ion that no smuggling was involved, in which case the authorities would have been merciless with them, the Jews, not the leeches, and expelled them from the Military Frontier at once. Now here is where the additional information that arrived from Zagreb comes in, an extract from a document that had eluded me or else had been located at a later date, in which the Slavonian general command informs the Zemun magistrate's office that a young Jewish man who had been smuggling leeches was arrested in the vicinity of Slavonski Brod, and when questioned as to what his name was and where he was from, he replied that his name was Volf Enoch and that he was a water carrier by trade from Zemun. The command didn't believe him and sought confirmation from the magistrate that in the registry of Zemun Jews such a person with such a name was listed, demanding at the same time of the magistrate that if the detainee's claims were shown to be accurate, why he had been able to leave his duties in Zemun and come as far as Slavonski Brod, especially since no leeches in any considerable quantity were found upon his person, but he did have in his sack many manuscripts and vials with an assortment of liquids and powders, which made everything more suspicious and merited confidentiality and caution. The response of the Zemun magistrate, Dacca said, has not been preserved, but even so we can clearly see that this could not be the same Volf Enoch, because the document refers to a young man, whereas Volf Enoch, if he were one and the same person, would have been about eighty years old at the time, and no one could have described him as a young Jew, unless, said Dača, it was, in fact, our Volf, but altered or refreshed in some way despite his advanced age. You see, he said, and by this time he was gesticulating excitedly, the extract quotes a part of a letter from the command dated January 1834, which states that the Zemun magistrate's office should make an effort to provide additional information about this Volf Enoch, because he vanished from the cell where he'd been held, and when they say vanished, said Dacca, they remark that he vanished in the literal sense of the word. In that cell, you see, there were other people, and when they woke up one morning, Volf was no longer among them. No one had heard or seen a thing, there were no traces of a tunnel dug or bars broken, and his sack was missing from the office where it had been set aside for safekeeping, though no one had been in the office that night, since the key was in the pocket of a prison clerk who had spent the entire night in his bed, as confirmed by his wife. This disappearance, the document explained in closing, casts an uncomplimentary light on the work of the police and the corresponding segment of the Slavonian general command, and required of them to make an effort as urgently as possible to address the case of the Jewish leech gatherer who could not have simply melted into thin air. Except, of course, said Dacca, and winked at me, if he was our Eleazar, for whom, as a Kabbalist, to move to another place was no hardship at all, no matter how far away. He leaned over, picked up his hat, and set it on his head. It's time, he said, as the doorbell rang. Dacca immediately took off his hat, I got up, Jaša said he wasn't expecting anyone, and when he opened the door, there was, indeed, no one there. Not only was there no one there, I told Marko when I visited him later, but it was dark in the stairwell, so Jaša, when he opened the door, took a quick step back, just as he would have, I said, had he seen an unusual person or an unexpected sight at the door, and Dacca and I, convinced that this was why he had stepped back, ran to the door, and then we too stepped back, faced with darkness. We peered for a bit longer into the darkness, then Jaša shut the door and asked if we'd like a drink. Darkness, he added, brings on thirst. Marko nodded, though I could see he was not listening as carefully as he had on previous days. I told him about what had happened on the hill near Hotel Yugoslavia, and here he seemed more willing to listen, he even asked a few questions about how the people were dressed, whether anyone among them was barefoot, whether there were more fair-haired women than dark-haired, but I had no precise answers. I was so vague in fact that Marko finally asked if I had been on the hill at all. I didn't answer right away; I was tired, I wanted to lie down and get a good night's sleep, and I was upset with myself for being upset by Marko's reproach, it being every bit as justified, I have to admit, as my own behavior of the day before. Perhaps I had forgotten some things, I said, finally, however, I remembered that their movement, which seemed arbitrary at first, was coordinated, even when they began to disperse, so I decided there was a message hidden in the shapes, forms, geometric figures, call them what you will, and that the movement, this traversing of imagined pathways to and fro, in other words everything up to their departure, represented a language that was being communicated to someone who knew how to listen. To watch, said Marko, because if this was geometry, listening wouldn't be of much use. He rolled a hefty joint and offered it to me like a peace pipe. While we smoked, he talked about grand geometric endeavors, such as the vast earthen drawings in South America or the magnificent hills raised by the Indians of North America, and in both cases, he felt, one could speak of visual languages, just as the pyramids had been elements of such a language, he