بخش 11

They won’t let me in.

I see them wheel him through a set of double doors and I follow. I burst through the doors, the smell of iodine and peroxide hits me, but all I have time to see is two men wearing surgical caps and a woman in green huddling over a gurney. A pair of small, bloody feet poke out from under the sheet and I see that the big toenail on the left foot is chipped. Then a tall, thickset man in blue presses his palm against my chest and he’s pushing me back out through the doors. “You cannot be here”, he says it in English, his voice polite but firm. “You must wait,” he says, leading me back to the waiting area. He leaves me in a wide, windowless corridor crammed with people sitting on metallic folding chairs set along the walls, others on the thin frayed carpet. I close my eyes and my nostrils fill with the smells of the corridor, sweat and ammonia, rubbing alcohol and curry.

I open my eyes again and I know what I have to do. I look around, my heart a jackhammer in my chest, blood thudding in my ears. There is a dark little supply room to my left. In it, I find what I need. It will do. I grab a white bedsheet from the pile of folded linens and carry it back to the corridor. I throw my makeshift jai-namaz, my prayer rug, on the floor and I get on my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, my tears soaking through the sheet. I bow to the west. Then I remember I haven’t prayed for over fifteen years. I have long forgotten the words. But it doesn’t matter, I will utter those few words I still remember: La illaha il Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah. There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger. I see now that Baba was wrong, there is a God, there always had been. I see Him here, in the eyes of the people in this corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him, not the white masjid with its bright diamond lights and towering minarets. I bow to the west and kiss the ground and promise that I will do zakat, I will do namaz, I will fast during Ramadan and when Ramadan has passed I will go on fasting. I will do all of this and I will think of Him every day from this day on if He only grants me this one wish: My hands are stained with Hassan’s blood; I pray God doesn’t let them get stained with the blood of his boy too.

I hear a whimpering and realize it is mine, my lips are salty with the tears trickling down my face. I feel the eyes of everyone in this corridor on me and still I bow to the west. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I’d always feared they would.

I stare at the clock on the wall. It’s just past 4 A.M. and I have been shut out of the room with the swinging double doors for over five hours now. I still haven’t heard any news.

The floor beneath me begins to feel like part of my body, and my breathing is growing heavier, slower. I want to sleep, shut my eyes and lie my head down on this cold, dusty floor. Drift off. When I wake up, maybe I will discover that everything I saw in the hotel bathroom was part of a dream: the water drops dripping from the faucet and landing with a plink into the bloody bathwater; the left arm dangling over the side of the tub, the blood soaked razor sitting on the toilet tank—the same razor I had shaved with the day before—and his eyes, still half open but lightless. That more than anything. I want to forget the eyes.

Soon, sleep comes and I let it take me. I dream of things I can’t remember later.

Someone is tapping me on the shoulder. I open my eyes. There is a man kneeling beside me. He is wearing a cap like the men behind the swinging double doors. His skin is dark like the imported Swiss chocolate Hassan and I used to buy from the bazaar in Shar-e-Nau; he has hazel eyes topped with curved eyelashes. In a British accent, he tells me his name is Dr. Nawaz, and suddenly I want to be away from this man, because I don’t think I can bear to hear what he has come to tell me. He says the boy had cut himself deeply and had lost a great deal of blood and my mouth begins to mutter that prayer again: La illaha il Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah.

They had to transfuse several units of red cells—

How will I tell Soraya?

Twice, they had to revive him—

I will do namaz, I will do zakat.

They would have lost him if his heart hadn’t been young and strong—

I will fast.

He is alive.

Dr. Nawaz smiles. It takes me a moment to register what he has just said. Then he says more but I don’t hear him. Because I have taken his hands and I have brought them up to my face. I weep my relief into this stranger’s small, meaty hands and he says nothing now. He waits.

