The Kite Runner Page 0,85
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.
Chapter 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