Gray, Black and white

Chapter 1: a piece of coal

  His father taught him how to hold a sickle , his mother taught him how to harvest wheat, his little sister taught him how to make a flower crown, but he managed to teach himself , at the age of eleven, how to hold a wooden stick and draw on the sand. At the age of fifteen , he taught himself how to draw with chalk on a rock. At the age of twenty, he had nothing,  but just a piece of coal in his bare hands, moving along his fingers, skating along a paper. His vision was blurry, and more than that, he couldn't see the colorful world we used to see, he just saw black, blue and degrees of gray . He lived the entire of his life with it, he had never considered it as a curse or a spell that burnt his soul to ashes, he used to smile and to thank God that at least he could see, even if as a color blind. Bilal has grown up to help in his father's farm. He was born with an artistic spirit that has flourished in his soul through the years, but unfortunately, he just became a shevered , and sometimes a merchant farmer following his father's instructions. He sat on a rock under the big oak tree ,where the smell of petrichor after rain is spread everywhere, he grabbed a piece of coal from his pocket,and with the other hand he grabbed a leather covered notebook, then started to draw. The great field of wheat in front of him had a golden yellow color , but for him it was only gray, it had no light , no glitter, no life. But he wanted to turn it into a vivid piece of art in that paper. After a while, he heard heavy footsteps walking into him, the sound of the feet on the ground accompanied with the crunching sound of dry spikes and leaves. He recognized his friend's steps, it was Ali, his childhood friend. Bilal quickly hid the note under his jacket, but Ali caught him, so he stole the notes and started making fun of every single sketch he's making. Deep inside, Ali knew that Bilal deserves the honor to be an artist, the talented fingers he had, the imaginary reality inside his soul, but sometimes, he wished to give him his eyes so that he can see the colorful world he had been always dreaming to see. While flipping in his sketchbook pages, he noticed a very beautiful sketch, traced with the black piece of coal,blended by the top of his idex. He managed to draw a very gorgeous woman with simple tools, uncolorful, but beautiful . The sketch was about a beautiful lady, with a big white hat, a long white dress, and she was blonde. Ali recognized her from the face , then he gazed to Bilal's eyes when he were amazed, he put his hand on his shoulder and said:« she’s so beautiful, who’s that ? » Bilal replied  « it’s none of your business, just give me the notes..or else .. » « or else what ? What you’re going to do ? Punch  me in the nose again and give me another scar, just like that day you punched me when I said that Khadidja is beautiful ?huh ? » Ali points to the bleu scar around his nose and yells at Bilal  «  you thought that I forgot that huh ? Come on man punch me again to the nose » Bilal stared at Ali in a pathetic way then he tried to make fun of him and tease him more with some pats on his head then said with a flirting laughter «  don’t worry, we’ll get you a girl soon brother, this is just a girl I saw in the city ,that day when we went to buy more seeds , do you remember ? That tall blonde girl , the brown eyed girl with the pretty smile » Ali stared at him for a moment and surprised him with a hit on his head «  are you dumb ? That girl is the only daughter of mr. Noureddine  . Don’t mess with her.Even if her father looks kind , he can cut your head. He’s working with the  French army which are relying on him to spy on the Algerian army but he’s actually silently carrying secret information and plans from the French military and bringing them to Algerians . He married a French woman and got a beautiful daughter. Then he gave her a french name « Claire » to show his fake loyalty to France, but still , not all Algerians know  about his secret job and plans , so they kept considering him as a betrayer of his country , in fact he’s a hero who tries to bring freedom to Algeria , his daughter is also involved in that , and by the way , you’re one of the least people who knows about that , so watch your mouth and zip it. Bilal looked at Ali's gray eyes "as they appear for him" then gazed back at the sketch. He said « I didn't draw her because I wanted her, I just wanted to draw something vivid for the first time in my life. All I used to draw was wheat spikes, horses, goats, rocks, trees, views, but that was the first time I ever draw a human's face and give it such a beautiful smile like that, even if it was in black and white blended to make some degrees of gray. I'm proud of what I sketch, and proud of what I see, I'm thankful for not being blind.» Ali felt the pain of his friend, the pain of a creative person born with an Achromatopsia. The next morning, Bilal woke up so early to pray. When he were about to go to the town to buy some seeds, his father stopped him to ask for a favor. He gave him an envelope, and asked him to give it to mr Recheulieu's hand , that was living in a great palace in the center of the town. Bilal had ridden his bike directly to the palace.  The town is usually full of French men dealing with their business, and women walking with their high heels , hitting the rocky ground that sounds like an earthquake. Bilal stopped at the portal of the bog palace, he found the portal opened so he went inside. He had been walking around until he saw a maid wearing a black short dress. So Bilal walked towards her and started the greetings with his poor french accent. He was able to speak a few words and understand that foreign language, but couldn't write or read a single word. The maid smiled at him , but couldn't reply. He was following her with his questions. He suddenly saw another girl sitting on a swing , reading a book. She was pretty and well dressed, and she didn't look like a maid. Bilal thought of asking her about Recheulieu, so he walked towards her and started speaking with confidence, despite his poor accent and unconjugated verbs that he used in his speech. The girl gazed at his eyes for a moment, then giggled with a flirting laughter. The boy felt embarrassed, so he told her :« sorry ma'am , if I said something I shouldn't say!» Suddenly, she started laughing out loud. Then Bilal felt the abuse, and told her with an angry tone :« fine ! You can make fun of le as you want . I know how you feel right now, say it now " poor Algerian" right? That's what you want to tell me huh? You can laugh at me as much as you can . You can make fun of me and make me feel offended. You can ask the French army to cut my head right now; I was born ready to die! At least we can speak your language somehow. You french people can't even say a single word in Arabic.» Then the girl's smile vanished , and the glitter of tears started to appear in her eyes . Somehow, Bilal felt guilty for the tone he used, and felt ashamed of making a girl cry. She made that agressive face and asked him: «what do you want?» Bilal were lost in his thoughts, he were smothered in guilt since it's the first time for hil to hurt a girl's emotions. So he made that face that signifies that he didn't understand. Then that girl, and with an aggressive tone, switched French to Arabic and yelled :« what do you want from me?» Bilal was amused , but at the same time, choked. «Do you speak Arabic?» he asked, « Yes idiot, my father is an Algerian,and my mother is French, I was born as an Algerian, you idiot!». At that moment, the man hoped for the reaper to come and take his life instead of his dignity. He was freezing in Choke.