Page 102 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 91

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 win-
ter, 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.
One sluggish, hazy afternoon early that summer, I asked Has-
san to go up the hill with me. Told him I wanted to read him a new
story I’d written. He was hanging clothes to dry in the yard and I
saw his eagerness in the harried way he finished the job.
We climbed the hill, making small talk. He asked about
school, what I was learning, and I talked about my teachers, espe-
cially the mean math teacher who punished talkative students by
sticking a metal rod between their fingers and then squeezing
them together. Hassan winced at that, said he hoped I’d never
have to experience it. I said I’d been lucky so far, knowing that
luck had nothing to do with it. I had done my share of talking in
class too. But my father was rich and everyone knew him, so I was
spared the metal rod treatment.
We sat against the low cemetery wall under the shade thrown
by the pomegranate tree. In another month or two, crops of
scorched yellow weeds would blanket the hillside, but that year
the spring showers had lasted longer than usual, nudging their
way into early summer, and the grass was still green, peppered
with tangles of wildflowers. Below us, Wazir Akbar Khan’s white-
walled, flat-topped houses gleamed in the sunshine, the laundry
hanging on clotheslines in their yards stirred by the breeze to
dance like butterflies.
We had picked a dozen pomegranates from the tree. I