بخش 3

It happened just the way I’d imagined. I opened the door to the smoky study and stepped in. Baba and Rahim Khan were drinking tea and listening to the news crackling on the radio. Their heads turned. Then a smile played on my father’s lips. He opened his arms. I put the kite down and walked into his thick hairy arms. I buried my face in the warmth of his chest and wept. Baba held me close to him, rocking me back and forth. In his arms, I forgot what I’d done. And that was good.

For a week, I barely saw Hassan. I woke up to find toasted bread, brewed tea, and a boiled egg already on the kitchen table. My clothes for the day were ironed and folded, left on the cane-seat chair in the foyer where Hassan usually did his ironing.

One overcast morning, as I was pushing the boiled egg around on my plate, Ali walked in cradling a pile of chopped wood. I asked him where Hassan was.

“He went back to sleep,” Ali said, kneeling before the stove. He pulled the little square door open.

Ali paused with a log in his hand. “Lately, it seems all he wants to do is sleep.

“Did something happen to him, Amir agha? Something he’s not telling me?”

I shrugged. “How should I know?”

“You would tell me, nay? Inshallah, you would tell me if something had happened?”

“Maybe he’s sick.” I snapped. “People get sick all the time, Ali. Now, am I going to freeze to death or are you planning on lighting the stove today?” That night I asked Baba if we could go to Jalalabad on Friday. He was rocking on the leather swivel chair behind his desk, reading an Iranian newspaper. He put it down.

“Why not!” he said. Lately, Baba agreed to everything I aske. “Do you want to ask Hassan to come along to Jalalabad?” Why did Baba have to spoil it like that? “He’s mareez,” I said. Not feeling well.

“Really?” Baba stopped rocking in his chair. “What’s wrong with him?”

I couldn’t help hating the way his brow furrowed with worry. I gave a shrug and sank in the sofa by the fireplace.

“So are we going Friday, Baba?”

“Yes, yes,” Baba said, pushing away from the desk. “Too bad about Hassan. I thought you might have had more fun if he came.”

“Well, the two of us can have fun together,” I said.

Baba smiled. Winked. “Dress warm,” he said.

It should have been just the two of us—that was the way I wanted it—but by Wednesday night, Baba had managed to invite another two dozen people. He called his cousin Homayoun—he was actually Baba’s second cousin—and mentioned he was going to Jalalabad on Friday, and Homayoun, who had studied engineering in France and had a house in Jalalabad, said he’d love to have everyone over.

We filled three vans. I rode with Baba, Rahim Khan, Kaka Homayoun—Baba had taught me at a young age to call any older male Kaka, or Uncle, and any older female, Khala, or Aunt. Kaka Homayoun’s two wives rode with us too, as did Kaka Homayoun’s twin girls. I sat in the back row, carsick and dizzy, sandwiched between the seven-year-old twins who kept reaching over my lap to slap at each other. The road to Jalalabad is a two-hour trek through mountain roads winding along a steep drop, and my stomach lurched with each hairpin turn. I tried closing my eyes. I still didn’t feel better. A finger poked me in the side.

“What?” I said.

“I was just telling everyone about the tournament,” Baba said from behind the wheel. Kaka Homayoun and his wives were smiling at me from the middle row of seats.

“There must have been a hundred kites in the sky that day?” Baba said. “Is that about right, Amir?”

“I guess so,” I mumbled.

“A hundred kites, Homayoun jan. No laaf. And the only one still flying at the end of the day was Amir’s. He has the last kite at home, a beautiful blue kite. Hassan and Amir ran it together.”

“Congratulations,” Kaka Homayoun said. His first wife clapped her hands. The younger wife joined in. Then they were all clapping, yelping their praises, telling me how proud I’d made them all. Only Rahim Khan, sitting in the passenger seat next to Baba, was silent. He was looking at me in an odd way.

“Please pull over, Baba,” I said.

“What?”

“Getting sick,” I muttered, leaning across the seat, pressing against Kaka Homayoun’s daughters.

Baba began to pull over, but I didn’t make it. A few minutes later, I was sitting on a rock on the side of the road as they aired out the van. I closed my eyes, turned my face to the sun. Little shapes formed behind my eyelids, like hands playing shadows on the wall. They twisted, merged, formed a single image: Hassan’s brown corduroy pants discarded on a pile of old bricks in the alley.

