Minut and had to call me that instant. She enunciated words by separating them into syllables and spoke as if she were humming. That's all right, I said, wondering what to do about the rolling pin. Why did I own a rolling pin in the first place, a rolling pin that looked old and battered, though I never bake, and the making of pastry dough, which is what, as far as I know, the rolling pin is generally used for, I consider to be an undertaking more challenging than the efforts of an alchemist at making gold? Margareta, however, was interested in the Sephirot, as far as numbers were concerned, she said, she knew nothing, and even an ordinary visit to a market was torment because of the awkwardness she felt when the woman at the cash register handed her back the change. Some things, I thought, we will never know, and while Margareta was talking about her wanderings through the deserts and the primeval jungles of numbers, I was putting the rolling pin back under the bed. But, Margareta then said, back to the Sephirot. Did she think, I asked, that I should have said there were in fact eleven, and should I have mentioned the hidden one, Knowledge, situated between Wisdom and Understanding? Hey, said Margareta, about such topics we are better off talking without an intermediary. It so happened she was in the apartment in the high-rise by the Danube where Marko and I had found her message, and she would like us to go on talking about the Sephirot there if I didn't mind getting dressed, of course, and going out so late at night. How did she know, I asked, that I wasn't dressed? I know all sorts of things, said Margareta, but I don't let on. I said nothing. I wondered whether she knew about the brandishing of the rolling pin. I would not be surprised. Fine, I said, and started pulling clothes on even before I'd hung up. All the while, even once I'd gone out into the street, I could not get the rolling pin off my mind, though what worried me more was completely forgetting something. I've always been fascinated, I later said to Margareta, by the mechanism of forgetting, or rather the question of how to check whether something is forgotten or not, because if it has been forgotten, I said, it is no longer in question, which means, if it is still in question, then the oblivion is not complete. Just as it wasn't complete in the case of my rolling pin, I said, if, indeed, it was mine at all. Margareta laughed with a full-throated laugh that I didn't entirely appreciate at that time of night, maybe because her teeth flashed sharply in the gloom of the apartment in the high-rise. I didn't mention that when I entered the high-rise and found that the bulb in the stairwell was out, I regretted not bringing the rolling pin, especially when it seemed that someone was breathing in the dark not too far from me. I didn't dare use the stairs, I would have been quaking at every corner, so instead I called the elevator and took it to the fourth floor. Margareta opened the door before I had had the chance to ring the doorbell or use the key from the mailbox. She was barefoot, and, trying not to look at her feet or at my pale image in the oval mirror, I started talking about the rolling pin while we were still in the front hall. Numerous lamps were on, so that, dappled with shadows, the apartment seemed buried in books. More books on the floor than before: some piled high had toppled, so in places it was barely possible to wade through. A lamp was also burning on the small desk, casting light on a volume of an encyclopedia, next to which there were pages of writing. Margareta offered me tea, and when I accepted, she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. I went to the window, looked to the left, looked to the right, night was everywhere. The lights of the capital city were squinting as if ready to go to bed. I turned when I heard clinking; Margareta set the tray on the floor, then sat beside it. Her skirt momentarily slid up her thigh, baring a dazzling whiteness, which forced me to look up and study the expanse of ceiling. Jasmine tea, said Margareta, and passed me a cup. She'd tried any number of teas, she said, but jasmine she liked best, and in any case, she added, there is nothing better for a conversation about good and evil. If she was thinking of my rolling pin, I said, that would be the embodiment of good, and it would only have something to do with evil if it were to land on a bad skull. There is nothing absolutely good or absolutely bad, answered Margareta, even in a rolling pin, though she believed, she added, that there were rolling pins that had pressed evil to the very edge of their cylindrical form. I laughed. I could not believe, I said, that she had got me up at three o'clock in the morning so we could talk about good and evil rolling pins. That is because, Margareta said, I thought I'd left my rolling pin at home, but I still had it with me. Many people, she felt, do not understand that things rule us only because we are careless with them. When you leave something, she said, then it must be left behind within the self and outside the self. She stretched out her hand, plucked a book from the nearest pile, lifted it, then set it on the floor. I am leaving it here, she said, but I am also leaving it in myself. She touched her stomach, as if she'd