The Reincarnationist Papers - Origins Prequel Page 4

  “I’m sorry, Marina, I still don’t understand.”

  “All the Romani know each other, especially the musicians among them. If we can find some of them who were in Zurich, then that can be another point of proof for you,” she said as though she didn’t need proof and was already convinced.

  I thought it over and slowly nodded. “And you can research this because most of the Romani are Bulgarian and because you have information on all Bulgarians everywhere?”

  “No, Eric. We can research this because they are here. They are here in Rome now. I have to work with them to get their paperwork in order.” She stood up and stretched out her long frame. “Let’s go, Eric.”

  “Go? Go where?” I asked.

  “The Ex-Mattitoio. They are camped there.”

  “The old stockyards and slaughterhouse?” I asked, trying to remember the sprawling compound of bare holding pens and long empty warehouses on the south side of Rome that had once been one of the largest killing floors in Europe and now sat abandoned and derelict.

  “Yes, the Romani are there, camped next to the communists and anarchists who have taken over and occupied the compound. Have you ever been there on a Saturday night?” she asked invitingly.

  “No, I only saw it during the day when I did an article about how the city is planning to redevelop it.”

  “Come with me,” she urged and took my hand in hers. “It will be fun. I will do all the talking. I will find out if any of them have been to Zurich, and I will show them the tattoo symbol.”

  I felt a jolt of excitement at the warm touch of her hand, but I had been warned by everyone to avoid them. “What about the notebooks? I am worried something might happen to them.”

  “Don’t worry about that. They know who I am and who I am with,” she said with dismissive confidence. “We will be safe with them. Come, Eric,” she said and tugged firmly on my hand.

  “All right,” I said as I started walking with her, holding on to her hand for few more seconds until she started clapping with excitement. “Let’s walk there, Marina. I want to get a slice of pizza and another glass of wine.”

  “We can if you want to,” she said as we walked up the long ramp that exited the Forum, “but I plan to eat and drink and probably dance with them. Trust me. You may want to wait.”

  “Is it okay to just show up?” I asked, still holding onto some concern. “I mean, will they have enough to share?”

  She looked over at me with an exasperated look, as though I had much to learn. “They have nothing, Eric. And yet, they always have more than enough. You will see.”

  Chapter 5

  We started walking through the quiet neighborhood, and my thoughts kept fixating on what she had been able to translate for me so far. “It seems to me, Marina, that you are convinced of Evan’s story,” I said, hoping to pry more information out of her.

  “I am,” she said without hesitation. “If you could read it in Bulgarian the way I can, you would know. His voice is true, I know it, and in time you will know it too.”

  “If it is true, I mean if all of it is true – Evan, the other ones, the Cognomina group in Zurich – what do you think it means?” I asked.

  “I have been thinking about this as I have been reading. It is the real question, is it not?” she replied. “I think about it on two levels,” she continued. “For religion, it could have a big impact, but only if there was proof, like real proof, and I imagine that could be why the group of them in the Cognomina are a secret society. Perhaps they know it is best to keep this information to themselves. Perhaps they know this from experience. For individuals like them, I think it is much more interesting, especially if you remembered more lives like the woman, Poppy.”

  I returned her glance and nodded. “There are some questions that hit me when I think about this. Marina, you said that Evan, Poppy, and the others like them are born normal but start to remember their past lives, all of them when they reach the age of seventeen or eighteen. Imagine if that happened to you, would you think of yourself as Marina who remembered these other lives before yours, or would you think of yourself as the person who lived before and was now reincarnated in this new body, as Marina?”

  “I thought about this. I think this is an excellent question, and Evan and Poppy talk about it but only for a moment. I think it would depend on how many lives there are. Think about it, Eric. What Evan, Poppy, and the other twenty-eight are talking about is reincarnation, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I think the accumulation of experience would be the key to how you identify yourself. Imagine that you are Evan. You are a normal American boy until you begin to remember a past life or two, and you think, wow, that’s weird. But imagine that you are Poppy, who has had this experience of remembering eight times. She would probably remember that she had remembered before and that she had been in a sort of transition period during her late teenage years before. And when you remember, again and again, each time that new confused teenager’s young personality becomes a smaller fraction of all the collected, transcending lives that combine to make you. Does that make sense, or does that sound weird?”

  I was impressed that she had thought it out so far. “It does, but for me, it only really works if the remembered lives are consecutive and continuous.”

  “And they are,” Marina interrupted. “Poppy talks about that with him when she shows him all the memorial plaques in her crypt for all the lives she remembers, all the lives she led. She feels like she is the first person that she can remember and that this person gets reborn again and again through reincarnation. But Evan is not there yet. He still thinks of himself as Evan, who remembers Vasili.”

  “I was thinking about this earlier. The dates of Poppy’s remembered lives were continuous,” I said as we walked, “and they were unbroken. I think that is probably important somehow and would affect how they felt about themselves and their potential future lives.”

