Leeches

by David Albahari

]. The part about Eleazar was still there, but it was up in the right-hand corner and it melted into another text, a document on the relationship between God and the Shekhinah. The ten Sephirot, it said, are the presence of the being of God, but Adam sinned, and he thought that the tenth, lowest Sephirot, called Malkhut, or Kingdom, was the whole of the divine being. This separated the Shekhinah, the feminine presence of God dwelling in that Sephirot, from the wholeness of the divine being, and it left God and the Shekhinah in a mutual yearning and a desire to reunite. To this day they are sometimes joined and sometimes not, depending on whether people sin, which drives them apart, or perform good deeds, which brings God and the Shekhinah close again. It should be repeated time and time again just how important it is to perform good deeds, for if God is not with the Shekhinah, he is seeking another female companion, and that other female companion will be Lilith, mistress of the demonic hordes, prepared to destroy everything that can be destroyed. So this is the obligation, then, I thought, this union of the male and female elements, which, if done properly, secures the normal functioning of the supreme being. Man must move God, so that God can move man; one influences the other, the one cannot exist without the other. I closed the manuscript and went over to the window. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then up, then down, but nowhere did I see anyone looking like God. Yes, it was Thursday, a working day, and he prefers to appear on Shabbat, who knows where he was just then. Here Marko would have elbowed his way in, if only he had been there beside me, and he would have said that what I was saying was absurd, for if God was omnipresent, he did not come and go, he was always there and missed nothing. I might have argued that God could shrink, reduce himself to the size of a dot, then there would be things good and bad beyond his ken. I would have hoped that Marko would not ask why God would shrink as if he were cheap fabric, because I had no answer. I knew that he shrank once long ago, when he created the universe, and I knew that he could be no larger than he was, though he could be smaller, but I also knew that my knowledge was shaky and would not serve me. I ought to calm down, I said to myself, my nose glued to the windowpane. The day wore on, it would soon be over, and then it would be Friday, and the beginning of Shabbat, and the obligation I had to Margareta. And not just to her. That too Marko would have loved: that I'm referring to the sexual act as an obligation, and if one thing is not an obligation, and cannot be an obligation, he'd say, it is the moment of union. And I would have had to admit he was right. I stepped back from the window, wandered aimlessly through the apartment, and ended up in the kitchen. The very thought that I should not be nervous as I awaited Friday sundown was making me nervous. Maybe, I thought, I should meditate, erase all from the mirror of my consciousness, but when I tried to imagine myself sitting in a chair, back straight, harmonizing my breathing with the general rhythm of the cosmos, I gave up. I had only one possibility left: to eat something. I remembered how as a boy I liked eating bread spread with lard and sprinkled with sugar, and at the thought my mouth watered, but I had nothing to stop it with. Lard had been replaced with cooking oil, and I could have gone up and down the entire stairwell and rung the doorbells of all my neighbors, and chances were I would not have found anyone who had a spoonful of lard to lend me. I had sugar, true, and I remembered another treat from my childhood: a slice of bread soaked in water and sprinkled with sugar, but I felt like eating lard and the thought of water had no appeal. I noticed a sheet of paper on the table with the yin and yang symbol on it, the one I had crumpled, then smoothed out, with the announcement for the tai chi course, to be held on the street I wasn't familiar with, so I had to look it up on the commercial map of Zemun. It was not in the upper part of town, as I had assumed, but near the city park, and it had indeed changed its name: the earlier Slovenian or Croatian locality had been changed to the name of a Serbian scientist, though my friends still referred to it by its old name. Odd, isn't it: when street names were changed after World War II, many people, possibly out of spite, continued using the prewar names, but once the new government imposed new names after the 1990s war, they preferred, at least for a time, the names from the Communist era. Perhaps it would be best to call the streets by number: governments change, the numbers remain the same. I have a feeling Dragan Mišović wouldn't agree, though I don't see why he wouldn't, but this only goes to show that there's always someone who has an ax to grind, though it also may mean that I'm overly anxious to please, and that, by always making sure I have an exit strategy, I invoke, or rather invent, the ax grinders myself. All in all, this unnecessary suspicion was one more proof that I needed to go out to walk off a little of the tension and edginess, as well as my nervous hunger. I had to hurry, because it was past six, which was the time the class started, so I dashed to the city park, making my way through longer and thicker shadows. The address on the flier took me to spacious rooms on the ground floor of a shabby five-story building, which probably used to house the tenants' building council or a branch office of the civil defense system, and there was a slightly lighter patch on the grimy wall where Tito's portrait used to hang. It felt as if that portrait had had its day a century ago, though only fifteen years have passed since then, and now it seems, maybe because I no longer live there, that its day never happened. Then again, maybe that's the way it is, maybe nothing ever exists, it's only somebody's thought, upon which we stumble accidentally and believe it to be our own. I will never find out, of course, just as I will never find out so many other things before death knocks on my door, or, as things now stand, at my heart, which a doctor here described to me in the past tense, as if it no longer existed. He clenched his fist and said: This is how your heart used to be. Then he opened his hand and said: This is how it burst. He stared into the palm of his hand and said: Goodbye, heart. I too stared at his hand and saw nothing. Goodbye, heart, I repeated after him, just as I am doing now, but back then, in the rooms that, despite the Eastern energy, were utterly gloomy, my mind was not on my heart. I looked at the fifteen people, mostly middle-aged women, doing warm-up exercises, as a young woman who introduced herself as the instructor of the Taoist version of tai chi courteously explained to me. She repeated that this was Taoist tai chi, as if I knew that there were different schools for the study of the martial arts, which, unlike others, is not in the service of attack or defense. The young woman clapped her hands and announced that the class would show me several characteristic postures, and while the group moved smoothly, wavelike, giving me the feeling that I was under water, she called out the names of individual postures, colorful names that were quickly self-explanatory, such as "grasps the bird's tail," "white crane spreads its wings," "arms move like clouds," or "creep low like snake." Maybe I should have joined in to learn how to master my inner energy, maybe then I never would have met that cardiologist for whom the heart is a balloon, though in the end, I admit, it makes no difference. Sooner or later every heart