The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [119]
“I know.”
“What . . . what did he tell you about us?”
“That you were the best friend he ever had,” he said.
I twirled the jack of diamonds in my fingers, flipped it back and forth. “I wasn’t such a good friend, I’m afraid,” I said. “But I’d like to be your friend. I think I could be a good friend to you. Would that be all right? Would you like that?” I put my hand on his arm, gingerly, but he flinched. He dropped his cards and pushed away on the stool. He walked back to the window. The sky was awash with streaks of red and purple as the sun set on Peshawar. From the street below came a succession of honks and the braying of a donkey, the whistle of a policeman. Sohrab stood in that crimson light, forehead pressed to the glass, fists buried in his armpits.
AISHA HAD A MALE ASSISTANT help me take my first steps that night. I only walked around the room once, one hand clutching the wheeled IV stand, the other clasping the assistant’s forearm. It took me ten minutes to make it back to bed, and, by then, the incision on my stomach throbbed and I’d broken out in a drenching sweat. I lay in bed, gasping, my heart hammering in my ears, thinking how much I missed my wife.
Sohrab and I played panjpar most of the next day, again in silence. And the day after that. We hardly spoke, just played panjpar, me propped in bed, he on the three-legged stool, our routine broken only by my taking a walk around the room, or going to the bathroom down the hall. I had a dream later that night. I dreamed Assef was standing in the doorway of my hospital room, brass ball still in his eye socket. “We’re the same, you and I,” he was saying. “You nursed with him, but you’re my twin.”
I TOLD ARMAND early that next day that I was leaving.
“It’s still early for discharge,” Armand protested. He wasn’t dressed in surgical scrubs that day, instead in a button-down navy blue suit and yellow tie. The gel was back in the hair. “You are still in intravenous antibiotics and—”
“I have to go,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, all of you. Really. But I have to leave.”
“Where will you go?” Armand said.
“I’d rather not say.”
“You can hardly walk.”
“I can walk to the end of the hall and back,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” The plan was this: Leave the hospital. Get the money from the safe-deposit box and pay my medical bills. Drive to the orphanage and drop Sohrab off with John and Betty Caldwell. Then get a ride to Islamabad and change travel plans. Give myself a few more days to get better. Fly home.
That was the plan, anyway. Until Farid and Sohrab arrived that morning. “Your friends, this John and Betty Caldwell, they aren’t in Peshawar,” Farid said.
It had taken me ten minutes just to slip into my pirhan-tumban. My chest, where they’d cut me to insert the chest tube, hurt when I raised my arm, and my stomach throbbed every time I leaned over. I was drawing ragged breaths just from the effort of packing a few of my belongings into a brown paper bag. But I’d managed to get ready and was sitting on the edge of the bed when Farid came in with the news. Sohrab sat on the bed next to me.
“Where did they go?” I asked.
Farid shook his head. “You don’t understand—”
“Because Rahim Khan said—”
“I went to the U.S. consulate,” Farid said, picking up my bag. “There never was a John and Betty Caldwell in Peshawar. According to the people at the consulate, they never existed. Not here in Peshawar, anyhow.”
Next to me, Sohrab was flipping through the pages of the old National Geographic.
WE GOT THE MONEY from the bank. The manager, a paunchy man with sweat patches under his arms, kept flashing smiles and telling me that no one in the bank had touched the money. “Absolutely nobody,” he said gravely, swinging his index finger the same way Armand had.
Driving through Peshawar with so much money in a paper bag was a slightly frightening experience. Plus, I suspected every bearded man who stared at me to be a Talib killer, sent by Assef. Two things