« you're obviously here to meet my father. Monsieur Richelieu, I think that's what they sent you for right?» she asked him, but he didn't reply,or let's say, he didn't want to get himself in more trouble than he's now. So the girl pulled him from the collar of his jacket and pulled him behind her as if he were not a human being. Bilal didn't want to say a word and kept a big smile on his face as he thought of how a soft sensitive girl like her tries to look aggressive in front of him. For a moment he thought that he had seen her  before. She pushed him towards a big black wooden door and said «knock before you go in, and remember, I don't want to see your face here again, I don't want to see you again in my life .» Bilal tried to act seriously at that moment and say his few vengeful words before she left:« I'm sorry for not being sorry for what I've said before, cause I'm right , you made fun of me and offended me. But thank you for bringing me here. To be honest, I don't want to see you here again either, so let's not meet again if possible.» The girl left him with no reaction, but that wasn't what dragged his intentions. He was curious about that Richelieu he was about to meet. The mysterious man that everyone in the village was talking about. The men that got his father to send him secret letters every day, begging for money , or let's say, begging for the safety of his farm , as long as he refused to sell it to French colonizers.  Bilal stepped forward, knocked the door with his shaking hands, asking for permission to get in. Then he pushed the door slowly, and saw a tall man with a black suit and a black hat on his head. Bilal's expectations had been reduced to zero. That tall man with all eyes on him, with a strong sense of prejudice filling his chest, and nobody dared to look straight into his eyes. He wasn't that man with blonde hair and blue eyes , but he looked like an Algerian man, and belonged to Algeria as his daughter mentioned. Bilal thought of him as a betrayer who tried to sell his soul of belongings to the French colonizers. As he turned to Bilal, he looked at him from head to toes, and said:« It seems that you have something for me.» Bilal gave him the envelope without saying a single word , then he waited for his permission to let him leave. Suddenly, somebody knocked on the door after Bilal, but from the sound of footsteps, Bilal thought that it's somebody that he knew. He entered in a hurry and was spitting the words out aloud as if he had been chased by a pack of fierce dogs. It turned out that it's Ali who had been out of breath, then the two friends started looking at each other in astonishment as if they've seen a ghost. They started asking each other about the reason for being here. Suddenly, a maid entered and shouted :« Mr Noureddine, believe me ! I tried to stop him but I couldn't ! He was so fast!» in Arabic, Mr Recheulieu replied:« it's okay, this is Ali and he's working with us. Next time , you should host him in a respectful way instead of chasing him like that, he's a precious guest here ». Bilal was really amazed by his friend, and embarrassed at the same time. For a moment he felt like a sculpture standing there and listening to a conversation he could never decypher, so he made a coughing sound to drag some attention, and probably, seek for some answers to his questions. Ali looked at Bilal and made a sign using his hands telling him that he's going to explain later. What made Bilal overthink more is the fact that the maid  called Mr. Rechilieu by mr, Noreddin. At the end , it turned out that he has two names , the first one is the one he uses while working undercovered among the French community, and the other one is his real name . Noureddin called his daughter « Claire!» , then she joined them after she wore a black dress and a red lipstick. Bilal quickly remembered her face, from that day he met her in the town. He couldn't recognize her at the beginning because she had been wearing no lipstick, and for him, the color of lipstick looks darker  than a red would look like. She looked at his eyes and made that annoyed face:« what are you looking at?» Ali moved closer to Bilal and hit him on the back, then with a low tone whispered in his ear:« if we kept acting like that , we won't make it out of here alive you know?» . Mr Nour Din moved closer to Bilal, grabbed him from his shoulder, and said:«Tell your father that we really appreciate his kindness, but we need that place to settle our base. It's not for my benefit, it's for Algeria's freedom». Bilal replied to him:« I tried to persuade him a million times but he would never listen, but we can't deny the fact that that golden field of wheat belonging to our farm is a resource of food that made our family, and thousands of other families from our village survive. That loaf of bread that you've been having for breakfast is made with flour, and that flour came from those golden spikes that are carried on my father's shoulders and mother's soft hands». Noureddin liked Bilal's argument , but he stuck to his idea. Anyways, Bilal had been given another envelope. While he had been trying to put it in a pocket inside his jacket, he dropped that black notebook he had been drawing on. Claire noticed that , so she wanted to tease him more. She kneed on the wooden floor to grab it , then she said in such a despising tone:« Oh my, I've never thought that a poor farmer could read and write». She started flipping through the pages, at the same time, Bilal was really embarrassed. He was afraid that the girl would see the uncolorful sketch of her in that notebook. Besides, he was afraid that she and her father would misunderstand the situation. Claire wanted to make fun of him, but a glitter started appearing on her green eyes. She kept flipping in the pages and saw what she had never seen before. A vivid art from a poor man who had no chance to see the world through the eyes of a normal human who has perfect sights, but from the vision of an artist. She stopped flipping at the page where she had seen herself in black and white. Claire called her father to see that masterpiece, and they both looked thankful for that boy, with no curiosity to know the hidden reason to draw her. When Bilal saw her for the first time, he thought that she's pretty. When he met her the second time, he thought that she's childish. But at that moment when he gazed straight into her, he managed to see eternity in her eyes. A magnificent reflection of his art in her wide eyes, and for the first time in his life, he heard somebody saying that his drawings are artistic, despite the fact that all what appears is black and white, then a light gray. Noureddin grabbed a painting from under his desk. It was a painting of a big palace located in Oran. He asked :« Son, what's your name?» 