firmly believed in that, both those in Egypt and those the Incas built to reach the sun, and then he rolled yet another joint, so the visual languages acquired yet another dimension, just as we two did, and the conversation meandered more and more, traversing a winding forest path, and at one point I wanted us to reach a clearing somewhere, to sit and catch our breath. Instead, I said goodbye to Marko and left for home. In the hallway of his building, as I was going down the stairs, I had to clutch the banister because I was finding it difficult to gauge the height and depth of each step correctly, which made me stumble, and I was afraid I would fall. By the end I was gripping the banister with my right hand, while swinging with my left as if I were walking on a tightrope, high above a ravine. Out on the street I raised my right hand high in the air, and only then did I feel the ease of equilibrium. I could go, I thought, anywhere I like, and I set out for the city park, but when I reached the main path, the barking of a dog that came from its dark depths prompted me to take a different route, by the hospital, then down along Dubrovačka, until I reached the main street. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. The traffic lights were blinking, several people were waiting at a bus stop in front of the department store, the McDonald's was gleaming, taxi drivers were sitting on a bench smoking, drunken men were singing, a little later a woman's voice joined in, then a man spoke of stars, perhaps he even gave their names, and suddenly I knew where I was to go. I headed for Zmaj Jovina Street. I walked back by the taxi drivers, crossed to the other side of the street, looked at the window of a stationery store, and turned by the theater, which seemed neglected in the dark, perhaps even more so than in daytime. I walked cautiously, as if wading through shallow water, and when I saw that the big wooden gate was ajar, I thought it would be better to keep going until I got to the riverbank where all this had started and where the water, I thought, would be deeper. But I did pause. I couldn't see the poster for tai chi classes, though for a moment I thought I spotted a light patch where the poster used to be. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. There was no one. Slowly I slipped into the dark passageway, took two or three steps and stopped, staring at the pump, which glowed as if all the moonlight were pouring into it and it alone. Everything else was pitch-dark: the flowerpots with the barberries, the sidewall of the facing building, the stoop, and the front door. I couldn't even make out the bench, the darkness had probably engulfed it, as it had everything else. Then it occurred to me that someone was sitting there. I don't know where I got the idea, but once it had occurred to me, I couldn't shake it, and I took cautious steps toward the courtyard, slightly hunched, as if fearful of what I would see. Very slowly I approached the end of the passageway, leaned against the wall, and inhaled and exhaled deeply. Out of my eye, my left, I could still see the silvery pump, its long handle, the decorated basin into which the water flowed, the foundation with partially chipped paint. I took another deep breath, but I didn't release it, and instead stepped abruptly out of the passageway, eyes open wide, prepared to surprise the person sitting on the bench. The bench was empty. Something rustled in the dark behind the barberries, and when I spun around the pump was no longer aglow. The moonlight, if it was moonlight, had disappeared and all that was visible on the pump were patches of old paint and layers of rust. I went over to the bench, sat down, lay my hands on my thighs, and shut my eyes. Nothing happened, no silence settled on me, no music struck up, no one's voice could be heard. I opened my eyes and looked at the walls around me. Nothing had changed, as if reality this time had decided to stay the same. I stood up, then sat down again. I shut and opened my eyes several times, even squinted once through my lashes and tried to hold my breath as long as possible, but nothing helped. It occurred to me then that I'd always sat on the bench in daytime, and that things might be different at night, which was a comforting thought, though inadequate to bring back the fine mood I'd felt as I had turned into Zmaj Jovina Street. I stood up, ready to go, and that is when I heard the music. It sounded different from the ethereal music I'd heard earlier, and when I strained to hear better, I realized it was the echo of music from a café nearby, or perhaps from the barges along the river. There was no point, what with the pounding rhythm and the rumble of bass and drums, to staying in the courtyard. The bench was sinking into a darkness so dense that it was as if the darkness meant to hide the bench. Then that same darkness seemed to be taking the shape of a body, of someone's presence, but when I moved and shifted my angle, I realized this was just the interplay of thick and thin shadows. I went down the passageway, headed for the entrance, and paused: the gate was shut and there was not a trace of light from the street. I was certain I had not shut the gate when I came in. More precisely, I had not even touched it, doing my best to slip through unobtrusively. I was also certain that no one had come into the courtyard after me, because I would definitely have spotted that someone; neither the pump nor the bench so held my attention that I could have lost touch with what was going on around me. But then if no one came in, did someone go out? Maybe the person was waiting in the dark of the passageway, maybe he'd been standing behind the gate or was crouching in a corner, and when I got far enough, or when I went over to sit on the bench, he sneaked out, pulling the heavy gate shut behind him? I took hold of the big latch with one hand, and with the other I pushed the gate open and stepped into the street. