Minut was due any day, and considering the historical circumstances, especially the threats of bombing and the efforts of the authorities to portray the threats as an illegitimate attack on the internal affairs of the country, a text on destiny seemed appealing. But what could I write about: that what was said made no difference, because what was bound to happen had been determined long ago, that any action on our part now would be a waste of time? Which, of course, was the opposite of what the government was saying to the nation: that we the people, all of us, were deciding what would happen, and if we said no to anyone or anything, we became the tailors of our own destiny. In other words, if the tailor was shown not to be real, and real bombs were to start falling on us, we would simply say this is not true and pretend to be living in another reality, in which the world was created to our own specifications. I completely understood Marko's desire to go off to another galaxy, though I would have been happy with a parallel time, a reality in which events were playing out in a calmer way. I went to the window and looked out. Lights were on in several apartments of the facing buildings. There was no one on the street, though the turn signal was blinking on a car parked in front of the pharmacy display window. It was blinking on and off with a slow, halting rhythm, and before long I decided that it was sending me a message, a little like Morse code. I watched a while longer, trying to divine the rhythm of the repeats, to measure the time between blinks, but then I got tired of it all, my eyelids began to droop, and I went into the bathroom. When I came back, the turn signal was no longer blinking. I looked to the left, I looked to the right. The city slumbered, and suddenly I felt terribly tired. I sat down in the armchair. Whether because of the late hour or my exhaustion, I thought I should forget all this, or give up on it, because it had begun to look like the poorly linked parts of a farce, comic in its efforts to be taken seriously. Even the manuscript that I had acquired suddenly looked like a pompous mishmash, a patchwork quilt, a toy that played games with itself. True, I hadn't looked at it for days, and maybe it would not be a bad idea, I thought, to leaf through it in the mood I was in now. I settled into the armchair, clenched my buttocks and released them, and then shut my eyes, anticipating a yawn. I was awakened by the clamor of the street. I opened my eyelids and saw a cloudy morning. I straightened up, stretched, probed my teeth with my tongue. Then I covered my face with my hands. My mouth was dry: I could do with a glass of water. I got up and went to the window. A fine rain was drizzling. A woman was standing at the bus stop, protected by a red umbrella. The car was no longer parked in front of the pharmacy. I drew the curtain, stepped back, and opened the window. People were going from kiosk to kiosk, buying newspapers, carrying bread from the bakery, somebody whistled, the buses rumbled, a boy and a girl were kissing, sparrows landed on crumbs, and then I thought that nothing could replace the fine warp and woof of life, that no government or system could completely unravel this fabric; at worst, some of the thread would be wound up in an irregular ball, but new ones would keep sprouting, even if they were only threads one of the Fates was drawing off her spindle, sometimes that's sufficient, a thread of life stretched in a void. I thought at once of the other two Fates, the one who decides how long the thread will be, and the one who snips it. A person is tied to the spinner of fate his whole life, and wherever he moves he pulls that thread along with him, and when he finally shakes free of it, he marches to death, as if by dying he earns his right to freedom. I shuddered at the thought, swiftly shut the window, dashed into the bathroom to wash my face and shave, nothing refreshes a man like a shave, even washing your hair doesn't feel as good, at least not for me, so, once I had done it all, I felt like a new man. Then I called Dragan Mišović. This time there was no need to remind him who I was. He asked what had happened with the sign made of the circle and the triangles, and how I was getting on with solving the equation with too many unknowns. Nothing has changed, I said, the sign hasn't opened up and the unknowns have gone on multiplying. And now you have a new question, said Dragan Mišović, and you think it will help you understand the other two? Yes, I said. Don't you think, he went on, that the unanswered questions will become too large an obstacle, which will, in time, become insurmountable? I don't like being lectured to and had I not shaved, which had put me in a good mood, I would have hung up on him. Sure, I said. That's what I always say when I don't understand something or I disagree with something. Dragan Mišović said nothing. I could feel he felt my lack of sincerity, just as I could feel that he felt I was feeling it. Sorry, I said. Forget it, he said, we all have moments we wish we hadn't had, and then he asked for the real reason I had called, he couldn't imagine I had called to ask how he was, and even if I had, he never answered such questions. Fine, I said, and took a deep breath, I'm interested in whether geometry can take the place of language. Geometry is a language, said Dragan Mišović. I don't mean the language of signs, I said. Me neither, said Dragan Mišović. I read somewhere, I said, that the body finds its way through space, whether