pumps its last, no matter what we call it, or whether we speak of it at all. Silence is a wall around wisdom, but if the wisdom is lacking, the silence can't bring it into being. So I stood there, watched the harmonious movements, and wondered why I was there. Nothing in the room or in the appearance of the people seemed to have anything to do with the rest of what was happening, so I could move on. If I did move on, however, I thought, then I'd be bringing everything into doubt, because if I doubted one of the possible threads, wasn't I questioning all the rest? And what does it mean, to doubt or to believe? What makes these similar and what distinguishes them, and is it possible to believe in doubt while at the same time doubting belief? No, Marko would have said, you don't need a cardiologist. The balloon you've got, he would say, isn't in your heart but in your head. You could do a circus act, he would tell me, with the rest of the freaks, and over your cage there would be a sign: THE HUMAN BALLOON. That's not funny, he would have said to me if I had started to laugh, though tears would have been more apt. Tears are always apt, I concur with that, though they are never good if you are crying over yourself. Two or t
hree times, alas, I did just that, I was trapped in a dead end and thought tears were my only solution. I'm not ashamed of those tears, even the balloon doctor would have approved, the one Marko was thinking of, or the one I was thinking Marko might have been thinking of, as I thought of our conversation and his presence. The previous sentence just shows the insecurity that possessed me then, the chaos that had become my order, the instability that had replaced my sense of balance. It would have been better if I had, without any thoughts, watched the postures of the introductory tai chi class as they spread waves of calm with their harmony, especially when they leaned sideways, like clouds, as their instructor said, though to me they looked more like sea waves, or better yet, like grain swaying at the lightest breath of wind. I had one more thing to try: I leaned confidentially over to the instructor and asked whether in tai chi there was a movement called "triangles opening." She looked at me, a wisp of doubt flitted across her eyes; in tai chi, she said, as far as she knew, there was nothing mathematical. It was true that the feet had to rest on the ground at a forty-five-degree angle to the axis of movement, but that could be learned without the use of a protractor. She drew my attention to the feet of the class participants, and indeed, they were all at forty-five-degree angles, then all lifted their right leg at the same time, and I saw that row of legs slowly straightening as if dealing a slow-motion blow as a farewell. A moment later I stepped out into the street. From the window of the barracks across the way, a soldier watched me. I recalled my own military service and the loneliness that fed on me like a bedbug, so I waved cheerfully, but he didn't react; instead, if I could trust my eyes from such a distance, he scowled and pursed his lips with scorn. I pictured a company of soldiers doing tai chi early in the morning instead of their routine morning limbering exercises, and that image of the soldiers in their olive drab uniforms moving slowly and mindfully over the concrete surface of the exercise grounds restored my good mood. I loathed the army and was sorry I had spent a year of my life in it, but an army using tai chi would, no doubt, be something different. I remembered our portly sergeant, and when I pictured him trying to stand on one leg like a rooster, I laughed out loud. None of that, however, could alter the fact that there was no connection between the tai chi class and the Well, which I found bewildering, since everything else had been tied in some way, or at least I'd been able to construe something that was convincing enough. For example, I had interpreted the car parked in front of the pharmacy as a lure, to draw me further into a story that I myself had constructed. Had that been the intention of the conspirators, if I can call them that? To persuade me to create a framework of my own, to be the protagonist who invents himself, chooses those elements he finds most convincing, rejects those that have no place in the construct of a reality that, in essence, did not exist? I came to a stop, then moved slowly on. Had I allowed myself to be drawn into a game in which I was by no means in control, as I'd thought I might be not so long ago, but rather an auxiliary piece, a pawn someone was skillfully moving while the pawn was certain that the choice of moves was his alone? I paused again, by the department store, and turned and hurried back to the building near the army barracks. The soldier was still staring through the window, scowling, and when he saw me watching him he winked, or at least so it seemed to me as I walked quickly by. There was no one in the tai chi classroom except that patch on the grimy wall where the picture of Tito had been. Where had they gone? How long had it taken me to leave the building, cross in front of the barracks and walk toward the department store, sidling between parked cars: Five minutes? Ten? I tried to reconstruct everything in the room when I first entered: I remembered a hat stand, on which hung items of clothing, as well as two large boards with diagrams of various postures, sketches showing dance steps, but no one was there. The walls were bare, the floor clean, the window shut. I walked around, knocked on the walls in search of a secret passageway, banged the floor with my foot to detect an echo of emptiness, then opened the window, looking for a ladder or signs left by people who had jumped out. I found nothing. Someone had made an extraordinary effort to clear out all I had seen, that much was obvious, but why? Was it because they hadn't expected me to come back, or was it precisely because they knew I would come back? If the latter, how could they have known? I shuddered at that thought, because if they had known, then they knew everything else, or they were managing my choices and actions with such precision that never for a moment did it occur to me that I was someone other than myself. I'm not thinking here of Enoch the water carrier or Eleazar or an ancient Kabbalist, which I was more prepared to believe, but someone I knew nothing about, someone about whom, clearly, I was not supposed to know. I walked around the room one more time, pausing below the space where Tito's portrait had hung, as if I could learn something from it. I learned nothing, though for a moment I thought perhaps I was overdoing things, the tai chi lesson had simply ended, and the people who had attended it left, taking with them their props. I went out into the street and walked by the barracks. The soldier was in the same place. I asked him if he had seen some women with a hat stand. The soldier tapped his forehead a few times with his index finger, then vanished. Such is my fate, I remember thinking, the closer I get to something, the farther it gets from me, and in the end it will all disappear, just as it had in the past, until I end up alone and disappear myself. I say I remember, but in fact I don't remember whether I remember or not, and I am guessing I say that because I did indeed end up alone and because nothing remained for me except to anticipate that I too would vanish. I don't regret that; everybody, after all, can expect the same fate, and it makes no difference whether a person has made peace with the fact or not, the fact that the only clear meaning of life is death, and all other interpretations, philosophizing about the fullness of life on this earth and the necessity