“Really? An American learns to read and write a foreign language from what could be memories of another man?” I countered. “That sounds like a Hollywood script.”
“I am only one-third of the way through the first notebook so far, and already we know this,” she protested. “Let me see what else there is.”
I wrote her sentence in my notes, ‘an American writes in old-style Bulgarian,’ and considered the possibility that total recall of a past life could be the explanation. I poured more wine into our glasses, being careful to fill them only half full in case there was another Bulgarian toast in our future. ‘What if it were true,’ I thought to myself. ‘What would that mean?’
I had read stories about people who had memories that did not belong to them. I wanted to find out more, but I wanted the facts, not conjecture or fantasy. I cut up more cheese and salami for her, and she idly reached for the pieces as she read on as if entranced.
“There is another set of memories here,” she said after reading for several minutes, “another life.”
“You mean something beyond the memories in Bulgaria?”
“Yes,” she said and closed the book slowly. “He has memories of someone else. It is a boy, this time in America.”
I waited for her to continue, but she had closed her eyes and seemed lost in her thoughts as though she were trying to visualize or absorb something. “And…” I prompted.
She opened her dark eyes and fixed them on mine. “There was a tragedy with a fire.” She looked back down at the notebook in her hand as though it had surprised her. “It is very sad. Do you remember when I told you that Evan had a fascination with fire?”
I opened my notes again and nodded.
“Evan lights the fire and burns things to reenact this tragedy in the boy’s life. It is a way for him to prove to himself that he is not crazy, that what he remembers is real. The menacing fire is the same to him now as it was to the boy in that life.”
I finished writing a note and looked up at her as she wiped a tear from her eye. “So, he remembers another life?”
“Yes, there are two,” she said, collecting her emotions. “But the second one is short, and he does not discuss many memories beyond the fire.”
I nodded and returned to capturing these details as she wiped her eyes and found her place again. ‘If it was true and this man had memories from two previous lives, what would that life be like?’ I thought I as wrote. ‘How different would you feel from everyone else? Would you think you were crazy and need to read Bulgarian books and set things on fire to commune with those estranged pasts that haunted you? How alone would you feel in a world that would neither understand nor accept that truth?’ I thought about those questions for a long time as she read, and one answer kept ringing in my ears like a truth from his pages that I could understand – just like him, I would write it all down so that if I died again, I could find it and know that I was not crazy, that I had not imagined it all.
“He writes about being injured and being discovered by a woman. This woman takes him into her home, but there is something different about this woman.”
“Different? What do you mean different?” I asked.
“I don’t know how to describe it, but it seems like she knows what he is. I mean, it reads like she knows that he is more than he seems.”
“Like she knows that he has these memories from the Bulgarian and the boy?”
Marina sighed. “Not exactly. I am not explaining it right. Let me read some more. There is something important about this woman. I just know it.”
‘What would your relationships be like if you had the memories of complete other lives?’ I thought but kept it to myself as she read. ‘Would you share them with the others in your life, or would you hide them out of fear of rejection by the other person, or by the entire society? If you shared them once, only once, and they were rejected, would that not drive you underground into a prison of solitude with only your memories of long-dead cellmates as your company?’
I finished my glass of wine and then refilled it halfway again. “What do you think your life would be like if you remembered other lives?” I asked, but my words seemed to have missed her as she remained focused, now at the three-quarter mark of the first notebook. I was starting to get annoyed that she was reading so quickly to satisfy her own curiosity and only trickling the important information to me. I was becoming frustrated that she now knew more than I did about the author of the notebooks. ‘Perhaps this is the only way it could happen,’ I told myself as she flipped page after page.
Chapter 4
Marina stopped reading and pushed the notebook over to me. “She has a small tattoo on the back of her right hand between the thumb and the first finger. I think this tattoo has some meaning. He does not talk about it, but he makes a drawing of it here in the notebook. See?”
She opened the notebook and pointed to the symbol that I had seen when flipping through the first notebook before but had no idea of its meaning.
“Have you ever seen this symbol before?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. “I only saw it when I first reviewed the manuscript. Have you seen it before?”
“No, I trust that we will discover its meaning if I continue reading.”
“I agree, but please share more detail with me as you read, Marina,” I pleaded, trying not to sound too frustrated. “I want to know what you are reading as you read it.”
“Yes, of course,” she said and continued. “I just want to see if we can get to some detail that we could research to prove that it’s real. I can’t help but want to find something like that.”
I sipped at my wine and took note of the sun’s position as it slipped down between gaps in the tall pine trees on the west side of the square. She was nearing the end of the first notebook, and I knew we only had two hours of daylight left before she would have to stop or find new light to read by.
“Here it is!” she exclaimed. “I have the name of the woman. Her name is Poppy, and she recognizes him for what he is because she is like him. She can remember her past lives too.”
“Does she remember only bits of those lives, or does she remember everything, like total recall of those lives like Evan claims?”
