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.

I set my mother up in a pretty village a few miles away. I tried to give her as little money outright as possible, knowing where it would end up. But I made sure she was comfortable, and I promised her I would return and bring my younger brothers back to her house.

I set off with Sophia that night on the back of my horse. It was a selfish thrill to have her there so close, but that was not the point, I told myself. If I left her there, she would be killed. Neither she nor my mother protested or asked a single question as we rode off. They knew this was her only chance.

The ride across the desert with Sophia on that fine horse was one of the happiest times in all of my many lives. I confess I’ve relived it so many times, I hardly remember it anymore. My feelings are strong enough to refract and distort the truth of that journey. But then, as my friend Ben might say, my feelings are the truth of that journey.

It took us four and a half days to get to Cappadocia, deep in the interior, and I wished, as we went, that the distance would lengthen and the horse would slow down. And I’ll admit to you at the start that something changed in those few days. What had been an innocent and uncomplicated devotion on my part turned into something deeper and more problematic.

The first night was awkward, as you might imagine. I stretched a piece of blue fabric across four wooden stakes to make us a roof and laid blankets under it. I was good at making fires and preparing food. These were some of the many skills I had accumulated over my lives. (Some skills are in the mind and some are in the muscles, and I have spent lifetimes learning the limitations of the first and the value of the second.) But that night, it was like I had never done anything before. My hands shook as she watched me. Nothing felt familiar.

With my heart laboring in my chest and a feeling of satisfaction like a mother, I watched her eat rice and bread and chickpeas and lamb. She was as slender as could be and at first ate slowly. But as she began to relax, she demonstrated an impressive appetite. I barely ate any of the food I’d packed after that. I wanted there to be enough for her.

When she reached for things I could see the bruises going up her arms. She never talked about them, which somehow made them sadder to me.

We lay on our blankets at a safe distance. I didn’t know how to talk to her right then. We were too close, and there were none of the social structures to make sense of us. I didn’t want to presume. We both stared upward, and it dawned on me that the only function of my roof was hiding the stars. So without really discussing it, we crawled with our blankets out from underneath it and bathed in the sparks. I still look up at the sky most nights and never quite believe it’s the same sky as that one.

I didn’t want her to think I needed anything from her. I didn’t want her to be afraid. I didn’t know how close or how far to be. How much talking was burdensome? How much silence was lonely? How much attention was unsettling? How little attention was cold? I wanted her to know she was safe with me. She yawned and I wondered. She slept, and I watched over her.

The second day we rode I was more aware of the feeling of her arms on me, the particular impression of each of her fingers, her chest against my back. Her cheek pressed sometimes, her forehead. My nerves even felt out for the tip of her nose as we galloped through the dry, brown hills. But I didn’t want anything from her. I didn’t need anything. I wanted to make her well and keep her safe. I didn’t want anything else. To say it was to make it so.

When we stopped for the evening she ate with more heartiness and less urgency. I saw how her bruises yellowed and faded into the lovely landscape of her face. I felt her basic knack for living, her resilience, and I knew how it would serve her on the long road. That was something you took with you from life to life. She wouldn’t know that about herself, but I would remember.

That second night was much colder, and I could no longer find enough wood to keep a fire going. The blankets were thick but not thick enough. She couldn’t fall into a true slumber in that cold. I watched her shiver, going in and out of sleep. I tried putting my blanket over her. My eagerness, the intensity of my purpose, kept me warm, but she shivered.

I went closer to her without quite deciding to. I didn’t want to overreach, but I had heat to share. I curled around her, a few inches away, trying to give her some of it. She must have felt my warmth in her sleep, because she gravitated toward it. I didn’t make the contact, much as I was yearning for it by that point. I got under the blankets with her, and, childlike, she wound her limbs in and around my warm surfaces. I felt the bare skin of her ankles and feet wrapped around my calves, her back burrowed into my chest; my arms went around her. She sighed, and I wondered who I was to her in her sleep.

I didn’t want to move. I was too happy, and the moment was too fragile. My arm fell asleep, but I didn’t want to take it from under her. There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through a lot of empty years, me more than most. You have to make them last as well as you can.

