid ordered one of the boys to fetch another blanket so I’d be

more comfortable on the floor, and asked Maryam to bring me some tea. He asked about the ride from Peshawar, the drive over the Khyber Pass.

“I hope you didn’t come across any dozds, ” he said. The Khyber Pass was as famous for its terrain as for the bandits who used that terrain to rob travelers. Before I could answer, he winked and said in

a loud voice, “Of course no dozd would waste his time on a car as ugly as my brother’s. ”

Farid wrestled the smallest of the three boys to the floor and tickled him on the ribs with his good hand. The kid giggled and kicked. “At least I have a car, ” Farid panted. “How is your donkey these

days? ”

“My donkey is a better ride than your car. ”

“Khar khara mishnassah, ” Farid shot back. Takes a donkey to know a donkey. They all laughed and I joined in. I heard female voices from the adjoining room. I could see half of the room from where I

sat. Maryam and an older woman wearing a brown hijab--presumably her mother--were speaking in low voices and pouring tea from a kettle into a pot.

“So what do you do in America, Amir agha? ” Wahid asked.

“I’m a writer, ” I said. I thought I heard Farid chuckle at that.

“A writer? ” Wahid said, clearly impressed. “Do you write about Afghanistan? ”

“Well, I have. But not currently, ” I said. My last novel, A Season for Ashes, had been about a university professor who joins a clan of gypsies after he finds his wife in bed with one of his stu dents. It wasn’t

a bad book. Some reviewers had called it a “good” book, and one had even used the word “riveting. ” But suddenly I was embarrassed by it. I hoped Wahid wouldn’t ask what it was about.

“Maybe you should write about Afghanistan again, ” Wahid said. “Tell the rest of the world what the Taliban are doing to our country. ”

“Well, I’m not... I’m not quite that kind of writer. ”

“Oh, ” Wahid said, nodding and blushing a bit. " You know best, of course. It’s not for me to suggest...

Just then, Maryam and the other woman came into the room with a pair of cups and a teapot on a small platter. I stood up in respect, pressed my hand to my chest, and bowed my head. “Salaam

alaykum, ” I said.

The woman, who had now wrapped her hijab to conceal her lower face, bowed her head too. “Sataam, ” she replied in a barely audible voice. We never made eye contact. She poured the tea while I stood.

The woman placed the steaming cup of tea before me and exited the room, her bare feet making no sound at all as she disappeared. I sat down and sipped the strong black tea. Wahid finally broke the

uneasy silence that followed.

“So what brings you back to Afghanistan? ”

“What brings them all back to Afghanistan, dear brother? ” Farid said, speaking to Wahid but fixing me with a contemptuous gaze.

“Bas! ” Wahid snapped.

“It’s always the same thing, ” Farid said. “Sell this land, sell that house, collect the money, and run away like a mouse. Go back to America, spend the money on a family vacation to Mexico. ”

“Farid! ” Wahid roared. His children, and even Farid, flinched. “Have you forgotten your-manners? This is my house! Amir agha is my guest tonight and I will not allow you to dishonor me like this! ”

Farid opened his mouth, almost said something, reconsidered and said nothing. He slumped against the wall, muttered some thing under his breath, and crossed his mutilated foot over the good one.

His accusing eyes never left me.

“Forgive us, Amir agha, ” Wahid said. “Since childhood, my brother’s mouth has been two steps ahead of his head. ”

“It’s my fault, really, ” I said, trying to smile under Farid’s intense gaze. “I am not offended. I should have explained to him my business here in Afghanistan. I am not here to sell property. I’m going to Kabul

to find a boy. ”

“A boy, ” Wahid repeated.

“Yes. ” I fished the Polaroid from the pocket of my shirt. Seeing Hassan’s picture again tore the fresh scab off his death. I had to turn my eyes away from it. I handed it to Wahid. He studied the photo.

Looked from me to the photo and back again. “This boy? ”

I nodded.

“This Hazara boy. ”

“Yes. ”

“What does he mean to you? ”

“His father meant a lot to me. He is the man in the photo. He’s dead now. ”

Wahid blinked. “He was a friend of yours? ”

My instinct was to say yes, as if, on some deep level, I too wanted to protect Baba’s secret. But there had been enough lies already. “He was my half-brother. ” I swallowed. Added, “My illegitimate half

brother. ” I turned the teacup. Toyed with the handle.

“I didn’t mean to pry. ”

“You’re not prying, ” I said.

“What will you do with him? ”

“Take him back to Peshawar. There are people there who will take care of him. ”

Wahid handed the photo back and rested his thick hand on my shoulder. “You are an honorable man, Amir agha. A true Afghan. ”

I cringed inside.

“I am proud to have you in our home tonight, ” Wahid said. I thanked him and chanced a glance over to Farid. He was looking down now, playing with the frayed edges of the straw mat.

A SHORT WHILE LATER, Maryam and her mother brought two steaming bowls of vegetable shorwa and two loaves of bread. “I’m sorry we can’t offer you meat, ” Wahid said. “Only the Taliban can

afford meat now. ”

“This looks wonderful, ” I said. It did too. I offered some to him, to the kids, but Wahid said the family had eaten before we arrived. Farid and I rolled up our sleeves, dipped our bread in the shorwa, and

ate with our hands.

As I ate, I noticed Wahid’s boys, all three thin with dirtcaked faces and short-cropped brown hair under their skullcaps, stealing furtive glances at my digital wristwatch. The youngest whispered

something in his brother’s ear. The brother nodded, didn’t take his eyes off my watch. The oldest of the boys--I guessed his age at about twelve--rocked back and forth, his gaze glued to my wrist. After

dinner, after I’d washed my hands with the water Maryam poured from a clay pot, I asked for Wahid’s permission to give his boys a hadia, a gift. He said no, but, when I insisted, he reluctantly agreed. I

unsnapped the wristwatch and gave it to the youngest of the three boys. He muttered a sheepish “Tashakor. ”

“It tells you the time in any city in the world, ” I told him. The boys nodded politely, passing the watch between them, taking

turns trying it on. But they lost interest and, soon, the watch sat abandoned on the straw mat.

⇐ Предыдущая 8 9 10 11 121314 15 16 17 Следующая ⇒