of happiness or the promise of another life as a reward for obedience, are just empty prattle. This has never been as clear to me as it is now, as I stand by the window, alone, owning nothing that anyone could covet except this pen, which is spending its inky heart as I spend mine, torn between fullness and emptiness, between insight and exhaustion. Words, of course, don't count; they're something else, as someone wrote recently, they never say what the speaker means for them to say, but what the listener wants to hear. I'm a little like the soldier whom I asked about the hat rack, except there's no one here to ask me, and the tapping of the index finger on the forehead can refer only to me, or more precisely, to my reflection in the mirror, to whom I sometimes turn even if I am not shaving, with a question requiring an urgent answer. I knew none of this while I stood under the barracks window. The soldier had left, a heavy cloak of grief settled on me, and when I turned to go, I staggered under its weight like a believer bearing a cross in a Christian procession, the difference being that unlike zealous believers, I did not want the cloak. It was smothering me. When I got home, I was barely able to stand, it was even a strain to sit, my only comfort the thought that Thursday would soon be over, and I fell asleep, repeating the word Friday as if it were a mantra of the days of the week. I woke up with an erection so hard, it almost hurt. Not yet, I said to my penis, and it sagged obediently. I took a shower, washed my hair and shaved, put the water on for coffee, and went out to get my paper. At the front door I was greeted by a familiar sight: a plastic bag reeking with a heavy stench. I leaned over to pick it up and jumped back horrified: instead of the usual excrement, the severed head of a cat leered from the bag. It was lying in a bloody heap of intestines and innards, undoubtedly from its gut, and heaving with maggots. The cat's eyes were open, the teeth bared, and I could imagine the terrible agony it had gone through. The message was crystal clear, but I would have understood it had it been written on a piece of paper or on the wall of the stairwell, no need for a cat to suffer, and the feeling that filled me was not dread, but fury. I took the bag down to the garbage bin, and for a few moments I stood by it, mutely paying my respects while fat blowflies buzzed around, then I bought my paper, went
back to the apartment, and made my coffee. The weather forecast promised a nice day, the only bright news item in the paper; everything else was gloom and doom, even the commentary on the fl ights reinstated to Sarajevo and trains running again to Zagreb and Ljubljana. There were too many obituaries, with photographs of the deceased who looked as if they had been dead long before they died. It was a horrible beginning to a day that was supposed to change the world, not the entire world, naturally, but the one part that stubbornly defied change. I got up and started pacing nervously around the apartment, staring at the pieces of furniture and various objects as if seeing them for the first time. I looked at the phone in the same way and then it rang. Margareta had promised to call in the morning, to give me the final instructions; the voice coming from the receiver, however, belonged to the editor of Minut. He didn't know what was going on, it looked as if I had jangled someone's nerves, he said, maybe more than one person's, and I should watch what I did for the next few days, especially tomorrow, when Minut would be distributed. Someone had attempted to break into the editorial offices the night before, but the night watchman had called the police and their arrival, speedy to everyone's surprise, chased the burglars away. If they were burglars, I said. Of course they weren't burglars, agreed the editor. Also, a young man had made an attempt to get into the printing press where Minut was typeset and printed. He claimed he had been sent by the editorial office to make some last-minute alterations to the computer type for the issue. He had a pass and a note written on Minut letterhead, but the porter insisted on calling the editor, which the man tried to prevent, unsuccessfully, hurling insults at him and threatening to thrash him. Something dangerous is cooking, son, said the editor, and a bit of extra caution would not be a bad idea. He had never called me "son" before, and tears nearly welled in my eyes. I thought of his cat Feliks, and I could hardly speak. My eyes are tearing now too, even though several years have passed since then, and Feliks is probably in cat heaven. If my soul is ever assigned to pass into the body of an animal, I will dispatch it to Feliks, I've decided. I don't know whether the soul chooses its next host or someone else sees to that, someone in charge of the archive of the living and the dead, responsible, so to speak, for the database in the celestial computer. The celestial computer, of course, is God, since he knows everything, including what he doesn't know. The conversation with the editor of Minut left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and I could hardly wait for Margareta to call. I said nothing to her about the conversation with the editor, nor would I have had a chance to, because she didn't let me get a word in edgewise. She recited a long list of my duties, which I assiduously noted on the pad by the phone. I did manage to complain about how many instructions I'd been given by Dragan Mišović, and she consoled me, promising she would be by my side and she would help, if help was needed. She didn't know, or pretended not to know, what was to happen as we went down the Well, or more precisely as we ascended the Well, no matter how preposterous that might sound. One certainly goes down most wells, she said, but in this one you ascend, because it is a path to higher spheres and the Sephirot. Everything else would be synchronized with the beginning of Shabbat: the people writing the prayer with their bodies would be taking their places at 6:22 in the evening, when the sun goes down; the preparation of the mixture for the golem would start immediately thereafter; at the same time another group would be placed in the area of the Well and they would take upon themselves the structure of the Tree of Sephirot; finally, after midnight, the union of the King and his Saturday bride would complete the process, and they would enter the Well, which would be open wide. At that point Margareta stopped and there was no way I could get her to proceed with the details. Should I have given up, or at least felt concerned? Now I'd know the answer, but then, no reason to hide it, I was longing for the possibility of union with Margareta, and that was all I could think of as she elucidated their strategy. Of course, she said, we are making a symbolic golem, not a real one, except it will have real powers. Something like an invisible man, I said, except it's an invisible golem. Margareta laughed, then coughed and said I should be taking this more seriously. A single mistake, one little mistake, she said, and everything will fall apart. I hope I won't make a mistake, I said, and remembering the morning, and the taxi ride, I felt the beginning of a new erection, as if I were talking to one of those women who touch themselves and pretend to come while the phone bill mushrooms with lightning speed. It wouldn't be a bad idea, Margareta recommended, for me to go to a service at the synagogue, because that would help me focus my spirit on all that was happening, and there was no reason to be at the Well before midnight. But I am not a believer, I defended myself weakly, knowing that in fact I wanted to attend the service. When