Page 161 - The Kite Runner

150 Khaled Hosseini

was it? I tossed in my sheets and stared at the ceiling, dismayed at
the thought of six laborious, interminable nights of yelda until I
saw her again.

It went on like that for a few weeks. I’d wait until the
general went for a stroll, then I’d walk past the Taheris’ stand. If
Khanum Taheri was there, she’d offer me tea and a kolcha and
we’d chat about Kabul in the old days, the people we knew, her
arthritis. Undoubtedly, she had noticed that my appearances
always coincided with her husband’s absences, but she never let
on. “Oh you just missed your Kaka,” she’d say. I actually liked it
when Khanum Taheri was there, and not just because of her ami-
able ways; Soraya was more relaxed, more talkative with her
mother around. As if her presence legitimized whatever was hap-
pening between us—though certainly not to the same degree that
the general’s would have. Khanum Taheri’s chaperoning made our
meetings, if not gossip-proof, then less gossip-worthy, even if her
borderline fawning on me clearly embarrassed Soraya.
One day, Soraya and I were alone at their booth, talking. She
was telling me about school, how she too was working on her gen-
eral education classes, at Ohlone Junior College in Fremont.
“What will you major in?”
“I want to be a teacher,” she said.
“Really? Why?”
“I’ve always wanted to. When we lived in Virginia, I became
ESL certified and now I teach at the public library one night a
week. My mother was a teacher too, she taught Farsi and history
at Zarghoona High School for girls in Kabul.”
A potbellied man in a deerstalker hat offered three dollars for
a five-dollar set of candlesticks and Soraya let him have it. She