Leeches

by David Albahari

] I read that a young but wise man named Eleazar, a "mystic and a teacher," was part of a group of some twenty Jewish, mostly Ashkenazi, families who arrived in Zemun in 1739. Little was known of him, though he was probably the first, even before the arrival of Rabbi Jehuda Jeruham, to perform religious rites. Until that time, it said in the manuscript, there had been no Jews living in Zemun, or at least not in any significant numbers. In 1717, when the Austrians routed the Ottomans and captured Belgrade, several Jewish merchants settled there, along with a larger group of Austrian merchants and craftsmen. When the Ottomans recaptured Belgrade some twenty years later, however, these Jews withdrew from Belgrade and chose to make their home in Zemun. Eleazar's trace can be found there today, it said, but hardly anyone knows this, or even wishes to learn about it. The next passage dealt with the way the Austrian authorities treated the Jewish residents of Zemun, but there was no further mention of Eleazar. On [>] of the manuscript, however, after a passage listing the rabbis who had served in the Zemun synagogues following Jehuda Jeruham—Israel Aleksandar, Joze Fridensberger, Šlomo Hirš, Jehuda ben Šlomo Haj Alkalaj, S. D. Tauber, Hinko Urbah, and kantor Geršon Kačka at the Ashkenazi synagogue, and M. B. Aharon, Šabtaj, Moše Bahar, and Hakham Jichak Musafija at the Sephardic synagogue—there was an unrelated passage: here one must also remember that Eleazar still had Hermes' words in mind about how he, Hermes, was searching for the secrets of Genesis, and how he had gone into a cave deep beneath the surface of the earth, through which powerful winds blew, and there before him appeared an image of incredible beauty, an image of which it is written in the Torah that God made man in his own image, and this image, which represented his perfect nature, instructed Hermes in what he should do to obtain knowledge about the most exalted matters. Further, it was written, this is why Eleazar occasionally separated his self from himself, that is, freed himself from his body, until he could see himself, slender and transparent, illuminated by a wondrous inner light that came from the divine spirit. But what Eleazar was able to do, and with such remarkable ease, did not work for anyone else, so perhaps there is no point in speaking of it further. And truly, the next few pages contained no mention of him, until [>], where the part about Eleazar began with the words "In the meanwhile," as if it were taken from some larger whole in which his life was laid out in chronological order, in much greater detail. And so in the meanwhile, it was written at the bottom of the page, Eleazar wondered more and more often why God, who was perfect, had not created a perfect world, but instead had made a world in which there was a place and a role for evil. Eleazar understood, it said, the Kabbalistic explanation that it had not been possible to create a perfect world because that would have meant that God, who is perfection, was duplicating himself, making a copy of himself, and God, in the nature of things, cannot be duplicated, cannot copy himself, he can only limit himself. Hence, it said, there is evil in this world, though not as a separate force, as pure evil, but always and only as part of all that is, therefore in man's soul, from its very inception, there are germs of both good and evil. God is none the weaker for it, the manuscript reads, but instead more generous; this didn't satisfy Eleazar, and after long periods of musing and going through all the possibilities, he decided to approach the left side, the side of evil. With this in mind, it said, Eleazar stood in the circle of light from a special source, but in such a way that he could see both his shadows, the one that was his astral body, and the one that held the living spark of the astral body and seldom shows itself, and for that he needed to say certain prescribed words, and that was when impure forces appeared, which took over Eleazar's shadows, and, with the shadows, Eleazar, and after that no one ever saw him. His name was not mentioned again until fifty pages later. Before that final mention, the manuscript dealt with the Zemun Jewish cemetery; then a brief history was given of the Zemun synagogue, so it's unclear why the piece about Eleazar's destiny is treated here. Today, it says in that chapter, somewhere in Zemun is a place where the forces of good and evil intersect, and where it is possible, if a person knows the right words, to pass from one world into the other, and even to move into the realm of endless possibilities, or into the realm of endless worlds that emanate from the ten divine Sephirot, endlessly multiplying and forging anew the reality we dwell in. Outside a new day had long since dawned. The clock showed seven-thirty A.M., which meant that I had spent four hours leafing through the manuscript I still had no clear sense of. If this is one of the books of sand, I told Marko, I should be finding grains of sand on my hands after reading it. There was no sand on my hands, but plenty of dust and paper shreds. After I read that Eleazar's passageway to the other world still existed in Zemun, my first thought was of the corner in the courtyard on Zmaj Jovina Street. I hadn't gone there for several days, just as I hadn't thought about the woman from the quay, because the circumstances, the events connected to the warnings scrawled on my door, had pulled me in another direction, which might have been the cause of the nagging sense of impaired equilibrium that had been dogging me for weeks. I splashed my face with water, ate a piece of bread spread with honey while I waited for the weather report on the morning radio program (clouds, wind, with a chance of rain in the afternoon), I got dressed, put a piece of gum in my mouth, and left the apartment. I decided to walk to Zmaj Jovina Street, taking the shortest cut through the center of town. This exposed me to exhaust fumes, but I was too groggy and tired, after my nocturnal reading, to take the less direct route by the quay. On my way back, I thought, I might take that route, but first I should walk through the market and pick up some fuse cartridges and a new phone jack at the stall of the man who resells spare parts, and then, walking along the Danube, I could inhale and exhale the air as deeply as possible, swinging my arms vigorously to accelerate circulation, coordinate my equilibrium and speed the rhythm of my steps. Glavna Street was packed with people and cars, bluish clouds of fumes, and bustle, and the street vendors had opened their makeshift stalls out in front of the department store. The clouds the radio announcer so generously promised had not yet appeared, unless they were at the horizon, hidden from view by the rows of buildings, so that the sun, though still a spring sun, radiated a heat hard to bear, swallowing shadows like a Kabbalist. If somebody, I thought, had told me a few weeks before that I would be caught up in mystical teachings about good and evil, I would have thought that somebody mad. And now that same somebody could tell me I am mad and grasping at straws. It's only right, I decided, that I am thinking about this as I walk by Dubrovačka Street, which used to be the heart of the Jewish quarter of Zemun and where the young and old trees continued to cast shadows full of foreboding and promise. Once I am on the street, I thought, I should go to the synagogue, though they knew nothing of Eleazar when the temple was built, because it is always possible, and sometimes inevitable, that what is anticipated turns up where one least expects it, be it exalted celestial light or shards of the pottery in which earthly darkness was once preserved. I passed by the cinema and the hotel, and at the corner, by the shoe store, I crossed into Zmaj Jovina Street. The tai chi poster hung in the same place by the large wooden gate, but with a different starting date for the beginner's course and with no circle and triangle. The yin and yang were real, as I established when I tried to scratch them. The gate was ajar, the passageway leading to the courtyard radiated a pleasant freshness, the bench and barberry bushes had not changed, and water was dripping from the pump, as if just before I got there someone had been filling a bucket or, perhaps, a washbasin, and had slipped away upon hearing my footsteps. I went over to the bench and sat down, but the muted murmur from the street and market did not stop, nor did the music start to play. I looked up and saw a patch of blue sky. The sky is the same, I thought, even if everything else has changed. I closed my eyes, perked my ears like a rabbit, stopped breathing. Nothing helped. I squeezed my eyes shut even more tightly, breathed the air in deeply, slowly re-leased the breath, then breathed in again. I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes a broom
was in my face. The broom was held by a small, scrawny woman, wizened face, no teeth. Get going, you bum, she said, scram. What did you think? she shrieked, and brandished the broom, that this is a city park and any old bum can sleep here? I shoved the broom out of my face, but that further infuriated her, so she kicked me. I got up and turned to go down the passageway and she swung the broom and smacked me on the behind. In a story by Kharms, I thought, she would have flown out a window, but I wasn't in a Kharms story, I was in Zemun, and as her voice rang after me down the cool passageway, I tried to understand what had happened. I didn't ask myself why the old woman with the broom was there, but why the place no longer radiated its magic. What had changed, the place or me? Maybe nothing, said Marko, maybe it just wasn't a good day for the harmony of the spheres. But that old woman, I asked, what are we to do with her, especially if she appeared from the left side? Do you actually believe, grinned Marko, that the old woman is a witch? She had a broom, I said. The broom means nothing, countered Marko, and besides, why would only old women be witches, don't you think that's prejudice? I said nothing. Why an old woman? Marko went on. Why not the young woman who was slapped? I'd much rather deal with a young witch than with some old hag. We hadn't been spending much time together of late, at least not the way we used to, and that came across in Marko's edginess, in his readiness to lock horns with me, to keep a certain distance. I didn't know what to do about it. I was spending more time with Jaša Alkalaj; I was staying up late, reading an assortment of Kabbalistic books from his library; I was able to think of little else. Worst of all, I told Marko, nothing had proved to me that I was on the right path or that I was on any path at all. Maybe, I said, I am just kicking around in the dust. When I repeated this to Jaša Alkalaj, he raised his index finger and said, If there is a signpost to be found, it is not along a path, but in the heart. Remember that, he added, and for the next few days I kept saying "A signpost in the heart" as a sort of mantra. Nothing happened. I still didn't know whether I was on the right path or not; I still couldn't explain why nothing had happened when I last sat on the bench in the courtyard at Zmaj Jovina Street; and I was still groping in the dark. After my retreat from the old woman I again walked the streets that led from the quay to the Harbormaster's, carefully inspecting the entranceways to the buildings and looking under each piece of litter I came across, but nowhere did I find any trace of the geometric symbol, nowhere was there a hint that would lead me to the woman who'd been slapped. I was running late again with my piece for Minut, except that the editor wasn't his usual sympathetic self; he lectured me on the obligation of columnists to respect the rules, adding that if this were to happen again, he'd have no choice. Though I would have much preferred to go back to my pursuit of the sign and the woman, I wrote a piece on the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Serbia. Hatred of other ethnic groups is in effect hatred of oneself, was how I started. It is not the other we fear, we fear ourselves, we fear the changes the presence of others may impose. When I say that I dislike Jews, or Roma, or Croats—the list is endless—I am expressing the fear that under their influence, or under the influence of what they genuinely or symbolically represent, I will be forced to give up some of the convictions that matter to me. Their uprooting of my convictions, no matter how irrational, represents uprooting of my personality. And so, I went on, if I am not to change, they must be branded, isolated, expelled, and, if necessary, utterly destroyed. But a person who dislikes members of other ethnic groups, dislikes, I declared, his or her own people, hence, if I announce that I dislike foreigners, I am admitting that I live in a void, stripped of anyone's love. And a person who has no love, given or offered, is no longer human, for love is what defines us in the system of nature we inhabit. The rising number of anti-Semitic incidents, I continued, is still small in comparison to the number of such incidents in the so-called democratic countries, but these statistics, no matter how attractive and dear to the state and politicians, are no comfort whatever to the victims of anti-Semitism. It is high time, I concluded, for the authorities to realize that this is a fire which, if not extinguished in time, may easily become a blazing conflagration that will no longer be possible to put out. Then, of course, I wrote, it will be too late, so speed is of the essence, and while there is time, we must stomp on the viper. Not just the viper of anti-Semitism, but the viper of every form of hatred, whether rooted in ethnic, sexual, or ideological differences. I titled the piece "In the Snake's Nest." The editor read the text twice before he looked at me. Many people will not like this, he said. It is mine to write, I said, and the rest is up to them. Yes, said the editor, but who are they? We shall see, I answered, not knowing that I would not have long to wait. He published the piece several days later, and on that day, or more precisely, that evening, I went to the theater. I don't remember the title of the play, I think it was an adaptation of a novel by one of our young writers, something about voluntary exile and escaping war, but I know that it was performed at the National Theater to a half-empty house. Three or four seats to my right an elderly man smacked his lips in his sleep; in the row in front a young man with a crewcut and a red-haired young woman never stopped kissing; to my left, in the first seat in the row, sat a middle-aged woman: whenever I looked over, she was looking at me. Once she smiled, brushed a lock of hair from her cheek, pursed her lips, and blew me a kiss. As hard as I tried to focus on the chaotic scene changes and the constant dips into the past, in the end it was a mystery to me why the mother was dying and the protagonist, apparently her son, took his clothes off and ran naked around the stage. When the son finally stood still and his penis stopped swinging, the curtain dropped. There was a scattering of reluctant applause as the mother and son appeared in front of the curtain. The son was no longer naked; a colorful patch of cloth covered his loins. The applause died down, they bowed, then retreated behind the curtain. The elderly man to my right was still asleep; the woman to my left had departed before the applause; the young man and woman stood up and stretched; my foot had fallen asleep, so I moved slowly toward the exit, waddling like a duck. Outside it was drizzling, yet the square in front of the theater was thronged with people. I looked to the left and to the right but saw no one familiar. Many years ago, you could find people selling hash on this square, but now, even if they were there, I couldn't spot them. I found a table in one of the nearby cafés, and to blaring music, mostly classic rock, I had a cappuccino. That's thunder, said the man at the counter in the break between two songs by Cream. I couldn't imagine how he could have heard it, but I took this as a sign that it was time for me to head home. And sure enough, as I was walking downhill to the Zeleni Venac bus stop, there was another rumble of thunder, then it started to rain, and while I was on the bus to Zemun, the rain turned into a real downpour. When I got off the bus at my stop, I ducked and dashed to my building, and there, after I had hopped over the last puddle, I bumped into a man at the entranceway. In fact I spotted him at the last moment, which allowed me to slow down a little and diminish the impact of the collision, and he seemed to have seen me, because he greeted me with arms wide open. My face ended up on his chest for an instant, while my arms encircled his back, and anyone seeing us would have thought we were embracing after a long separation. I pulled myself up, ready to apologize, but the person gripped my arm tightly and, through clenched teeth, ordered me to keep quiet. Then over my shoulder, as if speaking into a void, he said everything was fine. I turned and saw three other young men. In the wan light of the street lamp, weakened by the gloom of the storm, they looked a lot like the man standing before me, gripping my arm ever more tightly. Let's go, he said, and shoved me toward them. I thought I would fall, but the men grabbed me with a practiced ease: the one in the middle went for my neck, while the other two each reached for an arm. I should, of course, have guessed what was coming, but the only thing I could think of was that I would burst out laughing if they took me to a car and tied a blindfold over my eyes. We turned into Teslina Street, where it was darker still because of the
trees full of spring leaves. I tried to say something two or three times, but each time I was silenced by a squeeze to the neck or a jab in the side. At the end of the street, where a long time ago the railway tracks used to cross, we clambered through a twisted metal fence into a nursery school yard and through the bushes and came round to the back of the building, where it was pitch-dark. The men holding me stood so close I could hear them breathing. If I had leaned over an inch I would have been leaning against one of them; had I straightened my fingers I would have touched their faces. I didn't lean over, I didn't move a finger: I listened to the rain fall and pretended this was happening to someone else. Tell me one thing, said the fellow who had been standing by the door to my building, how can you bear to fraternize with those slimy creatures who obsess about one thing and one thing only? I wasn't certain whom he had in mind though I had an idea, but for the life of me I couldn't guess what it was these people were obsessed with. What thing? I asked. So we're playing a game, said the man, are we? Before I had the chance to say another word, his fist shot into my gut. I gasped for air, my mouth yawning, then my knees buckled and I dropped to the ground. The men behind me lifted me right up. Now you know what I am talking about, don't you? said the man. Sure, I said, though I had no clue. A rat is a rat is a rat, he said, and they go on living in the dark, all in the hope that one day they will rule the world. Sure, I said, just in case. However, said the man, there's one thing I will never understand: how an honest, true Serb can choose to side with them and then get on the case of other Serbs who criticize them and expose them for who they really are. When I had finally regained my breath, I understood whom he had in mind, but I said nothing, fearful I might be punched in the gut again. Say something, said the man, don't make me wait. I was silent. This time the blow came from behind, in the area of my kidneys. Did you hear the man's question? said a voice, or should we give those ears a twist? Instead of unmasking them, said the man, you defend them; instead of publishing the truth, you obscure it; instead of being true to who you are, you are being something else. Tell me, he went on, is this normal? I didn't have much choice: No, I said. So why do you call Serbia a snake's nest, said the man, and Serbs vipers to be stomped on? He didn't wait for my answer but slammed his fist into my belly. My knees betrayed me again. If it hadn't been for the men who were at the ready, and I must admit, practiced at putting me back on my feet, I would have lain there on the ground, gasping like a beached fish. If you've got to write, he said, at least write the truth; there have been enough lies. He dipped his hand into his pocket and for a moment I thought he was pulling a knife, but instead he produced several folded sheets of papers and pressed them into my hand. We're out of here, he said. The other men released me and followed him. I watched them walk away. My knees were knocking, pain was rising in my gut, my eyes were tearing. I tried to take a step, but every step ached. I had to stop by a plastic penguin with a spring for feet and a seat fastened to its head. I sat down and the penguin bounced. It was still raining. I finally made it home, stripped off my wet clothes, filled a hot-water bottle, got into bed, and spread the sheets of paper I had been given before me. I didn't have to read every word because after the first few lines I got the gist. The opening page dealt with the Aryan origins of the Serbian people and the need to preserve their racial purity, all those of mixed heritage, as well as members of the tainted peoples who lived in Serbia, and they included Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, and Albanians, would be sent back to their homelands, or else be relocated to special fenced-in areas. On the following pages, however, the Jews were the only group to receive attention. Here and there overt mention was made of the need for the world to rid itself of the Jews, who always found ways to control the governments of major countries, the flow of capital, and the mass media. We are living, it went on to say, in the claws of an international Zionist conspiracy, a conspiracy Hitler unmasked and brought to the verge of collapse. He did not succeed, it said near the end, in finishing the job, but he did show the direction all true Aryans must follow. Then a sketch of a skull encircled by a slogan: "Death to Zionism, freedom to the people." There are moments in life when one doesn't know whether to cry or laugh, I told Marko later, and that was one such moment. I clutched the hot-water bottle as if it were a life belt. What I had read could easily have been dismissed as the voice of a crackpot, but it was not a lone voice, it was one voice from a large chorus in which many, like the three who had looked after me in the nursery school yard, had no vocal talent and made up for their lack with skills of a different kind. I tried to summon their faces, which in the feeble light by the entrance to my building had seemed alike; their identical closely cropped haircuts, like those of soldiers, no doubt helped. The fellow who had addressed me, and who punched me in the gut several times, had a slanted scar on his forehead, that was all I remembered. The rain, the trees on Teslina Street, the smashed street lamps, made me remember what I had felt rather than seen. And I felt, as I told Marko later, something like grief, an emptiness that left me as limp as a straw doll. Did it ever occur to you, asked Marko, that they could have killed you? It did, I said, especially when they took me into the bushes behind the nursery school, I really was dead for a few minutes. So how is it, chuckled Marko, on the other side? I chuckled too, but Isak Levi and Jakov Švarc didn't. They read every line carefully, studied the sheets of paper on both sides, lifted the paper to the light, compared certain sections with other texts cut out of newspapers or photocopied from books. We sat around the kitchen table in Jaša Alkalaj's studio; Jaša wasn't in Belgrade then. The table was sprayed with an array of colors, mostly blue, though that color was rarely seen in his paintings, at least in the ones that hung on the walls. I don't like this, Jakov Švarc said, finally, it does not bode well. This is one big pile of nonsense, I said, and there is no point in paying attention to it. We paid no attention to another pile of nonsense, said Jakov Švarc, and look where it got us. The same thing would have happened, Isak Levi spoke up, even if we had paid all the attention in the world, and it is pointless to dupe ourselves with conditional sentences. Spare me the linguistic analyses, Jakov Švarc snapped back, the only thing a person can get from them is heartburn. History is not a novel that unfolds according to established rules. But it is also not a book, rejoined Isak Levi, that can be leafed through now from the beginning, then from the end. Experience tells us, continued Jakov Švarc as he waved the sheets of paper, that something like this always starts innocently and ends up in the most tragic way imaginable. So what now? asked Isak Levi, should we kill ourselves? No, said Jakov Švarc, we should keep ourselves alive. There was silence in the studio. Low tapping sounds could be heard, as if an alarm clock shut in a sock drawer was ringing, but when I went into the bathroom, I realized it was the sound of water dripping from the bathtub faucet. I tried to tighten it; I didn't succeed, it continued dripping onto the yellowed enamel. The rubber washer needs changing, said Isak Levi behind me, but Jaša doesn't see to things like that. He stood at the door, his hands crossed on his chest. You have to understand Jakov, he said, his experience in the last war was particularly painful. Which war are you referring to, I asked, when you say the "last"? I meant the big one, the world war, he answered, because little ones, like ours, don't count as real wars. For those who are no longer alive, I said, every war is real. That is correct, agreed Isak Levi, but a local war is actually abuse of the noun war, since it is most often an armed conflict of limited intensity being waged on limited territory. Of course, he said, most of the conflicts registered in history belong to that category, I admit, and there are few wars that were truly grandiose. You speak of wars, I said, at least of the big ones, as though you admire them, and I see no justification for that. He saw no reason to admire them either, Isak Levi replied, but if they did exist, there was no point in closing one's eyes to the fact. Did I think, he asked, that war, any war, great or small, would disappear if I were to shut my eyes tight? That depends, I said, willpower sometimes accomplishes fantastic things. I don
't know about willpower, answered Isak Levi, but I do see that Jaša Alkalaj's influence has had its effect. I tried to protest, claiming he was wrong, that I knew nothing about the Kabbalah, or I should say that I didn't know the Kabbalah well. Jaša was a good teacher, said Isak Levi, and I had no cause to worry. I said I wasn't worried and that I would ask Jaša to confirm that my knowledge of Kabbalistic teaching was minimal. Forget it, said Isak Levi dismissively. There was something else, he added, that had just occurred to him: the possibility that Jaša had invoked the dark forces against the thugs who had beaten me up. He would surely, he laughed, be able to summon an entire army of golems and other monsters to steal the thunder from the racists and Nazis and send them scampering as fast as their feet could carry them. Meanwhile, he said, we must fight without their help, because every single wasted moment makes us weaker. I wasn't sure whom he meant: the two of us in the bathroom, the three of us in Jaša's studio, the two of them and Jaša Alkalaj, or all the Jews of Belgrade. So, I said, I should write about what has been happening to me? Isak Levi nodded. As soon as possible, he said, as soon as possible. I, however, was not convinced that this was the best solution, and when the deadline came up, I wrote a lame, halfhearted piece about the absence of musical taste in the most widely watched television programs. For some mysterious reason the editor was pleased, he beamed as he read the text and even stood up and thumped me on the shoulder. Utterly perplexed, I left the building and for a while stood indecisively on the steps. Then I decided to forget about it, as I already had to struggle with plenty of secrets, and editors are unpredictable creatures. I went home, stepped onto the balcony overlooking the yard, shooed away two white pigeons, sat on the deck chair, and tried to make some sense of what had happened to me over the past few weeks. This was not my first try, just as I felt it would not be my last. Jaša Alkalaj's advice to seek in the Kabbalah, or rather, to find in the Kabbalah the key to these events, advice I genuinely believed in, proved of no help. I knew slightly more than I had known about the Kabbalah, though what I knew was a crumb in comparison to its entire treasure. I understood the meaning of the Sephirot, the divine emanations; I had moved toward an understanding of the Infinite, or Ein Sof, which was how the Kabbalists referred to divine substance; I had carefully studied the interpretation of Adam's fall; I had got to know the principles of Gematria; but these pathways led me nowhere, and sooner or later I came back to the beginning, to the Danube riverbank and the slap that, though I hadn't been able to hear it, had deafened me. That slap led to the next, to the event I was fully prepared to accept as a misunderstanding, a comic misunderstanding, but it brought the manuscript into my life, which, I had to admit reluctantly, was related to a variety of things, as if it were constantly being added to and renewed. Then I realized, as I sat in the deck chair and propped my feet on the balcony railing, that I had never mentioned the manuscript to Jaša Alkalaj, though he would certainly be interested in the Kabbalistic parts of the text. I couldn't explain this to myself; the only interpretation I thought of was that, jealous of his apparently limitless familiarity with the Kabbalah and mysticism, I wanted to withhold the information about the manuscript until I could plunk it onto the table in front of Jaša with unconcealed glee. I pictured him leaping from his chair, grabbing the pages of the manuscript, and trembling with excitement. I laughed out loud and decided to tell him about it. I shifted in the deck chair and looked to the right, toward a neighboring yard, and noticed in the crown of a poplar a man wearing black pants and a white shirt. The branches and leaves partially concealed him, but if he thought no one could see him, he was wrong. His hands were in front of his face, and it took me a moment to figure out that he was holding binoculars, trained on me. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I leaned over the railing, but there was no one but me on any of the balconies. There was the possibility, of course, that he was a jealous husband, trying to locate the window behind which his wife was languishing in the arms of a lover, though that was difficult to believe. I remembered I had my father's old binoculars somewhere, and dragging myself out of the deck chair, I went to look for them. I rummaged in the cupboard, checked some boxes in the pantry, poked around in the drawers of my desk, and, not having come up with the binoculars, I returned to the balcony, but the man was no longer in the poplar. I studied the other treetops, surveyed the roofs of the buildings, lowered my gaze to the yards overgrown in weeds, the man was gone. Maybe he was never there, said Marko when I told him, so I decided to say no more. Of course, I knew that people are sometimes victims of their own guesswork and prejudice, and that there are times when they think they see what they would like to see, and the man with the binoculars, so clumsily hidden in the crown of the poplar tree, might be nothing more than a projection of mine, a reflection of my hidden hope that I was part of a vast plot or scheme in which a large portion of the world was embroiled. I knew what Marko would say to that: he would laugh and say I had been watching too many American movies. He had said something along those lines a few days before when I had set out a theory about a different, though similar, version of a conspiracy. We've all seen too many American movies, I had told him then, which was true. This was not merely a worn phrase that Europeans use when, on their first visit to America, they feel they are in a movie, but even we in Europe compare our reality more and more often to the cinematic reality of American films. Who in Europe thinks about conspiracies, I asked Marko, in which ordinary citizens become the greatest obstacle to the monstrous plans of insatiable politicians? It's all small in Europe, said Marko, even conspiracies. I can't tell whether he meant that as consolation to me, but when I saw the man in that poplar tree, it was no consolation. Whether large or small, a conspiracy is a conspiracy, and if someone is caught up in it, the consequences may be dangerous. Fine, said Marko, when I'd made that argument to him, the consequences may indeed be dangerous, but we should be realistic and accept where we live. Conspiracy in Serbia, he said, is that even possible? Why should Serbia, I spoke in my defense, be any worse than any other country, why couldn't we have a nice, big conspiracy here? Serbia is already worse than many countries, said Marko, but I'd say you are missing something. Where have you been, he asked, these past ten years? On Mars? So, I continued, on the defensive, you have it all figured out, is that it? Nearly everything, said Marko, except a couple of murders among criminals turned patriots. And those, I said, aren't conspiracies? Just because I don't understand something, replied Marko, doesn't mean that some dark evil force is behind it, a mysterious organization in collusion with the government, army, police, or who knows what. Such things, he said, happen only in American movies, in which, by the way, the entire plot is reduced to the struggle of conspirators to strip free and honest American citizens of their right to information, to knowledge that supposedly belongs to them, if for no other reason than that they regularly pay their taxes, while in this country, he said, it is about silencing witnesses, and ordinary people like you and me are never in the picture. Besides, he added, in a country like ours, where everybody knows all there is to know about everybody else, conspiracies aren't workable, at least not conspiracies of the kind you've seen in the movies, because no one here can keep a secret. Someone, said Marko, don't ask me who, said that real history is what goes on between two people with no witnesses, but if that is true, then history here is what goes on inside a single person, who sits alone in a room and invents history. And if that is true, I said, then the single person's power is limitless. Sure it is, said Marko, and that's why our conspiracies aren't the same as the ones playing out in the world and in Hollywood studios. They're like a puppet theater with only one actor, well concealed behind the set, playing all the puppets and pulling all the strings. Marko was right, I had to give him credit, though I was still eager to understand who was pulling the strings of the people caught up in what was happening to me, including mine, and if they all had their little strings, as Marko put it, then I had strings too. And you too, I told him. In Serbia we are all
