Page 273 - The Kite Runner

262 Khaled Hosseini

where Hassan and I took turns falling the summer we learned to
ride a bike, didn’t look as wide or as long as I remembered it. The
asphalt had split in a lightning-streak pattern, and more tangles of
weed sprouted through the fissures. Most of the poplar trees had
been chopped down—the trees Hassan and I used to climb to shine
our mirrors into the neighbors’ homes. The ones still standing were
nearly leafless. The Wall of Ailing Corn was still there, though I saw
no corn, ailing or otherwise, along that wall now. The paint had
begun to peel and sections of it had sloughed off altogether. The
lawn had turned the same brown as the haze of dust hovering over
the city, dotted by bald patches of dirt where nothing grew at all.
A jeep was parked in the driveway and that looked all wrong:
Baba’s black Mustang belonged there. For years, the Mustang’s
eight cylinders roared to life every morning, rousing me from
sleep. I saw that oil had spilled under the jeep and stained the
driveway like a big Rorschach inkblot. Beyond the jeep, an empty
wheelbarrow lay on its side. I saw no sign of the rosebushes that
Baba and Ali had planted on the left side of the driveway, only dirt
that spilled onto the asphalt. And weeds.
Farid honked twice behind me. “We should go, Agha. We’ll
draw attention,” he called.
“Just give me one more minute,” I said.
The house itself was far from the sprawling white mansion I
remembered from my childhood. It looked smaller. The roof
sagged and the plaster was cracked. The windows to the living
room, the foyer, and the upstairs guest bathroom were broken,
patched haphazardly with sheets of clear plastic or wooden boards
nailed across the frames. The paint, once sparkling white, had
faded to ghostly gray and eroded in parts, revealing the layered
bricks beneath. The front steps had crumbled. Like so much else
in Kabul, my father’s house was the picture of fallen splendor.