The Kite Runner (15 page)

“Anyway, within a year, Ziba could read children’s books. We sat in the yard and she read me the tales of Dara and Sara—slowly
but correctly. She started calling me
Moalem
Soraya, Teacher Soraya.” She laughed again. “I know it sounds childish, but the first time Ziba wrote her own letter, I knew
there was nothing else I’d ever want to be but a teacher. I was so proud of her and I felt I’d done something really worthwhile,
you know?”

“Yes,” I lied. I thought of how I had used my literacy to ridicule Hassan. How I had teased him about big words he didn’t
know.

“My father wants me to go to law school, my mother’s always throwing hints about medical school, but I’m going to be a teacher.
Doesn’t pay much here, but it’s what I want.”

“My mother was a teacher too,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “My mother told me.” Then her face reddened with a blush at what she had blurted, at the implication of
her answer, that “Amir Conversations” took place between them when I wasn’t there. It took an enormous effort to stop myself
from smiling.

“I brought you something.” I fished the roll of stapled pages from my back pocket. “As promised.” I handed her one of my short
stories.

“Oh, you remembered,” she said, actually beaming. “Thank you!” I barely had time to register that she’d addressed me with
“
tu”
for the first time and not the formal
“
shoma,”
because suddenly her smile vanished. The color dropped from her face, and her eyes fixed on something behind me. I turned
around. Came face-to-face with General Taheri.

“Amir jan. Our aspiring storyteller. What a pleasure,” he said. He was smiling thinly.

“
Salaam,
General Sahib,” I said through heavy lips.

He moved past me, toward the booth. “What a beautiful day it is, nay?” he said, thumb hooked in the breast pocket of his vest,
the other hand extended toward Soraya. She gave him the pages.

“They say it will rain this week. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He dropped the rolled pages in the garbage can. Turned to me
and gently put a hand on my shoulder. We took a few steps together.

“You know,
bachem,
I have grown rather fond of you. You are a decent boy, I really believe that, but—” he sighed and waved a hand “—even decent
boys need reminding sometimes. So it’s my duty to remind you that you are among peers in this flea market.” He stopped. His
expressionless eyes bore into mine. “You see,
everyone
here is a storyteller.” He smiled, revealing perfectly even teeth. “Do pass my respects to your father, Amir jan.”

He dropped his hand. Smiled again.

“WHAT’S WRONG?” Baba said. He was taking an elderly woman’s money for a rocking horse.

“Nothing,” I said. I sat down on an old TV set. Then I told him anyway.

“Akh, Amir,” he sighed.

As it turned out, I didn’t get to brood too much over what had happened.

Because later that week, Baba caught a cold.

IT STARTED WITH A HACKING COUGH and the sniffles. He got over the sniffles, but the cough persisted. He’d hack into his handkerchief,
stow it in his pocket. I kept after him to get it checked, but he’d wave me away. He hated doctors and hospitals. To my knowledge,
the only time Baba had ever gone to a doctor was the time he’d caught malaria in India.

Then, two weeks later, I caught him coughing a wad of bloodstained phlegm into the toilet.

“How long have you been doing that?” I said.

“What’s for dinner?” he said.

“I’m taking you to the doctor.”

Even though Baba was a manager at the gas station, the owner hadn’t offered him health insurance, and Baba, in his recklessness,
hadn’t insisted. So I took him to the county hospital in San Jose. The sallow, puffy-eyed doctor who saw us introduced himself
as a second-year resident. “He looks younger than you and sicker than me,” Baba grumbled. The resident sent us down for a
chest X ray. When the nurse called us back in, the resident was filling out a form.

“Take this to the front desk,” he said, scribbling quickly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A referral.”
Scribble scribble.

“For what?”

“Pulmonary clinic.”

“What’s that?”

He gave me a quick glance. Pushed up his glasses. Began scribbling again. “He’s got a spot on his right lung. I want them
to check it out.”

“A spot?” I said, the room suddenly too small.

“Cancer?” Baba added casually.

“Possible. It’s suspicious, anyway,” the doctor muttered.

“Can’t you tell us more?” I asked.

“Not really. Need a CAT scan first, then see the lung doctor.” He handed me the referral form. “You said your father smokes,
right?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. Looked from me to Baba and back again. “They’ll call you within two weeks.”

