Page 369 - The Kite Runner

358 Khaled Hosseini

“Never mind.” I kissed her ear.
After, she knelt to eye level with Sohrab. She took his hand
and smiled at him. “Salaam, Sohrab jan, I’m your Khala Soraya.
We’ve all been waiting for you.”
Looking at her smiling at Sohrab, her eyes tearing over a little,
I had a glimpse of the mother she might have been, had her own
womb not betrayed her.
Sohrab shifted on his feet and looked away.

Soraya had turned the study upstairs into a bedroom
for Sohrab. She led him in and he sat on the edge of the bed. The
sheets showed brightly colored kites flying in indigo blue skies.
She had made inscriptions on the wall by the closet, feet and
inches to measure a child’s growing height. At the foot of the bed,
I saw a wicker basket stuffed with books, a locomotive, a water-
color set.
Sohrab was wearing the plain white T-shirt and new denims I
had bought him in Islamabad just before we’d left—the shirt hung
loosely over his bony, slumping shoulders. The color still hadn’t
seeped back into his face, save for the halo of dark circles around
his eyes. He was looking at us now in the impassive way he looked
at the plates of boiled rice the hospital orderly placed before him.
Soraya asked if he liked his room and I noticed that she was
trying to avoid looking at his wrists and that her eyes kept swaying
back to those jagged pink lines. Sohrab lowered his head. Hid his
hands under his thighs and said nothing. Then he simply lay his
head on the pillow. Less than five minutes later, Soraya and I
watching from the doorway, he was snoring.
We went to bed, and Soraya fell asleep with her head on my
chest. In the darkness of our room, I lay awake, an insomniac
once more. Awake. And alone with demons of my own.