Page 215 - The Kite Runner

204 Khaled Hosseini

the house. My knees and back were always aching—I would get
up in the morning and it would take me at least an hour to shake
the stiffness from my joints, especially in the wintertime. I did not
want to let your father’s house go to rot; we had all had many good
times in that house, so many memories, Amir jan. It was not
right—your father had designed that house himself; it had meant
so much to him, and besides, I had promised him I would care for
it when he and you left for Pakistan. Now it was just me and the
house and ...I did my best. I tried to water the trees every few
days, cut the lawn, tend to the flowers, fix things that needed fix-
ing, but, even then, I was not a young man anymore.
But even so, I might have been able to manage. At least for a
while longer. But when news of your father’s death reached me . . .
for the first time, I felt a terrible loneliness in that house. An
unbearable emptiness.
So one day, I fueled up the Buick and drove up to Hazarajat. I
remembered that, after Ali dismissed himself from the house, your
father told me he and Hassan had moved to a small village just
outside Bamiyan. Ali had a cousin there as I recalled. I had no
idea if Hassan would still be there, if anyone would even know of
him or his whereabouts. After all, it had been ten years since Ali
and Hassan had left your father’s house. Hassan would have been
a grown man in 1986, twenty-two, twenty-three years old. If he
was even alive, that is—the Shorawi, may they rot in hell for what
they did to our watan, killed so many of our young men. I don’t
have to tell you that.
But, with the grace of God, I found him there. It took very lit-
tle searching—all I had to do was ask a few questions in Bamiyan
and people pointed me to his village. I do not even recall its name,
or whether it even had one. But I remember it was a scorching
summer day and I was driving up a rutted dirt road, nothing on