The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [80]
And with my arthritis, it was getting harder for me to maintain the house. My knees and back were always aching—I would get up in the morning and it would take me at least an hour to shake the stiffness from my joints, especially in the wintertime. I did not want to let your father’s house go to rot; we had all had many good times in that house, so many memories, Amir jan. It was not right—your father had designed that house himself; it had meant so much to him, and besides, I had promised him I would care for it when he and you left for Pakistan. Now it was just me and the house and . . . I did my best. I tried to water the trees every few days, cut the lawn, tend to the flowers, fix things that needed fixing, but, even then, I was not a young man anymore.
But even so, I might have been able to manage. At least for a while longer. But when news of your father’s death reached me . . . for the first time, I felt a terrible loneliness in that house. An unbearable emptiness.
So one day, I fueled up the Buick and drove up to Hazarajat. I remembered that, after Ali dismissed himself from the house, your father told me he and Hassan had moved to a small village just outside Bamiyan. Ali had a cousin there as I recalled. I had no idea if Hassan would still be there, if anyone would even know of him or his whereabouts. After all, it had been ten years since Ali and Hassan had left your father’s house. Hassan would have been a grown man in 1986, twenty-two, twenty-three years old. If he was even alive, that is—the Shorawi, may they rot in hell for what they did to our watan, killed so many of our young men. I don’t have to tell you that.
But, with the grace of God, I found him there. It took very little searching—all I had to do was ask a few questions in Bamiyan and people pointed me to his village. I do not even recall its name, or whether it even had one. But I remember it was a scorching summer day and I was driving up a rutted dirt road, nothing on either side but sunbaked bushes, gnarled, spiny tree trunks, and dried grass like pale straw. I passed a dead donkey rotting on the side of the road. And then I turned a corner and, right in the middle of that barren land, I saw a cluster of mud houses, beyond them nothing but broad sky and mountains like jagged teeth.
The people in Bamiyan had told me I would find him easily—he lived in the only house in the village that had a walled garden. The mud wall, short and pocked with holes, enclosed the tiny house—which was really not much more than a glorified hut. Barefoot children were playing on the street, kicking a ragged tennis ball with a stick, and they stared when I pulled up and killed the engine. I knocked on the wooden door and stepped through into a yard that had very little in it save for a parched strawberry patch and a bare lemon tree. There was a tandoor in the corner in the shadow of an acacia tree and I saw a man squatting beside it. He was placing dough on a large wooden spatula and slapping it against the walls of the tandoor. He dropped the dough when he saw me. I had to make him stop kissing my hands.
“Let me look at you,” I said. He stepped away. He was so tall now—I stood on my toes and still just came up to his chin. The Bamiyan sun had toughened his skin, and turned it several shades darker than I remembered,