dangling by a thread, said Marko, no one is spared. Don't tell me, I protested, that all the strings are held by one man. Of course not, countered Marko, he is at the peak of a pyramid composed of his mini clones, just the way every successful dictatorship has always functioned, take Stalin's in the Soviet Union, for instance, if it was to function successfully, there had to be, aside from Stalin himself, hundreds, thousands of mini Stalins, his copies or clones, each one controlling a handful of strings, while their strings, he said, were in the hands of someone else who was above them on the hierarchical party ladder, and their strings were in the hands of someone above them, and there were always fewer of those above than those below, and so it went, he said, all the way up to Stalin, who held only two or three of the main strings, but he could give one of them a tweak and all of the Soviet Union would rock as if it had been hit by a major earthquake. I tried to imagine this pyramid and all the strings, but they kept getting knotted up in my mind's eye, tangling hopelessly. Only Stalin was unscathed at the very top, grinning under that bushy mustache. Always the same story, said Marko, in the end, there are no big differences among the dictatorial pyramids and the networks of strings that make them. The only difference he could think of, he said, was that our dictators didn't sport mustaches. This thought moved him to air a theory about how most dictators had a mustache because the mustache was a symbol of masculinity. Dictators, generally spineless types, grow a mustache to enhance their masculine powers and justify their authority, he remarked, which raises the engaging question of the absence of mustaches on the faces of our dictators. He looked at me but I shrugged. Maybe they proved their masculinity some other way, said Marko, or felt no one was questioning them, there is no other explanation. He spoke a bit longer about the difference in significance between Hitler's little brush of a mustache and the bushy mustache on Stalin's face, but I was no longer listening. The next day, however, while I was on a city bus crossing the Sava, I thought back to the conversation and chuckled to myself. The man standing next to me scowled, then quickly touched his cheeks, nose, and lips, and when he found nothing on them to have made me laugh, he snapped, What's got into you? I turned serious, but a moment later my lips stretched again into a grin. You know what, said the man, I'll hit you so hard you won't get up again. Even though he said this in a voice that shook with rage, his eyes flashing, brandishing his fist, for some reason it struck me as so hilarious that, clenching my teeth to choke back the spurts of laughter, I dashed off the bus at the next stop. Instead of at Zeleni Venac, where I was headed, I found myself at the end of the bridge over the Sava, at the beginning of Brankova Street, and so I had to walk farther than I had planned. It was Friday and I was supposed to meet Jaša Alkalaj at six that afternoon in the courtyard of the synagogue on Maršal Birjuzova. That was the time, he told me, Shabbat began, and there was no more peaceful moment than when, like a bride, Saturday steps into the temple. I don't know what it was like inside the temple, but when I arrived at the synagogue courtyard, short of breath from my brisk walk, no one was there, only a hat on a bench beneath a spreading tree. I approached it gingerly, as if something might leap out from under it. The hat didn't move, or resist when I picked it up and set it on my head. It was too large and slid down over my brow, covering my eyes and resting on my ears. What do you know, I heard Jaša Alkalaj's voice, such a refined fellow, so well-mannered, yet stealing hats. I tore the hat off my head and turned: Jaša Alkalaj, grinning, stood by a graying older man. The hat belongs to me, said the man, extending his hand. I gave him the hat. If his hair had been completely gray, I would have thought this was the man who had handed me the envelope with the manuscript. I asked him if he had a brother living in Zemun. No, said Jaša, our Dacca has no one, certainly not in Zemun. Though he had no relatives there, Dača was well versed in the history of the Zemun Jews, and he drew my attention to the fact that their fate for many years had been determined by the fact that Zemun lay on the Military Frontier, where they were not, otherwise, permitted to settle. For some reason, Dacca said, putting on his hat, Empress Maria Theresa gave her permission for the first Jewish families who moved here, roughly a dozen, to stay on in Zemun, and this edict determined the life of the Zemun Jewish community for the next hundred years or so. As with so many imperial privileges, Dacca said, taking off his hat, this one was based on defining the ban and on insisting that it be obeyed, so the whole century passed in attempts by the Zemun Jews to sidestep regulations and find a way to stay in Zemun, which was rich in opportunities for trade and other activities because of its border location. You see, said Dača, putting the hat on again, the privilege of staying here applied only to a small number of families, and though that number increased gradually through the decades, there were threats, even moves by the authorities to bring the number down to the few that had originally been permitted to stay. One way, Dacca said, once more taking off his hat, was to switch names, in hopes of burying their traces in lists and documents, which infuriated the authorities of the time and historians today, who need to determine whether, for instance, Rafael Salomon and Salomon Rafael are one and the same person whose first name becomes his last name for a time, and his last name becomes his first, or whether the two are unrelated. The names on one list, said Dača, holding his hat in his lap, do not appear on another drawn up several years later, and several years on they crop up again on some new list. He stared at his hat, lifted it, then dropped it back in his lap. Tell me, he said to Jaša Alkalaj, why am I telling you all of this? Because of Eleazar, said Jaša. Ah, that's right, said Dača, and patted the hat, because of Eleazar. He turned to Jaša again and asked him if I knew who Eleazar was. Naturally, said Jaša, he came asking about Eleazar and found him. And lost him, I said. Dacca looked at me sternly, as if startled that I knew how to speak, and I felt my cheeks blushing red. It's not that you lost him, he said, putting on his hat, but that he himself found ways of getting lost. I breathed a sigh of relief, the weight of guilt lifted off my shoulders. Yes, said Dača, he disappeared of his own volition, that was the best way he had of finding himself again. He took his hat off, scrutinized it on all sides, sniffed it. Hey, he looked over at Jaša Alkalaj, where did I get this hat? I was wondering that myself, Jaša replied. This is a pot, said Dacca, not a hat. I laughed, but turned serious when my eyes met Dača's. Eleazar, he said, if that was indeed his name, unlike most of the other Jewish families in Zemun was one of the "Turkish" Jews, meaning a Sephardic Jew who had been an Ottoman subject. And as such, and especially because of the niggling that went on between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, he was, at the very least, suspicious, so that is probably why when he was registering with the authorities, he came up with another name or, using Gematria, chose a name that had the same numerical value, so that he was Eleazar yet he was not Eleazar, and it is easy to assume that when a census was held fifteen years later of the Jewish inhabitants of Zemun, he was the very man registered as Volf, a water carrier, which was confirmed in a more detailed list drawn up a year later, in 1756, in which he was listed as Volf Enoch, only to disappear altogether or show up on a list in 1815, no longer as Volf, but as Nahmi the water carrier, who had apparently been living in Zemun for thirty years, with a family of four, which is, of course, rubbish, because where there is water, there is Eleazar, who slaked people's thirst, their thirst for water and their thirst for Zion, the thirst of the body and the thirst of the soul, because only in harmony between soul and body do the soul and body survive. He paused. I suddenly noticed that during that long sentence he had stopped touching the hat. He brought water to the Hertzls, said Jaša. And to Rabbi Alkalaj, said Dacca. He got up, put on the hat, and licked his lips. After all this talk of water, he said, a person works up a thirst, but there are no water carriers any longer, though I wouldn't mind a lemonade at Murat's, if one of you two is willing to pay. I'd pay, said Jaša, but just as there are no more water carriers, so there is no more Murat. Really? said Dacca, surprised, and took off his hat. When did he die? He didn't die, answered Jaša
, he went back to Priština. Really? said Dacca again, but why? Even you, as a Kabbalist, can't answer that question, laughed Jaša. Dača stared at the hat as if he no longer knew what to do with it. What about the pastry shop, he asked, finally, is it still there? It stands there, said Jaša, empty. I'd gladly give this hat, said Dacca, and looked at us, for a couple of his baklavas. I preferred the tulumba myself, said Jaša. And then, I said the next day to Marko, what came next was the two of them going on about all the other delicacies, the cream pastries like krempita and šampita, the sudǽuk and chocolate roll, the halva and chestnut purée, ice cream and lenja pita. Murat must have made all the pastries under the sun, I said. Marko shook his head. Let me get this straight, he said, on Friday evening, just as the holy day is beginning for Jews, you are standing in the synagogue courtyard quibbling about pastry? After all that, he asked, did you buy the man a lemonade? Yes, I said, but because Murat had shut down his shop, we went to the Majestic, where, as soon as we walked in, a friend of theirs showed up, an old actor, who sat at our table and regaled us with stories of what happens to actors when they tour the provinces. And then I felt certain again that I had seen the woman from the quay entering a gallery across the street. I said that a meeting had slipped my mind and that I would have to leave at once. By the time we'd said our goodbyes, and Dacca had showed me the Parisian label in his hat, and the actor had launched into a story of what happened to them on a visit to Leskovac, there was no one left over at the gallery. It was dark upstairs and down. So it goes every single time, I had thought, though I didn't tell Marko this, either I get there too late, like this time, or too early, like the day when I went into the courtyard on Zmaj Jovina Street and sat down on the bench in the corner, thereby missing the opportunity of running into her when she came out of the building. I don't know why I decided not to mention any of this to Marko. We were sitting in his kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking hashish that someone he knew had brought him from Amsterdam, and just as I was retelling the actor's last anecdote, I felt myself sinking. It was not, in fact, a real slump, but a sensation of unexpected shrinking, as if the hashish had set something off in me, a little switch that had totally changed my perspective, making me see everything from a low, bottom-up angle, as if the people and things surrounding me, and even whole realms, loomed suddenly large or, at least, unpleasantly elongated. Marko knew about this, moreover, he had had similar experiences several times, though in his case, or as he told it to me, more often he seemed to be growing, while everything else shrank. We never sorted out whether in both our cases this was a question of original experience, or if one of the two of us had gone through it and then told the other what had happened, and the other then had had the impression that he had experienced the same thing, because neither of us could remember who had first had the experience we called "the Alice," after the episode in the cartoon of Alice in Wonderland in which she nibbles the mushroom, or was it cake, and alternately grows bigger and smaller. I've got the Alice, I would say, which came in handy, particularly when we were in company or in a public place, because the Alice could, at times, be headstrong and rocky. That day, at the exact moment I was describing what had happened the night I left the Majestic and crossed the street, I was hit by a wave of the Alice, and though in my story I stayed at pavement level, I began to sink, and when in the story I looked at the upper level, where it was also dark, in the Alice I also looked up and saw Marko's face towering over me, in a space neither light nor dark. I don't know if I am making myself clear enough. In any case, it would not be good for someone to think, when I describe the experience called the Alice, that I am trying to attribute to it a mystical property or profound significance. It was a minor, silly optical illusion caused by the action of some of the ingredients of the cannabis on who knows which brain cells, and like many similar insights caused by intoxicating substances, it readily lent itself to the most varied interpretations. This is our remarkable ability as humans to attribute a meaning to everything, as if nothing happens just because it happens, as if everything is a basis or a mirror of a secret, if not the secret itself, whatever that secret might be. The greatest secret, Marko once said, is that there are no secrets. Very few people, however, are willing to accept this premise, though I doubt many readers will have made it this far. Sometimes I'm not even sure I am writing this; perhaps I am only saying it; perhaps I am thinking that I am saying that I am writing; maybe not even that, but something altogether different, an interplay of images and sounds, a language that is no one's, least of all mine. Slowly, slowly, I have veered off course, soon it will turn out that I am talking to myself, like some drooling old man in the corner of a room, dirty and unshaven, in unbuttoned pants, no underwear, so that everyone can see his wrinkled penis and sagging balls. There, as soon as I mentioned Alice, that curious predecessor to Lolita, I knew we'd end up in someone's fly, searching for the mystical meaning of her name, a fall through a hole, a disappearing cat, and hysterical tea drinking. No, our Alice was an altogether minor, paltry experience under the influence of hashish, an illusion we knew to be an illusion, which does nothing to interfere with the real state of affairs, but runs parallel with it. So I looked at Marko from below, and I looked at him normally, with eyes that were level with his face, as always happens in the Alice, an experience that, now I see, we might think of calling something else. What frightened me this time, however, was the fact, the fact not the supposition, that on Marko's face hovered something so horrendous, an expression so rife with malice, that I felt my heart clench. It reminded me of the masks of New Guinea cannibals that hung above the bed of a girl I'd briefly gone out with some ten years before. When I first saw them, the blood froze in my veins. Later I got used to them, but when we made love I didn't dare look at the masks, I would close my eyes or twist my neck, terrified by the thought that one might come loose and crush me. Suddenly I no longer felt like talking, though Marko was pestering me with questions, and even when the Alice was over and all the perspectives leveled off, when I could see perfectly well how the gentle features of his face had, under the influence of the cannabis, taken on a grimace of horror, not even then could I force myself to keep going. I told Marko I was tired, that I was behind again with my piece for Minut, and though he tried to entice me to stay by rolling a new joint, I headed home. The night before, when I had gone to the gallery and found it dark inside, I had noticed the open door to the neighboring café, and there, at the bottom of the glass door, that same symbol I had found near the Zemun open market. It's hard to believe that I even spotted it in the half-darkness, as if I had developed special receptors in my brain that had only one task: spot the circle and triangles. How much time had elapsed since I'd first seen them? Sometimes it felt as if March 8 was only yesterday, at other times I thought that it had all happened years before; once though, when I'd dozed off, I believed that it was only about to start, while another time, just after I'd woken up, it was clear it would never stop, though the truth, as often happens, was simpler: it was still April, an Eliot-like April, the cruelest month, which meant that slightly more than a month had passed, five weeks, maybe six, from the moment I'd witnessed the unpleasant, and I must quickly add, unconvincing slap on the Danube riverbank. Everything that had happened, and that I had learned, still meant nothing to me, but I also knew, or, to be more precise, sensed that behind it all, there was something that would open at some moment, at a time extremely difficult to predict, just then, entirely certain in its uncertainty, no matter how absurd that might sound. But the absurd had become ordinary, commonplace, something we'd become used to these past ten years in a country that was not a proper country participating in a war that was not a real war, subjecting ourselves to a government that had anointed itself the government, becoming an island that was floating, set apart from the world like a leprosy colony that no one wanted to touch. There is your explanation, as Marko would say, the reason you are investing so much hope and expectation in that symbol, a mere geometric construct, w
hich may conceal nothing in particular, but for that reason is powerful enough to draw your thoughts away from the chaos and commotion surrounding you. That may well be so, Marko is often right, indeed uncomfortably right, all the more reason for me not to tell him everything that had happened the night before. When I had caught sight of the symbol on the door of the café, I wasn't prepared at first to believe that it was the same geometric figure, the one that Dragan Mišović had explained, or at least tried to explain, to me. A startling likeness, I thought as I came closer to the café door and bent over to check. It even occurred to me that I should call him and ask how to explain the resemblance, and whether in mathematical terms there were, as one might say for people, kindred spirits. So, was there a spirit in mathematics? Were numbers conscious? I was thinking about this and similar nonsense as I bent down in front of the open door of the café and, kneeling, nearly touched the glass with my nose. There could be no doubt: it was the same symbol, drawn to the same proportions, even if some of the lines were a shade thicker. Once I was finally convinced, I ventured into the café, lifting each foot high as if afraid that I might trip over an invisible thread connecting the symbol to whatever and hoping at the same time for an explanation as to what it was doing here in the middle of Belgrade after the many sightings in Zemun. To my disappointment the café was empty. The only person there was a young man behind the counter, his head shaved smooth, dressed all in black, a small gold earring in his right ear. As I entered he was inserting a silver disc into the sound system, with his back to me. Everything gleamed in the gray semidarkness, the disc, the earring, and the back of his head, especially the back of his head, down which the rays of light slid as if alive. He caught sight of me in the mirror but turned around only after the disc had slid into the system, and then only to say, She's up there, and he gestured at the ceiling with his thumb. After that we were plashed by a wave of music from the band Morphine, a pounding bass and the moan of a saxophone. I stared at him. His lips moved again: I couldn't hear anything though I decided he wasn't addressing me, but mouthing the words of the song thundering in the café. Nonetheless I tried and I shouted as loudly as I could, Who is up there? The young man looked at me, scowled, then came close, nearly resting his lips against my ear. I can't hear you, he said. His breath tickled my ear and made me laugh. He moved his head and placed his ear in front of my lips. I smelled the sweet fragrance of lotion and saw the little hairs that had started traitorously growing. I was asking, I said, who is up there and why you told me. I tried carefully not to touch him but failed; my lips did touch the whorls of his ear several times. Again we changed positions, and his breath filled my ear. I don't know anything, he shouted, except she said I should send up the one who came in after her, dressed like you are dressed. He stepped away and gestured behind me, and only then did I see the beginning of a staircase leading to an upper level. I went over to the stairs, leaned on the banister, and looked up. There, I thought, reigned real darkness, but once I had climbed up I saw I'd been wrong. On each table was a lamp, so the room was filled with little oases of light, between which the dark was denser, but only for one or at most one and a half steps, which was all it took to move from table to table. Then I saw her hand. The lamps on the tables had low shades, so the heads and upper parts of the bodies of the guests were framed in a pale twilight, while the hands and lower arms shone with outlandish brightness, which is why I first saw her hands, almost unreal in their whiteness, and only then, above the edge of the light, her face, stippled with dark. I cannot recall how many tables were taken, perhaps there was no one else on the upper level, but I seem to recall a fragment of conversation, muffled laughter, which reached us when we fell silent and which persuaded me that someone was laughing at me. Each time I'd smooth my hair, feel my face with my fingertips, brush the corners of my mouth, press the tip of my nose. I think she never took her eyes off me. So all the while I was wondering, and here, that's the reason I was not prepared to tell Marko about it—sensing that, guided by male logic, he would have no understanding for such a subtle point—all the while I was wondering whether she could feel it in her fingertips, which rested on the table, how my heart was pounding, since I was seated at an angle and the left side of my chest rested against the table's edge. What did we talk about, or did we talk at all, or else did we take turns blurting out disconnected sentences? Everything was chopped, distinct, as if, while sitting at the same table, we were in different time zones and speaking to ourselves. I managed once or twice to bring up the Danube, but I didn't make it to the scene by the riverbank because she stopped me, lifting her hand or arching an eyebrow. May I at least know, I asked, your name? Of course, she said. I waited. Margareta, she said. She had two birthmarks on her left temple, freckles on her cheekbones, silken hairs above the corners of her lips, a small scar on the tip of her chin. I fell from a bicycle when I was small, she said, and touched the scar with the tip of her index finger. A scrap of someone's laughter floated over to us, and I quickly touched my cheeks and nose. The music in the lower part of the café swelled, the noise mounted the stairs, the drum and bass repeated the same monotonous, hypnotic beat, and I could feel the floor vibrate. I felt something else: nausea at the dense cigarette smoke, and I knew that I would wake up the next morning with a horrific headache. I wiped my forehead. I noticed worry flash through her eyes; I could see nothing when I took a closer look. I asked her if she would like to take a walk. A little fresh air, I said, would be nice. She nodded silently. But first I need to go and splash my face, I added, if she didn't mind waiting. She shook her head. I got up and went quickly down the stairs. In the mirror of the men's room I saw I was pale. I splashed my face and rubbed it with a paper towel. The paper was thin and tore, stuck to my fingers. How long did I stay there? Five minutes, ten, certainly no longer, not even that, but when I went back up she wasn't there. At first I assumed that she too had gone to the toilet, so I sat there calmly, legs crossed, sipping cold coffee. I stared at the table, Margareta didn't come back, the music got louder, and someone at a neighboring table swore ardently, someone else laughed, and finally I realized she was gone. I stood up abruptly, prepared to run, though I could barely walk for the misery of it, then, pressing against the table with the palms of my hands, I noticed a slip of paper protruding from under her saucer. I sat again. The paper, torn from a small pad, was folded twice, and it smelled just a little, when I sniffed it, of some long since forgotten perfume, something like patchouli or vanilla, no longer in fashion. I unfolded the paper and then quickly folded it again and turned to look around, and only then did I smooth out the scrap of paper and read what was written on it: A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unread. I knew the sentence, it had been on the back of the manuscript that the gray-haired man had given me. I turned over the scrap of paper and looked at the other side: nothing was written there, nothing sketched, despite my hopes to the contrary. I got up, picked up the check, and as I was making my way to the stairs I noticed a crumpled ball of paper under the table. A terrible silence suddenly reigned and all eyes were on me. In fact, no one was looking my way, the din had grown even more raucous, new guests were mounting the stairs, the waiter was carrying a tray with cups of cappuccino and little bottles of Coca-Cola, so I could bend down calmly and pick up the uneven paper ball. Just in case, however, I didn't smooth it out in the café. I shoved it into my jeans pocket, and there it remained until I got home. Even then I didn't smooth it out right away, but placed it on the table in the living room, sat in the armchair, and stared at it. For some reason I was sure that the crumpled paper held the real message and that the message left under the saucer had merely been a decoy, an illusion of a message, a distraction for someone who was not meant to learn anything. I tried to remember the appearance of the people sitting at the other tables, but they mingled, pale and paltry, always outshone by Margareta's face, and only one face came back to me in its entirety, the face of the young man at the bar, glowing with a light that, halo-like, reflecte
