Original text - English - Miss Stuart likes art. She has us bring old...

Miss Stuart likes art. She has us bring old shirts of our fathers from home, so we can do messier art without getting our clothes dirty. While we scissor and paint and paste she walks the aisles in her nurse’s mask, looking over our shoulders. But if anyone, a boy, draws a silly picture on purpose, she holds the page up in mocking outrage. "This guy here thinks he's being smarrut. You’ve got more between the ears than that!”. And she flicks him on the ear with her thumb and fingernail.
For her, we make the familiar paper objects, the pumpkins, the Christmas bells, but she has us to do other things too. We make complicated floral patterns with a compass, we glue odd substances to cardboard backings: feathers, sequins, pieces of macaroni garishly dyed, lengths of drinking-straw. We do group murals on the blackboards or on large rolls of brown paper. We draw pictures about foreign countries: Mexico with cactuses and men in enormous hats, China with cones on the heads and seeing-eye boats, India with what we intend to be graceful, silk-draped women balancing cooper urns, and jewels on their foreheads.
I like these foreign pictures because I can believe in them. I desperately need to believe that somewhere else these other foreign people exist. No matter that at Sunday School I’ve been told such people are either starving or heathens or both. No matter that my weekly collection goes to convert them, feed them, smarten them up. Miss Lumley saw them as crafty, given to he eating of outlandish or disgusting foods and to acts of treachery against the British, but I prefer Miss Stuart’s versions, in which the sun above their heads is cheerful yellow, the palm trees a clear green, the clothing they wear is floral, their folk-songs gay. The women chatter together in quick incomprehensible languages, they laugh, showing perfect, pure-white teeth. If these people exist I can go there sometime. I don’t have to stay here.
“Today”, says Miss Stuart, “we are going to draw what we do after school.”
The others hunch over their desks, I know what they will draw: skipping ropes, jolly snowmen, listening to the radio, playing with a dog. I stare at my own paper, which remains blank. Finally I draw my bed, with myself in it. My bed has a dark wooden headboard with curlicues on it. I draw the window, the chest–of-drawers. I color in the night. My hand holding the black crayon presses down, harder and harder, until the picture is entirely black, until only a faint shadow of my bed and my head on the pillow remains to be seen.