Page 223 - The Kite Runner

212 Khaled Hosseini

He kept walking around the house, looking for Sasa, but you know
how children are, they forget so quickly.
By then—that would have been 1995—the Shorawi were
defeated and long gone and Kabul belonged to Massoud, Rab-
bani, and the Mujahedin. The infighting between the factions was
fierce and no one knew if they would live to see the end of the day.
Our ears became accustomed to the whistle of falling shells, to
the rumble of gunfire, our eyes familiar with the sight of men dig-
ging bodies out of piles of rubble. Kabul in those days, Amir jan,
was as close as you could get to that proverbial hell on earth. Allah
was kind to us, though. The Wazir Akbar Khan area was not
attacked as much, so we did not have it as bad as some of the
other neighborhoods.
On those days when the rocket fire eased up a bit and the gun-
fighting was light, Hassan would take Sohrab to the zoo to see
Marjan the lion, or to the cinema. Hassan taught him how to
shoot the slingshot, and, later, by the time he was eight, Sohrab
had become deadly with that thing: He could stand on the terrace
and hit a pinecone propped on a pail halfway across the yard.
Hassan taught him to read and write—his son was not going to
grow up illiterate like he had. I grew very attached to that little
boy—I had seen him take his first step, heard him utter his first
word. I bought children’s books for Sohrab from the bookstore by
Cinema Park—they have destroyed that too now—and Sohrab
read them as quickly as I could get them to him. He reminded me
of you, how you loved to read when you were little, Amir jan.
Sometimes, I read to him at night, played riddles with him, taught
him card tricks. I miss him terribly.
In the wintertime, Hassan took his son kite running. There
were not nearly as many kite tournaments as in the old days—no
one felt safe outside for too long—but there were still a few scat-