d from his shaven head. I even recalled the earring in his right ear, slightly drooping, though nicely shaped. Perhaps Margareta's acts of caution were a routine she held to in every situation, regardless of whether there was real danger or not? I reached out to the paper ball, touched it with the tip of my index finger. Measures of caution, peril, a mask, and a distraction? What was I thinking? I looked at the finger with which I had touched the edge of the paper as if I expected to see a drop of blood on it. Then I licked it and raised it to the air, as I used to do when I was a boy, to determine which way the wind was blowing; where the saliva on the finger felt cooler, that was where the wind was blowing from. Nothing was moving in the room, of course, and the finger remained equally moist on all sides. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket, wiped my finger, then went to the window. I looked to the left, looked to the right, surveyed the street lit by the flickering light of the street lamps, and in the fragmented reflections in the windowpane I sought the reflection of the paper ball behind my back. Down there on the street, two pedestrians were moving from opposite sidewalks to cross the street at the same time, as if in a math problem, and I assumed that someone somewhere was calculating where they would meet. One of the pedestrians was much taller, which probably meant that his stride would be longer, but if he was melancholic by nature, then he would walk more slowly, which would give the second pedestrian, shorter and broader and irrepressibly optimistic, the advantage, despite the fact that his stride was shorter. Paying no attention to the demands of this challenging task, the pedestrians met precisely at the yellow line, which divided the street into two equal parts, and it even seemed to me that they nodded in greeting. I waited for each to cross over to the opposite sidewalk and walk on, then all there was to watch was the traffic light, but the pattern of its changes quickly became too predictable. There was no putting it off, I said to myself, but I waited for all three colors to follow one after the other once more. I went over to the table, uncrumpled the ball, and smoothed out the paper. I saw the familiar geometric figure, and below it, a six-digit number, which, there could be no doubt, was a phone number. I don't know what I was expecting: perhaps a few sentences, something more complex; this seemed simple, too simple for a story about the Kabbalah and cryptic occurrences. I took the paper, brought it to my nose, and sniffed. It had no smell. I checked the other side; it was empty, as had been the reverse side of the other scrap of paper. Now, easy, I said to myself, easy. Maybe there was something that should be done with that number, a mathematical operation, finding the right path, which would lead to the true meaning. A moment later I wondered what I was doing here: the country was in a state of collapse, threats of bombardment hung in the air like overripe fruit, people were snapping apart as if they had been made of Lego blocks, lunacy had nearly been declared the norm, and here I was tinkering with Kabbalistic mysteries and anti-Jewish conspiracies, and wasting hours and days to discover who had left tracks in river mud that had long since been washed away. I should have turned around there and then, shrugged it all off, headed in the opposite direction, forgotten Eleazar and his passage to the other world, returned to my messy, everyday life, to stories of politics and shifts in government, to exercises in the skill of survival, but just as I hadn't done that to begin with, so I didn't listen to myself now, and when I lifted the receiver my hand was shaking. The phone rang after only a few seconds, the first time with interference, then more clearly and loudly, until after the fifth or sixth ring it went quiet. Hello, I said, and my voice dropped like a stone into a void. I pressed the receiver against my ear: no more crackling, but now I was convinced that someone was saying something in a whisper or, perhaps, shouting from a great distance. Hello, I said again, feeling like a person who, leaning over the stone rim, speaks into the depths of a well. I waited a moment longer, then hung up. Where had I gone wrong? Again I remembered Dragan Mišović: perhaps more refined mathematical calculations were called for, more complex operations, a more sophisticated knowledge of algebra or whatever, something there was no way I could see when I looked at the numbers written on the crumpled scrap of paper. Then I picked up the phone again and dialed the same number, remembering the advice of the secretary at Minut when I complained that I had not been able to get through to them for hours. Never trust our phones, she said then, not when someone's talking, or even saying nothing, and less still when you get a busy signal. This time the phone rang straight away. It rang loud and clear, so loud, in fact, that I had to move the receiver away from my ear. And her voice, when she came on, was the same. Thank you, she said. I never knew what that meant, what she was thanking me for, so I said nothing. I remembered how her hands gleamed in the café, and I wondered what the light was like where she was sitting now. I imagined a great old-fashioned chandelier, full of crystal balls and tinkling decorations, through which the light was refracted, making fragile, little rainbows. It is dark, she said, it's dark in my room. My hands no longer shook; now my palms were sweating. So that's why I didn't tell Marko everything, it was because of Margareta's ability, I don't know what else to call it, to read my thoughts. At the time I thought of this as an ability; now, despite everything, I believe it was a skill, difficult but possible to master, yet as far as Marko went, nothing would have changed had I known that then. Ability or skill, none of this would have meant a thing to him, regardless of distinctions, because he would not have accepted it, and he would have produced a scornful smile, maybe even a loud laugh. Yoda from Star Wars reads minds, he'd say, that doesn't happen in everyday, normal life. High time, he'd add, for me to stop living in the world of sci-fi and come back to this planet, no matter how chaotic it might be. I would have told him then that he didn't know what he was saying, that I am not afraid of chaos, and word by word we would have sunk into the lull of hashish, until we fell silent, drained, or we pounced on a box of wafer cookies. Marko had once calculated that in the course of our many years of getting high we had eaten nearly a freight car worth of wafer cookies, though I never corroborated his figures. And it wasn't just wafer cookies we ate, often we had Turkish delight, tea crescents, and chocolate-covered raisins. These are from Freight Car Number 2, Marko would say, and as far as he was concerned the discussion would be over. Pressing the phone to my ear, I looked around as if I were in my apartment for the first time, and said that my room too was dark. In fact only one lamp was on, and its wan light could have passed for a thin dusk, the first stage of proper darkness. I may not have said that, or at least not in so many words, I no longer remember, though it was not so very long ago that this happened, but I, like most people, remember pointless details better, the circumstances leading to a goal, while the goal itself, even when I reach it, tends to elude memory, as if in a dream in which, no matter how far we walk, or run, or ride a white stallion, we cannot get close to the outline of walls on the horizon or the shore of the emerald river. Of course I should have jotted everything down and not allowed the writing, as is happening now, to turn into an archeological excavation. Words are the goods that rot the fastest, as the editor at Minut once said, and I stared, astonished, at him, not because he rarely declared such sentiments, but because those words suddenly illuminated a multitude of things to me and made me think about language as a cluster of bananas. Nothing, indeed, rots as quickly as language, though bananas that have gone soft do have their charm. I don't believe I brought up bananas in my conversation with Margareta that evening. In some sense we picked up where the conversation in the café left off, though she didn't explain why she had had to leave so abruptly, and just as I had felt at the café that we were not actually having a conversation, so this exchange too turned into a sequence of choppy fragments on the way to silence. Then we stopped talking, and a moment later, without saying goodbye, she hung up. In the rustling void that followed, again I thought I could hear someone whispering from an unreachable distance, and I kept the phone to my ear for a long time, so that my ear, as I could see in the mirror as I got ready for bed, turned red like a poppy and
hurt at the slightest touch. The next day I told Marko other things, and in the end he advised me to stay away from it all, because pretty soon, he said, I'd be wanting to become a Jew, and then, he pointed out, I would have to be circumcised. He winked and laughed. Enough of this. I must go back to a few other things that happened, because if I don't do it now I'll never catch up. This story has too many threads as it is, and it probably will never become a proper story. Stories are orderly, the threads in stories are harmoniously arranged, what I am doing here is more a reflection of life, which is chaotic, with too much going on at once. Life, I heard someone say, is like a puppet theater in which many of the strings have snapped, so each of us is an unhappy puppeteer trying to pull together and reconnect the strings into a workable whole, but keeps making mistakes. Life comes down to untangling knots, and even more to tying them again, but that simple act grows more complicated as the years pass, the fingers thicken or get stiff, the sight grows feeble, the teeth drop out. The puppets stagger around on the stage, they raise arms instead of legs, they swivel their heads when they should be looking straight, in the summer they seek shade and in the winter they ask for gloves and scarves, they complain of gas pains, they wear two different pairs of glasses to read letters, and when that is not enough, they read only the headlines in the newspaper and then guess about the articles, and this makes their world more and more the product of their fancy, as perhaps it should be, because after that comes the moment when nothing matters, and the only thing left for the puppeteer to do is release the string that holds the funeral plaque and watch the little puff of dust rise above the empty stage. The performance is over. The end. That is not what I meant to talk about, but rather about something still far from over. The walls of the stairwell in the building where I lived were covered in splotches of different colors, irregular shapes, which my neighbors were using to try and cover the large and small swastikas, the six-pointed stars that dripped with gore, and the brief anti-Semitic slogan, if anti-Semitic best describes it: BOO TO THE JEWS. The messages in my mailbox had become so frequent and monotonous that I stopped saving them. One night, I found a little mound of excrement on the doormat. I bent over, then knelt down to examine it more closely. It was firm, compact, and I could just picture the effort with which the person had squeezed it out. Perhaps the squeezing was even accompanied by pain, the rupturing of a blood vessel along the rim of the anus, but the light in the stairwell was too weak for me to spot any traces of coagulated blood. Judging by the position of the stool, tidily coiled, the person had produced it while crouching over the doormat, and someone else, I assume, was keeping watch at the door to the building. If they had brought it there from somewhere else, surely the natural snakelike appearance would have been spoiled, at least smeared. I was not eager to carry it, so I picked up the doormat along with it and tossed them both into a large plastic shopping bag with the name of a fashion shop written across it. I bought a new doormat with the word WELCOME on it, but when I found it a few days later soaked in urine I gave up on any further purchases. So, maybe this was a victory for the monster, as Marko put it, and I believe that they experienced it as such; however, I would do better, I answered, spending my money on more useful things. I can always wipe my shoes, I added, on my neighbor's mat, nothing wrong with that. If I was being exposed to such things, then, I reasoned, the real Jews surely must have been suffering far greater abuse. Strangely, Jaša Alkalaj and Isak Levi had not known of any such incidents, or maybe, as Marko claimed, they preferred not to talk about them. Fear is the greatest censor, said Marko. I hadn't seen Jakov Švarc much at that point, but when I ran into him by chance on Knez Mihailova Street I brought the matter up. As I leaned toward him to hear better in the clamor and bustle of the street, I spotted two familiar figures by the entrance to a passageway that led through to Čika Ljubina Street. I could not recall at first where I knew their faces from, but then, as strains of an accordion wafted from somewhere, I recalled the rainy night when they accosted me at the doorway to my building. One of them, in the nursery school bushes, had punched me in the small of my back, right in the kidneys. The other had changed some, his hair had grown out or he had grown a mustache, but there was no doubt that he too had been breathing down my neck. Do you now understand, asked Jakov Švarc, why this is as it is? I looked at his lips, as if there were words on them that I had not yet heard. I noticed only a crumb of bread. It might get better someday, he went on, meanwhile, it is what it is. He had, he said, an appointment with a cardiologist, at his age, he said, every twitch was interpreted as announcing the ultimate absence of all pain. He patted himself on the chest, in the area of the heart, and left, and I looked again at the entrance to the passageway. There was no one there. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I turned and kept walking toward Kalemegdan, spinning like a mindless weathervane. I had similar experiences over the next few days, not every day, of course, though often enough to make me anxious about going out into the street. The sequence of events was nearly always the same: here and there, alone or in company, I would spot the familiar faces, unobtrusive yet present, and the moment I was distracted they would slip away. Ignore them, Jaša Alkalaj said when I complained, they are spoiled rotten and have seen too many bad movies. I didn't believe him, sensing that he didn't believe himself. When I asked what was really going on in the Jewish community, he avoided answering, and when I said rumors were circulating around town that the Jewish cemetery had been vandalized, he said that I shouldn't believe everything I heard, but if I was so curious I could go to the cemetery and see for myself. The dead don't lie, you know, he said. So off I went to the cemetery. The metal gateway was freshly painted. I opened it with effort, stepped into the cemetery, and let it shut with a bang behind me. After all the noise and commotion of the traffic, the serenity of the cemetery was almost painful. The broad avenue, lined with evergreens, led to a large monument resembling the wings of a butterfly, or, more precisely, a gateway to heaven, a gate to the other world. The day was bright and warm, the path crisscrossed with shadows. I walked slowly, pausing, studying tombstones, but I couldn't shake off the sense that someone was watching me. Maybe that's how it is at every cemetery, what with the presence of all the dead and the feel of silence, but, just in case, I turned around abruptly several times, once I even crouched, determined to wait for the person to appear. No one appeared. I crouched until my calves and thighs ached, and then I straightened up with great effort and sat on the nearest bench. Though the avenue was not long, the winged monument looked as if it were far off on the horizon, as if I would never reach it. Then, suddenly, the branches of a pine tree above me began swaying, though I felt not a breath of wind. Two or three pine needles floated past me, and one, like an arrow, pierced the sleeve of my jacket, shivered, then tipped over. I looked up. There was still rustling, but now it came from the very top of the tree. That must be how the dead make themselves known, I thought. I no longer looked back. I lowered my head and hurried toward the monument. I wanted to get out of that tunnel of evergreens as fast as possible, to get to a place where no one was saying anything to me. I came out of the shadows and thought I saw someone pass behind the monument wings: he stepped from behind the right-hand wing and slipped behind the one on the left. I froze. I stood on the concrete path at the approach to the monument, staring at the empty space between the wings. Maybe those are the wings of an angel, I thought, but this did nothing to ease my terror. Only one possibility was left, and slowly, step by step, I walked along the path that led through the monument. I held my breath and listened. The only sound I could hear was the pounding of blood in my ears. Then I squinted and nearly galloped across the empty space on the path, shielding my head with my arms and kicking my feet up high. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with the cemetery wall. I turned around. Between the wings of the monument I could see the iron gate at the opposite end of the path. The pounding in my ears subsided, but my heart was beating furiously. There was nothing more stupid I could
have done, I thought, than come to the cemetery and display my helplessness. I moved slowly among the tombstones. Some were standing at a slant, some eroded with age, but nowhere did I see any smashed stones or scribbled graffiti. In one corner I did see discarded hypodermic needles and wrinkled condoms, the sort of thing that can be found at any cemetery, and they did not seem to have any particularly anti-Semitic message to convey. I walked through another section and then came back to the shady avenue. There, by a modest fountain from which water was dripping, my attention was drawn to a monument in the shape of a pile of books. I leaned over to take a closer look and noticed that one part of the gravestone was lighter, as if it had recently been washed or scrubbed with a powerful cleanser. I crouched down and despite the best efforts of the person who had tried to scrub away the unwanted message, I was able to decipher the words DEATH TO THE JEWS. Instead of an exclamation point following the words there was an odd mark, probably someone's unsuccessful attempt at signing the message. I straightened up and wiped the sweat off my forehead. Why hadn't Jaša Alkalaj simply confirmed the story about the vandalizing of the cemetery, but instead sent me to see for myself? The dead do not lie, he'd said, and indeed, the dead did not lie. They also told the truth in the section of the cemetery near the entrance gate. Three tombstones were lying on the ground, all three smashed to pieces, and it was clear, though the pieces were laid out on boards as if awaiting repair, that an unnatural force had caused them to fall and break. Three tombstones do not topple on their own. I rinsed my hands at the fountain, shook them dry, and wiped them with a handkerchief. It took even more effort to open the gate from the inside, and as I pulled at the large iron handle, I was wondering whether someone might have locked it to shut me inside the cemetery, alone. Then the door creaked, budged, and when I pulled it to and stepped out into the street, a tram rumbled by. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I looked every which way. In the days to come, as I said before, these motions preceded everything I did, and sometimes even today I look in every direction when I open the front door, though I am in a different city and no one is expecting me. Six years ago every gesture, every time someone broke suddenly into a dash, every word spoken loudly, to say nothing of whistles, all of it signified something entirely different from what that gesture, dash, or word seemed to mean on the surface. Never was reality farther from reality in Belgrade than during those years, and never was there greater insistence on the fact that this reality was the only true reality. And so I stood on the sidewalk, watched the tram trundling off into the distance, and strained to hear the murmur of the dead behind my back, and wondered how to fend off the aggressive flower hawkers who were striding my way. I never handled myself well in such situations, and usually I ended up buying everything they foisted on me. The only way to defend myself was to get away, so I turned in the opposite direction and moved quickly along the cemetery fence, but the hawkers also sped up, and their shouts reverberated in my ears, brief cries offering all kinds of flowers. Keep walking, a man said to me suddenly, as a woman shoved bouquets under my nose. When we come to the corner, continued the man, stop. I did. I stopped and said, What now? Now you buy the flowers, said the man. What you're looking for, said the woman, is in the bouquet. She lifted up the bouquet: carnations wrapped in damp paper. I asked, How much do they cost? The woman and the man looked at each other. Give what you want, the woman said finally. You wouldn't actually take his money, would you? asked the man. In case someone is watching, I interrupted, it must all look authentic. Fine, said the woman, then give me a piece of paper, give me anything. I dipped my hand into my pocket and pulled up a crumpled receipt for a registered mail package. The woman took it with the tips of her fingers, as if the paper were burning hot, dropped it into her pocket, and pushed the bouquet of flowers into my arms. They turned and walked to the cemetery gate, where other sellers were bustling with flowers and candles, and I stayed at the corner with the bouquet resting on my chest. And what, I later said to Marko, should I have done: gone back into the cemetery or kept walking, as if I had just decided this bouquet was for the living, not for the dead? Marko said he would have gone back, and he would not have neglected to see what was in the bouquet. A key, I answered, or actually, I added, a small plastic bag with a key in it. Good, said Marko, but for what? I'd like to know that too, I said. I showed him the key: an ordinary, smallish key of the kind used for a mailbox or a cupboard door. Marko was disappointed. He had been expecting a key to a safe, a key with an unusual mark on it, something to signal the complexity of any attempt at opening. If that's what the key looks like, he said, there is nothing of value hidden there. Shouldn't we first figure out what this key opens, I said, and then talk about what's there? You're right, said Marko, and suggested we smoke a joint of local grass. The grass, he claimed, was from Montenegro, and it had a nasty aftertaste and caused coughing, and that was the way it hit too: a sideswipe, slow, bitter. After some time, mostly spent staring at the ceiling, I wondered out loud how I would find the lock for the little key from the bouquet. Where do I start, I said, where should I look? Maybe there's something written on the little bag it was in, said Marko. It's a clear plastic bag, I said, there is nothing on it. Are you sure? asked Marko, sometimes it is hardest to see stuff that's in plain sight. I sighed, rose with effort, and weaving gently, went over to the wastepaper basket by my desk. When I knelt down, the entire room knelt with me, and when I bent my head to peer into the basket, I felt my brain touch my forehead on the inside. The basket was full of crumpled sheets of paper; the plastic bag was lying on top. I picked it up between my thumb and forefinger, and waved it triumphantly at Marko, and in that gesture toward Marko the bag was lit by a ray of light from the lamp by the sofa, and the letters KRSQ and the number 13 were clearly visible. I hadn't noticed them before because they weren't written with a ballpoint or a marker, but rather scratched on the inside surface of the bag with something sharp, perhaps the tip of a scalpel. Karađorđe Square, number 13, shouted Marko when I showed it to him. He suggested we go there immediately. He was shivering with excitement and some of the shivering affected me. I was barely able to tie my shoelaces, and my expression in the mirror wavered, as if I were shaking all over. Not bad, this Montenegrin stuff, said Marko as we stepped out into the street. He felt, he said, that he was trudging through layers of wool, that the soles of his feet never rested on solid ground. Maybe that is why it took us so long to walk to the high-rise. The entrance was dirty, buried in torn newspapers, plastic bags, and wrappers from wafer cookies and chocolate bars. The walls were scrawled with messages and scribbles. The mailboxes were on the right-hand side, many were broken open, some scorched with fire, some painted in different colors. Marko looked for box 13, but it was wide open and the door was dangling on a half-broken hinge. Someone beat us to it, said Marko, and I could do nothing but agree. Who knows how long we'd have stood there, alert to the despair we were feeling, had I not raised my eyes again to the mailboxes and studied them carefully until we found the one that had the right kind of lock. It was number 22, and the little key slid in smoothly, with no resistance. In the back of the opened box lay another key. This time there could be no doubt: unlike the first, the second key was clearly for unlocking and locking the door to an apartment. I looked at Marko and he nodded. Just in case, we went back to the front door and surveyed the area. We decided the apartment was on the fourth or fifth floor and Marko suggested we take the elevator, but I insisted we walk up, claiming that additional caution was not a bad idea and that the elevator might be more dangerous. Marko relented, though he did it because of a woman who had just entered the building, not because of me. We climbed quickly, skipping two or three steps at a time, and when we stopped on the fourth floor, we were both out of breath. Leaning against the banister, we waited to catch our breath and then went to the door with the number 22 on it. I looked at Marko; he nodded again. I put the key in the lock, turned it once, once more, and turned the knob gingerly. The door swung open to a dark
front hall. Marko went in first, I followed. I closed the door, leaned on it, and wiped the sweat from my forehead. You entered an apartment when the owner wasn't home after all, said Marko, not hiding his sarcasm, as he felt the wall by the door in search of the light switch. He flicked it, and, with a crack that echoed like the sound of a rifle shot, light poured into the front hall. Our faces were reflected in an oval mirror. The two doors that led farther into the apartment were shut. One of them, the first one we opened, was the door to the kitchen, spotlessly clean and tidy, as if no one ever used it. Marko went over to the refrigerator and pulled open the door: empty. We stood a little longer before the open fridge and stared into its interior as if it held the answer to all our questions. Marko shut the refrigerator, we returned to the front hall and opened the other door. That led into the dining room, which gave access to two other rooms. However, at the doorway to the dining room we were startled by what we saw: all the walls, from floor to ceiling, were covered with shelves crammed with books. There were books on the fl oor stacked in uncertain, wobbly piles. The same was true in the other rooms: shelves with books, nothing else. In the larger room were a small desk and an office chair with a seat that swiveled, that was all. Incredible, said Marko, just like that novel about the man who lived in an apartment full of books. He couldn't remember what novel, nor could he recall the writer's name, but he knew that it all ended in a big blaze, a fire that mercilessly devoured the books. I also didn't know which novel he had in mind, though for me, I said, the scene in the apartment evoked descriptions of the apartment where Salinger's heroes lived, the Glass family, or whatever their name was, they also had books lying all over the place, on the shelves, on chairs, the floor, even in the bathtub. It is always like that, said Marko, you put one book down somewhere, and two or three days later it's a pile, as if books get there by themselves. That had happened to him so many times, he said, that he decided to keep books in his apartment in only one place, otherwise, he said, they spread like mold, nothing can hold them back. You shouldn't compare books and mold, I said, but Marko rebelled, asserting that there are good molds and that everything that gets moldy needn't be thrown away. We were standing in the dining room again, not knowing what to do next. I didn't want to talk anymore about molds. Marko went over to the desk and looked into a side compartment, then he slid open one of the two drawers. There is nothing here, he said almost gruffly, then pulled open the second drawer and found an envelope with my name on it. I took the envelope and sniffed. I don't know what I was expecting, but it didn't smell like anything in particular, though I was convinced that my name had been written by Margareta, whose fragrance I would have recognized. Marko insisted that I open it immediately. I refused. He was startled, he pressed his lips together, said nothing. My refusal surprised me too, though I could have anticipated it after my decision not to tell him about the encounter with Margareta. Just as books attract other books, so confidences not shared attract other confidences not shared, and after the initial silence, others follow ever faster. Marko was, most certainly, my closest friend, someone whom I had known my entire life, but sometimes one should be cautious even with such friendships. In other words, there are moments when it is better to be alone, and I wanted such a moment for reading the letter from the desk. Marko made a last stab at changing my mind and offered me a joint, which he pulled out of his shirt pocket. A little more of the Montenegrin stuff, he said, and everything will be different. No, I said, and added that he should not be smoking grass in a strange apartment in which there were no ashtrays and someone might show up at any moment. Marko lit the joint anyway, and I went to the kitchen and opened a window. The kitchen looked out on the Danube and the path that stretched to Hotel Yugoslavia, and which, probably because of the clouds that had gathered over Belgrade, was almost deserted. Not far from the high-rise several boys were playing soccer. I heard Marko whistling behind my back, then a chair creaked and he coughed. Then I noticed that on a grassy slope by the hotel, where pillars were left standing from the old Zemun railway station, a group of people had gathered in an uneven, jagged circle, or so it looked from where I stood, and they were listening to a person who stood in the middle of the circle. Something is going on, I said, and called Marko over. Marko looked out at the scene on the slope, stubbed out the joint on the metal frame of the venetian blinds, and said that to him it looked like the meeting of some ecological party. No point, he said, in wasting our time. Besides, he went on, there's nothing for us to do here. At least for some of us, he added, and later, after we had left the high-rise, he said he had to run, said goodbye, and took off toward the center of Zemun at a fast clip. I watched him walk away and suddenly found myself thinking he was leaving forever. The thought was so awful that I nearly ran after him. Instead I called out his name. He didn't hear me, or pretended not to, and continued walking, zigging and zagging among the pedestrians and parked cars until I lost sight of him. I touched the pocket where the folded letter was. The paper rustled soothingly. I thought I ought to read it, I even started reaching into the pocket, but then I turned and headed toward the hill by the hotel. I walked past the boys playing soccer and cursing. A little dog was tied to a lamppost serving as the goalpost, and the dog whined and wagged its tail each time the ball flew by. I came out on the path and walked by a kiosk selling food and juices. The fragrance of frying fish wafted my way. Two pregnant women walked slowly by, holding hands. One mentioned the košava wind, though the day wasn't windy, and the other automatically lifted her hand to smooth her hair. A young girl on a bike rang her bell, then asked us to let her pass. High above, an airplane moved across the sky, leaving a shaggy trail, while along the river a boat slid by, reflected in the surface, so at one moment I thought that the boat underneath, not the real one, was carrying the one above. I wondered where Marko was, whether he had already reached home and whether he would be angry the next day when I went looking for him. Why the next day, I said out loud, I could see him tonight. An old woman sitting on a bench gave me a sharp look, then shook her head. She was knitting. The woman sitting next to her was crocheting. Of the dozen electric cars, only one was being used by two little girls waiting for the ride to begin. On the path someone had written WHOEVER LOVES VESNA MUST BE CRAZY in chalk. I passed by an inflated slide in the shape of a four-sided giraffe, near which a foul-smelling compressor was rumbling, and then the entire hillside stretched out in front of me. The people I'd seen from the window of the high-rise were still on the slope, perhaps more closely packed than before and still forming an irregular circle. The only difference, I thought as I walked toward them across the grass, was that no one was standing inside the circle. In fact, circle is not the right word, I saw as I got closer, and what had seemed from afar, from the window of the high-rise, to be an irregular circle was actually a complicated arrangement of men and women, a human stripe circling the entire small hill and slowly dispersing. The people from the group were gradually, unhurriedly, leaving their places, but efficiently enough that by the time I'd climbed to the top of the hill, there was no one left. The last couple, a graying man and a young woman who resembled him, passed me on my way up the slope. I stood by the old metal pillars alone, my ears humming as if I were standing at the foot of a church tower. For several minutes more I could follow the people as they moved away from the hill; soon enough, however, they began to mingle with those out walking, and when I looked back, the grassy surfaces were empty. I touched my pocket again. Go home, I said to myself softly, through my teeth, go home. I turned, walked down the hill, and headed toward the Danube riverbank. As I was crossing the path, I nearly bumped into a little girl on a bike, perhaps the same girl on her way back to the high-rises. I reached the steps, sat on the lowest one, so that my feet were nearly in the water, pulled the letter from my pocket, and tore open the envelope. The letter was short, disappointingly short, it contained three sentences. The first I knew well. A dream uninterpreted, was written in large, even letters, is like a letter unread. A lette