geometric or emotive, by constantly drawing mental maps, and in that way space and feeling communicate with the body. So, now, I said, if we take this map out of the body, so to speak, will it speak to others the way it speaks to us? Sometimes I wonder, said Dragan Mišović, how you come up with such questions. I would like to know that too, I answered. And besides, he said, I am not sure your question really belongs to the realm of mathematics, because these mental maps, even though they can be represented as geometric models, come about in a complex interaction of physical and mental factors. And one more thing, he added, geometry implies a certain universality, while mental maps are highly individual, as individual, he said, as each of us is different, and here, I am afraid, there is no language. Yet if we imagine a group of people, I continued stubbornly, who are making the shape of the same mental map with their bodies, say, a map of feelings of love or serenity, couldn't someone else, who sees that, develop those same feelings? Maybe, said Dragan Mišović, though I am not entirely sure what you are saying, and I am no expert at feelings. I'm not talking about feelings, I said, but about the transmission of information, a process that happens with every reading, say, when you read a description of a sad scene in some novel and you start to cry. I wouldn't know, he said, I don't read novels. His tone had suddenly changed, as if he were losing interest in the conversation, or, which only occurred to me much later, as if someone were standing next to him and listening in. I asked him to give it some thought anyway, and he, sounding vague and unconvincing, promised to get in touch if he thought of anything. He hung up before we'd even said goodbye. I stared for a while longer at the receiver, then placed it back in the cradle. Had the time come, I wondered, to admit that I was at a dead end, that somewhere I had taken a wrong turn and found myself on the wrong path, and the only way to change anything was to go back to square one? So, I took an apple, just as I had a month before, and walked down to the quay. It was not Sunday, and it was not yet two P.M., but the day was every bit as fickle: the clouds parted as I left the house, the sun gleamed through, but by the time I reached the promenade, it started to rain. I lowered my head, swallowed the last bite of apple, except the stem, which I continued to nibble on and suck until it finally came apart. The water level of the Danube was not as high as it had been a month before, so I could not be sure where the man and the woman had been standing, and I wasn't altogether certain which bench I had been sitting on. There were three, and first I thought it was the middle one, which seemed too easy and obvious a choice, so I settled on the third, the one that was the farthest from the shabby little playground. The playground was deserted: maybe it was too early for the mothers with small children, or maybe they had already been here and the rain had chased them away. I went over to the third bench and from there looked out at the Danube. Yes, that was the angle, that was exactly the spot where I had been sitting when the young man walked past, and it was from there that I had stepped forward, ready and eager to go down the slope toward the woman who had stood with one leg in the water, but then I had stopped when I caught sight of the man in the black trench coat. Why had I stopped? What led me to kneel and start tying and untying my shoelaces, allowing the man in the black trench coat to get away? I looked at the damp seesaw, the little cars and the train, and the only explanation I could arrive at was that the man who'd been standing by the seesaw was so at odds with those surroundings that he couldn't help but arouse my suspicions, my alarm, and, finally, lead me to abandon my Samaritan descent to the woman who had been slapped on the riverbank. Maybe I wasn't supposed to have followed the girl, I thought, except that my later discovery of the signs could be interpreted as an outcome of my having followed her, as something she guided me to. Probably I wasn't supposed to notice the man in black either. He wasn't there because of me, but because of the young man and woman. But what was the connection between the two, if any? And had everything that had happened to me since then happened only because someone saw me follow the woman? Perhaps here on the promenade there had not been just one man in a black trench coat, perhaps there had been two? And why not an entire battalion, Marko would have asked had I told him about it, why be modest? And he would have been right, I have to confess, regardless of the role that he played in it all. From this distance I can see, clear as day, but it's too late now, I've said it before, to change anything, life is only a handful of memories, after all, nothing more. The rain kept pelting, sharp and persistent, as if it were autumn, not spring, and the raindrops slid off my hair and unerringly found the space between my neck and shirt collar. I went home, dried my hair with a towel, ate one more apple, translated some, wrote for a while, watched television, and finally tumbled into bed. Two days later, armed with a pad and several colored pencils, I made a detailed inspection of the streets around the Zemun open market. I wanted to find as many traces as I could, or signs, and make a list to see whether, taken in total, they offered additional insight. The day before I'd done something different: I went to the