  “You’re right. Poppy talks about it with him that they are all the same – that once you remember one life, once you come back or reincarnate one time, then you keep remembering, you keep coming back, you keep reincarnating. Once you remember more than one or two lives, you would begin to identify as the older personalities. But what’s really important is that you would have confidence, complete confidence, that you will reincarnate or live again. That confidence in your future lives that await you would be like…” she left the sentence unfinished as if unable to utter the word.

  “Immortality,” I finished for her. “They would be in effect, infinite. You would know that your mind, your experiences, your memories would survive and be waiting for you in some new and strange body.”

  “Exactly,” she stated. “My head is spinning with the consequences of it.”

  “Mine too,” I said, trying to wrap my head around it. “Marina, do you think that knowing you would come back and reincarnate would change the way you would live?”

  “You mean if I was like them?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose it would remove risk,” she said thoughtfully. “And it would remove worry about making the wrong choices. You could just make different choices next time.”

  “And the next time, you would have the benefit of more wisdom, another lifetime’s worth of wisdom.”

  “That is the thing that keeps coming into my mind,” Marina said, “how wise would you be with the experience of many lives?”

  “I wonder if I would make better choices or if I would make the same choices or mistakes lifetime after lifetime?” I asked the question to Marina, but I realized I was asking it of myself. “How would you live your life now, or what would you do differently if you knew, really knew, that you would come back and reincarnate?”

  “If I knew, really knew,” she started, “then any mistakes I made in this life would have no consequence for me. I could just do it over in the next life if any decision were a mistake. And a life without any consequence would be…”
>
  “A dangerous one?” I offered.

  She paused for a moment to finish her thought, “I was going to say a free one. I think if you could live without consequences, or even the fear of any consequences, then you would be free, totally free. Why would you say dangerous?”

  “If there are no consequences for your actions, then what are your boundaries, what are your limits?”

  “Why even have limits?” she countered. “Why not live your life without them if you could? Just be free.”

  “I just can’t help but wonder if freedom from consequence would make for better men or better monsters.”

  She seemed to take in the question and did not answer as we walked the quiet streets of the Testaccio neighborhood.

  “You know there is one consequence for them if this is real,” I added, “is that it seems like they reincarnate as either sex. The plaques in Poppy’s crypt were for both men and women, so she must have the knowledge and experience of being both a man and a woman.”

  “She does,” Marina confirmed. “She talks about it to Evan and compares the differences. She said that she preferred being a woman.”

  “And what about you?” I asked, looking over at her. “Do you think you would prefer to be a man or a woman if you could come back in a new body?”

  “A man,” she declared without hesitation. “I would want to be a man. I am so tall, tall like a man, and it is hard for me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Do you know how tall you are?” she prompted.

  “Sure, I don’t know in metric, but I am six feet tall.”

  “No, that is not how to measure it. You think you are six feet tall, but you are really taller than 90% of the people in the world, and I know because I am also this tall. It is not right, not proper for a woman. It makes it difficult in many ways. I feel like I have one benefit of a man - I get to look down on the world, but I would like the other benefits too.”

  I felt bad that my question had highlighted something so sensitive for her, and I asked another question that had been burning in me since the afternoon. “What era in history would you like to have lived in?”

  “For me, it would be the renaissance,” she answered. “Think about it. Everyone was coming out of a dark age. They were rediscovering the science, philosophy, and art of the ancients. I would want to be at the head of one of Florence’s elite families like the Medicis or the Sforzas. What about you?” she asked.

  “Do you see that hill up there?” I asked her and pointed to the outline of a tall hill still visible against the last colors of the sunset. “That is Monte Testaccio, and on the other side of it was the river port for ancient Rome. That mountain is made from trash, but a very specific type of trash.”

  “It is an ancient landfill?” Marina asked.

  “Yes, but only for clay pots that held olive oil. They imported many things into Rome from all parts of the empire: fruits from the Middle East, wine from Greece, grain from France, and olive oil from Spain. That mountain is made only from the discarded clay pots that held olive oil, tens of millions of them. The Romans could not recycle those pots because the residual oil would turn rancid, so they had to dump them. Marina, I would want to be alive and remember that time when ancient Rome was that strong, that vibrant that they needed a dump for olive oil containers that created a mountain,” I said as we walked along its base.

  “I knew it would be Rome,” she answered with confidence. “What experience or skill from that time do you think you would find most useful today?”

  “Other than being a Latin teacher?” I joked.

  “Yes, besides that,” she laughed.

  “I think if I lived then that I would be better on a horse than I am now,” I paused a moment to consider the question, “but I think the real skill from that time was public speaking. There was no television, no radio, not even printed books then. Public speaking was the media of that time, and they must have been well-practiced masters of it.”

  “I knew that too,” she said with a smile.