swallowed the book. If she were to walk away now, she said, and stood up abruptly, the book would remain, both outside and inside, and when she returned, she said, and sat back down, she would pick it up as if she'd never left it, in the room or in herself. As she was sitting, the whiteness of her thigh shone again. Margareta sipped her tea. Next time, I said, I will be more careful. No, said Margareta, it has nothing to do with being careful, and there may be no next time. She looked hard at me, and I had to make a major effort to sustain her gaze, not knowing what was expected of me. She had gray-blue eyes, more gray than blue, now that I think of it, though after all these years I'm not sure of that either. All right, she said, now listen. I'm guessing she talked for more than an hour; then she went off to brew fresh tea. What did she talk about? About the Kabbalah, the system of the Sephirot, the emanation of divine substance, about the system of everything in existence, the notion of good and evil, the migration of souls, the harmony of the spheres, the influence of the planets, prayer and silence. Some of the things were familiar, while others I was hearing for the first time. I got up, lifted my arms, stretched, then began pacing back and forth by the bookladen shelves. I passed by the desk, eyed the pages of writing, but didn't dare stop and study them more closely, though the sounds coming from the kitchen confirmed that Margareta was still busy preparing the tea. I did, however, recognize the open book; it was the volume of the Jewish Encyclopedia dedicated to entries starting with the letter G, as confirmed by the title of the entry " Gilgul," which I did manage to glimpse in passing. I paced a little longer, stared into the dark windowpanes, glanced at two or three books, leafed through Moshe Idel's study on the golem, and promised myself that I would definitely read it at some point. I notice that I am inventing reasons more and more often now to digress from the story, or slow it down, or even to avoid telling it at all, as if keeping a record can be called storytelling, and as if all this sounds like a story to anyone but me. After all, what is a story? A question to which, of course, I will not respond, because that answer too would only be yet another form of postponement, unlike the answer I got from Margareta when I asked her, pointing to the open volume of the encyclopedia, whether she was getting ready to travel. The question was meant to be witty, but Margareta answered in all seriousness that preparations mean nothing here because souls are traveling all the time, and it is certain that we do not make those decisions. The only decision we make, she said as she poured the tea, is what we'll be like in this life, because good souls seek out good people, just as evil souls search for the bad. That, she said, is one of the explanations as to why a good person becomes better sometimes, or why an evil person suddenly feels the evil urge. I sipped my tea. There are souls, Margareta continued, who circle the world for centuries doing whatever they can to contribute to the spread of good because that is the only way for evil to be gradually crowded off the face of the earth, to make the whole world a mirror for the good. She spoke with a fervor that in those years could only be heard, in an entirely different context, in the rabid tirades of political agitators on television news, and it was astonishing for me to find that such earnestness still existed in some other realm of the spirit. Margareta suddenly stopped talking, and tilting her head to one side, she looked at me intently. I hope, she said, that I'm not burdening you with things that don't interest you. There is nothing worse, she continued, than making people listen to something that means nothing to them, and it had seemed for a moment to her, she said, that she detected a shadow of boredom in my expression. I touched my face with the tips of my fingers, as if to check whether such a shadow was there, but the only thing I felt was the rough tips of my fingers on my chin and cheeks. If she had seen something, I told her, then it was fatigue, because if I'd been bored, I would have left long ago. In that case, Margareta told me, she would like to hear how I explained the presence of evil in the world. I shrugged. It is here, I said, like everything else, and if there is an explanation for other things, then the same holds true for evil. Margareta raised the cup to her lips, sipped a little tea, smiled. She had already taken note, she said, of my skill at speaking without saying anything, while leaving space in the process for further maneuvers, for affirming or denying or for totally withdrawing from further conversation. Now it was my turn to smile and raise my cup to my lips. I'd noticed, I said, that she never used more words than necessary, so that in some sense we complemented each other because I used the largest number of words, while she used the least possible number, which meant, statistically speaking, that on the average we used the same number of words. We'll never get anywhere if we fall back on language games, said Margareta. I agreed and took another sip of jasmine tea. The problem with evil, she said, is that its existence brings into question the assertion that