well. Jaša mused on his vision of falling through a well, but in his vision, or was it some old dream, at the end of the well he arrived in a new, shiny, and perfect world, which was the product of all Kabbalist Sephirot, in which an unerring wisdom reigned. The wisdom may be unerring, I said, but if the well is endless, the man's fall will never reach that end. Jaša countered that I was taking the words too literally, or that I understood the word endless to mean something that had no end, but that every word has countless meanings, so at different levels, in different worlds, endless could mean many things. No word, he said, is ever plumbed, it always contains within it all other words, and speaking of language, he said, I see it as a series of bowls stacked one inside the next. I didn't think of language as stacked bowls, but that's not the point. For me language is alive, so it doesn't stack in larger or smaller packages, since nothing alive tolerates restraint, and if something defines language, it is the freedom of the movement of words, a subject for another time and another place. Meanwhile Dacca began to sweat from under his hat, and it was time to let him speak, because if we hadn't, he would have melted away, leaving only his hat and his shoes. This is how things stand, said Dacca. He put his shot glass down on the table and smacked his lips. On Shabbat when we met in the synagogue courtyard, he said, actually later that night, I dreamed of Eleazar. He was standing on a dusty path, wearing a shoulder yoke from which hung two buckets, brimming with water, he pointed at the horizon and said, Go to Sremski Karlovci. I asked him, What will I do in Sremski Karlovci, I am doing all right where I am now, but he kept repeating: Go to Sremski Karlovci, so in the end I had to agree to go, and he stopped talking, waved to me, and vanished. Then I woke up, said Dacca. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. He peered into it, then set it down on the floor by the chair. I lay awake, he continued, and tried to understand why Eleazar was sending me to Sremski Karlovci. For wine? said Jaša Alkalaj. No, said Dača, for the archives. Jaša looked at me, I shrugged; the last time I'd visited Sremski Karlovci I was in the seventh or eighth grade of elementary school and interested in everything but what the teachers were trying to teach us. There are archival collections there, said Dača, and, back when things were better, I spent many a day in those rooms. Eleazar, Dacca went on, apparently was aware of this, otherwise why, of all the places in the world, would he mention that particular place in Fruška Gora? But as he lay there awake, said Dača, he realized that Eleazar knew something else, something that had once escaped him, Dača, or at another time hadn't seemed to matter. He could no longer go back to sleep, and tossed and turned until the day dawned, and then, he said, he went to the train station and took a train to Sremski Karlovci. When he entered the archive, the first archivist he ran into crossed herself, he said, and exclaimed that he looked like a ghost. She asked, he said, whether anyone was giving him trouble, or, was it that he'd finally married? They all knew him there, said Dacca, as a sworn bachelor, which he had been, no question, but why marriage would have turned him into a ghost, he couldn't fathom, and so, he said, he stood in front of her desk, unsure of whether to strike up a conversation about the ups and downs of married life, or to go in search of what had brought him there, and who knows how long he would have hung around spinning his hat, had the archivist not struck herself on the brow and pronounced it a miracle that he had turned up that morning, for had he come a day later, or even later that afternoon, he would not have found her in the office, and no one would ever have known, she said, that waiting for him in her desk was an envelope that had arrived from Zagreb, who knows by what route, stamped with the seal of the city archive, she had not sent it on to him because no one knew what had become of him, of Dača, he'd stopped coming to the reading room, not having left a forwarding address or phone number or the name of a person they could get in touch with, so the envelope had stayed with her, unopened, of course, she said, no one would ever have considered opening it, she added, even if they had learned that the very worst, heaven forbid, had happened to him, to which he, Dača, replied that there are worse things than dying, for instance, betrayal or deception, and then the archivist, who knows why, he said, blushed, quickly bent down, and pulled a small white envelope out of the lowest drawer. The size of the envelope disappointed him, Dacca confessed, because he'd expected a larger and heftier missive, probably because of her lengthy introduction. He set his hat on her desk, he said, took the envelope, and sniffed it. The archivist shook her wrinkled index finger at him. Dacca tore open the end of the envelope and inched out a folded sheet of business stationery. Dear Sir, it said at the top, I recently came across the enclosed printout and remembered that you were looking for this information a long time ago. I don't know whether you are still researching this topic, but I thought this might be of interest. There are other archives now active, it said in closing, but I hope the old ones will not be forgotten, or, worse yet, destroyed. Sounds nice, said Jaša, but I don't understand any of it. You've never understood anything, Dacca said, glancing at me as if seeking support, though all I could do was raise my hands helplessly. Now you'll tell us, said Jaša, that this message came from an old flame of yours? Nonsense, said Dacca, though not without a smile at the corners of his mouth, she is a good friend, that's all, a person I often saw when I was leafing through documents many years ago at the Croatian Archive in Zagreb, searching, among other things, and here he looked at me again, for information about Eleazar. But, he said, first I have to tell you something else. He closed his eyes, leaned over, and I thought he'd fallen asleep. I am not sleeping, said Dača, just wondering where my hat is. Under the chair, said Jaša, where else would it be? At the time, Dača continued, I was obsessed with leeches. He knew this might sound peculiar, he said, but leeches used to be a precious commodity. It is hard to believe, for instance, that in one year alone, he said, and the year was 1833, French doctors imported over forty million leeches, and if you take all the other countries into account, over one hundred million leeches changed hands that year. Leeches