The Kite Runner Page 0,73
an area my garrulous driver referred to as "Afghan Town." I saw sweetshops and carpet vendors, kabob stalls, kids with dirtcaked hands selling cigarettes, tiny restaurants--maps of Afghanistan painted on their windows--all interlaced with backstreet aid agencies. "Many of your brothers in this area, yar. They are opening businesses, but most of them are very poor." He tsk'ed his tongue and sighed. "Anyway, we're getting close now."
I thought about the last time I had seen Rahim Khan, in 1981. He had come to say good-bye the night Baba and I had fled Kabul. I remember Baba and him embracing in the foyer, crying softly. When Baba and I arrived in the U.S., he and Rahim Khan kept in touch. They would speak four or five times a year and, sometimes, Baba would pass me the receiver. The last time I had spoken to Rahim Khan had been shortly after Baba's death. The news had reached Kabul and he had called. We'd only spoken for a few minutes and lost the connection.
The driver pulled up to a narrow building at a busy corner where two winding streets intersected. I paid the driver, took my lone suitcase, and walked up to the intricately carved door. The building had wooden balconies with open shutters--from many of them, laundry was hanging to dry in the sun. I walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor, down a dim hallway to the last door on the right. Checked the address on the piece of stationery paper in my palm. Knocked.
Then, a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be Rahim Khan opened the door.A CREATIVE WRITING TEACHER at San Jose State used to say about clich�s: "Avoid them like the plague." Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clich�s got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clich�d saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a clich�. For example, the "elephant in the room" saying. Nothing could more correctly describe the initial moments of my reunion with Rahim Khan.
We sat on a wispy mattress set along the wall, across the window overlooking the noisy street below. Sunlight slanted in and cast a triangular wedge of light onto the Afghan rug on the floor. Two folding chairs rested against one wall and a small copper samovar sat in the opposite corner. I poured us tea from it.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"It's not difficult to find people in America. I bought a map of the U.S., and called up information for cities in Northern California," he said. "It's wonderfully strange to see you as a grown man."
I smiled and dropped three sugar cubes in my tea. He liked his black and bitter, I remembered. "Baba didn't get the chance to tell you but I got married fifteen years ago." The truth was, by then, the cancer in Baba's brain had made him forgetful, negligent.
"You are married? To whom?"
"Her name is Soraya Taheri." I thought of her back home, worrying about me. I was glad she wasn't alone.
"Taheri... whose daughter is she?"
I told him. His eyes brightened. "Oh, yes, I remember now. Isn't General Taheri married to Sharif jan's sister? What was her name..."
"Jamila jan."
"Balay!" he said, smiling. "I knew Sharif jan in Kabul, long time ago, before he moved to America."
"He's been working for the INS for years, handles a lot of Afghan cases."
"Haiiii," he sighed. "Do you and Soraya jan have children?"
"Nay."
"Oh." He slurped his tea and didn't ask more; Rahim Khan had always been one of the most instinctive people I'd ever met.
I told him a lot about Baba, his job, the flea market, and how, at the end, he'd died happy. I told him about my schooling, my books--four published novels to my credit now. He smiled at this, said he had never had any doubt. I told him I had written short stories in the leather-bound notebook he'd given me, but he didn't remember the notebook.
The conversation inevitably turned to the Taliban.
"Is it as bad as I hear?" I said.
"Nay, it's worse. Much worse," he said. "They don't let you be human." He pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy eyebrow. "I was at a soccer game in Ghazi Stadium in 1998. Kabul against Mazar-i-Sharif, I think, and by the way the players weren't allowed to wear shorts. Indecent exposure, I guess." He