Kaka Homayoun’s white, two-story house in Jalalabad had a balcony overlooking a large, walled garden with apple and persimmon trees. There were hedges that, in the summer, the gardener shaped like animals, and a swimming pool with emerald-colored tiles. I sat on the edge of the pool, empty save for a layer of slushy snow at the bottom, feet dangling in. It shouldn’t have felt this way. Baba and I were finally friends. I finally had what I’d wanted all those years. Except now that I had it, I felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.

The wives and daughters served dinner—rice, kofta, and chicken qurma—at sundown. Baba, who’d had a few scotches before dinner, was still ranting about the kite tournament, how I’d outlasted them all, how I’d come home with the last kite. I felt like sticking a knife in my eye.

Later, well past midnight, after a few hours of poker between Baba and his cousins, the men lay down to sleep on parallel mattresses in the same room where we’d dined. The women went upstairs. An hour later, I still couldn’t sleep.

“I watched Hassan get raped,” I said to no one. A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn’t have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

That was the night I became an insomniac.

My memory of the rest of that winter of 1975 is pretty hazy. I remember I was fairly happy when Baba was home. Sometimes Rahim Khan came over and Baba let me sit in his study and sip tea with them. He’d even have me read him some of my stories. It was good and I even believed it would last. And Baba believed it too, I think. We’d actually deceived ourselves into thinking that a toy made of tissue paper, glue, and bamboo could somehow close the chasm between us.

But when Baba was out—and he was out a lot—I closed myself in my room. I’d hear Hassan shuffling around the kitchen in the morning, hear the clinking of silverware, the whistle of the teapot. I’d wait to hear the door shut and only then I would walk down to eat. On my calendar, I circled the date of the first day of school and began a countdown.

To my dismay, Hassan kept trying to rekindle things between us. I remember the last time. I was in my room, reading an abbreviated Farsi translation of Ivanhoe, when he knocked on my door. “What is it?” “I’m going to the baker to buy naan,” he said from the other side. “I was wondering if you …if you wanted to come along.” “I think I’m just going to read,” I said, rubbing my temples.

Lately, every time Hassan was around, I was getting a headache. “I wish you’d come along,” he said. Paused. Something thumped against the door, maybe his forehead. “I don’t know what I’ve done, Amir agha. I wish you’d tell me. I don’t know why we don’t play anymore.”

“You haven’t done anything, Hassan. Just go.” “You can tell me, I’ll stop doing it.” I buried my head in my lap, squeezed my temples with my knees, like a vice. “I’ll tell you what I want you to stop doing,” I said, eyes pressed shut. “I want you to stop harassing me. I want you to go away,” I snapped. I wished he would give it right back to me, break the door open and tell me off—it would have made things easier, better. But he didn’t do anything like that, and when I opened the door minutes later, he wasn’t there. I fell on my bed, buried my head under the pillow, and cried.

Hassan milled about the periphery of my life after that. I made sure our paths crossed as little as possible, planned my day that way. But even when he wasn’t around, he was. He was there in the hand-washed and ironed clothes on the cane-seat chair, in the warm slippers left outside my door, in the wood already burning in the stove when I came down for breakfast. Everywhere I turned, I saw signs of his loyalty, his goddamn unwavering loyalty.

Early that spring, a few days before the new school year started, Baba and I were planting tulips in the garden. He was telling me how most people thought it was better to plant tulips in the fall and how that wasn’t true, when I came right out and said it. “Baba, have you ever thought about getting new servants?” He dropped the tulip bulb and buried the trowel in the dirt.

“Why would I ever want to do that?” Baba said curtly.

“You wouldn’t, I guess. It was just a question,” I said, my voice fading to a murmur. I was already sorry I’d said it.

“Is this about you and Hassan? I know there’s something going on between you two, but whatever it is, you have to deal with it, not me. I’m staying out of it.”

“I’m sorry, Baba.”

“I grew up with Ali,” he said through clenched teeth. “My father took him in, he loved Ali like his own son. Forty years Ali’s been with my family. Forty goddamn years. And you think I’m just going to throw him out?” He turned to me now, his face as red as a tulip. “You bring me shame. And Hassan . . . Hassan’s not going anywhere, do you understand?” He dug a new hole with the trowel, striking the dirt harder than he had to. “He’s staying right here with us, where he belongs. This is his home and we’re his family. Don’t you ever ask me that question again!” “I won’t, Baba. I’m sorry.”