had become so popular by the nineteenth century in Europe, he said, that they became an endangered species and were on the brink of extinction. Someone, of course, he said, had to go out and gather all those leeches, and unlike many of the other jobs that were off-limits for Jews at the time, or restricted to an elite, no one was fighting over gathering leeches, so among the Jews, he said, there were quite a few leech gatherers, people who went out and collected them in swamps, but also those who organized their purchase and further resale. Despite the distasteful nature of the work, however, he said, there were others who, as was the case with most occupations, protested the issuing of permits to Jews for this kind of work, and some of the most vocal, he said, were Serbian and German merchants who viewed the Jews as unpleasant competition. Good Lord, interrupted Jaša Alkalaj, who could possibly mind them gathering leeches? Leeches, he shuddered, I am disgusted at the very thought. One more person, shouted Dača, and clapped his hands, one more person who doesn't know anything about leeches! All I care about is that they are disgusting, said Jaša, the rest doesn't matter. You should care, said Dacca, but, as always, you prefer to scratch the surface, just like your paintings. If you don't shut up, said Jaša, you might end up without your hat. Dacca scowled, bent over, and peered under his chair. When he straightened up, his face was red. You wouldn't dare, he asked Jaša, touch it, would you? Jaša said nothing. You know what the Talmud says, Dača continued, that he who takes another man's hat may lose his soul? Are you a leech gatherer or a sermonizer? answered Jaša. Or are you just a hatter? Listen to him, will you? said Dacca, turning to me, and all because he has never overcome his childhood phobias, his fear of a leech latching on to him when he was splashing in the puddles, though — he couldn't have known that at the time — they do everything to keep their victims from feeling pain, so along with an anticoagulant, which makes possible the unobstructed flow of blood, they secrete an analgesic, which helps the victim, or patient, not to feel anything. I looked at Jaša, who was frowning, but I couldn't be sure whether the frown was a sign of genuine ire or just an act in a well-rehearsed performance. In a sense, I might well have been the one to be angry because Dača's claim about the painless leeches reminded me of the opening lines in Nabokov's book on Gogol, where Nabokov gives a convincing description of Gogol's agonies as doctors let his blood and leeches were dangling from his legendary nose. Every time I read those lines I felt revulsion at the thought of those powerful leeches, no different, to tell the truth, from Jaša's disgust of a moment before, and I had always thought how excruciating Gogol's pain must have been, how awful and miserable and humiliated he must have felt, and suddenly Dacca destroyed the image for me with the analgesic, making me doubt Gogol, whose nose was all that was still real, and Nabokov, who, I thought, should have warned me somewhere of this absence of pain. To convince you that I am telling you the truth, piped up Dača, I should put a leech on each of your legs. You're mad, shouted Jaša Alkalaj, you really are mad! That sent Dača into fits of laughter, except that this time he didn't clap, he slapped his thighs. I reached out and touched his elbow. Why don't you tell us what was in the document, I said, because everybody has the right to be afraid of whatever he wants to be afraid of. I knew a woman who fainted whenever she saw a photograph of a spider, and even the sight of a drawing of a spider sparked an unbearable headache. So why shouldn't someone have the right to be disgusted by leeches? Fine, agreed Dacca, but I would like him to see a leech, he said, on the operating table of Pirogov, the Russian surgeon, who would fix as many as two hundred leeches on a patient. The document, I asked, what did the document say? Dacca repeated the story of his interest in the unusual jobs that Jews did in Zemun and Srem, making a point of how he would tell us the next time about rag collecting, once a very lucrative business because rags were the raw material for the production of paper. Leeches, however, were not as appealing for Serbian and German merchants, regardless of the huge demand and good earnings, and it was while he was at the Zagreb archive, Dacca said, that he came upon many documents about the Jewish leech gatherers, about whom, as in the material on the other trades, there was an assortment of permits and bans, support and suspicion, an invoking of legal regulations and an evident sidestepping of these same regulations. Since Jews were not allowed to reside permanently on the Military Frontier, Dača explained, they used every opportunity, even the smallest, the size of a leech, for instance, to find a way to rest with at least one foot on solid ground. In the case of leeches, of course, it would be better to say mud rather than solid ground, but even mud, he remarked, could sometimes be reliable. There was something about mud in the Talmud, he said, but now he couldn't remember where. He stopped talking and began to nod. Jaša and I looked at each other. Don't you look at each other, said Dacca, I'm not sleeping, I am just trying to remember the name of the leech gatherer in the Brod regiment. Then he straightened up, opened his eyes, and said that the buyer's name was Marko Felner and that for the right to be a buyer he paid more than a thousand forints annually, while he gave the gatherers ten krajcars in silver for a standardized measure, which came to about a cup and a little more. No one, Dača said, no one dared catch leeches without Felner's go-ahead, and his privilege was supported by the military command, which, of course, was a paradox, he added, because the army should have been doing the exact opposite, meaning that they should have been encouraging Jews to leave the Military Frontier region. Clearly everybody cared more about pocketing a little spare change, he said, even if it came from leeches, because the dilemma of the leech gatherers crops up often in the correspondence of the Slavonian general command, and for instance, he said, there is mention of a case of two Jews who hung around Slavonski Brod for more than a month in 1833 without authorization, which was absolutely unacceptable according to the regulations of the day, and they were allowed to be in Brod only on the days the ferry ran, and even then, said Dacca, only for as long as absolutely necessary for them to receive the leeches delivered from Bosnia, and on condit