Minut when I complained that I had not been able to get through to them for hours. Never trust our phones, she said then, not when someone's talking, or even saying nothing, and less still when you get a busy signal. This time the phone rang straight away. It rang loud and clear, so loud, in fact, that I had to move the receiver away from my ear. And her voice, when she came on, was the same. Thank you, she said. I never knew what that meant, what she was thanking me for, so I said nothing. I remembered how her hands gleamed in the café, and I wondered what the light was like where she was sitting now. I imagined a great old-fashioned chandelier, full of crystal balls and tinkling decorations, through which the light was refracted, making fragile, little rainbows. It is dark, she said, it's dark in my room. My hands no longer shook; now my palms were sweating. So that's why I didn't tell Marko everything, it was because of Margareta's ability, I don't know what else to call it, to read my thoughts. At the time I thought of this as an ability; now, despite everything, I believe it was a skill, difficult but possible to master, yet as far as Marko went, nothing would have changed had I known that then. Ability or skill, none of this would have meant a thing to him, regardless of distinctions, because he would not have accepted it, and he would have produced a scornful smile, maybe even a loud laugh. Yoda from Star Wars reads minds, he'd say, that doesn't happen in everyday, normal life. High time, he'd add, for me to stop living in the world of sci-fi and come back to this planet, no matter how chaotic it might be. I would have told him then that he didn't know what he was saying, that I am not afraid of chaos, and word by word we would have sunk into the lull of hashish, until we fell silent, drained, or we pounced on a box of wafer cookies. Marko had once calculated that in the course of our many years of getting high we had eaten nearly a freight car worth of wafer cookies, though I never corroborated his figures. And it wasn't just wafer cookies we ate, often we had Turkish delight, tea crescents, and chocolate-covered raisins. These are from Freight Car Number 2, Marko would say, and as far as he was concerned the discussion would be over. Pressing the phone to my ear, I looked around as if I were in my apartment for the first time, and said that my room too was dark. In fact only one lamp was on, and its wan light could have passed for a thin dusk, the first stage of proper darkness. I may not have said that, or at least not in so many words, I no longer remember, though it was not so very long ago that this happened, but I, like most people, remember pointless details better, the circumstances leading to a goal, while the goal itself, even when I reach it, tends to elude memory, as if in a dream in which, no matter how far we walk, or run, or ride a white stallion, we cannot get close to the outline of walls on the horizon or the shore of the emerald river. Of course I should have jotted everything down and not allowed the writing, as is happening now, to turn into an archeological excavation. Words are the goods that rot the fastest, as the editor at Minut once said, and I stared, astonished, at him, not because he rarely declared such sentiments, but because those words suddenly illuminated a multitude of things to me and made me think about language as a cluster of bananas. Nothing, indeed, rots as quickly as language, though bananas that have gone soft do have their charm. I don't believe I brought up bananas in my conversation with Margareta that evening. In some sense we picked up where the conversation in the café left off, though she didn't explain why she had had to leave so abruptly, and just as I had felt at the café that we were not actually having a conversation, so this exchange too turned into a sequence of choppy fragments on the way to silence. Then we stopped talking, and a moment later, without saying goodbye, she hung up. In the rustling void that followed, again I thought I could hear someone whispering from an unreachable distance, and I kept the phone to my ear for a long time, so that my ear, as I could see in the mirror as I got ready for bed, turned red like a poppy and hurt at the slightest touch. The next day I told Marko other things, and in the end he advised me to stay away from it all, because pretty soon, he said, I'd be wanting to become a Jew, and then, he pointed out, I would have to be circumcised. He winked and laughed. Enough of this. I must go back to a few other things that happened, because if I don't do it now I'll never catch up. This story has too many threads as it is, and it probably will never become a proper story. Stories are orderly, the threads in stories are harmoniously arranged, what I am doing here is more a reflection of life, which is chaotic, with too much going on at once. Life, I heard someone say, is like a puppet theater in which many of the strings have snapped, so each of us is an unhappy puppeteer trying to pull together and reconnect the strings into a workable whole, but keeps making mistakes. Life comes down to untangling knots, and even more to tying them again, but that simple act grows more complicated as the years pass, the fingers thicken or get stiff, the sight grows feeble, the teeth drop out. The puppets stagger around on the stage, they raise arms instead of legs, they swivel