Page 40 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 29

“Well, everyone in my school knows what it means,” I said.
“Let’s see. ‘Imbecile.’ It means smart, intelligent. I’ll use it in a sen-
tence for you. ‘When it comes to words, Hassan is an imbecile.’ ”
“Aaah,” he said, nodding.
I would always feel guilty about it later. So I’d try to make up
for it by giving him one of my old shirts or a broken toy. I would
tell myself that was amends enough for a harmless prank.
Hassan’s favorite book by far was the Shahnamah, the tenth-
century epic of ancient Persian heroes. He liked all of the chap-
ters, the shahs of old, Feridoun, Zal, and Rudabeh. But his
favorite story, and mine, was “Rostam and Sohrab,” the tale of the
great warrior Rostam and his fleet-footed horse, Rakhsh. Rostam
mortally wounds his valiant nemesis, Sohrab, in battle, only to dis-
cover that Sohrab is his long-lost son. Stricken with grief, Rostam
hears his son’s dying words:

If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy
sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thou didst it of
thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I
implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee
the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto
thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting . . .

“Read it again please, Amir agha,” Hassan would say. Some-
times tears pooled in Hassan’s eyes as I read him this passage, and
I always wondered whom he wept for, the grief-stricken Rostam
who tears his clothes and covers his head with ashes, or the dying
Sohrab who only longed for his father’s love? Personally, I couldn’t
see the tragedy in Rostam’s fate. After all, didn’t all fathers in
their secret hearts harbor a desire to kill their sons?