Page 123 - The Kite Runner

112 Khaled Hosseini

a sign of the retching that was yet to come. I stumbled to the edge
of the cliff overlooking the deep valley that was shrouded in dark-
ness. I stooped, hands on my kneecaps, and waited for the bile.
Somewhere, a branch snapped, an owl hooted. The wind, soft and
cold, clicked through tree branches and stirred the bushes that
sprinkled the slope. And from below, the faint sound of water
tumbling through the valley.
Standing on the shoulder of the road, I thought of the way
we’d left the house where I’d lived my entire life, as if we were
going out for a bite: dishes smeared with kofta piled in the kitchen
sink; laundry in the wicker basket in the foyer; beds unmade;
Baba’s business suits hanging in the closet. Tapestries still hung
on the walls of the living room and my mother’s books still
crowded the shelves in Baba’s study. The signs of our elopement
were subtle: My parents’ wedding picture was gone, as was the
grainy photograph of my grandfather and King Nader Shah stand-
ing over the dead deer. A few items of clothing were missing from
the closets. The leather-bound notebook Rahim Khan had given
me five years earlier was gone.
In the morning, Jalaluddin—our seventh servant in five
years—would probably think we’d gone out for a stroll or a drive.
We hadn’t told him. You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul any-
more—for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neigh-
bor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on
master, friend on friend. I thought of the singer Ahmad Zahir, who
had played the accordion at my thirteenth birthday. He had gone
for a drive with some friends, and someone had later found his
body on the side of the road, a bullet in the back of his head. The
rafiqs, the comrades, were everywhere and they’d split Kabul into
two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn’t. The
tricky part was that no one knew who belonged to which. A casual