My Name Is Memory (12 page)

Daniel thought of the last time he had seen Joaquim, just a glance in a village square in Hungary in the thirteen hundreds. He’d already learned by that point that Joaquim also had the Memory, and he’d been on his guard, but Joaquim had shown no sign of recognizing him. Daniel kept expecting him to turn up much closer at hand—his uncle, his father, his teacher, his son, his brother again—as significant people often did. But unlike most things he dreaded, it hadn’t happened. At first, Daniel expected, it was because his former brother’s basic misanthropy held him up in death for long periods of time. If there was ever a soul that died apart—far apart—it was his. In lighter moments he’d pictured Joaquim zagging randomly around the globe, turning up here in Jakarta, there in Yakutsk.

Much later, Daniel had learned that Joaquim had begun to bend the rules of leaving and coming back. It was a chilling notion. Daniel didn’t know how he did it; he’d learned it from a mystical soul, his old (really old) friend Ben, and how Ben came to know these things he never understood. But Daniel could well imagine that Joaquim wouldn’t stand to wait his turn, or put up with starting again as a powerless infant. He wouldn’t tolerate the impotence of childhood time after time. He was geared toward revenge, and he wouldn’t leave the hunt for his enemies to chance, though he probably would have found them faster if he had.

It was a bitter thing to see him again after all that time. Daniel had been tempted to think that Joaquim’s soul had finished, but of course not. He had too much hate to be gone for good. Daniel imagined Joaquim using his memory for the sole purpose of grinding out his vendettas over the centuries. Who knew how many he had.

It was grating to see him in a body he did not deserve. It was sick to think of how he’d done it and what had become of the man who did deserve it. Daniel had no way of knowing what Joaquim was up to. But he had a bleak sense that it was dangerous for him—and dangerous for Sophia, if he ever found her.

A
t the turn of the tenth century, I was an oarsman sailing under the banner of the doge aboard a ship in the Venetian fleet. I hailed from the countryside to the east of Ravenna at the time, and like many boys in that part of the world, I dreamed of the sea. The Venetians were the finest sailors on earth, or so we believed, and we had good reason to. I joined my first crew at fifteen and sailed for twenty-one years on warships and merchant ships until I went down in a storm off Gibraltar.

We sailors expected and rather hoped to die at sea, so it was just a question of when. I had a fine, long run, and it wasn’t a bad death, as compared to many others. I’ve drowned only twice, and the second time, with the novelty of it removed, I hardly minded at all, to tell you the truth.

Our routes took us primarily to Greece and Asia Minor, Sicily and Crete, and occasionally to Spain and the north coast of Africa. These were glorious places then, especially when you approached them by sea. As I’ve said, I keep the nostalgia minimal, but as the centuries pass, the brutality of that life falls away and I am left with the vision of sailing into the Grand Canal at dusk.

It was a fairly routine voyage to the Cretan port of Iraklion (or Candia, as we Venetians called it) that I want to tell you about. This was early in my career. I was still young and lowly in the naval hierarchy and suffered long shifts on the oars and more than my share of night watches.

From one voyage to the next you saw the same characters again and again, but there were always one or two new ones. In this case there was a sailor even younger than I, probably fifteen to my eighteen. I had noticed him not because of anything he said or did but the absence of either. He kept his mouth shut and did his job assiduously, but he watched and listened intently to everything around him. With him there was no ennui, no irony, no sass, no braggadocio—the staples of ordinary seamen. He had large, intelligent eyes, strangely complex in an otherwise innocent face. His name was Benedetto, but the men called him Ben or Benno when shouting orders at him or mocking him, and those were essentially the only times he was addressed.

The first few shifts we did not exchange a word. But I felt his heavy eyes on me when I talked to the other hands. I could tell how he listened. By about the fourth or fifth shift he was my only companion on the foredeck, and I was struggling to stay awake, so I started up a conversation.

“You’re an Italian, no?” I asked in the low Italian vernacular we used on the ship.

He looked at me before he answered. “Yes. I was born south of Naples.”

