Page 97 - The Kite Runner

86 Khaled Hosseini

Faruq patted my back with his clean hand. I felt like sticking a
knife in my eye.
Later, well past midnight, after a few hours of poker between
Baba and his cousins, the men lay down to sleep on parallel mat-
tresses in the same room where we’d dined. The women went
upstairs. An hour later, I still couldn’t sleep. I kept tossing and
turning as my relatives grunted, sighed, and snored in their sleep.
I sat up. A wedge of moonlight streamed in through the window.
“I watched Hassan get raped,” I said to no one. Baba stirred in
his sleep. Kaka Homayoun grunted. A part of me was hoping
someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn’t have to live with
this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that fol-
lowed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to
get away with it.
I thought about Hassan’s dream, the one about us swimming
in the lake. There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he’d
been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had
grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom.
I was that monster.
That was the night I became an insomniac.

I didn’t speak to Hassan until the middle of the next
week. I had just half-eaten my lunch and Hassan was doing the
dishes. I was walking upstairs, going to my room, when Hassan
asked if I wanted to hike up the hill. I said I was tired. Hassan
looked tired too—he’d lost weight and gray circles had formed
under his puffed-up eyes. But when he asked again, I reluctantly
agreed.
We trekked up the hill, our boots squishing in the muddy
snow. Neither one of us said anything. We sat under our pome-