tulumba myself, said Jaša. And then, I said the next day to Marko, what came next was the two of them going on about all the other delicacies, the cream pastries like krempita and šampita, the sudǽuk and chocolate roll, the halva and chestnut purée, ice cream and lenja pita. Murat must have made all the pastries under the sun, I said. Marko shook his head. Let me get this straight, he said, on Friday evening, just as the holy day is beginning for Jews, you are standing in the synagogue courtyard quibbling about pastry? After all that, he asked, did you buy the man a lemonade? Yes, I said, but because Murat had shut down his shop, we went to the Majestic, where, as soon as we walked in, a friend of theirs showed up, an old actor, who sat at our table and regaled us with stories of what happens to actors when they tour the provinces. And then I felt certain again that I had seen the woman from the quay entering a gallery across the street. I said that a meeting had slipped my mind and that I would have to leave at once. By the time we'd said our goodbyes, and Dacca had showed me the Parisian label in his hat, and the actor had launched into a story of what happened to them on a visit to Leskovac, there was no one left over at the gallery. It was dark upstairs and down. So it goes every single time, I had thought, though I didn't tell Marko this, either I get there too late, like this time, or too early, like the day when I went into the courtyard on Zmaj Jovina Street and sat down on the bench in the corner, thereby missing the opportunity of running into her when she came out of the building. I don't know why I decided not to mention any of this to Marko. We were sitting in his kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking hashish that someone he knew had brought him from Amsterdam, and just as I was retelling the actor's last anecdote, I felt myself sinking. It was not, in fact, a real slump, but a sensation of unexpected shrinking, as if the hashish had set something off in me, a little switch that had totally changed my perspective, making me see everything from a low, bottom-up angle, as if the people and things surrounding me, and even whole realms, loomed suddenly large or, at least, unpleasantly elongated. Marko knew about this, moreover, he had had similar experiences several times, though in his case, or as he told it to me, more often he seemed to be growing, while everything else shrank. We never sorted out whether in both our cases this was a question of original experience, or if one of the two of us had gone through it and then told the other what had happened, and the other then had had the impression that he had experienced the same thing, because neither of us could remember who had first had the experience we called "the Alice," after the episode in the cartoon of Alice in Wonderland in which she nibbles the mushroom, or was it cake, and alternately grows bigger and smaller. I've got the Alice, I would say, which came in handy, particularly when we were in company or in a public place, because the Alice could, at times, be headstrong and rocky. That day, at the exact moment I was describing what had happened the night I left the Majestic and crossed the street, I was hit by a wave of the Alice, and though in my story I stayed at pavement level, I began to sink, and when in the story I looked at the upper level, where it was also dark, in the Alice I also looked up and saw Marko's face towering over me, in a space neither light nor dark. I don't know if I am making myself clear enough. In any case, it would not be good for someone to think, when I describe the experience called the Alice, that I am trying to attribute to it a mystical property or profound significance. It was a minor, silly optical illusion caused by the action of some of the ingredients of the cannabis on who knows which brain cells, and like many similar insights caused by intoxicating substances, it readily lent itself to the most varied interpretations. This is our remarkable ability as humans to attribute a meaning to everything, as if nothing happens just because it happens, as if everything is a basis or a mirror of a secret, if not the secret itself, whatever that secret might be. The greatest secret, Marko once said, is that there are no secrets. Very few people, however, are willing to accept this premise, though I doubt many readers will have made it this far. Sometimes I'm not even sure I am writing this; perhaps I am only saying it; perhaps I am thinking that I am saying that I am writing; maybe not even that, but something altogether different, an interplay of images and sounds, a language that is no one's, least of all mine. Slowly, slowly, I have veered off course, soon it will turn out that I am talking to myself, like some drooling old man in the corner of a room, dirty and unshaven, in unbuttoned pants, no underwear, so that everyone can see his wrinkled penis and sagging balls. There, as soon as I mentioned Alice, that curious predecessor to Lolita, I knew we'd end up in someone's fly, searching for the mystical meaning of her name, a fall through a hole, a disappearing cat, and hysterical tea drinking. No, our Alice was an altogether minor, paltry experience under the influence of hashish, an illusion we knew to be an illusion, which does nothing to interfere with the real state of affairs, but runs parallel with it. So I looked at Marko from below, and I looked at him normally, with eyes that were level with his face, as always happens in the Alice, an experience that, now I see, we might think of calling something else. What frightened me this time, however, was the fact, the fact not the supposition, that on Marko's face hovered something so horrendous, an expression so rife with malice, that I felt my heart clench. It reminded me of the masks of New Guinea cannibals that hung above the bed of a girl I'd briefly gone out with some ten years before. When I first saw them, the blood froze in my veins. Later I got used to them, but when we made love I didn't dare look at the masks, I would close my eyes or twist my neck, terrified by the thought that one might come loose and crush me. Suddenly I no longer felt like talking, though Marko was pestering me with questions, and even when the Alice was over and all the perspectives leveled off, when I could see perfectly well how the gentle features of his face had, under the influence of the cannabis, taken on a grimace of horror, not even then could I force myself to keep going. I told Marko I was tired, that I was behind again with my piece for