Auda

Auda is an Egyptian member of the Cognomina, a society of people who carry memories across successive lives. He appears at pivotal moments in Evan Michaels’s passage from candidate to accepted member: as a warm presence during the Ascension proceedings, as the maker of the society’s identifying tattoo, and as a benefactor who sets aside money for Evan’s possible return in another body. His contribution is at once ceremonial and practical. Auda gives the Cognomina’s continuity a visible mark, a human welcome, and a material promise that extends beyond one lifetime.

Identity and Place in the Cognomina

Auda is first identified by his Egyptian background and by the distinctive warmth of his manner. When he welcomes Evan back into the proceedings, his smile and unusual kindness bolster Evan’s confidence. Later, at the welcome gathering, Auda introduces himself directly and greets Evan with the words that amount to a welcome home. The movement from formal hearing to shared celebration matters: Auda helps present the Cognomina not only as a body that tests identity, but as a community prepared to receive someone it recognizes as one of its own.

Auda’s age and experience emerge through his account of earlier lives. He recalls living first in Scythia and then in West Africa, estimating that these journeys began about seven hundred years earlier. He does not claim exact dates; he explains that the years were not recorded where he lived those first two times. The uncertainty is itself a measure of the scale of his memory: Auda can name places across centuries while acknowledging that some details cannot be precisely fixed. His life gives an intimate human scale to the Cognomina’s history, which began centuries before Evan’s arrival.

The Ascension and Auda’s Role

Auda takes part in Evan’s Ascension, the process by which a returning person must persuade members who knew an earlier incarnation that the new body belongs to the same person. Evan is questioned about his past, including whether he remembers the name of the judge who convicted him in the life he lived as Vasili in 1946. Auda is among those addressing him during the proceedings, but the evidence does not identify him as the judge who asks that particular question or specify his vote in the final decision. The panel ultimately accepts Evan by four votes to one. Auda’s importance is clearest not in a claimed judicial action, but in what follows: he helps turn recognition into welcome.

The ceremony takes place in an underground grotto reached by a long, torch-lit staircase. The chamber’s stone columns, tiered gallery, and curtained space make the gathering feel removed from ordinary life. After the vote, the formal strain gives way to celebration, and Auda steps forward to introduce himself. His greeting helps bridge the distance between the solitary ordeal of proving a past life and the collective life Evan is being invited to rejoin.

Keeper of the Embe Tattoo

Auda’s most tangible ceremonial work is applying the Embe tattoo, the mark worn by Cognomina members after Ascension. Poppy gives Evan a fingerless leather gauntlet whose upper side carries the tattoo’s shaped template. Auda then arrives with a worn leather pouch fastened by three irregularly carved bones. Inside are ink-stained tools made from slim wooden handles set with rows of tiny bone needles. He examines the template on Evan’s hand, mixes oil and dark powder in a stained white ceramic crucible, and explains that his ink combines poplar ash, roasted and ground tamarind pits, and poppy seeds to ease the pain.

The procedure connects Auda’s skill to the society’s ritual of recognition. The mark is not simply displayed as an emblem: it is applied to Evan’s body after his identity has been accepted, making the transition into membership physical as well as social. Auda says he makes all the tattoos except his own. His was done by Jens, and he points out its crooked edge. That small imperfection gives the practice a personal history: even the maker carries a mark made by someone else, and the tradition is sustained through members’ work on one another.

Welcome, Money, and Continuity

At the gathering, Auda offers Evan more than ceremony. He asks Mr. Diltz to place five thousand American dollars from one of his accounts in escrow for Evan. The money is not to become available until Evan returns in a new body, so that he will have something to come back to. Auda describes the gift as modest because what he gives up is only the money’s time value, which Kress has said is unimportant to people like them. The arrangement converts the Cognomina’s belief in continued reincarnation into a concrete provision for a future life: Evan’s return is not treated as an abstract possibility but as a reason to preserve resources for him.

Auda’s generosity is matter-of-fact rather than grand. He makes no claim that the money changes the conditions of Evan’s life in the present; instead, he places it beyond Evan’s reach until a later incarnation. The gift therefore expresses a distinctive sense of time. Ordinary financial value depends on when money can be used, but Auda treats the delay as negligible beside the prospect of continuity across lives. His welcome takes the form of a promise that can outlast the person receiving it.

Character and Narrative Significance

Auda’s gentleness also appears in less solemn company. During a card game with Chance, he wins with a flush and draws a mound of silver and gold coins toward himself. When Chance offers Evan a thousand dollars to borrow the dice, Auda counters with two thousand if Evan does not lend them. Evan is on the point of answering before Auda intervenes; Chance withdraws, and Auda tosses Evan an oversized gold coin. The episode places Auda’s money and generosity within the group’s playful social life, contrasting the measured formality of the Ascension with a gathering where wagers, teasing, and gifts mingle.

Taken together, these scenes define Auda through acts of continuity. He remembers lives in distant places, makes the bodily mark by which Cognomina members recognize their shared passage, welcomes Evan after the vote, and safeguards money for a return that may occur in another body. The institution’s doctrines become credible through such practical gestures. In Auda’s hands, membership is not only something to prove; it is something other people help carry forward.