My Other Life Read Online Free PDF

verandah, and how dusty and stained and torn they were when I saw them up close.
    Washing my hands at the sink in the kitchen, I glanced at my face in the mirror and hardly recognized myself—my sooty hair and skin, my sunburned nose, my exhausted bloodshot eyes. Brother Piet sat me down and gave me the food that Simon had prepared—beans and boiled greens and boiled peanuts and roasted corn and a lump of steamed dough they called
nsima:
African food.
    Brother Piet asked me about the train. He traveled on it now and then, he said, to get to the market in Balaka.
    "I always go second class," he said. "Then I have someone to talk to."
    "But Holland is your home," I said in Chinyanja.
    "
Pepani!
Sorry!" he said. "The noise of Amsterdam! The tramcars! The crowds of people! It hurts my ears.
Chinthunthumira! Misala!...
"
    "He shivers," Simon explained. "It is madness."
    "...Sorry. I stay here where it is peaceful." Brother Piet repeated the African word,
mtendere.
    He was seventy-four and had last been on leave in Holland in 1951, thirteen years before.
    "When did you come to Africa?"
    "So long ago"—and the phrase he used,
za kale,
meant "in ancient times"—"that I traveled down the Nile River from Cairo to Juba. Yes! And I drank the water of the Nile!"
    I went on eating, scooping up food with my hands, using a ball of
nsima,
in the African way.
    "When I die, maybe," he said, and laughed, "they send me back to Amsterdam. Then I won't mind the noise! I am dead, eh?"
    I liked his humor and oddity, speaking Chinyanja in his boisterous way and occasionally throwing in an English word.
    Father Touchette did not have much conversation. He was new, fearful, with the tense demeanor of a stria believer; no jokes—pious perhaps because he was afraid. He clutched his breviary as though it were a brick he wanted to throw at a sinner.
    He seemed to be listening at the window, one ear cocked in the direction of the African shouts and laughter, and the random dribbling sound of the drums.
    "And how did you happen to come here to Moyo?" I asked.
    "I was sent here," Father Touchette said sternly, as though it had been a punishment.
    "It is his good luck," Father DeVoss said in a cheery voice, and it seemed to me that he had detected a grievance in what Father Touchette had said and was trying to make light of it.
    "I am happy to be here," I said, truthfully, and I had the sense that they were glad to have a visitor. My smile revealed my weariness—I was tired from the trip, and from the hot meal in that humid room, all the dark heat of the night hanging like black curtains at the windows.
    "Does Paul know where his room is?" Father DeVoss asked, seeing that I was tired.
    I said good night, and with a candle in a dish Simon led me down a long hallway and showed me to my room.
    "This is a good place," I said.
    "Yes," he said.
    "But some people are sick."
    "This is where they are cured," Simon said. "That is why it is a good place."
    He had put the candle down and was throwing open the shutters.
    "In the villages"—he meant everywhere else—"people are sick, but they stay that way."
    After he slipped away into the darkness I lay on the hard bed with dust in my nostrils, in the cool room, the candle flame making shadows twitch on the plaster wall. It was like being in the antechamber of a castle—strange and spooky.
    I had been reading Kafka. But it was more than Kafka's imagery that inspired this feeling. It was the experience of the train trip, and the heat and the dry yellow landscape and the black night and the smell of poverty and illness.
    The next morning everything was different. In darkness Africa seemed enchanted. In daylight it was hot and pitiless. Most of the trees were so wraithlike, their leaves so slender, there was no shade under them.
    The light at Moyo was more intense than where I lived in the south of the country. Was it some effect of the lake near here, the surface flashing sunlight back? But