Minut a piece about the role numbers play in our lives. It is amazing that something that doesn't exist in nature, in any form, plays such an important role in our conceptualization of the world. It would be more natural not to know numbers, which probably was the case long ago, because that brings us closer to the original construct of the universe, and this was recently confirmed. I read in Politikin Zabavnik that a tribe was discovered in the jungles of the Amazon who had no notion of numbers and could not count. If a member of the tribe caught two fish, a second one caught three, a third one caught five, they made no distinction. Fish are fish, and that was that. It is a long way from there to the numbers tattooed on people's skin in concentration camps, and I wanted to write the piece for my column in Minut about that journey, from a number that does not exist to the number that was the entrance ticket to the death chamber. When I did write the piece, it looked different, as so often happens when we write, and I focused mostly on numbers in the Jewish tradition and on the fact that many things in their religious practice are defined in numbers, such as, for instance, the Thirteen Divine Attributes, the Ten Commandments, the 613 commandments, or mitzvoth, the 231 permutations in the order of the alphabet through which the world is created, and here I also had to mention, which I now see as an exceptionally important detail, the ten Sephirot, or degrees, through which God is manifested in the world. The editor had worried needlessly; the piece did draw readers, and the same day it was published email began pouring in, followed with a lag of several days by real, old-fashioned letters, two or three postcards, and even a small package, which, for reasons of security, I never opened but tossed into the nearest trash basket on my way out of the editorial office. The messages were mostly voicing praise and respect for the Jewish tradition, though there were also unfavorable comments, even open attacks and accusations of excessive love for "Jewish scum." One letter looked like a ransom note from a crime novel, it was composed of letters, words, and parts of sentences cut from the daily and weekly press. It was long, and I felt a begrudging admiration for the person willing to spend so many hours with all that finicky cutting and pasting, probably while wearing plastic gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints on the scissors, glue tube, and newspapers. After finishing the job, when he had finally taken off the gloves, his skin must have been all puckered and wrinkled from sweat. Some of the phrases in the 1 etter irresistibly reminded me of what I had heard in my encounter with the hard-core nationalists, and I had a feeling they would soon reemerge, which was promised, more or less, in the final sentence in the pasted letter. We will see who is right, the sentence said, composed of eight little slips of newspaper, among which I recognized two letters cut from Politika and one word cut out of Danas. A day or two after the piece was published, graffiti appeared on a building near the editorial office of Minut, which said, JEWS ARE NOTHING BUT NUMBERS, and under it the next night someone added, AUSCHWITZ COMMANDER, and out in front of my door I was greeted by foul-smelling excrement again, wrapped in a photograph of the Dead Sea, but, I confess, I didn't understand what that meant. I had never been good at interpreting symbols, and for the life of me I couldn't divine whether the excrement was an allusion to death, as suggested by the name of the sea, or to a surfeit of salt, a spooky atmosphere, a depression on the earth's surface, which could possibly be associated with hell, or whether the purveyor of the excrement, perhaps better the producer of the excrement, had no other picture of Israel handy, so the picture he did have, a somber view of the empire of salt, had to suffice for the wrapping. In any case, the shit lay over the photograph as if it were floating on the surface of the sea. The excrement, the writing, the irate messages warned me that there were worse things to come, and indeed, in the next few days I noticed those young men trailing me more often, and I tried to avoid coming home late at night or taking solitary walks along the river. At night I heard sounds in the hallway of my building, as well as in front of my door, which prompted me to position things useful for self-defense around the apartment: an umbrella, a board from the cellar, a hard plastic pipe, a hammer, and a wrench. And as I was placing them strategically, I had to laugh, because I knew I'd never use them, or if I were to use them, I'd be more likely to hurt myself. The hammer fell on my foot more than once. However, when the phone rang the next night, I grabbed the rolling pin from under the bed and started for the door. I stood there in the dark for a while, listening to the silence in the hallway, and only then did I recognize the sound of the phone ringing behind me. I walked over to the phone, rolling pin raised, as if, when I picked up the receiver, someone might leap out, but when I put the receiver to my ear, I heard Margareta's voice. Chagrined, I hid the rolling pin behind my back. She apologized for calling so late, especially if she'd woken me, she said, but she'd just read my piece in