A few of the glories of the city stood intact in my childhood, though some had crumbled, and most of the temples and shrines had been wrecked or converted to Christian churches by then. The marketplace stayed almost the same.
When I lived there you could see the Aegean from our doorstep. Now the city overlooks a valley fifteen flat miles inland from the sea. I went back there a few lives ago, when the German archaeologists were just getting going on it, and saw the ruins of the old city again. I knew the columns. I knew the blocks of stone under my feet. I had touched those very ones before. I felt closer to them than I feel to most other human beings. We stood still while the world changed shape around us.
I’m not often nostalgic anymore. There’s too much behind me. I know that gradual change is the easiest to take, and the giant leaps and losses can overwhelm you. My home and every trace of my life and family from that time were long erased. But that wasn’t what got to me. It was the look of that ancient city, once mighty and perched on a sea of commerce pushed farther and deeper into dry remoteness and strangled off.
It was back then, as a child in the eighth century, that I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past. The present is over quickly, you might say, and it is, but man, it goes like a wrecking ball.
I would sit at a certain crumbling altar overlooking the sea and try to imagine our city as it had been before the degradations. You wanted to think that history was a story of progress, but seeing what remained of Pergamum and the direction we were going, you just knew it wasn’t so.
The first momentous occurrence of that life was the reappearance of my older brother from my first life in Antioch, returning to the role of older brother once more. That kind of thing occasionally happens, family members repeating from one life to another. Usually it’s devotion that keeps people together through lives, but the soul’s basic yearning for balance and resolution can sometimes bring a person back to confront a previous torment. I recognized this old brother with a sense of unease from when I was quite young. Every association with the burning of the village in North Africa was harrowing to me, but added to it was the enmity that had burst out between this old brother and me long ago, when I’d confessed to a superior—and later a priest—that we had raided the wrong village. It was my own relentless guilt that drove me to it, not hostility or vengeance, but my brother didn’t see it that way. From that first moment of recognition, when I was not more than two or three years old, I knew I needed to steer clear of him.
He was called Joaquim now, and he stayed true to his early passions to become an enforcer of iconoclasm under Constantine, leaving our home and family in Pergamum at the age of seventeen. His mission was the destruction of religious art, the invasion of monasteries, and humiliation of monks. It’s no mystery how the old and beautiful works came to be destroyed.
I was called Kyros then. In those days I struggled to consider myself by a new name each time. Later, I would answer to the name my parents gave me but think of myself by my old name. This was more disorienting than you can know. It’s hard enough to maintain your identity through a single life in a single body. Imagine dozens of lives and dozens of bodies in dozens of places among dozens of families, further complicated by dozens of deaths in between. Without my name, my story is no more than a long and haphazard tangle of memories.
At times I wanted to give up the thread of my lengthening life. It felt too hard to hold on, to keep myself together as one person. I felt as though the past and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going. If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That’s all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we need those stories. I guess I do.
Sometime after the turn of the last millennium, I began naming myself. Whatever my parents named me, I asked them to call me Daniel, the name I had at the very beginning. Some resisted, but all came around in some way at some time, because I didn’t really give them a choice.
THE NIGHT I want to tell you about took place about 773. There are so many things I’ve seen that I could tell you about. But I am telling you a story, a love story, and I will try, with limited digressions, to hold on to my thread.
This particular night I remember distinctly. I hadn’t seen my dreaded brother Joaquim in two years, and he was coming home. He had sent word a few weeks before that he had taken a wife and would bring her to us when he came. Our household was in a stir, as you might imagine. My brother was my parents’ eldest son, and though he was an awful person, he was gone so long we all thought better of him.
Apart from my older brother, it was a good family I had then. I’ve seen quite a range in my time, and there haven’t been as many of those as a person would hope. It’s been an error of mine to think there will be more, and I forget to cherish them as I should. My father was a kind man, though distant, and my mother was a deeply loving soul, probably too much so for her own good. The worst I can accuse them of is parental blindness, and that is something they share with nearly all those who love their children. My two younger brothers, especially the youngest, were sweet-natured and quick to trust.
I guess I was better at loving then, too, and also better at being loved—the two go together. It was a long time ago. Back then the past didn’t stretch out nearly as far, and the present seemed much more vivid—not, as it came to seem later, like an ever-tinier fraction of all there was.
Our family was not rich—my father was a butcher—but we were prosperous and had two servants. I’m sure my father had no meat to sell in the market that day. He slaughtered the fatted calf and every other creature with foot or flesh he could put a knife to for our “welcome home” feast.
My anticipation held as much dread as excitement. I hoped an improved version of my brother would come home with his wife that night, but I knew that the arrogant sadist who’d left would probably be the one to return.
The house and courtyard were laid out as if for an emperor. After all the scurrying preparations, we waited there in eager silence, my parents, my two younger brothers, my uncles, my maternal grandfather, several cousins, the servants. We couldn’t eat or converse because of all the suspense.
