The Kite Runner
At one point Baba pointed to someone. “Amir, do you see that man stiting up
there with those other men around him?”
I did.
“That’s Henry Kissinger.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know who Henry Kissinger was, and I might have asked.
But at the moment, I watched with horror as one of the chapandaz fell off his
saddle and was trampled under a score of hooves. His body was tossed and hurled
in the stampede like a rag doll, finally rolling to a stop when the melee moved
on. He twitched once and lay motionless, his legs bent at unnatural angles, a
pool of his blood soaking through the sand.
I began to cry.
I cried all the way back home. I remember how Baba’s hands clenched around the
steering wheel. Clenched and unclenched. Mostly, I will never forget Baba’s
valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he drove in
silence.
Later that night, I was passing by my father’s study when I overheard him
speaking to Rahim Khan. I pressed my ear to the closed door.
“—grateful that he’s healthy,” Rahim Khan was saying.
“I know, I know. But he’s always buried in those books of shuffling around the
house like he’s lost in some dream.”
“And?”
“I wasn’t like that.” Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry.
Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them
with your favorite colors.”
“I’m telling you,” Baba said, “I wasn’t like that at all, and neither were any
of the kids I grew up with.”
“You know, sometimes you are the most self-centered man I know,” Rahim Khan
said. He was the only person I knew who could get away with saying something
like that to Baba.
“It has nothing to do with that.”
“Nay?”
“Nay.”
“Then what?”
I heard the leather of Baba’s seat creaking as he shifted on it. I closed my
eyes, pressed my ear even harder against the door wanting to hear, not wanting
to hear. “Sometimes I look out the window and I see him playing on the street
with the neighborhood boys. I see how they push him around, take his toys from
him, give him a shove here, a whack there. And, you know, he never fights back.
Never. He just…drops his head and…”
“So he’s not violent,” Rahim Khan said.
“That’s not what I mean, Rahim, and you know it,” Baba shot back. “There is
something missing in that boy.”
“Yes, a mean streak.”
“Self-defense has nothing to do with meanness. You know what always happens
when the neighborhood boys tease him? Hassan steps in and fends them off. I’ve
seen it with my own eyes. And when they come home, I say to him, ‘How did
Hassan get that scrape on his face?’ And he says, ‘He fell down.’ I’m telling
you, Rahim, there is something missing in that boy.”
“You just need to let him find his way,” Rahim Khan said.
“And where is he headed?” Baba said. “A boy who won’t stand up for himself
becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New
York: Riverhead, 2003. Prin