r when read, the second sentence began, opens the way to dreams. If dreams are not dreams, read the third sentence, what are they? Such expectation, I thought, only to find myself faced with yet another question. Maybe I should crumple up the letter, I thought, and toss it into the water? I was angry, really angry, which, hand on heart, was funny, because a person who receives a letter never determines what's in the letter, but once he opens it, there is no going back, because regardless of how hard he tries to stuff that letter back into the envelope, it can never be as it was, even if he reseals the envelope so expertly that it fools the naked eye. I didn't crumple it up, though for a while longer I toyed with the idea of folding it into a paper boat. A letter from an unknown sender headed in an unknown direction, and the twofold indeterminacy suddenly became a source of comfort to me. I folded it carefully, slid it back into the envelope, stood up, and tucked it into my pocket. A wave that splashed against the steps splashed my sneakers. When I climbed to the top of the steps and looked back, I saw wet footprints leading straight to my feet. Someone's following me, I thought, and then burst out laughing. I laughed again every time I recalled the thought, especially as I was walking by the old woman knitting. Hearing my chuckles, she looked up and shook her head. The woman who was crocheting didn't move. She's deaf, I thought, but then, as I reached the high-rise, I realized that someone was, indeed, following me. Suddenly I was sure that someone behind me was making an effort to keep me in sight. I was next to the first of the high-rises, not far from the spot where it all began, and I could see the playground and the parents shouting greetings and encouragement to the children in the caterpillar train. There was a man somewhere here, I thought, in a black trench coat, standing by the seesaw or the wooden horse with the broken ear, watching a woman who has just stepped into the water. I spun around, my hands raised high as if ready to strike a karate blow, and one of the people out for a walk said quite audibly, He is crazy. I'm not crazy, I said, though I was hardly convincing. The little train had meanwhile come to a stop and the children were getting off, shrieking, jostling with the children who were getting on for the next ride. Go home, I whispered again to myself, go home, and I headed home, though I sensed that someone, keeping a careful distance, was eyeing the back of my head. There are things one should ignore, I said to Jaša Alkalaj the next day, and that is the best way that they, at least for a moment, cease to exist. I suppose, said Jaša, without conviction. He got up and went to the window and looked out. We were sitting in his studio waiting for Dacca, placing bets on whether he would come wearing a hat. I had not seen old Dača since the encounter in the yard of the Belgrade synagogue, and this time, at least so Jaša Alkalaj said, Dacca had asked to see me, though Jaša didn't know why. I told him I had been to the Jewish cemetery, that I had seen the traces of vandalism, and that I didn't understand why he had been ambivalent about my going. It would be better, he said, for us to have some brandy, and went over to the shelf with bottles. He had told me, I reminded him, that the dead don't lie, and that their truth must be honored. But, said Jaša, to honor the truth there have to be people who wish to honor it. At the end of July last year several tombstones were knocked over at the Zemun Jewish cemetery, others were defaced, some soiled, and ever since, he said, there has been no end to it. I can speak anywhere I please, he said, and be listened to with the greatest commiseration, but short of head shaking and maybe even some clucking, nothing happens, despite their promises, he said, despite the promises they offer, not one of them will lift a finger. These are times, he added, when there is a lot of talk, and when there is a lot of talk, little gets done. He put three glasses on the table and began to pour the brandy, but his hand shook so hard he had to stop. I took the bottle and filled the shot glasses nearly to the brim. For every thing, Jaša Alkalaj said, there is a season, and life is, in essence, the skill of matching the season to the thing. Now is not the season for cemeteries, he added, let's hope the dead won't hold it against us. Then suddenly, in a bright voice, he announced Dača's arrival and in a gulp he downed the brandy. Dača was wearing his hat, though we couldn't remember who had bet that he would, so even Dača's willingness to wait outside the door while we placed our bets again could not take us back to our earlier levity. The brandy, in its unpredictable way, closed off every path and thoroughfare to a brighter mood, and soon all three of us were darkly silent, clutching our shot glasses. Cemeteries are bottomless wells, said Jaša, and if you begin to talk about them, you have no choice but to go on falling. I perked up my ears when I heard the word well. Jaša mused on his vision of falling through a well, but in his vision, or was it some old dream, at the end of the well he arrived in a new, shiny, and perfect world, which was the product of all Kabbalist Sephirot, in which an unerring wisdom reigned. The wisdom may be unerring, I said, but if the well is endless, the man's fall will never reach that end. Jaša countered that I was taking the words too literally, or that I understood the word endless to mean something that had no end, but that every word has countless meanings, so at different levels, in different worlds, endless could mean many things. No word, he said, is ever plumbed, it always contains within it all other words, and speaking of language, he said, I see it as a series of bowls stacked one inside the next. I didn't think of language as stacked bowls, but that's not the point. For me language is alive, so it doesn't stack in larger or smaller packages, since nothing alive tolerates restraint, and if something defines language, it is the freedom of the movement of words, a subject for another time and another place. Meanwhile Dacca began to sweat from under his hat, and it was time to let him speak, because if we hadn't, he would have melted away, leaving only his hat and his shoes. This is how things stand, said Dacca. He put his shot glass down on the table and smacked his lips. On Shabbat when we met in the synagogue courtyard, he said, actually later that night, I dreamed of Eleazar. He was standing on a dusty path, wearing a shoulder yoke from which hung two buckets, brimming with water, he pointed at the horizon and said, Go to Sremski Karlovci. I asked him, What will I do in Sremski Karlovci, I am doing all right where I am now, but he kept repeating: Go to Sremski Karlovci, so in the end I had to agree to go, and he stopped talking, waved to me, and vanished. Then I woke up, said Dacca. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. He peered into it, then set it down on the floor by the chair. I lay awake, he continued, and tried to understand why Eleazar was sending me to Sremski Karlovci. For wine? said Jaša Alkalaj. No, said Dača, for the archives. Jaša looked at me, I shrugged; the last time I'd visited Sremski Karlovci I was in the seventh or eighth grade of elementary school and interested in everything but what the teachers were trying to teach us. There are archival collections there, said Dača, and, back when things were better, I spent many a day in those rooms. Eleazar, Dacca went on, apparently was aware of this, otherwise why, of all the places in the world, would he mention that particular place in Fruška Gora? But as he lay there awake, said Dača, he realized that Eleazar knew something else, something that had once escaped him, Dača, or at another time hadn't seemed to matter. He could no longer go back to sleep, and tossed and turned until the day dawned, and then, he said, he went to the train station and took a train to Sremski Karlovci. When he entered the archive, the first archivist he ran into crossed herself, he said, and exclaimed that he looked like a ghost. She asked, he said, whether anyone was giving him trouble, or, was it that he'd finally married? They all knew him there, said Dacca, as a sworn bachelor, which he had been, no question, but why marriage would have turned him into a ghost, he couldn't fathom, and so, he said, he stood in front of her desk, unsure of whether to strike up a conversation about the ups and downs of married life, or to go in search of what had brought him there, and who knows how long he would have hung around spinning his hat, had the archivist not struck herself on the brow and pronounced it a miracle that he had turned up that morning, for had he come a day later, or even later that afternoon, he would not have found her in the office, and no one would ever have known, s
he said, that waiting for him in her desk was an envelope that had arrived from Zagreb, who knows by what route, stamped with the seal of the city archive, she had not sent it on to him because no one knew what had become of him, of Dača, he'd stopped coming to the reading room, not having left a forwarding address or phone number or the name of a person they could get in touch with, so the envelope had stayed with her, unopened, of course, she said, no one would ever have considered opening it, she added, even if they had learned that the very worst, heaven forbid, had happened to him, to which he, Dača, replied that there are worse things than dying, for instance, betrayal or deception, and then the archivist, who knows why, he said, blushed, quickly bent down, and pulled a small white envelope out of the lowest drawer. The size of the envelope disappointed him, Dacca confessed, because he'd expected a larger and heftier missive, probably because of her lengthy introduction. He set his hat on her desk, he said, took the envelope, and sniffed it. The archivist shook her wrinkled index finger at him. Dacca tore open the end of the envelope and inched out a folded sheet of business stationery. Dear Sir, it said at the top, I recently came across the enclosed printout and remembered that you were looking for this information a long time ago. I don't know whether you are still researching this topic, but I thought this might be of interest. There are other archives now active, it said in closing, but I hope the old ones will not be forgotten, or, worse yet, destroyed. Sounds nice, said Jaša, but I don't understand any of it. You've never understood anything, Dacca said, glancing at me as if seeking support, though all I could do was raise my hands helplessly. Now you'll tell us, said Jaša, that this message came from an old flame of yours? Nonsense, said Dacca, though not without a smile at the corners of his mouth, she is a good friend, that's all, a person I often saw when I was leafing through documents many years ago at the Croatian Archive in Zagreb, searching, among other things, and here he looked at me again, for information about Eleazar. But, he said, first I have to tell you something else. He closed his eyes, leaned over, and I thought he'd fallen asleep. I am not sleeping, said Dača, just wondering where my hat is. Under the chair, said Jaša, where else would it be? At the time, Dača continued, I was obsessed with leeches. He knew this might sound peculiar, he said, but leeches used to be a precious commodity. It is hard to believe, for instance, that in one year alone, he said, and the year was 1833, French doctors imported over forty million leeches, and if you take all the other countries into account, over one hundred million leeches changed hands that year. Leeches had become so popular by the nineteenth century in Europe, he said, that they became an endangered species and were on the brink of extinction. Someone, of course, he said, had to go out and gather all those leeches, and unlike many of the other jobs that were off-limits for Jews at the time, or restricted to an elite, no one was fighting over gathering leeches, so among the Jews, he said, there were quite a few leech gatherers, people who went out and collected them in swamps, but also those who organized their purchase and further resale. Despite the distasteful nature of the work, however, he said, there were others who, as was the case with most occupations, protested the issuing of permits to Jews for this kind of work, and some of the most vocal, he said, were Serbian and German merchants who viewed the Jews as unpleasant competition. Good Lord, interrupted Jaša Alkalaj, who could possibly mind them gathering leeches? Leeches, he shuddered, I am disgusted at the very thought. One more person, shouted Dača, and clapped his hands, one more person who doesn't know anything about leeches! All I care about is that they are disgusting, said Jaša, the rest doesn't matter. You should care, said Dacca, but, as always, you prefer to scratch the surface, just like your paintings. If you don't shut up, said Jaša, you might end up without your hat. Dacca scowled, bent over, and peered under his chair. When he straightened up, his face was red. You wouldn't dare, he asked Jaša, touch it, would you? Jaša said nothing. You know what the Talmud says, Dača continued, that he who takes another man's hat may lose his soul? Are you a leech gatherer or a sermonizer? answered Jaša. Or are you just a hatter? Listen to him, will you? said Dacca, turning to me, and all because he has never overcome his childhood phobias, his fear of a leech latching on to him when he was splashing in the puddles, though—he couldn't have known that at the time—they do everything to keep their victims from feeling pain, so along with an anticoagulant, which makes possible the unobstructed flow of blood, they secrete an analgesic, which helps the victim, or patient, not to feel anything. I looked at Jaša, who was frowning, but I couldn't be sure whether the frown was a sign of genuine ire or just an act in a well-rehearsed performance. In a sense, I might well have been the one to be angry because Dača's claim about the painless leeches reminded me of the opening lines in Nabokov's book on Gogol, where Nabokov gives a convincing description of Gogol's agonies as doctors let his blood and leeches were dangling from his legendary nose. Every time I read those lines I felt revulsion at the thought of those powerful leeches, no different, to tell the truth, from Jaša's disgust of a moment before, and I had always thought how excruciating Gogol's pain must have been, how awful and miserable and humiliated he must have felt, and suddenly Dacca destroyed the image for me with the analgesic, making me doubt Gogol, whose nose was all that was still real, and Nabokov, who, I thought, should have warned me somewhere of this absence of pain. To convince you that I am telling you the truth, piped up Dača, I should put a leech on each of your legs. You're mad, shouted Jaša Alkalaj, you really are mad! That sent Dača into fits of laughter, except that this time he didn't clap, he slapped his thighs. I reached out and touched his elbow. Why don't you tell us what was in the document, I said, because everybody has the right to be afraid of whatever he wants to be afraid of. I knew a woman who fainted whenever she saw a photograph of a spider, and even the sight of a drawing of a spider sparked an unbearable headache. So why shouldn't someone have the right to be disgusted by leeches? Fine, agreed Dacca, but I would like him to see a leech, he said, on the operating table of Pirogov, the Russian surgeon, who would fix as many as two hundred leeches on a patient. The document, I asked, what did the document say? Dacca repeated the story of his interest in the unusual jobs that Jews did in Zemun and Srem, making a point of how he would tell us the next time about rag collecting, once a very lucrative business because rags were the raw material for the production of paper. Leeches, however, were not as appealing for Serbian and German merchants, regardless of the huge demand and good earnings, and it was while he was at the Zagreb archive, Dacca said, that he came upon many documents about the Jewish leech gatherers, about whom, as in the material on the other trades, there was an assortment of permits and bans, support and suspicion, an invoking of legal regulations and an evident sidestepping of these same regulations. Since Jews were not allowed to reside permanently on the Military Frontier, Dača explained, they used every opportunity, even the smallest, the size of a leech, for instance, to find a way to rest with at least one foot on solid ground. In the case of leeches, of course, it would be better to say mud rather than solid ground, but even mud, he remarked, could sometimes be reliable. There was something about mud in the Talmud, he said, but now he couldn't remember where. He stopped talking and began to nod. Jaša and I looked at each other. Don't you look at each other, said Dacca, I'm not sleeping, I am just trying to remember the name of the leech gatherer in the Brod regiment. Then he straightened up, opened his eyes, and said that the buyer's name was Marko Felner and that for the right to be a buyer he paid more than a thousand forints annually, while he gave the gatherers ten krajcars in silver for a standardized measure, which came to about a cup and a little more. No one, Dača said, no one dared catch leeches without Felner's go-ahead, and his privilege was supported by the military command, which, of course, was a paradox, he added, because the army should have been doing the exact opposite, meaning that they should have been encouraging Jews to leave the Military Frontier region. Clearly everybody cared more about pocketing a little spare change, he said, even i
f it came from leeches, because the dilemma of the leech gatherers crops up often in the correspondence of the Slavonian general command, and for instance, he said, there is mention of a case of two Jews who hung around Slavonski Brod for more than a month in 1833 without authorization, which was absolutely unacceptable according to the regulations of the day, and they were allowed to be in Brod only on the days the ferry ran, and even then, said Dacca, only for as long as absolutely necessary for them to receive the leeches delivered from Bosnia, and on condition that no smuggling was involved, in which case the authorities would have been merciless with them, the Jews, not the leeches, and expelled them from the Military Frontier at once. Now here is where the additional information that arrived from Zagreb comes in, an extract from a document that had eluded me or else had been located at a later date, in which the Slavonian general command informs the Zemun magistrate's office that a young Jewish man who had been smuggling leeches was arrested in the vicinity of Slavonski Brod, and when questioned as to what his name was and where he was from, he replied that his name was Volf Enoch and that he was a water carrier by trade from Zemun. The command didn't believe him and sought confirmation from the magistrate that in the registry of Zemun Jews such a person with such a name was listed, demanding at the same time of the magistrate that if the detainee's claims were shown to be accurate, why he had been able to leave his duties in Zemun and come as far as Slavonski Brod, especially since no leeches in any considerable quantity were found upon his person, but he did have in his sack many manuscripts and vials with an assortment of liquids and powders, which made everything more suspicious and merited confidentiality and caution. The response of the Zemun magistrate, Dacca said, has not been preserved, but even so we can clearly see that this could not be the same Volf Enoch, because the document refers to a young man, whereas Volf Enoch, if he were one and the same person, would have been about eighty years old at the time, and no one could have described him as a young Jew, unless, said Dača, it was, in fact, our Volf, but altered or refreshed in some way despite his advanced age. You see, he said, and by this time he was gesticulating excitedly, the extract quotes a part of a letter from the command dated January 1834, which states that the Zemun magistrate's office should make an effort to provide additional information about this Volf Enoch, because he vanished from the cell where he'd been held, and when they say vanished, said Dacca, they remark that he vanished in the literal sense of the word. In that cell, you see, there were other people, and when they woke up one morning, Volf was no longer among them. No one had heard or seen a thing, there were no traces of a tunnel dug or bars broken, and his sack was missing from the office where it had been set aside for safekeeping, though no one had been in the office that night, since the key was in the pocket of a prison clerk who had spent the entire night in his bed, as confirmed by his wife. This disappearance, the document explained in closing, casts an uncomplimentary light on the work of the police and the corresponding segment of the Slavonian general command, and required of them to make an effort as urgently as possible to address the case of the Jewish leech gatherer who could not have simply melted into thin air. Except, of course, said Dacca, and winked at me, if he was our Eleazar, for whom, as a Kabbalist, to move to another place was no hardship at all, no matter how far away. He leaned over, picked up his hat, and set it on his head. It's time, he said, as the doorbell rang. Dacca immediately took off his hat, I got up, Jaša said he wasn't expecting anyone, and when he opened the door, there was, indeed, no one there. Not only was there no one there, I told Marko when I visited him later, but it was dark in the stairwell, so Jaša, when he opened the door, took a quick step back, just as he would have, I said, had he seen an unusual person or an unexpected sight at the door, and Dacca and I, convinced that this was why he had stepped back, ran to the door, and then we too stepped back, faced with darkness. We peered for a bit longer into the darkness, then Jaša shut the door and asked if we'd like a drink. Darkness, he added, brings on thirst. Marko nodded, though I could see he was not listening as carefully as he had on previous days. I told him about what had happened on the hill near Hotel Yugoslavia, and here he seemed more willing to listen, he even asked a few questions about how the people were dressed, whether anyone among them was barefoot, whether there were more fair-haired women than dark-haired, but I had no precise answers. I was so vague in fact that Marko finally asked if I had been on the hill at all. I didn't answer right away; I was tired, I wanted to lie down and get a good night's sleep, and I was upset with myself for being upset by Marko's reproach, it being every bit as justified, I have to admit, as my own behavior of the day before. Perhaps I had forgotten some things, I said, finally, however, I remembered that their movement, which seemed arbitrary at first, was coordinated, even when they began to disperse, so I decided there was a message hidden in the shapes, forms, geometric figures, call them what you will, and that the movement, this traversing of imagined pathways to and fro, in other words everything up to their departure, represented a language that was being communicated to someone who knew how to listen. To watch, said Marko, because if this was geometry, listening wouldn't be of much use. He rolled a hefty joint and offered it to me like a peace pipe. While we smoked, he talked about grand geometric endeavors, such as the vast earthen drawings in South America or the magnificent hills raised by the Indians of North America, and in both cases, he felt, one could speak of visual languages, just as the pyramids had been elements of such a language, he firmly believed in that, both those in Egypt and those the Incas built to reach the sun, and then he rolled yet another joint, so the visual languages acquired yet another dimension, just as we two did, and the conversation meandered more and more, traversing a winding forest path, and at one point I wanted us to reach a clearing somewhere, to sit and catch our breath. Instead, I said goodbye to Marko and left for home. In the hallway of his building, as I was going down the stairs, I had to clutch the banister because I was finding it difficult to gauge the height and depth of each step correctly, which made me stumble, and I was afraid I would fall. By the end I was gripping the banister with my right hand, while swinging with my left as if I were walking on a tightrope, high above a ravine. Out on the street I raised my right hand high in the air, and only then did I feel the ease of equilibrium. I could go, I thought, anywhere I like, and I set out for the city park, but when I reached the main path, the barking of a dog that came from its dark depths prompted me to take a different route, by the hospital, then down along Dubrovačka, until I reached the main street. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. The traffic lights were blinking, several people were waiting at a bus stop in front of the department store, the McDonald's was gleaming, taxi drivers were sitting on a bench smoking, drunken men were singing, a little later a woman's voice joined in, then a man spoke of stars, perhaps he even gave their names, and suddenly I knew where I was to go. I headed for Zmaj Jovina Street. I walked back by the taxi drivers, crossed to the other side of the street, looked at the window of a stationery store, and turned by the theater, which seemed neglected in the dark, perhaps even more so than in daytime. I walked cautiously, as if wading through shallow water, and when I saw that the big wooden gate was ajar, I thought it would be better to keep going until I got to the riverbank where all this had started and where the water, I thought, would be deeper. But I did pause. I couldn't see the poster for tai chi classes, though for a moment I thought I spotted a light patch where the poster used to be. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. There was no one. Slowly I slipped into the dark passageway, took two or three steps and stopped, staring at the pump, which glowed as if all the moonlight were pouring into it and it alone. Everything else was pitch-dark: the flowerpots with the barberries, the sidewall of the facing building, the stoop, and the front door. I couldn't even make out the bench, the darkness had probably engulfed it, as it had everything else. Then it occurred to me that someone was sitting there. I don't know where I got the idea, but once it had
occurred to me, I couldn't shake it, and I took cautious steps toward the courtyard, slightly hunched, as if fearful of what I would see. Very slowly I approached the end of the passageway, leaned against the wall, and inhaled and exhaled deeply. Out of my eye, my left, I could still see the silvery pump, its long handle, the decorated basin into which the water flowed, the foundation with partially chipped paint. I took another deep breath, but I didn't release it, and instead stepped abruptly out of the passageway, eyes open wide, prepared to surprise the person sitting on the bench. The bench was empty. Something rustled in the dark behind the barberries, and when I spun around the pump was no longer aglow. The moonlight, if it was moonlight, had disappeared and all that was visible on the pump were patches of old paint and layers of rust. I went over to the bench, sat down, lay my hands on my thighs, and shut my eyes. Nothing happened, no silence settled on me, no music struck up, no one's voice could be heard. I opened my eyes and looked at the walls around me. Nothing had changed, as if reality this time had decided to stay the same. I stood up, then sat down again. I shut and opened my eyes several times, even squinted once through my lashes and tried to hold my breath as long as possible, but nothing helped. It occurred to me then that I'd always sat on the bench in daytime, and that things might be different at night, which was a comforting thought, though inadequate to bring back the fine mood I'd felt as I had turned into Zmaj Jovina Street. I stood up, ready to go, and that is when I heard the music. It sounded different from the ethereal music I'd heard earlier, and when I strained to hear better, I realized it was the echo of music from a café nearby, or perhaps from the barges along the river. There was no point, what with the pounding rhythm and the rumble of bass and drums, to staying in the courtyard. The bench was sinking into a darkness so dense that it was as if the darkness meant to hide the bench. Then that same darkness seemed to be taking the shape of a body, of someone's presence, but when I moved and shifted my angle, I realized this was just the interplay of thick and thin shadows. I went down the passageway, headed for the entrance, and paused: the gate was shut and there was not a trace of light from the street. I was certain I had not shut the gate when I came in. More precisely, I had not even touched it, doing my best to slip through unobtrusively. I was also certain that no one had come into the courtyard after me, because I would definitely have spotted that someone; neither the pump nor the bench so held my attention that I could have lost touch with what was going on around me. But then if no one came in, did someone go out? Maybe the person was waiting in the dark of the passageway, maybe he'd been standing behind the gate or was crouching in a corner, and when I got far enough, or when I went over to sit on the bench, he sneaked out, pulling the heavy gate shut behind him? I took hold of the big latch with one hand, and with the other I pushed the gate open and stepped into the street. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. There was no one. But I still felt, I said to Marko on the phone, that someone was watching. I expected his mocking commentary, but all that came across the telephone receiver was the sound of crunching. I had called him at about midnight and our conversation went on for nearly two hours, so that at one point, just as I was wrapping up the account of my most recent escapades, Marko said he had to eat an apple. I didn't see a soul, I repeated, but the feeling that someone was watching closely was so real. And offensive, I added. You too, Marko announced, should eat more apples, and he went on to talk about the beneficial qualities of the apple, and then, without a pause, remarked that he was still thinking of a newspaper article he had read about a man who had killed himself, and for no reason, it said, in a car parked in front of a clinic, and it wasn't even his own car but a car borrowed from a friend, allegedly to cart his old television set to his mother-in-law's. It's not clear, said Marko, why he stopped in front of the clinic, which is not near his mother-in-law's apartment but in a whole different part of town, and besides, where did he get the gun, sometimes it seems easier to get ahold of a gun than of household appliances. But it's clear, Marko continued, the times we live in killed him, what else could have? By the way, he said, no one knew the man in the clinic, which didn't stop the employees from making all sorts of pronouncements, and the mother-in-law from stating that she would cherish that television set as a memento of her son-in-law, though she had to go to great lengths to wash all traces of the blood off the screen and the buttons. I was supposed to laugh at that point, but there was no time, because Marko kept talking about wiping off the blood and removing traces, and then from the story about the suicide and the mother-in-law moved on to advising on the direction the talks should be taking between the authorities in Belgrade and the Albanian leaders in Kosovo. The newspapers at that point were forever running reports on the efforts of the government to establish a dialogue with the Albanians, thereby painting a more favorable picture of themselves for world opinion, and if there was a subject about which I had absolutely no desire to talk, Marko had found it. Now I realize that I was actually evading talk of reality and that everything that happened to me during those spring months six years ago—plunging into the shadowy world of mystical phenomena—was a form of self-deception, a form of solace or, more precisely, escapism from our reality at the time. The encounters with the unbridled nationalists were so surreal that I didn't even feel them to be a part of that reality. I was wrong, of course, because they, the violent young men, were just as real as the blows they dealt me, and just as real today, perhaps not quite so numerous, but certainly louder and more bold. Furthermore they are still where they were then, in a place they feel to be theirs alone, while I am somewhere else, it doesn't matter where, and words are all I have left, and this attempt at fashioning from them something that will have at least a semblance of permanence. Eleazar, if he were here, might have cast off words, though I am not altogether sure of that because the Kabbalah, like the entire Jewish tradition, is based on words, and silence is a realm into which Kabbalists have not been eager to venture. But what do I really know about the Kabbalah? What I learned from Jaša Alkalaj and heard from Dača, when I managed to wrest myself free of the hypnotic movement of his hat, and which, in terms of real knowledge, was barely a drop in the sea. Sometimes one drop, Jaša would say, is greater than a whole sea, a grain of sand more impassable than a desert, a snowflake more threatening than an avalanche. At those words Dacca would take off his hat and add that the ignorance of an ignoramus is greater than the knowledge of a connoisseur, and a connoisseur will never know as much as the ignoramus doesn't know. Then he would put on the hat, maybe even tilt it, you would barely see his eyes under the lowered brim. My eyes were also barely visible, but in my case the reason was exhaustion, as well as Marko's endless, monotonous, boring monologue. At first I attempted to get a word in edgewise, then I only voiced my assent or disagreement gutturally, and finally I fell silent altogether, and waited for it to end, doing what I could to fend off sleep. All in all, said Marko finally, only madmen can't see that the solution to the crisis lies in partitioning Kosovo. Sure, I said, easy to say that to me, but go and say it out loud on Terazije and they'll skin you alive. I looked at the clock, it was almost two, I nearly ended the conversation, which I didn't do, because I felt I ought to show Marko some sign of devotion so that I could repair what I had damaged with the unintended misunderstanding at the high-rise. I turned away from the clock and pressed the receiver more firmly to my ear. You think I won't? Marko went on, and not only on Terazije but anywhere else for that matter. All right, I said. My mouth was dry. You know how all this will end? he asked. No, I answered, I don't. Those idiots will bomb us, he said, and maybe none of us will survive. What idiots? I asked. The Europeans or the Americans? Both, answered Marko. I said nothing. He said nothing. I tried to think what bombing would be like, I managed to summon images from archival footage on the bombing of Belgrade in April 1941—t he wing of an airplane and bombs dropping like logs, then the pilot turning and grinning a big grin. He had nice teeth. I could hear Marko breathing, breathing deeply and evenly, as
