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.I savored the feeling of her body for the last time with a heavy notion of what was to come.I knew what I’d taken.I knew what I’d get to keep, and I also knew the price I’d pay.I LEFT SOPHIA in a tiny village where the houses were built into the sides of the hills.I put her in the care of an older woman, a widow, who was all too happy to take Sophia and call her niece.I knew this woman because she had been my mother once.I knew I could trust her.I left Sophia with money and what I hoped would be the safety of a new identity.“I’ll see you again,” she said to me.Her face was resigned, but I saw tears, too.I agreed sincerely and ardently, though I didn’t mean it in exactly the way she did.“You’ll come back here someday.”“I promise I will.”By returning to Pergamum about a week later I knew I was taking a risk, but I didn’t want to back down.I couldn’t move away.I wouldn’t become another person.There’d be time enough for that.I told my mother I would come back, and I did.I found my brothers.I settled them with her in her small house.I gave them each money and a few items that would be easy to hide and hard to steal.I did each of these things with a sense of finality, as I look back.Leaving my mother’s house on the third night, I can’t say I was surprised by my brother’s ambush.In hindsight, it would have been surprising not to see him following me into a dark street.It happened quickly.I was prepared for a face-to-face confrontation, but he was angrier and lower than that.He struck from behind.He put a knife in my back and again in my neck, and I died painfully.As I died, I felt the end of that life much harder than I expected.I found myself hoping my mother would never know what happened to me.I thought I was prepared for death, but I wasn’t.Only as I bled away did I understand all that I was losing.I was losing Sophia and my family and myself, too.I would no longer be the person she trusted and loved.I never had so much to lose.I never lived or died like that again.As much as I longed to get back to her, a part of me hoped that this, at last, would be the end of it.IT WASN’T THE END, of course.It was, as Winston Churchill might say, the end of the beginning.I went back to that small village near Cappadocia to find her again.But I was eleven, traveling all the way from the Caucasus on my own.I was just relieved to find her there.The widow had died, but Sophia was safe.She was kind enough to invite me into her little house and feed me tea and bread and honey.There was no sign of any husband or child, but there were lovely weavings on every wall and surface.I knew she had made them.I recognized our joint history in the flowering trees from the garden in Pergamum and the beautiful horse, the Arabian, on which we had ridden to this village.She sat across from me at a little wooden table.The candlelight and the fabrics made it feel like the inside of a jewel box.I was with her and looking at her and also a stranger to her and missing her painfully.I saw her through old eyes and felt old things, and my child body didn’t know what to do with them.Rarely have I felt a disjuncture between memory and body as confusing as that.I don’t know what I wanted from her.She was the same person, and I was different.She asked about me, naturally, and as I talked she was struck by me; I could see that.“How do you know my language?” she asked me, puzzled.“I learned it as I traveled,” I said, but she didn’t look entirely convinced.I wanted to tell her more, but I couldn’t.I didn’t make sense to anyone.I knew that.It would make her instantly distrustful and remote from me, and I ached to be close in the old way.She said I should stay the night and be on my way the next day.The blanket she laid out for me was the same one we had slept under together when I was older and she was younger and she was my brother’s wife.I was not equal to the smell of that blanket.She sat with me on the little pallet and rubbed my back with great tenderness, almost like she could remember.Because I was eleven and lonely and holding far too many memories, I cried into my arm and hoped she didn’t see.When I looked upward in the morning light I saw the old curling piece of parchment pinned on the wall.It was the sketch I’d made for her of my baptistery mosaics.The garden and the apple tree and, of course, the snake.“Who made that?” I asked her, pointing to it as she fed me a breakfast that must have used up most of her pantry.I always hated asking false questions, but I couldn’t help myself.She looked at the drawing thoughtfully.“A man I knew,” she said, looking down.“What happened to him?”She shook her head, and her face contorted.She braced her chin to keep it steady.“I don’t know.He said he would come back here someday, but I am almost sure he was killed.” The sadness in her face was as much as I could take.“He will come back,” I told her tearfully.She shook her head.“I don’t know if I can wait any longer.”I realized what I had done, and I was ashamed.I had given her false hope.She had believed in me, and I had disappointed her.She couldn’t see the canvas as I could.It was selfish of me to promise her something she couldn’t see.“He didn’t forget you.He’ll find you again, but it might take longer than you thought.”She looked at me oddly.“That’s what he said, too.”I WENT BACK to Sophia’s village for the last time when I was nineteen.I was bursting with intention to prove to Sophia who I really was, that I really had come back as I’d promised.I planned to live with her for the rest of our lives.I was ready and armed to combat her every doubt and protest.I prepared the words to convince her that the difference in our ages didn’t matter.I spent years and miles rehearsing these conversations and dreaming of all the lovemaking that would follow.But when I got there I saw that the craggy hillside was blackened in places, and a new, larger house now stood where her little house had been.Most of the village was newly built and unrecognizable
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