all this was done, she felt I should become a Jew. I thought I was one already, I answered, because of the soul I carry. Yes, said Margareta, but don't forget that there is also the body, and it is necessary to commit the body to God, otherwise it won't work. I imagined a surgical blade on my penis and the blood dripping, there had to be blood involved, and I shuddered. Don't worry, announced Margareta, who seemed able to see me through the phone line, it doesn't hurt at all with a little local anesthetic. The thought of blood reminded me of the severed cat's head, and that reignited the fury in me, which, as is the case in this sort of chain of cause and effect, produced more acid in my stomach, and after the conversation I ended up curled in a ball in the armchair, beset by acid indigestion and gas pains. So undignified for a person who was shortly supposed to play a decisive role in a tangled game of an ethnic group's attempt to secure peace for itself in a place where more and more people had both symbolically and literally been taking potshots at all the ethnic groups living there. Finding an enemy in such places is a favorite pastime, relished in equal measure by ordinary people, the political elite, intellectuals, and artists. There is nothing better than a well-laid-out conspiracy about the existence of conspiracy, for everyone except those singled out as the conspirators, whose repeated denials are seen as proof of the very opposite intentions. Of course it's one thing to practice this as a theoretical discourse and another to be part of it at the crossroads of converging hatreds. But, to come to the point: at six o'clock I was in the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue. Around the table were seated people, most of whom I had met before, though Dacca and his hat were not among them. Three elderly women were there, and that led me to think of the Fates, though the Fates belong to another tradition. Someone must have to snip the threads of life for Jews too, because they do not live forever. True, the women looked nothing like the mythological beings, and one of them was so tiny that she was more likely to have come from the world of dwarves than from Olympus, where the Fates, I'm only guessing here, dwell. I was surprised to see Jaša Alkalaj at the table, though I'd assumed he was involved in some aspect of the conspiracy, as Margareta was his daughter. But maybe it was just as natural for a father to be somewhere other than where his offspring were? Also, more and more often I refer to the plan that Margareta and her friends were devising as a conspiracy, giving credence to Marko and others who mock the notion of conspiracy, at least as rendered in American movies. This is not a case of conspiracy, but a case of my lack of concentration, my haste to bring this document to a close, if I had the time, I'd carefully peruse all the pages, and wherever the word appeared, I'd replace it with another, but I haven't got the time, because as it is I fear that it will all slip out of my grasp, if it hasn't already done so. This is not a book of sand, after all, that can be read however the reader may wish, but a text the reader's soul should use to climb with the same effort my soul needs to descend the written pages, nearing the inevitable end. Yes, it is terrible that a book has an end, yet life goes on, somehow that fact cheapens every effort at writing, because it means that books are always the measure of something finite, they remind us that we have before us only a limited number of days, weeks, months, and years, that afterward nothing makes any sense anyway, though it is just as possible t
o claim the opposite: that the finality of the book helps us free ourselves of the illusion of eternal life, whether as a real possibility or as a religious symbol. I don't know if during the service the rabbi said anything about eternal life, I know no Hebrew, but after a while I got bored and started looking around. Maybe the person speaking wasn't the rabbi but his assistant, I didn't understand what Jaša Alkalaj had whispered in my ear as we entered the synagogue, and later I forgot to ask. The service ended, the worshipers started rising and congratulating one another on the beginning of Shabbat, and a line quickly formed in front of the rabbi, which I joined behind Jaša Alkalaj. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but the rabbi merely pressed my hand, saying, Shabbat shalom, then extended his hand to the next person in line, one of the Fates, behind whom waited the other two. He didn't even look me straight in the eyes, I told Jaša as we left the synagogue courtyard. I sounded like a jealous teenager. What were you thinking, answered Jaša, that he'd kiss you on both cheeks and on the forehead too? Besides, he continued, chances are he noticed you weren't listening too closely to the service, and that is unforgivable. He saw my anxious expression and laughed. On his face I recognized features that had been copied into Margareta's face, and I thought that it was absurd to be standing here, talking to a man with whose daughter I was supposed to make love later, though not for pleasure but for a higher purpose. The pleasure would actually be a bonus, because I couldn't imagine a mere mechanical performance of intercourse, though only then, as I spoke with Jaša Alkalaj, did I realize how many subtle and not so subtle levels this entailed. We'd have to make love carefully and in harmony with a ritual that had not been fully explained to me: staying mindful of the obligations that were apparently awaiting as I went down the Well, or ascended it; prepared to answer questions in which there was more math than I cared to know; and finally, ready for consequences that I had not been alerted to, because they were nowhere written down or spelled out. Most mystical texts set out preparations for travel in the finest detail, but very little space is devoted to description of what has been accomplished by following those instructions. I had always assumed that every mystic began from scratch, which may well be true, because to be a mystic is something so personal, something above and beyond a mere set of rules applied to life. No one has achieved illumination by simply going off to a Zen monastery, getting up at dawn, scrubbing the common rooms, eating rice, and going out to beg. For illumination something else is required, something that belongs to that person alone, something that is that person and is activated when they begin the mystical practice. In brief, if I was not mistaken, Margareta and her co-conspirators had not been through a Kabbalistic experience of their own before, which didn't mean that this wasn't available to them. Indeed, sometimes a game—if we can call a game this stab of theirs with no anchor in experience—may produce results more serious than a well-rehearsed scientific approach subverted by technical perfection. All I could do was wait another few hours and test this in practice, but my excitement was mounting and I could no longer concentrate on the conversation with the group of the faithful in the synagogue courtyard. The three Fates walked past and I could have sworn I heard a snipping sound of scissors opening and shutting, despite their smiles. I watched them walk toward the gateway and thought how odd it was that people were so calm, going through their daily and weekly routines, while only a few kilometers away their fellow countrymen were preparing for a decisive battle. The people with whom I was standing, not counting Jaša Alkalaj, obviously had no clue, and I was only guessing that Jaša knew, because in no way did he let on that he knew what was happening, or that I was a part of the