The Other Hand

relief. I realized: this is what you can do for her, Little Bee. You can understand.
    I went into the kitchen and I filled the kettle to make myself a drink of tea.
    Understanding. That would have been a good name for my village, even before the men came to burn our huts and drill for oil. It would have been a good name for the clearing around the limbatree where we children swung on that bald old car tire, and bounced on the seats of my father’s broken Peugeot and my uncle’s broken Mercedes, with the springs poking out from them, and where we chanted church songs from a hymnbook with the covers missing and the pages held together with tape. We knew what we had: we had nothing. Your world and our world had come to this understanding. Even the missionaries had boarded up their mission. They left us with the holy books that were not worth the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? We understood that this was the end of the story.
    That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one. From the rest of the world all we knew was from that one old movie. About a man who was in a great hurry, sometimes in jet planes and sometimes on motorbikes and sometimes upside down.
    From the windup radios we had a little news, but mostly music. We also had a TV, but in Understanding there was no reception and you had to make the programs yourself. Our TV was just a wooden frame around where the screen used to be, and the frame sat in the red dust underneath the limba tree, and my sister Nkiruka used to put her head inside the frame to do the pictures. This is a good trick. I know now that we should have called this, reality television.
    My sister used to adjust the bow on her dress, and put a flower in her hair just so, and smile through the screen and say: Hello, this is the news from the British BBC, today ice cream will snow down from the sky and no one will have to walk to the river for water because the engineers will come from the city and put a stand pipe in the middle of the village. And the rest of us children, we would all sit in a half circle around the television set and we would watch Nkiruka announcingthe news. We loved these dreams of hers. In the pleasant afternoon shade we would gasp with delight and all of us would say, Weh!
    One of the good things about Understanding was that you could talk back to television. The rest of us children, we used to shout at Nkiruka:
    —This ice-cream snow, exactly what time will it occur?
    —In the early evening, of course, when the day is cooler.
    —How do you know this, Madam Television Announcer?
    —Because the day must be cool enough or the ice cream would melt, of course. Do you children know nothing?
    And we children would sit back and nod at one another—evidently the day would need to be cool enough first. We were very satisfied with the television news.
    You can play the same trick with television in your country, but it is harder because the television sets do not listen. Early in the morning, after Sarah had gone back to bed when we came home from the service station, it was Charlie who wanted to turn the television on. He appeared in the kitchen in his bat costume and bare feet. I said, Good morning, little bat, do you want breakfast? He said, No, I doesn’t want breakfast, I does want TELEVISION. So I said, Does your mummy say it is okay for you to watch television before breakfast? Charlie looked at me and his eyes were very patient, like a teacher who has told you the answer three times already but you have forgotten it. Mummy is asleep, actually, he said.
    So we went into the next room and we switched on the television. We looked at the pictures without the sound. It was the BBC morning news, and they were showing pictures of the prime minister making a speech. Charlie put his head on one side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over.
    He said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?”
    “No Charlie. That is the prime minister.”
    “Is he a goody or a baddy?”
    I thought to myself.
    “Half the people think he is a goody and the other half think he is a baddy.”
    Charlie giggled. “That’s silly,” he said.
    “That is