war, since it is most often an armed conflict of limited intensity being waged on limited territory. Of course, he said, most of the conflicts registered in history belong to that category, I admit, and there are few wars that were truly grandiose. You speak of wars, I said, at least of the big ones, as though you admire them, and I see no justification for that. He saw no reason to admire them either, Isak Levi replied, but if they did exist, there was no point in closing one's eyes to the fact. Did I think, he asked, that war, any war, great or small, would disappear if I were to shut my eyes tight? That depends, I said, willpower sometimes accomplishes fantastic things. I don't know about willpower, answered Isak Levi, but I do see that Jaša Alkalaj's influence has had its effect. I tried to protest, claiming he was wrong, that I knew nothing about the Kabbalah, or I should say that I didn't know the Kabbalah well. Jaša was a good teacher, said Isak Levi, and I had no cause to worry. I said I wasn't worried and that I would ask Jaša to confirm that my knowledge of Kabbalistic teaching was minimal. Forget it, said Isak Levi dismissively. There was something else, he added, that had just occurred to him: the possibility that Jaša had invoked the dark forces against the thugs who had beaten me up. He would surely, he laughed, be able to summon an entire army of golems and other monsters to steal the thunder from the racists and Nazis and send them scampering as fast as their feet could carry them. Meanwhile, he said, we must fight without their help, because every single wasted moment makes us weaker. I wasn't sure whom he meant: the two of us in the bathroom, the three of us in Jaša's studio, the two of them and Jaša Alkalaj, or all the Jews of Belgrade. So, I said, I should write about what has been happening to me? Isak Levi nodded. As soon as possible, he said, as soon as possible. I, however, was not convinced that this was the best solution, and when the deadline came up, I wrote a lame, halfhearted piece about the absence of musical taste in the most widely watched television programs. For some mysterious reason the editor was pleased, he beamed as he read the text and even stood up and thumped me on the shoulder. Utterly perplexed, I left the building and for a while stood indecisively on the steps. Then I decided to forget about it, as I already had to struggle with plenty of secrets, and editors are unpredictable creatures. I went home, stepped onto the balcony overlooking the yard, shooed away two white pigeons, sat on the deck chair, and tried to make some sense of what had happened to me over the past few weeks. This was not my first try, just as I felt it would not be my last. Jaša Alkalaj's advice to seek in the Kabbalah, or rather, to find in the Kabbalah the key to these events, advice I genuinely believed in, proved of no help. I knew slightly more than I had known about the Kabbalah, though what I knew was a crumb in comparison to its entire treasure. I understood the meaning of the Sephirot, the divine emanations; I had moved toward an understanding of the Infinite, or Ein Sof, which was how the Kabbalists referred to divine substance; I had carefully studied the interpretation of Adam's fall; I had got to know the principles of Gematria; but these pathways led me nowhere, and sooner or later I came back to the beginning, to the Danube riverbank and the slap that, though I hadn't been able to hear it, had deafened me. That slap led to the next, to the event I was fully prepared to accept as a misunderstanding, a comic misunderstanding, but it brought the manuscript into my life, which, I had to admit reluctantly, was related to a variety of things, as if it were constantly being added to and renewed. Then I realized, as I sat in the deck chair and propped my feet on the balcony railing, that I had never mentioned the manuscript to Jaša Alkalaj, though he would certainly be interested in the Kabbalistic parts of the text. I couldn't explain this to myself; the only interpretation I thought of was that, jealous of his apparently limitless familiarity with the Kabbalah and mysticism, I wanted to withhold the information about the manuscript until I could plunk it onto the table in front of Jaša with unconcealed glee. I pictured him leaping from his chair, grabbing the pages of the manuscript, and trembling with excitement. I laughed out loud and decided to tell him about it. I shifted in the deck chair and looked to the right, toward a neighboring yard, and noticed in the crown of a poplar a man wearing black pants and a white shirt. The branches and leaves partially concealed him, but if he thought no one could see him, he was wrong. His hands were in front of his face, and it took me a moment to figure out that he was holding binoculars, trained on me. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I leaned over the railing, but there was no one but me on any of the balconies. There was the possibility, of course, that he was a jealous husband, trying to locate the window behind which his wife was languishing in the arms of a lover, though that was difficult to believe. I remembered I had my father's old binoculars somewhere, and dragging myself out of the deck chair, I went to look for them. I rummaged in the cupboard, checked some boxes in the pantry, poked around in the drawers of my desk, and, not having come up with the binoculars, I returned to the balcony, but the man was no longer in the poplar. I studied the other treetops, surveyed the roofs of the buildings, lowered my gaze to the yards overgrown in weeds, the man was gone. Maybe he was never there, said Marko when I told him, so I decided to say no more. Of course, I knew that people are sometimes victims of their own guesswork and prejudice, and that there are times when they think they see what they would like to see, and the man with the binoculars, so clumsily hidden in the crown of the poplar tree, might be nothing more than a projection of mine, a reflection of my hidden hope that I was part of a vast plot or scheme in which a large portion of the world was embroiled. I knew what Marko would say to that: he would laugh and say I had been watching too many American movies. He had said something along those lines a few days before when I had set out a theory about a different, though similar, version of a conspiracy. We've all seen too many American movies, I had told him then, which was true. This was not merely a worn phrase that Europeans use when, on their first visit to America, they feel they are in a movie, but even we in Europe compare our reality more and more often to the cinematic reality of American films. Who in Europe thinks about conspiracies, I asked Marko, in which ordinary citizens become the greatest obstacle to the monstrous plans of insatiable politicians? It's all small in Europe, said Marko, even conspiracies. I can't tell whether he meant that as consolation to me, but when I saw the man in that poplar tree, it was no consolation. Whether large or small, a conspiracy is a conspiracy, and if someone is caught up in it, the consequences may be dangerous. Fine, said Marko, when I'd made that argument to him, the consequences may indeed be dangerous, but we should be realistic and accept where we live. Conspiracy in Serbia, he said, is that even possible? Why should Serbia, I spoke in my defense, be any worse than any other country, why couldn't we have a nice, big conspiracy here? Serbia is already worse than many countries, said Marko, but I'd say you are missing something. Where have you been, he asked, these past ten years? On Mars? So, I continued, on the defensive, you have it all figured out, is that it? Nearly everything, said Marko, except a couple of murders among criminals turned patriots. And those, I said, aren't conspiracies? Just because I don't understand something, replied Marko, doesn't mean that some dark evil force is behind it, a mysterious organization in collusion with the government, army, police, or who knows what. Such things, he said, happen only in American movies, in which, by the way, the entire plot is reduced to the struggle of conspirators to strip free and honest American citizens of their right to information, to knowledge that supposedly belongs to them, if for no other reason than that they regularly pay their taxes, while in this country, he said, it is about silencing witnesses, and ordinary people like you and me are never in the picture. Besides, he added, in a country like ours, where everybody knows all there is to know about everybody else, conspiracies aren't workable, at least not conspiracies of the kind you've seen in the movies, because no one here can keep a secret. Someone, said Marko, don't ask me who, said that real history is what goes on between two people with no witnesses, but if that is true, then history here is what goes on inside a single person, who sits alone in a room and invents history. And if