story. When I told him I had to leave because of obligations that could not be put off, he merely nodded, which could have meant anything. A body is not a book, just as gestures are not words written down, hence the possibilities for interpretation are all the greater, though a lack of precision is characteristic of both words and gestures, and they both mean several things at once. I didn't want to assume that Jaša Alkalaj was nodding merely to say goodbye, so I told myself that in this movement, just as in some secret Masonic greeting, there was tacit respect and support. One thing I could not understand was why Margareta had insisted I go to the synagogue, yet she herself didn't feel it necessary to do so. For the second time recently I felt I'd been lured onto the wrong path, as if someone deliberately meant for me to be at one place instead of another. When I left the synagogue courtyard, I came across the three elderly ladies standing one right next to the other, whispering as if someone on the street might overhear them. They stopped when they saw me, their gazes were inquisitive while their lips curved in a trace of a smile. For a moment I shifted aimlessly from foot to foot, then walked by them and headed for Zeleni Venac. This time I heard no snipping of scissors. I decided not to take Carica Milica Street but to go down Pop-Lukina and from Pop-Lukina I turned onto a street that ran to a little park, from which narrow, steep stairs led straight down to the bus station for Zemun. A dog took a long time sniffing at my shoes, refusing to obey a woman calling to it from the other end of the park. I looked across the river at the sky over Zemun and saw a ray of light piercing a cluster of clouds. I looked down at the dog, fearing it might pee on my shoes and pants, and when I looked back at Zemun the ray of light had gone and the clouds dispersed, and I wondered whether I'd seen it at all. Sometimes we see what we want to see, I know that, but I didn't want to see anything in particular, just as I wasn't looking in the belief I'd see something. The dog was finally satisfied with the smell that wafted from my shoes and it scampered back to its owner, while I stared for another fifteen minutes in vain at the sky over Zemun. Only later, in the bus, did I realize why the dog had been so taken with my shoes: I had stepped in dog shit somewhere along the way, which was always an unwanted possibility on the streets of Belgrade, and I would have to go home and change my shoes. The first thing I noticed when I got off the bus, before I crossed the street, was that the lights were on in my apartment. Sometimes I leave a light on deliberately, usually a table lamp in the living room, but I would never leave all the lights blazing, and I surely wouldn't do that in broad daylight, because evening had only begun to slink along the sky when I left for the synagogue. Every nerve, every inch of my body shouted: Run! However, I walked slowly, full of caution, one foot after the other, like the pensioners who walk along the Zemun quay, my muscles trembling from the effort of restraint, like a flag in the wind. Why do I compare muscles to flags, perhaps because, walking and trembling, I was visualizing a charge from one of the partisan movies, with banner in hand and a shout on my lips, a machine gun at the ready to spray everything in sight as I entered the apartment, or the bunker, in my thoughts. Instead of stepping into a bunker, I stepped first into the musty hallway of my building. The door to the building was locked, I unlocked it cautiously, as if the enemy was lurking right behind. Then, stair by stair, my back propped against the wall, I went up to my apartment. As I climbed the stairs, the stink of the dog shit on my shoes filled my nostrils and I could barely keep from vomiting. I assume that when the body is tense and the mind focused on possible danger, the senses are sharpened owing to some chemical fusion in the brain. I don't know how else to explain it, though the explanation is moot; I mention it only because I thought I ought to remove the shoes, and with them in my hands, if need be, I could lunge at the people who had broken into my apartment, and the image of me lunging at a band of burglars, brandishing my foul-smelling shoes, flinging myself every which way, made me laugh out loud. I managed to calm down after a few moments, wiped my tearing eyes, went up the remaining four steps, and leaned my ear on the door. Not a sound. If anyone was still in the apartment, they were keeping quiet, waiting for my next move. I conjured that image: me listening at one side of the door, my opponent listening on the other side, so our ears are nearly touching. I pressed my ear against the door until it hurt, then carefully turned the doorknob. The door opened. I went into the front hall, listened, and, spurred on
by the silence, stepped into the living room. I took a few steps, then went back to get an umbrella that was hooked over the coat tree; an umbrella is no semiautomatic weapon, but it is a weapon of sorts, and that gave me a measure of security. There was no one in the apartment; I looked behind the wardrobes, under the bed, moved the armchair and the curtain, checked the pantry; the person who had been in the apartment had long since gone. There was nothing that even suggested anyone had been there, nothing had been moved, none of the things on the tables or shelves, none in the cupboards. I'd imagined entering an apartment in which nothing was in its place, but instead of stepping into chaos I walked into an order that had been preserved. This was comforting, but it did nothing to diminish the sense of insecurity, and moreover, the certainty that the apartment was polluted by the very fact that someone had been there. An apartment is part of one's body, and if someone intrudes on it, it is as if they have intruded on one's person. In this case, since everything was untouched, it wasn't like a symbolic rape, though it could be compared to someone pressing up against you, uninvited, in public transportation. But time was passing, I needed to get moving toward the center of the Sephirot, and it was not until I started switching off the lights around the apartment that I noticed what I should have noticed straight away: the manuscript of The Well was spread open. And not only that. When I leaned over to look at the page, I thought there might be something wrong. All it took was shutting the manuscript and opening it again to confirm my suspicion: the manuscript on my table was not the same one I'd had in my possession before. My first thought was of Margareta: if she had taken the original copy from the museum, why wouldn't she take the living translation? Hadn't she said she'd return the manuscript when they no longer needed it? True, the planned event had not yet taken place, but she'd sounded confident enough, also she may have just started preparing for the next phase? I could breathe a sigh of relief. Could I really breathe a sigh of relief? I had no proof that the manuscript was in Margareta's hands, and just as she might have been the one to take it, so anyone else might have. It wasn't clear, of course, why anyone else would have made the effort to replace it with the unliving version of the translation; this was also less than clear in the version of the story that had Margareta taking it, but at least I knew that she had access to the other copies and that she would consider the act of exchanging the manuscript a sort of just reward for the effort I'd made. As I stood by the unliving translation, this is what I thought of: payment of debt. I thought of something else: perhaps this was happening so the living manuscript of the translation