The intensive care unit is L-shaped and dim, a jumble of bleeping monitors and whirring machines. Dr. Nawaz leads me between two rows of beds separated by white plastic curtains. On the silent ride up the elevator with Dr. Nawaz, I had thought I’d weep again when I saw Sohrab. But when I sit on the chair at the foot of his bed, looking at his white face through the tangle of gleaming plastic tubes and IV lines, I am dry-eyed.

I kept vigil at Sohrab’s bedside in the daytime and wandered through the hospital’s serpentine corridors at night, listening to my shoe heels clicking on the tiles, thinking of what I would say to Sohrab when he woke up. I’d end up back in the ICU, by the whooshing ventilator beside his bed, and I’d be no closer to knowing.

After three days in the ICU, they withdrew the breathing tube and transferred him to a ground-level bed. I wasn’t there when they moved him. I had gone back to the hotel that night to get some sleep and ended up tossing around in bed all night. In the morning, I tried to not look at the bathtub. It was clean now. But I couldn’t stop myself from sitting on its cool, porcelain edge.

I was exiting the lobby when the hotel manager, Mr. Fayyaz, caught up with me. “I am very sorry for you,” he said, “but I am asking for you to leave my hotel, please. This is bad for my business, very bad.”

When I got in the cab, I asked the driver if he knew any Afghan bookstores. He said there was one a couple of kilometers south. We stopped there on the way to the hospital.

Sohrab’s new room had cream-colored walls, chipped, dark gray moldings, and glazed tiles that might have once been white. A uniformed security guard was standing at the window, munching on cooked watermelon seeds—Sohrab was under twenty-four-hours-a-day suicide watch. Hospital protocol, Dr. Nawaz had informed me. The guard tipped his hat when he saw me and left the room.

Sohrab was wearing short-sleeved hospital pajamas and lying on his back, blanket pulled to his chest, face turned to the window. 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. “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. “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 reached into the paper bag between my feet and took out the used copy of the Shahnamah I had bought at the Afghan 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. 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. “Anyway, 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.

“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. I read him most of chapter 1, up to the part where the young warrior Sohrab comes to his mother, Tahmineh, the princess of Samengan, 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? 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. “Tired,” he said.

“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.”

“What can I do, Sohrab? Please tell me.”

“I want—” he began. He winced again and brought his hand to his throat as if to clear whatever was blocking his voice. My eyes were drawn again to his wrist wrapped tightly with white gauze bandages. “I want my old life back,” he breathed.

“Oh, Sohrab.”

I touched his shoulder and he flinched. Drew away. I dropped my hand, remembering ruefully how in the last days before I’d broken my promise to him he had finally become at ease with my touch. “Sohrab, I can’t give you your old life back, I wish to God I could. But I can take you with me. That was what I was coming in the bathroom to tell you. You have a visa to go to America, to live with me and my wife. It’s true. I promise.” He sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. I wished I hadn’t said those last two words. “You know, I’ve done a lot of things I regret in my life,” I said, “and maybe none more than going back on the promise I made you. I ask for your bakhshesh, your forgiveness. Can you do that?” I dropped my voice. “Will you come with me?”

Sohrab rolled to his side, his back to me. “I am so khasta.” So very tired.

I sat by his bed until he fell asleep. Something was lost between Sohrab and me. Until my meeting with the lawyer, Omar Faisal, a light of hope had begun to enter Sohrab’s eyes like a timid guest. Now the light was gone, the guest had fled, and I wondered when it would dare return. I wondered how long before Sohrab smiled again. How long before he trusted me. If ever.

So I left the room and went looking for another hotel, unaware that almost a year would pass before I would hear Sohrab speak another word.

In the end, Sohrab never accepted my offer. Nor did he decline it. But he knew that when the bandages were removed and the hospital garments returned, he was just another homeless Hazara orphan. So what I took as a yes from him was in actuality more of a quiet surrender, not so much an acceptance as an act of relinquishment by one too weary to decide, and far too tired to believe.

And so it was that, about a week later, we crossed a strip of warm, black tarmac and I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.

