that is true, I said, then the single person's power is limitless. Sure it is, said Marko, and that's why our conspiracies aren't the same as the ones playing out in the world and in Hollywood studios. They're like a puppet theater with only one actor, well concealed behind the set, playing all the puppets and pulling all the strings. Marko was right, I had to give him credit, though I was still eager to understand who was pulling the strings of the people caught up in what was happening to me, including mine, and if they all had their little strings, as Marko put it, then I had strings too. And you too, I told him. In Serbia we are all dangling by a thread, said Marko, no one is spared. Don't tell me, I protested, that all the strings are held by one man. Of course not, countered Marko, he is at the peak of a pyramid composed of his mini clones, just the way every successful dictatorship has always functioned, take Stalin's in the Soviet Union, for instance, if it was to function successfully, there had to be, aside from Stalin himself, hundreds, thousands of mini Stalins, his copies or clones, each one controlling a handful of strings, while their strings, he said, were in the hands of someone else who was above them on the hierarchical party ladder, and their strings were in the hands of someone above them, and there were always fewer of those above than those below, and so it went, he said, all the way up to Stalin, who held only two or three of the main strings, but he could give one of them a tweak and all of the Soviet Union would rock as if it had been hit by a major earthquake. I tried to imagine this pyramid and all the strings, but they kept getting knotted up in my mind's eye, tangling hopelessly. Only Stalin was unscathed at the very top, grinning under that bushy mustache. Always the same story, said Marko, in the end, there are no big differences among the dictatorial pyramids and the networks of strings that make them. The only difference he could think of, he said, was that our dictators didn't sport mustaches. This thought moved him to air a theory about how most dictators had a mustache because the mustache was a symbol of masculinity. Dictators, generally spineless types, grow a mustache to enhance their masculine powers and justify their authority, he remarked, which raises the engaging question of the absence of mustaches on the faces of our dictators. He looked at me but I shrugged. Maybe they proved their masculinity some other way, said Marko, or felt no one was questioning them, there is no other explanation. He spoke a bit longer about the difference in significance between Hitler's little brush of a mustache and the bushy mustache on Stalin's face, but I was no longer listening. The next day, however, while I was on a city bus crossing the Sava, I thought back to the conversation and chuckled to myself. The man standing next to me scowled, then quickly touched his cheeks, nose, and lips, and when he found nothing on them to have made me laugh, he snapped, What's got into you? I turned serious, but a moment later my lips stretched again into a grin. You know what, said the man, I'll hit you so hard you won't get up again. Even though he said this in a voice that shook with rage, his eyes flashing, brandishing his fist, for some reason it struck me as so hilarious that, clenching my teeth to choke back the spurts of laughter, I dashed off the bus at the next stop. Instead of at Zeleni Venac, where I was headed, I found myself at the end of the bridge over the Sava, at the beginning of Brankova Street, and so I had to walk farther than I had planned. It was Friday and I was supposed to meet Jaša Alkalaj at six that afternoon in the courtyard of the synagogue on Maršal Birjuzova. That was the time, he told me, Shabbat began, and there was no more peaceful moment than when, like a bride, Saturday steps into the temple. I don't know what it was like inside the temple, but when I arrived at the synagogue courtyard, short of breath from my brisk walk, no one was there, only a hat on a bench beneath a spreading tree. I approached it gingerly, as if something might leap out from under it. The hat didn't move, or resist when I picked it up and set it on my head. It was too large and slid down over my brow, covering my eyes and resting on my ears. What do you know, I heard Jaša Alkalaj's voice, such a refined fellow, so well-mannered, yet stealing hats. I tore the hat off my head and turned: Jaša Alkalaj, grinning, stood by a graying older man. The hat belongs to me, said the man, extending his hand. I gave him the hat. If his hair had been completely gray, I would have thought this was the man who had handed me the envelope with the manuscript. I asked him if he had a brother living in Zemun. No, said Jaša, our Dacca has no one, certainly not in Zemun. Though he had no relatives there, Dača was well versed in the history of the Zemun Jews, and he drew my attention to the fact that their fate for many years had