By Kim Farleigh
The box-like houses most of the camp’s children drew had slanting roofs and picket fences under ice-cream clouds, cows, farmers, machinery, paths, roads, cars, tanks, corpses, and flames–The Seen–reproduced on mass.
Hashim works, however, boomed with chance, yellow clouds, fusing into red, reappearing around purple, the permanent-recreation cosmos a work of abstract expressionism from his perspective. The multicoloured parrots he drew he also had never seen. He just loved parrots. The black figures he drew being bundled by soldiers into an armoured vehicle he had seen – people nobody ever saw again. He wrote: “I feel sorry for the bad things that have happened to others.” The drawing of his family’s destroyed house – whose destruction he had not seen – ended up matching reality, imagination and fact fused by sensitive talent.
The other boys often fought when they were supposed to be drawing, for bland imitation, creating limited entertainment, quickly bores. A Kosovan teacher screamed “STOOOOOPP!!” to halt the fighting. The sombre-looking boys returned to their simple reproductions.
A Viennese girl recoiled as Hashim returned her pencil. Fighting boys had knocked it off the table. She and her Albanian parents, visiting Kosovo just before war’s eruption, got herded, without documents, into the camp, her dignity strained further by having to be with that “subnormal doing weird drawings.”
That subnormal’s painted camp focussed on one tent, the world outside this tent–outside our story–increasingly blurred as the focus moved away from that tent at the painting’s centre.
The Viennese girl pointed to her head while sneering as Hashim worked on. He acknowledged my stamping foot. People thought he was deaf; but he detected sounds. The girl hadn’t noticed my experiment, her stick-leg depiction of a sheep intriguing her more than Hashim’s peaks, that severing slope skin, escaped into infinity with a sharp clarity of purpose from a blurred world whose deeper realities Hashim’s pencils and brushes were destined to reveal.
*
A five-year-old girl, whose mature anguish belied her age, was saying goodbye to a doctor at the camp’s hospital, the doctor’s black hair vivid against hospital-tent whiteness.
“Buenos días, señor,” I said, after the child had left with her parents.
Jordi’s azure eyes consistently offered startled alertness.
“What’s up, chaval?” he asked.
“There’s a kid here,” I said, “who seems deaf. But he detects sounds. What’s the problem?”
“Ear-bone deformities cause hearing distortions,” Jordi replied. “Why?”
“Is it curable by surgery?”
“In Geneva. Why?”
I showed him Hashim’s paintings.
“Vaya!” he gasped. “He did them?”
“Si.”
The five-year-old girl’s artificial legs swung like awkward pendulums between her crutches, her parents watchful on either side of her as they disappeared behind canvas pyramids.
“A mine,” Jordi said, patting me on the back, my throat hardening.
She had refused to be carried while descending the slope.
*
The camp rose from a valley of cornfields towards saw-tooth peaks. Stark light made red peppers and clothes drying on tent ropes resemble brushstrokes against canvases. Wind shrilled and walloped like refugee anguish around the tents.
“Prepare for a miracle,” I said.
Zyrafete’s amused eyes glowed.
“Do miracles exist?” she asked.
“Life isn’t a miracle?”
“The only one,” she replied.
Hashim cackled upon his father’s lap. Gratitude for just being alive–for living this “miracle”–had been imbued into father and son, the peaks above them looking immortal, the heat suggesting that steam was rising through fissures in the earth. Camp days had fused into namelessness, thereby reflecting life’s real pulse. I had no idea what day of the week it was – and I didn’t care – a far cry from “normal” existence.
Hashim’s father’s hopes hummed under the sky’s blue radiance that capped the valley. The saw-toothed, summit-jaw serenity above emerged, I imagined, from those peaks dining on truths that nature only feeds to the gifted.
“The UNHCR have agreed to fly Hashim to Geneva for an operation,” I said. “You can go with him.”
The gap in Hashim’s father’s beard released yelping stupefaction. He slapped his hands together. His wife wrapped her arms around his neck, Hashim’s irises becoming emerald fires of delight.
“The UNHCR,” I continued, “does this in special circumstances, and these circumstances are special. Your son is possibly the most artistically gifted child in Europe.”
Zyrafete stopped translating; her head spun to face me.
“Go on,” I said.
She spoke. Hashim’s father’s hands rushed to his face. His wife put her arm around his waist. In crazed bliss, they huddled, Hashim in its core–a human statue of tearful joy.
Hashim’s father’s features quivered as he wiped tears from his face. His Adam’s apple wobbled. Choked “thank you’s” left his quivering mouth.
“And soon,” I said, “he’ll be speaking to you for the first time.”
Zyrafete wiped tears from her cheeks.
“It’s a miracle,” she acknowledged.
Hashim’s father said something that Zyrafete told me meant “incredible.”
