The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [100]
I ran around the desk and saw why Zaman’s screaming was muffled: Farid was strangling him. I grasped Farid’s shoulders with both hands and pulled hard. He snatched away from me. “That’s enough!” I barked. But Farid’s face had flushed red, his lips pulled back in a snarl. “I’m killing him! You can’t stop me! I’m killing him,” he sneered.
“Get off him!”
“I’m killing him!” Something in his voice told me that if I didn’t do something quickly I’d witness my first murder.
“The children are watching, Farid. They’re watching,” I said. His shoulder muscles tightened under my grip and, for a moment, I thought he’d keep squeezing Zaman’s neck anyway. Then he turned around, saw the children. They were standing silently by the door, holding hands, some of them crying. I felt Farid’s muscles slacken. He dropped his hands, rose to his feet. He looked down on Zaman and dropped a mouthful of spit on his face. Then he walked to the door and closed it.
Zaman struggled to his feet, blotted his bloody lips with his sleeve, wiped the spit off his cheek. Coughing and wheezing, he put on his skullcap, his glasses, saw both lenses had cracked, and took them off. He buried his face in his hands. None of us said anything for a long time.
“He took Sohrab a month ago,” Zaman finally croaked, hands still shielding his face.
“You call yourself a director?” Farid said.
Zaman dropped his hands. “I haven’t been paid in over six months. I’m broke because I’ve spent my life’s savings on this orphanage. Everything I ever owned or inherited I sold to run this godforsaken place. You think I don’t have family in Pakistan and Iran? I could have run like everyone else. But I didn’t. I stayed. I stayed because of them.” He pointed to the door. “If I deny him one child, he takes ten. So I let him take one and leave the judging to Allah. I swallow my pride and take his goddamn filthy . . . dirty money. Then I go to the bazaar and buy food for the children.”
Farid dropped his eyes.
“What happens to the children he takes?” I asked.
Zaman rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. “Sometimes they come back.”
“Who is he? How do we find him?” I said.
“Go to Ghazi Stadium tomorrow. You’ll see him at halftime. He’ll be the one wearing black sunglasses.” He picked up his broken glasses and turned them in his hands. “I want you to go now. The children are frightened.”
He escorted us out.
As the truck pulled away, I saw Zaman in the side-view mirror, standing in the doorway. A group of children surrounded him, clutching the hem of his loose shirt. I saw he had put on his broken glasses.
TWENTY-ONE
We crossed the river and drove north through the crowded Pashtunistan Square. Baba used to take me to Khyber Restaurant there for kabob. The building was still standing, but its doors were padlocked, the windows shattered, and the letters K and R missing from its name.
I saw a dead body near the restaurant. There had been a hanging. A young man dangled from the end of a rope tied to a beam, his face puffy and blue, the clothes he’d worn on the last day of his life shredded, bloody. Hardly anyone seemed to notice him.
We rode silently through the square and headed toward the Wazir Akbar Khan district. Everywhere I looked, a haze of dust covered the city and its sun-dried brick buildings. A few blocks north of Pashtunistan Square, Farid pointed to two men talking animatedly at a busy street corner. One of them was hobbling on one leg, his other leg amputated below the knee. He cradled an artificial leg in his arms. “You know what they’re doing? Haggling over the leg.”
“He’s selling his leg?”
Farid nodded. “You can get good money for it on the black market. Feed your kids for a couple of weeks.”
TO MY SURPRISE, most of the houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan district still had roofs and standing walls. In fact, they were in pretty