It would not have been my brother’s style to arrive when the food was freshly prepared, the meat and sauces were perfectly cooked, and the waiting was still new and enjoyable. It was his style to arrive after the food was wilted and congealed, and the thrill of anticipation had turned to restlessness and worry.
As we waited, the rain began. I remember my mother’s attempts at buoyancy, her happy talk. We spoke Greek then. Not the language of Sophocles but a distant corruption. I can still remember most of the conversation word for word. I try to hold on to the old languages, but keeping them in my head isn’t enough. They are built to communicate, and no one else speaks them anymore.
My brother arrived not on horseback in glorious regalia, as we imagined for him, but on foot, underdressed for the weather and irritable. He came from the darkness into the candlelight first. I looked at him, wondering what had become of his military career, but then his wife entered the room. From the moment she lifted her hood and uncovered her face, I didn’t think about him again. This is the part I wanted to draw your attention to. This is the part that matters.
Seeing the girl from North Africa only in memories and dreams for a couple of centuries, I looked at my brother’s wife and, to my astonishment, saw her made flesh again. To this day, there is no soul I recognize more immediately or more powerfully than hers. Whatever her age or her circumstances, she makes a strong impression on herself and on me.
First out of confusion, then out of shock, and then out of exhilaration, I stared at her too long. My brother was expecting to be greeted with proper bowing and scraping, and my eyes were fixed in almost painful rapture on his wife. A lot of trouble can be accounted to my foolishness that first night.
It wasn’t his displeasure that finally penetrated my fat skull, it was hers. She was confused and embarrassed by all my attention. Her head was down, and her eyes, which had projected so much certainty the other times I’d seen her, were uneasy.
I tried to resume the normal kind of behavior. I embraced my brother. I stepped back to let the other family members take their turns. I watched my parents welcome their new daughter, Sophia.
I orbited her in a strange haze that night. I tried not to, but everywhere I stood and everything I did was in relation to her. I tried not to stare at her too long.
She looked burdened enough as it was. Instead of eating she glanced around at us, her new family, sparing every other glance for her husband. The rest of them feasted and drank while she sat delicately on her hands. My brother was several cups of wine in before he seemed to notice. “Is our food not good enough for you? Eat something!” he roared at her, and finally she did.
That night, I lay awake in wonder. At first I was moved just at seeing her, at knowing she was still alive and now close to me. It took longer to sink in, the injustice of how she happened to turn up. I didn’t know all the ways I loved her yet.
But when I overheard my brother’s voice through the wall I had to recognize what was going on. She was his wife. She belonged to him and never to me.
It wasn’t jealousy. Not at first. I was awed by her and by the role she played in my mind. I longed for forgiveness. I didn’t presume to want her or deserve her in that way. If my brother had been kind to her and she had loved him, I would have taken joy in her joy and just been happy to get to be near her sometimes. I think that’s true.
But he wasn’t kind to her. The voice through the wall rang with abuse.
I couldn’t hear all of it, but he called her a whore. I heard my own name more than once.
I COULD BARELY glance at her the next day; I felt ashamed and guilty. Why could I never do her a good turn? Why did I only add to her suffering? But I did glance at her, eventually. I saw some misery, to be sure, but also pride. And when Joaquim spoke to her across the table I saw disgust in her face. By that look alone I knew she had not chosen to be his wife. His power over her was limited, because she didn’t love him.
I avoided her for a few days out of consideration, but then my brother left. He disappeared for weeks at a time. He came home, usually drunk, when he ran out of money. So over time I discovered that Sophia gravitated to the garden as I often did, and I allowed myself to say a few halting words to her, and then a few more. Over the course of time I got her to tell me about growing up in the city of Constantinople, which seemed magical to me. Her father had been a master mason and builder of several churches. He’d made repairs to the great dome of the Hagia Sophia. But her parents died in a fire when she was nine, which helped explain why her grandmother gave her to the highest bidder when she was fifteen, at a moment when my brother was flush from one of his few big victories at cards.
At the time I was apprenticed to an artist who had been commissioned to design mosaics for the baptistery of our church. I took Sophia to the work site and showed her the plans. Over the weeks, and with some reluctance, I showed her carvings I’d made and some verses I had printed on a piece of parchment. These were things I had learned in earlier lives—languages, reading and writing, carving and design. I hid them from most people, because they were foreign to my upbringing and pretty much inexplicable, but I didn’t hide them from her. We had things in common. She loved stories and poems as much as I did. She knew many that I didn’t. I opened up to her in a way I had never done with anyone before.
That was the first time I knew her and loved her. I loved her innocently then, I promise you. Even in my mind.
My brother never saw us speak, I’m sure, but he probably heard about our friendship. Three months after the night he brought Sophia home, he arrived at the house drunk and angry. He’d lost a huge sum of my father’s money gambling and earned himself a beating and a threat against his life. On the other side of the wall that night I heard him shouting, but I knew his insults didn’t matter to her. Then I heard another kind of sound. A heavy crack against the wall and a scream and a muffled strike and the sound of her crying.
