The Kite Runner: Before the Gunfire Becomes History
Reading Note: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Spoilers for Amir and Baba’s escape from Afghanistan.
Amir has a reason to welcome the night Afghanistan’s monarchy falls. His father, Baba, comes home frightened, having been kept away by blocked roads and a failed telephone connection, and takes him and Hassan into his arms. Hassan is the servant’s son; Amir has been watching Hassan’s father comfort him, and will later tell himself he felt no envy. Now the affection he wanted has come to him through the gunfire.
Writing years afterward, Amir calls his happiness “a brief insane moment” (chapter 5, p. 36). He already knows what followed that night: the communist coup, the Soviet invasion, the destruction of the life he remembers. Hosseini puts that knowledge before the embrace. We have been told where Afghanistan is heading when the frightened father comes through the door, and still, for the boy being held, something good has happened.
“Brief” gives the happiness only an instant; “insane” marks that instant for rebuke. By then, Baba’s fear and open arms have drawn us toward the feeling Amir is judging. We can see why he is glad, and the older narrator’s disapproval cannot easily become our own. Hosseini keeps us close to the child’s hunger for affection even as the remembered night becomes part of a national disaster. Years later, as Amir escapes the country, he will still be worrying about the kind of son his father thinks he is.
A republic outside the study
During the shooting, Ali, Hassan’s father, tells the boys that people are hunting ducks. His hoarse reassurance belongs to the same night as the coup, though it belongs to a different kind of speech. Ali must answer children who are frightened now. The narrator can range forward over years of violence; Ali has to get them through the next noise. Hosseini moves between these unequal positions without granting the children the hindsight through which we are reading their fear.
The movement runs through a single remembered vigil. The boys huddle indoors; the narrator looks ahead to Afghan children who will grow up hearing gunfire; then Baba arrives. Decades pass in the telling before the door opens. When he embraces the boys, the story has returned to a need that its historical forecast could neither explain away nor satisfy.
The following morning, the radio repeatedly announces a republic. Hassan asks Amir, “Does ‘republic’ mean Father and I will have to move away?” (p. 37). He has turned an unfamiliar form of government into a possible loss of home. The question also places father and son together: whatever the new word means, Hassan imagines it happening to both of them. Amir, who has just admitted that he does not know what a republic is, assures him that nobody is sending them away.
That assurance sounds easy from the owner’s son. Hassan’s place in the household depends on arrangements Amir has never needed to explain. Their unequal security enters the exchange before either boy can discuss politics. Soon Hassan proposes climbing their tree, and Amir runs for a book and pine nuts, relieved to escape the boring news. Hosseini lets the scene move on with their attention. The adult narrator knows he is remembering a lost childhood; the child is still impatient to get outside.
What leaving cannot settle
By March 1981, Amir and Baba are fleeing Kabul. The eighteen-year-old’s first humiliation on the road is carsickness: Baba looks embarrassed and apologizes to the other passengers. Years of wanting his father’s approval travel with Amir into the truck. His grievance has the injured familiarity of a family quarrel, even as the smuggler refuses to stop so close to the city they are escaping.
Hosseini preserves that disproportion all the way to Pakistan. After the journey, Amir looks at their luggage and thinks of Baba’s life reduced to “one disappointing son and two suitcases” (chapter 10). The luggage can be counted. The judgment of the son comes from Amir. Set beside the two cases, his old conviction about himself acquires the blunt appearance of one more thing his father has brought out of Afghanistan. Exile has cost Baba his home and standing; Amir still imagines himself among the losses.
Between these moments, the abandoned house receives a strangely leisurely inspection. There are dishes to wash, beds to make, suits hanging in the closet. Photographs and a notebook are missing, but much of the household looks ready to resume its ordinary day. The inventory makes departure hard to see. Even the servant, who has not been told, may wake believing they have merely gone out. Fear of informers has required secrecy, leaving the rooms to suggest a return their occupants are not planning.
Amir’s attachment to that life continues in his wish to wake in his own bed, with a book beside him. He has to hear Baba and the smuggler discussing their arrangements before he can admit that the departure is real.
A memory without a date
Inside the fuel tanker carrying them toward Pakistan, even that backward-looking fluency breaks down. Baba has just kissed a handful of Afghan dirt, poured it into his snuffbox and placed the box beside his heart. He has found a gesture for leaving. Amir, lowered into darkness and gasoline fumes, can scarcely breathe.
“You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak” (p. 121). The second sentence orders the action again, pushing it further. “Wide” promises an opening; “creak” makes us hear the strain. The airways answer by doing the opposite: they “collapse, tighten, squeeze.” Each verb continues the contraction, withholding the relief we are waiting for. The shift into second-person present tense keeps these commands immediate: although the man telling the story survived, the sentences hold us with the passenger who cannot secure his next breath.
Baba draws Amir’s attention to the green hands of his wristwatch. We have followed dates that name changes of government and the month of their escape, but here a clock helps because it shines. Amir fixes his eyes on the small light. Gradually he can hear the other passengers, feel the truck’s movement and register his father beside him. Baba then asks him to think of something happy.
The scene that comes is an afternoon in Paghman with Hassan. They are flying a kite in an open field, with grass around their ankles and room above them for the kite to dip and steady. After the tank’s sealed darkness, the passage opens out through sight, movement and sound: their shadows, a fountain, music, someone calling them for tea and cake. Hassan handles the spool; Amir holds the line. The remembered pleasure includes their unspoken coordination.
This passage, too, unfolds in the present tense, but its actions succeed. The kite “spins, dips, steadies”: the three verbs carry movement into balance, where “collapse, tighten, squeeze” kept taking breath away. Our attention can follow the kite out into the field. Grass, sky and the fountain’s sound enlarge the space we have been imagining; the call to tea supplies an ordinary destination after a journey whose next stage could be fatal. Hosseini brings relief through the remembered afternoon’s room to move and its familiar welcome. Only afterward does Amir admit that he cannot remember the month, or even the year. The memory has lost its place on a calendar and retained its power to bring him company.
Arrival in Pakistan briefly offers a different ending: daylight, air, the relief of being alive. Then a cry draws Amir toward Kamal, another boy from Kabul, who has died during the journey. Baba tries to comfort Kamal’s father and is pushed away. The grieving man takes the smuggler’s gun and kills himself. Amir, who began the journey vomiting, is left dry-heaving beside the road.
The return of that bodily distress makes the arrival difficult to seal off as an escape completed. Baba’s touch and the memory of Hassan helped Amir endure the tanker; neither the father nor the recovered childhood could make the journey safe for everyone inside it. The same place that gives Amir back his breath contains another father’s unanswered demand that his son breathe.
At the beginning, the boy’s happiness in Baba’s arms interrupts a forecast of national catastrophe. Here, another family’s catastrophe interrupts his relief at having survived.
Hosseini has made room for both feelings without letting either stand for the whole event. A sentence announcing that the refugees reached Pakistan could contain both families. The end of the journey makes it impossible to read that sentence as a shared deliverance.
Sources
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, Riverhead Books digital edition, novel copyright 2003, reader’s guide copyright 2005, ISBN 0-7865-6473-3. Chapters 5 and 10; opening quotations on pp. 36–37; tanker passage on p. 121; suitcase judgment and Paghman memory in chapter 10; escape sequence, pp. 110–124. English original.
Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978–1980.” Used for the distinct 1973, 1978 and 1979 political events; the novel supplies the fictional experiences discussed here.
Comments