Page 122 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 111

praying woman’s husband—asked if I was going to get sick, I said
I might. Baba looked away. The man lifted his corner of the tar-
paulin cover and rapped on the driver’s window, asked him to
stop. But the driver, Karim, a scrawny dark-skinned man with
hawk-boned features and a pencil-thin mustache, shook his head.
“We are too close to Kabul,” he shot back. “Tell him to have a
strong stomach.”
Baba grumbled something under his breath. I wanted to tell
him I was sorry, but suddenly I was salivating, the back of my
throat tasting bile. I turned around, lifted the tarpaulin, and
threw up over the side of the moving truck. Behind me, Baba was
apologizing to the other passengers. As if car sickness was a crime.
As if you weren’t supposed to get sick when you were eighteen. I
threw up two more times before Karim agreed to stop, mostly so I
wouldn’t stink up his vehicle, the instrument of his livelihood.
Karim was a people smuggler—it was a pretty lucrative business
then, driving people out of Shorawi-occupied Kabul to the relative
safety of Pakistan. He was taking us to Jalalabad, about 170 kilo-
meters southeast of Kabul, where his brother, Toor, who had a big-
ger truck with a second convoy of refugees, was waiting to drive
us across the Khyber Pass and into Peshawar.
We were a few kilometers west of Mahipar Falls when Karim
pulled to the side of the road. Mahipar—which means “Flying
Fish”—was a high summit with a precipitous drop overlooking the
hydro plant the Germans had built for Afghanistan back in 1967.
Baba and I had driven over the summit countless times on our way
to Jalalabad, the city of cypress trees and sugarcane fields where
Afghans vacationed in the winter.
I hopped down the back of the truck and lurched to the dusty
embankment on the side of the road. My mouth filled with saliva,