We planted the rest of the tulips in silence.

I was relieved when school started that next week. School gave me an excuse to stay in my room for long hours. And, for a while, it took my mind off what had happened that winter, what I had let happen. For a few weeks, I preoccupied myself with gravity and momentum, atoms and cells, the Anglo-Afghan wars, instead of thinking about Hassan and what had happened to him. But, always, my mind returned to the alley. To Hassan’s brown corduroy pants lying on the bricks. To the droplets of blood staining the snow dark red, almost black.

I turned thirteen that summer of 1976, Afghanistan’s next to last summer of peace and anonymity. Baba’s motto about throwing parties was this: Invite the whole world or it’s not a party. I remember scanning over the invitation list a week before my birthday party and not recognizing at least three-quarters of the four hundred–plus Kakas and Khalas who were going to bring me gifts and congratulate me for having lived to thirteen. Then I realized they weren’t really coming for me. It was my birthday, but I knew who the real star of the show was.

I guess in most ways, or at least in the ways in which parties are judged, my birthday bash was a huge success. I’d never seen the house so packed. Guests with drinks in hand were chatting in the hallways, smoking on the stairs, leaning against doorways. I had to greet each of the guests personally—Baba made sure of that; no one was going to gossip the next day about how he’d raised a son with no manners. I kissed hundreds of cheeks, hugged total strangers, thanked them for their gifts. My face ached from the strain of my plastered smile.

I was standing with Baba in the yard near the bar when someone said, “Happy birthday, Amir.” It was Assef, with his parents. Assef’s father, Mahmood, was a short, lanky sort with dark skin and a narrow face. His mother, Tanya, was a small, nervous woman who smiled and blinked a lot. Assef led them toward us, like he had brought them here. Like he was the parent, and they his children. A wave of dizziness rushed through me. Baba thanked them for coming.

“Still playing soccer, Assef jan?” Baba said. He’d always wanted me to be friends with Assef.

Assef smiled. “Of course, Kaka jan.”

“Right wing, as I recall?”

“Actually, I switched to center forward this year,” Assef said. “You get to score more that way. He favored Baba with a good-natured wink.

Baba returned the wink. My stomach was turning at the sight of my father bonding with Assef.

Assef shifted his eyes to me. “Wali and Kamal are here too. They wouldn’t miss your birthday for anything,” he said, laughter lurking just beneath the surface. I nodded silently.

“We’re thinking about playing a little game of volleyball tomorrow at my house,” Assef said. “Maybe you’ll join us. Bring Hassan if you want to.”

“That sounds fun,” Baba said, beaming. “What do you think, Amir?”

“I don’t really like volleyball,” I muttered. I saw the light wink out of Baba’s eyes and an uncomfortable silence followed.

“Sorry, Assef jan,” Baba said, shrugging. That stung, his apologizing for me.

“Nay, no harm done,” Assef said. “But you have an open invitation, Amir jan. Anyway, I heard you like to read so I brought you a book. One of my favorites.” He extended a wrapped birthday gift to me. “Happy birthday.” On the surface, he was the embodiment of every parent’s dream, a strong, tall, well-dressed and well-mannered boy with talent and striking looks, not to mention the wit to joke with an adult. But to me, his eyes betrayed him. When I looked into them, the facade faltered, revealed a glimpse of the madness hiding behind them.

I took the box from Assef and lowered my gaze. I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

Baba spoke in a low voice, the one he took on whenever I embarrassed him in public. “Aren’t you going to thank Assef jan? That was very considerate of him.”

I wished Baba would stop calling him that. How often did he call me “Amir jan”? “Thanks,” I said. Before I could embarrass myself and Baba anymore—but mostly to get away from Assef and his grin—I stepped away. “Thanks for coming,” I said.

I squirmed my way through the throng of guests and slipped through the wrought-iron gates. Two houses down from our house, there was a large, barren dirt lot. I tore the wrapping paper from Assef’s present and tilted the book cover in the moonlight. It was a biography of Hitler. I threw it amid a tangle of weeds.

