Chapter 35 Sullha
SULLHA
After the serving was done and the next shift began the cleanup, Sullha headed out to collect Tomek from Saphira's class.
"We're going to visit someone," Sullha told him as they walked along the path between the dormitory buildings.
"Who?"
"A girl named Asira. She draws pictures."
Tomek was not impressed. "Drawing is for girls."
"Well, Asira is a girl, so I guess it's fine."
What she'd wanted to say was that art was for everyone, not just girls, and that he should draw if he felt like it, but that wouldn't do him any favors in this place. It would only get him bullied.
"Asira draws portraits," Sullha said. "She offered to draw yours."
"I don't want it." He kicked a pebble. "What's a portrait?"
"A picture of your face."
He pursed his lips, which always made her want to kiss them because they were so cute. "Just my face?" he asked.
"Maybe your shoulders, too."
"Does it take long?"
"I don't know. Probably not."
"Will it hurt?"
"Drawing a picture doesn't hurt anyone, Tomek."
"Some things that don't sound like they hurt end up hurting."
The observation was too perceptive for a five-year-old, and it made Sullha's heart ache because she knew where he'd learned it. Life in the enclosure taught children to be wary of everything.
"This won't hurt," she promised. "She's going to look at you and draw what she sees on paper. You just have to sit still."
"I don't like sitting still."
Sullha shrugged. "Then perhaps she will draw a picture of me instead."
"No. I will sit."
She stifled a smile. That trick always worked with Tomek.
Asira's dormitory was in the middle row of buildings, identical to all the others. Low, single-story, concrete block construction with small windows and a communal entrance. The interior was the standard layout—a hallway with doors on both sides, each leading to a room shared by four women.
Asira greeted them at the entrance and immediately crouched down to Tomek's level.
"You must be Tomek. I'm Asira."
"Hi." He eyed her suspiciously. "My mama says you draw pictures."
"I do."
"She says you're going to draw my face."
"Only if you want me to."
His brow furrowed. "Will it look like me?"
"I hope so. That's the whole point, right?"
"Okay." He shrugged. "But only my face."
Asira laughed and pushed to her feet. "Only the face. Come on in."
She led them down the hallway to the third door on the right. The door was open, and when Sullha stepped inside, she stopped and gaped.
The walls were covered in pictures.
Drawings were plastered on every available surface.
They overlapped at the edges, pinned to the concrete with tiny pieces of adhesive that must have been scavenged from the school supply room.
The paper was the same cheap, grainy stock that the children used for their lessons, but what had been done with it transformed the drab room into something that didn't belong in the enclosure because it was too bright, too full of life.
There were portraits. Dozens of them. Faces of women, some of whom Sullha recognized, rendered in colored pencil with a skill that shouldn't have been possible given the crude materials.
The likenesses were uncanny, not because they were photographically accurate but because they captured something beneath the surface.
And then there were the imaginary scenes.
A mountain range with snow on the peaks and a purple sky above.
A city at night with pinpricks of yellow light in hundreds of tiny windows.
A river cutting through a green valley, the water rendered in layered strokes of blue and white and gray that somehow conveyed movement on a flat page.
A market scene full of people and stalls and color that practically vibrated.
Tomek's mouth was open. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the walls, and for possibly the first time in his young life, he had nothing to say.
Sullha remembered when she'd shared a room like this one. Before Tomek, before she'd been assigned a mother's room, she'd slept in a four-person room with women who kept their spaces bare because decorating required energy they didn't have. The walls had been gray concrete and nothing else.
Asira's walls were alive.
"When did you do all of these?" Sullha asked.
"It took several years and a lot of paper." Asira pulled a low stool from the corner and set it near the window where the light was best. "Drawing keeps me sane."
"These are amazing, Asira."
The reaction to the compliment was different from what Sullha had expected.
Instead of brightening further, Asira seemed embarrassed, and something else that Sullha recognized because she wore the same expression when someone praised her gardening.
It was the look of a person whose sense of self-worth was entirely contained in one skill, and being recognized for that skill touched a place that was usually kept locked.
"Thank you," Asira said. "Sit here, Tomek. The light is good in this spot."
Tomek climbed onto the stool and sat with his hands on his knees and his back straight, like a soldier reporting for inspection.