“Good wine country,” I said irrelevantly. I’ve never been good at small talk and I’d never been to Naples, but he seemed tongue-tied and ill at ease. How little I knew.

“And you are Italian also,” he said after a long silence.

“Ravenna,” I said with some pride.

“And before that?”

“Before that?”

“Where did you come from before that?”

It was an odd question, and I wondered if he suspected I wasn’t quite from Ravenna proper. I had more interest in status back then, I guess. “I was born three leagues east of the city,” I said a little defensively.

He nodded. There was nothing urgent or demanding in his manner. “But before you were born three leagues east of Ravenna, where did you come from?”

I was struck mute. I still remember how the thoughts streaked around my head. I had been alive many times by that point. I knew how strange and even freakish I was. So much of my deeper life was conducted in the remote part of my mind, it never occurred to me that another person could get near it. Was it possible he was like me? Did he remember things? I was so accustomed to hiding these things that when I opened my mouth I literally could not put the words into the air.

Ben looked at me curiously. “Was it Constantinople? I know you must have spent some time in that region. Maybe that was earlier? Greece, perhaps?”

I tried out his words in different ways. Could they fit an ordinary interpretation? “I have not sailed to Constantinople . . . in this fleet,” I said slowly.

“I don’t mean as you are now, but before. I, for instance, was born in Illyria before Naples, and Lebanon before that.”

I felt my breath catch short. I wondered if I was actually awake or even alive. Sailors loved to talk about enchanted stretches of the sea that made a sane man mad. I suddenly worried I was being tricked. “I don’t know your meaning,” I said slowly. My voice sounded so stretched I barely recognized it.

Ben had the least tricky face you’ve ever seen. “You must. I have met only a few like you . . . like me . . . a very few. And I have come down on this earth many times. It is possible I am mistaken, but I don’t think so.”

“Like you?” I said cautiously.

“Like me in that you remember. It’s rare, I know, for people to remember past their birth. With some it goes back only one life or two, and for others there are only bits and pieces. But yours goes deeper, I suspect.”

I looked around to see that we were alone. I looked up at the moon and the stars to be sure of my relationship to them. “It does go deeper,” I said.

He nodded. There was no triumph in his eyes. He never doubted it. “Half the millennium. Or more?”

“That’s about right.”

“Where did you start?”

“I was born first near Antioch.”

“That makes sense,” he said, gazing past my head to the east, where the sun was just beginning its climb out of the ocean.

“How so?”

He shook a thought away and refocused his eyes on me. “It’s almost dawn.”

What he meant was that our replacements would arrive at any moment. His face conveyed sympathy. He could see that it was worse torture for me to end this conversation than it had been to start it.

“How did you know?” I asked. “About me?”

“I can’t really explain,” he said. His eyes were no less direct. He wasn’t meaning to be evasive. “I just . . . knew.”

And that was my introduction to the extraordinary capabilities of Ben, and the near impossibility of getting at them.

BEN IS VERY OLD. I don’t know how old. Sometimes I think he is like Vishnu, holding the entire story of human experience in his mind, but I’m not certain even he knows when he started. He told me once that his first memory was the lapping of the river Euphrates, but he is more impressionistic than factual in these kinds of recollections. If he does hold our story in his mind, I’m afraid it’s been entrusted to a poet rather than a historian.

“It’s all metaphor, finally, isn’t it?” he said to me once in his wistful way.

“Is it?” I asked, in my fact-craving way.

He is so old that his memory works differently from anyone’s. Even mine. Later he became a great fan of Lewis Carroll. (He also loved the Upanishads, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tagore, Whitman, Borges, E. B. White, and Stephen King, to name a few.) One time when I was pestering him about how he knew something that he couldn’t possibly know, he quoted the following line from Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”

He once told me he thought his first name had been Deborah, but he didn’t seem sure of it. I asked him if he’d like me to call him that, knowing how important my name had become to me, but he said no, he wasn’t Deborah anymore.