been determined by the fact that Zemun lay on the Military Frontier, where they were not, otherwise, permitted to settle. For some reason, Dacca said, putting on his hat, Empress Maria Theresa gave her permission for the first Jewish families who moved here, roughly a dozen, to stay on in Zemun, and this edict determined the life of the Zemun Jewish community for the next hundred years or so. As with so many imperial privileges, Dacca said, taking off his hat, this one was based on defining the ban and on insisting that it be obeyed, so the whole century passed in attempts by the Zemun Jews to sidestep regulations and find a way to stay in Zemun, which was rich in opportunities for trade and other activities because of its border location. You see, said Dača, putting the hat on again, the privilege of staying here applied only to a small number of families, and though that number increased gradually through the decades, there were threats, even moves by the authorities to bring the number down to the few that had originally been permitted to stay. One way, Dacca said, once more taking off his hat, was to switch names, in hopes of burying their traces in lists and documents, which infuriated the authorities of the time and historians today, who need to determine whether, for instance, Rafael Salomon and Salomon Rafael are one and the same person whose first name becomes his last name for a time, and his last name becomes his first, or whether the two are unrelated. The names on one list, said Dača, holding his hat in his lap, do not appear on another drawn up several years later, and several years on they crop up again on some new list. He stared at his hat, lifted it, then dropped it back in his lap. Tell me, he said to Jaša Alkalaj, why am I telling you all of this? Because of Eleazar, said Jaša. Ah, that's right, said Dača, and patted the hat, because of Eleazar. He turned to Jaša again and asked him if I knew who Eleazar was. Naturally, said Jaša, he came asking about Eleazar and found him. And lost him, I said. Dacca looked at me sternly, as if startled that I knew how to speak, and I felt my cheeks blushing red. It's not that you lost him, he said, putting on his hat, but that he himself found ways of getting lost. I breathed a sigh of relief, the weight of guilt lifted off my shoulders. Yes, said Dača, he disappeared of his own volition, that was the best way he had of finding himself again. He took his hat off, scrutinized it on all sides, sniffed it. Hey, he looked over at Jaša Alkalaj, where did I get this hat? I was wondering that myself, Jaša replied. This is a pot, said Dacca, not a hat. I laughed, but turned serious when my eyes met Dača's. Eleazar, he said, if that was indeed his name, unlike most of the other Jewish families in Zemun was one of the "Turkish" Jews, meaning a Sephardic Jew who had been an Ottoman subject. And as such, and especially because of the niggling that went on between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, he was, at the very least, suspicious, so that is probably why when he was registering with the authorities, he came up with another name or, using Gematria, chose a name that had the same numerical value, so that he was Eleazar yet he was not Eleazar, and it is easy to assume that when a census was held fifteen years later of the Jewish inhabitants of Zemun, he was the very man registered as Volf, a water carrier, which was confirmed in a more detailed list drawn up a year later, in 1756, in which he was listed as Volf Enoch, only to disappear altogether or show up on a list in 1815, no longer as Volf, but as Nahmi the water carrier, who had apparently been living in Zemun for thirty years, with a family of four, which is, of course, rubbish, because where there is water, there is Eleazar, who slaked people's thirst, their thirst for water and their thirst for Zion, the thirst of the body and the thirst of the soul, because only in harmony between soul and body do the soul and body survive. He paused. I suddenly noticed that during that long sentence he had stopped touching the hat. He brought water to the Hertzls, said Jaša. And to Rabbi Alkalaj, said Dacca. He got up, put on the hat, and licked his lips. After all this talk of water, he said, a person works up a thirst, but there are no water carriers any longer, though I wouldn't mind a lemonade at Murat's, if one of you two is willing to pay. I'd pay, said Jaša, but just as there are no more water carriers, so there is no more Murat. Really? said Dacca, surprised, and took off his hat. When did he die? He didn't die, answered Jaša, he went back to Priština. Really? said Dacca again, but why? Even you, as a Kabbalist, can't answer that question, laughed Jaša. Dača stared at the hat as if he no longer knew what to do with it. What about the pastry shop, he asked, finally, is it still there? It stands there, said Jaša, empty. I'd gladly give this hat, said Dacca, and looked at us, for a couple of his baklavas. I preferred the