Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

Abu Youssef was the science teacher, an older man with a gray beard and kind eyes who had been at the school for twenty years. He found Amal in the teachers' lounge, staring at the stack of drawings she had spread across the table, her tea growing cold beside her.

"What's all this?" he asked, settling into the chair across from her.

"The children drew these," Amal said. Her voice was flat, emptied of everything except exhaustion. "During art time. I asked them to draw something that makes them happy."

Abu Youssef adjusted his glasses and picked up the nearest drawing —Layla's, the one that had started it all. He studied it for a long moment, his expression unreadable.

"Ah," he said finally. "The soldier."

"You've seen drawings like this before?"

"Many times." He set the paper down carefully. "The children process what they see. This is normal, in a situation like ours. The psychologists call it 'trauma expression.' The children lack the words to describe their experiences, so they draw them instead."

"But they're all the same." Amal spread the drawings out, overlapping their edges like a mosaic of nightmares. "Look. The same helmet. The same vest. The same... eyes. Red eyes, Abu Youssef. What soldier has red eyes?"

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was gentler than before, the voice of a teacher explaining something to a struggling student.

"They all see the same thing because they've all experienced the same thing. Soldiers at checkpoints. Raids at night. Vehicles on fire. The details blur together in their minds, and what comes out is... this. An archetype. A symbol of everything they fear."

"But these children don't know each other. Layla just moved here. Malik lives on the other side of the city. How could they all—"

"Because fear doesn't need geography." Abu Youssef picked up his own tea and took a slow sip. "My grandfather used to tell me stories about the Nakba. About how the villages that fell in '48 all had the same nightmares afterward —the same faceless soldiers, the same burning houses, the same empty roads. He said the land remembers, and what the land remembers, the people dream."

Amal opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. What was there to say? That she didn't believe in collective nightmares? That she didn't believe the land could remember anything?

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