My Other Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

became. Now most of them were bare-breasted on this hot lake-shore plain. It was the Africa of my imagination at last.
    I sat at the window, squinting through the coal smoke at Africa, and waited and watched and went deeper. Through the late afternoon I saw shadows rippling in the trees like phantoms, Africans whispering, watching the train, and I knew they had seen my white face. They were like glimpses of strangeness. On a passing embankment I saw a funeral procession, a mass of chanting people marching behind a wooden coffin. I saw naked children. I saw two people, a man and a woman, rolling on the ground in panic away from the train, startled in the act of love.
    Now the sun was below the tattered trees, and dusk was gathering in shadows under a briefly bluer sky.
    "Ntakataka," an African said to me.
    That was the station for Moyo.
    It was almost six. I had been traveling in a state of great happiness for over twelve hours.
    Father DeVoss met me. He was tall and gaunt, and although he was not old he was gray. He wore a dusty white cassock and looked at me—fondly I thought—with a sad smile.
    "Good to see you," he said. "You play cards?"
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    The dark house on the only high ground here looked haunted, one of its windows lit by an overbright pressure lamp, the rest of the windows shuttered or in darkness. Its shadows and its size and its crumbling stucco gave it a ghostly wolfish look. But I soon realized that was misleading. The house was mostly empty, a relic of an earlier time when the mission had been much bigger and there had been more lepers and more priests. It was like the rubbly ruin—of a fort or a palace—that lay neglected and overgrown in the African bush. Inside, the priests' house seemed forlorn.
    We had passed through the village below it, which was a place of fires and wood smoke and voices and yapping dogs. Because of the crude lamps flaring inside the huts, all the shadows were active and black. There was a smell, too—human, sweetish, like decay—the smell of illness and death.
    An old priest came fussing forward on the stone stairs. He managed to snatch my bag over my protests, and he passed it to an African in khaki shorts and a white shirt, an African servant's basic uniform. Another priest, much younger, stared at me from behind the fussing priest, who was speaking in Chinyanja and who I now realized was talking to me, not to the African, slapping at my bag.
    "
Moni, bambo, muli bwanji? Eeh, nyerere! Eh, mpemvu! Pepani, palibe mphepo
..." Hello, how are you? What's that? An ant! A roach! Sorry, there's no breeze here...
    The old priest went on jabbering and sweeping away the insects from my bag, and it was clear to me that he did not speak English and, as I did not speak Dutch, this would be our way of communicating. But he tended to use very precise words when he was speaking the language, such as
majiga
for railway station—most Africans just mangled the English word "station." And that night he taught me the word
mberetemberete
when I glanced down at the village, at the lamps showing through the ragged curtains of the mud huts. It meant "shining faintly through," like a woman in a loose dress with a light behind her, a sight that made me pause many African nights.
    "
Dzina lanu ndani?
" I said, asking him his name.
    His reply sounded like "Fonderpilt," but when he added in English, "The poor ones, not the rich American ones," I understood that his name was van der Bilt. To everyone he-was Brother Piet.
    The younger priest was Father Touchette, newly arrived from Canada, still sallow from the trip and rather confused by this torrent of Chinyanja. The African, Simon, put my bag in the corner and then returned and dished up some food. Father DeVoss sat and simply watched and listened. He had an air of gentle authority. He seemed at once kindly and remote. He had a melancholy smile.
    I was thinking how white their cassocks had seemed when I had approached the men on the