“There’s a doctor here,” I continued, “whose father is an art dealer. He sent photographs of Hashim’s paintings to his father. The response has been tremendous.”
Hashim’s father stared with gob-smacked bliss. His wife and child leapt upon him. Paramilitaries had burnt down their house. All their work had gone up in smoke–literally.
*
Jordi removed the bandages, exposing Hashim’s swollen ears.
“Hello, Hashim,” Jordi said.
“Sound!” Hashim’s eyes cried. Auditory jewels, like poppy gems in spring fields! Soprano trees singing, the brain hearing what it was supposed to hear. A gift!
His mother’s blue eyes matched the sound emerging from her mouth, a sound blue should have.
“The pictures I took,” Jordi enthused, “of Hashim’s paintings my father showed…how is said in Ingleesh…the people controlling a museum?”
“Curators,” Zyrafete said.
“And,” Jordi continued, “they want to see more!”
“Who?” I asked.
“The Picasso Museo.”
Hashim’s father’s hug lifted me off the ground. Journalists were taking photographs, the regional imagination enflamed by the “new Picasso”.
Hashim’s eyes radiated contentment, his white hair, tinted orange, embraced by the arms of a late-afternoon star.
His voice, older than I had imagined, had surprising volume, like an announcer’s. Zyrafete chuckled, amazed. She kissed Hashim on the cheek, clutching his head.
She and Jordi followed the prodigy into the tent while I stayed outside to observe the victims of war on the slope below. The girl with artificial legs was down there bearing memory’s burden of when she could play and run, a victim of fate’s vicious grandeur. Her life had been decimated by war, while Hashim’s had been lifted out of obscurity by the upheaval, likely his talent would never have been discovered had the major powers not stopped his people’s oppression, the girl’s story probably remaining untold. Such are life’s fortunes.
Steam swirling from cooking pots before the tents vaporised into invisibility. The mountains facing the camp across the valley rose from fertility. The details light revealed on those facing slopes disappeared under cloud shadows that glided over the valley’s cornfields, changes made striking by sharp visual transformations happening silently.
Conversation hummed upon the slope. Wispy islands dotted sea-blue sky. Sudden increases in light revealed the rocks’ colours on the facing slopes. The laughter coming from Hashim’s tent emphasised my self-contained lightness. Until then, I hadn’t realised how private elation could be. I felt as if I didn’t need anything–as if I had done it all–had won something vital–had defied vast odds to reach a treasure chamber of sparkling rewards.
History places names in the accumulating tiers of consciousness by blooming-blue chance.
*
In a nearby village I ran into someone who had worked for years with underprivileged children.
I said: “His parents heard him speaking for the first time! It was…”
“Ohhh,” Ruud replied.
His chin rose as his head rotated with wonder. Astonishment, in the shape of an invisible cylinder, split his lips apart.
“There isn’t enough…mun…ee…”
“Ohhh,” Ruud marvelled.
“Nothing,” I gulped.
“I know, I know….,” he said.
*
A TV camera faced Hashim’s tent. Light shone from silver-backed, fluorescent bulbs. Hashim’s father spoke into a microphone, his son’s hair ringed by light.
Hashim smiled when he saw the Viennese girl. Elation, like candles of delicate strength, sparkled in his eyes as she waved–shyly. Her yearning eyes looked remorseful. He waved back. His eyes’ uncritical sheen surprised her. Hashim’s magnanimity eliminated the wrinkles that troubling considerations had laid upon her thoughts, her awkwardness evaporating under the warmth ejected by those emerald disks that randomness had given the acclaimed.
Her cheeks flushed red. Ebony hair covered her shoulders. Her carbon eyebrows highlighted her skin’s translucence.
Hashim indicated that she should sit beside him. Her expression suggested that this might have been intrusive; but he insisted. A journalist asked her to join us. Hope defeated timidity when Hashim’s father waved her on, fortune providing the chance to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable.
She sat on a cushion, crossed legged, elbows on her knees, her white teeth in a cherry loop of lips.
She whispered: “Sorry.”
Her black hair, falling past her alabaster neck, contrasted strikingly with her pale skin, and with the whiteness of her blouse, black and white enhancing each other.
“Love begins with hate,” Hashim joked.
She giggled at this felicitous irony.
“Your voice is beautiful,” she said.
“Yours, too,” he replied.
Cameras flashed.
“We’re going back to Vienna tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll never forget—.”
Her eyes watered.
“I, I….,” she tried saying, “….hated this place at first….now….I don’t want to…leave.”
The TV cameras rolled. Fraught gasps escaped from her mouth. Lines creased her forehead. The sudden distance between her eyes and her eyebrows revealed a white delicacy like the insides of shells.
She rested her head on Hashim’s shoulder. He put his arm around her. Hashim’s mother placed her arms around the clutching children. Silence engulfed this intimacy as camera flashes flashed. Tears wet the girl’s face. War victims don’t realise how shocked they are until time allows reflection, the spring’s hard events returning as tears and art on humility’s reconciling waves.
