Page 131 - The Kite Runner

120 Khaled Hosseini

Once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I counted about thirty
refugees in that basement. We sat shoulder to shoulder along the
walls, ate crackers, bread with dates, apples. That first night, all
the men prayed together. One of the refugees asked Baba why he
wasn’t joining them. “God is going to save us all. Why don’t you
pray to him?”
Baba snorted a pinch of his snuff. Stretched his legs. “What’ll
save us is eight cylinders and a good carburetor.” That silenced
the rest of them for good about the matter of God.
It was later that first night when I discovered that two of the
people hiding with us were Kamal and his father. That was shock-
ing enough, seeing Kamal sitting in the basement just a few feet
away from me. But when he and his father came over to our side
of the room and I saw Kamal’s face, really saw it ...
He had withered—there was simply no other word for it. His
eyes gave me a hollow look and no recognition at all registered in
them. His shoulders hunched and his cheeks sagged like they
were too tired to cling to the bone beneath. His father, who’d
owned a movie theater in Kabul, was telling Baba how, three
months before, a stray bullet had struck his wife in the temple
and killed her. Then he told Baba about Kamal. I caught only
snippets of it: Should have never let him go alone . . . always so
handsome, you know ...four of them . . . tried to fight ...God ...
took him . . . bleeding down there . . . his pants . . . doesn’t talk any-
more . . . just stares . . .

There would be no truck, Karim told us after we’d
spent a week in the rat-infested basement. The truck was beyond
repair.
“There is another option,” Karim said, his voice rising amid