Ben and I sailed three voyages together, one right after the next, and had the opportunity to talk about a lot of things. The third and final trip was to Alexandria, which prompted from Ben a wealth of funny and fragmentary observations about Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra, as well as Ptolemy, her pesky younger brother who was also her husband. I discovered it didn’t do any good to try to understand the mechanics of his past or his memory in any literal way. A direct question never begat a direct answer. (“Tell the truth, but tell it slant” later became one of his favorite lines from Dickinson.) But to listen to him talk was a feast of odd and fascinating information.

He had the sunniest disposition of any sailor I knew and the keenest devotion to its lowly labors. I never saw a man more absorbed in tying a knot. Probably the worst experience of my life on the sea was hearing Ben beaten bloody by a couple of drunken spearmen on a dark reach out of Thira. He never had the right temperament for a sailor.

After that third voyage he disappeared, and it was several hundred years before I saw him again, but first we shared a conversation that has stayed with me even more than most.

On a slow night a hundred or so leagues off the coast of Crete, I began to tell him about Sophia. And once begun, there was not much I kept to myself. I began at the fateful beginning and told him about each of our meetings. I can’t describe how thrilling it was to be with someone like me, and how little of myself I shared with most people. I dashed back and forth through my long history without having to make any explanations or apologies. I felt like a pianist who’d been forced to play on a few white keys in the middle, finally allowed to run his hands all up and down the keyboard.

I finished my story with our most recent encounter, with me as a child in her tiny cliffside house in Central Anatolia, but it was the part of the saga involving my brother, Joaquim, that Ben kept coming back to. He asked me to tell those parts again and again.

I got tired of it. I wanted to talk about Sophia, not my brother. But Ben wanted every tick of the story, starting with the feud in my first life and dragging me through each detail of my stabbing death more than two hundred years later. He closed his eyes as though he was seeing it for himself.

“Mercifully it’s done,” I said finally. “There’s no reason to think of him ever again if I don’t have to.” Life was long for people like us. Long enough to smooth away the tragedies. That’s what I thought at the time.

Ben was crouched over, his forehead in his hands. He was rocking, sort of; I didn’t know why. He was acutely empathetic, I knew, but this was a bit much.

“Ben, it’s not so bad. It’s one life of many,” I remember saying, ready to move on to a new subject. “We go along. We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.”

Ben lifted his head finally. He looked at me carefully. I was accustomed to this look, but it was darkened by something I hadn’t seen before.

“Do you think he forgets?”

“What do you mean?”

“I trust you forgive, but are you certain that he forgets?”

“I’m sure he’s long gone,” I said quickly. “He’s been dead at least a hundred years. I haven’t run into him in a new life as yet, but I’m sure I’ll have that displeasure sometime in the future.”

I hoped my lightness would lift the troubled look from Ben’s face, but it didn’t. I was starting to feel uneasy. “What do you mean?” I said again.

“Are you certain that he forgets?”

“Everyone forgets,” I said, almost combatively.

“Not everyone.”

“Not you or I, but everyone else.” I stared at Ben, desperate to see some sunniness return to his eyes, but I couldn’t find it. “Do you know something?” I said, impatient and frustrated. “If you know something, tell me.”

“I don’t know, but I think,” Ben said slowly. “I think about him, and I don’t think that he forgives or forgets.”

“Why do you think that? Joaquim gave no sign of it. He lived like a man with no history at all,” I argued. “The Memory is rare, isn’t it? In almost five hundred years you’re the only person I’ve encountered with it. And you, who have no knowledge of him, think he has it?”

I think I wanted Ben to be angry at me in return, but he wasn’t. I wanted him to argue, but he didn’t. “Do you think anyone knows that you have it?” he asked. “Do you think your brother knows about you?”

I stood there with a growing sense of dread. Joaquim was present for those cataclysmic events of my first life. If I could trace my memory back to that time, why shouldn’t he also have it? I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t argue with Ben. I didn’t want to think through what it meant for me and for Sophia, wherever she was.

“I hope I’m wrong,” Ben said, and his eyes were compassionate. “But I think he remembers.”

Often, over the years, I’ve hoped Ben was wrong. But unfortunately, as far as I know, he never is.