Leeches

by David Albahari

], BURN AFTER MY DEATH, but then again I won't, not because I will have given up on the idea, but because that gesture guarantees nothing. The number of manuscripts preserved against the wishes of their authors is not small. If you want something burnt, do it yourself, I told myself, and I prepared a box of matches and a vial of lighter fluid, but then I found myself faced with a conundrum—if I meant to burn the manuscript, why did I write it in the first place? Why not burn it to start with, and save myself the trouble, to say nothing of the paper. The environmentalists would be grateful to me, I'm sure. When once in a while I believed I was a writer, interestingly enough I never asked myself why I was writing a poem or a story, but now that I am writing only for myself, that question obsesses me. Yet I am writing about it anyway, spending the precious heart of my pen. Enough of that. If there is a need for fire, fire there will be. Where did I leave off? I sat in the armchair, staring at the blank television screen, listening to the pain throb in my temples as if it were a disco beat. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, it was day. My head was still throbbing, but more slowly, as if the disco beat had changed to truculent, heavy blues. That is how I moved, slowly but steadily, avoiding looking out the window, as the bright sunshine made my head spin. It took me fifteen minutes to walk to the phone, though it was no more than five meters to the front hall where the phone was recharged at night. It was early, but Jaša picked up right away. He knew what I wanted to talk about, and he suggested that I stop by his studio, Isak Levi, he said, would come by, Jakov Švarc too, he had no secrets from them anyway, and it wouldn't be the first time, he said, that he had had to manage things when Margareta's plans fell flat. I decided not to ask questions at that point, and said I'd come by. No sooner did I hang up than the phone rang. Thinking it was Jaša with something more, I said, We're all set, aren't we? An unfamiliar man's voice, making no effort to mask the loathing or scorn, or similar emotion, growled, Your time has come. I heard him hanging up, and I put down the receiver. The phone rang again. Another voice, just as unfamiliar, asked how it felt to be up the ass of the Jews. I heard snickers in the background, the person hung up, the phone rang again, someone informed me that I'd signed my death warrant, and then I yanked the phone line out of the wall. At first I was surprised by this inexplicable flood of loathing, but then through the slowness that besieged my body and soul the simple fact dawned on me: it was Saturday, the new issue of Minut had hit the newsstands, and my piece had apparently irritated some readers, as had been the intention, or rather my intention, since texts don't write themselves. I didn't know whether this should gratify or alarm me, perhaps ultimately every piece for the papers is written with this intention, and so I decided to take a shower and attend to the painful throbbing that had taken over my body. They say lukewarm water is the best cure, and after I had toweled down and changed my clothes, some twenty minutes later I felt the pain only in my neck, and I got rid of that with a series of small exercises I learned many years ago when I happened to tune in to a fitness program on channel one. I still remember how the instructor moved his head left-right, demonstrating how to stretch the neck, how far to drop the lower jaw or fling back the head. The only other thing I recall from television are the dance classes, broadcast, if my memory serves me well, from the Ljubljana studio, and a voice that repeated, One step forward, one step back, one-two, cha-cha-cha. I never learned how to dance, just as I never sang in the shower, though when I discovered rock-and-roll in the early 1960s I liked to imagine myself as the front man of a successful band, which I so fittingly dubbed the Invisible Lads. Ah, the comfort that comes from images of childhood and youth! And the misery when one realizes that life has become a series of memories, an album with choice photographs. Why must everything have a reverse side? Why does what caresses you in front, slap you from behind? That's the sort of thing I mused on while I shaved, and dried my hair, clueless as to what was waiting for me out there. The chaos of that day can be put in order now, but it seemed then that order had been irrevocably lost, from the moment I stepped out to buy Minut and saw copies of it strewn around the entrance to my building, through my flight across the gardens of Zemun, to the moment when illusions ceased to exist, when all was reduced to a single word: death. When I saw the sea of newspaper pages through the glass entrance doors, I didn't go out. I turned around, went back into the apartment, and plugged the phone in. It rang instantly, and a torrent of curses and threats spewed from the receiver. I hung up, the telephone rang again, and I had to wait for the ringing to end so I could get a connection and call the Minut editorial office. The secretary picked up, and her tearful voice turned into a sequence of deep sobs when she realized who was on the line. No, she said, the editor wasn't there, he was on his way to the office, the police had just arrived, the windows had been smashed, black paint smudged everywhere, and she had before her two letters, and here her voice quavered—I had condemned myself to the worst punishment. What punishment did they have in mind, I asked, but she could no longer speak, she squeaked unintelligibly, and all I could do, after reassuring her that I'd be there soon, was hang up. The phone rang again and it kept ringing while I got ready, had some cold coffee, and made my way downstairs. The jangling sound had replaced, in a sense, the painful throbbing in my veins, my blood, with the phone. Someone had picked up the sheets of newspaper by then, but when I stepped out into the street I saw a group of young men clearly waiting for me, because as soon as one of them spotted me, they all turned to face me. We stood that way for an instant, then I took two or three steps to get a better view of the cabs parked at the taxi stand at the next corner, and then moving fast, though not running, I took the first cab and gave the driver the address of the Minut editorial office. I kept looking back but didn't notice any cars following us. The taxi driver, to my amazement, paid no attention to my fidgeting and simply asked toward the end of the ride whether it had to do with a woman, was her husband after me. Those men back at the cab stand, he said, they must have been related. By the time I reached the Minut offices the editor's secretary had calmed down, and offered me coffee and whispered in confidence that the editor was drinking whiskey, and indeed, when I walked into his office, he was pouring whiskey into a big glass. He raised the bottle in my direction, but I shook my head, and he added a little more to his glass. So what do you say, he asked, should we be drinking to celebrate or to forget? I said I hoped he didn't feel that what had happened was my fault. If anyone was to blame, he said, it was he, because it was my right to write whatever I felt like writing, but the decision to publish was his alone, and anyway, he said, I surely remembered that he'd been of two minds, though as far as he was concerned, this was over and done with, what had happened should not be forgotten, it was now a matter of what to do next and how, the material damage was of