Kite Runner

I know everyone has read it, but I just can't.

I bought it back when I was still in Egypt (I actually probably bought it more than a year ago), and I still can't read it.

There have been only a few experiences in my life as rich and dense as my summer in Afghanistan. Taking an overnight bus alone from Skopje to Belgrade the summer after I graduated college and walking around Belgrade without a map or guidebook (left behind by accident in Macedonia) is one of the few times I can remember that can even compare in intensity to my time in Afghanistan.

I arrived in Belgrade early in the morning, before anything (even McDonald's) was open, had no money until the moneychangers opened, and it was pouring rain. When you are in a place you've never been, surrounded by a language you don't speak, and don't have any sort of guide to help sort out the information around you, it's like you are stumbling around blindly feeling for some indication of how the world around you is supposed to function and how you are supposed to fit into it (I think this is especially true in police states where there feeling that one could potentially be stopped or questioned according to an unknowable set of state rules threatens and lurks in the background). I slept in a subterranean crosswalk (the kind that goes under a busy avenue and has little shops and things) that seemed menacing and unsafe at first -- like the first time you walk in Central Park alone and pass under the bridge that looks like it might be a tunnel with thieves hidden in its darkness -- but over the next hour or so it came alive and totally transformed into a protecting and lively space. After I woke up and things began to open, I got money and bought the best yogurt parfait of my life (something I've only seen in the Serbian incarnation of the McDonald's menu), and walked all over the city. I entered buildings that I found visually appealing with total disregard for what they actually were and perhaps a small sense of mischief that I knew could be converted into naivete if I were to get into trouble for going somewhere I didn't belong. It's funny how easy it is to find yourself unable to distinguish a government building from an elementary school, or a research laboratory from a museum. I cat napped in a gorgeous park at what appeared to be the Serbian answer to Washington DC's mall (Belgrade has some great public spaces), and eventually made my way to the botanical gardens where I again napped under a light rain. I went to every orthodox church whose steeple caught my eye in the distance, and was even permitted to tour one that was closed to the public for renovation (when you're quiet, nonthreatening, earnest, and alone, people will let you in just about anywhere). I even went to the tennis center and asked if I could hit with someone on the red clay. Everyone was shocked, as I was wearing jeans and a pair of Prada sneakers, and unfortunately there was no one there to hit with me (although I am fairly certain that two of Serbia's top female professional players were the two girls that I met when I was there).

Anyway, back to Kite Runner. Afghanistan was so rich, to the point that it was overwhelming, that I don't want my experience with it -- which is fragile insofar as I still cannot articulate precisely its impression on me because its too big for me to fully process -- to be replaced by a literary image. I'm sure the book is excellent, but it's not something I'm ready for when my internal text on Afghanistan is still being revealed to me.

As I tried to read it before I went to bed tonight, I finally had to put it down because my mind started racing with my memories of Afghanistan. There are so many discrete moments of impact that all then run together. I was reading, yesterday, about language groups in Central Asia (it started with a wikipedia search on Zoroastrianism that snowballed into lots of reading about proto-Indo-Iranian peoples and the cultures and languages that sprung-forth from them), and there was a photo in the entry on Greater Khorasan of the mosque in Herat that brought back SO many memories, I could never write them all. It's unbelievable how crisply I remember not only the place, but my thoughts nearly every moment that I was there (and that's not remotely and exaggeration). I see the photo and remember not just the entry gate, or the pathway, or my seduction of the mullah on the stairs, but what I was thinking at each of those moments -- what they meant. The photo gets filled with my thoughts and experiences in a way that a book cannot be, because books are already deliberately filled with thoughts and experiences to a degree that they are usually rather surreal in their panoramic depiction of things.

I finally had to get out of bed and type this because I was so restless with thoughts of Afghanistan, ranging from the biggest and most abstract thoughts, to the smallest and most moment-specific ones (I keep reliving Sher trying to get to me from her branch on the tree and knocking against the hard cement at my feet).

To feel full and profoundly. To be saturated. The colours are beautiful but angst-ridden in their richness.

VC