My Name Is Memory (9 page)

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.

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?”

Neither of them wanted to argue with her. It wasn’t personal for them. “A lot of people did hear about it,” Alex said a little defensively. “I don’t know where you were, but Mattie wasn’t keeping it secret.”

“And anyway, newspapers don’t go out of their way to report suicides,” Brandon told her. “Especially not teenage suicides.”

Turning slowly away from them, she walked back to the sofa and sat on it, staring blindly at the window and seeing Daniel’s face as he’d looked that night. She remembered her own fragile state in the days after, so beset by panic she didn’t leave her house or talk to anybody.

She was vaguely aware that Brandon and Alex were still standing there, that her social graces were a failure and her mother would be ashamed. Brandon said something to her, something like “I thought everybody knew,” but words were no longer making their way into her brain.

Daniel couldn’t be dead.

Numbly, she fished around for her keys in her purse and walked out of the party to her car. She got in it and drove. She drove aimlessly along the darkest streets, in spite of her mother’s constant exhortations to save gas.

Finally it was late and dark, and she drove to the bridge. She left her car on the grassy shoulder and walked out onto it. She stared down at the Appomattox. It was a mythic name and place for her because of her father and grandfather. She once asked her father why they always talked about the Civil War, whereas it seemed like Yankees never did. “Because we lost,” he said. “You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.”

She put her chin on the rail and watched the water flow darkly. This was a river of loss, and here was one more. She wondered how it would feel to jump.

M
y long absence from Pergamum was not enough to keep Sophia safe. I first heard reports from my youngest brother and then from my mother.

In three years, Joaquim’s temper had deteriorated, as difficult as that was to imagine. My father died, and I mourned him and missed him terribly. Joaquim took over the butchery and drove a profitable business into the ground. I was horrified to discover he sold the family house and sent my younger brothers out into the world before they were teenagers. He left his wife with my mother in a room of a public house for long stretches while he ran away from creditors or ran up more debts. Sophia managed, mercifully, not to have his children.

When I got the message from my mother, I made another momentous decision. I borrowed a horse and rode thirty-some miles toward Smyrna to a remote cave I had last looked upon a hundred years and two lives ago. There had been a lot of wind and sand in those years, but I could still see the tiny markings I had made on the limestone walls. With my torch and my secrecy I felt like a tomb robber, but the tomb was my own and my bodily remains, thankfully, were not to be found there. I wove through the passages, descending into dank earth as I went. I didn’t need the markings; I remembered how to go. I was relieved to see the pile of rocks I’d constructed completely intact. I moved them carefully, one by one, until I’d exposed the misshapen little portal. I squeezed through, realizing how much bigger I was in this life than in the one when I’d dug it.

I twisted my torch into the dirt floor of the chamber and looked around. The larger things sat on the ground covered in a century of dust. There were a couple of beautiful Greek amphorae, one with black figures depicting Achilles in battle and the other red-figured, showing Persephone borne down to the underworld. (I gave the first to the archeological museum in Athens in the 1890s, and I still have the second one.) There were a few good pieces of Roman statuary, some early and exquisite examples of metalwork I bought from a bedouin trader who claimed they came from the Vedic Kings in India. There was the beginning of my collection of feathers from rare birds, a number of wood carvings (the worst of which were made by me), a gorgeous lyra I learned to play from my patient father in Smyrna, and a bunch of other things.

The smaller and most valuable things I had to dig for. Less than a foot under the hard dirt were bags of gold coins: Greek, Roman, biblical, Byzantine, and a few Persian. Other bags held precious stones and a few pieces of jewelry. I tried not to linger over any of it. I had a sense of urgency and grief that day. But my fingers came upon the gold and lapis wedding ring worn by my first bride, Lena, who had died young and whom I had tried to love. I held it for a few moments before I put it back in the ground.

In my fourth life, I had been a trader. I used my experience and knowledge of languages to put myself at the hub of several profitable trade routes. I wanted to get rich, and I did. In part it was a reaction to my bruising and humiliating life in Constantinople. I hated being hungry, and because I knew other ways of living, I hated it worse. I decided that if I was going to lug this memory around, I might as well be smart about it. I would use it to insulate myself from the whims of birth. For each life that I made money, and I did get good at that, I put most of it aside for leaner times. And I remember fantasizing that the girl from North Africa would see me when I was rich and powerful, and that she would want to know me then.

My fifth life, in Smyrna, I had the fortune of being born into an educated and well-connected family. As I grew up, I built on what I had learned from my previous life, and became a merchant of consequence. Beyond amassing piles of gold, I started to collect with a particular eye to the past and future. That’s when I established my cave, and I used it for nine lifetimes before the traveling became too onerous. I moved my stash to the Carpathians about 970 A.D.

By now, more than a thousand years later, I’ve accrued a huge collection of property and currency and artifacts, though the feelings of power and pleasure that once came from owning it have faded significantly over time. The few things I’ve added to it in recent years have no objective value at all. I’ve found ways of giving pieces away without being recognized and also of entailing it to myself: Wherever I turn up, I always know my name. And these days, bank vaults and numbered accounts make it all a lot easier.

That night in the eighth century, I put everything in my cave back to rights and took with me a bag of fairly recent and homogenous gold coins—I needed money rather than treasure. I gathered supplies, made a few arrangements, bought a magnificent Arabian horse from a rich bedouin, and rode back to Pergamum the following afternoon. I found Sophia and my mother living in one room off an alley. My mother’s spirits were in ruins. She was still trying to find a way to love my brother; her heart would not allow her to give up on him. Sophia’s face was bruised, but her pride was mostly intact.