the least importance, there were many more delicate issues, he added, and waved a sheet of paper. It was a letter from the church authorities bitterly protesting the insinuations in the piece in which the author (I noticed they spelled my name incorrectly) linked the Orthodox Church to the unacceptable manifestations of anti-Semitism. The church has always made every effort, the letter continued, to stand up to this, and reiterates that it has no history of negative relations with the Jewish people, who have always been received with hospitality in this community. I handed the letter back to the editor. I could write a protest protesting their protest, I said, which made the editor clutch his head. That's all we need, he said, we have enough trouble as it is, I don't need any new headaches, and besides, he grabbed a sheaf of papers, there are plenty of other messages from various parties and concerned individuals, just as, he added, there are open threats directed at me, you, all of us. This one is particularly intriguing, he said, and handed me a leaf torn from a school notebook. For those who do not understand the need to have our nation cleansed of foreign parasites, it declared in letters of unequal size, and who contribute to spreading texts in which our people are accused of various evils, there is only one fitting punishment: impaling
on a stake. We will impale you, and display you on Terazije so that everyone can see how our enemies fare. Nor should you expect any mercy. No one among us feels pity for Yid scum and their helpers who drink our blood, and it is the duty of every one among us who has knowledge of the evil deeds of the Yids, from the betrayal of God's lamb and the spilling of the blood of Jesus Christ, to destroy every Yid or other degenerate who stands in our way. I read no further. The secretary appeared at the door, walked to the editor's desk, and deposited another pile of messages. This has been going on since last night, said the editor, since the moment the distribution started. And that was how it was for the next few days: every time I came to the office, the editor showed me the letters and the comments that stood out from the general tone of revulsion and scorn. There were, of course, those who agreed with my piece and called for an investigation, punishment for the guilty, respect for the law, and a public apology. And then, one morning, three or four days later, the editor hugged me and said Feliks had come home. Worn out, thick with fleas and filthy, said the editor, he had lain down in his basket the night before and was lying there still this morning, clearly at the end of his rope. If he hadn't come back last night, said the editor, he wouldn't have lived to morning. I said something about seven lives, or was it nine, I'd forgotten, I was never a big fan of household pets, dogs or cats or canaries, any little animal, for me they were always a sort of elemental disaster, far from stirring in me a sense of serenity, goodness, or any special emotion. A person who gets along with other people, I told the editor's secretary that day, has no need of animals. Feliks is different, said the secretary, her eyes flashing, which led me to conclude that it was better to say no more. There is nothing so easy to promise as silence, and no promise so difficult to make good on, because the more we insist on silence, the stronger the urge to speak, like the story about the shepherd who knew the emperor had the ears of a goat and who, compelled by the urge to speak, tells his secret to a hole in the ground, which he carefully covers up, but the earth speaks through a reed pipe, if I remember it correctly, and the whole world learns what was supposed to be a secret. I thought of this story several days after Feliks's auspicious return, the evening I went to see Jaša Alkalaj. Shabbat was ending; the curses and threats were multiplying; no matter where I turned I was sure to see someone threatening me with a clenched fist or an index finger drawn across the throat; my visit to Jaša's studio felt like entering the garden of primeval serenity. Jakov Švarc was already there. Isak Levi hadn't come, and the glass set out for him was left untouched. Jaša pulled out a bottle of brandy, the time had come for us to make a toast, he said, and before I had the chance to ask what we were toasting, the glasses were full, we clinked and drank up. I asked whether Margareta might join us, and when Jaša gave me a look torn between anguish and relief, I should have known instantly that I would never see her again, but at the time I interpreted it as an expression of parental concern. On the other hand I may have sensed the answer, and for that reason hurried to ask the next question about what had happened to the Well manuscript. Let's say, said Jaša, that it has been returned to its proper owner. So the living version of the manuscript was back at the Jewish Historical Museum, which I still believe, especially after reading a story about a secret transfer of metal chests from the Jewish Community Center to the safe at the National Bank, or some such place, several days after the bombing of Serbia began. I was reading the newspaper that published this news item, or leafing through it rather, because I didn't know the language, in mild spring sunshine, savoring a double espresso, while hundreds of kilometers away bombs were falling in unintelligible patterns on military and civilian buildings. One of the people sitting next to me translated into awkward English the brief article, with a blurred photograph of the Jewish Community Center, in front of which several people were loading two large chests into a van that resembled a police vehicle. The article speculated that the chests might contain the manuscript of the Sarajevo Haggadah, about which various stories had circulated during the siege of Sarajevo and after, including the claim that the original was no longer in Bosnia. I told my reluctant translator not to bother, because if the story about the transmittal of the chests was true, I knew what the chests contained, along with other museum valuables: the Well manuscript, on which, some day in the future, a researcher will discover my fingerprints that will be duly noted as prints of an unknown person who, judging by their frequency and age, was in possession of the manuscript during the last decade of the twentieth century. This researcher will have to start work soon, because fingerprints don't last forever, they don't fossilize, at least not the ones left on books, especially on books of sand that are constantly shifting, like all deserts. Jaša Alkalaj meanwhile refilled our glasses. If he kept going, I said, I would believe he didn't want to answer my questions. It wasn't that, answered Jaša, he just wanted to encourage me to ask more questions, since I hadn't asked him about anything but the manuscript. In that case, I said, I would like to know what really happened, I mean, did anything happen? Jakov Švarc grinned, as if he concurred with my question, though even today I can't tell whether he had any idea what we were discussing. Why was he even there? Did Jaša Alkalaj ask him to attend because Švarc was an historian, and Jaša saw him as the most objective possible witness or else as the most impartial chronicler of events? If so, then Jaša's error in judgment was odd, in light of his exhibition of paintings, which had originated in a playful mingling of history and art, yet such an error was also understandable in the context of all that was going on in the country, where a distorted image of history was being