But as soon as I was old enough to think—or old enough to remember the thoughts—I thought of the girl in the little thatched house. I saw her face in the doorway. Later I saw the flames and I understood what was happening to her and what I had done.

I thought of her every time I closed my eyes. I screamed at night. I cried in my dreams. I began to think of her in the daytime, too. I was probably only two or three years old and not old enough to understand my guilt or shame or the significance of her face to me. But I experienced the pure horror of it every day, almost as if it were happening to me.

I had a kindhearted mother in that life, but even she got tired of me. I lived in another world. I couldn’t let it go.

The kind of memory I have is extreme, but many people have some small degree of it. I once knew a boy in Saxony whose family lived a few doors down from mine. One day when he, Karl, was very small, his mother came by with him to deliver something or borrow something—I wasn’t paying attention to that part—and he saw my knife, my prized possession. I was probably ten or eleven at the time, and he was not even three. This tiny kid could barely talk yet, but he followed me into the garden, desperate to tell me how he was stabbed three times through his ribs by a thief, a footpad, who accosted him on the road to Silesia. He saw my confusion and wanted very badly to make me understand. “Not now, but before, when I was big,” he kept saying, holding up his arms to make the point. “When I was big.”

He lifted his shirt and sucked in his belly to show me the jagged birthmark along his rib cage. Needless to say, I was fascinated and astonished by all this, and I asked him many questions. I thought I had discovered a kindred mind. When his mother came to fetch him she saw his animation and gave me a long-suffering look. “Did he tell you about the thief on the road?” she asked wearily.

Soon after that I went away. I began my apprenticeship with a smith in a village several miles outside of town. I didn’t see Karl again for five years, but I thought of him hundreds of times. When I did see him I immediately asked him about the stabbing. He looked at me with interest but only the faintest recollection.

“The thief on the road to Silesia,” I reminded him. “The scar on your chest.” This time it was me who was desperate to convince him.

He looked at me and shook his head. “Did I really tell you that?” he asked before he ran off to play with his friends.

I’ve learned since then that it’s not that unusual for very young children to have memories from their old lives, especially if they suffered a violent death the last time around. Or maybe the violence gives them a more urgent need to communicate. Typically they express old memories as soon as they can talk and keep pressing them for a couple of years. And typically time passes and they get further away from their death and their parents get spooked or just fed up. The memories fade, and they put them aside. New experiences fill in. By the age of reason, at seven or eight, all but a few have forgotten and moved on.

This is fairly well documented, and I’ve followed the research carefully. There are scientists who have compiled thousands of interviews and case studies of this kind. But the good ones are naturally reluctant to say what it really means, and who can blame them? I, of all people, know how futile it is to try to make rational people believe.

My case was different. In my case, as I grew older my memory grew stronger and filled in. The more capable of reason I became, the more I remembered—little things and big things, names, places, sights and smells. It was as though my death was a long sleep, and when I woke up and reoriented myself, it all came back. I didn’t remember these things as happening to someone else. I remembered them happening to me. I remembered the things I’d said and the ways I’d felt. I remembered myself.

By the age of ten I knew I was different, but I stopped talking about it. I knew I had been alive before. I didn’t need to convince anyone else to know the truth of it. Mostly I was sorry that other people didn’t remember the way I did. I wondered if they had old lives to remember, or if it was only I who came back again. I wondered if I was an error of God’s planning that would be fixed at the end of my life.

I guess I still feel like an error of planning. I’m still waiting for it to be fixed.

With every life it starts more or less the same. My mind is a blur of infant’s murk and then, sooner or later, I see her face in the doorway. She becomes clearer and more present, and then I see the flames. I try not to get so upset anymore. I know what’s coming, and I think, Here I am again. Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.