Marina held up a finger as if to beg a few more sentences of reading before she replied to his question. “This is amazing, Eric. She takes him on a picnic in a cemetery.”
“At least I pick better locations,” I joked, but she paid no attention.
“And in the cemetery, she tells him about herself, how she is like him and remembers past lives, nine of them,” Marina paused for a moment and looked up at me, “and the lives are consecutive and unbroken.”
“I’m not sure what you mean when you say unbroken.”
“Let me try to explain the text,” Marina said and moved over on the marble blocks to sit next to me. “Evan is sitting with her in a crypt, and there are plaques on the wall for the dead people, except all of the dead people are the people that she remembers, all the way back to the first life she can remember.” She leaned in and showed me the page. “You can read the Cyrillic names, and you see the dates next to them. Take a look for yourself,” she prompted.
I took the notebook from her and started reading the names and dates next to her finger. ‘Nez-Lah 1506-1524, Bando 1524-1540, Bahram Al-Malick 1540-1630, Marco Parcalus 1630-1657, Louis Lucas de Nehon 1657-1723, Colleen Korin McGregor 1723-1761, Diana Marie Duggan 1761-1824, Dr. Hans M. Roder 1824-1889, Graciela L. Cruz 1889-1977.’
“The dates are continuous,” I said. “Like as soon as one life ends, a new one begins.”
“Exactly,” Marina answered, taking back the notebook. “And that’s not all. I was just getting to the really good part,” she said as she turned the next page and then another. “She is not alone.”
I froze and repeated her words in my head. “What do you mean, she is not alone?”
“She is not the only one; I mean not the only other one.” Ex
citement flashed in Marina’s eyes. “She tells Evan that there is a secret society of people like them, people who can remember all of their past lives. This secret society is called the Cognomina, and they are in Zurich, Switzerland. And that…”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Wait, there are more of them like Evan and Poppy?”
“…And that they are always looking for more people like them, like Evan, who they believe are out there.”
“How many more?” I asked in disbelief.
“She says there are twenty-eight of them.”
I shook my head as if trying to wrap my mind around it all. “There are twenty-eight of them,” I repeated, “in a secret society,” I continued, “in Zurich,” I concluded.
“That’s right,” Marina confirmed.
“Okay,” I said, going along as if it were proven fact. “What else does she say? What street is it on? What are the names of the other twenty-eight?”
“She doesn’t say anything else to him about this because their society is a secret one, and they only share their details with people who can verify that they have total recall of their past lives.”
“And how does one do that, I wonder? Write down your life story so that you can find it again and present it to them?”
“She was just getting to that point,” Marina explained and fell into fast reading again. “There is a test. No,” she corrected, “it sounds more like a trial, where the prospective member recalls events from his past lives, and the group fact checks them. If the facts check out, then the new person is welcomed in as a new member and takes the tattoo.”
“The tattoo? Like the one she had? Like the drawing?” I asked.
“Exactly. She tells him that each member wears the tattoo. It is a symbol that represents the three pyramids of Giza, which is where the first members of the society used to meet each other once a year.”
“And they get the tattoo in each life?”
“It’s complicated, and I am still reading the last of the detail here, but it seems that they begin to remember their past lives in the same way Evan did,” she sighed and looked up at the start of the sunset as if trying to gather and communicate all that was racing through her mind as well. “Do you member when Evan wrote that he began to remember the life of the Bulgarian and the boy when he was seventeen or eighteen? Well, it is the same way for all of them. They are born normal and grow up like normal kids until they reach their late teens, and then they remember their past lives again, but all at once, as Evan did. When they remember who they were, they eventually remember the society and all of their friends who remember the past like them. When they remember, they come home – to Zurich. And they have to do the trial again. She calls it the Ascension, and then they get the tattoo and are welcomed back into a sort of family.” She paused for a second and reflected back on her summary. “Yes, such a secret society would be like a family, really. They would be the people who could understand what that kind of multiple life would be like.”
I nodded. “I was thinking the exact same thing,” I replied. “So does Evan join, or does she invite him in?”
Marina flipped two pages ahead. “She does. She tests him with little questions about his past and his memories, but now that I think back, she did this from the first time they met when she took him in after his injury. She believes he is like them, and she invites him to Zurich.”
“Then we might expect Evan to go through this Ascension.”
“I think so,” Marina answered.
“Then perhaps Evan will have to provide some additional detail on his past lives as the Bulgarian or the boy.”
“And we could get some facts or details that we could research,” she exclaimed.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said, pouring some more wine in her glass. “Marina, I wrote for newspapers when I lived in the US, and I still write articles for them today. In journalism, it is always about the facts. You have to get facts to make a real story. So far, we only have the writings of a single man, a mystery man named Evan. It could be fiction, like a novel.”
“I know there will be more,” she challenged. “Look at what we have learned so far today. It is fantastic, isn’t it?”