if he were sleeping. It's sad, he said suddenly, when nobody loves you. I didn't know what he was talking about, how love came into it after the bombs. We are now the bowels of the world, he said, and I fear we are going to stay that way for a long time. The image was challenging, though I didn't try to picture it. I had had enough, what with the stench of excrement and urine that I continued to find, at irregular intervals, before my apartment door. The bucket and broom were now permanently stationed in my front hall. I had rubber gloves and a pile of old newspapers, and still needed to buy disinfectant. Your future is assured, said Marko when he happened upon me once with all my cleaning supplies, you'll always be able to find work scrubbing toilets. I pressed the receiver against my ear again: there was no sound. Marko, I called, where are you? You know what, Marko finally said, I'd like to be in another galaxy, but fuck it, I live in Belgrade and there's nothing I can do about that. I didn't know what to say, whether to console or reassure him, so I breathed a sigh of relief when he wished me a good night and hung up. I hung up at my end, then as I turned I snagged with my elbow the address book and pad that stood by the phone. They dropped to the floor, and when I bent down to pick them up, I saw that the pad had opened to the page where I'd jotted down Dragan Mišovićs phone number several weeks before. That meant I should call him, I had no doubt. Maybe I should write about this, I thought. My next piece for Minut was due any day, and considering the historical circumstances, especially the threats of bombing and the efforts of the authorities to portray the threats as an illegitimate attack on the internal affairs of the country, a text on destiny seemed appealing. But what could I write about: that what was said made no difference, because what was bound to happen had been determined long ago, that any action on our part now would be a waste of time? Which, of course, was the opposite of what the government was saying to the nation: that we the people, all of us, were deciding what would happen, and if we said no to anyone or anything, we became the tailors of our own destiny. In other words, if the tailor was shown not to be real, and real bombs were to start falling on us, we would simply say this is not true and pretend to be living in another reality, in which the world was created to our own specifications. I completely understood Marko's desire to go off to another galaxy, though I would have been happy with a parallel time, a reality in which events were playing out in a calmer way. I went to the window and looked out. Lights were on in several apartments of the facing buildings. There was no one on the street, though the turn signal was blinking on a car parked in front of the pharmacy display window. It was blinking on and off with a slow, halting rhythm, and before long I decided that it was sending me a message, a little like Morse code. I watched a while longer, trying to divine the rhythm of the repeats, to measure the time between blinks, but then I got tired of it all, my eyelids began to droop, and I went into the bathroom. When I came back, the turn signal was no longer blinking. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. The city slumbered, and suddenly I felt terribly tired. I sat down in the armchair. Whether because of the late hour or my exhaustion, I thought I should forget all this, or give up on it, because it had begun to look like the poorly linked parts of a farce, comic in its efforts to be taken seriously. Even the manuscript that I had acquired suddenly looked like a pompous mishmash, a patchwork quilt, a toy that played games with itself. True, I hadn't looked at it for days, and maybe it would not be a bad idea, I thought, to leaf through it in the mood I was in now. I settled into the armchair, clenched my buttocks and released them, and then shut my eyes, anticipating a yawn. I was awakened by the clamor of the street. I opened my eyelids and saw a cloudy morning. I straightened up, stretched, probed my teeth with my tongue. Then I covered my face with my hands. My mouth was dry: I could do with a glass of water. I got up and went to the window. A fine rain was drizzling. A woman was standing at the bus stop, protected by a red umbrella. The car was no longer parked in front of the pharmacy. I drew the curtain, stepped back, and opened the window. People were going from kiosk to kiosk, buying newspapers, carrying bread from the bakery, somebody whistled, the buses rumbled, a boy and a girl were kissing, sparrows landed on crumbs, and then I thought that nothing could replace the fine warp and woof of life, that no government or system could completely unravel this fabric; at worst, some of the thread would be wound up in an irregular ball, but new ones would keep sprouting, even if they were only threads one of the Fates was drawing off her spindle, sometimes that's sufficient, a thread of life stretched in a void. I thought at once of the other two Fates, the one who decides how long the thread will be, and the one who snips it. A person is tied to the spinner of fate his whole life, and wherever he moves he pulls that thread along with him, and when he finally shakes free of it, he marches to death, as if by dying he earns his right to freedom. I shuddered at the thought, swiftly shut the window, dashed into the bathroom to wash my face and shave, nothing refreshes a man like a shave, even washing your hair doesn't feel as good, at least not for me, so, once I had done it all, I felt like a new man. Then I called Dragan Mišović. This time there was no need to remind him who I was. He asked what had happened with the sign made of the circle and the triangles, and how I was getting on with solving the equation with too many unknowns. Nothing has changed, I said, the sign hasn't opened up and the unknowns have gone on multiplying. And now you have a new question, said Dragan Mišović, and you think it will help you understand the other two? Yes, I said. Don't you think, he went on, that the unanswered questions will become too large an obstacle, which will, in time, become insurmountable? I don't like being lectured to and had I not shaved, which had put me in a good mood, I would have hung up on him. Sure, I said. That's what I always say when I don't understand something or I disagree with something. Dragan Mišović said nothing. I could feel he felt my lack of sincerity, just as I could feel that he felt I was feeling it. Sorry, I said. Forget it, he said, we all have moments we wish we hadn't had, and then he asked for the real reason I had called, he couldn't imagine I had called to ask how he was, and even if I had, he never answered such questions. Fine, I said, and took a deep breath, I'm interested in whether geometry can take the place of language. Geometry is a language, said Dragan Mišović. I don't mean the language of signs, I said. Me neither, said Dragan Mišović. I read somewhere, I said, that the body finds its way through space, whether geometric or emotive, by constantly drawing mental maps, and in that way space and feeling communicate with the body. So, now, I said, if we take this map out of the body, so to speak, will it speak to others the way it speaks to us? Sometimes I wonder, said Dragan Mišović, how you come up with such questions. I would like to know that too, I answered. And besides, he said, I am not sure your question really belongs to the realm of mathematics, because these mental maps, even though they can be represented as geometric models, come about in a complex interaction of physical and mental factors. And one more thing, he added, geometry implies a certain universality, while mental maps are highly individual, as individual, he said, as each of us is different, and here, I am afraid, there is no language. Yet if we imagine a group of people, I continued stubbornly, who are making the shape of the same mental map with their bodies, say, a map of feelings of love or serenity, couldn't someone else, who sees that, develop those same feelings? Maybe, said Dragan Mišović, though I am not entirely sure what you are saying, and I am no expert at feelings. I'm not talking about feelings, I said, but about the transmission of information, a process that happens with every reading, say, when you read a description of a sad scene in some novel and you start to cry. I wouldn't know, he said, I don't read novels. His tone had suddenly changed, as if he were losing interest in the conversation, or, which only occurred to me much later, as if someone were standing next to him and listening in. I asked him to give it some thought anyway, and he, sounding vague and unconvincing, promised to get in touch if he thought of anything. He hung up before we'd even said goodbye. I stared for a while longer at the receiver, then placed it back in the cra
dle. Had the time come, I wondered, to admit that I was at a dead end, that somewhere I had taken a wrong turn and found myself on the wrong path, and the only way to change anything was to go back to square one? So, I took an apple, just as I had a month before, and walked down to the quay. It was not Sunday, and it was not yet two P.M., but the day was every bit as fickle: the clouds parted as I left the house, the sun gleamed through, but by the time I reached the promenade, it started to rain. I lowered my head, swallowed the last bite of apple, except the stem, which I continued to nibble on and suck until it finally came apart. The water level of the Danube was not as high as it had been a month before, so I could not be sure where the man and the woman had been standing, and I wasn't altogether certain which bench I had been sitting on. There were three, and first I thought it was the middle one, which seemed too easy and obvious a choice, so I settled on the third, the one that was the farthest from the shabby little playground. The playground was deserted: maybe it was too early for the mothers with small children, or maybe they had already been here and the rain had chased them away. I went over to the third bench and from there looked out at the Danube. Yes, that was the angle, that was exactly the spot where I had been sitting when the young man walked past, and it was from there that I had stepped forward, ready and eager to go down the slope toward the woman who had stood with one leg in the water, but then I had stopped when I caught sight of the man in the black trench coat. Why had I stopped? What led me to kneel and start tying and untying my shoelaces, allowing the man in the black trench coat to get away? I looked at the damp seesaw, the little cars and the train, and the only explanation I could arrive at was that the man who'd been standing by the seesaw was so at odds with those surroundings that he couldn't help but arouse my suspicions, my alarm, and, finally, lead me to abandon my Samaritan descent to the woman who had been slapped on the riverbank. Maybe I wasn't supposed to have followed the girl, I thought, except that my later discovery of the signs could be interpreted as an outcome of my having followed her, as something she guided me to. Probably I wasn't supposed to notice the man in black either. He wasn't there because of me, but because of the young man and woman. But what was the connection between the two, if any? And had everything that had happened to me since then happened only because someone saw me follow the woman? Perhaps here on the promenade there had not been just one man in a black trench coat, perhaps there had been two? And why not an entire battalion, Marko would have asked had I told him about it, why be modest? And he would have been right, I have to confess, regardless of the role that he played in it all. From this distance I can see, clear as day, but it's too late now, I've said it before, to change anything, life is only a handful of memories, after all, nothing more. The rain kept pelting, sharp and persistent, as if it were autumn, not spring, and the raindrops slid off my hair and unerringly found the space between my neck and shirt collar. I went home, dried my hair with a towel, ate one more apple, translated some, wrote for a while, watched television, and finally tumbled into bed. Two days later, armed with a pad and several colored pencils, I made a detailed inspection of the streets around the Zemun open market. I wanted to find as many traces as I could, or signs, and make a list to see whether, taken in total, they offered additional insight. The day before I'd done something different: I went to the Politika newspaper archive and pulled out the issues between the eighth and fifteenth of March. I didn't know what I was looking for exactly, but I pored over the city chronicle, the classifieds, and the death notices. I came across a brief news item in the March 10 issue that the body of a young male was found in the reeds along the Danube shore on the Zemun side, but there was nothing to indicate foul play. There was no follow-up of the news item over the next days, nor did I find anything among the death notices that could be tied to the young man. Then, in the March 15 paper, along with a news item about a man who'd been killed the day before in Surčin, I came across a mention of an investigation showing that the young man whose corpse had been found near Hotel Yugoslavia had been killed by a blunt object. The identity of the victim was still unknown. I put the paper down and rubbed my face. My heart was pounding as if I had come to a sudden halt after a horrific run; I felt dizzy, nausea climbed up my esophagus. I don't know how I got out of the Politika building. All I know is that I caught sight of myself in the window of a glass-cutting shop. The wan, rumpled figure smiling anxiously at me must have been me, though there was no indication that I had recognized myself. I turned and kept walking down the street that, as it turned out, led to Zeleni Venac. I got on a bus to Zemun, and not until the crowds around me grew larger did I finally pull myself together. If the news in the paper had been accurate, and there was no reason to think it was not, and provided this had been the very same young man, then what had happened was much more than a game. For a moment I even thought that I was to blame for the young man's death, for had I gone after him instead of pointlessly following the woman, he might be alive today. On the other hand, something else could have happened: I could be dead today, because clearly, the people the young man had rubbed the wrong way would have been just as sensitive about witnesses. Therefore, I should be pleased that I had followed the woman; still, I couldn't rid myself of the bitter taste of complicity or betrayal. The bus crossed the Sava Bridge and turned toward Zemun. In the distance along the promenade cyclists and strollers could be seen. A little girl was holding a string tied to a kite flying high above her. Big and little dogs romped in the bright green grass. Two boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth, and it wobbled through the air as if exhausted. The bus passed Hotel Yugoslavia. There was nothing at the top of the artificial hill but the pillars of the old Zemun railroad station, protruding like the ruins of antiquity. I got off the bus at the square, went into a supermarket, and spent about fifteen minutes studying the ingredients on various canned and processed foods. Nothing calms me so profoundly as the partially intelligible lists that reduce food to an extremely unappealing form. A cookie, for instance, becomes flour, sugar, vegetable shortening, cocoa powder, powdered skim milk, ammonium bicarbonate, sodium bicarbonate, lecithin, kitchen salt, natural coloring, and natural aroma. I read this in several languages: Serbian, Albanian, Slovene, Croatian, Macedonian, English, Hungarian, and Romanian. Then I bought some bread and yogurt and went home. Over the past few days and weeks I had been unsure how to act in certain situations, but now I felt I'd lost ground altogether. It did occur to me, I must confess, that I should flee; inevitable thinking in such situations, but never for a moment did I consider this acceptable. Later I did run away, that's true, but the circumstances were entirely different and flight was a necessity rather than a choice. I'll get to that later, there's time. Flight, therefore, at that moment was out of the question, as was my next thought: that I should go to the police. I had no faith in the system, I didn't side with the regime in power, which meant that I had nothing to hope for from the police: they had quite a number of unsolved crimes on their hands, after all, one more would have meant nothing to them. Maybe I could write something for my column in Minut? I had to laugh: after holding forth for so long on how postmodernism had broken with a more traditional approach to language and form, here I was considering a text to be a reliable source of information, prepared to believe in words. Besides, what could I say in such a text when I knew nothing? I had seen someone who was, perhaps, now dead, and except for that unconfirmed death, I had no other information. That meant I had only one choice: no longer to wait for things to happen or not happen to me, but to make them happen. It was high time, I thought, for all the diverse streams to become a single course, for everything to become something, no matter how unconnected it appeared, or to finally dissolve into nothing, a marvelous solution that would offer complete freedom, and was, I had to say right off the bat, the least likely. And so the next day, armed with a pad and colored pencils, I set out for a detailed inspection of the Zemun market. It was a beautiful spring day, pleasantly warm, with clouds racing across the sky, and t
he market, when I arrived, swarming with people. I intended to cover as many streets as possible, looking carefully around, to record all the spots where I saw the sign made of the circle and triangles, as well as all the places where there were possible traces of the sign. I had to bear in mind the likelihood that most of the signs had not been drawn using permanent materials, so those drawn in chalk, or perhaps in crayon, were likely to have disintegrated. For instance, the signs I had seen earlier on Zmaj Jovina Street were no longer visible, which didn't mean that they played no role in the overall constellation of signs. Once I had completed the list, I intended to draw their locations on a map of Zemun and by so doing gain additional insight or a sort of key for my future moves. To be frank, I had no notion of any further moves, but I did have the hope that they would take form in and of themselves or that they would suggest themselves in a clear light the moment I made a map of the signs. I walked toward the market along Beogradska Street, where I found no traces of any kind. I turned into Mornarska, took two or three steps, spun around and went back. I obeyed a murky feeling, I said later to Marko, that I would find no signs there. So I went back to Beogradska Street and stepped into the bustle of the market. I passed by the stalls that offered the most varied merchandise, items of food, hygiene, electrical and plumbing equipment, men's and women's underwear, wooden spoons and three-legged wooden stools, coffee and detergents. Behind them were the vegetable stalls. I dove for a moment into the crowd, then came back to the first row of stalls, where I bought some chocolate. If there was a sign inscribed anywhere in that part of the marketplace, it was pointless to look for it, so when I arrived at the end of the first section of the market I turned off onto Gospodska Street and headed toward the quay. On the quay, across from the Venezia, I saw a few chalk drawings on the sidewalk, one resembled a spiral and the other a tangled ball, which had nothing to do with my signs. My signs? I am always amazed at the ease with which we adopt things, even when there is no question of ownership, because if there is something that was not mine, it was those signs, that much, at least, is clear. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then turned left toward the corner of Zmaj Jovina Street. Here, a few weeks earlier, I had come across the first sign, hidden under a button. I stopped and entered that fact in the notebook. I wrote in black: the black was to mark the absence, or rather the absence of a presence; I planned red for entering newfound signs, blue for the possible vestiges of signs, while green was to serve for lingering vestiges that may not have been drawn as parts of signs. There was nothing at the spot where the black button had lain, just as there was nothing on the steps where I had seen the sign when I leaned over to pick up the woman's potato. Now too the street was littered, so I had to pause at every step, shove aside crumpled newspapers, pick through heaps of trash, lift plastic bags. At the corner of Gajeva, at the foot of a traffic sign, I came across an unfinished triangle, drawn in chalk, which might have been part of a smaller, inner triangle, inscribed in a larger triangle. I jotted this down in the notebook, in blue this time. Not far from the remnant of the triangle was an arrow pointing to the opposite side of the market, to Dositejeva and Karamatina streets. As children we used to leave signs for friends: by following the arrows they would find where we were waiting for them. I walked down Gajeva and soon came across a new arrow, pointing to the left, to Dositejeva Street. I saw yet another arrow, and then a boy who, a little farther along, was drawing a new arrow on the pavement. When he saw me, he ran off. He shouted something, without turning, then ducked into an entranceway. I didn't even try to follow him. I went back to Gajeva Street, and as I passed by the old foundry, I finally caught sight of the first real sign. After that it got easier. From Gajeva I went into Karamatina and walked down its one side to the quay, came back along the other side to Muhar, and then along Glavna Street to Zmaj Jovina. By then I had recorded six or seven signs and several possible traces, including one triangle with a dot in the middle, which, I suspected, represented something different, but it was easier for me to consider it a remnant of a sign to which someone, either by chance or on purpose, had added a dot. Then I walked along Zmaj Jovina Street. On the fence around the construction site behind the theater, in a sheltered spot, I noticed four signs, as if someone was practicing drawing them. At the large wooden gate, where there had been the poster advertising tai chi classes, a much larger poster was up, announcing a concert of folk music. I studied the poster carefully; I found nothing; a part that was smudged suggested a trace of lipstick, the imprint of a kiss someone had planted on the cheek of a performer. I peeked into the passageway that led to the inner courtyard, went over to the bench, checked the water pump and the barberry bushes. No traces there. Back I went into the street, passed down one side and then up the other, and ended at the quay. I found another seven or eight signs along Zmaj Jovina, as well as two traces, both by the first market stalls. Before I went into Gospodska Street I circled around the Harbormaster's. The gallery was closed, half dark, and when I pressed my nose against the glass door, on the facing wall, next to a photograph, I thought I could see the sign, but when I looked again a moment later, the wall was an unblemished white. I continued walking and recording with the different colored pencils, and when I got hungry, I went into a bakery and had some burek. The burek was greasy; I had to lick my fingers. I licked them one by one, ignoring the woman behind the counter. Then I bought a crescent roll with jam and asked for a glass of water. The water was lukewarm. I sipped at it and leafed through my notebook. I still had to go through Pobeda Square, and I mustn't forget Piljarska Street, the narrowest of the streets around the market but full of handy places to leave signs. This proved true: I found as many as six on Piljarska, drawn at precise seventy-centimeter intervals. By now it was late afternoon, fewer people at the market, time to head home. Clouds were gathering in the sky, rain was on the way. I stopped at the stationery store on Zmaj Jovina and asked for a map of Zemun. They had only a commercial map of the city, with the stores and businesses drawn in, but it was large and comprehensive, and I was happy with it, especially because in the upper-right-hand corner it had a magnified insert of the city center. My feet were stinging by the time I got home. I spread open the map on the kitchen table and began marking the places where I had seen the signs. The part around the market, I noticed, consisted of nine different-sized blocks, of which one, the one that came out to the quay, bordered by Zmaj Jovina and Karamatina, was in the shape of a triangle. The number nine may have had special significance, but I didn't dare call Dragan Mišović again. I could have asked Jaša Alkalaj, of course; after all, numbers are numbers, whether it is mathematics or the Kabbalah. I leafed through the notebook and marked the dots in different colors. Most were red, a few were blue, three or four green, and three were black. Once I had put in the last dot, I stepped back to see the map from a distance. I didn't know what I would see, I didn't know what I expected to see, I didn't actually see anything. The dots, dense in some spots and sparse in others, surrounded all nine blocks; only the middle, which was roughly at the place where Gospodska Street ran into Omladinski Square, was empty. I was disappointed, I admit. I had expected that this pattern would immediately suggest things to me I hadn't known, but it told me nothing, though perhaps it was speaking an unfamiliar language. Once more I checked everything carefully, and then I rolled a joint, lit it, and walked over to the window. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then straight ahead. The window of the pharmacy was already lit; not a single car was parked in front of it; I could take a deep breath, inhale in peace. Slowly, deeply, I inhaled, watching night conquer the sky and felt the cannabis rise in my body: my knees softened, my stomach sagged, my heart beat faster, my eyelids drooped, and when I felt it behind my forehead, I went to lie down. That night I dreamed a strange dream. I regret not writing it down right away; with time it faded, and now, no matter how hard I try, I can summon only details and cannot, for the life of me, reconstruct the whole thing. Nothing particular happened in it, as far as I
