Page 211 - The Kite Runner

200 Khaled Hosseini

“Kabul was my home. It still is.” He snickered. “Remember the
street that went from your house to the Qishla, the military bar-
racks next to Istiqlal School?”
“Yes.” It was the shortcut to school. I remembered the day
Hassan and I crossed it and the soldiers had teased Hassan about
his mother. Hassan had cried in the cinema later, and I’d put an
arm around him.
“When the Taliban rolled in and kicked the Alliance out of
Kabul, I actually danced on that street,” Rahim Khan said. “And,
believe me, I wasn’t alone. People were celebrating at Chaman, at
Deh-Mazang, greeting the Taliban in the streets, climbing their
tanks and posing for pictures with them. People were so tired of
the constant fighting, tired of the rockets, the gunfire, the explo-
sions, tired of watching Gulbuddin and his cohorts firing on any-
thing that moved. The Alliance did more damage to Kabul than
the Shorawi. They destroyed your father’s orphanage, did you
know that?”
“Why?” I said. “Why would they destroy an orphanage?” I
remembered sitting behind Baba the day they opened the orphan-
age. The wind had knocked off his caracul hat and everyone had
laughed, then stood and clapped when he’d delivered his speech.
And now it was just another pile of rubble. All the money Baba
had spent, all those nights he’d sweated over the blueprints, all
the visits to the construction site to make sure every brick, every
beam, and every block was laid just right . . .
“Collateral damage,” Rahim Khan said. “You don’t want to
know, Amir jan, what it was like sifting through the rubble of that
orphanage. There were body parts of children ...”
“So when the Taliban came ...”
“They were heroes,” Rahim Khan said.