  “It is an interesting question, but if they do exist and if they do have total recall of past lives, then your question misses half of the point.”

  “What half?” she asked.

  “The future half,” I answered. “If they know that they will reincarnate and come back again based on their experience, then do you imagine that they think of what lessons, skills, and experiences from their current life they would like to leave to their future selves?”

  Marina walked without speaking, as though pondering the question. “Like an inheritance of skills.”

  “Exactly. Marina, what do you know today that you think a new eighteen-year-old you would want to know or be able to do?”

  “It would be like leaving a treasure, but leaving it for yourself,” she pondered. “Well, speaking Bulgarian, like in the example of Evan, would be one. What about you?”

  “Being a writer would be one, knowing how to fix things would be another – I am a good mechanic.”

  “Eric, do you think that you have those skills now because you learned those things in a previous life but that you are not able to remember it the way that they do?”

  I thought about her question and nodded, “now you are on to something, Marina.”

  “I’m an excellent cook, but no one ever taught me to do it,” she said. “Perhaps I know it from a past life that I cannot remember.” She looked over at me and continued, “I have thought this before, I mean before this week and meeting you and your notebooks.”

  Chapter 6

  I heard the distant sound of dance music as we approached the triple arches that marked the entrance to the wide-open courtyard that was once the cattle pens for Rome’s old slaughterhouse. We walked through the right arch under a majestic marble sculpture of a muscular man wrestling to control a bull, and stepping through was like entering another world. Rome's ordered streets gave way to graffiti covering every square meter of each abandoned building and crumbling wall. The throb of techno music echoed from a derelict building that now pulsed with strobing dance lights shooting through empty window frames into the night. A Soviet flag fluttered on a makeshift flagpole atop a two-story stone turret that had once acted as a control tower directing doomed herds of bovine traffic. I stood and watched as ravers intermingled with anarchists and leaders of student unions who had taken over the sprawling compound as their own.

  Marina took my hand again and pulled me to the left, toward a collection of caravan campers parked in neat rows at the far edge of the last neglected building. I walked with her and could see that fires burned inside old oil barrels at regular intervals between the narrow rows of tow-behind campers.

  “One hundred, or even fifty years ago, they would have all lived in colorful wagons. Now the Romani people live in these,” she said as she walked straight into their camp.

  I stayed close to her as she walked, nodding back to the secretive Romani faces who looked out at her. I heard another type of music coming from the far end of their camp ahead of us, like American folk music or Appalachian bluegrass but devilishly fast and hauntingly melancholic. I tried to keep my eyes on Marina and follow her direction as I felt myself being drawn deeper into an unknown world.

  When I did glance to one side or the other, I saw the same Gypsy women with infants that I had seen a hundred times begging for change in the metro and train stations. Except now, their faces had lost their plaintive daytime grieving and were now hardened in a forge of flickering firelight into a collective pride usually hidden from the world. Men sat in folding chairs in groups of three or four in front of their caravans. Women wore colorful skirts that had seemed dirty during the day but now blazed as they carried plates of steaming food down the rows to their hungry families. Marina continued to walk toward the music and a gathering crowd that either danced or held empty plates in their hands.

  “Our timing is good. They are eating now, but we should let them finish first.”

&nb
sp; “Have you been here before?” I asked.

  She continued walking up to the back of a ring of people who watched three men dancing with their arms interlocked in front of a band of musicians. “Yes, I have been here before a few times but only once before on the weekend. They might be a bit worried about me being here, but I know how to put them at ease and let them know I am not here on business.”

  I stood next to her and felt like we were both taller than 90% of the people in the circle. There was no hiding us. “Wait here a minute,” she said.

  I held my backpack straps tight in my hands and watched as she walked over and began speaking to two men in Bulgarian. I saw her point to the back of her right hand where Evan had described the trademark tattoo of the members of the Cognomina. Both men shrugged their shoulders as she spoke. She eventually pulled a green five thousand lire note from her pocket and handed it to one of the men who retreated into a nearby caravan and emerged with an open bottle of red wine for her. She raised the bottle in the air toward the faces in the crowd and then brought it to her lips. A few claps and shouts erupted from the circle as she drank.

  She walked back over to me and handed me the bottle. “Have some,” she offered.

  I took the bottle and drank. Three young men next to me cheered and raised their bottles in return.

  “I know those two men,” she started. “They are leaders in this group. I asked them about Zurich and people with the tattoo, but they didn’t know anything and said that I should ask the musicians when they stop to take their meal.”

  She took the bottle back and drank from it. “The music is great, isn’t it?” she asked as she took a few dancing steps around me.

  “Yes,” I replied. “But it feels old, like from another time. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, of course. We have this music everywhere in Bulgaria. And it is old, old, and unchanged.” She took another step that brought her lithe body up against mine. “Evan would have known this music,” she whispered next to my ear and then drifted back to arm’s length away from me.