I leaned against the neighbor’s wall, slid down to the ground. I just sat in the dark for a while, knees drawn to my chest, looking up at the stars, waiting for the night to be over.

“Shouldn’t you be entertaining your guests?” a familiar voice said. Rahim Khan was walking toward me along the wall.

“They don’t need me for that. Baba’s there, remember?” I said. The ice in Rahim Khan’s drink clinked when he sat next to me.

He lit a cigarette, one of the unfiltered Pakistani cigarettes he and Baba were always smoking. “Did I ever tell you I was almost married once?”

“Really?” I said, smiling a little at the notion of Rahim Khan getting married. I’d always thought of him as Baba’s quiet alter ego, my writing mentor, my pal, the one who never forgot to bring me a souvenir, a saughat, when he returned from a trip abroad. But a husband? A father?

He nodded. “It’s true. I was eighteen. Her name was Homaira. She was a Hazara, the daughter of our neighbor’s servants. She was as beautiful as a pari, light brown hair, big hazel eyes … “We used to meet secretly in my father’s apple orchards, always after midnight when everyone had gone to sleep. We’d walk under the trees and I’d hold her hand . . . Am I embarrassing you, Amir jan?” “A little,” I said.

“It won’t kill you,” he said, taking another puff. “Anyway, we had this fantasy. We’d have a great, fancy wedding and invite family and friends from Kabul to Kandahar. I would build us a big house, white with a tiled patio and large windows. We would plant fruit trees in the garden and grow all sorts of flowers, have a lawn for our kids to play on. He took a long gulp of his scotch. Coughed. “You should have seen the look on my father’s face when I told him. My mother fainted. My brother Jalal actually went to fetch his hunting rifle before my father stopped him.” Rahim Khan barked a bitter laughter. “So what happened?”

“That same day, my father put Homaira and her family on a lorry and sent them off to Hazarajat. I never saw her again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Probably for the best, though,” Rahim Khan said, shrugging. “She would have suffered. My family would have never accepted her as an equal. You don’t order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them ‘sister’ the next.” He looked at me. “You know, you can tell me anything you want, Amir jan. Anytime.” “I know,” I said uncertainly. He looked at me for a long time, like he was waiting, his black bottomless eyes hinting at an unspoken secret between us.

“Here.” He handed me something. “I almost forgot. Happy birthday.” It was a brown leather-bound notebook. “For your stories,” he said. I was going to thank him when something exploded and bursts of fire lit up the sky.

“Fireworks!”

We hurried back to the house and found the guests all standing in the yard, looking up to the sky. Every few seconds, the backyard lit up in sudden flashes of red, green, and yellow.

In one of those brief bursts of light, I saw something I’ll never forget: Hassan serving drinks to Assef and Wali from a silver platter. I saw Assef grinning, kneading Hassan in the chest with a knuckle.

Then, mercifully, darkness.

Sitting in the middle of my room the next morning, I ripped open box after box of presents. I don’t know why I even bothered, since I just gave them a joyless glance and pitched them to the corner of the room. I didn’t want any of it—it was all blood money; Baba would have never thrown me a party like that if I hadn’t won the tournament.

Baba gave me two presents. One was sure to become the envy of every kid in the neighborhood: a brand new Schwinn Stingray, the king of all bicycles.

“You like it?” Baba said, leaning in the doorway to my room. I gave him a sheepish grin and a quick “Thank you.” I wished I could have mustered more.

“We could go for a ride,” Baba said. An invitation, but only a halfhearted one.

“Maybe later. I’m a little tired,” I said.

“Get some rest,” Baba said, walking toward his room.

The other present Baba gave me—and he didn’t wait around for me to open this one—was a wristwatch. It had a blue face with gold hands in the shape of lightning bolts. I didn’t even try it on. I tossed it on the pile of toys in the corner. The only gift I didn’t toss on that mound was Rahim Khan’s leather-bound notebook. That was the only one that didn’t feel like blood money.

I sat on the edge of my bed, turned the notebook in my hands, thought about what Rahim Khan had said about Homaira, how his father’s dismissing her had been for the best in the end. She would have suffered. An image kept flashing in my mind over and over: Hassan, his head downcast, serving drinks to Assef and Wali. Maybe it would be for the best. Lessen his suffering. And mine too. Either way, this much had become clear: One of us had to go.