recall, and one could say I was dreaming emotions more than events. I remember, for instance, that I dreamed I was sleeping and that I was waking up but couldn't open my eyes. I wake up, in the dream, because someone is sitting by my bed, leaning over me, and staring at my closed eyes. Since I am dreaming that my eyelids are shut, everything I see in the dream is dark. I am awake in the dream but I don't dare open my eyes, I'm fearful of what I'll see, and I remember saying to myself in my dream, Maybe these are ordinary human eyes. Then a voice, right by my ear, says: There is no such thing as ordinary human eyes. And then: Each eye is a story unto itself. Then I was really awake, unsure of who had heard that voice or who was feeling fearful. I dreamed the same dream several times that night, and in the morning I could barely stand up. Go back to bed, I said to my reflection in the mirror. The reflaction didn't answer, and even if it had, it wouldn't have helped, because that morning I had to edit the piece for my Minut column. Recently everybody had been talking about a referendum in which the people, the government claimed, would decide whether or not the involvement of foreign powers in resolving the Kosovo crisis was acceptable, and the editor, remarking that political subjects didn't seem to interest me much, said that he would still find it interesting to read what I had to say. I finally chose a different topic: the problems caused by the vast number of stray dogs, including quite a few purebreds whose owners, unable to cover the cost of food and care, had simply cast out into the street. Of course, I didn't feel that deciding the fate of Kosovo was any less important than abandoned dogs, but anyone could see that the way the referendum was being run was a farce and that there was no point in wasting words on it. The consequences would not be part of the farce, but someone else would write that story, not me. The stray dogs were left to me and the dilemmas they posed for us—the question of goodness and a test of loyalty. I wrote without passion, using cliched phrasing and attacking the class of the newly rich for squandering their wealth on rare and expensive breeds of dogs, then shunting their problems off onto society. The simplest solution, I wrote, is to put the dogs down, but this does not go to the root of the problem, it deals only with the consequences. The real question is what to do with the people who abandon their dogs, and I was leaving it to the readers, I wrote, to come up with the most fitting punishment. Such a shame that it didn't occur to me at the time to encourage readers to send in their suggestions, because this might well have resulted in a little encyclopedia of both well-meaning and vengeful cruelties, intriguing proposals, though it may not be too late for this, if one bears in mind that, judging by the news that reaches me here, the problems with stray dogs in Serbia persist. There is no more Minut, of course, it went the way of so many other daily and weekly papers unable to secure a large enough readership, so I would have to write for a different publication, Evropa or Vreme or whatever the periodicals published there these days are called. I couldn't believe that the editor of Minut liked my piece, despite the fact that he was a cat lover, and besides his own, he fed three or four other cats in the yard of the building he lived in. Later it turned out they had to cut the piece down, that's why I was at the editorial office that morning with the editor in chief and the copyeditor. While we were waiting for the edited text to be entered into the computer, the editor in chief told me he had divorced his wife because she didn't like cats. She tried, he said, but couldn't. Whenever Feliks, the editor's old tom, jumped on the bed, she'd scream, he said, and she'd scream until Feliks left the room or until the editor carried him out. She put up with it for two years, which was, he said, admirable, then she gave him an ultimatum: it was Feliks or her, one of them would have to go. The editor thought about it, he said, for precisely three seconds, then got up, took down two suitcases, and began tossing her belongings into them. She sobbed, he packed, Feliks meowed, the phone rang, the TV news blasted, he had never in his life been in such a tangle of sounds, but once she left, everything was quiet and, I might not believe him, but Feliks hadn't meowed since. I didn't know what I'd done to deserve this confidence; our conversations had always been limited to work, to remarks about my columns and discussion of future pieces. Maybe, I told Marko when we ran into each other in front of the Youth Center, I should have reciprocated in kind and told him something from my own life? The man is lonely, that's all, said Marko, and besides, like anyone with a measure of power and control over others, he sometimes has the need to show himself in a benevolent, gentle, human guise. Refer to that same story tomorrow, Marko continued, and don't be surprised if he tells you to mind your own business. We waited for the light to change, crossed the street, and, on the other side of the square, headed for Knez Mihailova. I paused at the corner, looked to the left, looked to the right, then hurried after Marko. Good, I said when I caught up, they are not here. Who? asked Marko. Or do you think everybody knows? I reminded him of the men with the crewcuts. He dismissed this with a wave of the hand. They don't matter, he said, and within the year they'll be gone, trust me. I don't know where Marko is now, but I do know how wrong he was. The nationalists have not disappeared, nor are they insignificant; on the contrary, they are more present than ever, and their influence is again on the rise and shows no signs of waning. That is how things now stand, judging by the meager news reports and rare email messages that I trust because they come from reliable sources, while back then, in the constant, exhausting expectation of change, Marko's certainty was understandable and acceptable. Oh Lord, when I think of the waiting, of the energy invested in faith and hope, my stomach clenches. How slowly it was all built, with how much effort, and with what speed it was all dismantled, stopped, mired in swamp. There are some things one should not think about, or maybe one must never stop thinking about them, I still haven't decided which of the two to choose, but whichever I choose, nothing can be changed anymore, life is a line that moves forward only at one end, while the other stays in place, rooted, and no matter what we do, what we say, we can't get near it, just as I already said, I mean, wrote, even though that was not wrong, because I often first say sentences aloud, turn the words over on my tongue, listen to them bumping and bouncing back from the empty corners, but whatever the case, I am repeating myself, no doubt, which should not be seen as a bad thing, since all of life is segments repeated from other lives, with only the order of the segments new and singular, bringing an element of surprise to life, and surprise is just another word for uniqueness, since we invariably think that what is new to us, or what we don't recognize, is unique, though the truth may be quite different and what we think is unique may be only one of many iterations, which is what I meant to say when I started this sentence, but which broke off and went its own way, not waiting, as I had expected, perhaps incautiously, for Marko and me to continue our walk along Knez Mihailova, and instead, like a disobedient household pet that has been let out for the first time in ages, now scampered along, one minute in front of us, and the next, far behind, so we had to turn now and then to check whether it was still there and had not gone wandering off or over to someone's beckoning hand. Once when I turned to look back, I saw Margareta. I didn't recognize her at first: she'd changed her hairdo, she was wearing high heels, a light trench coat belted at the waist, a shawl carefully arranged over her shoulders. When I turned a second time I could no longer see her among the passersby. I looked a third time and saw her leaving a book or stationery store, pausing to drop a wrapped packet into her handbag, and turning to head in the opposite direction. I tugged at Marko's sleeve and said that I had forgotten to check on something at the bookstore. He should keep going, I told him, and I would catch up in a minute, if not before, then certainly by the entrance to Kalemegdan. He was not pleased, I could see, but on he went. I waited for him to disappear among the passersby, then went chasing after Margareta. I caught up with her by the bookstore at the other end of the street; she had stopped by the store window and was looking at the books on display. I didn't approach her but paused instead at a street vendor's counter and poked among the costume jewelry. Margareta
didn't move. She stood by the window, staring in as if trying to read a closed book. Then a tall man with a mustache joined her by the window and also stared in. People passing by interfered with my view of Margareta and the man with the mustache, but I was almost certain I saw his lips moving. To be almost certain means to be uncertain, this I realize, but I can't be more precise. A moment later, I am almost sure of that as well, their hands touched briefly, the man's left and Margareta's right, and it is entirely possible that something changed hands. The street vendor asked impatiently whether I was going to buy anything or just wanted to poke around among his merchandise, so I had to put down the chains and charms I had been running through my fingers, and when I looked over at the bookstore window again I could see that the man was leaving in the direction I had just come from, toward the Academy and Kalemegdan. Margareta stood there for a few more minutes, then tossed back her hair, turned, and walked off the other way. I felt like howling, like invoking a band of angels, because again I had to choose between her and a man, but this time, cautioned by the earlier experience and against my better judgment, I went after the man with the mustache. Before I dove into the dense mass of pedestrians, I saw Margareta once more as she moved off toward Terazije, while the shawl over her shoulders swayed cheerfully as if in greeting. Following the man with the mustache was no joke. He moved swiftly, skillfully sidestepping passersby, which forced me several times to elbow my way through the crowd. I assumed that because he was tall he could see what was ahead and adjust his stride accordingly while I was scampering along, and since I could not see what was ahead, I kept bumping into people who were stopping and talking and walking in the opposite direction. When we got closer to the Academy, the man with the mustache suddenly turned to the right, toward the Faculty of Philosophy, which forced me to stop. If I turn and follow him, I said to myself, I will anger Marko, who must already be waiting for me in front of the Belgrade City Library, but if I don't follow him, I thought, then what? Who was that man anyway, and why was I following him? Maybe I really had seen too many thrillers, maybe I was a victim of my own mistaken convictions and delusions? How could I be sure that something had gone on between that man and Margareta, and why, suddenly, wherever I looked, did I see indications of secrecy, the language of signs, fugitives and pursuers, plotters and madmen? I looked back and, just as I'd thought I would, I saw the two men with the crewcuts in a lively conversation, jabbing each other and doubling over with laughter. I wouldn't have been surprised, I thought, if it turned out that the man with the mustache was also being followed, nor would it have surprised me if someone were following the men with the crewcuts, which thought made me give up on the tall man with the mustache, whom I could still see at the far end of the philosophy building, and hurry toward Kalemegdan, where I told Marko the whole story. I started talking while still a few steps away from him, but he cautioned me with a raised index finger. Then he whispered that I should take a look down the other side of the street, and there at the entrance to Kalemegdan I caught sight of a man in a black trench coat and dark glasses. I wasn't sure whether it was the same man I had seen on the quay in Zemun. It was a coincidence, I said, not everyone was being followed, and I told him about what had just happened, avoiding, of course, any mention of Margareta. At that moment, the man in the black trench coat and dark glasses turned and strolled slowly into Kalemegdan. What is this, I said, shouldn't he be behind us? He is luring us, answered Marko, and if we follow him, somehow he will disappear. And that is precisely what happened. Marko claimed that we had outsmarted him, though he couldn't say how, and that we had not lost sight of him, he had lost sight of us. And now, said Marko, who knows where he is off to, wandering around the fortress? Maybe he has gone into the dungeons, he mused, from which he will never emerge to the light of day or the dark of night. I wasn't so sure myself, though I stopped looking back. We came out on the terrace that offered a view of the Sava and the Danube, New Belgrade and Zemun on the facing riverbank. I thought of Feliks, my editor's tomcat, not meowing anymore after the editor's wife had left. Was Feliks quiet because he was happy or because he was unhappy? The editor seemed happy enough, but the cat might have felt differently. Perhaps, I thought, the editor should have gone off and left his wife with the cat, maybe they would have found a way to get along, and the fear and anxiety would have turned into respect and esteem? I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Marko. What was he thinking about? Certainly not the editor's tomcat, just as it would never have occurred to him that I was thinking about a hairy creature at a time when I should have been obsessed with thoughts of conspiracy. I was tired of everything else, of the stories that fed on themselves, that never moved forward, just as the colored point on a spiral always appears to stay in the same spot, though it is constantly spinning. Every time I thought I was getting close to something or somebody, I would discover that the distance between us hadn't changed a bit, and if it were to change, it would grow rather than shrink. This is too much, I thought, for someone who until recently was dreaming of being a writer, nothing more. I could hear Marko breathing deeply and regularly, as if he'd fallen asleep, though his eyes were open wide. The sky drew back over Zemun and New Belgrade like the curtain in a theater in which the two of us were the only audience, concerned that the night would descend before the last act and frightened by the possibility that this might be one of those plays in which the audience participates, reluctant actors whom fate had dealt the role of losers. The sun slid across the sky as if it were oiled, and it looked as if it might collide at any moment with the horizon, though the day was still young. The afternoon, I said, has hardly begun and it's already over. Marko turned slowly to face me. What was that? he asked. The first line of a new poem? I wrote a few poems several years ago, and Marko had never forgiven me. At the time he had a girlfriend who was a real poet and she published a collection of poems in the First Book edition of the Matica Srpska publishing house, and his intolerance for poetic voices and forms followed after a sudden and extremely unpleasant breakup, when she hit him on the head with a Benson English-Serbo-Croatian dictionary, until streams of blood were coursing down his forehead and neck. Worst of all, this happened during a performance of a play by Miroslav Mandić, so that at first no one found it disturbing, convinced it was part of the performance. Even Miroslav Mandic stood by, unsure of what to do. Not until the blood began dripping down Marko's head did he wrench the Benson dictionary from the hands of the enraged woman, yet she kept lunging at Marko. After that, no doubt, I too would have lost my taste for poetry, though I would never deny the power of the poet to express the essence of the world and our existence most succinctly. Right now I could use that kind of artist, a master at expressing essence, someone who, in one sentence or possibly two, could summarize what had happened to me over the last few weeks. Marko was staring at me, expecting an answer. No, I said in the end, this is not the first line of a poem, but a summation of my despair, time is passing, faster and faster, yet I can't seem to move an inch. Despair is not going to help you there, said Marko, especially if you bear in mind that no one has swindled, cheated, or mastered time. Some have too, I shot back, but when Marko looked at me inquiringly, I could think of no one. Perhaps those, Marko added, who made a pact with the devil, which as far as I know you would never do. Forget the devil, I said, these are far more serious matters. How can you say that the devil's not a serious matter? Marko shouted. Over his shoulder I saw an elderly woman who, at the mention of the devil, froze in her tracks and turned to stare at us. No need to shout, I said, we are attracting way too much attention as it is. The elderly woman took a step toward us, then crossed herself and went on her way. I will shout if I want to, said Marko more softly. He turned his back on me like a pouting child. I looked at my hands: my ten fingers probably would not suffice to number the calamities in my life, and now I had to include Marko's unreasonable behavior. Or was it my behavior, perhaps, that had become impossible to understand? Maybe I attribute to others what I should b
e ascribing to myself? How many unanswered questions can a person absorb and still not change? There must be an upper limit, and after that a collapse. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I looked down, I looked up. I saw no answer. I assumed the same was true behind me. I checked, just in case, and sure enough. No trace of an answer, just as there was no trace of the man in the black trench coat. Marko's back was still turned, the sky was taking on a darker shade, the clouds were scudding away with no promises, and down below, on the Sava, two boats moved slowly under the bridge. I touched Marko's shoulder. He would stay a little longer, he said, and held out his hand. I couldn't remember when we had last shaken hands. I gave him mine and our hands joined, limply, only for a moment. Enough, however, for me to feel that his palm was stone cold, as if he had been holding ice. So now, how can I write the next sentence and not sound ridiculous to anyone, myself included? When I touched Marko's icy palm, what occurred to me was that he was so bitterly prepared to defend the devil because he, Marko, was one of the devil's acolytes. As I walked away from him, I saw that phrase clear as day in the realm of my consciousness: it shone like a vast neon sign, in different colored letters, blinking on and off in slow rhythm. If the man in the black trench coat and dark glasses had appeared before me at that moment, I would have waved at him cheerfully; compared to the devil, he was nothing; he did not, however, appear, and I soon found myself on Knez Mihailova Street, which was even more crowded than when we started out. I thought it might be good to go to the synagogue courtyard, but I also thought I should shake off the thoughts of the devil, so I changed direction by the Academy of Science and Art and walked to the park at Topličin Venac. There is nothing so soothing as sitting on a park bench, surrounded by cooing pigeons on the lookout for bread crumbs. I would close my eyes here and try to calm my breathing, focusing on an emptiness that purifies. These were simple meditation exercises, but they always helped, so that within ten minutes I'd feel as if I had sloughed off the dingy skin of the polluted spirit and breathed a pure breath, first through one nostril, then through the other. By that time the pigeons had given up on me and were gravitating to an old woman seated on a nearby bench, tossing them seeds. She looked like the old woman who earlier on, in Kalemegdan, had turned when I invoked the devil, but all old women looked the same to me, whether it was a matter of the devil or a flock of hungry pigeons. Pigeons, pigeons, pigeons, I could think of nothing else, and so, with pigeons on the brain, I entered the courtyard of the synagogue. It may have been a Friday, or perhaps one of the Jewish holidays, I can no longer recall, but several men were seated at a table under a tree in leaf, among them Jaša Alkalaj, Isak Levi, and Dača. Jaša waved, and when I came over, he made room for me next to him on the bench. I had come at just the right moment, he said, because they were talking about how to protect the cemetery from incursions by the barbarians. Why barbarians? asked a man who was sitting on Jaša's other side. They are just plain scum. Barbarians, scum, makes no difference, interrupted a man from across the table, doesn't matter who they are, but what we can do against them, and I'm afraid, he said, that we don't have much of a choice. In any case we can't scrawl graffiti on their gravestones, said the man next to Jaša, the police aren't interested in helping, and what options do we have left, nighttime guard duty? Not a bad idea, said a man wearing a yarmulke, fight poison with poison. Nonsense, said Dača, putting on his hat, then taking it off again, no point in biting off more than we can chew. And who, he said, would be doing the guard duty, us? And what would we do, he asked, take them on? Look at yourselves, for God's sake, he said, and tell me what you see? We all looked at ourselves and, as if by agreement, we all looked down at the tabletop. We are a handful of misery, said Dacca, and anyone who can't understand that, or doesn't want to, will have to ask himself if he's in his right mind. Then he pointed at me. Only he, he said, can think differently, but that's something he'll have to decide for himself. I asked whether I should leave, perhaps it would be easier, I said, for them to talk about such delicate matters without the presence of outsiders. That doesn't apply, said Jaša Alkalaj, to the people sitting on my right side and on my left side, does it? Everyone clamored in confirmation, so Dacca had to pound on the table to quiet them. We can hope to receive help from only one place, he said. He straightened his finger and pointed up. We all looked up, into the tree. Not there, shouted Dača, up there, above us! He stretched out his arm and we all stared at his trembling index finger. A tiny beam of light, barely visible, shot from the tip of his finger, passed through the spring leaves, and flashed to the sky. I blinked, the beam was gone. I looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed a thing. What will the rabbi say, said the man wearing the yarmulke at last, when he hears of this? How will he hear, asked Dača, if we don't tell him? The rabbi is the least of our worries, said Jaša Alkalaj, it's deciding what we should be doing. By then evening had nestled into the sky and was spreading, changing gradually into night. Dacca launched into a story, sounding like a local town-hall bureaucrat in the office for community defense, describing in detail the advantages of guerrilla warfare and the importance of surprise, only to say in the end that we should forget all that and focus on living tradition. If for centuries the Kabbalists and mystics had managed to create beings of earthen dust and breathe life into them, he said, then there must be a way for us to fight against these hoodlums. Don't tell me, said Jaša Alkalaj, that you propose we make a golem? I'm not proposing anything, he answered, but if that is the only way, then why not? Again silence reigned at the table. The dark was descending on our faces, pressing down our eye-lids, and for a moment I was afraid I might fall asleep, right there, in front of everybody, with my forehead on the table. Dacca's voice reached me from a great distance, as if he were shouting from the deck of a ship sailing away. As I recall, he was talking about how in ancient Kabbalistic writings there were recipes, that is what he said: recipes, for different forms of resistance or concealment, or for simply outwitting the enemy, all we had to do was find what suited us, then adapt it to our times and technology, because it was important not to forget, he repeated in a soft voice, that these documents date from the Middle Ages, and some from even earlier, and that nothing can be simply grafted from one historical period to another, but that, he whispered, everything would be fine as long as we knew what we were doing. Do we know, said Jaša Alkalaj suddenly, aloud, straight into my ear, or do we think we know? I started. Even today I don't know what was happening: I'm certain I had not been asleep, yet at that moment there was no one at the table but the two of us. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. They are gone, said Jaša, no point in looking for them. And the golem, I asked, what happened to the golem? He's not here yet, laughed Jaša, and neither is Godot. Then he grew serious: You don't believe in what Dača was saying, do you? He seemed pretty convincing, I said, I have to admit. It's easy to be convincing, said Jaša, anyone can be convincing, especially someone as eloquent as Dacca. The dark had grown so thick I could barely discern the features of Jaša's face. I don't believe he would lie, I said. Of course not, replied Jaša, no one is talking about lying, everything he said is the pure truth, from the first to the last letter. And those recipes, I asked, for the different weapons, do they exist? Let's say, said Jaša, that this is a kind of poetic license, but the fact is that there are very precise instructions for making a golem, and if an obedient golem were made, such a creature could easily throw the ranks of the enemy into a panic, and panic is the first stage of defeat. Generally, I said. Always, said Jaša. All that was left of his face was a pale egg-shaped stain, and I felt that I was conversing with a ghost on the verge of vanishing. The most interesting thing about the golem, said Jaša's mouth, is that despite his origins in language and the recitation of magic formulas, he cannot speak, which is patently absurd, because you'd expect language to fi st make language, with all else coming later; however, Jaša's mouth went on, if the golem were able to speak, then he'd be a perfect being, which would be a direct challenge
to God, who alone can create perfect, complete beings. That's why, Jaša's voice came out of the darkness, the golem must be imperfect, and if he doesn't speak, then he doesn't have the most essential component of a real being, in other words, he cannot be a creator and create the world by uttering it, which is to say in the same way that the Lord created his world, our world, this world. I could no longer see him. I stretched out my hand but reached nothing. Then I heard the iron gate creaking, and slowly, stumbling, I moved toward the sound. Even today, six years later, I still don't understand what was happening in the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue that evening; I only know that the dark thinned as I passed through the iron gate and stepped out into the street. When I tried to go back into the synagogue courtyard, I couldn't open the gate. That gate is always getting jammed, said a man who was passing by, high time they fixed it. I was about to ask how I might get back inside, if he knew that the gate jammed then he might know how to unjam it, but he had already moved on down the sidewalk and I didn't try to catch up with him. I crossed over to the other side of the street and started up the steps that led to Obilićev Venac. It occurred to me that there must be some connection between the synagogue and the sign I had seen at the café by the Graphics Collective Gallery, in the same way that there was a link among the signs left around the Zemun marketplace. In other words, I was convinced that all I had to do was keep an eye out and I would discover an abundance of new signs, but I didn't have it in me to start yet another investigation. Perhaps investigation is not the best word, though at that moment I truly felt like a worn-out police inspector who, at the end of his boring career, finally comes across a spectacular case that radically changes his life, the only difference being that I had no desire at all to change my life. This is perhaps a strange thing to say for a person who lived in such a troubled, shattered country, in which very few managed to sustain even a shred of hope, but if I were to attempt an explanation, I would fail. There are some things one either knows or doesn't know, that's all. Ultimately my life did change, which I say with no regret, there is no point to regret, but I am giving it as a fact, especially because I feel that every fact is welcome in a story that has so few facts, at least in the form to which we are accustomed, and by saying that I mean those facts that free us from doubt, not facts that encourage us to doubt. In any case, a sentence in which the same word is repeated four times cannot be a good sentence and is a reliable reflection of the anxiety and powerlessness of the person who wrote it. I experienced that same powerlessness as I wrote the pieces for Minut those last weeks. When I refer to the last weeks, I am thinking of the weeks during which the events set in motion by the slap along the riverbanks of the Danube were brought to a close. I recently got hold of a calendar for the year 1998, counted the days following the eighth of March, and established that it all took a little over nine weeks. What is nine weeks? Nothing. At the time, however, it seemed to be taking far longer, I even sometimes thought with despair that it would never end, that I would stay caught up in that merciless spiral for the rest of my life, which, tornadolike, sucked up everything in its path. In that chaos, which I am not doing a good enough job of conveying, I realize, the only constant was the pieces I was writing regularly and handing in every Wednesday by three P.M. at the latest. And of course, as time passed and I handed in each new piece later and later, they all screamed at me when I would come into the editorial office, text in hand. I mention this only because after the evening in the synagogue courtyard, as I climbed the stairs to Obilićev Venac and thought about the new cluster of signs, I remembered that when I had studied the map of Zemun, I had established that the neighborhood around the market, where I found a concentration of signs, consisted of nine city blocks. Why did that matter? Because nine men were seated around the wooden table in the courtyard of the synagogue; I was the tenth. At that point, of course, I didn't yet know that these events would last for nine weeks, but even so the coincidence was enough to prompt me to write about the role of numbers in our lives, which is what I told the editor in a phone conversation the next day. The editor was not thrilled, claiming that the subject matter was too obscure for your average reader, but I stood my ground, convinced that it was precisely the sort of subject that did engage readers, especially speculating about what might affect their lives. Other than Slobodan Milosevic, of course, I added. The editor smiled, even so it took my asking about Feliks the cat and his meowing before he relented, with the caveat that he would publish no esoteric writing. We have more than enough of the esoteric in our day-to-day lives, he said at the end of the conversation. The first thing I thought of was Dragan Mišović, though after our last conversation, in which I didn't come off too well, I was not overly eager to talk to him. On the other hand, who else could tell me more about numbers? He was the only mathematician I knew; no one else cared about numbers, and as things stand in today's world, mathematics will become a secret language only for the initiated. In many countries, I recently read, children are no longer able to do calculations in their head, by heart, and the multiplication tables are no longer the foundation of knowledge the way they used to be, because everybody has, or can easily get ahold of, a calculator, and calculate all sorts of things while essentially having no understanding of what is involved. And while some say this is good, because knowledge need not be the exclusive property of the educated minority, I see this as the ascendancy of mediocrity. The mediocre rule the world, no doubt, and it is normal that they adapt the world to their needs and intellectual capacity. In a store, for instance, there are times when I can add up the prices of the groceries I am buying faster than the woman at the cash register can, which always wins me the admiration of the salespeople and other customers. I wouldn't be surprised if one day they all burst into applause. But I digress. It is always easier to make plans than to follow them up, and this was something that forever plagued me in my earlier life, the life I had to leave behind six years ago when I started this new one, which doesn't much resemble life. I was sometimes known to say that I dreamed of a life far away from historical divides and would be happiest to spend all my days reading and writing and listening to music, and now, when I am living far from history, when my time is all my own, I'm trying to reconstruct the events that led to it and am shamelessly saying, here and now, that I can imagine no other life, that I long for what I used to consider useless sludge. But back to the question of numbers, they are at least impartial, feelings mean nothing to them, one number is like any other, though, on the other hand, each is unique. It sounds as if I am talking about people, and that may have been my thinking when I proposed to the editor of Minut a piece about the role numbers play in our lives. It is amazing that something that doesn't exist in nature, in any form, plays such an important role in our conceptualization of the world. It would be more natural not to know numbers, which probably was the case long ago, because that brings us closer to the original construct of the universe, and this was recently confirmed. I read in Politikin Zabavnik that a tribe was discovered in the jungles of the Amazon who had no notion of numbers and could not count. If a member of the tribe caught two fish, a second one caught three, a third one caught five, they made no distinction. Fish are fish, and that was that. It is a long way from there to the numbers tattooed on people's skin in concentration camps, and I wanted to write the piece for my column in Minut about that journey, from a number that does not exist to the number that was the entrance ticket to the death chamber. When I did write the piece, it looked different, as so often happens when we write, and I focused mostly on numbers in the Jewish tradition and on the fact that many things in their religious practice are defined in numbers, such as, for instance, the Thirteen Divine Attributes, the Ten Commandments, the 613 commandments, or mitzvoth, the 231 permutations in the order of the alphabet through which the world is created, and here I also had to mention, which I now see as an exceptionally important detail, the ten Sephirot, or degrees, through which God is manifested in the world. The editor had