their heads when they should be looking straight, in the summer they seek shade and in the winter they ask for gloves and scarves, they complain of gas pains, they wear two different pairs of glasses to read letters, and when that is not enough, they read only the headlines in the newspaper and then guess about the articles, and this makes their world more and more the product of their fancy, as perhaps it should be, because after that comes the moment when nothing matters, and the only thing left for the puppeteer to do is release the string that holds the funeral plaque and watch the little puff of dust rise above the empty stage. The performance is over. The end. That is not what I meant to talk about, but rather about something still far from over. The walls of the stairwell in the building where I lived were covered in splotches of different colors, irregular shapes, which my neighbors were using to try and cover the large and small swastikas, the six-pointed stars that dripped with gore, and the brief anti-Semitic slogan, if anti-Semitic best describes it: BOO TO THE JEWS. The messages in my mailbox had become so frequent and monotonous that I stopped saving them. One night, I found a little mound of excrement on the doormat. I bent over, then knelt down to examine it more closely. It was firm, compact, and I could just picture the effort with which the person had squeezed it out. Perhaps the squeezing was even accompanied by pain, the rupturing of a blood vessel along the rim of the anus, but the light in the stairwell was too weak for me to spot any traces of coagulated blood. Judging by the position of the stool, tidily coiled, the person had produced it while crouching over the doormat, and someone else, I assume, was keeping watch at the door to the building. If they had brought it there from somewhere else, surely the natural snakelike appearance would have been spoiled, at least smeared. I was not eager to carry it, so I picked up the doormat along with it and tossed them both into a large plastic shopping bag with the name of a fashion shop written across it. I bought a new doormat with the word WELCOME on it, but when I found it a few days later soaked in urine I gave up on any further purchases. So, maybe this was a victory for the monster, as Marko put it, and I believe that they experienced it as such; however, I would do better, I answered, spending my money on more useful things. I can always wipe my shoes, I added, on my neighbor's mat, nothing wrong with that. If I was being exposed to such things, then, I reasoned, the real Jews surely must have been suffering far greater abuse. Strangely, Jaša Alkalaj and Isak Levi had not known of any such incidents, or maybe, as Marko claimed, they preferred not to talk about them. Fear is the greatest censor, said Marko. I hadn't seen Jakov Švarc much at that point, but when I ran into him by chance on Knez Mihailova Street I brought the matter up. As I leaned toward him to hear better in the clamor and bustle of the street, I spotted two familiar figures by the entrance to a passageway that led through to Čika Ljubina Street. I could not recall at first where I knew their faces from, but then, as strains of an accordion wafted from somewhere, I recalled the rainy night when they accosted me at the doorway to my building. One of them, in the nursery school bushes, had punched me in the small of my back, right in the kidneys. The other had changed some, his hair had grown out or he had grown a mustache, but there was no doubt that he too had been breathing down my neck. Do you now understand, asked Jakov Švarc, why this is as it is? I looked at his lips, as if there were words on them that I had not yet heard. I noticed only a crumb of bread. It might get better someday, he went on, meanwhile, it is what it is. He had, he said, an appointment with a cardiologist, at his age, he said, every twitch was interpreted as announcing the ultimate absence of all pain. He patted himself on the chest, in the area of the heart, and left, and I looked again at the entrance to the passageway. There was no one there. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I turned and kept walking toward Kalemegdan, spinning like a mindless weathervane. I had similar experiences over the next few days, not every day, of course, though often enough to make me anxious about going out into the street. The sequence of events was nearly always the same: here and there, alone or in company, I would spot the familiar faces, unobtrusive yet present, and the moment I was distracted they would slip away. Ignore them, Jaša Alkalaj said when I complained, they are spoiled rotten and have seen too many bad movies. I didn't believe him, sensing that he didn't believe himself. When I asked what was really going on in the Jewish community, he avoided answering, and when I said rumors were circulating around town that the Jewish cemetery had been vandalized, he said that I shouldn't believe everything I heard, but if I was so curious I could go to the cemetery and see for myself. The dead don't lie, you know, he said. So off I went to the cemetery. The metal gateway was freshly painted. I opened it with effort, stepped into the cemetery, and let it shut with a bang behind me. After all the noise and commotion of the traffic, the serenity of the cemetery was almost painful. The broad avenue, lined with evergreens, led to a large