You can forget a beautiful street in a medieval village, but you never forget a refugee camp.
*
Light shone from a Jeep’s windscreen beside the hospital’s canvas doors. Jordi was putting something into the Jeep; light soldered a star into the Jeep’s black windscreen. Radiant arms emerged from that starry luminosity. Jordi looked humble and secure against that ivory flame.
“Jordi,” I asked, “can you ask Zyrafete to ask the girl who lost her legs if she would like to be a model for Hashim?”
Jordi’s chin rose, his eyes’ whites, ringing his irises, creating azure iris islands in milky seas.
“Great idea,” he said.
*
The facing slopes resembled canvases upon which solar brushstrokes magnified colour. Before those natural works of art, Hashim’s father smiled at Hashim’s responses to a journalist’s questions.
“I feel so good when I’m drawing,” Hashim said, “and bad when I remember, so I must draw.”
Reading with his father helped Hashim connect sounds to words.
The girl’s father carried her from Jordi’s Jeep to a seat before the canvas that Hashim had placed on a stand, the gracious wonder the girl felt making her focus on now–like young children should do–loss’s murky undercurrent halted by bracing recognition. The potential consequences of that recognition were enormous.
A photographer held her hand and started speaking. Everyone listened, the girl’s eyes and mouth widening, her irises seemingly being extracted from their white enclosures by the magnetism of alluring speech; then Hashim started painting.
The photographer’s shutter swished. The girl’s father’s lips were turned down, but he wasn’t scowling, his demeanour too pleasant for that.
Whispering from Hashim’s brush tingled my neck, like caresses from soothing hands.
The girl’s face was being reborn, Hashim’s talent flooding hope back into her life’s previously dry valley. She now had a future–gripped by absorbed forgetfulness.
“What did the photographer tell her?” I asked Zyrafete.
“That she was going to be linked with greatness,” Zyrafete replied. “That many people were going to want to visit her; that her name was going to get etched into art history. Amazingly, she understood.”
Because a violent tragedy had robbed her of a hope I knew she needed to regain, I suspected she would grasp the consequences of being painted by Hashim.
Twenty years later, she became the curator of the National Art Gallery of Kosovo where many of Hashim’s paintings were first exhibited.
*
From the outside, the building looked ordinary in comparison to the innovation within. Its floor’s dark-grey squares were seemingly arranged indiscriminately amid their light-grey counterparts, like a work of abstract expressionism. The walls protruded and retreated under regularly spaced lights. Paintings perfectly spaced upon the walls were set off strikingly by the gallery’s whiteness.
A woman was sitting at a desk just inside the entry. Her round face’s most notable features were her high, sharp cheekbones that reminded me of Hashim’s peaks. Her long, thin eyebrows matched the long thinness of her mouth. Her green eyes were an impressive mix of penetrating and gentle.
She looked up from her keyboard when she realised that I was looking at her.
“Andy!” she cried.
When her eyebrows rose her smooth forehead suddenly became furrowed with dark trenches. The dramatism of that silent transformation reminded me of the effects of changing light on the slopes that had surrounded the camp.
Her face blazed with joy.
“Jelena – quick!” she cried. “It’s Andy!”
A woman rushed from the office that faced Amina’s desk. Amina rose and awkwardly moved towards me. She wrapped her arms around me and said: “Incredible. You saved my life.”
She knew who I was from the internet.
Sailing on the warm winds of blissful surprise, I said: “I was really happy when I found out what had happened to you. When I found out, I couldn’t wait to come and see you.”
“This is so amazing,” she said, “I might even become religious.”
Jelena and I laughed. But Amina was right. The feeling of joyous astonishment was so intense it felt miraculous, like something extraordinary arriving from outside the Oort Cloud.
“You’ll never guess who Jelena’s brother married,” Amina said.
“Who?” I asked.
“The Austrian girl?” Jelena said.
“Really?” I replied. “My God. I have to admit that she was a gorgeous kid.”
“Now a beautiful woman,” Jelena said.
“Jelena’s brother is Hashim’s best friend,” Amina said.
“Kneeohh,” I replied.
“Yes,” Amina said. “And you made it all happen.”
“Well,” I replied, “if you want to blow my importance out of all proportion, I won’t stop you.”
“Nothing could ever,” Amina replied, with sudden, serious gravity, “stop me from blowing your importance out of all importance. Not a thing.”
Hit by walloping wonder, I said: “The most horrible thing of all–war–is ironically supreme in producing love.”
They knew exactly what I meant.
THE END
About the Author
Kim Farleigh has worked for NGOs in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine and Macedonia. He takes risks to get the experience necessary for writing. He also likes painting, art, bullfighting photography and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. He has received 229 acceptances from over 100 different literary magazines.