The Other Hand

and green, but very soft, as if the colors did not have any happiness in them. Then the sun rose, and the whole world turned to gold. The gold was all around me and I was walking through clouds of it. The sun was blazing on the white mist that hung over the fields, and the mist swirled around my legs. I looked over at my sister, but she had disappeared with the night. I smiled though, because I realized that she had left me with her strength. I looked around me at the beautiful sunrise and I was thinking, Yes, yes, everything will be beautiful like this now. I will never be afraid again. I will never spend another day trapped in the color gray.
    There was a low roaring, rumbling sound ahead of me. The noise rose and fell in the mist. It is a waterfall, I thought. I must be careful not to fall into the river in this mist.
    I walked on, more carefully now, and the noise got louder. Now it did not sound like a river anymore. There were individual sounds in the middle of the roaring. Each sound got louder, rumbling and shaking and then fading away. There was a dirty, sharp smell in the air. Now I could hear the sound of cars and trucks. I went closer. I came to the top of a green grass slope and there it was in front of me. The road was incredible. On my side of it there were three lines of traffic going from right to left. Then there was a low metal barrier, and another three lines of traffic going from left to right. Thecars and the trucks were moving very fast. I walked down to the edge of the road and put out my hand to stop the traffic, so I could cross, but the traffic did not stop. A truck blew its horn at me, and I had to step back.
    I waited for a gap in the traffic and then I ran across to the center of the road. I climbed over the metal barrier. This time a great many car horns were blown at me. I ran across, and up the green grass bank at the other side of the road. I sat down. I was out of breath. I watched the traffic racing past below me, three lines in one direction and three lines in the other. If I was telling this story to the girls from back home they would be saying, Okay, it was the morning, so the people were traveling to work in the fields. But why do the people who are driving from right to left not exchange their fields with the people who are driving from left to right? That way everyone could work in the fields near to their homes. And then I would just shrug because there are no answers that would not lead to more foolish questions, like What is an office and what crops can you grow in it?
    I just fixed the motorway in my mind as a place I could run back to and kill myself very easily if the men suddenly came, and then I stood up and carried on going. I walked for another hour across fields. Then I came to some small roads, and these roads had houses on them. I was amazed when I saw them. They were two stories high and made out of strong red bricks. They had sloping roofs with neat rows of tiles on them. They had white windows, and there was glass in all of them. Nothing was broken. All the houses were very smart, and each one looked like the next. In front of nearly every house there was a car. I walked along the street and I stared at the shining rows of them. These were beautiful cars, sleek and shining, not the kind of vehicles we saw where I came from. In my village there were two cars, one Peugeot and one Mercedes. The Peugeot came before I was born. I know this because the driver was my father, and my village was the place where his Peugeot coughed twice and died in the red dust. He went into the firsthouse in the village to ask if they had a mechanic. They did not have a mechanic but what they did have was my mother, and my father realized he needed her more than he needed a mechanic in any case, and so he stayed. The Mercedes arrived when I was five years old. The driver was drunk, and he crashed into my father’s Peugeot, which was still standing exactly how my father had left it except that the boys had taken one of its tires away to use as the seat of the swing on the limba tree. The driver of the Mercedes got out and he walked over to the first house and met my father there and he said, Sorry. And my father smiled at him and said, We should be thanking you, sir, you have really put our village on the map, this is our very first road traffic accident. And the driver of that Mercedes, he laughed, and he stayed too, and he became great friends with my father, so much that I called