embraced as the standard and where people of the most varied political views believed that the history of their nation was exceptional and no one but they could understand. After all, why wouldn't Jaša feel and think as they did, even if he wasn't, in fact, a member of that nation? The political conflicts and the struggle for power were based on diverging approaches to issues, such as the economy or the relations to Europe and the world community, but the ideology of the nation was most often considered beyond reproach. All that became far more obvious a year later, during the bombing and in the months after the devastation, but other people should write about that, the real witnesses, and not people like me, who followed the events from a safe distance. Whatever the case, Jakov Švarc and I sat there, sipped brandy, and waited for Jaša's explanation. Hours later, the bottle was empty, Jakov Švarc was asleep on the sofa, and Jaša was still talking. He may not have stopped talking even after I'd risen to go, promising to come back on Tuesday or Wednesday to hear the rest. Most of what Jaša said I already knew, and most of that, perhaps because of Jakov Švarc's presence, referred to what for me was the least interesting part, the history of the idea of Jewish self-defense, which, according to Jaša, sprang from Margareta's dread that the Jews would disappear from the face of the earth. From the start, said Jaša, he felt that this was an idea doomed to failure, not because it seemed so fantastic and unreal, there was nothing that seemed more unreal and fantastic, he said, than our country in the 1990s, but because the Jewish community was too scant for such an undertaking, which just for the unusual form of physical prayer required more than one hundred participants. When Margareta realized this, said Jaša Alkalaj, she got in touch with public and secret organizations that supported calls for political change yet maintained a critical distance from the national euphoria, which had become stronger, and threatened, said Jaša, to destroy the finest minds of my generation, not with drugs, but with the pure evil of ethnic hatred. I didn't know what to be more startled by: Jaša's paraphrase of Ginsberg's "Howl" or his references to secret organizations. Whom did he have in mind? The Masons, members of an assortment of nongovernmental organizations, Theosophists, the Jehovah's Witnesses? All of them, said Jaša, but many more as well. I'd have been surprised, he told me, had I known how many people sought comfort from the madness of everyday life in secret societies, where they renewed their sense of purpose in life by dedicating themselve
s to charitable works and gestures of goodwill. Now was not the time for that story, but he hoped, he said, that in the future someone would write a real history of Serbian secret societies at the close of the twentieth century, because only then would the picture of the events in this part of the world be complete and it would be made clear that there always was an alternative to nationalism gone berserk. Of course, he went on to say, I shouldn't think he was promoting an interpretation of history in support of Margareta's idea on how to resolve the political and national problems facing our country. Margareta herself would be horrified at the thought, he had no doubts on that score, which, however, did nothing to gainsay the fact that all those issues, like it or not, were connected, and once you started poking around in one of them, you'd find all the rest. Meanwhile Margareta heard of a strange manuscript, rumors about it had circulated in the Jewish community, and when she got hold of the translation, she found she had hit on a pattern that seemed like the ideal key for her plan, but nothing of that would have worked, said Jaša, had not a mathematician shown up who'd shed light on the mathematical elements in the Kabbalistic instructions. I know the man, I said. He knew I would know, said Jaša, though he also knew that I didn't know it was the mathematician who had chosen me, if that is the right word, for the role they felt was vital to seeing the plan through, except that the plan had become so byzantine that Jaša himself, he said, chose to pull out. I stared at him and blinked, trying to remember where I had heard all this before: had I not wondered about it at the very beginning, only later to convince myself to doubt my doubts? How was I chosen? I asked. Did I get more votes than the other candidates? Jaša reached for a new bottle, the brandy gurgled into the emptied glasses, Jakov Švarc's head dropped and his breathing became deeper and more even, and I had difficulties now and then seeing Jaša clearly and following what he was saying. This was a classic feint, Jaša went on, while the front appears to be opening on one side, it actually opens on the other. The mathematician, Jaša explained, read my writing in Minut and concluded that I was the perfect solution: I had access to the public, I could transmit information, I could get temperatures to rise. I could provoke the other side while at the same time nudging them to react the way Margareta and her collaborators had planned. Of course, said Jaša, not everything could be predicted, especially when the pieces in Minut began to take on a life of their own and provoke a far more tempestuous reaction than had been anticipated. I hoped, I said, that he wasn't suggesting that the break-ins at the Jewish Community Center and the butchering of his paintings were all just a foil, because I couldn't bear that blow. Jaša told me not to worry, those were real, as real as the beating I got at the beginning of the story. I didn't remember telling him about the beating, but it was clear that many people knew far more than I had assumed. All in all, on the basis of Jaša's story, which became more detailed and tangled with every glass, I could conclude that my task had been to stir up the public with my writing, luring various enemy groups to come after me, thereby deflecting attention from the real intentions of the conspirators. That word conspiracy again, except this time it had far more credence. Somewhere deep down I saw the flash of Margareta's thigh, which I still blame for everything, I could not believe it had such a hold on me, more powerful than any word. Again I felt discomfort at thinking about Margareta's thigh in front of her father, but his half-closed eyes forgave me in a way. Jakov Švarc snored on the sofa. I looked out the window, wishing I could see the sliver of the new moon. I didn't see anything. I got up; it was time to go. I had, I told Jaša Alkalaj, just one more question: did something happen that night, and if so, what? I would save all my other questions for my next visit. He looked at me drunkenly, bleary-eyed, and said: Yes. Then: No. Yes or no, I asked, there is a difference between those two words, especially when they are in answer to a question. Yes, Jaša repeated, no. He let his head drop onto the arm of the chair, smacked his lips once or twice, and fell asleep. It occurred to me that I should look for blankets and cover him and Jakov Švarc, but who could ever have found anything in that studio? I gave up, lurched over to the front door, locked it, and put the key back in its place. The elevator was there, and when the cabin began its descent, I went down on my knees and threw up in the corner, careful to keep the sticky liquid from touching my pants. There was no one in front of the building, at least I didn't see anyone, and my walk home progressed more calmly than I had anticipated. Actually, I don't remember