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. There was no one. But I still felt, I said to Marko on the phone, that someone was watching. I expected his mocking commentary, but all that came across the telephone receiver was the sound of crunching. I had called him at about midnight and our conversation went on for nearly two hours, so that at one point, just as I was wrapping up the account of my most recent escapades, Marko said he had to eat an apple. I didn't see a soul, I repeated, but the feeling that someone was watching closely was so real. And offensive, I added. You too, Marko announced, should eat more apples, and he went on to talk about the beneficial qualities of the apple, and then, without a pause, remarked that he was still thinking of a newspaper article he had read about a man who had killed himself, and for no reason, it said, in a car parked in front of a clinic, and it wasn't even his own car but a car borrowed from a friend, allegedly to cart his old television set to his mother-in-law's. It's not clear, said Marko, why he stopped in front of the clinic, which is not near his mother-in-law's apartment but in a whole different part of town, and besides, where did he get the gun, sometimes it seems easier to get ahold of a gun than of household appliances. But it's clear, Marko continued, the times we live in killed him, what else could have? By the way, he said, no one knew the man in the clinic, which didn't stop the employees from making all sorts of pronouncements, and the mother-in-law from stating that she would cherish that television set as a memento of her son-in-law, though she had to go to great lengths to wash all traces of the blood off the screen and the buttons. I was supposed to laugh at that point, but there was no time, because Marko kept talking about wiping off the blood and removing traces, and then from the story about the suicide and the mother-in-law moved on to advising on the direction the talks should be taking between the authorities in Belgrade and the Albanian leaders in Kosovo. The newspapers at that point were forever running reports on the efforts of the government to establish a dialogue with the Albanians, thereby painting a more favorable picture of themselves for world opinion, and if there was a subject about which I had absolutely no desire to talk, Marko had found it. Now I realize that I was actually evading talk of reality and that everything that happened to me during those spring months six years ago — plunging into the shadowy world of mystical phenomena — was a form of self-deception, a form of solace or, more precisely, escapism from our reality at the time. The encounters with the unbridled nationalists were so surreal that I didn't even feel them to be a part of that reality. I was wrong, of course, because they, the violent young men, were just as real as the blows they dealt me, and just as real today, perhaps not quite so numerous, but certainly louder and more bold. Furthermore they are still where they were then, in a place they feel to be theirs alone, while I am somewhere else, it doesn't matter where, and words are all I have left, and this attempt at fashioning from them something that will have at least a semblance of permanence. Eleazar, if he were here, might have cast off words, though I am not altogether sure of that because the Kabbalah, like the entire Jewish tradition, is based on words, and silence is a realm into which Kabbalists have not been eager to venture. But what do I really know about the Kabbalah? What I learned from Jaša Alkalaj and heard from Dača, when I managed to wrest myself free of the hypnotic movement of his hat, and which, in terms of real knowledge, was barely a drop in the sea. Sometimes one drop, Jaša would say, is greater than a whole sea, a grain of sand more impassable than a desert, a snowflake more threatening than an avalanche. At those words Dacca would take off his hat and add that the ignorance of an ignoramus is greater than the knowledge of a connoisseur, and a connoisseur will never know as much as the ignoramus doesn't know. Then he would put on the hat, maybe even tilt it, you would barely see his eyes under the lowered brim. My eyes were also barely visible, but in my case the reason was exhaustion, as well as Marko's endless, monotonous, boring monologue. At first I attempted to get a word in edgewise, then I only voiced my assent or disagreement gutturally, and finally I fell silent altogether, and waited for it to end, doing what I could to fend off sleep. All in all, said Marko finally, only madmen can't see that the solution to the crisis lies in partitioning Kosovo. Sure, I said, easy to say that to me, but go and say it out loud on Terazije and they'll skin you alive. I looked at the clock, it was almost two, I nearly ended the conversation, which I didn't do, because I felt I ought to show Marko some sign of devotion so that I could repair what I had damaged with the unintended misunderstanding at the high-rise. I turned away from the clock and pressed the receiver more firmly to my ear. You think I won't? Marko went on, and not only on Terazije bu