Page 47 - The Kite Runner

36 Khaled Hosseini

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morn-
ing. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour,
but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever
heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us
then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know
nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.
Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to
rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our
way of life. If not quite yet, then at least it was the beginning of
the end. The end, the official end, would come first in April 1978
with the communist coup d’état, and then in December 1979,
when Russian tanks would roll into the very same streets where
Hassan and I played, bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew
and marking the start of a still ongoing era of bloodletting.
Just before sunrise, Baba’s car peeled into the driveway. His
door slammed shut and his running footsteps pounded the stairs.
Then he appeared in the doorway and I saw something on his
face. Something I didn’t recognize right away because I’d never
seen it before: fear. “Amir! Hassan!” he exclaimed as he ran to us,
opening his arms wide. “They blocked all the roads and the tele-
phone didn’t work. I was so worried!”
We let him wrap us in his arms and, for a brief insane
moment, I was glad about whatever had happened that night.

They weren’ t shooting ducks after all. As it turned out,
they hadn’t shot much of anything that night of July 17, 1973.
Kabul awoke the next morning to find that the monarchy was a
thing of the past. The king, Zahir Shah, was away in Italy. In his
absence, his cousin Daoud Khan had ended the king’s forty-year
reign with a bloodless coup.