the whole walk back, only fragments, a part in which I see myself crossing the highway near the Sava Center as cars zip past, honking, then I remember unlocking the door to my apartment and listening, certain that in the depths of the apartment someone was breathing deeply. There was nobody there, I made sure, turning on all the lights and peering into every room and every wardrobe, I even took a look under the sofa, and then I could lie down, calm, satisfied, though I was hurt too in a way, amusing as that may sound, because I had fully expected to be attacked, physically and symbolically, as the author of the piece in Minut. Vanity is strange, I have to admit. I couldn't believe I would wish for any sort of assault on my person, and be disappointed that it had happened to others and not to me. From various sources I learned subsequently why no one had time for me that night: the wall of the Jewish cemetery was scrawled with anti-Semitic slogans; a huge swastika was drawn on the door of the synagogue; the entrance to the Jewish Community Center was buried in heaps of garbage; a doll dressed in a camp inmate's clothes was left on the monument to the Jewish victims at Dorćol with a yellow star on its left arm and a little black cap on its head; threatening notes were dropped into the mailboxes of many Jewish families; unconfirmed stories circulated about attacks on the elderly, a big fight down by the Sava, knives were drawn and apparently, as the woman I was talking to claimed, even gunshots were heard. When asked how she knew the shots were from guns and not from rifles, or perhaps automatic weapons, she couldn't say, but that was how her neighbor had described it, and her neighbor had been on the front in the early 1990s and knew a thing or two about weapons, and he had been wounded, she said, and still limped with his left leg. It wasn't so visible, she added, but you could hear, since she lived downstairs from him, the sole of his shoe scraping the floor when he moved around his apartment. The first attacks on my piece appeared in the papers that Monday. The church authorities bitterly denied any anti-Jewish sentiment among their leaders, as did several of the political parties, though one party proposed that anyone who didn't like it in this country was free to go elsewhere. No one asked you to come, it said, so no one has to tell you to go. It was announced that an article would run the next day under the title "What? You Haven't Left Yet?" revealing the "truth" about what the Jews of Belgrade controlled, with special emphasis on their role among the Serbian Masons. That Monday I also smelled smoke coming into my apartment from the stairwell, and when I opened the door I saw a small bonfire on which a Jewish star made of yellow cardboard was burning. I called the editorial office of Minut, but the editor couldn't or didn't want to speak with me, and the secretary called me later to say that I needn't hurry with a piece for their next issue. Much later, when I was already far away from Belgrade and Zemun, I learned of the lawsuits, the fines, and the confiscation of the property of Minut, but all I could do was raise my hands, which I do again now, though this time it has nothing to do with a feeling of helplessness, but because I need to rest my stiff muscles and stretch out my fingers cramped around the pen. The pen is see-through and its heart will soon be gone. The end of its heart will be the end of the story, fitting enough, since when a heart is no longer beating, the story is silent, just as the story is silent when the heart beats too fast and words tumble out, choking one another. That happened to me after the makeshift fire, so much like child's play, and in the evening I went to the quay, convinced that the river would soothe me as it had so many times before. On my way to the promenade I went by the high-rise where the book-filled apartment was; I turned toward the entrance, then decided against it. At th
e entrance I saw a man who looked familiar, and on the way back toward the promenade I saw two more who looked like him. I turned in another direction: there were more of them, at least six. The distance between them and me was not negligible, but I felt completely surrounded, as if they were standing right next to me. I could have started running, which would have been just as ludicrous as taking them all on at once. Then I noticed another group approaching down the promenade: fifteen elderly people, men and women, moving along at a slow pace but in lively conversation, and I simply slid in among them, striking up a conversation with two short women about the problem of late pension payments and whether mosquitoes should be sprayed the minute they hatch or when they are more mature. The women showed no surprise at all that I had joined their conversation, and based on their accent and what they were saying, I determined that they were from southern Serbia and on their way to Hotel Yugoslavia to attend the opening ceremony of the annual conference of some association that, if I had understood correctly, protected the rights of retired people threatened by what was happening in politics and the economy in the 1990s. I nodded, took one step after another, and kept an eye on what that other group of people was up to. They came closer and closer, until they had surrounded the pensioners, and I found myself in the center of concentric circles. The pensioners then proceeded to a lower walkway, by the river, and the men with the crewcuts followed along on the upper walkway, and I sensed that their patience was ebbing and that they would lose it altogether when the two levels joined at the pier by the entrance to the hotel. I only had one choice, and as we approached the slope that led to the pier, I bent over abruptly, grabbed one of the women, and shouted that she had been taken ill and dashed with her to the entrance of the hotel. The woman was shocked silent for a moment, then wriggled and screamed, and the more she screamed, the louder I shouted that she was suffering from a seizure and needed emergency care and demanded that the way be cleared for me. The men following us halted, uncertain what to do. I galloped toward the hotel, drenched in sweat, because the woman, though short, was plump and wriggling free of my grasp. Some other people rushed over, one man grabbed her legs, another took her under the arms, the woman shrieked, we yelled at her to calm down, that everything would be fine, then we were at the back entrance of the hotel where a largish group had gathered, pushing and cursing, and I took the opportunity to slip into the stairwell and out to the front entrance of the hotel, and from there sprinted across the street and ducked in among the facing apartment buildings. I stopped at a deserted playground. My clothes were drenched with sweat, the shoelaces on my right sneaker untied, my hands trembling, I was panting like a dog in the summer sun. Do dogs pant in the dark? I'll never find that out, like so many other things, from the simple ones, such as how fireflies glow, to the more complicated questions, such as the purpose of color in nature, to say nothing of places I'll never visit or music I'll never hear, and that certainty, the fact that our life, seen through the reflection of human knowledge, is by necessity partial, no matter how we may try to make it complete, always filled me with a greater or lesser degree of despair. It is not a fear of death, it is foolish to fear the inevitable, but the thought that I'll die before I've had the chance to see Bombay and Melbourne, for instance, can