Page 37 - The Kite Runner

26 Khaled Hosseini

tied a string around the poor thing to yank it back every time it
took flight.
We chased the Kochi, the nomads who passed through Kabul
on their way to the mountains of the north. We would hear their car-
avans approaching our neighborhood, the mewling of their sheep,
the baaing of their goats, the jingle of bells around their camels’
necks. We’d run outside to watch the caravan plod through our
street, men with dusty, weather-beaten faces and women dressed
in long, colorful shawls, beads, and silver bracelets around their
wrists and ankles. We hurled pebbles at their goats. We squirted
water on their mules. I’d make Hassan sit on the Wall of Ailing
Corn and fire pebbles with his slingshot at the camels’ rears.
We saw our first Western together, Rio Bravo with John
Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite
bookstore. I remember begging Baba to take us to Iran so we
could meet John Wayne. Baba burst out in gales of his deep-
throated laughter—a sound not unlike a truck engine revving
up—and, when he could talk again, explained to us the concept of
voice dubbing. Hassan and I were stunned. Dazed. John Wayne
didn’t really speak Farsi and he wasn’t Iranian! He was American,
just like the friendly, longhaired men and women we always saw
hanging around in Kabul, dressed in their tattered, brightly col-
ored shirts. We saw Rio Bravo three times, but we saw our favorite
Western, The Magnificent Seven, thirteen times. With each view-
ing, we cried at the end when the Mexican kids buried Charles
Bronson—who, as it turned out, wasn’t Iranian either.
We took strolls in the musty-smelling bazaars of the Shar-e-
Nau section of Kabul, or the new city, west of the Wazir Akbar
Khan district. We talked about whatever film we had just seen and
walked amid the bustling crowds of bazarris. We snaked our way
among the merchants and the beggars, wandered through narrow