Page 312 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 301

You were right all those years to suspect that I knew. I
did know. Hassan told me shortly after it happened. What
you did was wrong, Amir jan, but do not forget that you
were a boy when it happened. A troubled little boy. You
were too hard on yourself then, and you still are—I saw it
in your eyes in Peshawar. But I hope you will heed this: A
man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
I hope your suffering comes to an end with this journey to
Afghanistan.
Amir jan, I am ashamed for the lies we told you all
those years. You were right to be angry in Peshawar. You
had a right to know. So did Hassan. I know it doesn’t
absolve anyone of anything, but the Kabul we lived in in
those days was a strange world, one in which some things
mattered more than the truth.
Amir jan, I know how hard your father was on you
when you were growing up. I saw how you suffered and
yearned for his affections, and my heart bled for you. But
your father was a man torn between two halves, Amir jan:
you and Hassan. He loved you both, but he could not love
Hassan the way he longed to, openly, and as a father. So he
took it out on you instead—Amir, the socially legitimate
half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited
and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with them.
When he saw you, he saw himself. And his guilt. You are
still angry and I realize it is far too early to expect you to
accept this, but maybe someday you will see that when
your father was hard on you, he was also being hard on
himself. Your father, like you, was a tortured soul, Amir jan.
I cannot describe to you the depth and blackness of
the sorrow that came over me when I learned of his pass-