bring me to tears more readily than I care to admit. Back then, that evening, in the playground, it was Tokyo and Montevideo I was thinking about, but I didn't cry, mostly because I was gasping with laughter at the thought of the poor woman flailing in my arms and staring at me, eyes swimming with horror. I could no longer stand, I was laughing so hard, and I sat on the nearest swing. The seat was small, I could barely wedge myself onto it, and when I started swinging, I had to lift my knees nearly up to my chin. The chain links creaked, the swing groaned, and when I turned around I saw the moon in the sky. Who knows, it may have been there earlier, I am never sure where to look for it, sometimes it pokes out from the horizon or struts above my head, often it is not there at all, one more thing I will not learn before I depart for the other world: all the trajectories that delineate the movements of the celestial bodies across the cupola that arches over us, resembling graphs indicating economic surges and downturns and, I assume, violent catastrophes resulting in utter destruction. The seat of the swing cut into my buttocks, the moon swung back and forth above me, or maybe it was me swinging back and forth beneath it, who could say, everything is relative in this world, anyway, especially when one is swinging with the head flung back, with the blood rushing to the brain, prompting thoughts one might never otherwise think, or hear, just as I thought I heard a familiar voice ask, What are you doing here? I dropped my feet, touched the ground, stopped swinging. I lifted my head up, shut my eyes, waited for the blood to stop gurgling and go back to where it had come from. The voice that had asked the question belonged to Marko, but when I opened my eyes he wasn't there, just as he hadn't been there for the past few days. And nights, of course. When he left, Marko left for good. I couldn't remember when that happened; I knew, or I sensed, why; in a way, I had had a hand in his leaving, by choosing to believe Margareta's story above all and not trying harder to bring Marko into the game, which, in the end, turned out to be precisely that: a game. Besides, I was relieved that he wasn't here, because his jeering would have been merciless. First he would have ridiculed me, then he would have rolled a joint in honor of my recklessness, then another joint in honor of the joint that, he would have said, had burned for the truth, then another one, in honor of that second one, and so forth. I extracted myself from the tight swing seat, looked to the left, looked to the right, but nowhere did I see the source of the voice that had asked what I was doing there. Had I treated Marko's disappearance too lightly? People don't disappear just like that, or more precisely, people don't disappear for no reason, and then and there in that playground, lit by the moon, I decided to go over to Marko's apartment. The routes that led to my apartment were probably blocked anyway: the men I'd managed to evade were likely to be waiting at my door, and it wouldn't surprise me if one of them was at that very moment straining in the hallway and leaving a semicircle, or perhaps a full circle, of his excrement on the threshold. I set out for the center of New Belgrade, leaving Hotel Yugoslavia behind, and along the way I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to a street not far from Marko's. When we got there, I waited for him to drive away, then walked in the thickest shadow, which was not difficult in a city where the system of streetlights had almost completely collapsed, until I came to Marko's street and reached his building. I looked up at his windows and couldn't believe my eyes: a light was on in his bedroom. I crossed the street. His building had an intercom system, but the front door, like so many front doors and entranceways in Belgrade and Zemun, was always unlocked. I pushed it, slipped in, and, without turning on the light, started up the stairs. Something touched my leg, I nearly screamed, however, it turned out to be a cat that arched its back, purred, and rubbed up against my shins. Pssst, I said. Its eyes flashed in the dark and I kept climbing. One floor, the next, and I was in front of the door to his apartment, breathing with difficulty, as if I'd climbed to the top of the Avala television tower. I leaned on the handrail and waited for my breathing to become inaudible. The cat clearly had nothing better to do, I felt it between my legs. I leaned over to pat it and heard the sound of steps in Marko's apartment. I grabbed the cat, and, leaping up two steps at a time, went to the floor above. The cat was purring as if it had an electric motor in its rib cage, and as the minute vibrations of its body were transmitted to my heart, we seemed to be rumbling in unison. There was the sound of a key in the lock, the door opened, someone stepped into the hallway, took a step or two, stopped as if listening, then flicked on the stairwell lights. The cat and I exchanged glances, it meowed, pushed away with its paws, sprang from my embrace, and scampered down the stairs. I inched over to the wooden banister and peered cautiously over it, and right below me saw someone looking up at the cat that had left the stairwell and was winding in and out of th
e iron balusters supporting the stairwell railing. I stepped back and the voice beneath me said, There's no one out here, it's only the cat. The door closed, the key turned twice in the lock, the chain rattled, and everything went quiet. I waited for the light to go off and walked slowly down the stairs. The cat was not in front of Marko's door or on the lower floors, it must have gone into Marko's apartment, though when it comes to cats, one can never be certain, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were to turn up here, after all these years, as if nothing had happened, as if we were still on the stairs, which to some extent is true, since all the unresolved moments in our lives contain a tiny segment of our being in the constant replay of each, and the more such unresolved moments, the greater the fragmentation of our being, or the less of us left in the reality in which we dwell. Each time the light goes out in the stairwell of Marko's building in my memory, a part of my being disappears, and considering how often I think about it there is not much of me left, just as there isn't much ink left in my pen. I noticed a while ago that I had written out some letters only partially, two vowels and a consonant, which is the most serious warning I have had that the end is inevitable, even as I try every trick to postpone it. Now, for example, I am wondering why I didn't knock at the door of Marko's apartment. What did I have to lose? Nothing I hadn't already lost, or at least had begun losing, though that evening a hope may have still lingered that all of it might yet change and that the loss wouldn't be total, so I slid once more through the front door of his building, this time going out, and found myself in the street. I took a full breath of air into my lungs, looked to the left, looked to the right, and tried to decide where to spend the rest of the night. I didn't come up with anything, or everything I came up with sounded unsafe, especially the thought of spending the night at the home of an acquaintance, which might have exposed them to danger if someone was following me, so I spent the night wandering aimlessly, which wasn't so much aimless as it was a deliberately evasive approach to my apartment. I don't know how far I walked that night, ducking into entranceways