After Dachau Read Free Page B

their lives during the time when she was alive. When all this was done, the two records would be compiled and compared by an independent panel of scientists, and a new round of examinations would begin in order to resolve as far as possible the discrepancies and conflicts revealed. Not until all this was done would anyone dream of introducing Mary Anne to the Prescotts in the flesh—and even then it wouldn’t be designed as a festivity for the girl (who by this time would probably be a young woman) but as a further and final opportunity to gather evidence.
    Assembled in this way, the case would be compelling (which it otherwise certainly is not). With coincidence, blind luck, collusion, and deception decisively ruled out, skeptics would be hard pressed to suggest any other “ordinary” explanation for the wonder. If Mary Anne truly had no normal access to ten thousand items of thrice-verified information about the Prescotts during a twenty-year period before her own life began, how explain this marvel except as an instance of reincarnation?
    The case as it stands convinces only those who are already convinced or who want to be convinced. When I arrived on the scene, there wasn’t a single case in the files of We Live Again that did more than that. Not one even came close to doing more than that.
    The Fenshaws understood this as well as anyone (and better than most of their supporters). “Someday we’ll have it, though,” they said.
    They called it the Golden Case. The Golden Case wouldn’t convert the scoffers, but it would certainly give them something to deal with, something they couldn’t just wave away as superstitious nonsense.

I LEARNED SOMETHING about obsession during my time with the Fenshaws. I learned it isn’t madness or even foolishness, though madness and foolishness have given it a bad name. How could anyone who wasn’t obsessed compose a symphony or write a thousand-page novel? How could anyone who wasn’t obsessed cross an uncharted ocean in a seventy-foot sailboat? No one sneers at people like these, but they will sneer at someone whose obsession drives them to fill a house with starving cats or to build a half-size model of the Brandenburg Gate out of matchsticks. I almost feel that someone who lives without an obsession has a poor sort of life.
    I wasn’t obsessed with anything when I joined the Fenshaws in Tunis, their home. The possibility of reincarnationfascinated me, but I was neither a believer nor a nonbeliever. I was there to satisfy my curiosity one way or the other, and if I’d somehow managed to do that immediately, I probably would’ve gone on to other things without a backward look.
    One can’t plausibly begin to do fieldwork without being familiar with the classic cases, and the Fenshaws had been feeding me these for a year before I arrived. In a way, these were more frustrating than the rest, because each would have been profoundly persuasive if someone had taken the trouble to demonstrate with reasonable certainty that they weren’t just instances of people seeing what they wanted to see. After the event, however, no test can be run that will reveal whether what you have is gold or pyrite.
    My first investigation took me to Johannesburg at the other end of the continent, where (we’d been told) there lived a young man who one morning woke up speaking a strange language that was finally determined to be ancient Persian. The young man, Rudolph Kintmacher by name, mystified all with uncanny tales of the court of Darius I, the greatest of the Achaemenid kings, which (as far as anyone could tell) were absolutely true. With this, I learned the first rule of reincarnation research, which is: If you don’t investigate the silly stories, then you might as well just pack up and go home. I investigated and found it was just as silly as it sounded.
    The facts (which Rudolph freely provided) bore little resemblance to what we’d heard. To begin with, he hadn’t “woken up one