I wanted to ask him how I was supposed to live with that word, “suspicious,” for two whole weeks. How was I supposed eat,
work, study? How could he send me home with that word?

I took the form and turned it in. That night, I waited until Baba fell asleep, and then folded a blanket. I used it as a prayer
rug. Bowing my head to the ground, I recited half-forgotten verses from the Koran—verses the mullah had made us commit to
memory in Kabul—and asked for kindness from a God I wasn’t sure existed. I envied the mullah now, envied his faith and certainty.

Two weeks passed and no one called. And when I called them, they told me they’d lost the referral. Was I sure I had turned
it in? They said they would call in another three weeks. I raised hell and bargained the three weeks down to one for the CAT
scan, two to see the doctor.

The visit with the pulmonologist, Dr. Schneider, was going well until Baba asked him where he was from. Dr. Schneider said
Russia. Baba lost it.

“Excuse us, Doctor,” I said, pulling Baba aside. Dr. Schneider smiled and stood back, stethoscope still in hand.

“Baba, I read Dr. Schneider’s biography in the waiting room. He was born in Michigan.
Michigan!
He’s American, a lot more American than you and I will ever be.”

“I don’t care where he was born, he’s
Roussi,
” Baba said, grimacing like it was a dirty word. “His parents were
Roussi,
his grandparents were
Roussi.
I swear on your mother’s face I’ll break his arm if he tries to touch me.”

“Dr. Schneider’s parents fled from
Shorawi,
don’t you see? They escaped!”

But Baba would hear none of it. Sometimes I think the only thing he loved as much as his late wife was Afghanistan, his late
country. I almost screamed with frustration. Instead, I sighed and turned to Dr. Schneider. “I’m sorry, Doctor. This isn’t
going to work out.”

The next pulmonologist, Dr. Amani, was Iranian and Baba approved. Dr. Amani, a soft-spoken man with a crooked mustache and
a mane of gray hair, told us he had reviewed the CAT scan results and that he would have to perform a procedure called a bronchoscopy
to get a piece of the lung mass for pathology. He scheduled it for the following week. I thanked him as I helped Baba out
of the office, thinking that now I had to live a whole week with this new word, “mass,” an even more ominous word than “suspicious.”
I wished Soraya were there with me.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. Baba’s was called “Oat Cell Carcinoma.” Advanced. Inoperable. Baba
asked Dr. Amani for a prognosis. Dr. Amani bit his lip, used the word “grave.” “There is chemotherapy, of course,” he said.
“But it would only be palliative.”

“What does that mean?” Baba asked.

Dr. Amani sighed. “It means it wouldn’t change the outcome, just prolong it.”

“That’s a clear answer, Dr. Amani. Thank you for that,” Baba said. “But no chemo medication for me.” He had the same resolved
look on his face as the day he’d dropped the stack of food stamps on Mrs. Dobbins’s desk.

“But Baba—”

“Don’t you challenge me in public, Amir. Ever. Who do you think you are?”

THE RAIN General Taheri had spoken about at the flea market was a few weeks late, but when we stepped out of Dr. Amani’s office,
passing cars sprayed grimy water onto the sidewalks. Baba lit a cigarette. He smoked all the way to the car and all the way
home.

As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, “I wish you’d give the chemo a chance, Baba.”

Baba pocketed the keys, pulled me out of the rain and under the building’s striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with
the hand holding the cigarette. “
Bas!
I’ve made my decision.”

“What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?” I said, my eyes welling up.

A look of disgust swept across his rain-soaked face. It was the same look he’d give me when, as a kid, I’d fall, scrape my
knees, and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that brought it on now. “You’re twenty-two years old,
Amir! A grown man! You . . .” he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the
canvas awning. “What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never
have to ask that question.”

He opened the door. Turned back to me. “And one more thing. No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one. I don’t want
anybody’s sympathy.” Then he disappeared into the dim lobby. He chain-smoked the rest of that day in front of the TV. I didn’t
know what or whom he was defying. Me? Dr. Amani? Or maybe the God he had never believed in.

FOR A WHILE, even cancer couldn’t keep Baba from the flea market. We made our garage sale treks on Saturdays, Baba the driver
and me the navigator, and set up our display on Sundays. Brass lamps. Baseball gloves. Ski jackets with broken zippers. Baba
greeted acquaintances from the old country and I haggled with buyers over a dollar or two.

