The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.

“For you a thousand

times over!”

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.

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.

Come. There is a way to be good again,

“She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘Why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like

this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you,’

The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

“I owe you thanks too, Sohrab jan,” I said. “You saved my life.”

man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer. I hope your suffering comes to an end with this journey to Afghanistan.

some

things mattered more than the truth.

But your father was a man torn between two halves, Amir jan: you and Hassan. He loved you both, but he could not love Hassan the way he longed to, openly, and as a father. So he took it out on you instead—Amir, the socially legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with them. When he saw you, he

saw himself. And his guilt.

when your father was hard on you, he was also being hard on himself. Your father, like you, was a tortured soul, Amir jan.

Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

know that in the end, God will forgive. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But, most important, forgive yourself.

“For you a thousand times over,” Farid said.

“I wasn’t such a good friend, I’m afraid,” I said. “But I’d like to be your friend. I think I could be a good friend to you. Would that be all right? Would you like that?”

“For you, a thousand times over,” I heard myself say.