I did share her excitement, but I knew any real hope of validation would be tied to items that could be researched and verified. “We are running out of daylight, Marina. I suggest you keep reading and see what else we can find.”
“Hand me the second notebook,” she demanded and began to read again.
I looked out through the lengthening shadows of the trees that surrounded us and saw the tourist crowds were thinning and quiet calm was falling over the Forum. I closed my eyes and listened to a colleague wrapping up her English language tour with the trademark Shakespeare speech. My mind raced with the possibility that only one country away, only one overnight train ride away, in Switzerland lived a group of people who remembered potentially dozens of past lives. ‘Would that be, in effect, like immortality?’ I thought. ‘Could there be people in Zurich tonight, who were alive when Shakespeare wrote the words that I hear now? Could there be people in that secret society who knew Rome before the fall?’ I wondered as I felt the ruined stone block getting cool under my hands.
“I have his name. I have his name!” she shouted.
I snapped out of my Zurich fantasy. “Which name? His last name as Evan or his name from before?”
She leaned in and looked intently at me. Her dark eyes blazed with excitement. “Both.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I had to read ahead a bit, but I had a feeling that if he went to Zurich and did this Ascension trial that he would have to provide them all the information about himself now and everything that he could remember about Bulgaria. And I was right,” she said, pouring the last of the wine into our glasses. “His name is Evan Michaels. And I was right. He is an American. But he also gives the name of the man he was, or the man he remembers, in Bulgaria. That name was Vasili Blagavich Arda.”
“Vasili,” I repeated.
“He even recounts the year of Vasili’s birth and his village.”
“Do you recognize the name of the village?”
“No, but there is something else here too. He talks about being arrested and put into prison.”
“Prison?”
“It was not that unusual during the Communist times,” she said and stopped her reading. “Do you know what that means?” she cried out in a high voice.
“No, not really,” I answered, unsure of the cause of her heightened excitement.
“It means I can research that name against Bulgarian records and see if it is real! Eric, this is the fact that you wanted.”
“Potential fact,” I corrected. “But yes, that does seem like a strong lead.”
“A toast,” she said, grabbing her glass. “To Vasili Blagavich Arda,” she said, knocking her glass against mine, “and we toast a person, so we drink everything.”
“To Vasili,” I replied and emptied my glass. “Do you really think you can find information about him?”
“If he is real, I can. We have our ways behind the closed doors of my embassy,” Marina said in a lowered voice.
“How long will it take if you have his name, his year of birth, and his village?” I asked, my hope rising with hers.
“I can do it in a few hours, but I want to read just a bit more while I still have the light.” She moved to the far edge of her stone and placed the open second notebook into a narrow shaft of golden sunlight.
“Can you do that research when you get back to the embassy?”
“For certain,” she said without taking her eyes off the pages as she read in a race against the coming night. “We have information on all Bulgarians, everywhere.”
“I bet you do,” I said and let my mind drift back to the possibility of them as I cleaned our plates and tossed the scraps of cheese rind and salami skin for the stray cats that ruled this ruined empire each night after the tourists left. I
thought about what era I would like to have memories from. I looked out at the collection of ruined temples and bare foundations, and I thought about all of the times that I had brought those sparse and shattered buildings to life for people, and I how desperately wished that I could have seen them in their glory. I imagined myself being able to remember the Forum and the Colosseum as soaring white awe-inspiring giants that they were.
As I imagined myself remembering walking in their dominating shadows, a powerful thought entered my mind – if you could recall the experience of walking in ancient Rome or being a Bulgarian peasant, didn’t that mean that you were that person and had lived that experience? I was a man now, and I could remember being a boy, but only because I was a boy. If Evan could remember being Vasili, was that because he was Vasili before he was Evan? Or was Vasili living again as Evan? Was it the same way for the other members of the Cognomina, even the older ones? Were they, in essence, as old as their earliest remembered life?
I watched Marina read in the twilight that was almost gone now. The bold beauty of her strong features appealed to me but might shock others, like a strong flavor. She would have to finish reading soon or find a bar or café with enough light to read on. I was excited that she might be able to work some intelligence service magic behind the closed doors of her embassy and I was planning where to meet up with her tomorrow to learn her findings.
“Tsigani,” she whispered in a low, disbelieving voice. “No, it can’t be.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Romani,” she answered and then caught herself, “the English and Americans call them Gypsies, but they prefer the name The Roma or Romani.” Excitement was building in her voice again. “He writes that they had Romani musicians playing music in Zurich for the secret society people, the Cognomina.”
“I don’t understand why that is important,” I said. “I mean, I know about the Romani gypsies, but why does that matter to this story?”
“The Romani, they are mostly from my country. They do not consider themselves Bulgarian,” she said in a scolding tone, “but they are.”
The Reincarnationist Papers - Origins Prequel Page 3
