The Cloak of the Soul, he said. The painting portrayed a genderless human, barefoot in a grassy clearing, a generous variety of symbols hovering around it. The symbols were probably all Jewish, I recognized a six-pointed star of David, a menorah, the aleph, and other Hebrew letters. Some parts of the body were exposed, as if in an anatomical atlas, so that the body's cavities were clearly visible, though they contained no organs, or else the organs were not depicted, instead the entire insides were lit with a radiance that came from within, from a central point located in the general vicinity of the bellybutton. A transparent glow permeated the interior and was visible at some of the orifices, but it didn't extend beyond the body layer, meaning the skin, and that space, the buffer zone between the body and the radiance, was filled with a second body, if the word body applies here, that was transparent, and identical in all but its transparency to the body above it. In short, this genderless body seemed to include three bodies, each tucked into the next, like Russian dolls, except that Russian dolls are all made of the same material, and the three bodies were not. I painted this, Jaša Alkalaj continued, after I had read the interpretation of Chaim Vital, a sixteenth-century Kabbalist and student of the celebrated Yitzhak Luria, that God, when he places a soul in a human body, has to insert an intermediary between them, an astral body of sorts, because if there is no shield, the radiance of the soul will scorch everything. Therefore, when a person wishes to speak with his soul, he said, he doesn't invoke the soul, for it would scorch him; rather he communicates with his astral body, which joins the reflection of his soul and the reflection of his body. But to see the astral body, and even more so to communicate with it, Jaša Alkalaj said, one must reach the highest level of purity. Then his eyes open to the beauty of God's nature, and he sees, he said, how beautiful he too is in his purity. So, now two things matter: first that one be cautious when invoking the astral body, for many cases have been recorded of invocations that took people to the side on the left, as it says in the Kabbalah, meaning the side of evil, while the other thing to keep in mind, he said, is that one's shadow is actually a projection of his astral body, which is why the Bible says our days upon the earth are as a shadow, which means, he said, that they are brief because every shadow lasts only a short while, but they are also a reflection of our astral body, in which are recorded all of our days, and everything that has been, and, most important right now, everything that will be. The prophets were people, he said, who could invoke their shadow, or, more precisely, their astral body, whenever they wished to, and it would tell them what was to come. But how does the astral body, I asked, know all that? By descending at the moment of conception with the soul, said Jaša Alkalaj, as its cloak, and in it, in the astral body, is registered the figure of the new being and everything that the life of that being will be in the days and years to come. In other words, chimed in Isak Levi, he who sees his shadow will see the course of his life. And he who learns to converse with it, added Jakov Švarc, will learn all he wants to know. It all sounded rehearsed, and for a moment I thought it would be best for me to leave, but then Jaša Alkalaj, turning away from me, said, One needs to doubt, but one needn't believe in doubt. I swallowed and sniffled. Is there any more brandy? I asked. When all the shot glasses were topped off, Isak Levi raised his and invited us to drink to the shadows. I waited until the bite subsided on my tongue, then asked, How long does it take to learn how to invoke one's shadow? I watched the three of them exchange glances and shrug. Twelve years, said Jaša Alkalaj finally, sometimes longer. To this day I don't believe that to be a true figure, and at the time I felt my mouth drop open in astonishment. I looked from one to the other and tried to decipher whether they were joking. There are those, said Jaša Alkalaj, who manage it in six years, but they are the gifted followers who have already succeeded in ascending the stages of the Kabbalistic Sephirot. If they need so much time to see the shadow, I said, how much time do they need to see the body that casts that shadow? The body is always visible, answered Jaša Alkalaj, as is the shadow, but they are looking with the wrong eye. Only when one learns to see, he went on, only when the eye is pure, can the body be seen as it truly is, but the shadow is no longer a shadow then but a cloak for the soul, a cloak that is acquired during conception and added to by the weaving of the days and the good deeds one performs in a lifetime. Isak Levi poured the rest of the brandy into our shot glasses. Things cannot be hurried, he said, and what needs to happen, no matter what it is, will happen when the time is right. For instance, he added, in this glass I am holding soon there will be no brandy. He raised the glass to his lips, downed it in a gulp, turned it over, and not a drop dribbled out. Jaša Alkalaj offered to open another bottle. Jakov Švarc was nodding in approval, so I quickly announced my departure. The brandy I had drunk, and I had had more than usual, had softened my knees and dulled my eyes, and I didn't want to test the