could be stored in a safe place, or where no one would think of looking for it? Or more precisely, I thought, banging myself on the forehead, where it would serve as a lure, drawing attention away from the original living manuscript, the original book of sand, which could be in only one place: at the entrance to the Well. I looked at my watch, it was nearly eleven, I'd have to hurry, I took off my shoes, put on another pair, glanced at myself in the mirror, flicked a lock of hair aside, turned off the lights in the apartment, locked the door, and rushed down the stairs. I left the building, paused, looked to the left, looked to the right, then went straight to the quay, taking the same route I'd followed three months before. Then it was daytime, now it was night; then the promenade was full of people, now it was deserted; then the rides had been running at the playground, now the horses on the merry-go-round and parts of the train were shrouded under waterproof covers; then I was an apparently uninterested observer, now I was in the middle of something I couldn't properly define. How to describe hatred? How to explain prejudice? How to explain suicidal tendencies at the level of the collective, even of a whole nation? How to find the common denominator for events that belong to different categories, histories, and beliefs? Too many questions. On this last page or two there have been eight, if I count them correctly. I always thought that books began with questions and ended with answers, but in my case it's different, at least as far as questions are concerned, they seem to pile up at the end, while the answers are scattered all over, which is just fine, I believe, because this is not a book, I never meant to write a book, as I may have said before, though I may be mistaken, since no one who writes lengthy works, regardless of the subject matter, remembers every word he or she has written. There are times when I dream of parts of this document that I am sure have never crossed my lips or the tip of my ballpoint pen, but when I leaf through it later, I find them all there. Proof for me once again that every text, every document, every book, all that is composed of words, is made of sand or, better yet, of water. Nothing is less constant than words, yet nothing lasts as long as words do, and in that paradox lie the beginning and the end of all writing, and every human effort, I mused as I walked along the quay. Of course the action defines the man, but the same can be said of words. After all, words are the actions of the mind, aren't they? I turned, as if expecting a precise answer, and in the distance spotted three figures heading my way. It might not mean a thing, of course, and I calmly continued on toward the Venezia, but when I turned again, they were closer, and this prompted me to speed up and veer off from the quay into a street running parallel, where the shadows were denser and the doorways offered temporary shelter. I slipped into one, crouched behind a door with broken glass panes, and decided to wait a few minutes. I counted slowly, as if trying to determine how soon the thunder would follow after a lightning flash, and when I got to three hundred, which might have been about five minutes, I went back out. Nobody was there. The three men had disappeared, or if they had had anything to do with me, they had turned into one of the side streets, tricked by my ruse. I was near the elementary school, which meant I had already entered into the world of the Sephirot contained in the urban plan of the old part of Zemun between Glavna Street and the quay. That quarter is divided, roughly speaking, into nine blocks, which correspond to the Kabbalist Sephirot, though the tenth Sephirot, Malkhut, connected to the Shekhinah, is absent, and that absence, that asymmetry in the order, made it possible, at least as Margareta told it, to realize their plan. By renewing Malkhut, Margareta had said, the entire cosmos would be renewed, the balance of the divine powers would be reinstated, and, most important, the essential energy would be sparked for making the golem or protective shield or whatever it was they wanted to make. The Well was in the middle block, which corresponded to the Sephirah called Tiferet, or Beauty, and which on the human body occupied the navel and the heart. I kept going until I got to the corner of Zmaj Jovina Street. I should have wondered where the people were who were to write the essential prayers with their bodies, but I assumed they had accomplished that task, or, which sounded entirely plausible, they had taken their places in courtyards and apartments, hidden from curious and hostile eyes. I kept going, and the air around me seemed to thicken, slowing down my already cautious movements. On the left was the market, with stalls that had turned into greasy splotches of darkness, threatening, like nests from which wasps might come swarming out at any moment. I tried not to look at them, to pay no attention to the flickering shadows that played at the edge of my vision. When I passed the corner of the building that marked the beginning of the middle block, I stepped, or so it felt, into absolute silence. I looked at my feet, suddenly infinitely far from my body, and saw them as if in a silent movie, undulating and inconstant. They were mine, nonetheless, I thought, while I raised them with effort and steered them toward the goal, the old wooden gate that couldn't be far from here. And sure enough, sooner than I'd expected, I saw the heavy gate flung open, and the rectangular street lamp cast a path across the concrete that led into the inner courtyard. I stopped at the entrance, leaned on one of the wings of the gate, and looked at my shadow. How fitting that image is now, when I am no more than a shadow, slipping over things until it settles on the border between light and dark, in the narrow space between the real and the unreal. At the time, I was hoping for the silence to end so I could hear and recognize sounds and determine my next move. I stepped onto the path, re
aching for my shadow, and of course, it fled from me. I took another two or three steps, and when it finally hid in the dark, I saw the familiar scene: the bench, the barberry bushes, the pump with the curving handle, the radiance that emanated from it as if it were coated in silver dust. I wanted to sit down on the bench, I was so drained by the effort of lifting my feet, but the instructions required the bench to remain empty until Malkhut and the Shekhinah were ready to sit on it together. Fine, I thought, here is the King, so where is the Queen? I sounded arrogant to myself, though I wasn't thinking anything that didn't correspond to reality, or at least the reality we had agreed upon. I played the role assigned me, and I certainly wouldn't be the first actor to identify with a character. Then I noticed that the twigs on the barberry were moving, though there was no breeze. Not a vigorous movement, just a gentle swaying that I spotted only because I was eyeing the rim of the flowerpot as a possible perch for my aching feet. Just then the silver radiance emanating from the pump shimmered, and as it twisted like steam wafting from a kettle in which water is boiling, I realized what was happening: the Well was open, and the vibrating and swaying were caused by a draft coursing between the worlds. What a paradox, I recall thinking, that in a country where drafts are considered one of the most alarming natural phenomena, they are the very signal marking the passageway to parallel space or a new dimension of existence. Let us hope, I thought, that some vitriolic old woman doesn't hasten to block the influence of the draft of air on her fragile health. I had to