On the third day as we rode I felt the way her body relaxed into mine, and that was a gift. When we stopped to eat in the midday, she spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time.

That night she got under the blanket and curled against me without a word. “Thank you,” she said as she fell asleep, her hair against my neck, the top of her head under my chin. My arms pressed against her breasts, and I felt her heart beating and mixing with the pulse in my wrist. I tried to keep my lower regions at a safe distance, as certain organs weren’t complying with overall discipline.

Sometime in the night I must have let down my guard and fallen into a deep sleep. I had been dreaming, I guess, of older versions of ourselves, and I was disoriented. I had gone all the way back to the first time I saw her, for only a glimpse, but it must have jarred me. When I woke she was right there, her face in front of mine. I didn’t understand exactly what she was doing there or where we were in time. The sight of her face filled me with regret.

“I am so sorry,” I whispered.

I wasn’t sure if she was awake or asleep, but I guess she was awake. “What could you be sorry for?” she whispered back.

“For what I did to you.” I was certainly disoriented at that point, because I thought she would know what I meant. My connection to her felt so strong, I couldn’t hold on to the idea that she could know anything less than I did. It was a strange, illusory moment of believing our experiences were the same. I don’t understand where it came from. If there’s one sad thing I know, it’s that nobody’s experience is ever the same as mine.

Confusion set her quiet face in motion. “What you did to me?” She sat up. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You protected me. You saved my life. Not just now but many times. You’ve been kind to me at your own peril. I don’t know why. You haven’t asked anything from me. You’ve made no demands. You haven’t been lustful toward me. What other man would do this?”

It was getting on morning, and I was as aroused as could be at that point and felt ambivalent about her innocence.

I sat up, too, trying to orient myself better. I wanted to explain, but I didn’t know how much I could say. “I’ve tried to protect you. I have. But a long time ago, I did something to you that I—”

“To me?”

“To you.” I couldn’t stand the look of wariness. “Not to you, Sophia, as you are now. But long before. In Africa. You don’t remember Africa.” This was a reckless turn. What was I expecting? That she would suddenly sprout a memory to match mine?

Her eyebrows came down in a particular way she’s always had. “I haven’t been to Africa,” she said slowly.

“But you have. A long time ago. And I—”

“I haven’t.”

There she sat, tiny under the giant dawning sky in that strange lunar landscape near Cappadocia with only me to look at. If my desire was to make her feel safe, this was not the way to go.

“No. I know. Of course. I was speaking in metaphor. I meant . . .”

Though I was looking for expiation, I wasn’t going to take it at her expense. “I didn’t mean anything.” I shrugged and looked east, where the sun was puncturing our private night. “It’s a strange memory I have.” My voice was so quiet it probably drifted away before it reached her. I don’t know.

She kept her eyes on me for a long time. There was uncertainty, but I could see the warmth, too. “You are a good man, and I do not understand you.”

“Someday I’ll try to explain,” I said.

We got down under the covers again together, both of us facing east. She pressed herself fiercely against me, so my body’s ungovernable parts were made known to her. She didn’t pull away but turned her head to look up at me again, sort of curiously.

I buried my face in her neck and felt for her ear with my mouth. I lifted up her skirts and put my hands on her bare hips. I opened her dress and kissed her breasts. I pulled her underclothes away and entered her with a pent-up passion that could only be imagined.

And imagined is all it was. That’s not a memory but a fantasy I’ve enshrined alongside my memories so that it’s almost become one. And I relive it in preference to the other version of events every time. My memory, as I’ve said, admits a few distortions. I try to cultivate it as a reliable record, and it’s rare when my emotions are strong enough to bend the facts. But here I bent the facts wide enough to push myself inside her and stay there forever.

But let the record show the truth: She looked at me and licked her lips with an unmistakable passion, and she said, “I am your brother’s wife.”

“You are my brother’s wife,” I said, and mournfully, miserably, rolled a few inches away from her.

No matter how brutal my brother was, he couldn’t take down the sanctity of marriage. Not the idea of it. He didn’t respect it, but he didn’t have the power to nullify it. I guess because we believed in it. We couldn’t help ourselves.