God is good and omnipotent, because if he truly is, why did he need to create evil in any form? Maybe he didn't mean to, I replied, and instead, all on its own, evil transformed itself into a force opposing the one God had intended for the world and people? Margareta said that there were such interpretations in all religions, and that many rabbis, among them Kabbalists such as Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, felt that evil had been created so that the very act of overcoming it would bring people to understand the oneness of God. The Kabbalists determined the place within the system of the Sephirot where the source of evil lies, she said, and that is the Sephirot of Chesed and Gevurah, as shown by Rabbi Isaac the Blind. She spread her hands to remind me that these Sephirot assume the realms of the right and left hands on the human body, that the white and red colors belong to them, which she, for some reason, called angry colors, and silver and gold, or water and fire, all of them opposites, which, she added, through their friction probably encourage the emphasis on evil. All in all, she said, lowering her hands, whatever the sources of evil may be, no one can gainsay its existence, so there is no point in dwelling too long on the question of where it comes from, especially, she said, if the source is taken as Adam, or his tasting of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Even if we wanted to, she said, we couldn't go back in time and stop him from separating the tree of life from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by his action, so by picking the fruit he was sundering the thread that connected the fruit to the original source, which led to the creation, in his heart, according to the Kabbalists, of malicious intention. After that, she said, after taking apart what should have been joined, evil could have easily used the newly formed conduit to pour into the world, where it would then keep growing, establishing a counterbalance to good and offering itself, shamelessly, to the human race and its right to free choice. I'll never understand, I said, how someone, faced with a choice between good and evil, chooses evil. She couldn't understand either, Margareta replied, but the fact remained that human history is a series of disgraces springing from wrong choices. She sipped a little tea, wiped her mouth, and repeated that no matter how interesting the question of evil might be, what really interested all of us here was how to respond to it, how to stand up to it, and, finally, how to overcome it. I asked, staring at her feet, whom she had in mind when she referred to all of us here. Margareta fell silent for a moment, took another sip of tea, and said we would talk about that another time. Behind her head, through the window, I saw the sky begin to lighten. There are some, Margareta continued, who see no point in tangling with evil and feel that a focus on doing good deeds is all that is needed, leading to an increase in the quantity of goodness and a total liberation from evil, therefore, to an establishment of a world in which there will be nothing but goodness, not even free will, because there will no longer be a need for man to choose. There will be nothing to choose from, said Margareta, because everything a person does will be good, and each person will be good, and so will the whole world. Regrettably, she sighed, in the times we live in we don't have the luxury of waiting patiently for that day to come, because the lunacy of evil is growing, and there is nothing left for us but to take on the fight with evil, not just individually, each in our own heart, she said, but more broadly, just as the sons of light battle the sons of darkness. And what, I asked, does this have to do with me? Margareta hesitated for a moment, then shook her head as if she was persuading herself of something. This was still not the right time for an answer to that question, she said, but soon enough it would be, she couldn't say when, but she could promise that I wouldn't have long to wait. So does that mean, I persisted, that there's an explanation for everything that's been happening to me? There is always an explanation, Margareta replied, nothing happens outside the larger flow of all things. I know that, I said impatiently, but there are ways to channel that flow, to guide a person to a path that someone else has defined, and what interests me is which path that is. Margareta touched her finger to her pursed lips, then reached over and with the same finger touched my lips. There would be time for that, she said, first she had to wrap up the description of the fight between good and evil she'd begun, and she had to finish it before the day had fully dawned. We both looked out the window at the pale sky. Whatever the evil is, however it came to be, said Margareta, it is always growing, threatening to squeeze all the good out of the world. In the process, the evil is nourished, if one can put it that way, by the evil deeds people do, even by their impure thoughts, especially thoughts of committing sins, and as the evil gains in strength the bond is severed between the lowest of the Sephirot, called Malkhut, or Kingdom, and the other Sephirot, and this redirects the emanation of the divine to charging and boosting evil,