Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

Later, after Noor was asleep and Fadi had retreated to the bedroom with questions in his eyes that Amal couldn't face, she sat alone at the kitchen table with all the drawings spread before her.

Eighteen now. Noor's original, plus the seventeen from her students.

The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sounds of the city settling into night. Through the kitchen window, Amal could see the amber glow of streetlights and, beyond them, the darker bulk of the hills where the settlements sprawled in their networks of bright security lights. It was a view she had looked at a thousand times, a geography she had memorized without meaning to. But tonight it felt different. Tonight, every shadow seemed to hold a weight it hadn't held before.

She had spent the last hour making phone calls.

Layla's mother had been the first. Amal had dialed the number with shaking hands, speaking in careful, neutral tones about her daughter's artwork. Layla's mother had been quiet for a long time before responding.

"She draws them at home too," the woman had said. "Ever since we left our old apartment. She says they followed us. I thought it was just—you know—the situation. The stress. But she draws the same thing every time. The same eyes. The red eyes."

"Does she talk about them? The figures she draws?"

Another long pause. When Layla's mother spoke again, her voice was very quiet. "She says they stand at the place where her father was taken. She says they've been standing there ever since, waiting for someone to remember."

Layla's father had been arrested eight months ago, during a night raid. He was being held in administrative detention—no charges, no trial, no set release date. Layla's mother had told Amal this in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, the voice of someone who had learned to speak about catastrophe as if it were ordinary.

"I don't know what to tell her," the woman had said. "I don't know what any of us can tell them."

Amal had made calls to three other mothers after that, receiving variations of the same story.

Malik's mother said he drew the figures on any surface he could find—paper, cardboard, the walls of his room when she forgot to hide the crayons. He said they gathered at the place where his grandmother's house used to stand, before it was demolished to make way for a bypass road that was never built.

Yasmin's mother said her daughter refused to walk past the checkpoint near their street. She said there was a man standing there who never moved, who never left, who watched everyone who passed.

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