reactions of my body to even more alcohol. I deflected their efforts to persuade me to stay and soon found myself in a taxi, which drove through the poorly lit streets to Zemun. There was no one at the front door of Jaša Alkalaj's building; no car followed us; no one was standing in front of my building; the stairs were deserted, the door to my apartment was locked as it should be, the doormat had not been touched. By then I was barely able to move, and all I wanted was to drop into bed and sleep, which I promptly did. When I opened my eyes again the clock next to my bed showed exactly three o'clock in the morning. What had woken me? Was it someone snooping around my door? I got up and padded out to the front hall, I leaned my ear to the door, held my breath: not a sound. I unlocked the door, opened it a crack without undoing the chain, and peered out into the corridor. There was no one crouching on the doormat, no one's eyes gleamed in the dark. I locked the door and went back to my bedroom. I went over to the window, checked out the street and the buildings across the way: the street was deserted, all the windows were dark, only the yellow of the traffic lights blinked patiently. My mouth was bitter and dry, which I had not expected from the brandy, I admit. I ate a piece of Turkish delight in the kitchen and drank a glass of water. The clock showed that seventeen minutes had passed since I got up. I watched the clock face until the big hand shivered and moved a notch, then I remembered what had woken me: I'd been dreaming that I was standing on the bank of a rapid mountain stream, so different from the slow Danube of the plains, and that a voice was announcing numbers: seventeen, thirty-five, forty-three, ninety-eight. At the final number, on the river a woven basket swept by, in which sat, instead of an abandoned baby, the manuscript given to me by the mysterious old man. I reached for the basket, my foot slipped on the damp grass, I flew face forward toward the river, and as the water splashed my face I woke. Now it was nearly three-thirty. I went to my study to get the manuscript, repeating the numbers I'd heard in my dream. On [>] I read that a young but wise man named Eleazar, a "mystic and a teacher," was part of a group of some twenty Jewish, mostly Ashkenazi, families who arrived in Zemun in 1739. Little was known of him, though he was probably the first, even before the arrival of Rabbi Jehuda Jeruham, to perform religious rites. Until that time, it said in the manuscript, there had been no Jews living in Zemun, or at least not in any significant numbers. In 1717, when the Austrians routed the Ottomans and captured Belgrade, several Jewish merchants settled there, along with a larger group of Austrian merchants and craftsmen. When the Ottomans recaptured Belgrade some twenty years later, however, these Jews withdrew from Belgrade and chose to make their home in Zemun. Eleazar's trace can be found there today, it said, but hardly anyone knows this, or even wishes to learn about it. The next passage dealt with the way the Austrian authorities treated the Jewish residents of Zemun, but there was no further mention of Eleazar. On [>] of the manuscript, however, after a passage listing the rabbis who had served in the Zemun synagogues following Jehuda Jeruham — Israel Aleksandar, Joze Fridensberger, Šlomo Hirš, Jehuda ben Šlomo Haj Alkalaj, S. D. Tauber, Hinko Urbah, and kantor Geršon Kačka at the Ashkenazi synagogue, and M. B. Aharon, Šabtaj, Moše Bahar, and Hakham Jichak Musafija at the Sephardic synagogue — there was an unrelated passage: here one must also remember that Eleazar still had Hermes' words in mind about how he, Hermes, was searching for the secrets of Genesis, and how he had gone into a cave deep beneath the surface of the earth, through which powerful winds blew, and there before him appeared an image of incredible beauty, an image of which it is written in the Torah that God made man in his own image, and this image, which represented his perfect nature, instructed Hermes in what he should do to obtain knowledge about the most exalted matters. Further, it was written, this is why Eleazar occasionally separated his self from himself, that is, freed himself from his body, until he could see himself, slender and transparent, illuminated by a wondrous inner light that came from the divine spirit. But what Eleazar was able to do, and with such remarkable ease, did not work for anyone else, so perhaps there is no point in speaking of it further. And truly, the next few pages contained no mention of him, until [>], where the part about Eleazar began with the words "In the meanwhile," as if it were taken from some larger whole in which his life was laid out in chronological order, in much greater detail. And so in the meanwhile, it was written at the bottom of the page, Eleazar wondered more and more often why God, who was perfect, had not created a perfect world, but instead had made a world in which there was a place and a role for evil. Eleazar understood, it said, the Kabbalistic explanation that it had not been possible to create a perfect world because that would have meant that God, who is perfection, was duplicating himself, making a copy of himself, and God, in the nature of things, cannot be duplicated, cannot copy himself, he can only limit himself. Hence, it said, there is evil in this world, though not as a separate force, as pure