I watched her carefully, and she watched me. A kiss, a real one, and all that would inevitably follow would transform our errand of mercy into a tawdry betrayal. No matter how I loved her. No matter how much I wanted to.

No one will ever know but her and me, the lower part of my body was urging.

But the brain in my head took a longer view. No one would know but us, and my brother would be proven right in all his ugly suspicions, and we would always know we were wrong. When you live as long as I do, always is a crippling distance. I know she was thinking the same. In that moment my belief in our common mind was not a delusion.

It turned out to be a giant piece of hammered brass, heavy and well wrought. I flipped it over and discovered it was a basin of some sort. It probably belonged to a merchant who’d found himself under attack and left in a hurry. It was too heavy to carry quickly, but it gave me an idea. We rode a mile or so out of the way to where I’d last seen evidence of water. We filled all of our containers and two wineskins and returned to the basin. I made a fire to heat the water and set the basin atop a little rise that offered the loveliest view of the sun as it showed off its ecstatic orange and purple streaks. The air turned cool and dim as Sophia watched my labors with a bemused look, but I kept at it until the basin was full of clean, steaming water.

We’ve become so used to modern plumbing we practically consider it a right to have a hot bath at the turn of the wrist, and it’s easy to forget what a luxury it once was, but it was. I found a piece of soap in my saddlebag and handed it to her with some ceremony. It wasn’t much of a gift, but it felt like the right way to send her on to her new life.

I was going to leave her in privacy, but I hated to miss her pleasure. “Should I go?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “You should stay.” She took off her dress and underclothes without shame or shyness but without any coyness, either. I watched her set one foot, then two into the basin and shiver with delight.

I can make you happy, I thought.

I realized I was watching her with the knowledge of what was coming. I wanted to commit her to my memory more deeply and concretely than any other thing. I wanted to take in every bit of her so I could keep her with me for the long haul and so I could find her again. I studied her feet, slightly turned in, the pretty design of her rib cage, and the way she held her head forward. I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.

She slipped all the way in and dunked her head under. She came up smiling, and her skin was a lighter shade. She lay back in the tub and let the water settle and smooth around her, reflecting the colors of the sky.

“Come sit with me,” she said, and I sat on a flat rock on the rise just above her. It was a beautiful view.

After she finished she ordered me into the bath. She watched me undress with proprietary boldness and scrubbed my back with deft fingers. I dunked my head under and felt only the silence and her hands. Each of these moments was a pearl on a string, one prettier and more perfect than the next.

“I wish you were in here with me,” I said.

She gave me a long, full look. “There are many things I wish.”

“We’ll bathe together someday,” I told her with a heave of contentment.

“Will we?”

“Yes. Someday you’ll be free. Then I will find you and we’ll be as happy as this.”

She had tears in her eyes and suds on her fingers. “How can that be true?”

“It might take a long time, longer than you imagine, but someday we will.”

“Do you promise me?”

I looked at her and made another fateful choice. “I do.”

When I was clean she washed our clothes and laid them out to dry. We had no choice but to huddle under the blankets and cling to each other bare-bodied and -souled until the sun came up and our clothes were dry.

We ate the last of our food and rode out of our reverie and on into the village where she would begin her new life.

I didn’t dare kiss her when we were naked under the blankets and burning with lust. I waited until we could read the shapes of the dusty village on the horizon before I stopped the horse and pulled her off. I held her for a long time. Even then I didn’t mean to kiss her. I was too committed to preserving her lawful innocence. But then I saw that a kiss would serve her better.

It was a sadder, more tearful, and more serious kiss than it would have been a few hours earlier. I savored the feeling of her body for the last time with a heavy notion of what was to come. I knew what I’d taken. I knew what I’d get to keep, and I also knew the price I’d pay.

“I’ll see you again,” she said to me. Her face was resigned, but I saw tears, too.

I agreed sincerely and ardently, though I didn’t mean it in exactly the way she did.

“You’ll come back here someday.”

“I promise I will.”

By returning to Pergamum about a week later I knew I was taking a risk, but I didn’t want to back down. I couldn’t move away. I wouldn’t become another person. There’d be time enough for that. I told my mother I would come back, and I did. I found my brothers. I settled them with her in her small house. I gave them each money and a few items that would be easy to hide and hard to steal. I did each of these things with a sense of finality, as I look back.

