My Name Is Memory Read Online Free PDF Page B

domestic life, but the idea transformed us. It made our hills a little grander and our food a little tastier and our children a little prettier because we fought for them. The able-bodied men in my family fought, albeit distantly, under the famous general Belisarius. He, more than anyone, gave the glory and shape to our lives, which were otherwise not glorious. My uncle, whom we revered, was killed on a campaign to put down a Berber uprising in North Africa. We had only enough information about his death to demonize North Africa and every soul contained therein. I later discovered my uncle was most likely stabbed to death by a comrade for stealing his chicken, but again, that was later.
    I sailed with my brother and a hundred other soldiers of the empire across the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa. We were inflamed by vengeance. Like many new souls, I was never better suited to being a soldier than I was in that life. I obeyed orders with absolute literalness. I didn’t question my superiors, not even in the privacy of my mind. I was fully committed, ready to kill, ready to die for my cause.
    If you had asked me why this or that Berber tribe, who shared none of our culture, religion, or language, had to die or remain part of Byzantium for a few years longer, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. We weren’t the first to conquer them and wouldn’t be the last, but I was a young man of faith. I didn’t need to know exactly the cause of my fervency. The fervency itself was the cause. And just as blindly as I believed in the rightness of my side, I believed in the black heart of my enemy. This is characteristic of a very young soul and evidence, though not proof, that it really was my first life. I hope so. It would be an atrocity to have stayed that stupid.
    In every life since that one, I’ve known from early on that I was different. I’ve known my interior life was something to hide. I have always kept apart, always shared little of myself except in the rarest cases. But that’s not how I was when I started.
    I was swelled up with eagerness for my first soldierly assignment, but we spent weeks, it seemed, making a camp civilized for our commander. We went to great and arbitrary lengths to make an African desert as comfortable to him as his hilltop home in Thrace. These are not the kinds of reflections I made at the time. I don’t know if I reflected on anything at all. Little did I know then how long I’d have to reflect and how long I’d be saddled with my regrets.
    Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms. This was yet another war when we mostly sat around gambling, bragging, getting drunk, and watching the meanest drunks pick fights—usually my brother in this case. It was almost identical to every other war I have fought in up to and including the Great War. The memorable parts, as in when you kill or get killed, take a very short amount of time.
    At last our assignment came. We were making a raid on an encampment a day’s march west of Leptis Magna. As the mission grew closer it became clear it wasn’t an army encampment so much as it was a village. A village, we were told, where the army was being quartered.
    “Is it a village of the Tuareg?” I asked with a shiny thirst for blood. It was the tribe I held responsible for killing my uncle.
    My direct superior was a good motivator. He knew the answer I wanted. “Of course.”
    I embarked on the raid with a knife and an unlit torch. I remember carrying the knife in my teeth, but that’s an emotional memory and not an actual one. I try to sift those out as well as I can, but there are exceptions, some more pleasurable than others.
    When I see myself in that life, it’s mostly from the outside in. It feels to me as though, without the awareness of my memory, I wasn’t me yet. This was an ordinary person who would become me, and I look at him from a distance. Maybe that’s what I do to live with it. I contrast