worried needlessly; the piece did draw readers, and the same day it was published email began pouring in, followed with a lag of several days by real, old-fashioned letters, two or three postcards, and even a small package, which, for reasons of security, I never opened but tossed into the nearest trash basket on my way out of the editorial office. The messages were mostly voicing praise and respect for the Jewish tradition, though there were also unfavorable comments, even open attacks and accusations of excessive love for "Jewish scum." One letter looked like a ransom note from a crime novel, it was composed of letters, words, and parts of sentences cut from the daily and weekly press. It was long, and I felt a begrudging admiration for the person willing to spend so many hours with all that finicky cutting and pasting, probably while wearing plastic gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints on the scissors, glue tube, and newspapers. After finishing the job, when he had finally taken off the gloves, his skin must have been all puckered and wrinkled from sweat. Some of the phrases in the 1 etter irresistibly reminded me of what I had heard in my encounter with the hard-core nationalists, and I had a feeling they would soon reemerge, which was promised, more or less, in the final sentence in the pasted letter. We will see who is right, the sentence said, composed of eight little slips of newspaper, among which I recognized two letters cut from Politika and one word cut out of Danas. A day or two after the piece was published, graffiti appeared on a building near the editorial office of Minut, which said, JEWS ARE NOTHING BUT NUMBERS, and under it the next night someone added, AUSCHWITZ COMMANDER, and out in front of my door I was greeted by foul-smelling excrement again, wrapped in a photograph of the Dead Sea, but, I confess, I didn't understand what that meant. I had never been good at interpreting symbols, and for the life of me I couldn't divine whether the excrement was an allusion to death, as suggested by the name of the sea, or to a surfeit of salt, a spooky atmosphere, a depression on the earth's surface, which could possibly be associated with hell, or whether the purveyor of the excrement, perhaps better the producer of the excrement, had no other picture of Israel handy, so the picture he did have, a somber view of the empire of salt, had to suffice for the wrapping. In any case, the shit lay over the photograph as if it were floating on the surface of the sea. The excrement, the writing, the irate messages warned me that there were worse things to come, and indeed, in the next few days I noticed those young men trailing me more often, and I tried to avoid coming home late at night or taking solitary walks along the river. At night I heard sounds in the hallway of my building, as well as in front of my door, which prompted me to position things useful for self-defense around the apartment: an umbrella, a board from the cellar, a hard plastic pipe, a hammer, and a wrench. And as I was placing them strategically, I had to laugh, because I knew I'd never use them, or if I were to use them, I'd be more likely to hurt myself. The hammer fell on my foot more than once. However, when the phone rang the next night, I grabbed the rolling pin from under the bed and started for the door. I stood there in the dark for a while, listening to the silence in the hallway, and only then did I recognize the sound of the phone ringing behind me. I walked over to the phone, rolling pin raised, as if, when I picked up the receiver, someone might leap out, but when I put the receiver to my ear, I heard Margareta's voice. Chagrined, I hid the rolling pin behind my back. She apologized for calling so late, especially if she'd woken me, she said, but she'd just read my piece in Minut and had to call me that instant. She enunciated words by separating them into syllables and spoke as if she were humming. That's all right, I said, wondering what to do about the rolling pin. Why did I own a rolling pin in the first place, a rolling pin that looked old and battered, though I never bake, and the making of pastry dough, which is what, as far as I know, the rolling pin is generally used for, I consider to be an undertaking more challenging than the efforts of an alchemist at making gold? Margareta, however, was interested in the Sephirot, as far as numbers were concerned, she said, she knew nothing, and even an ordinary visit to a market was torment because of the awkwardness she felt when the woman at the cash register handed her back the change. Some things, I thought, we will never know, and while Margareta was talking about her wanderings through the deserts and the primeval jungles of numbers, I was putting the rolling pin back under the bed. But, Margareta then said, back to the Sephirot. Did she think, I asked, that I should have said there were in fact eleven, and should I have mentioned the hidden one, Knowledge, situated between Wisdom and Understanding? Hey, said Margareta, about such topics we are better off talking without an intermediary. It so happened she was in the apartment in the high-rise by the Danube where Marko and I had found her message, and she would like us to go on talking about the Sephirot there if I didn't mind getting dressed, of course, and going out so late at night. How did she know, I asked, that I wasn't dressed? I know all sorts of things, said Margareta, but I don't let on. I said nothing. I wondered whether she knew about the brandishing of the rolling pin. I would not be surprised. Fine, I said, and started pulling clothes on even before I'd hung up. All the while, even once I'd gone out into the street, I could not get the rolling pin off my mind, though what worried me more was completely forgetting something. I've always been fascinated, I later said to Margareta, by the mechanism of forgetting, or rather the question of how to check whether something is forgotten or not, because if it has been forgotten, I said, it is no longer in question, which means, if it is still in question, then the oblivion is not complete. Just as it wasn't complete in the case of my rolling pin, I said, if, indeed, it was mine at all. Margareta laughed with a full-throated laugh that I didn't entirely appreciate at that time of night, maybe because her teeth flashed sharply in the gloom of the apartment in the high-rise. I didn't mention that when I entered the high-rise and found that the bulb in the stairwell was out, I regretted not bringing the rolling pin, especially when it seemed that someone was breathing in the dark not too far from me. I didn't dare use the stairs, I would have been quaking at every corner, so instead I called the elevator and took it to the fourth floor. Margareta opened the door before I had had the chance to ring the doorbell or use the key from the mailbox. She was barefoot, and, trying not to look at her feet or at my pale image in the oval mirror, I started talking about the rolling pin while we were still in the front hall. Numerous lamps were on, so that, dappled with shadows, the apartment seemed buried in books. More books on the floor than before: some piled high had toppled, so in places it was barely possible to wade through. A lamp was also burning on the small desk, casting light on a volume of an encyclopedia, next to which there were pages of writing. Margareta offered me tea, and when I accepted, she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. I went to the window, looked to the left, looked to the right, night was everywhere. The lights of the capital city were squinting as if ready to go to bed. I turned when I heard clinking; Margareta set the tray on the floor, then sat beside it. Her skirt momentarily slid up her thigh, baring a dazzling whiteness, which forced me to look up and study the expanse of ceiling. Jasmine tea, said Margareta, and passed me a cup. She'd tried any number of teas, she said, but jasmine she liked best, and in any case, she added, there is nothing better for a conversation about good and evil. If she was thinking of my rolling pin, I said, that would be the embodiment of good, and it would only have something to do with evil if it were to land on a bad skull. There is nothing absolutely good or absolutely bad, answered Margareta, even in a rolling pin, though she believed, she added, that there were rolling pins that had pressed evil to the very edge of their cylindrical form. I laughed. I could not believe, I said, that she had got me up at three o'clock in the morning so we could talk about good and evil rolling pins. That is because, Margareta said, I thought I'd left my rolling pin at home, but I still had it with me. Many people, she felt, do not understand that things rule us only because we are careless with them. When you leave something, she said, then it must be left behind within the self and outside the self. She stretched out her hand, plucked a b
ook from the nearest pile, lifted it, then set it on the floor. I am leaving it here, she said, but I am also leaving it in myself. She touched her stomach, as if she'd swallowed the book. If she were to walk away now, she said, and stood up abruptly, the book would remain, both outside and inside, and when she returned, she said, and sat back down, she would pick it up as if she'd never left it, in the room or in herself. As she was sitting, the whiteness of her thigh shone again. Margareta sipped her tea. Next time, I said, I will be more careful. No, said Margareta, it has nothing to do with being careful, and there may be no next time. She looked hard at me, and I had to make a major effort to sustain her gaze, not knowing what was expected of me. She had gray-blue eyes, more gray than blue, now that I think of it, though after all these years I'm not sure of that either. All right, she said, now listen. I'm guessing she talked for more than an hour; then she went off to brew fresh tea. What did she talk about? About the Kabbalah, the system of the Sephirot, the emanation of divine substance, about the system of everything in existence, the notion of good and evil, the migration of souls, the harmony of the spheres, the influence of the planets, prayer and silence. Some of the things were familiar, while others I was hearing for the first time. I got up, lifted my arms, stretched, then began pacing back and forth by the bookladen shelves. I passed by the desk, eyed the pages of writing, but didn't dare stop and study them more closely, though the sounds coming from the kitchen confirmed that Margareta was still busy preparing the tea. I did, however, recognize the open book; it was the volume of the Jewish Encyclopedia dedicated to entries starting with the letter G, as confirmed by the title of the entry "Gilgul," which I did manage to glimpse in passing. I paced a little longer, stared into the dark windowpanes, glanced at two or three books, leafed through Moshe Idel's study on the golem, and promised myself that I would definitely read it at some point. I notice that I am inventing reasons more and more often now to digress from the story, or slow it down, or even to avoid telling it at all, as if keeping a record can be called storytelling, and as if all this sounds like a story to anyone but me. After all, what is a story? A question to which, of course, I will not respond, because that answer too would only be yet another form of postponement, unlike the answer I got from Margareta when I asked her, pointing to the open volume of the encyclopedia, whether she was getting ready to travel. The question was meant to be witty, but Margareta answered in all seriousness that preparations mean nothing here because souls are traveling all the time, and it is certain that we do not make those decisions. The only decision we make, she said as she poured the tea, is what we'll be like in this life, because good souls seek out good people, just as evil souls search for the bad. That, she said, is one of the explanations as to why a good person becomes better sometimes, or why an evil person suddenly feels the evil urge. I sipped my tea. There are souls, Margareta continued, who circle the world for centuries doing whatever they can to contribute to the spread of good because that is the only way for evil to be gradually crowded off the face of the earth, to make the whole world a mirror for the good. She spoke with a fervor that in those years could only be heard, in an entirely different context, in the rabid tirades of political agitators on television news, and it was astonishing for me to find that such earnestness still existed in some other realm of the spirit. Margareta suddenly stopped talking, and tilting her head to one side, she looked at me intently. I hope, she said, that I'm not burdening you with things that don't interest you. There is nothing worse, she continued, than making people listen to something that means nothing to them, and it had seemed for a moment to her, she said, that she detected a shadow of boredom in my expression. I touched my face with the tips of my fingers, as if to check whether such a shadow was there, but the only thing I felt was the rough tips of my fingers on my chin and cheeks. If she had seen something, I told her, then it was fatigue, because if I'd been bored, I would have left long ago. In that case, Margareta told me, she would like to hear how I explained the presence of evil in the world. I shrugged. It is here, I said, like everything else, and if there is an explanation for other things, then the same holds true for evil. Margareta raised the cup to her lips, sipped a little tea, smiled. She had already taken note, she said, of my skill at speaking without saying anything, while leaving space in the process for further maneuvers, for affirming or denying or for totally withdrawing from further conversation. Now it was my turn to smile and raise my cup to my lips. I'd noticed, I said, that she never used more words than necessary, so that in some sense we complemented each other because I used the largest number of words, while she used the least possible number, which meant, statistically speaking, that on the average we used the same number of words. We'll never get anywhere if we fall back on language games, said Margareta. I agreed and took another sip of jasmine tea. The problem with evil, she said, is that its existence brings into question the assertion that God is good and omnipotent, because if he truly is, why did he need to create evil in any form? Maybe he didn't mean to, I replied, and instead, all on its own, evil transformed itself into a force opposing the one God had intended for the world and people? Margareta said that there were such interpretations in all religions, and that many rabbis, among them Kabbalists such as Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, felt that evil had been created so that the very act of overcoming it would bring people to understand the oneness of God. The Kabbalists determined the place within the system of the Sephirot where the source of evil lies, she said, and that is the Sephirot of Chesed and Gevurah, as shown by Rabbi Isaac the Blind. She spread her hands to remind me that these Sephirot assume the realms of the right and left hands on the human body, that the white and red colors belong to them, which she, for some reason, called angry colors, and silver and gold, or water and fire, all of them opposites, which, she added, through their friction probably encourage the emphasis on evil. All in all, she said, lowering her hands, whatever the sources of evil may be, no one can gainsay its existence, so there is no point in dwelling too long on the question of where it comes from, especially, she said, if the source is taken as Adam, or his tasting of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Even if we wanted to, she said, we couldn't go back in time and stop him from separating the tree of life from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by his action, so by picking the fruit he was sundering the thread that connected the fruit to the original source, which led to the creation, in his heart, according to the Kabbalists, of malicious intention. After that, she said, after taking apart what should have been joined, evil could have easily used the newly formed conduit to pour into the world, where it would then keep growing, establishing a counterbalance to good and offering itself, shamelessly, to the human race and its right to free choice. I'll never understand, I said, how someone, faced with a choice between good and evil, chooses evil. She couldn't understand either, Margareta replied, but the fact remained that human history is a series of disgraces springing from wrong choices. She sipped a little tea, wiped her mouth, and repeated that no matter how interesting the question of evil might be, what really interested all of us here was how to respond to it, how to stand up to it, and, finally, how to overcome it. I asked, staring at her feet, whom she had in mind when she referred to all of us here. Margareta fell silent for a moment, took another sip of tea, and said we would talk about that another time. Behind her head, through the window, I saw the sky begin to lighten. There are some, Margareta continued, who see no point in tangling with evil and feel that a focus on doing good deeds is all that is needed, leading to an increase in the quantity of goodness and a total liberation from evil, therefore, to an establishment of a world in which there will be nothing but goodness, not even free will, because there will no longer be a need for man to choose. There will be nothing to choose from, said Margareta, because everything a person does will be good, and each person will be good, and so will the whole world. Regrettably, she sighed, in the times we live in we don't have the luxury of waiting pa
tiently for that day to come, because the lunacy of evil is growing, and there is nothing left for us but to take on the fight with evil, not just individually, each in our own heart, she said, but more broadly, just as the sons of light battle the sons of darkness. And what, I asked, does this have to do with me? Margareta hesitated for a moment, then shook her head as if she was persuading herself of something. This was still not the right time for an answer to that question, she said, but soon enough it would be, she couldn't say when, but she could promise that I wouldn't have long to wait. So does that mean, I persisted, that there's an explanation for everything that's been happening to me? There is always an explanation, Margareta replied, nothing happens outside the larger flow of all things. I know that, I said impatiently, but there are ways to channel that flow, to guide a person to a path that someone else has defined, and what interests me is which path that is. Margareta touched her finger to her pursed lips, then reached over and with the same finger touched my lips. There would be time for that, she said, first she had to wrap up the description of the fight between good and evil she'd begun, and she had to finish it before the day had fully dawned. We both looked out the window at the pale sky. Whatever the evil is, however it came to be, said Margareta, it is always growing, threatening to squeeze all the good out of the world. In the process, the evil is nourished, if one can put it that way, by the evil deeds people do, even by their impure thoughts, especially thoughts of committing sins, and as the evil gains in strength the bond is severed between the lowest of the Sephirot, called Malkhut, or Kingdom, and the other Sephirot, and this redirects the emanation of the divine to charging and boosting evil, while the feminine nature, designated as the Shekhinah, is threatened and forced into exile, and when it is exiled, we become one-sided, stripped of the balance of oppositions, and we become easy prey for surging evil. The entire system of Sephirot is threatened, said Margareta, from the Crown to the Foundation, in other words, from the top of the head to the genitals the world goes awry. And to keep that from happening, she added, the Shekhinah must become a part again of the system of divine meaning, so the feminine presence of reality has a role equal to the masculine presence. She turned and looked at the sky, now bright. Even to herself she was sounding like Scheherezade, she said, but her story had to end as morning came. If we were going to spend another night awake, I said as I stood up with effort, she might as well be Scheherezade, because I was not the kind likely to lop off heads, the kind that had to be distracted from the sword. Margareta didn't answer. Morning, apparently, contributed to her change: she was no longer talkative, the smile vanished, and as she hastily rinsed out the cups and spoons, it was as if her whole body went stiff, she became formal. A little later, as I kept talking, she put on white socks. When I saw that my attempts to keep our conversation going were floundering, I too fell silent, and the brief ride in the elevator was extremely awkward. There is nothing more unnatural than two people standing next to each other, nearly touching, saying nothing and looking for something to stare at. How many places to stare at could there be in a filthy, close, graffiticovered elevator cabin? I could not understand Margareta's unexpected transformation, though I decided immediately, as both of us, were staring fixedly at the same upper corner of the elevator cabin, that I would pay it no mind. The fact of the matter is that the number of unknowns in my equation was no smaller than it had been, but that didn't mean that I should allow it to grow. So, showing nothing, I said goodbye to Margareta, though I couldn't resist turning to see the direction she took as she walked away from the quay. It occurred to me to follow her, it wouldn't have been difficult to do, and following her might have helped to resolve the dilemma that Margareta hadn't wished to speak of, meaning the question of what all these events had to do with me; but after she had opened up to me that night, it seemed dishonorable to follow her. If I had made it this far, I thought, I could last a little longer, so I went home. If I had known just how far off I was in my estimate of how long this would go on, I probably would have set off after her, regardless. Now, of course, it's too late, as I've said, or written, I'm not sure because several times I noticed I've been talking to myself, even as I sit at the table bent over the paper. Somewhere I read that this is called mixing the real and imaginary levels, and that movement between what is real and what is imaginary is most common in children, not counting mentally disturbed people. If that's true, I hope it's a child I'm becoming, and not a person with a dislocated consciousness, though it is the same either way, because no change can alter the past that preceded it. I used to think about that a great deal more, especially at a time when I dedicated myself to studying the Chinese Book of Changes, and I did what I could to find an arrangement of the hexagrams that would prepare me for the arrival of future changes, so that when they occurred I would not experience them as changes but as continuity. I do not remember whether I found the best arrangement of hexagrams; most probably not, because I never really understood the system of broken and unbroken lines, just as I do not now fully understand the system of the Sephirot. If the Chinese hexagrams represent a picture of the world, and if the Kabbalist Sephirot also represent the world, do the hexagrams and the Sephirot reflect the same world, or are these worlds so different that one could say with certainty that each of us has our own, unique world, which is not repeated anywhere? I know that in the end everything comes down to moral purity, and that between the Jewish tza dik and the Chinese superior man one could place an equal sign, but what about all of us who do not attain these pinnacles of virtue? I never had a chance to discuss this with Margareta; when I went off to see Jaša Alkalaj with the same question, I learned he was preparing for an art show. These were the paintings, he told me at his studio, he had been working on for the past few months, and most of them were dedicated, he remarked, to the theme of racial misunderstanding and prejudice. Until that moment I'd paid no particular attention to his work, because what I'd seen earlier had little appeal for me, and he was still convinced that, belonging as we did to different generations, guided by different poetics, we had nothing to offer each other. He invariably dismissed postmodernism with a shrug, while I was prepared at any moment to swear by that same postmodernism, and with the same intolerance I heard his positions on the political and social engagement of the artist. Our discussions, therefore, about the Kabbalah and mysticism had not strayed into the realms of art and politics. The art show was something very different, just as the paintings he showed me were altogether different from my simple-minded impressions and ill-conceived notions. Unlike the earlier paintings, many of which were abstract, not including the Kabbalistic canvases I had seen on my first visit, the new pieces, which Jaša showed me one by one, embraced the most varied influences and styles; they included direct references to other works, ranging from impressionism to pop art. Instead of a connection through stylistic expression, the paintings were linked by an openly political theme. Two or three paintings were references to famous canvases by the painter Mica Popović, while Slobodan and Mira Milošević appeared in a direct quote from Warhol's works portraying Mao and Marilyn Monroe. The most interesting, at least for me, were paintings using hyperrealism techniques, I wasn't sure of the source, to respond to the recent upsurge in anti-Semitism. I assume these were based on photographs, though I'd never seen the original photos, except one. A group of paramilitaries poses next to vandalized Jewish tombstones, for instance, one of them holding a severed human head. The damaged tombstones, I sensed, were photographed at the Zemun Jewish cemetery; I don't know where the paramilitaries were from because they wore no insignia on their clothing or uniforms, but regardless of who they were in the original photograph, the accusation of racism and intolerance referred to the many irregular troops that had gone into the war from our regions. One of the other paintings depicted a fragment of a slogan scrawled across the wall of the Belgrade Jewish cemetery, and in front of it a group of young men with closely cropped hair; some were sneering with hatred, others had their hands raise
d in quasi-Nazi salutes, yet others brandished a banner, painted as a reverse pirate flag: a black skull and crossed thigh bones on a white ground. The photograph looked familiar: they were soccer club fans before a match in the cup finals or perhaps qualifying matches for the World Cup. In these paintings, as in the others, there were Kabbalistic symbols here and there, Hebrew letters, illuminations from ancient books, six-pointed stars, menorahs, and mezuzahs. Meanwhile, Jaša poured brandy into two glasses, we clinked our glasses, raising them to the paintings, which, as he said, through the art show were becoming a part of the world, we drank to the show, and to him, and, he added, with each of his paintings a piece of himself was subtracted and hence he was becoming an ever smaller part of the world. When he put together all he had done, he said, a few crumbs were all that was left of him, a handful of bits. They shouldn't even be calling him Jaša anymore, he said, but Little Jaša, there was so little of him left. I laughed, he was serious. What's going on, I asked, with the show coming up, shouldn't you be in high spirits? Jaša went over to the table, brushed the papers and newspapers aside, and handed me a folded envelope. Inside, on a sheet of red paper, in letters cut out of newsprint, was a brief message: You haven't got much longer, Judas!!! I noticed that each of the three exclamation points was different, the one in the middle was thicker and the one on the right-hand side was longer. It's no picnic finding the right-sized punctuation marks in newspapers, as anyone would agree, except in the gossip rags with those bombastic headlines, a gold mine of question marks and exclamation points. And besides, the size of the lettering in messages like that isn't coordinated anyway. I turned over the paper, there was nothing on the back, only several uneven blobs of glue. First I said, This is ridiculous; then I said, We should go to the police. Nonsense, said Jaša, what can they do? I said nothing. I could hardly praise a police force that was interested only in propping up the regime in power, motivated solely by their own survival, because if I did, I'd be flying in the face of my own actions. After all, I hadn't turned to the police when I was beaten up, nor did I call them to take a look at my shit-covered, pissed-on doormat, and I made a point of dissuading my well-intentioned neighbor from calling them for me. In return, sometimes I would wash the entire stairwell. Cleanliness is always calming. I asked Jaša whether any of his acquaintances had received similar threats, had Isak or Jakov, or maybe old Dacca? But Jaša shook his head and said, If I was keeping silent about it, why would they say anything? And what happens next? I wanted to know. Jaša shrugged. One death threat, he said, is not the end of the world. The preparations for the art show are coming along, the catalog is at the printer's, the invitations too, life goes on and there is no point in paying this any mind, which has always been the case and always will be. Isak Levi wrote the text for the catalog, said Jaša, and the art show was planned for the following Tuesday at the Jewish Historical Museum. Perhaps that space, he said, wasn't the best possible, but I would surely agree that there was no more fitting place for such a show. I agreed, and then we washed that down with our topped-off glasses of brandy, drinking to the prosperity of the museum, the success of the show, and good reviews, for peace on earth and a speedy change of government in our country. For this last wish Jaša filled our glasses yet a third time, so from that moment on my recollections fade, and no matter what I do, I can't bring them back into focus. I remember, and only with great effort, the moment when I left his building to wait for a cab: I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and though I'd done this slowly, looking to the side made my head spin. I had to sit down, and I sat on the highest step. I kept thinking I was hearing leaves rustling, though when I looked at the treetops, they were still. Is that, I later asked the cab driver, the sound of alcohol in my bloodstream? The cab driver glanced at me sullenly in the rearview mirror. He was probably afraid I'd throw up on the seat next to me, which was not out of the question, so, just in case, I opened the window and took a deep breath. There is another bit that has since vanished from my memory, because all I remember is how I suddenly opened my eyes, how I stared at the cab driver's hand on my knee, shaking me, and how, little by little, his words reached me. I paid for the ride, tried to kiss his hand, which he had extended to take the money, got out of the cab, and then I emptied the contents of my stomach by a newspaper kiosk. As the last droplets were spewing from my mouth, I thought I should get my cleaning equipment and restore everything to order. I mustn't forget my plastic gloves, I kept repeating to myself. Of course, as soon as I stepped into the apartment, all such thoughts vanished. I flopped into the armchair, and I was still there when I opened my eyes the next morning, stiff, with a disgusting taste in my mouth, pain in my stomach, tacky fingers, and a headache that threatened to blast my skull to pieces. I'd been wakened by the reflection of the sun's rays, which had found their way to me from the windows of the facing buildings. I squinted at the sunshine, belched and groaned, hoping that by some miracle I might start to feel well again. I was hoping in vain. Some people don't even know what a hangover is, but I am of the kind for whom every hangover is a disease, and when I finally managed to get on my feet, I filled a hot-water bottle, got undressed, and crawled into bed. The next day, Marko gave me a lecture, his favorite lecture on the theme of how impossible it is to reconcile cannabis and alcohol, and how my hangover and headache, which caused me to open the door to him with my eyes nearly shut, was one more proof that he was right. According to him, the earth was divided into regions of unequal size in which various means for altering consciousness dominated: the Near East, for instance, was a hashish region; the Far East an opium region; in South America it was coca; alcohol ruled in Europe; the native populations in North America had tobacco. However, he maintained, one's background does not necessarily oblige one to embrace the preference of a particular geographic region, rather, each of us was born with a predisposition, and if that predisposition were to connect one to, say, cannabis, then the other substances would hold no interest. In a search for the right substance, Marko explained, you try different mind-altering substances, and when you find the right one, all others become unappealing or damage you, as my poor reaction to Jaša's brandy demonstrated. He offered me his cure for a hangover, a plump joint of marijuana, but I waved him away: the very thought of smoke made my gorge rise, and I was in no mood to test what real smoke would do to me. The headache settled like a veil over my eyes, and I felt I was looking at Marko through my lashes, eyelids half closed, from a great distance. All right, said Marko, if you won't, I will. He lit the joint and for a moment his head disappeared in a cloud of smoke. I closed my eyes and pinched my nose, which was the only way I could shield my stomach from temptation. I even turned my head to the side and tried to point my mouth as far away from him as possible. In the end, fearing I might succumb, I went to the kitchen to make some mint tea, but once I'd made it, I stared into the cup, unable to bring myself to lift it to my lips. Meanwhile, Marko had smoked his joint and had joined me at the kitchen table. He had clearly read the papers that morning, he showered me with minute details on what was happening locally and in the world. The members of the Atlantic Pact had yet again threatened to bomb Serbia if there wasn't an acceptable resolution to the Kosovo crisis; the German mark was still worth six dinars, which was what a liter of gasoline cost; stray dogs were a growing problem; in an apartment frequented by the homeless, in the heart of Belgrade, the dead body of an unknown male was found; the preparations for the referendum were underway; the weather showed no sign of stabilizing; Chinese merchants were flocking to the Belgrade markets; the taxi drivers were calling for higher rates and were threatening a strike that would paralyze the city, as if the city, Marko said, was not already paralyzed. Depressing news sometimes has a bracing effect, if for no other reason than because you realize how paltry your troubles are compared with all those tragedies and cataclysms, so I perked up, sipped some tea, and finally was able to see Marko clearly. Marko, naturally, offered to roll another joint, but my insistence in turning him down