Leaving my mother’s house on the third night, I can’t say I was surprised by my brother’s ambush. In hindsight, it would have been surprising not to see him following me into a dark street. It happened quickly.

I was prepared for a face-to-face confrontation, but he was angrier and lower than that. He struck from behind. He put a knife in my back and again in my neck, and I died painfully.

As I died, I felt the end of that life much harder than I expected. I found myself hoping my mother would never know what happened to me. I thought I was prepared for death, but I wasn’t. Only as I bled away did I understand all that I was losing. I was losing Sophia and my family and myself, too. I would no longer be the person she trusted and loved.

I never had so much to lose. I never lived or died like that again. As much as I longed to get back to her, a part of me hoped that this, at last, would be the end of it.

I was just relieved to find her there. The widow had died, but Sophia was safe. She was kind enough to invite me into her little house and feed me tea and bread and honey. There was no sign of any husband or child, but there were lovely weavings on every wall and surface. I knew she had made them. I recognized our joint history in the flowering trees from the garden in Pergamum and the beautiful horse, the Arabian, on which we had ridden to this village.

She sat across from me at a little wooden table. The candlelight and the fabrics made it feel like the inside of a jewel box. I was with her and looking at her and also a stranger to her and missing her painfully. I saw her through old eyes and felt old things, and my child body didn’t know what to do with them. Rarely have I felt a disjuncture between memory and body as confusing as that. I don’t know what I wanted from her. She was the same person, and I was different.

She asked about me, naturally, and as I talked she was struck by me; I could see that.

“How do you know my language?” she asked me, puzzled.

“I learned it as I traveled,” I said, but she didn’t look entirely convinced.

I wanted to tell her more, but I couldn’t. I didn’t make sense to anyone. I knew that. It would make her instantly distrustful and remote from me, and I ached to be close in the old way.

She said I should stay the night and be on my way the next day. The blanket she laid out for me was the same one we had slept under together when I was older and she was younger and she was my brother’s wife. I was not equal to the smell of that blanket.

She sat with me on the little pallet and rubbed my back with great tenderness, almost like she could remember. Because I was eleven and lonely and holding far too many memories, I cried into my arm and hoped she didn’t see.

When I looked upward in the morning light I saw the old curling piece of parchment pinned on the wall. It was the sketch I’d made for her of my baptistery mosaics. The garden and the apple tree and, of course, the snake.

“Who made that?” I asked her, pointing to it as she fed me a breakfast that must have used up most of her pantry. I always hated asking false questions, but I couldn’t help myself.

She looked at the drawing thoughtfully. “A man I knew,” she said, looking down.

“What happened to him?”

She shook her head, and her face contorted. She braced her chin to keep it steady.

“I don’t know. He said he would come back here someday, but I am almost sure he was killed.” The sadness in her face was as much as I could take.

“He will come back,” I told her tearfully.

She shook her head. “I don’t know if I can wait any longer.”

I realized what I had done, and I was ashamed. I had given her false hope. She had believed in me, and I had disappointed her. She couldn’t see the canvas as I could. It was selfish of me to promise her something she couldn’t see.

“He didn’t forget you. He’ll find you again, but it might take longer than you thought.”

She looked at me oddly. “That’s what he said, too.”

But when I got there I saw that the craggy hillside was blackened in places, and a new, larger house now stood where her little house had been. Most of the village was newly built and unrecognizable. I finally found the priest in his stone church, one of the few familiar structures.

“We had a terrible fire,” he explained to me.

I could barely listen as he told me how they’d lost most of their houses and almost half of the villagers.

“What about Sophia?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I went back to the site of her house and found the new occupants. “Was there anything left from the fire?” I asked them desperately.

There was nothing. Aimless, I went into the desert, retracing the route I had taken with her from Pergamum, but on foot and alone. I felt the bending weight of my memory as I walked. She was gone, and everything she’d touched was gone. Her weavings, the blanket, my sketches. All of it was lost without a trace. It was up to me to carry it forward or let it be gone forever.