I got out of bed and made my way into the room. Good as my memory is, I don’t remember how I got from one place to the other. The door must have been locked. I remember the splinters and pieces of it on the ground afterward. She was lying on the floor, hair all tangled, her nightdress ripped apart and the sticky shine of blood and perspiration on her face. Two centuries before, in the doorway of her burning house, she’d stared at me with strange equanimity, but now I saw distress.
I paused for a moment and saw my brother crouched and glaring like a wolf. He was waiting for me, daring me to come after him, trying to lure me into some game of his. But I didn’t think about him at all. She was the one who mattered to me. I closed my fist and hit him in the face as hard as I could. He went down. I watched him get up and then I hit him again. I remember the look of astonishment in the middle of his fury. I was the younger one, the smaller one, the weird one, the artist. I punched him again.
His nose and mouth were bleeding. He was still drunk, disoriented, sputtering and heaving, throwing ineffective fists. The deeper violence was on its way but taking longer for him to gather.
I wanted to hold her and comfort her, but I knew that would only make it worse for her. She sat up, covered herself, and backed against a wall.
If he wasn’t so drunk and I didn’t care so much, he certainly would have killed me. It was the only asymmetry between us that ever came out in my favor. I loved his wife, and he didn’t.
I left him on the ground in his own blood and vomit. I packed my few belongings. I woke my father and begged him to take care of her. I left my home and family with the idea that if I were gone, she might be safe.
Fighting Joaquim in front of his wife was one of the pivotal decisions of my long existence, and I’ve tried and retried myself for it in the years since. It was the spark for hatred and violence and enmity over many lives, and I ask myself how I could have averted it for her sake and mine and even his.
But in retrospect, it wasn’t really a decision at all. Looking back, even from this great distance, I don’t think I could have done anything else. Wrong as it may have been, I would do it again.
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2006
LUCY DIDN’T GIVE herself over to the party. She essentially waited on the couch for Brandon Crist to show up. She didn’t even realize she’d snubbed the mighty Melody Sanderson until her friend Leslie Mills told her so.
“Melody is telling everybody you won’t come out back to the tap because you think you’re too good for Hopewood.”
Lucy felt herself sifting down through layers of pettiness to make sense of that. Maybe it was true. “Excuse me?”
“She thinks all the kids who go to fancy schools up north act snotty now.”
“Up north? I’m in Charlottesville.”
“Right. I know.”
“I just didn’t feel like fighting through the crowd for a beer,” Lucy said.
“I’m just telling you in case you, you know, want to go out there.” Lucy seriously considered going out there, but she stopped herself. She remembered a simpler time when she went to all lengths to stay on the right side of those girls. She also remembered when she and her parents could lay every trouble and pain and failure in one location. But Melody’s term had expired, and she must have known it.
Still, Lucy chastised herself and walked into the crowded kitchen instead. It was true that you shouldn’t go to a party if you couldn’t be friendly. When Brandon finally did arrive she went right over to him. It was awkward, she recognized, but she felt strangely driven.
“I’m Lucy,” she said. “We were in chemistry together.”
“Of course,” he said. “I know who you are.” He sloshed his drink around in its plastic cup.
“I have a question for you,” she
said directly. He used too much gel in his hair, which for some reason led Lucy to consider that he probably thought she was trying to ask him out.
“Okay.” His eyebrows were raised into flirt position.
“You knew Daniel Grey, right?” It seemed reckless and even thrilling to just say his name right out as though it was just any other name.
His eyebrows floated back down a little. “Yeah. Somewhat. Not well.”
“Well, do you have any idea what happened to him?”
Brandon looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know for sure. But you know what Mattie Shire and those guys said.”
Lucy heard the bleakness in his voice, and a slow thumping started in her throat. “No. I don’t. What did they say?”
“The night of the last party and the knife fight. You heard about what happened.”
“A lot of things happened,” she said warily.
Brandon looked around the crowd in the dining room. He didn’t see Mattie Shire, but he saw Mattie’s friend, Alex Flay, and hailed him over. “You remember Daniel Grey, don’t you?”
Alex nodded, looking from one of them to the other.
“Were you there with Mattie when he saw him jump off the bridge?”
Lucy stared at Brandon. “What?”
“I wasn’t there,” Alex said. “But Mattie told me about it. I don’t know if Daniel drowned or what.”
Brandon nodded. “He was an unusual dude, rest his soul.”
“You’re saying he is dead?” Lucy asked.
Brandon looked at Alex, and Alex shrugged. “I have no idea. That’s what Mattie thought. Nobody really knew. I never heard anything more after that. Everybody went off in different directions after that.”
“He couldn’t be dead,” Lucy said fervently. She felt a burst of outrage, and she couldn’t keep it off her face or out of her voice. “Wouldn’t everybody have heard about it? Wouldn’t it be in the newspaper or something?”
My Name Is Memory Page 7