Page 362 - The Kite Runner
P. 362

The Kite Runner                       351


          eyes closed. I wondered what his last thought had been as he had
          raised the blade and brought it down.
              I was exiting the lobby when the hotel manager, Mr. Fayyaz,
          caught up with me. “I am very sorry for you,” he said, “but I am
          asking for you to leave my hotel, please. This is bad for my busi-
          ness, very bad.”
              I told him I understood and I checked out. He didn’t charge
          me for the three days I’d spent at the hospital. Waiting for a cab
          outside the hotel lobby, I thought about what Mr. Fayyaz had said
          to me that night we’d gone looking for Sohrab: The thing about
          you Afghanis is that ...well, you people are a little reckless. I had
          laughed at him, but now I wondered. Had I actually gone to sleep
          after I had given Sohrab the news he feared most?
              When I got in the cab, I asked the driver if he knew any Per-
          sian bookstores. He said there was one a couple of kilometers
          south. We stopped there on the way to the hospital.


          Sohrab’s new room  had cream-colored walls, chipped,
          dark gray moldings, and glazed tiles that might have once been
          white. He shared the room with a teenaged Punjabi boy who, I
          later learned from one of the nurses, had broken his leg when he
          had slipped off the roof of a moving bus. His leg was in a cast,
          raised and held by tongs strapped to several weights.
              Sohrab’s bed was next to the window, the lower half lit by the
          late-morning sunlight streaming through the rectangular panes. A
          uniformed security guard was standing at the window, munching
          on cooked watermelon seeds—Sohrab was under twenty-four-
          hours-a-day suicide watch. Hospital protocol, Dr. Nawaz had
          informed me. The guard tipped his hat when he saw me and left
          the room.
              Sohrab was wearing short-sleeved hospital pajamas and lying
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