I was born near Bucharest, in Montenegro, twice outside of Leipzig, in the Dordogne. I picked up a number of languages and skills along the way, as you might imagine. I seem not to dip too far south or climb very far north. I’ve been born in Africa only once, in the east, in what is now Mozambique, and never have I felt more blessed or forsaken than in that beautiful, remorseless place. I still dream of the darkness of my hands sometimes; it’s part of who I am. And then there was that one cold life in Denmark. But otherwise I seem to track along the fat haunch of the northern hemisphere.

I found Sophia only briefly at the end of a short, crushing life in Greece. I had traveled to Athens from Montenegro on a trade mission. I was a statesman and a merchant then, in control of a large fortune. It was one of a spate of lives in which I amassed power and money because I could, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It took a half-dozen of those lives for me to recognize the difference between a means and an end.

I was pretty satisfied with myself at that time. I had a fat wife and two beautiful mistresses, one young and one old. I had a castle overlooking Dalmatia and hundreds of artworks I socked away and never looked at. I never forgot about Sophia, but the idea of her had grown dimmer in my mind.

So there I was on a street in Athens in all my finery, surrounded by an entourage of men who gasped at my wit and laughed at my jokes, when I caught sight of her. She was at the end of an alley, dark-skinned and black-eyed and huddled over a hunk of bread. She’d probably stolen it, because as I walked toward her she began to run. I ran after her, leaving my attendants in confusion. I was pretty fat and gouty myself at the time, and it took me several minutes to catch her. When I did she was crying. I reached for her, and she felt as though she was made of sticks and rags.

“It’s okay,” I told her soothingly in an array of languages until she seemed to understand. “I’m your friend.” She was probably six or seven, but she looked much younger because she was starving. She didn’t want to come with me, so I sat with her there. I wanted to buy her food and drink and clothing, but I was afraid to leave her, knowing she would disappear if I turned my head.

We sat there for a long time. I talked to her and told her stories about her and me until the sun ended and the moon began. I held her until she fell asleep. Her heart was skipping along so rapidly and her breathing was so quick, I put my hand to her head and realized she was burning with fever. I brought her back to the villa where I stayed and called the finest Arab doctor in the city. When we laid her on a bed we discovered that some grisly accident had befallen her. Her left arm was almost completely severed above her elbow. The wound was badly wrapped and gravely infected. I nursed her and sat with her and watched her die two days later. There was nothing to be done.

I didn’t find her for a long time after that. Not for almost five hundred years. I was afraid that her soul had finished. The kind of life she’d suffered would be hard to rally from. You see, while some souls go out with the achievement of wholeness or balance, others end out of pure discouragement. As I’ve said, it’s desire more than anything else that keeps us coming back for more. When your business is finished for better or worse, that is usually the last of you.

In my shameless heart, I’ve always hoped that Sophia and I would become whole together. I hate that phrase (along with the term “soul mates”), but I can’t think of a better way to say it. I’ve always thought I could erase my sins and make myself a better person through her. I’ve had the gall to think I could love her better than anyone else could. I’ve always feared she would find completion without me, and I’d be around, stupid and unperfected, forever.

Finally, I came to England. On the last day of the nineteenth century, I was born in the English countryside, near Nottingham. I was fairly delighted to find myself there. Though the sun never set on the British Empire, I had not been her subject before. My mother took care of her children and her garden. I had three sisters, one of whom had been a very dear uncle to me in France and another who had been my wife, which was awkward.

My father worked in a textile factory, and as a hobby he raced pigeons. He kept a loft behind the house and raised them from stock that had been in his family for more than two centuries. I wasn’t interested in the racing or the hunting but was captivated by the flying and especially the homing capabilities of the birds. I was also fascinated by the prospect of flying men.

Percy Pilcher, the late glider pilot, was an early hero of mine, and when I was nine years old I remember excitedly following the progress of Wilbur and Orville Wright, begging my father to take us to Le Mans for the first public demonstration.

