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, while the feminine nature, designated as the Shekhinah, is threatened and forced into exile, and when it is exiled, we become one-sided, stripped of the balance of oppositions, and we become easy prey for surging evil. The entire system of Sephirot is threatened, said Margareta, from the Crown to the Foundation, in other words, from the top of the head to the genitals the world goes awry. And to keep that from happening, she added, the Shekhinah must become a part again of the system of divine meaning, so the feminine presence of reality has a role equal to the masculine presence. She turned and looked at the sky, now bright. Even to herself she was sounding like Scheherezade, she said, but her story had to end as morning came. If we were going to spend another night awake, I said as I stood up with effort, she might as well be Scheherezade, because I was not the kind likely to lop off heads, the kind that had to be distracted from the sword. Margareta didn't answer. Morning, apparently, contributed to her change: she was no longer talkative, the smile vanished, and as she hastily rinsed out the cups and spoons, it was as if her whole body went stiff, she became formal. A little later, as I kept talking, she put on white socks. When I saw that my attempts to keep our conversation going were floundering, I too fell silent, and the brief ride in the elevator was extremely awkward. There is nothing more unnatural than two people standing next to each other, nearly touching, saying nothing and looking for something to stare at. How many places to stare at could there be in a filthy, close, graffiticovered elevator cabin? I could not understand Margareta's unexpected transformation, though I decided immediately, as both of us, were staring fixedly at the same upper corner of the elevator cabin, that I would pay it no mind. The fact of the matter is that the number of unknowns in my equation was no smaller than it had been, but that didn't mean that I should allow it to grow. So, showing nothing, I said goodbye to Margareta, though I couldn't resist turning to see the direction she took as she walked away from the quay. It occurred to me to follow her, it wouldn't have been difficult to do, and following her might have helped to resolve the dilemma that Margareta hadn't wished to speak of, meaning the question of what all these events had to do with me; but after she had opened up to me that night, it seemed dishonorable to follow her. If I had made it this far, I thought, I could last a little longer, so I went home. If I had known just how far off I was in my estimate of how long this would go on, I probably would have set off after her, regardless. Now, of course, it's too late, as I've said, or written, I'm not sure because several times I noticed I've been talking to myself, even as I sit at the table bent over the paper. Somewhere I read that this is called mixing the real and imaginary levels, and that movement between what is real and what is imaginary is most common in children, not counting mentally disturbed people. If that's true, I hope it's a child I'm becoming, and not a person with a dislocated consciousness, though it is the same either way, because no change can alter the past that preceded it. I used to think about that a great deal more, especially at a time when I dedicated myself to studying the Chinese Book of Changes, and I did what I could to find an arrangement of the hexagrams that would prepare me for the arrival of future changes, so that when they occurred I would not experience them as changes but as continuity. I do not remember whether I found the best arrangement of hexagrams; most probably not, because I never really understood the system of broken and unbroken lines, just as I do not now fully understand the system of the Sephirot. If the Chinese hexagrams represent a picture of the world, and if the Kabbalist Sephirot also represent the world, do the hexagrams and the Sephirot reflect the same world, or are these worlds so different that one could say with certainty that each of us has our own, unique world, which is not repeated anywhere? I know that in the end everything comes down to moral purity, and that between the Jewish tza dik and the Chinese superior man one could place an equal sign, but what about all of us who do not attain these pinnacles of virtue? I never had a chance to discuss this with Margareta; when I went off to see Jaša Alkalaj with the same question, I learned he was preparing for an art show. These were the paintings, he told me at his studio, he had been working on for the past few months, and most of them were dedicated, he remarked, to the theme of racial misunderstanding and prejudice. Until that moment I'd paid no particular attention to his work, because what I'd seen earlier had little appeal for me, and he was still convinced that, belonging as we did to different generations, guided by different poetics, we had nothing to offer each other. He invariably dismissed postmodernism with a shrug, while I was prepared at any moment to swear by that same postmodernism, and with the same intolerance I heard his positions on the political and social engagement of the artist. Our discussions, therefore, about the Kabbalah and mysticism had not strayed into the realms of art and politics. The art show was something very different, just as the paintings he showed me were altogether different from my simple-minded impressions and ill-conceived notions. Unlike the earlier paintings, many of which were abstract, not including the Kabbalistic canvases I had seen on my first visit, the new pieces, which Jaša showed me one by one, embraced the most varied influences and styles; they included direct references to other works, ranging from impressionism to pop art. Instead of a connection through stylistic expression, the paintings were linked by an openly political theme. Two or three paintings were references to famous canvases by the painter Mica Popović, while Slobodan and Mira Milošević appeared in a direct quote from Warhol's works portraying Mao and Marilyn Monroe. The most interesting, at least for me, were paintings using hyperrealism techniques, I wasn't sure of the source, to respond to the recent upsurge in anti-Semitism. I assume these were based on photographs, though I'd never seen the original photos, except one. A group of paramilitaries poses next to vandalized Jewish tombstones, for instance, one of them holding a severed human head. The damaged tombstones, I sensed, were photographed at the Zemun Jewish cemetery; I don't know where the paramilitaries were from because they wore no insignia on their clothing or uniforms, but regardless of who they were in the original photograph, the accusation of racism and intolerance referred to the many irregular troops that had gone into the war from our regions. One of the other paintings depicted a fragment of a slogan scrawled across the wall of the Belgrade Jewish cemetery, and in front of it a group of young men with closely cropped hair; some were sneering with hatred, others had their hands raised in quasi-Nazi salutes, yet others brandished a banner, painted as a reverse pirate flag: a black skull and crossed thigh bones on a white ground. The photograph looked familiar: they were soccer club fans before a match in the cup finals or perhaps qualifying matches for the World Cup. In these paintings, as in the others, there were Kabbalistic symbols here and there, Hebrew letters, illuminations from ancient books, six-pointed stars, menorahs, and mezuzahs. Meanwhile, Jaša poured brandy into two glasses, we clinked our glasses, raising them to the paintings, which, as he said, through the art show were becoming a part of the world, we drank to the show, and to him, and, he added, with each of his paintings a piece of himself was subtracted and hence he was becoming an ever smaller part of the world. When he put together all he had done, he said, a few crumbs were all that was left of him, a handful of bits. They shouldn't even be calling him Jaša anymore, he said, but Little Jaša, there was so little of him left. I laughed, he was serious. What's going on, I asked, with the show coming up, shouldn't you be in high spirits? Jaša went over to the table, brushed the papers and newspapers aside, and handed me a folded envelope. Insi