_ Bilal sir, bilal replied.

_ you've already drawn my precious daughter in such an artistic way. It's a magnificent sketch and I appreciate it.

_ Thank you sir, it was just.. to kill time.

_ can you draw such a palace like this in the painting?

_Sure, I can give it a shot.

_I want to offer you a job if you're free.

_ Really? That's going to be great.

_ If you can draw people and places, can you draw that for me .I want you to draw a design of places and  things like that. It can help our Algerian soldiers to win these battles in Constantine.

_ Yes, that's going to be my pleasure.

_ then I want to give you one of my painting workshops in this town. Nobody has visited it for years, but it's going to be a great honor if you do that. I'll offer you brushes and colors and all of what you need to do that. 

Bilal got confused a little bit when he mentioned the acrylic colors, so he kept silent for a while to think. 

_ Bilal what is wrong? Artists need a drawing palate and acrylic colors to draw right? All of your drawings are in gray,black and white, what if you try something new to make it look so vivid and artistic.

Ali interrupted him and said :

_sorry for that Mr Noureddin but Bilal was born looking at the world in black and white. We asked the doctor and he told us that he had a lack of something in his eyes impeding him to see the colors as we can do. Hopefully he's not losing his sight. 

Noureddin were and his daughter somehow felt that they're lying, because Achromatopsia is a rare case and hard to find in the world . Then Claire grabbed a rose and asked Bilal,« can you draw that with those colors on my father's desk»

Bilal grabbed those color pencils and gazed for a long time to that rose. He was disappointed since all of what he had seen were grey and black. Since childhood, Bilal couldn't distinguish between the light and the darkness nor between a hot and a cold color. But he grabbed a random pencil anyway and decided to face his fears. He has drawn the crown of the rose then he switched to another random pencil to draw the rest of the leaves and the root. He grabbed a black pencil since it's the only one that he could clearly see and started linig and drawing the shades with it. The rose looked so realistic in the shape, but something was wrong with the color. He has drawn a blue rose with orange leaves . Nour Din scratched his chin and Claire looked at the floor and felt sorry for Bilal. But still, Nour Din gave him the chance to work in the art workshop and draw places with a black pencil instead of coal. Bilal left the palace accompanied by Ali with a big smile on their faces since Bilal got the chance of his dreams to be seen as an artist. On the other hand, Claire stood at a surface of their house and watched them leaving like that. She had been curious about Bilal's artistic senses and the way he fought the weakness of his sights to see the world in an artistic vision.