Page 367 - The Kite Runner

356 Khaled Hosseini

I sat by his bed until he fell asleep. Something was lost
between Sohrab and me. Until my meeting with the lawyer, Omar
Faisal, a light of hope had begun to enter Sohrab’s eyes like a
timid guest. Now the light was gone, the guest had fled, and I
wondered when it would dare return. I wondered how long before
Sohrab smiled again. How long before he trusted me. If ever.
So I left the room and went looking for another hotel,
unaware that almost a year would pass before I would hear Sohrab
speak another word.

In the end, Sohrab never accepted my offer. Nor did he
decline it. But he knew that when the bandages were removed and
the hospital garments returned, he was just another homeless
Hazara orphan. What choice did he have? Where could he go? So
what I took as a yes from him was in actuality more of a quiet sur-
render, not so much an acceptance as an act of relinquishment by
one too weary to decide, and far too tired to believe. What he
yearned for was his old life. What he got was me and America. Not
that it was such a bad fate, everything considered, but I couldn’t
tell him that. Perspective was a luxury when your head was con-
stantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
And so it was that, about a week later, we crossed a strip of
warm, black tarmac and I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan
to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping
him in a turmoil of uncertainty.

One day, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in
Fremont. I was standing in the Westerns section when a guy next
to me, sipping Coke from a 7-Eleven cup, pointed to The Magnif-
icent Seven and asked me if I had seen it. “Yes, thirteen times,” I
said. “Charles Bronson dies in it, so do James Coburn and Robert