Page 210 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 199

scored a goal and the man next to me cheered loudly. Suddenly
this young bearded fellow who was patrolling the aisles, eighteen
years old at most by the look of him, he walked up to me and
struck me on the forehead with the butt of his Kalashnikov. ‘Do
that again and I’ll cut out your tongue, you old donkey!’ he said.”
Rahim Khan rubbed the scar with a gnarled finger. “I was old
enough to be his grandfather and I was sitting there, blood gush-
ing down my face, apologizing to that son of a dog.”
I poured him more tea. Rahim Khan talked some more.
Much of it I knew already, some not. He told me that, as
arranged between Baba and him, he had lived in Baba’s house
since 1981—this I knew about. Baba had “sold” the house to
Rahim Khan shortly before he and I fled Kabul. The way Baba
had seen it those days, Afghanistan’s troubles were only a tempo-
rary interruption of our way of life—the days of parties at the
Wazir Akbar Khan house and picnics in Paghman would surely
return. So he’d given the house to Rahim Khan to keep watch
over until that day.
Rahim Khan told me how, when the Northern Alliance took
over Kabul between 1992 and 1996, different factions claimed
different parts of Kabul. “If you went from the Shar-e-Nau sec-
tion to Kerteh-Parwan to buy a carpet, you risked getting shot by a
sniper or getting blown up by a rocket—if you got past all the
checkpoints, that was. You practically needed a visa to go from
one neighborhood to the other. So people just stayed put, prayed
the next rocket wouldn’t hit their home.” He told me how people
knocked holes in the walls of their homes so they could bypass the
dangerous streets and would move down the block from hole to
hole. In other parts, people moved about in underground tunnels.
“Why didn’t you leave?” I said.