and behind shrubs and into the dense shadows whenever I came upon something potentially dangerous, but I know I was staggering by the time I walked into my apartment on Tuesday morning, with the latest editions of the papers under my arm. As before, I was a little disappointed at finding nothing nasty in front of the door and for a moment felt like someone who, against his will, has seen his importance diminished. Vanity is a strange thing, I said that already, it needs no repeating. I fell into my armchair. The soles of my feet were burning, my hands shook, my eyes teared as if my eyelids were lined with sand. The papers were packed with op-ed pieces, rebuttals, and polemics, including an official statement by the Jewish community, condemning every form of hatred and denying, along the way, any tie to me, which was true enough. A letter to the editor signed by fifteen prominent individuals of Jewish background demanded in much harsher terms an investigation to ascertain under whose orders I was working to corrupt the traditionally good relations between Serbian and Jewish people, and expressed unwavering support of the government, which, and I am quoting based on dim recollection, was doing all in its power to secure a dignified place for our country in the merciless ghettoization of the new world order. As a rule, I avoided reading such sycophantic praise, but now my own skin was at stake and it was expedient to offer me in exchange for a promise of peace, therefore I needed to get as detailed a picture as I could about those involved as the only way to ready my defense. Of course anything that would have provided me with evidence—information about the slogans, attacks, the vandalizing of monuments, and the public accusations—was not cited by the newspapers, claiming that this, to quote a television commentator, would have interfered with the investigation. At that point I didn't know everything there was to know, so all I could do was observe with horror the quantity of the attacks and the support they received from certain politicians, church dignitaries, and ordinary citizens. A year later, when Serbia was bombed, the business of forgiving themselves completely overwhelmed all else, allowing the resistance to be focused on the international enemy who in turn could be blamed for everything, for everything that happened and what was going to happen, whatever that was. By then I was somewhere else, not where I am now, but once you leave, all other places are the same, so in a sense it made no difference where I was, and I remember thinking I should write about it, about the magnificent and grandiose yet failed attempt to revive the supernatural in the construct of the world, as well as a deliberate move by a government to play the difference card, to encourage a rift along subtle, often intricate, ethnic and religious lines in an act of self-preservation. Unlike the failed Kabbalistic experiment, this other policy still prevails, but in a reduced form, and was additional inspiration for my resolve, which has meanwhile evolved into desire, then to a feeling of obligation, then to a pledge, and that is where I came to a stop, here by this window, rolled up my sleeves, and got down to work. Yes, writing is work, I repeat that for all those who think of writing as pleasure, and when sometimes, like now, I look up and out the window into the night, I see the face of a tired man. And worried, also, because the ink tube inside the pen is nearly empty. Who knows where all these letters come from, how all the words are born? I asked myself the same question as I leafed through the newspaper, while the soles of my feet burned, my thighs ached, and the phone rang insanely. At one moment I got up, limped to the side table, and picked up the receiver. The voice at the other end delivered a hysterical sequence of curses, threats, and burps. I went into the kitchen, put the kettle on for tea, spread some honey on a slice of bread. If the explanation I got from Jaša Alkalaj was right, and we were all caught up in a double game of sorts, then none of us was what we seemed, which seemed clear enough in the cases of Margareta or Dragan Mišović, but it did nothing to explain Marko. Yet perhaps it does, I thought, except that I don't see it. I should have rung his doorbell, I chided myself, to see who was there, instead of deciding that Marko wasn't there and that the entrance to his apartment was a passage into a trap. After talking with Jaša Alkalaj, at whose studio I was expected again later that evening, I would return, I told myself, to Marko's apartment, nothing would hold me back. I waited for the phone to stop ringing for a moment and called Jaša Alkalaj. I left a message on his answering machine that I would be there around nine o'clock that evening, and then, though the phone kept ringing, I lay down to rest. I woke up late in the afternoon in an apartment where silence reigned. I felt a terrible fatigue, I am one of those for whom sleep during the day brings no rest, and I knew I'd be walking around for the next hour or two with a veil over my eyes and gauze bandages wrapped around my mind. I walked gingerly over to the window, as if I feared sniper fire, and saw rain clouds. Everything else seemed ordinary enough: the passersby were hurrying along, cars and buses moved intermittently across the square, two women stood talking by the door to the pharmacy and gestured as if warding off mosquitoes, a boy was staring at a balcony on which another boy stood throwing paper airplanes, three dogs nosed around the garbage bins, the traffic lights blinked on and off. I could have stood there forever, with my nose pressed against the windowpane, outside the world and yet in it, an observer but not a participant, visible yet unseen. Such a blissful state, however, could not last long and I was jolted by a knock on the door. I pulled away from the window and asked who was there. No one answered, but the knocking repeated. I started toward the door and peered through the spy hole: I couldn't see a thing. Someone was holding a hand over it, and there was nothing to do but step back and hurry to the phone. Kabbalah, magic, Sons of the Revolutionary Light or reactionary dark, it didn't matter which, it was time to call the police. I picked up the receiver, dialed the number, and stood there for a while, not realizing that the phone wasn't working. The line was dead; there was no sound coming from it; I punched the buttons in vain. The knocking, which came again, was now more alarming, though at the same time it made me wonder about the person or the people knocking, because I was
