Page 220 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 209

Then late that fall, Farzana gave birth to a stillborn baby girl.
Hassan kissed the baby’s lifeless face, and we buried her in the
backyard, near the sweetbrier bushes. We covered the little
mound with leaves from the poplar trees. I said a prayer for her.
Farzana stayed in the hut all day and wailed—it is a heartbreaking
sound, Amir jan, the wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you never
hear it.
Outside the walls of that house, there was a war raging. But
the three of us, in your father’s house, we made our own little
haven from it. My vision started going by the late 1980s, so I had
Hassan read me your mother’s books. We would sit in the foyer, by
the stove, and Hassan would read me from Masnawi or Khayyám,
as Farzana cooked in the kitchen. And every morning, Hassan
placed a flower on the little mound by the sweetbrier bushes.
In early 1990, Farzana became pregnant again. It was that
same year, in the middle of the summer, that a woman covered in
a sky blue burqa knocked on the front gates one morning. When I
walked up to the gates, she was swaying on her feet, like she was
too weak to even stand. I asked her what she wanted, but she
would not answer.
“Who are you?” I said. But she just collapsed right there in the
driveway. I yelled for Hassan and he helped me carry her into the
house, to the living room. We lay her on the sofa and took off her
burqa. Beneath it, we found a toothless woman with stringy gray-
ing hair and sores on her arms. She looked like she had not eaten
for days. But the worst of it by far was her face. Someone had
taken a knife to it and . . . Amir jan, the slashes cut this way and
that way. One of the cuts went from cheekbone to hairline and it
had not spared her left eye on the way. It was grotesque. I patted
her brow with a wet cloth and she opened her eyes. “Where is
Hassan?” she whispered.