When the Great War began I fantasized about training pigeons to carry messages and medicine across enemy lines, and in fact the British and every side in that war relied on pigeons, but I was young and strong and came from the working class—ideal frontline fodder. I was a loyal subject of the crown and so eager to do my bit I would have enlisted as a powder monkey at sixteen if that’s what it took, and probably gotten myself killed at Passchendaele or Verdun. As it was, I had to wait until 1918 to join up as an infantryman, and I didn’t manage to confront death until the second battle of the Somme later that year. It feels very recent to me.

There’s a lot I could say about that time, but I’ll tell you I was both gassed and shot in that battle and left unconscious in the infamous mud, the closest I’ve come to death without quite dying. When I woke up I found myself blinking in sunshine, light streaming through a massive antique window. At the sight of my stirring—my first sign of life in several days, I was later told—a young woman in a white nurse’s cap rushed over to me. I blinked and refocused to see a face hovering over mine of such loveliness and deep familiarity I thought I dreamed her. I would have believed I were in heaven, had I not experienced the actual afterlife (pre-life, inter-life) so many times.

She put her hand on mine, and somehow I thought that meant she remembered me, too. “Sophia,” I gasped blearily, my heart surging in confused ecstasy. “It’s me.”

Her look was not so much recognition as pity. I was half dead and disoriented but not so disoriented that I couldn’t tell. “My name is Constance,” she whispered to me. I could feel the tiny bursts of her breath on my skin. “I am glad you woke up.”

It was her. It really was. Was she truly glad? I wondered. Was it possible I was familiar to her? Did she have any idea how important she was to me?

“Dr. Burke will be so pleased. We had another boy in your unit wake yesterday, and now you.”

I was another boy in hospital, I realized. I was potentially one fewer death. I absorbed her pretty accent and her neat white smock. “Are you a nurse?” I asked her.

“Not a full nurse,” she said, both modest and proud. “But training to be.”

Her manner was so familiar and so sweet to me. I wanted to tell her so badly, but I didn’t want to send her hurrying in another direction before I even really got to look at her.

“Where are we?” I asked. I raised my eyes to the large window and the elegantly coffered ceiling.

“We’re at Hastonbury. Kent.”

“In England?”

“Yes, in England.”

“It looks like a palace,” I said, unable to catch much breath.

“It’s just a country house,” she said. Her eyes darted downward and then back to me. “But it’s a hospital now.”

I realized I was breathless and my chest ached terribly. Other aches filed up to the surface. I tried to remember what had happened to me. In all the years I’d been involved in war, phosgene and mustard gas were not part of it. As elated as I was to see Sophia, I suddenly feared how she was seeing me. “Am I in one piece?” I asked.

She looked me over. “A bit banged up, but all of your parts seem to be in their proper places,” she said. There was a hint of nervy good humor there, I felt almost sure.

“No burns?”

She winced almost imperceptibly. “Some blistering but no serious burns. You’re very fortunate in that.”

I tried moving my legs. It brought a wash of pain, but they were still under my body and still in my command. I could feel her hand on mine. No numbness or paralysis there. I started to feel hopeful. I had Sophia right there with me, and I wasn’t dead or disfigured.

She put her hand on my forehead, and I felt that my skin was slick with sweat. Her tenderness gave me another kind of ache in the chest and the throat. Did she know me at all?

“Come, Constance. Get on with your rotation,” said an older woman, probably a full nurse, who was nowhere near as pretty in voice, looks, or manner as Sophia.

Sophia looked up suddenly. “Patient . . .” She looked down at the chart. “D. Weston has woken, ma’am,” she said eagerly. “Shall I tell Dr. Burke?”

The nurse didn’t appear to find this news as exciting as Sophia did. “I’ll tell him,” she said, looking at me critically.

“Yes, Nurse Foster,” Sophia replied.

I hated for Sophia to take her hand from mine, and I hated it when she walked to the next bed and put it on the forehead of the next boy in my row. My neck hurt too badly to turn it far, but that much I saw. I could hear how she spoke to him and how his spirits rose at the sight of her.

Indeed, I was another smashed-up boy in hospital, and she was the tenderhearted nurse in training who made us think of love and gave us all hope. She didn’t know she was Sophia, and she didn’t know I was me. But we were in the same place at the same time in our lives, and for that alone I was inexpressibly buoyant and a few hundred years’ worth of grateful.