We arrived home about seven months ago, on a warm day in August 2001. Soraya picked us up at the airport. I had never been away from Soraya for so long, and when she locked her arms around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how much I had missed her. “You’re still the morning sun to my yelda,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Never mind.” I kissed her ear.

After, she knelt to eye level with Sohrab. She took his hand and smiled at him. “Salaam, Sohrab jan, I’m your Khala Soraya. We’ve all been waiting for you.”

Looking at her smiling at Sohrab, her eyes tearing over a little, I had a glimpse of the mother she might have been, had her own womb not betrayed her.

Sohrab shifted on his feet and looked away.

Soraya had turned the study upstairs into a bedroom for Sohrab. She led him in and he sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets showed brightly colored kites flying in indigo blue skies. She had made inscriptions on the wall by the closet, feet and inches to measure a child’s growing height. At the foot of the bed, I saw a wicker basket stuffed with books, a locomotive, a watercolor set.

Soraya asked if he liked his room and I noticed that she was trying to avoid looking at his wrists and that her eyes kept swaying back to those jagged pink lines. Sohrab lowered his head. Hid his hands under his thighs and said nothing. Then he simply lay his head on the pillow. Less than five minutes later, Soraya and I watching from the doorway, he was snoring.

We went to bed, and Soraya fell asleep with her head on my chest. In the darkness of our room, I lay awake, an insomniac once more.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I slid out of bed and went to Sohrab’s room. I stood over him, looking down, and saw something protruding from under his pillow. I picked it up. Saw it was Rahim Khan’s Polaroid, the one of Hassan and Sohrab standing side by side, squinting in the light of the sun, and smiling like the world was a good and just place.

I looked at the photo. Your father was a man torn between two halves, Rahim Khan had said in his letter. I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of Baba’s guilt. I looked at Hassan, Baba’s other half. The unentitled, unprivileged half. The half who had inherited what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe, in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son.

I slipped the picture back where I had found it. Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it. Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

The general and Khala Jamila came over for dinner the following night. Khala Jamila, her hair cut short and a darker shade of red than usual, handed Soraya the plate of almond-topped maghout she had brought for dessert. She saw Sohrab and beamed. “Mashallah! Soraya jan told us how khoshteep you were, but you are even more handsome in person, Sohrab jan.”

“Hello, young man,” was all the general said, looking at Sohrab the way one might study a bizarre decorative item at someone’s house.

The general and I sat in the living room and sipped wine while Soraya and her mother set the table. I told him about Kabul and the Taliban. He listened and nodded but as we spoke, I caught his eyes drifting again and again to Sohrab sleeping on the couch. As if we were skirting around the edge of what he really wanted to know.

The skirting finally came to an end over dinner when the general put down his fork and said, “So, Amir jan, you’re going to tell us why you have brought back this boy with you?”

“Iqbal jan! What sort of question is that?” Khala Jamila said.

People will ask. They will want to know why there is a Hazara boy living with our daughter. What do I tell them?”

Soraya dropped her spoon. Turned on her father. “You can tell them—”

“It’s okay, Soraya,” I said, taking her hand. “It’s okay. General Sahib is quite right. People will ask.”

I turned to the general. “You see, General Sahib, my father slept with his servant’s wife. She bore him a son named Hassan. Hassan is dead now. That boy sleeping on the couch is Hassan’s son. He’s my nephew. That’s what you tell people when they ask.” They were all staring at me.

“And one more thing, General Sahib,” I said. “You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab.”

No one said anything for the remainder of the meal.

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquillity. Quiet is turning down the VOLUME knob on life. Silence is pushing the OFF button. Shutting it down. All of it.

Sohrab didn’t so much live with us as occupy space. And precious little of it. He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if not to stir the air around him. Mostly, he slept.

While Sohrab was silent, the world was not. One Tuesday morning last September, the Twin Towers came crumbling down and, overnight, the world changed. Soon after the attacks, America bombed Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance moved in, and the Taliban scurried like rats into the caves. Suddenly, people were standing in grocery store lines and talking about the cities of my childhood, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif. Now Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz, the Taliban’s last stronghold in the north. That December, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras gathered in Bonn and, under the watchful eye of the UN, began the process that might someday end over twenty years of unhappiness in their watan. Hamid Karzai’s caracul hat and green chapan became famous.

