Children s Drawings on the Pavement

Перевод рассказа "Детские рисунки на асфальте"

The other day, on my way back from a walk by the bay, I passed by a park with a children’s playground next to an elementary school. My kids went to that school over twenty years ago, back when we lived in this part of New York—Sheepshead Bay. They used to play in that very park, while I sat on a bench reading Solovyov’s History of Russia. We had only recently moved to America from Kazakhstan, a part of the former USSR.

Back then, the park was quiet and sparsely populated. Now it was full of noise and movement. Children were running around everywhere, and their mothers, dressed in flowing black garments that reached the ground, their faces covered up to the eyes, chased after their little ones or stood in clusters, discussing something amongst themselves. If anyone in that park still resembled the people who used to frequent it, they no longer stood out.

Everything flows, everything changes.

And this neighborhood has changed a lot. It's now largely populated by Muslims, the kind whose women wear the niqab. The niqab is a garment that covers the face, leaving only the eyes visible. Who exactly they are—Arabs, Pakistanis—I don't know. Muslims lived here before, among us. The women worked the same jobs as other immigrants—cashiers, front-desk workers, nurses. They wore hijabs, or even just scarves. The rest of their clothing was anything but grim—sometimes even brightly colored. Back then, you didn’t see black robes that completely concealed the figure and face.

Now that’s the norm.

I still remember the first time I saw a family like that in the park. I had come with my daughters, as usual, bringing along a bucket of sidewalk chalk for drawing on the pavement. Whenever my kids started drawing, other children would come over to watch, and my girls would share their chalk. A kind of creative community would spring up—though only briefly. The kids would soon grow bored and scatter. Some would return the chalk. Drawings of houses, trees, the sun, people, and ships at sea would be left behind, and I’d walk around looking at them.

That day, just like always, as soon as my daughters began drawing, a few skinny, dark-eyed, dark-skinned kids of both sexes came over to watch. I gestured toward the chalk, offering to share. They just looked at me and ran off.

Soon, an older girl, maybe about ten years old, came up to me.

“What do you usually celebrate, sir, Christmas or Hanukkah?”

“Christmas,” I replied, curious to hear more, but she immediately ran back to her mother, who sat nearby dressed in black. Her face was covered, with only a slit for her eyes. I had never seen anyone like that on our streets before.

I was left wondering why a child would need to know such a thing. I couldn’t come up with any answers.

Soon after, the same dark-skinned children reappeared. They stood there, casting questioning glances from me to the bucket of chalk. Sure, go ahead, take them—I made an inviting gesture.

They grabbed the chalk and ran off to draw nearby, but away from my daughters. You could read Solovyov forever. I never did finish his work. His history is full of endless quotes from documents, interesting in their own right. It creates a sort of complex dish or picture—like a multi-figure painting by Veronese, where it’s unclear what exactly prompted its creation, but you want to keep examining it. That’s how I feel, anyway.

Eventually, the kids got bored with drawing. They dropped the chalk and ran off. Only one very small boy remained. He busied himself trying to push the leftover chalk sticks through the grate of a storm drain.

Suddenly, I became curious. Their mother, sitting there with her face covered, was clearly deeply religious. And according to the Holy Quran, the depiction of living beings is forbidden. So what had her children drawn? What’s allowed for them? What limits are set on their childhood imagination?

I got up and, as if just taking a stroll, walked around and reached their drawings.

I didn’t know what I expected to see, but I certainly didn’t expect what I saw. There was no childhood imagination. All the drawings were the same: Stars of David, drawn in white chalk and then scribbled over with colors. And nothing else. Dozens of such defaced stars.

Wow. And this is already in their minds—at such a young age?

Now I understood why the girl had asked whether I celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah. Probably, if I had said Hanukkah, they wouldn’t have taken the chalk.

It seems they ran to their mother for permission before joining the drawing. She sent the older girl to find out if I was Jewish—whether it was even okay to interact with me. Then, presumably, she explained to the kids what they were allowed to draw and what they weren’t, if they didn’t already know. A house with a chimney, a tree in front, mom and dad—in other words, the world of a child—was forbidden. That’s haram. Symbolic death to all Jews—perfectly fine. That’s apparently what they should be drawing, from a certain pedagogical point of view.

America is a free country, one of the few left. You can draw whatever you want, wear whatever you like, make a living however you can—no one really cares. For every supporter of some grand idea, there’s always an opponent with an equally grand counter-idea. That’s how we live. Everyone’s happy. Even those in niqabs. For them, this place is definitely better than anywhere else.

Those kids are grown now. That girl must be over thirty. If they didn’t move away, she might be here now, in a niqab, with three or four kids of her own. Her oldest daughter would be just like she was back then. Now it’s their turn to draw on the pavement. I’d love to see it—though I doubt anything has changed in that regard. To know for sure, they’d have to pick up the chalk.

But now, there’s no one left to bring chalk to the park.