Page 219 - The Kite Runner

208 Khaled Hosseini

He nodded and dropped his head. “Agha sahib was like my
second father . . . God give him peace.”
They piled their things in the center of a few worn rags and
tied the corners together. We loaded the bundle into the Buick.
Hassan stood in the threshold of the house and held the Koran as
we all kissed it and passed under it. Then we left for Kabul. I
remember as I was pulling away, Hassan turned to take a last look
at their home.
When we got to Kabul, I discovered that Hassan had no inten-
tion of moving into the house. “But all these rooms are empty,
Hassan jan. No one is going to live in them,” I said.
But he would not. He said it was a matter of ihtiram, a matter
of respect. He and Farzana moved their things into the hut in the
backyard, where he was born. I pleaded for them to move into one
of the guest bedrooms upstairs, but Hassan would hear nothing of
it. “What will Amir agha think?” he said to me. “What will he
think when he comes back to Kabul after the war and finds that I
have assumed his place in the house?” Then, in mourning for your
father, Hassan wore black for the next forty days.
I did not want them to, but the two of them did all the cook-
ing, all the cleaning. Hassan tended to the flowers in the garden,
soaked the roots, picked off yellowing leaves, and planted rose-
bushes. He painted the walls. In the house, he swept rooms no
one had slept in for years, and cleaned bathrooms no one had
bathed in. Like he was preparing the house for someone’s return.
Do you remember the wall behind the row of corn your father had
planted, Amir jan? What did you and Hassan call it, “the Wall of
Ailing Corn”? A rocket destroyed a whole section of that wall in
the middle of the night early that fall. Hassan rebuilt the wall with
his own hands, brick by brick, until it stood whole again. I do not
know what I would have done if he had not been there.