Like any of it mattered. Like the day I would become an orphan wasn’t inching closer with each closing of shop.

Sometimes, General Taheri and his wife strolled by. The general, ever the diplomat, greeted me with a smile and his two-handed
shake. But there was a new reticence to Khanum Taheri’s demeanor. A reticence broken only by her secret, droopy smiles and
the furtive, apologetic looks she cast my way when the general’s attention was engaged elsewhere.

I remember that period as a time of many “firsts”: The first time I heard Baba moan in the bathroom. The first time I found
blood on his pillow. In over three years running the gas station, Baba had never called in sick. Another first.

By Halloween of that year, Baba was getting so tired by mid–Saturday afternoon that he’d wait behind the wheel while I got
out and bargained for junk. By Thanksgiving, he wore out before noon. When sleighs appeared on front lawns and fake snow on
Douglas firs, Baba stayed home and I drove the VW bus alone up and down the peninsula.

Sometimes at the flea market, Afghan acquaintances made remarks about Baba’s weight loss. At first, they were complimentary.
They even asked the secret to his diet. But the queries and compliments stopped when the weight loss didn’t. When the pounds
kept shedding. And shedding. When his cheeks hollowed. And his temples melted. And his eyes receded in their sockets.

Then, one cool Sunday shortly after New Year’s Day, Baba was selling a lampshade to a stocky Filipino man while I rummaged
in the VW for a blanket to cover his legs with.

“Hey, man, this guy needs help!” the Filipino man said with alarm. I turned around and found Baba on the ground. His arms
and legs were jerking.

“
Komak!”
I cried. “Somebody help!” I ran to Baba. He was frothing at the mouth, the foamy spittle soaking his beard. His upturned eyes
showed nothing but white.

People were rushing to us. I heard someone say seizure. Someone else yelling, “Call 911!” I heard running footsteps. The sky
darkened as a crowd gathered around us.

Baba’s spittle turned red. He was biting his tongue. I kneeled beside him and grabbed his arms and said I’m here Baba, I’m
here, you’ll be all right, I’m right here. As if I could soothe the convulsions out of him. Talk them into leaving my Baba
alone. I felt a wetness on my knees. Saw Baba’s bladder had let go.
Shhh,
Baba jan, I’m here. Your son is right here.

THE DOCTOR, white-bearded and perfectly bald, pulled me out of the room. “I want to go over your father’s CAT scans with you,”
he said. He put the films up on a viewing box in the hallway and pointed with the eraser end of his pencil to the pictures
of Baba’s cancer, like a cop showing mug shots of the killer to the victim’s family. Baba’s brain on those pictures looked
like cross sections of a big walnut, riddled with tennis ball–shaped gray things.

“As you can see, the cancer’s metastasized,” he said. “He’ll have to take steroids to reduce the swelling in his brain and
antiseizure medications. And I’d recommend palliative radiation. Do you know what that means?”

I said I did. I’d become conversant in cancer talk.

“All right, then,” he said. He checked his beeper. “I have to go, but you can have me paged if you have any questions.”

“Thank you.”

I spent the night sitting on a chair next to Baba’s bed.

THE NEXT MORNING, the waiting room down the hall was jammed with Afghans. The butcher from Newark. An engineer who’d worked
with Baba on his orphanage. They filed in and paid Baba their respects in hushed tones. Wished him a swift recovery. Baba
was awake then, groggy and tired, but awake.

Midmorning, General Taheri and his wife came. Soraya followed. We glanced at each other, looked away at the same time. “How
are you, my friend?” General Taheri said, taking Baba’s hand.

Baba motioned to the IV hanging from his arm. Smiled thinly. The general smiled back.

“You shouldn’t have burdened yourselves. All of you,” Baba croaked.

“It’s no burden,” Khanum Taheri said.

“No burden at all. More importantly, do you need anything?” General Taheri said. “Anything at all? Ask me like you’d ask a
brother.”

I remembered something Baba had said about Pashtuns once.
We
may be hardheaded and I know
we’re
far too proud, but, in the hour of
need, believe me that
there’s
no one
you’d
rather have at your side than a
Pashtun.