Some Lines There

When I was travelling back from the Venice Biennale  completely on my own - I had to leave earlier than the rest of my academy class for I wanted to catch Raimund Stecker's speech at the Barnett Newman Symposium in Düsseldorf - I had to share my sleeping car from Milan to Düsseldorf with five other people. There were a couple from Southern Germany, a Dutch student and two men who obviously knew each other. One of them was rather remarkable in that he was scarified in his face. I could see the couple exchanging glances with one another saying: "How could we spend the night with someone like this?! And thank God we will be leaving early in the morning."
All of us soon went to sleep and the second man left quite early in the night. When I was up again, the couple had got off the train and the Dutch student had left also, probably to refresh herself. Thus  only me and the scarred man were left. We got into a conversation, he addressed me in German, but to my shame I did not realise it, and so we went on in English. It turned out that he was from Nigeria and he was a Roman Catholic priest coming directly from the seminary in Rome travelling to Dortmund as the vacation replacement of the local priest. We had a very nice chat and the one thing that stuck in my mind was that I was impressed by the very low life expectancy in Nigeria. While he stated that most people in Nigeria die at the age of 40 and most people there are lucky to know their parents let alone their grandparents, I told him that I had known my great-grandfather, who had died at the age of 90.