Evan uses Vasili’s memories to prove his reincarnation

Evan Michaels’s relationship to Vasili Blagavich Arda is the first and most formative link in the chain of memories through which Evan comes to understand his reincarnation. Vasili is not simply a former identity Evan reports: his memories arrive as a developing, increasingly usable presence, supply details Evan can recount under examination, and connect a life in Bulgaria to Evan’s present search for belonging. The link gives Evan evidence for who he has been, but it also leaves room for uncertainty about what memory cannot recover.

Memory and recognition

Evan describes Vasili’s memories as the first to emerge. They began in the fall of a strange year as dreams and visions, often occurring while he was awake. At first they seemed disordered; eventually they took on sequence and meaning, and Evan recognized them as memories belonging to another life. Their initial setting was the Bulgarian countryside, distant from Evan’s Minnesota winter, but they grew longer, more vivid, and more frequent there.

The change was not only a matter of seeing more. Evan gradually learned to control the memories and review them until he felt comfortable with knowledge carried over from them, including language and music. At first, the suggestion that another consciousness existed within his experience made him question his grasp on reality. By that summer, however, he could read, write, and speak Bulgarian and play the organ. What had seemed like troubling images had become practical abilities as well as a history he could examine. The progression—from intrusive visions to controlled recollection—makes Vasili’s life the first sustained basis for Evan’s belief that the memories are real.

Vasili’s life in Bulgaria

During Cognomina’s questioning, Evan identifies the beginning of his first incarnation as April 4, 1892, outside Voditza, a small village in Bulgaria about one hundred kilometers west of Varna. He gives the name he remembers for that life as Vasili Blagavich Arda. He also supplies the names of Vasili’s parents, Blag Ivanovich Arda and Liuda Poriskovna Arda, and says Vasili had no siblings. These particulars turn the relationship from a general claim of another life into an account tied to a named family and a specific place.

Evan’s account of Vasili’s childhood adds the ordinary structure of that earlier life. Vasili lived with his parents on an eighty-acre farm near Voditza, worked there, received schooling at home from his father, and went to mass twice a week. Evan identifies the religion he now understands Vasili to have practiced as Eastern Orthodox. This remembered routine places the past life in a household, a landscape, and a pattern of work and religious observance—not only in the extraordinary episodes that might seem most persuasive to an examiner.

That routine lasted until 1915, when the army was mobilized and Vasili left to begin military training. The remembered life thus extends from rural childhood into wartime service. Evan’s testimony supplies a sequence of changes in Vasili’s circumstances, allowing the earlier identity to be understood as a life with its own chronology rather than as a collection of disconnected images.

Death and the limits of recall

Evan says Vasili died in the fall of 1968 while living in Istanbul. He cannot give an exact date or explain how Vasili died; what he remembers is collapsing on the floor of his room. The uncertainty is part of the account. Evan can name the place and season and recall the collapse, but the memory does not provide a complete explanation of the death. His testimony therefore presents continuity across lives without pretending that continuity gives him perfect knowledge of every moment.

That distinction matters to the relationship. Vasili’s memories offer Evan a substantial record—family names, childhood, abilities, places, and later circumstances—yet remain partial. The remembered collapse gives the story a point at which one life ends, but not a fully recovered account of the passage between lives. Evan’s claim rests on what he can remember and describe, while the missing date and cause remain explicit limits rather than details he fills in.

The memories put to the test

During Evan’s Ascension review, the examiner asks when the first incarnation began, what name Evan had in that life, and when, where, and how he first died. Evan answers with the date and location near Voditza, names himself as Vasili Blagavich Arda, and describes the 1968 collapse in Istanbul. He says he has had three incarnations including his current one. The exchange makes Vasili’s identity a central part of the formal review: Evan must present his memories in response to precise questions, and the examiner emphasizes that detailed, exact answers make the process easier.

Mr. Diltz is present at the panel, and Evan is encouraged to answer. When the review resumes, the examiner returns specifically to Vasili and asks about his first memories as a child. Evan then sets out the farm, his parents, his work, his father’s home schooling, and the twice-weekly mass. The repeated questioning links the private experience of memory to an institutional test. What began as an unsettling inner experience is recast as testimony that can be organized, examined, and compared with the chronology Evan has retained.

Historical life and present meaning

The account also places Vasili within the Bulgarian front’s retreat in September 1918. On September 18 and 19, the front had been retreating for three weeks. Vasili did not consider himself a military strategist, but he understood that the small triangle where the Cherna River flowed into the Vardar made a poor place to hold, even for one night. He stacked artillery shells beside a gun emplacement: each weighed seventy-five pounds and was two feet long. Five Krupp 77-millimeter howitzers faced south toward Greece and two French divisions somewhere on the horizon. These concrete military details extend the remembered identity beyond childhood and establish the conditions in which Vasili served, without resolving what ultimately happened to him there.

For Evan, the significance of Vasili’s memories is at once evidentiary and personal. His early command of Bulgarian and the organ gives the remembered life a presence in his current abilities; his answers in the review give that presence a place in the search for recognition. At the same time, Evan’s understanding of return changes from fearing an endless recurrence to imagining that he may return to someone, something, or someplace that feels like home. Vasili’s life is the first part of that continuity, but the present relationship with Poppy makes the prospect of returning less solitary. The memories connect Evan to a former self; the possibility of belonging changes what that connection means.