surprised even me. All right, said Marko, he had come to show me something, or take me to where he'd show me something, something he felt I had to see, as it was directly related, or at least that was how he perceived it, to stuff that had been going on with me recently, and even if he'd read it wrong, which was not impossible, he said, anyone can make a mistake, I'd be interested in what he had to show me, and we should get going as soon as possible, so he was getting up, which was a good thing because tangled sentences like this were terribly draining for him. All right, I said, went into the bathroom, washed, confirmed that I looked haggard, brushed my teeth, splashed lotion on my cheeks, and came back to the kitchen. I'm ready, I said. Marko looked at me slowly, and suddenly, as I saw his bloodshot eyes, it crossed my mind that I shouldn't trust him. It's a horrible moment when you doubt a person you think of as your best friend, especially when it's not you doubting him over facts, but something inside you, some minuscule signal warning you, so at first you want to ignore it, persuade yourself that it is all a mistake, a short circuit, a disturbance sending you a false image as a foil. But had I not already decided not to tell Marko everything, especially when it came to Margareta? Now my intuition was merely confirming something my subconscious had known for a long time, as it knows everything else, both what has already happened and what is to happen. I am not talking about destiny here; I am not a believer in destiny, I have always favored the notion of free will and the freedom of choice. The blind given, a life spent in writing out an unchanging destiny, I never found such notions appealing—they reduced me to an automaton who goes through life simply to acknowledge that he's but a grain of sand swept along by events, stripped of any meaning. That biologist, I can't recall his name, hit the nail on the head when he said that destiny does exist but is not predetermined, we are the creators of our destiny, but what we choose to do, seen in retrospect, becomes an inevitability, not because of divine intervention but because the past can no longer be altered. Enough of that. Marko waited patiently for me to get ready, then got impatient. He kept hurrying me along, urging me to walk faster, he grew nervous and agitated as if he had snorted cocaine. He was taking me straight into the lion's den, I remember thinking at the time, though now I have to laugh, because there were no lions nor did the place we went to resemble a den. I was still hung-over, and I had the feeling that my stomach was an inflated balloon that I was carrying on a string, high above my head, and my head throbbed whenever we hit the bright sunlight. At the same time, I admit, I was figuring out how to run away at the slightest sign of danger, and I kept lagging a few steps behind Marko. Of course, this bothered him, so he'd grab me by the elbow and pull me along, cursing, though he never once explained why the rush. Even so, we made progress: we passed by the Faculty of Agriculture, entered the city park, then left the park near the hospital and turned onto a street that led to the synagogue. Once long ago, when a discotheque was located in that building, Marko and I went dancing there, as we used to say, to reel a girl in on our fishing line. The past few years there had been quite a public controversy over the synagogue, because the municipal authorities at the time were accused of having illegally taken over the building, but then it turned out there had been no violation of the law, though the story about the scandal resurfaced from time to time, always tinged with political overtones. As we approached the building, I wondered what Marko had in mind: a nostalgic return to the discotheque where Zoran Modli used to be the disc jockey, if I am not mistaken, or an attempt to draw me into some resurgent political dispute. It turned out to be something altogether different. We stepped into the courtyard. Though it was not an enclosed space, I felt a change from the street, as if the air was denser, no, as if something was in the air that could not be felt outside that space, a condensed sanctity, as Marko later said. He was surprised that I hadn't felt that change when I entered the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue, though that didn't necessarily mean anything, since our reaction to the sanctity of a place, he said, need not always be the same. When he visited famous monasteries, he said, he seldom felt a thing, while, on the other hand, the pressure of sanctity would be nearly unbearable in a ramshackle little church in a village off the beaten track. Everything can be explained, he said, all you need is the will to do it. We were standing in the yard in the increasingly warm sunlight, looking at the synagogue as if expecting it to address us. I still felt a fast-paced throb in my head, but the pain had mostly subsided. I was even able to look at a window refl ecting the rays of the sun, and the glare didn't make me nauseous. Marko called me over closer to the building and pointed to a rock with the number 1863 carved in it. He said he wasn't sure what that number meant, but that it probably was the year the synagogue was built. I knelt and touched the number, as if it could tell me something by touch. The number said nothing, instead it scratched the skin on my fingertips with its rough edges. Marko mentioned that the sum of the first two numbers was nine, as was the sum of the second two, and he was convinced that between those two sums there was a connection. I thought of Dragan Mišović. But why would every combination of numbers have an additional, hidden meaning? Couldn't a number be a number and nothing more? How could each number seem mystical, as if filled with secret missives, while words seem like a parody of reality, and the more words there are, the more ridiculous they are? Perhaps I should have wondered how Marko had discovered that number, what he had been looking for in the synagogue courtyard, or, who knows, in the building? I was passing by here the other day, said Marko, and suddenly it looked to me as if someone was waving to me from the corner of the building. And you wondered, I said, whether it was me? Exactly, answered Marko, how did you guess? Who else would have been waving to you, I said, from the synagogue courtyard? Whatever the case, he went into the courtyard and looked behind the corner of the building. No one was there. He had noticed the rock with the numbers, bent over to take a closer look, then heard a voice behind his back. He turned and saw an old woman in black: she even wore black lace gloves and a little hat with a short black veil. She raised her hand and pointed to the top of the synagogue. There, she said, by the chimney, you can see a light at night and those who know how to listen can hear a banging, rattling, and garbled words. Marko tried to ask for details, but she said the light was like no other light, it sometimes burned all night, and the sounds would become so loud that sleep was out of the question. Suddenly she fell silent, pointed up at the roof of the synagogue again, and with quick small steps, left. And you, I said, you came the next night to see what was going on, didn't you? Yes, said Marko, but I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, some commotion and the cooing of pigeons. And what did he expect from me now? I wanted to know. I have enough mysteries going at the moment, I said, that I don't know what to do with, I don't want to add one more to the burden. And besides, I continued, isn't there a bar here that stays open until late at night? All those sounds, the racket, the trembling light, doesn't that sound like a bar or club making noise and music? To a lady in black lace gloves, that might seem like the devil's work. Clearly I had not convinced him. He shook his head, blinked, wiped his nose. I suggested we find a café, and reluctantly he agreed. He stared up at the roof and stood on tiptoe, as if that would help him reach the attic. We set out along Dubrovačka Street, but at the first corner we bumped into a man, someone Marko knew, who apparently had something more attractive in mind for Marko than the planned cappuccino, because after conferring briefly they headed off in a different direction. I was left alone. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then turned to look back at the synagogue. I thought of Dacca's story about making a golem or finding some other Kabbalistic weapon; could there be a better place for work on that assignment than a synagogue? Then I remembered Volf Enoch, the water carrier, who passed through these same places more than two hundred years before, changing names the way someone else might change hats. Perhaps he was still walking around, under yet another name and with another occupation. What if, I said to myself, I am Volf Enoch, and
that thought made me stop. I am Volf Enoch, I said aloud, and I didn't feel that I was not speaking the truth. But, I went on to say, how could I be Volf Enoch when I'm not a Jew? How do you know, I asked myself, that you're not a Jew? Just as I was about to voice my response, I noticed a little boy and girl staring at me, probably happy to see a crazy man talking to himself. I turned and started running. I don't know why I was running, but when I stopped, my head was clear, as if the increased amount of oxygen that had entered my lungs and blood as I ran absorbed every remaining trace of the discomfort from the hangover. And not just my head; my vision was sharper, more precise, so that I saw everything, as they say, as clearly as if it lay in the palm of my hand. My palm was sweaty, however, and so was my forehead, my lungs were still huffing with effort, my leg muscles quivered, my knees were buckling gently. I looked around: I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how I'd arrived there, obsessed with the thought that no matter how it had happened, I was in fact Volf Enoch. To the left of me was a toolshed, to the right a rickety fence, in front of me were tended garden beds. I was standing in the backyard of one of the old Zemun houses, that much was clear, all I had to figure out was how I'd got here, if I'd got here. I turned again and saw the house to which the backyard belonged. The door was closed, the curtains drawn, a broom and shovel lay next to a cracked set of stairs, a washbasin with a hole in it was on the roof of a vacant doghouse. I saw a pair of old slippers, though I couldn't tell whether they were a man's or a woman's. As I took note of all that, the door opened and an old man appeared, with a rag in his hand. The rag had probably served for dusting, because as the door creaked open, he thrust out his hand and shook it out. When he caught sight of me, he lifted his other hand and waved, as if strange people walked into his backyard every day and stomped around his garden. We exchanged glances until my breathing had slowed and he had shaken out the dust rag, and then I moved slowly toward him. The whole time, however, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was sleeping and that none of this was happening, but when I got closer to the house, the old man, instead of vanishing as in a dream, came down the worn steps and held out his hand. I took it, expecting my fingers to find only air, but his hand was real and warm. He asked if I'd like to come in. I answered that I didn't know, because I genuinely didn't: I had not the slightest idea how I got there, so how could I know what I'd like to do now? The only thing I wanted was to ask where we were, but I couldn't bear to ask the question, because, as usual, I was embarrassed by my ignorance. So I stood in front of the old man, smiling, waiting for his next question. The old man asked if I'd like something to drink. This must be a dream, I thought, only in dreams do things like this happen, but if this is a dream, how could I have fallen asleep midstride, and if I really am asleep, then am I back there, still running? The old man was patient. Two or three times he rubbed his hands together, he coughed once, he scratched himself once, but he didn't rush me, just as he didn't prompt me to answer. Thank you, I said finally, a little water. The old man clapped his hands, and went back into the house. He closed the door and I heard him turn the key. A minute ago he was inviting me in, I thought, and now he is doing everything to make sure I don't follow him. So I stood there and waited for him and got more and more thirsty. The old man didn't reappear. I suddenly recalled the pump in the courtyard at Zmaj Jovina Street, and the thirst became unbearable. I went up the steps and knocked at the door. There was no sound, even when I leaned my ear against the peeling surface. I knocked again and pressed my ear even more closely to the door, and stayed there until my ear began to smart. I'll be going now, I said to the door, and stepped back. When I turned around, meaning to go down the stairs, I saw that I was in a city park. I sat down on a bench near a children's playground, a little dog sniffed the leg of my pants, two girls were making a sandcastle, a flock of pigeons waited at a safe distance, a woman on the next bench over was embroidering or crocheting, I was never sure which was which, and when I looked up, I saw blue sky and curly clouds. To this day I have not been able to figure out what really happened—had I run, or had I been sitting on that bench the whole time, and if so, how did I get there, and did it all happen because I, or at least something inside me, was truly Volf Enoch? But how could I have become Volf Enoch, and why me, of all people? Perhaps that was why I'd suddenly found myself caught up in these events, as Marko would say, though helpless to extricate myself from them. The universe is a weird place, said Marko, and there is so much stuff in it that makes no sense, which never bothers us except when the lack of sense comes crashing down on us. I had always felt this was empty talk fueled by cannabis smoke, but as it so happened I had personally experienced how emptiness can turn into fullness. I sat on the bench, wondering whether to approach the woman who was crocheting or embroidering and ask if she knew how I'd got there. Of course I didn't, but I could imagine how she'd have looked at me, and who knows, thinking I was attacking her, she might have brandished her crochet hook or embroidery needle, or whatever the device was that she was holding, as a weapon. So I sat there quietly, looking up from time to time at the clouds and waiting for my muscles to stop twitching. The little dog had by that time sniffed his fill of the fragrance in the cuffs of my pants and started sniffing other things in the vicinity. Volf Enoch, the water carrier, I repeated to myself, and tried to imagine what his work had been like back then. Did he have a barrel he filled with water, then lugged on his back from house to house? Where did he fill it? Did he receive a wage for his labors from the Zemun Jewish community, or did he charge by the water flask, bucket, or trough, depending on what he poured the water into? Later, of course, the leeches had their day, and when I remembered them I shivered. It was agonizing enough for me to be the person I was, and now I had to be a water carrier and a leech gatherer, too. That was not all, as it turned out. I stopped by the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue on Saturday morning, hoping I would find Dača there and perhaps learn more about Volf Enoch. Dacca was indeed there: he was sitting at the table, under the tree, wearing the hat. For two days now, he said, he'd been waiting for me to get in touch, and had I not turned up that morning, he would have gone out looking for me. Where would he have looked for me, I asked, since he didn't know where I lived? He would have looked for me where he'd find me, he said. He raised the hat, wiped his brow, then lowered the hat onto his head. I sat on the other bench, right across from him. Crumbs were visible on the table, left there after a meal. The crowning success in the first Serbian uprising, said Dacca, was the taking of Belgrade, as any historian would agree, but history is always a mother to some and a stepmother to others, he said, and it was stepmother not only to the Ottomans, but also to the Jews, who were accused of having served the Ottomans, for which some were killed, others forcibly baptized, and some crossed over into Zemun. And now, said Dacca, there are documents in which a certain Solomon Enoch is mentioned as the person who brought the ransom for the group, mostly women and children, though in the registers at the time of the Jewish families of Zemun there is no mention of a single Enoch. There is, however, a Jakob Volf, a widower and trader in used goods, but he surely could not have played that role because it is said of Solomon Enoch in one place that he was very young, while this trader must have been older if he had had the time to marry and, regrettably, bury his spouse, who died young. So who is Solomon? asked Dača, taking his hat off and looking at me as if I knew the answer. I don't know, I said. Of course you don't, replied Dača, but we can believe in the possibility that it might have been Volf Enoch, or, he added, putting his hat on again, whoever represented his essence. He saw my confused look. I am thinking of his soul, of course, he said, what were you thinking of? Nothing, I answered, I stopped thinking ages ago. Dača grinned. It won't help you, he said, especially when I tell you one more thing. He leaned toward me as if to impart a secret, so I leaned toward him, feeling conspiratorial. When, at the start of the uprising, said Dača, Father Matija Nenadović crossed secretly over into Zemun to ask Bishop Jovan Jovanović for a cannon,
involved in all of this was a Jew, as Nenadović writes in a letter, a man named Enoch who was damned capable, though Nenadović doesn't specify capable of what. It appears, Dacca continued, that he was involved in supplying a second cannon, a cannon that Father Luka Lazarević had helped bring to Serbia, which, he said, is strange, to say the least, because later the Belgrade Jews suffered at the hands of the Serbian rebels, but so it goes in history, at one moment you're up, up high, then you're down, very low. So it came about, he said, in Belgrade too, where, when Prince Milos came into power, better times came for the Jews because the prince granted them full civil rights while they were in Zemun; in the other empire, they were still undesirables, which would last, he said, another thirty years or so. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead again, then he flipped the hat over and set it on the table, as if expecting a piece of fruit to tumble into it. I looked up into the crown of the tree. Dacca was quiet, his eyes were closing, so I hurried to ask the question I'd come to ask. On the basis of what he'd told me, was I to conclude that Volf Enoch was not one man, but several, and if this was so, how many people were we talking about, no, that's not what I meant to ask, the number was moot the moment it went beyond one, but could he, I asked, explain how this had happened? Where had all these Volfs and Enochs in different places and times come from, and how did water carriers evolve into gun runners? Dacca sat bolt upright when I said this and swiftly put on his hat. What runners, what guns? he asked, he had never said any such thing, and if Volk Enoch had ever run anything, it was leeches. Fine, I said, leeches and guns aren't so different after all, both subsist on bloodletting, but what I really want to ask, I added, is where Volf Enoch is now, today, at this moment? Dacca stood up and spread his arms. If we knew everything God intended, he said, we'd have no need for him. He turned and walked toward the gateway, bent, tentative as he negotiated the uneven surface of the courtyard. At one moment he paused and called to me over his shoulder not to forget the opening of Jaša's art show on Tuesday. No need to worry, I called back, I am thinking of Jaša even when I am not thinking of him. I stayed a while longer in the shadow of the tree, then set off on my Saturday stroll. This was one of my little rituals, one of those intimate routines that help us, or at least helped me, preserve my sanity during the recent years in Belgrade, the lunacy years, as a friend of mine dubbed them. That friend managed to alert me but not himself, and at a moment of distress and confusion, in the middle of the day, he leaped from the terrace of a New Belgrade high-rise. The košava wind was blowing at the time, as it was blowing several days later when he was buried, and I remember the voice of a woman saying in muffled tones, If this curse doesn't end, I too will kill myself. It was around then that someone told me how important rituals were in sustaining a certain level of normalcy and keeping one from sinking into despondency and despair. I don't remember who said it, but I know we were talking about the ordinary activities, such as taking walks, visiting museums and galleries, reading classics, listening to music, or, and why not, the routine dusting of the apartment. That is when I began my ritual Saturday stroll, which, unlike my other walks, did not take me to the quay. Every other day belonged to the Danube; Saturdays I explored the less well-known parts of Zemun and Belgrade, sometimes walking quite far afield, nearly out to the edge of town. I walked like an old man, a pensioner, one foot in front of the other, hands crossed behind my back, and those walks had a remarkably calming effect, like, I'm guessing, the practiced moves of the Eastern martial arts. I don't believe my walks could be described as a part of the Samurai codex, but in the course of those walks my senses became purer, and at the end I felt as serene as Buddha. That particular Saturday I decided to walk along Kosančićev Venac and through the neighboring streets. Something about walking on cobblestones is different from walking on sidewalks; a person who walks on cobblestones is more mindful of his body, keeping it in balance and coordinating the movements of all his limbs. Many people slump as they walk on paved surfaces, their spine is curved, their legs unstable, so they easily fall, and sink into a bad mood. On cobblestones a person is always spry, poised to adjust his step, his spirit is alert and attentive, the eye sharp, the ear attuned, the nostrils flared. On cobblestones, I once said to Marko, I am a hunter, on the pavement I am merely the prey. Ah, how Marko laughed. We were younger then, of course, and the young find it easy to laugh; as the years pass, laughter often cloaks itself in sneers, disdain, caution, sarcasm, cynicism, and other garments. When you are young it is nicest to be naked; later taking your clothes off is agony because it's not easy to face the creature staring at you from the mirror. I don't know why I am thinking of this now. I have definitely never walked around naked on cobblestones: a swaying penis, no matter how large, will more likely provoke a snigger than an erotic response. So I walked down to Kosančićv Venac, walked to its far end, came back, having passed the Faculty of Theology twice, went down Zadarska Street, then down Srebrenička, and down the stairs to the bus stop at the foot of the bridge. I hated the jostling buses and the crowds, but I didn't have much choice, or actually it was money I didn't have, so taking a taxi was out of the question, as was walking all the way to Zemun. It was time, I thought, to write a new piece for Minut. I couldn't have known it would be my last. What I am writing now, of course, doesn't count because this is not a piece like other pieces, this is a whisper into the dark from my window, a dark so dense that no light can penetrate it. So I stand by an open window, I utter the words and watch them burrow their way molelike through the dark. I bit my tongue before I'd even finished that sentence, not because I dislike the notion that my words are blind, but because I remembered that years ago I helped a neighbor, who had a weekend house just outside of Belgrade, get rid of moles. He poured water into one end of their underground tunnel, and I waited at the other end, shovel in hand, and bashed each mole that emerged until it was a bloody rag. And we were laughing as we did this, we even took pictures of ourselves with all those mashed little bodies, first he took a picture of me, then I took a picture of him, and no doubt those photographs still exist somewhere. Someone is sure to hold on to what we'd most prefer not have saved. One day I'll open a newspaper and on the front page I'll see those photographs, I'll see my face triumphantly grinning above the mangled moles, and I will know that the entire world, along with me, will be horrified at my heartlessness, despite the fact that moles are the most ordinary of pests. Fine, I'll use a different comparison then, and say that my words were twisting their way through the dark like corkscrews through cork, though it sounds as if the words are tied by threads to whoever is saying them, as if that person can easily, whenever he'd like to, yank them out and return them to his embrace. Nothing is further from the truth, because words, once they venture into the dark, even when the light is the brightest possible, never return. I don't know precisely where they go. Maybe there is a cemetery for words somewhere, I wouldn't be surprised. I have no more time for surprise. I have no more time. Being alive is being constantly amazed at life itself, and once the amazement is gone, so is life. A text isn't life, is it? No point in cocking my ear to listen: no one here will tell me anything, and the dark never has any answers anyway. I can sit again at the table and hold on to a glass of water, as if it will keep me floating. That night, the night after the encounter with Dača and the stroll along Kosančićev Venac, I couldn't fall asleep. This had happened to me before, there was no cause for alarm, I could explain it by restlessness, insecurity, uncertainty, ignorance, and I could lie there hoping to fall asleep at some point. I lay on my back, my hands crossed behind my head, breathed deeply, and stared at the ceiling, barely visible in the dark. I did what I could yet again to pull myself together and find an answer to what had gone on in my life over the past few weeks, but I kept coming back to the questions. Had someone truly tried to make a golem in Belgrade, and was this intention somehow'related to the group on the ridiculous artificial hill by Hotel Yugoslavia? And what sort of role was Volf Enoch playing in all this, if indeed he wa
s involved? The thought of Enoch unnerved me, as if someone were stretching inside me, straightening up to see who was summoning him. This time I reacted far more calmly to the possibility that I might have become Volf Enoch, my breathing may have quickened for a few minutes, but that's all. Margareta I couldn't forget, never would. I sensed the diagonal whiteness of her thigh, then her bare foot, but had to make an effort to recall her face. Then again I saw her thigh and felt my penis stiffening, until like a bar it reached across my belly. I should have called her, I thought. I didn't move. I trembled, stared into the darkness, and waited for the blood to seep back out of the spongy tissue. That was the first time I thought that Margareta might actually be the Shekhinah, the female presence of the divine, tied to the tenth Sephirot, Kingdom, situated on the map of the human body in the soles of the feet. Wasn't Margareta barefoot during our conversation at the apartment in the Zemun high-rise? But even if she was, does that really mean anything? People go barefoot, after all, because they like to and not because they mean to carve the shards of a secret message into someone's consciousness. The times we were living in required a haven from reality, which could be found only by living everyday life in a fantasy or by reading meanings into reality. If I go on this way, I thought, I will never fall asleep. My penis had wrinkled and curled up by then like a pup weary of chasing cats. I touched it with my fingertips; it raised its head sleepily, then flopped right back onto my crossed hands. Good, I said, at least you're asleep. My voice sounded hollow in the dark, like any voice that knows it can expect no answer. My eyelids were starting to droop, my head lolled on the pillow, my limbs grew heavier, and I could tell myself that finally I was on the verge of sleep, and, of course, the minute that thought occurred to me my eyes snapped open, the ceiling stared me in the face, and I knew beyond a doubt that I'd greet the morning. Now when I think about it, I am amazed that anyone slept at all in those days, or rather, those nights. Reality had reached a mind-boggling degree of ugliness: we were living under a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy, which was closing in ever more tightly around anyone who dared voice a divergent opinion. The divide between the cynical government, obsessed with material possessions, and the population pushed into gloom and poverty was deeper than the Grand Canyon, and the feeling of powerlessness to change anything ate at people like a stomach ulcer. You couldn't see all of it in Belgrade yet, but in the heartland of Serbia a true darkness reigned, both spiritual and otherwise. Such thoughts unsettled me all the more, so I got up and started pacing around the apartment. I didn't turn on the light; I shuffled around, though not barefoot like Margareta, but in soft slippers, until I got to the desk and the manuscript, which, it occurred to me, I hadn't looked at for a long time, so long, in fact, that I felt I'd never read it at all. I got back into bed, switched on the light, opened to [>