Living the Dream

Amir character talks about how this time, he can not run away.  He knows how much his redemption is tied to Sohrab.    “There will be no floating away.  There will be no other reality tonight.” Hosseini helps the reader know how close to death Sohrab is:  “…I hear the paper flapping of their wings.” (p363)

It is fitting, then, that Sohrab survives, but only after Amir does something he has not done for fifteen years: He prays (The prayer itself, besides being an obvious literary symbol for redemption, is another acknowledgement of Amir’s past and Afghani heritage. It is, indeed, the final step in his redemption.  He ends his prayer:   “I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I’d always feared they would.” (p364)

Amir sleeps beside Sohrab and whn he wakes, he is struck by a memory of what he saw when he found Sohrab:  “…and his eyes, still half open but lightless.”  Amir knows the suffering this boy has to be going through.   A doctor arrives with drops of Sohrab’s blood on his mask.  Amir breaks into prayer and begins to make promises:    I will beg…I will fast.  And the doctor says Sohrab cut deeply and had many transfusions but he will live.  “…I have taken his hands and I have brought them up to my face.  I weep my relief into this stranger’s small, meaty hands and says nothing….” (p367)

Ah, when you want something more for someone else before yourself…there is a key here to redemption.  The reader suddenly remembers that Amir must now face having his own face reconstructed…remember, his upper lip is so scarred that he looks like a harelip.  Amir has not once prayed about that.    Amir goes to Sohrab, “…his white face…a curious numbness washes over me, the same numbness a man might feel seconds alter after he has swerved his car and barely avoided a head-on collision.”  Ah, yes, had Sohrab not been spared, and if Amir did not feel like his prayers had something to do with Sohrab’s survival, and that God has listened….one can not imagine Amir’s continued suffering.  The boy had to survive.  Amir is very aware of man as savior.  He has a dream about a man in a mask who saved Sohrab’s life…when the man, in his dream, removes the mask, it is Mr. Andrews.  (p368)  The psyche knows when it has been forgiven.

Sohrab does not do well.  The boy has been so brutalized, and so very wounded, even the day before that, he barely speaks and never smiles. “He held my glance, then looked away, his face set like some stone.  His eyes still lightless, I saw, vacant, the way I had found them when I had pulled him out of the bathtub.” (p371)  Sohrab begins reading Hassan’s favorite story to Sohrab:  A touching tender moment in the book.  Sohrab tells Amir, finally that he is tired of everything, and Amir is given a tremendous flashback.  “There was a band of sunlight on the bed between us, and, for just a moment, the ashen gray face looking at me from the other side of it was a  dear ringer for Hassan’s, not the Hassan I played marbles with…not the Hassan I chased….but the Hassan I saw alive for the last time, dragging his belongings behind Ali in a warm summer downpour, stuffing them in the trunk of Baba’s car while I watched through the rain-soaked window of my room.”  (p372-373)  Sorhab says all he wants is his old life back, and Amir realizes that he would too, but it cannot be but he tells Sohrab that the Visa has been given to him.  “Can you forgive me?”  Amir waits for Sohrab to give him back a sense of worthiness by accepting to come with him to America.  Amir senses he has to prove his worthiness through this child.  Amir’s character describes Sohrab as a “guest” as if he were the visitation of Christ, the reader identifies, this.  It is also interesting that he then says, “I left the room …unaware that almost a year would pass before I would hear Sohrab speak another word.”  (p375)  I believe Amir knows the feeling of an unresponsive God, as well as the Son.

Who of us have not felt forsaken, betimes?

False Light

I am in love with sunny days

and you knew it:

You, with broad brown brow

who drew your hand over the sun~

Hands, I drew to my breast

so my heart might know the touch of you

as you ticked out your time

between here and there

Before I saw stars widen around the irises

of your eyes when you knew

what I knew

scrumbling behind the little clouds

were storms I had never thought

could be possible

you stole my absolute obsession

with songs of birds

and I became a moth

batting myself against false light

©Carol Desjarlais

Tags: Good Reading //