laugh, and as my laughter bounced off the walls and slowly dissipated, I heard church bells. I didn't have to count, I knew they were tolling midnight, which meant that Margareta was late, and if she didn't turn up before the last chime of the bell, everything would be ruined. Suddenly, like Faulkner's character, I wanted to stop time, or rush off to the church and stop the bells from tolling, but just as his character realized that time would not stop, even if he ripped the hands off his watch, so I had to make my peace with the fact that I'm no superman, and even if I were to make it to the bell tower and wedge myself between the clapper and the lip, nothing would change. I wasn't sure what to do. The ringing of the bells was coming to an end, and once the sound of the last chime had faded and Margareta still hadn't appeared, I could go home. I went over to the bench anyway, and when I was three or four steps away, I felt the gusting of air currents. My trouser legs billowed, my hair fluttered, the chill air brushed my ears and head. The sound of the last clang of the clapper died away, and silence reigned. I thought I heard footsteps, but when I turned, a single drop of water sped downward from the shining pump to the netting covering the mouth of the drainage canal. The drop, I said, sped downward, but in fact it dripped slowly, and it felt as if I was following its drawn-out fall for hours. When it finally landed, I braced for the thud, but it merely slid between the metal interstices, lingering for a moment on one, like a gymnast who at the end of a figure looks as if she will never pull away from the vibrating spindle. I stood there for a moment longer, and then, suddenly assertive, I walked over to the bench and sat down. In the past, when I'd sat there, a powerful stillness had enveloped me accompanied by music, nearly celestial voices, but now there was a quiet rumbling, the muted noise that comes from a transformer that converts one kind of electricity into another. Of course I'm not saying that the Well was a transformer, but something inside it was surely being transformed into something else. I thought maybe I should get up and go, no point staying here any longer, especially if it had all been for naught, and I felt an odd bodilessness, as if I had been emptied out and made into a shell, into something resembling the shell that some insects shed in the process of maturing and transforming. This made me feel so fragile that I dared not move. I sat on the bench as if glued to it, the air streaming around me, a crackling sound filling my ears, and the radiance of the pump and barberries growing brighter and sharper. Then I felt the empty shell of my body gradually filling, and I could see the level of the substance rise from my feet to my belly, chest, and neck. I should hasten to add that substance is not the right word, because usually it refers to something material, something tangible, but what was pouring into me wasn't composed of particles but formed an indivisible whole, a compact mass I would like to call the visible manifestation of divine emanation, but I can't because I have no proof that this was indeed divine emanation, or anything else for that matter. As the substance rose to the upper edges of my body, a pleasant warmth spread, a kind of energy that freed me from that sense of fragility and made me at once heavy and light. I felt pressure on my back, an itch by my shoulder, and I thought: I'm becoming an angel. I cringe at the thought now, who was I to become an angel, but at that moment, in the Well, the thought caused no alarm. Feeling the discomfort in my shoulder, I really believed my skin would open and the tips of wings would sprout, moist and still sticky, like the wings of a baby bird clambering out of a cracking egg. I remember I was worried that I hadn't felt the same itch and pressure on the other shoulder, and I thought with horror that I might end up a one-winged angel, a crippled angel, unable to fly, unstable on the ground, a wobbly angel who would long in the end to shed its wing, even if that meant becoming a human again. Better a stable human being, I thought, than an angel tipping to one side. Meanwhile, the substance had risen to my neck and began rising toward my head, and I realized that what was happening was precisely what I'd been anticipating, meaning that the King and Queen were uniting in me, that the radiance of the Shekhinah was filling me, and that the physical union I'd counted on with such certainty had never actually been planned. That's one of the last things I remember. The substance had begun to fill my head, to rise to the crown of my head. I remember that I still had a moment to think, I'll drown! Then everything froze, and when I opened my eyes, I was in my apartment, in the armchair in front of the television set. The TV was off, and it was night outside. My feet were bare, and nowhere, no matter where I looked, could I see my socks and shoes. There was a buzz in my head, my nose was stuffed up, my neck was stiff, as if I had been sitting for a long time in a draft. Then I remembered the Well and the air currents coursing between the worlds, though I still didn't know how I had arrived home, just as I didn't know whether it was the same night outside, or a different one. A glance at the clock, which showed ten minutes to four, told me nothing about whether Sunday was beginning, or Monday, or, why not, Wednesday. It wouldn't have surprised me if it had been Wednesday because I felt exhausted, as if I hadn't slept for three days and three nights. The hole in my memory remained. Something had happened, and I had taken part in it, and now I couldn't recall a thing. I tried to get up, but I simply could not lift my head, not even when I put my hands behind it. The throbbing in my neck and temples was almost palpable: if I were to bend my neck more, the pain would ooze out of me like toothpaste from a squeezed tube. I sank back into the chair, and instantly every fiber of my being went taut: there were sounds of another presence in the apartment. I'm not alone, I'm not alone, I'm not alone, reverberated in my head while I feverishly tried to figure out what to do. Then I heard footsteps and the creaking of the parquet floor; they came closer, right behind me. They stopped. And who first came to mind? Marko, though I couldn't imagine how he'd have got into my apartment. On the other hand, I didn't know how I'd got there, especially barefoot. I thought of the picture of the Beatles marching across the street, and only Paul McCartney is barefoot, and there were rumors that his bare feet announced he was dead. I had never been one to go barefoot and I wondered what my feet symbolized, what the significance was of their bareness, and then I remembered that the Sephirah Malkhut is connected to the feet as much as to the ground we walk on, as with the Shekhinah, and I believed that something had happened in the tunnel. The parquet creaked again and someone's hand touched my cheek. I reached for the hand and brought it to my eyes. Margareta, I said, what are you doing here? She didn't say. I tried to move my head again, and this time I succeeded. I am not sure what I expected or whether I expected anything, but Margaret
