Politika newspaper archive and pulled out the issues between the eighth and fifteenth of March. I didn't know what I was looking for exactly, but I pored over the city chronicle, the classifieds, and the death notices. I came across a brief news item in the March 10 issue that the body of a young male was found in the reeds along the Danube shore on the Zemun side, but there was nothing to indicate foul play. There was no follow-up of the news item over the next days, nor did I find anything among the death notices that could be tied to the young man. Then, in the March 15 paper, along with a news item about a man who'd been killed the day before in Surčin, I came across a mention of an investigation showing that the young man whose corpse had been found near Hotel Yugoslavia had been killed by a blunt object. The identity of the victim was still unknown. I put the paper down and rubbed my face. My heart was pounding as if I had come to a sudden halt after a horrific run; I felt dizzy, nausea climbed up my esophagus. I don't know how I got out of the Politika building. All I know is that I caught sight of myself in the window of a glass-cutting shop. The wan, rumpled figure smiling anxiously at me must have been me, though there was no indication that I had recognized myself. I turned and kept walking down the street that, as it turned out, led to Zeleni Venac. I got on a bus to Zemun, and not until the crowds around me grew larger did I finally pull myself together. If the news in the paper had been accurate, and there was no reason to think it was not, and provided this had been the very same young man, then what had happened was much more than a game. For a moment I even thought that I was to blame for the young man's death, for had I gone after him instead of pointlessly following the woman, he might be alive today. On the other hand, something else could have happened: I could be dead today, because clearly, the people the young man had rubbed the wrong way would have been just as sensitive about witnesses. Therefore, I should be pleased that I had followed the woman; still, I couldn't rid myself of the bitter taste of complicity or betrayal. The bus crossed the Sava Bridge and turned toward Zemun. In the distance along the promenade cyclists and strollers could be seen. A little girl was holding a string tied to a kite flying high above her. Big and little dogs romped in the bright green grass. Two boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth, and it wobbled through the air as if exhausted. The bus passed Hotel Yugoslavia. There was nothing at the top of the artificial hill but the pillars of the old Zemun railroad station, protruding like the ruins of antiquity. I got off the bus at the square, went into a supermarket, and spent about fifteen minutes studying the ingredients on various canned and processed foods. Nothing calms me so profoundly as the partially intelligible lists that reduce food to an extremely unappealing form. A cookie, for instance, becomes flour, sugar, vegetable shortening, cocoa powder, powdered skim milk, ammonium bicarbonate, sodium bicarbonate, lecithin, kitchen salt, natural coloring, and natural aroma. I read this in several languages: Serbian, Albanian, Slovene, Croatian, Macedonian, English, Hungarian, and Romanian. Then I bought some bread and yogurt and went home. Over the past few days and weeks I had been unsure how to act in certain situations, but now I felt I'd lost ground altogether. It did occur to me, I must confess, that I should flee; inevitable thinking in such situations, but never for a moment did I consider this acceptable. Later I did run away, that's true, but the circumstances were entirely different and flight was a necessity rather than a choice. I'll get to that later, there's time. Flight, therefore, at that moment was out of the question, as was my next thought: that I should go to the police. I had no faith in the system, I didn't side with the regime in power, which meant that I had nothing to hope for from the police: they had quite a number of unsolved crimes on their hands, after all, one more would have meant nothing to them. Maybe I could write something for my column in