Second World War

The Second World War matters to this entry through Evan Michaels’s exile in Istanbul after the war: a cigarette he smoked there carried a former slogan that later helped Poppy connect him to an earlier life. The war itself is not described here; its significance lies in the postwar detail that turns an ordinary pack into evidence.

Postwar Exile in Istanbul

After the Second World War, Evan lived in exile in Istanbul and smoked the same Turkish cigarettes that Poppy would later recognize as part of his history. The evidence gives no further account of the exile or of the war. Instead, it fixes the connection in a specific afterwar setting and makes the cigarettes a trace of Evan’s life there.

A Clue Preserved in a Slogan

When Poppy examined the cigarette pack, its slogan had changed to “The Pride of the Turks.” She recalled that it had once read “Centuries of Flavor”; the slogan changed in 1960. She checked the change with the company the following day and later learned that Evan had smoked the same cigarettes during his Istanbul exile. The old slogan therefore linked him to a particular period and place, supplying evidence for Poppy’s recognition of his past-life identity.

Role in Poppy’s Discovery

Poppy described the cigarette history as the second clue. Two days after the events she recounted, she took Evan to her funerary vault in Los Angeles and told him about herself. More precisely, he worked out her identity after seeing the concurrent dates on the monuments. The postwar exile thus enters the story not as a narrated wartime episode, but as one link in a chain of evidence that leads from a changed slogan to Evan’s recognition of Poppy.