Free My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares Page B

into dry remoteness and strangled off.
    It was back then, as a child in the eighth century, that I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past. The present is over quickly, you might say, and it is, but man, it goes like a wrecking ball.
    I would sit at a certain crumbling altar overlooking the sea and try to imagine our city as it had been before the degradations. You wanted to think that history was a story of progress, but seeing what remained of Pergamum and the direction we were going, you just knew it wasn’t so.
    The first momentous occurrence of that life was the reappearance of my older brother from my first life in Antioch, returning to the role of older brother once more. That kind of thing occasionally happens, family members repeating from one life to another. Usually it’s devotion that keeps people together through lives, but the soul’s basic yearning for balance and resolution can sometimes bring a person back to confront a previous torment. I recognized this old brother with a sense of unease from when I was quite young. Every association with the burning of the village in North Africa was harrowing to me, but added to it was the enmity that had burst out between this old brother and me long ago, when I’d confessed to a superior—and later a priest—that we had raided the wrong village. It was my own relentless guilt that drove me to it, not hostility or vengeance, but my brother didn’t see it that way. From that first moment of recognition, when I was not more than two or three years old, I knew I needed to steer clear of him.
    He was called Joaquim now, and he stayed true to his early passions to become an enforcer of iconoclasm under Constantine, leaving our home and family in Pergamum at the age of seventeen. His mission was the destruction of religious art, the invasion of monasteries, and humiliation of monks. It’s no mystery how the old and beautiful works came to be destroyed.
    I was called Kyros then. In those days I struggled to consider myself by a new name each time. Later, I would answer to the name my parents gave me but think of myself by my old name. This was more disorienting than you can know. It’s hard enough to maintain your identity through a single life in a single body. Imagine dozens of lives and dozens of bodies in dozens of places among dozens of families, further complicated by dozens of deaths in between. Without my name, my story is no more than a long and haphazard tangle of memories.
    At times I wanted to give up the thread of my lengthening life. It felt too hard to hold on, to keep myself together as one person. I felt as though the past and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going. If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That’s all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we need those stories. I guess I do.
    Sometime after the turn of the last millennium, I began naming myself. Whatever my parents named me, I asked them to call me Daniel, the name I had at the very beginning. Some resisted, but all came around in some way at some time, because I didn’t really give them a choice.
    THE NIGHT I want to tell you about took place about 773. There are so many things I’ve seen that I could tell you about. But I am telling you a story, a love story, and I will try, with limited digressions, to hold on to my thread.
    This particular night I remember distinctly. I hadn’t seen my dreaded brother Joaquim in two years, and he was coming home. He had sent word a few weeks before that he had taken a wife and would bring her to us when he came. Our household was in a stir, as you might imagine. My brother was my parents’ eldest son, and though he was an awful person, he was gone so long we all thought better of him.
    Apart from my older brother, it was a good family I had