evil, but always and only as part of all that is, therefore in man's soul, from its very inception, there are germs of both good and evil. God is none the weaker for it, the manuscript reads, but instead more generous; this didn't satisfy Eleazar, and after long periods of musing and going through all the possibilities, he decided to approach the left side, the side of evil. With this in mind, it said, Eleazar stood in the circle of light from a special source, but in such a way that he could see both his shadows, the one that was his astral body, and the one that held the living spark of the astral body and seldom shows itself, and for that he needed to say certain prescribed words, and that was when impure forces appeared, which took over Eleazar's shadows, and, with the shadows, Eleazar, and after that no one ever saw him. His name was not mentioned again until fifty pages later. Before that final mention, the manuscript dealt with the Zemun Jewish cemetery; then a brief history was given of the Zemun synagogue, so it's unclear why the piece about Eleazar's destiny is treated here. Today, it says in that chapter, somewhere in Zemun is a place where the forces of good and evil intersect, and where it is possible, if a person knows the right words, to pass from one world into the other, and even to move into the realm of endless possibilities, or into the realm of endless worlds that emanate from the ten divine Sephirot, endlessly multiplying and forging anew the reality we dwell in. Outside a new day had long since dawned. The clock showed seven-thirty A.M., which meant that I had spent four hours leafing through the manuscript I still had no clear sense of. If this is one of the books of sand, I told Marko, I should be finding grains of sand on my hands after reading it. There was no sand on my hands, but plenty of dust and paper shreds. After I read that Eleazar's passageway to the other world still existed in Zemun, my first thought was of the corner in the courtyard on Zmaj Jovina Street. I hadn't gone there for several days, just as I hadn't thought about the woman from the quay, because the circumstances, the events connected to the warnings scrawled on my door, had pulled me in another direction, which might have been the cause of the nagging sense of impaired equilibrium that had been dogging me for weeks. I splashed my face with water, ate a piece of bread spread with honey while I waited for the weather report on the morning radio program (clouds, wind, with a chance of rain in the afternoon), I got dressed, put a piece of gum in my mouth, and left the apartment. I decided to walk to Zmaj Jovina Street, taking the shortest cut through the center of town. This exposed me to exhaust fumes, but I was too groggy and tired, after my nocturnal reading, to take the less direct route by the quay. On my way back, I thought, I might take that route, but first I should walk through the market and pick up some fuse cartridges and a new phone jack at the stall of the man who resells spare parts, and then, walking along the Danube, I could inhale and exhale the air as deeply as possible, swinging my arms vigorously to accelerate circulation, coordinate my equilibrium and speed the rhythm of my steps. Glavna Street was packed with people and cars, bluish clouds of fumes, and bustle, and the street vendors had opened their makeshift stalls out in front of the department store. The clouds the radio announcer so generously promised had not yet appeared, unless they were at the horizon, hidden from view by the rows of buildings, so that the sun, though still a spring sun, radiated a heat hard to bear, swallowing shadows like a Kabbalist. If somebody, I thought, had told me a few weeks before that I would be caught up in mystical teachings about good and evil, I would have thought that somebody mad. And now that same somebody could tell me I am mad and grasping at straws. It's only right, I decided, that I am thinking about this as I walk by Dubrovačka Street, which used to be the heart of the Jewish quarter of Zemun and where the young and old trees continued to cast shadows full of foreboding and promise. Once I am on the street, I thought, I should go to the synagogue, though they knew nothing of Eleazar when the temple was built, because it is always possible, and sometimes inevitable, that what is anticipated turns up where one least expects it, be it exalted celestial light or shards of the pottery in which earthly darkness was once preserved. I passed by the cinema and the hotel, and at the corner, by the shoe store, I crossed into Zmaj Jovina Street. The tai chi poster hung in the same place by the large wooden gate, but with a different starting date for the beginner's course and with no circle and triangle. The yin and yang were real, as I established when I tried to scratch them. The gate was ajar, the passageway leading to the courtyard radiated a pleasant freshness, the bench and barberry bushes had not changed, and water was dripping from the pump, as if just before I got there someone had been filling a bucket or, perhaps, a washbasin, and had slipped away upon hearing my footsteps. I went over to the bench and sat down, but the muted murmur from the street and market did not stop, nor did the music start to play. I looked up and saw a patch of blue sky. The sky is the same, I thought, even if everything else has changed. I closed my eyes, perked my e