Page 362 - The Kite Runner

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