certain that a whole horde was crouching in front of my door, so why didn't they just break down the door and do it. I felt like a mouse in a trap, or, more accurately, like a dog the dogcatcher has chased down a dead end, and while the knocking kept up at irregular intervals, I went into the kitchen and out onto the little terrace. The neighbor's terrace, to which I had jumped from the edge of my terrace when I was much younger, now seemed farther away. I would never make a jump like that now, I realized, though a part of my consciousness, still wrapped in gauze, suggested it was better to take the risk, because I would give myself a chance, whereas in my apartment I would meet a certain fate, a certain end. Nonetheless I went back into the apartment. The knocking picked up again as I tiptoed over to the door, and again I asked loudly who it was. No one answered. The knocking stopped. I went to the door and, as I had done so many times, leaned my ear against it. I thought I could hear someone mumbling, the sound of paper being torn, and soft footsteps going down the stairs, but when I leaned my ear to a different spot on the door, everything sounded different: the paper wasn't being torn but crumpled, the footsteps were going up the stairs, and instead of the mumbling I could hear a muffled giggle, and all the while heavy breathing. I no longer recall how much time passed before I realized that it was my own breathing I was hearing. I straightened up and looked through the spy hole. The hallway was empty. I unlocked the door and opened it as far as the chain allowed. I didn't see anybody, I didn't hear anybody, so I unhooked the chain and opened the door cautiously until I could see the entire hallway. No one leaped out at me, no one shoved me, no one brandished a knife, no one pointed a gun. A swastika spread vividly across the door, and under it, in uneven letters: DEATH TO THE TRAITOR. The paint was still fresh, and dribbles of black dripped from the tips of the swastika, hurrying toward the bottom, where they belonged. I thought it was just as well I had not opened the door earlier, because if I'd seen the writing, I'd have wanted to confront the offenders verbally. I could see myself shouting theatrically: How can I be a traitor? Whom have I betrayed? Instead of taking on the scum, you come here to puff out your chests before someone who is trying to rid you of a burden you have been bearing on your shoulders for years! I looked to myself like Lenin speaking from a podium, leaning forward to look more assertive. Nonsense, of course, and I am not thinking of Lenin but of myself, because they would not have waited for me to end, or even to begin, they would have assaulted me straightaway. It was ridiculous to hope for anything else. Death to the traitor, that's the only thing that interested them, and sooner or later, they would do what they had set out to do. I could switch day and night, I could change my hiding places, I could shave my head and grow a mustache, I could wear black-framed glasses, nothing would help. The punishment of a person who thinks differently is always welcome, no matter which side the person doing the punishing is on. The death of one traitor is a lure for hundreds of others, eager to ferret out new traitors and administer new punishments. I should have taken up the bucket, rag, and brush, and washed the swastika off the door, but for the first time I felt I had no strength left: I could no longer wash away as much as they could defile. I also regretted at that point that the Kabbalistic experiment had failed, even if it hadn't been designed as a realistic undertaking, because if it had worked, the forces of darkness would have had to retreat before the forces of light and nothing would have been the same. Now it was too late, and the feeling of being driven into a trap flared before me as if fanned by doom. Everything was coming apart at the seams, and it would only get worse. Somewhere it must have been recorded how long all of this would last; fate, in any case, is unchanging. You are rambling on like some washed-up old sage, Marko would have said, and that made me think of going to his apartment again. Although I couldn't prevent general disintegration, perhaps I could prevent my own further disintegration, preserve some of what was still precious to me. If I didn't do that, I thought, there'd be nothing left of me, and no one, not even I, will be able to look myself in the eye. The evening was fast approaching, dragging night along with it, and who knew what it had in store and whom it would bring in tow, so it would be best, while there was still daylight, for me to head to Jaša Alkalaj's. The swastika, I thought, would have to wait. It may still be there for all I know, on the door where I left it, slightly abstracted by the streams of paint that had dribbled every which way, though recognizable enough. The rain started as I stepped out into the street, and I didn't have time to look to the left or to the right, or up or down, instead I sprinted over to the bus stop where I leaped onto a bus that was just pulling away. By the time we reached the bridge over the Sava, the rain was pelting with such ferocity that the bus driver had to slow down. Water was coursing in every direction at the Zeleni Venac bus stop, and crowds were huddling in the underground walkway to get out of the downpour, the people waiting for the Zemun and Novi Beograd buses, policemen, peddlers, vendors, shoppers still out and about, even though it was late. I somehow managed to push my way through the crowd, then went on, from doorway to doorway, to Terazije, where I waited for the trolley bus. The trolley bus was a wreck, its windows were smashed, its doors had trouble closing, then suddenly sprang open mid-drive, it stank of damp and vomit. We hadn't got far from the Slavija roundabout when I decided to get off at the first stop, certain that a man was staring at me. I got off, but the man stayed on, so I was left alone at the stop, in the rain, which was coming down in gusts. The next trolley bus arrived after fifteen minutes. Although it was too early for me to go to Jaša Alkalaj's, the persistent rain forced me to head to his studio; even if he wasn't there, I knew where the key was, I could let myself in and wait. He'd given me permission to do so on my first visit, and I certainly wouldn't paint, which was the one thing that was forbidden, he had said. How much time had passed since then? On the calendar, a little more than two months; in terms of experience, a lifetime; it was difficult for me to reconcile these two measures, so different yet the same, and to acknowledge that one of them was inaccurate. And what, I thought as I walked toward the studio, if both are accurate, thereby confirming that we live far longer than the calendar indicates, each person in his or her own time, and that hours, days, months, years are merely a convention that enables us to function more smoothly within the boundaries of the larger world? One thinks of all sorts of things when rain falls for a long time, especially if he has no umbrella. Although I walked close to the buildings and dashed from doorway to doorway, I was drenched and started to shiver, then ran the rest of the way to Jaša's street. When I got to the corner, I stopped and looked carefully around. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary: there was no one in front of the building entrance, cars were parked along the sidewalk, the garbage bins were open and overflowing with trash, the street lamps shone with a stingy light. I looked at my watch: it wasn't yet nine o'clock. Then I heard the sound of an ignition turning, and a car pulled out of the row of parked cars. A moment later, shouting something I couldn't catch, two young men hurtled out of Jaša's building, both dressed in black hooded sweatshirts. They pulled the hoods up over their heads and their faces were in shadow. The doors of the car swung open, they leaped in, still shouting, and the car careened around and sped off in the opposite direction. I don't know why I didn't turn around and leave. I should have known what I would see in the studio, no point in actually seeing it, but my legs carried me as if heeding somebody's orders, first to the entrance, where I paused and looked back after the fleeing car, then to the elevator, its door ajar, as if it had been waiting for me. The door to Jaša's studio was also ajar. I approached it, and, as if watching from a great distance, from across the river, saw Jaša at his kitchen table. His head was resting on his chest, his right arm dangled by his side, his left lay on the table, palm upward. His legs were out of my range of vision, but I could see droplets of thick liquid dripping from his chin and nose. They were dripping onto his clothes, onto the floor, with such a deafening noise that I had to cover my ears. Oh, Jaša, I said. No, I didn't say anythin