The next morning, Ali and Hassan went grocery shopping to the bazaar, pushing the empty wheelbarrows in front of them. Then I took a couple of the envelopes of cash from the pile of gifts and my watch, and tiptoed out. I went downstairs, crossed the yard, and entered Ali and Hassan’s living quarters by the loquat tree. I lifted Hassan’s mattress and planted my new watch and a handful of Afghani bills under it.

I waited another thirty minutes. Then I knocked on Baba’s door and told what I hoped would be the last in a long line of shameful lies.

Through my bedroom window, I watched Ali and Has-san push the wheelbarrows loaded with meat, naan, fruit, and vegetables up the driveway. I saw Baba emerge from the house and walk up to Ali. Their mouths moved over words I couldn’t hear. Baba pointed to the house and Ali nodded. They separated. Baba came back to the house; Ali followed Hassan to their hut.

A few moments later, Baba knocked on my door. “Come to my office,” he said. “We’re all going to sit down and settle this thing.”

I went to Baba’s study, sat in one of the leather sofas. It was thirty minutes or more before Hassan and Ali joined us.

They’d both been crying; I could tell from their red, puffed-up eyes. They stood before Baba, hand in hand, and I wondered how and when I’d become capable of causing this kind of pain.

Baba came right out and asked. “Did you steal that money? Did you steal Amir’s watch, Hassan?”

Hassan’s reply was a single word, delivered in a thin, raspy voice: “Yes.”

I flinched, like I’d been slapped. My heart sank and I almost blurted out the truth. Then I understood: This was Hassan’s final sacrifice for me. If he’d said no, Baba would have believed him because we all knew Hassan never lied. And if Baba believed him, then I’d be the accused; I would have to explain and I would be revealed for what I really was. Baba would never, ever forgive me. And that led to another understanding: Hassan knew. He knew I’d seen everything in that alley, that I’d stood there and done nothing. He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time. I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone, and I wanted to tell them all that I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon. There would be some pain, but life would move on. I wanted that, to move on. I wanted to be able to breathe again.

Except Baba stunned me by saying, “I forgive you.”

Forgive? But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins. There is no act more wretched than stealing. Hadn’t Baba sat me on his lap and said those words to me? Then how could he just forgive Hassan? And if Baba could forgive that, then why couldn’t he forgive me for not being the son he’d always wanted? “We are leaving, Agha sahib,” Ali said.

“What?” Baba said, the color draining from his face.

“We can’t live here anymore,” Ali said.

“But I forgive him, Ali, didn’t you hear?” said Baba.

“Life here is impossible for us now, Agha sahib. We’re leaving.” Ali drew Hassan to him, curled his arm around his son’s shoulder. It was a protective gesture and I knew whom Ali was protecting him from. Ali glanced my way and in his cold, unforgiving look, I saw that Hassan had told him.

“I don’t care about the money or the watch,” Baba stood up, a sheen of grief across his face. “You’re the brother I never had, Ali, you know that. Please don’t do this.” “Don’t make this even more difficult than it already is, Agha sahib,” Ali’s mouth twitched and, for a moment, I thought I saw a grimace. That was when I understood the depth of the pain I had caused, that not even Ali’s paralyzed face could mask his sorrow.

Baba was pleading now. “At least tell me why. I need to know!”

Ali didn’t tell Baba, just as he didn’t protest when Hassan confessed to the stealing.

“Will you drive us to the bus station?”

Then I saw Baba do something I had never seen him do before: He cried. “Please,” Baba was saying, but Ali had already turned to the door, Hassan trailing him.

In Kabul, it rarely rained in the summer. Blue skies stood tall and far, the sun like a branding iron searing the back of your neck.

But it rained the afternoon Baba took Ali and Hassan to the bus station. Through the blurry, rain-soaked window of my bedroom, I watched Ali haul the lone suitcase carrying all of their belongings to Baba’s car idling outside the gates.

Slithering beads of rain sluiced down my window. I saw Baba slam the trunk shut. Already drenched, he walked to the driver’s side. Leaned in and said something to Ali in the backseat, perhaps one last-ditch effort to change his mind. But when he straightened, I saw in his slumping shoulders that the life I had known since I’d been born was over. I watched Baba’s car pull away from the curb, taking with it the person whose first spoken word had been my name.