Sohrab sleepwalked through it all.

The year ended with Soraya and me on the couch, blanket spread over our legs, watching Dick Clark on TV. People cheered and kissed when the silver ball dropped, and confetti whitened the screen. In our house, the new year began much the same way the last one had ended. In silence.

Then, four days ago, on a cool rainy day in March 2002, a small, wondrous thing happened.

I took Soraya, Khala Jamila, and Sohrab to a gathering of Afghans at Lake Elizabeth Park in Fremont. The general had finally been summoned to Afghanistan the month before for a ministry position, and had flown there two weeks earlier—he had left behind his gray suit and pocket watch. The plan was for Khala Jamila to join him in a few months once he had settled. She missed him terribly and we had insisted she stay with us for a while.

The previous Thursday, the first day of spring, had been the Afghan New Year’s Day—the Sawl-e-Nau—and Afghans in the Bay Area had planned celebrations throughout the East Bay and the peninsula. It had been sunny for days, but Sunday morning, as I swung my legs out of bed, I heard raindrops pelting the window. Afghan luck, I thought. Snickered. I prayed morning namaz while Soraya slept—I didn’t have to consult the prayer pamphlet I had obtained from the mosque anymore; the verses came naturally now, effortlessly.

We arrived around noon and found a handful of people taking cover under a large rectangular plastic sheet mounted on six poles spiked to the ground.

We stooped under the makeshift tent. Soraya and Khala Jamila drifted toward an overweight woman frying spinach bolani.

Sohrab stayed under the canopy for a moment, then stepped back out into the rain, hands stuffed in the pockets of his raincoat, his hair—now brown and straight like Hassan’s—plastered against his scalp. No one seemed to notice. No one called him back in. With time, the queries about our adopted—and decidedly eccentric— little boy had mercifully ceased. People stopped asking why he never spoke. Why he didn’t play with the other kids. The novelty had worn off. Like dull wallpaper, Sohrab had blended into the background.

By three o’clock, the rain had stopped and the sky was a curdled gray burdened with lumps of clouds. A cool breeze blew through the park. More families turned up. Afghans greeted each other, hugged, kissed, exchanged food. There was music, some new singer I didn’t know, and the giggling of children. I saw Sohrab, still in his yellow raincoat, leaning against a garbage pail, staring across the park at the empty batting cage.

Soraya pulled on my sleeve. “Amir, look!”

She was pointing to the sky. A half-dozen kites were flying high, speckles of bright yellow, red, and green against the gray sky.

“Check it out,” Soraya said, and this time she was pointing to a guy selling kites from a stand nearby.

I excused myself and walked over to the kite stand, my shoes squishing on the wet grass. I pointed to a yellow seh-parcha. “Sawl-e-nau mubabrak,” the kite seller said, taking the twenty and handing me the kite and a wooden spool of glass tar. I thanked him and wished him a Happy New Year too. I tested the string the way Hassan and I used to, by holding it between my thumb and forefinger and pulling it. It reddened with blood and the kite seller smiled. I smiled back.

I took the kite to where Sohrab was standing, still leaning against the garbage pail, arms crossed on his chest. He was looking up at the sky.

“Do you like the seh-parcha?” I said, holding up the kite by the ends of the cross bars. His eyes shifted from the sky to me, to the kite, then back. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Soraya watching us from the tent. Hands tensely dug in her armpits. Unlike me, she’d gradually abandoned her attempts at engaging him. She had shifted to “Holding Pattern,” waiting for a green light from Sohrab. Waiting.

I wet my index finger and held it up. “West, I think.” Sohrab wiped a raindrop from his earlobe and shifted on his feet. Said nothing. I thought of Soraya asking me a few months ago what his voice sounded like. I’d told her I didn’t remember anymore.