g. Pressing my ears shut, I stepped back, stumbled into the elevator, and groped for the ground-floor button. The noise of the droplets followed me, and the woman who opened the elevator door after it stopped shrieked when she saw me with my hands over my ears and my face in a grimace of pain. I smiled at her, which sent her a step back, and as soon as I moved off, she got swiftly on. I kept walking, feeling I would never get out of the hallway, and when I finally did get out, I walked straight on in the rain, which fell in thick, heavy drops as if this weren't the end. And it wasn't. Some things and events have several beginnings, while others have several ends, they end in stages, as if moving from one sense of finality to another, in slow leaps or spasms. Spasm is a better word, because it is reminiscent of deathbed convulsions, and in that ongoing end I was indeed dying, until I became a living corpse of sorts, bait swallowed up in the end by the dark. I don't remember how I got to Zemun: at one point I realized that I was in front of my building, but instead of going home I went on to Marko's apartment. I turned on the light, walked up the stairs, rang the doorbell. I could hear footsteps and laughter. Marko opened the door and squinted, as if trying to make me go away. Behind him, on the coat rack, hung a black hooded sweatshirt. From inside the apartment a man's voice asked who was there. No one, said Marko, and opened his eyes wide. We stared at each other for a few moments, then he slammed the door with all his might. Crumbs of plaster sprayed the floor, the light in the hallway went out, I sprinted down the stairs in the dark and didn't stop until I was back at my apartment. The next day all the papers carried the news about the sudden death of the painter Jaša Alkalaj. No reference to a tragic death, which was probably because the investigation was underway, but I knew it was a matter of time before the news media would broadcast the true story, just as it was a matter of time before the investigation would hear my message on Jaša's answering machine, or the woman from the elevator would remember the man with the hands over his ears. There was a fire that night in the book-filled apartment, and while I watched the smoke billow through the windows and listened to the sirens, I knew I had scant time left. I pulled out a small suitcase, packed up the basics, avoided anything that might resemble a memento, collected my money, passport, and a bag with some valuables that had been left in my possession after the last death in the family, awaited morning, and by noon I was on the minibus shuttling travelers to the Budapest airport. I shook like a leaf, I confess, as we crossed the border, even more so on the Hungarian side, and then, when the ornery Hungarian customs official waved for us to continue on our way, I could finally breathe. Everything that happened after that, all the years between me now and the events I have described, the distance set up between this place and that place, all must go unrecorded. The spot where I am now, by the window in whose panes I occasionally see a figure that is my own reflection, and where I was brought by the kindness of strangers, I will probably never leave. Finality has come at last to my door. It's not death I'm thinking of. I am thinking of how a series of events comes to a definite end and becomes destiny, while at the same time nothing indicates what a new beginning may bring, or whether there will be a new beginning. Perhaps that was why I wanted to tell this story, or write down all that had happened, for a person who talks to himself is considered crazy, while one who records a story is respected, thought creative, as if spoken words are not creation and as if the world was created by the written word, not a voice. As far as I know, God spoke while he created the world, he wasn't reading a document drawn up in advance. The sound of words is the sound of the world, its true face. Reading is an attempt at courting the creator, especially the way people read before they learned to read silently, when they whispered and their lips shaped the letters and words their eyes passed over. But now it is over and done with. When this pen dries up, I will place the last page on top, turn the manuscript over, and start from the beginning. Margareta, whose name I didn't know at the time, stood on the muddy shore waiting for the slap designed to be a trap for me. Don't worry, I will not tell the whole story again. What has been told once can never be repeated. And what happened once, happened once and for all. There is still something, however, that confuses me. Several times over these years, at unpredictable intervals, the image of a blazing gateway at the entrance to a lavish celestial palace comes to me, and I see myself walking along a path of clouds and going from one palace to another larger one, so large that the first palace is inside it, and the larger one is inside yet another, larger still, and so on, until I arrive at the last palace, in which there is a throne so grand that, no matter how far back I stretch my neck, I cannot see its end. If the throne is so vast, I remember thinking, how large is he who sits upon it? At that moment, crystal clear, I hear the trumpets announcing: The Lord is coming any minute now. Then I see myself on the way back and I gape, mouth open, at the arabesques on the walls. Where was I? Is it possible that I did follow Eleazar that evening, that we were on the verge of realizing what had been planned? I am sure I was barefoot, for as I was clambering over the entrance threshold of the last palace, I tripped and scraped the big toe on my right foot. The skin on the toe puckered up like a curly little cloud, exposing a deep wound that did not bleed. I leaned over to look at it, thinking I should urinate into it to disinfect it, then heard a voice within me, which was not mine, saying: Not to worry, in heaven there is no bleeding. Of course not, I thought later, angels aren't warm-blooded animals like us, to say nothing of God. Of course, if he created us in his own image and shape, wouldn't it stand to reason that he too would bleed? I ask that of my reflection in the window, but the reflection is silent, the pane doesn't hum, the night is still. I read once somewhere that our exterior is truly the image of God, but what is inside of us was created by someone else. It didn't say who. Perhaps I should have asked him while I was wandering barefoot around his palaces? More and more often I see our life as essentially consisting of a host of lost chances, with some exceptions. Again my pen records furrows instead of letters, just as life leaves gaps, the difference being that we can change pens, while life is like a blade that, once dull, can no longer be sharpened. A dull knife, that's me. All I can do is groan while I try to carve the sediment of memory into a series of words and sentences. Far away, where it all happened, no one is interested in these words and sentences anyway, and maybe it is best that I go out this very night, before I change my mind, and bury them in the woods, on a slope, under a birch tree, in a box. After that I'll do nothing but keep my silence. There, silent.