"You can relax," Asira said. "I need you to look normal, not like you swallowed a broom."
He slumped immediately, overcorrecting from rigid to boneless.
Sullha leaned against the frame, not wanting to sit on anyone's bed. She hated when people sat on hers, so she wasn't going to do it to someone else unless she was invited.
Asira sat cross-legged on the floor with a piece of paper on a flat board across her knees and a fistful of colored pencils. She looked at Tomek with focused intensity, as if she was reaching into his soul.
"Don't stare at me like that," Tomek said.
"I have to stare at you. I'm drawing your face. I have to learn it first."
"It's weird."
"Tell me a story."
"What kind of story?"
"Just use your imagination. Create a story in your head and tell it to me while I draw you."
"I don't know how to tell stories." He fidgeted on the stool, his feet swinging. "How long?"
"Not long. Tell me about something you like."
"I like the garden."
That was a surprise. Sullha was sure he would say the play yard, which was his favorite place.
"What do you like about it?"
"I like planting things and watching them grow. My mama taught me how to do sweet potatoes. You have to put the slips in the soil not too deep, or they can't breathe."
"Plants breathe?"
"Yes." He looked smug because he knew something that Asira didn't. "Through their roots and their leaves."
"I didn't know that. What else do you know about plants?"
Tomek launched into everything he'd learned in the garden, and Asira's hand moved across the paper while she listened, her eyes flicking between his face and the drawing. He even stopped fidgeting because he was too busy talking, which was exactly what Asira had intended.
Sullha watched them and felt something loosen inside her.
The enclosure produced two kinds of women. Those who were broken by it and those who found a way to survive. The broken ones were the majority, and Sullha didn't judge them for that. The system broke women and resisting it required a strength that not everyone possessed.
Some even bought into the delusion that they were doing Mortdh's work by producing more soldiers for his army.
It gave them a sense of purpose, of fulfillment, and she didn't resent them for it.
If believing that helped them endure and survive, then who was she to point out that their god considered them barely human, never mind deserving of immortality?
Asira possessed strength. She had channeled whatever rage and grief and helplessness she carried into art, and the art had kept her whole.
It was the same thing Sullha had done with gardening and with Tomek.
Finding something to pour herself into, so the rage and pain couldn't fill every part of her and burn through it until there was nothing left.
"Can I see?" Tomek asked after a while.
"Not yet. I'm almost done."
"Do I look handsome?"
"Very."
Tomek straightened on the stool, craning his neck to peek at the paper.
"No peeking," Asira said. "Three more minutes."
He sat back with an exaggerated sigh, but waited patiently until the pencils stopped and Asira put them down.
"Done." She turned the board around and held up the portrait.
Tomek's face looked back at them from the paper. His dark hair falling across his forehead, his brown eyes slightly too large for his face, his mouth set in the stubborn line that he wore when he was concentrating.
It was Tomek, but it was also more than Tomek.
Asira had captured the intensity that lived behind his eyes, the seriousness that sat alongside his playfulness, and the determined set of his jaw that he had gotten from Sullha.
"It's me," Tomek said, and there was wonder in his voice.
"That's you," Asira confirmed.
He tilted his head, examining the portrait. "My hair doesn't look like that."
Asira had taken some artistic liberties with the portrait, exaggerating some features to make them stand out.
"It moved while I was drawing it."
"Can I keep it?"
"Of course. It's yours."
Tomek took the portrait with both hands and held it carefully. He looked at Sullha with an expression that said this was the best thing ever, and he didn't know what to say.
"Say thank you, Tomek."
"Thank you," he repeated. "I'm going to show it to all my friends."
"It was fun." Asira mussed his hair. "You are a good subject." She turned to Sullha. "He has a very expressive face. He looks a lot like you."
Tomek was still staring at his portrait. "Can you draw my mother too?"
"Sure." Asira turned to Sullha. "Would you like that?"
"Maybe another time. We need to go."
Asira smiled. "You're welcome anytime."
The warmth in the invitation was genuine, and Sullha felt the instinct that she had learned to trust above all others settle into certainty.
Asira could be trusted. She didn't have evidence for it. She hadn't tested the girl or asked probing questions or conducted any of the careful evaluations that someone smarter and more experienced might have employed.
She just knew, and she was going to tell Yaaf to put Asira on his list.