“Did I ever tell you your father was the best kite runner in Wazir Akbar Khan? Maybe all of Kabul?” I said, knotting the loose end of the spool tar to the string loop tied to the center spar. “How jealous he made the neighborhood kids. He’d run kites and never look up at the sky, and people used to say he was chasing the kite’s shadow. But they didn’t know him like I did. Your father wasn’t chasing any shadows. He just …knew.” Another half-dozen kites had taken flight. People had started to gather in clumps, teacups in hand, eyes glued to the sky.

“Do you want to help me fly this?” I said.

Sohrab’s gaze bounced from the kite to me. Back to the sky.

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Looks like I’ll have to fly it tanhaii.” Solo.

I balanced the spool in my left hand and fed about three feet of tar. The yellow kite dangled at the end of it, just above the wet grass. “All right. Here I go.” I took off running, my sneakers splashing rainwater from puddles, the hand clutching the kite end of the string held high above my head. It had been so long, so many years since I’d done this, and I wondered if I’d make a spectacle of myself. I let the spool roll in my left hand as I ran, felt the string cut my right hand again as it fed through. The kite was lifting behind my shoulder now, lifting, wheeling, and I ran harder. The spool spun faster and the glass string tore another gash in my right palm. I stopped and turned. Looked up. Smiled. High above, my kite was tilting side to side like a pendulum, making that old paper-bird-flapping-its-wings sound I always associated with winter mornings in Kabul. I hadn’t flown a kite in a quarter of a century, but suddenly I was twelve again and all the old instincts came rushing back.

I felt a presence next to me and looked down. It was Sohrab. Hands dug deep in the pockets of his raincoat. He had followed me.

“Do you want to try?” I asked. He said nothing. But when I held the string out for him, his hand lifted from his pocket. Hesitated. Took the string. My heart quickened as I spun the spool to gather the loose string. We stood quietly side by side. Necks bent up. I wished time would stand still.

Then I saw we had company. A green kite was closing in. I traced the string to a kid standing about thirty yards from us. Sohrab was handing the string back to me.

“Are you sure?” I said, taking it.

He took the spool from me.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s give him a sabagh, teach him a lesson, nay?” I glanced over at him. The glassy, vacant look in his eyes was gone. His gaze flitted between our kite and the green one. His face was a little flushed, his eyes suddenly alert. Awake. Alive. I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child.

The green kite drew closer yet, now rising a little above us, unaware of the trap I’d set for it. “Watch, Sohrab. I’m going to show you one of your father’s favorite tricks, the old lift-and-dive.”

Next to me, Sohrab was breathing rapidly through his nose. The spool rolled in his palms, the tendons in his scarred wrists like rubab strings.

The green kite hovered directly above us now. “He’s going for it. Anytime now,” I said, my eyes flicking from Sohrab to our kite.

The green kite hesitated. Held position. Then shot down. “Here he comes!” I said.

I did it perfectly. After all these years. The old lift-and-dive trap. I loosened my grip and tugged on the string, dipping and dodging the green kite. A series of quick sidearm jerks and our kite shot up counterclockwise, in a half circle. Suddenly I was on top. I pulled hard and our kite plummeted. I could almost feel our string sawing his. Almost heard the snap.

Then, just like that, the green kite was spinning and wheeling out of control.

Behind us, people cheered. Whistles and applause broke out. I was panting. The last time I had felt a rush like this was that day in the winter of 1975, just after I had cut the last kite, when I spotted Baba on our rooftop, clapping, beaming.

I looked down at Sohrab. One corner of his mouth had curled up just so.

A smile.

Lopsided.

Hardly there.

But there.

Behind us, kids were scampering, and a melee of screaming kite runners was chasing the loose kite drifting high above the trees. I blinked and the smile was gone. But it had been there. I had seen it.

“Do you want me to run that kite for you?”

His Adam’s apple rose and fell as he swallowed. The wind lifted his hair. I thought I saw him nod.

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

Then I turned and ran.

It was only a smile, nothing more. But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.

I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I didn’t care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips.

I ran.