The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [115]
I wanted to ask him about the wires. Postsurgical? Where was Aisha? I wanted her to smile at me, wanted her soft hands in mine.
Armand frowned, cocked one eyebrow in a slightly self-important way. “You are in a hospital in Peshawar. You’ve been here two days. You have suffered some very significant injuries, Amir, I should tell you. I would say you’re very lucky to be alive, my friend.” He swayed his index finger back and forth like a pendulum when he said this. “Your spleen had ruptured, probably—and fortunately for you—a delayed rupture, because you had signs of early hemorrhage into your abdominal cavity. My colleagues from the general surgery unit had to perform an emergency splenectomy. If it had ruptured earlier, you would have bled to death.” He patted me on the arm, the one with the IV, and smiled. “You also suffered seven broken ribs. One of them caused a pneumothorax.”
I frowned. Tried to open my mouth. Remembered about the wires.
“That means a punctured lung,” Armand explained. He tugged at a clear plastic tubing on my left side. I felt the jabbing again in my chest. “We sealed the leak with this chest tube.” I followed the tube poking through bandages on my chest to a container half-filled with columns of water. The bubbling sound came from there.
“You had also suffered various lacerations. That means ‘cuts.’”
I wanted to tell him I knew what the word meant; I was a writer. I went to open my mouth. Forgot about the wires again.
“The worst laceration was on your upper lip,” Armand said. “The impact had cut your upper lip in two, clean down the middle. But not to worry, the plastics guys sewed it back together and they think you will have an excellent result, though there will be a scar. That is unavoidable.
“There was also an orbital fracture on the left side; that’s the eye socket bone, and we had to fix that too. The wires in your jaws will come out in about six weeks,” Armand said. “Until then it’s liquids and shakes. You will lose some weight and you will be talking like Al Pacino from the first Godfather movie for a little while.” He laughed. “But you have a job to do today. Do you know what it is?”
I shook my head.
“Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.” He laughed again.
Later, after Aisha changed the IV tubing and raised the head of the bed like I’d asked, I thought about what had happened to me. Ruptured spleen. Broken teeth. Punctured lung. Busted eye socket. But as I watched a pigeon peck at a bread crumb on the windowsill, I kept thinking of something else Armand/Dr. Faruqi had said: The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.
FARID AND SOHRAB came to visit the next day. “Do you know who we are today? Do you remember?” Farid said, only half-jokingly. I nodded.
“Al hamdullellah!” he said, beaming. “No more talking nonsense.”
“Thank you, Farid,” I said through jaws wired shut. Armand was right—I did sound like Al Pacino from The Godfather. And my tongue surprised me every time it poked in one of the empty spaces left by the teeth I had swallowed. “I mean, thank you. For everything.”
He waved a hand, blushed a little. “Bas, it’s not worthy of thanks,” he said. I turned to Sohrab. He was wearing a new outfit, light brown pirhan-tumban that looked a bit big for him, and a black skullcap. He was looking down at his feet, toying with the IV line coiled on the bed.
“We were never properly introduced,” I said. I offered him my hand. “I am Amir.”
He looked at my hand, then to me. “You are the Amir agha Father told me about?” he said.
“Yes.” I remembered the words from Hassan’s letter. I have told much about you to Farzana jan and Sohrab, about us growing up together and playing games and running in the streets. They laugh at the stories of all the mischief you and I used to cause! “I owe you thanks too, Sohrab jan,” I said. “You saved my life.”
He didn’t say anything. I dropped my hand when he didn