Page 168 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 157

and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that
brought it on now. “You’re twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown
man! You . . .” he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again,
reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the canvas awning.
“What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s
what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that
question.”
He opened the door. Turned back to me. “And one more thing.
No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one. I don’t want
anybody’s sympathy.” Then he disappeared into the dim lobby. He
chain-smoked the rest of that day in front of the TV. I didn’t know
what or whom he was defying. Me? Dr. Amani? Or maybe the God
he had never believed in.

For a while, even cancer couldn’t keep Baba from the flea
market. We made our garage sale treks on Saturdays, Baba the
driver and me the navigator, and set up our display on Sundays.
Brass lamps. Baseball gloves. Ski jackets with broken zippers.
Baba greeted acquaintances from the old country and I haggled
with buyers over a dollar or two. Like any of it mattered. Like the
day I would become an orphan wasn’t inching closer with each
closing of shop.
Sometimes, General Taheri and his wife strolled by. The gen-
eral, ever the diplomat, greeted me with a smile and his two-
handed shake. But there was a new reticence to Khanum Taheri’s
demeanor. A reticence broken only by her secret, droopy smiles
and the furtive, apologetic looks she cast my way when the gen-
eral’s attention was engaged elsewhere.
I remember that period as a time of many “firsts”: The first