monument resembling the wings of a butterfly, or, more precisely, a gateway to heaven, a gate to the other world. The day was bright and warm, the path crisscrossed with shadows. I walked slowly, pausing, studying tombstones, but I couldn't shake off the sense that someone was watching me. Maybe that's how it is at every cemetery, what with the presence of all the dead and the feel of silence, but, just in case, I turned around abruptly several times, once I even crouched, determined to wait for the person to appear. No one appeared. I crouched until my calves and thighs ached, and then I straightened up with great effort and sat on the nearest bench. Though the avenue was not long, the winged monument looked as if it were far off on the horizon, as if I would never reach it. Then, suddenly, the branches of a pine tree above me began swaying, though I felt not a breath of wind. Two or three pine needles floated past me, and one, like an arrow, pierced the sleeve of my jacket, shivered, then tipped over. I looked up. There was still rustling, but now it came from the very top of the tree. That must be how the dead make themselves known, I thought. I no longer looked back. I lowered my head and hurried toward the monument. I wanted to get out of that tunnel of evergreens as fast as possible, to get to a place where no one was saying anything to me. I came out of the shadows and thought I saw someone pass behind the monument wings: he stepped from behind the right-hand wing and slipped behind the one on the left. I froze. I stood on the concrete path at the approach to the monument, staring at the empty space between the wings. Maybe those are the wings of an angel, I thought, but this did nothing to ease my terror. Only one possibility was left, and slowly, step by step, I walked along the path that led through the monument. I held my breath and listened. The only sound I could hear was the pounding of blood in my ears. Then I squinted and nearly galloped across the empty space on the path, shielding my head with my arms and kicking my feet up high. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with the cemetery wall. I turned around. Between the wings of the monument I could see the iron gate at the opposite end of the path. The pounding in my ears subsided, but my heart was beating furiously. There was nothing more stupid I could have done, I thought, than come to the cemetery and display my helplessness. I moved slowly among the tombstones. Some were standing at a slant, some eroded with age, but nowhere did I see any smashed stones or scribbled graffiti. In one corner I did see discarded hypodermic needles and wrinkled condoms, the sort of thing that can be found at any cemetery, and they did not seem to have any particularly anti-Semitic message to convey. I walked through another section and then came back to the shady avenue. There, by a modest fountain from which water was dripping, my attention was drawn to a monument in the shape of a pile of books. I leaned over to take a closer look and noticed that one part of the gravestone was lighter, as if it had recently been washed or scrubbed with a powerful cleanser. I crouched down and despite the best efforts of the person who had tried to scrub away the unwanted message, I was able to decipher the words DEATH TO THE JEWS. Instead of an exclamation point following the words there was an odd mark, probably someone's unsuccessful attempt at signing the message. I straightened up and wiped the sweat off my forehead. Why hadn't Jaša Alkalaj simply confirmed the story about the vandalizing of the cemetery, but instead sent me to see for myself? The dead do not lie, he'd said, and indeed, the dead did not lie. They also told the truth in the section of the cemetery near the entrance gate. Three tombstones were lying on the ground, all three smashed to pieces, and it was clear, though the pieces were laid out on boards as if awaiting repair, that an unnatural force had caused them to fall and break. Three tombstones do not topple on their own. I rinsed my hands at the fountain, shook them dry, and wiped them with a handkerchief. It took even more effort to open the gate from the inside, and as I pulled at the large iron handle, I was wondering whether someone might have locked it to shut me inside the cemetery, alone. Then the door creaked, budged, and when I pulled it to and stepped out into the street, a tram rumbled by. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, I looked every which way. In the days to come, as I said before, these motions preceded everything I did, and sometimes even today I look in every direction when I open the front door, though I am in a different city and no one is expecting me. Six years ago every gesture, every time someone broke suddenly into a dash, every word spoken loudly, to say nothing of whistles, all of it signified something entirely different from what that gesture, dash, or word seemed to mean on the surface. Never was reality farther from reality in Belgrade than during those years, and never was there greater insistence on the fact that this reality was the only true reality. And so I stood on the sidewalk, watched the tram trundling off into the distance, and strained to hear the murmur of the dead behind my back, and wondered how to fend off the aggressive flower hawkers who were striding my way. I never handled myself well in such situations, and usual