The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

“I watched Hassan get raped,” I said to no one. Baba stirred in his sleep. Kaka Homayoun grunted. A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn’t have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it. I thought about Hassan’s dream, the one about us swimming in the lake. There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he’d been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster. That was the night I became an insomniac. I didn’t speak to Hassan until the middle of the next week. I had just half-eaten my lunch and Hassan was doing the dishes. I was walking upstairs, going

We’d actually deceived ourselves into thinking that a toy made of tissue paper, glue, and bamboo could somehow close the chasm between us.

But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing.

elopement

They made me sad for Baba. After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation

life: one disappointing son and two suitcases.

know her, but dying to. Sometimes she was there with a portly middle-aged woman with pale skin and dyed red hair. I promised myself that I would talk to her before the summer was over, but schools reopened, the leaves reddened, yellowed, and fell, the rains of winter swept in and weakened Baba’s joints, baby leaves sprouted once more, and I still hadn’t had the heart, the dil, to even look her in the eye.

People were rushing to us. I heard someone say seizure. Someone else yelling, “Call 911!” I heard running footsteps. The sky darkened as a crowd gathered around us. Baba’s spittle turned red. He was biting

envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them.

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.

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?”

Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn’t been good to him, that he’d become homeless and destitute.

“Take two Afghans who’ve never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they’ll figure out how they’re related.”

Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys. They do nothing but thumb their rosaries and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand. God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands.

You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is . . . God help him.

morbidly

mascara,

surreal,

epiphany.

hemorrhage

But I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer. I hope your suffering comes to an end with this journey to Afghanistan. Amir

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood. He stretched his hand to give it back to me.

Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing

with a swarm of demons.

thought had brought no sting with it. Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Sohrab’s silence wasn’t the self-imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.