a was the same as before, perhaps a little more pale and a little more tired. I looked at her feet: she was not barefoot. Her eyes were not green, as they had been when I had last looked into them, they were a light gray, though if someone were to ask me now what color that was, I wouldn't be able to pin it down or point to it among the things that surround me. So I held her by the hand and gazed into her gray eyes, she said nothing, I asked nothing. I could wait, and I waited. The blood was pulsing gently in her hand, her eyelids hesitated with every blink, wanting sleep, I heard the air move through her nostrils, her forehead wrinkled, and suddenly I saw it all lucidly, and I knew where my shoes and socks were, and why I was barefoot. I drew Margareta's hand to me, pressed her palm against my forehead, and shut my eyes. I felt the rhythm of her pulse adjusting to the rhythm of the pulse in my veins, and then, as if they had been waiting for this harmony, images began to follow one after the other: I saw the shell of my body filling with something transparent, a substance that was not substance, not part of the material world, and when it reached the crown of my head, it suddenly became so heavy that I collapsed. I'd never experienced anything so unusual: I thought of a person watching himself fall, unable to do anything except try not to imagine the pain that will follow. I collapsed like a half-empty sack, which softened the blow of the body on the ground, though it couldn't prevent my head from hitting the metal leg of the bench. And when I touched the crown of my head, I found a painful bump, though when it happened I hadn't felt a thing. If I may put it that way, the film I then watched was silent; today's version has long since been overdubbed, and, as is always the case with subsequent interventions, it no longer corresponds to reality. Everything that happened was without sound, the rising of a transparent shape from my body, and a broad opening high above me, or above us, because the shape leaned toward me and whispered something in my ear, or at least it seemed to, and the leap of the shape toward the opening, which was both as real and unreal as the transparent shape itself, and which at one moment was high among the clouds and the next moment right above the bench, and when the shape reached the rim of the opening and disappeared inside it, into the tunnel, which, as Margareta had said long ago, was leading upward, it rose to the top of the Sephirot, to the very Crown, and when the shape appeared again at the opening, it was suddenly a fully formed face, with gentle lines and dark eyes, and it soundlessly spoke a word I hadn't recognized then, but now I did, while Margareta's blood and my blood pulsed in tandem, and I said: Eleazar. Yes, said Margareta, Eleazar, though I was sure she didn't know why I had said the name. Several hours earlier, when I was watching the mouth of the shape in perfect silence and the forming of the word I hadn't understood, I thought it wished to give me instruction for my next assignment, perhaps the kind of mathematical puzzle Dragan Mišović had alerted me to, and then I thought with perfect clarity, as if I were reading a prepared text: He must be barefoot. I didn't know to whom the sentence referred: the shape vanished into the tunnel, my body was still lying by the bench, I too was a bodiless shape, and there was no one in the space between the high walls. I approached my body, which is an entirely arbitrary description, because I wasn't sure whether I could move at all, it could be more accurately described as a camera moving, which, when it focuses on a scene, remains in place and the lens turns, and the closer I got, the more clearly I understood that bodiless shapes could not perform physical obligations, nonetheless I continued to approach my feet until they, shod in suede shoes, filled my entire view, and then two hands entered the scene that tenderly, but with confidence, unlaced my shoes, removed them from my feet, stripped off my socks, placed them outside my range of vision, then one hand began to rise toward my gaze and a moment later covered the source of my vision, and the image filled with darkness. I moved Margareta's palm and looked at it, then slowly rested it on my eyes. She knew why I had said the name Eleazar. The palm that had prevented me from seeing had been hers, I was certain, though this further tangled the net. With an open tenderness I thought of Marko, his advice would have done me good, as would have one of his joints. Reality had become so skewed that being high on marijuana now seemed a normal state of mind. I still felt the pulsing of Margareta's blood, but our rhythms were no longer in sync. I released my grip, and she readily withdrew her hand, now our eyes met and I saw that each of her eyes was a different color. Don't ask, said Margareta, just listen. I listened and heard the siren of a fire engine approaching from far away. No, said Margareta, she hadn't meant the siren. She wanted, while there was still time, to offer an explanation. Because things didn't go as they were supposed to? I asked. Oh no, answered Margareta, because they went exactly as they were supposed to. I let her answer slowly sink in. I don't know how long that lasted, that slow sinking, because my mind resisted like a child who refuses to put his pajamas on before bed. Margareta stood patiently by the armchair. She wasn't touching me, she wasn't trying to touch me. She knew she should wait, and she waited, and my first thought was: The King lost his Queen, as if it were a move in a chess game, which ended in an irreparable loss. Margareta sniffled, and I sensed she was crying. Soon after that she left. On her way out, at the door, she stood on tiptoe, touched her lips to my cheek, and whispered in my ear, Go to Jaša's, he'll explain. I watched her go down the stairs, then I heard only the sound of her footsteps, the opening and shutting of the front door, and I never saw her again. Of course I didn't know that at the time; had I known it, perhaps I wouldn't have been so quick to turn the key in the lock, hook up the safety chain, go back to the living room, and sit back down in the armchair in front of the television set. I could have thought of a million things, but I didn't think of anything. Actually, I thought of switching on the TV to see whether at that late hour, on one of the private channels, there were pornographic movies. That would have calmed me, the mindless erotic endeavor and futile spending of semen, the whole farce to demonstrate absent passion. But I didn't turn on the television. I sat there, as the pain spread to my neck and temples again, stronger than before Margareta's arrival. When I asked her, just before she left, how she had got into the apartment and how I had turned up there, she said she'd been helped by friends. Then she left, but I already said that, or wrote it, or whispered it in the dark, bent over my desk. I reach out and switch on the desk lamp. Light is always a comfort, even when the dark doesn't bring fear. And the words I've been jotting down feverishly for days, as if my life depends on them, offer some consolation, though I cannot, when it comes to words, deny the possibility of manipulation, which is not the case with light. Words are like the things left behind after someone close to us dies—do we throw them out or save them, either would have its drawbacks and its advantages, but if we are perfectly frank with ourselves, we will acknowledge that their value is exhausted with the departure of the owner and the only choice is to throw them into a sack or box and deposit them in the garbage bin, which is what we do in the end, though we always hang on to something, something that allegedly means the world to us yet turns useless in the years to come and ends up in the rubbish heap, but as a tribute of sorts to our inability to ignore the customs and habits that shape our lives. I don't know who will be sifting through my things after I die, but that's why I have more or less decided that, when I reach the end of this narrative, not so long from now, there isn't much ink left in my pen, then I'll write in capital letters on [>