The Wedding of Anna F. Read Free Page A

spite of all the gadgets people have these days it still isn’t possible to travel back in time? To make things more clear? Why must it still be that the only thing we ever have to move through, in any direction, is each other?
    *
    HE SITS BACK AND rests his notepad on his lap. His voice crosses the short distance between us with an easy, confident lilt. Bardawil. When I read it I thought it sounded like bide-a-while. But he is not Scottish. No, not that.
    “Your assistant just told me it’s your birthday.” He smiles and gestures to the flowers and the cards on the mantel. “Congratulations. And thank you for having me out today.”
    “You’re welcome, Mr. Bardawil. Absolutely. I wanted you to be here. It’s a funny thing, though, isn’t it? To say congratulations on a birthday, I mean. It’s not as though we generally accomplish anything on the day.” Although on this one I would try to.
    “Except to go on breathing.” He smiles.
    “True enough.”
    “But I do need to thank you again for helping me with my project. Your assistant mentioned that you sometimes have trouble… Ah, you do understand why I’m here?”
    “Yes. Of course. You want to get into contact with people who believe they have been reincarnated. But as I told you in my e-mail, I do not believe I have been reincarnated. I believe I have simply rediscovered myself.”
    “Yes. And has anyone come to visit you before about this ‘discovery’ that you have made? Have you talked to anyone about your recovered past life?”
    “No, as I mentioned in my e-mail. They couldn’t. I only discovered myself a few weeks ago.”
    “I see. Do you mind if I start recording now?” He takes something slim as a cigarette lighter out of his jacket pocket. Another one of those modern phones.
    “Oh.” I make a show of leaning forward, over my glasses, for a better look. “Please do.” Let us start. Remake history. Ignite.
    “If you’re ready and comfortable then, why don’t we begin, since your assistant explained you have a party to host later on. Lots of people coming?” he asks easily, adjusting the phone on the table between us. “Do you have lots of family?”
    He pulls a mechanical pencil out of his breast pocket. How nice, I think, that they still use both the pencil and the recorder. Just as my reporter-lover used to do. Because they are afraid, afraid that they won’t remember properly. Or that something will happen to the words.
    “No. I have no immediate family, Mr. Bardawil. Not living, in any case.”
    “You were adopted, as you told me in your e-mail.”
    “Yes.”
    “I was able to do a bit of background work on you before I came today. I pulled a bit about you from the Times archives. You were once very well known, the only survivor of a major disaster. As someone very, very lucky. And now you believe you have been born again.”
    “No. Not exactly. Not born again. After all these years, my memory has finally returned to me, from before that time, before that disaster. And when you find your memory, you see, you want to share it. You want to produce evidence of it. I was a lawyer.” A believer in evidence.
    “You said you suffered trauma during the Second World War. You were found after it was over, in a refugee camp, with no memory.”
    “You are almost right. Not a refugee camp. A kibbutz. There were many refugees there, however.” I fold my hands in my lap and tip my good ear to him, giving him my warm-the-jury nod. We need to become good friends, and quickly. If he is going to work for me. If he is going to be my advocate, out there. “Even then, though, I—it—wasn’t all a blank. I remember my birthday, for instance. The date and year, June 12, 1929. Like a little drumbeat, pounding in my head. And I knew my first language. Dutch. An identity is like spit, you see. Once you have it, you can’t get rid of it. You’re tasting it all the time, even if you don’t know you’re tasting it; you can’t feel it. But