Page 318 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 307

in that crimson light, forehead pressed to the glass, fists buried in
his armpits.

Aisha had a male assistant help me take my first steps
that night. I only walked around the room once, one hand clutch-
ing the wheeled IV stand, the other clasping the assistant’s fore-
arm. It took me ten minutes to make it back to bed, and, by then,
the incision on my stomach throbbed and I’d broken out in a
drenching sweat. I lay in bed, gasping, my heart hammering in my
ears, thinking how much I missed my wife.
Sohrab and I played panjpar most of the next day, again in
silence. And the day after that. We hardly spoke, just played panj-
par, me propped in bed, he on the three-legged stool, our routine
broken only by my taking a walk around the room, or going to the
bathroom down the hall. I had a dream later that night. I dreamed
Assef was standing in the doorway of my hospital room, brass ball
still in his eye socket. “We’re the same, you and I,” he was saying.
“You nursed with him, but you’re my twin.”

I told Armand early that next day that I was leaving.
“It’s still early for discharge,” Armand protested. He wasn’t
dressed in surgical scrubs that day, instead in a button-down navy
blue suit and yellow tie. The gel was back in the hair. “You are still
in intravenous antibiotics and—”
“I have to go,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for
me, all of you. Really. But I have to leave.”
“Where will you go?” Armand said.
“I’d rather not say.”