The Kite Runner Page 0,131

lying on his back, blanket pulled to his chest, face turned to the window. I thought he was sleeping, but when I scooted a chair up to his bed his eyelids fluttered and opened. He looked at me, then looked away. He was so pale, even with all the blood they had given him, and there was a large purple bruise in the crease of his right arm.

"How are you?" I said.

He didn't answer. He was looking through the window at a fenced-in sandbox and swing set in the hospital garden. There was an arch-shaped trellis near the playground, in the shadow of a row of hibiscus trees, a few green vines climbing up the timber lattice. A handful of kids were playing with buckets and pails in the sand box. The sky was a cloudless blue that day, and I saw a tiny jet leaving behind twin white trails. I turned back to Sohrab. "I spoke to Dr. Nawaz a few minutes ago and he thinks you'll be discharged in a couple of days. That's good news, nay?"

Again I was met by silence. The Punjabi boy at the other end of the room stirred in his sleep and moaned something. "I like your room," I said, trying not to look at Sohrab's bandaged wrists. "It's bright, and you have a view." Silence. A few more awkward minutes passed, and a light sweat formed on my brow, my upper lip. I pointed to the untouched bowl of green pea aush on his nightstand, the unused plastic spoon. "You should try to eat some thing. Gain your quwat back, your strength. Do you want me to help you?"

He held my glance, then looked away, his face set like stone. His eyes were still lightless, I saw, vacant, the way I had found them when I had pulled him out of the bathtub. I reached into the paper bag between my feet and took out the used copy of the Shah namah I had bought at the Persian bookstore. I turned the cover so it faced Sohrab. "I used to read this to your father when we were children. We'd go up the hill by our house and sit beneath the pomegranate..." I trailed off. Sohrab was looking through the window again. I forced a smile. "Your father's favorite was the story of Rostam and Sohrab and that's how you got your name, I know you know that." I paused, feeling a bit like an idiot. "Any way, he said in his letter that it was your favorite too, so I thought I'd read you some of it. Would you like that?"

Sohrab closed his eyes. Covered them with his arm, the one with the bruise.

I flipped to the page I had bent in the taxicab. "Here we go," I said, wondering for the first time what thoughts had passed through Hassan's head when he had finally read the Shahnamah for himself and discovered that I had deceived him all those times. I cleared my throat and read. "Give ear unto the combat of Sohrab against Rostam, though it be a tale replete with tears," I began. "It came about that on a certain day Rostam rose from his couch and his mind was filled with forebodings. He bethought him..." I read him most of chapter 1, up to the part where the young warrior Sohrab comes to his mother, Tahmineh, the princess of Samen gan, and demands to know the identity of his father. I closed the book. "Do you want me to go on? There are battles coming up, remember? Sohrab leading his army to the White Castle in Iran? Should I read on?"

He shook his head slowly. I dropped the book back in the paper bag. "That's fine," I said, encouraged that he had responded at all. "Maybe we can continue tomorrow. How do you feel?"

Sohrab's mouth opened and a hoarse sound came out. Dr. Nawaz had told me that would happen, on account of the breathing tube they had slid through his vocal cords. He licked his lips and tried again. "Tired."

"I know. Dr. Nawaz said that was to be expected--" He was shaking his head.

"What, Sohrab?"

He winced when he spoke again in that husky voice, barely above a whisper. "Tired of everything."

I sighed and slumped in my chair. There was a band of sunlight on the bed between us, and, for just a moment, the ashen gray face looking at me from the other side of it was