Ding-dong. I rang again, waited a little longer, though I knew I was waiting in vain, and then slowly, gripping the banister, I headed downstairs. About halfway down, on the fourth or third floor, the elevator passed me on its way up, dark and empty. So it goes in life, I said to the person who had run into Dragan Mišović; from time to time, while some are on their way down, others are on their way up. I was thinking of the woman clambering up the muddy bank to the paved promenade, but this I didn't say out loud. There are some things we can always rely on, the person said, adding she was especially gratified to hear that since she had moved to Banovo Brdo nothing had changed in the vicinity of the former underpass. Now at least she knew that she could go back there any time if it turned out she didn't like life in Banovo Brdo, because there was nothing worse than going off somewhere and then, once you had decided, for whatever reason, that you wanted to go back, finding that the place you had left behind was no longer the same place that you had, in symbolic terms, taken with you. Did Dragan Mišović;, I asked the person, wear a cap, and if he did, exactly what kind of a cap was it? The person said nothing. Hello, I said. No, answered the person. She didn't remember a cap, though she might well have been wrong and his coat might have so distracted her that it prevented her from registering other details. But the cap, I said, you had to have seen it, unless it was an invisibility cap, in which case the whole person would have been invisible, the coat would have been walking by itself. But that is just how it looked, said the person, because the coat was so oversized it nearly reached the ground, and when Dragan turned up the collar and pulled his arms into the sleeves, it really looked as if the coat were walking by itself. One should keep in mind, said the person, that Zemun is a damp place, and dense fogs are not uncommon. And if Dragan Mišović was sensitive to the cold, and the person thought that he was, though she didn't say why, then he withdrew into that coat as a turtle did into its shell. Didn't I remember, the person asked, how Dragan was always closing the windows in our classroom, even after the teacher had opened them? As soon as the teacher turned around, the person went on, Dragan would sneak over to the window and close it, which would, of course, have all of us in stitches. I didn't remember that, the part about the windows or the part about the stitches, but I didn't let on, just as I didn't know why I'd called this person again and told her how my search for our schoolmate had turned out. My guess is that I simply wanted to talk to someone, and no one else came to mind. Should I ever run into Dragan Mišović;, the person said, I must certainly give him her regards, though he might not remember her. Sure, I said, and then I wrote a letter in which I asked Dragan Mišović; to take a look at the enclosed geometric figure and tell me if anything was hiding in that arrangement of a circle, triangles, and the pieces shaped like apple slices. I rang his doorbell at nine o'clock the next morning. No response. I leaned my ear against the door and listened. I couldn't hear anything. I rang again, knelt, and tried to slip my letter under the door. I couldn't. I had to toss it into his mailbox, downstairs, at the entranceway, though I'd wanted to avoid doing that not only because of the filth and nauseating stench of urine but also because I was afraid that someone might pull it out of the half-smashed mailbox, and that the letter might get into the hands of someone other than the person for whom it was intended. When we don't have much of a choice, I said in passing to a little boy who was calling to his mother in a squeaky voice, the choice we do have is a good one. The boy fell silent for a moment, then stuck his tongue out at me and fled into the building. His tongue was blue, as if he'd been sucking on a hard blue candy. I walked between several buildings and came out on Radoja Dakiča Street, which ultimately led me to the Zemun park, and from there, walking by the high school and the Air Force Center, to the main street. I decided to retrace the streets I had walked the day before. I turned from the main street onto Karamatina. As had been the case earlier, I had no notion of what I was looking for, not counting the geometric figure under the button. I looked everywhere, scanned the walls, curtains, and shutters, wooden and glass doors, and carefully moved aside the crumpled sheets of newspaper or cigarette wrappings on the sidewalk. When I reached the quay, I turned right onto Zmaj Jovina. At the corner, where I had found, and left, the black button, I could see nothing, not even when I knelt close to the pavement. I went down the street and soon I could hear the noises of the market. There was more litter along this street, so I moved slowly, looking carefully around, yet it was by chance that I discovered a new lead. While I was preoccupied, head bowed, with a mess of cigarette butts, I bumped into a woman, who in the collision dropped her shopping bag, full of vegetables and fruit. Potatoes and bananas littered the sidewalk. I knelt to pick them up and, on a step leading to a building painted yellow, I saw the familiar sign. I handed the woman her bag, apologized once again, and when she moved down the street I crouched by the stairs. There could be no doubt. It was that same combination of a circle and triangles. The symbol was drawn on the first of three steps leading to a tall double door. I tried the knob: the door was locked. I knocked, the door didn't open. How many more doors were there going to be like this one? I stepped back and checked out the windows. There was nothing visible through the curtains, which didn't lessen the chance that someone inside might easily be able to see what was happening outside. I continued toward the market, the main street, and the theater, passed a hairdressing salon, a fabric store, a bookstore, and a display window full of souvenirs, and then, when I was least expecting it, I caught sight again of the geometric figure. I was standing for a minute, studying a poster on a large wooden gate, a poster advertising a beginner's course in tai chi, and when I came close to it, I saw that the circular sign, which from farther off I had taken to be the black-and-white Taoist symbol for yin and yang, was in fact the design of the circle and triangles. First mathematics, and now Eastern meditation through movement, who knew where this sign would take me next? The big gate was not locked, I pushed it and stepped into a dark passageway leading to a small courtyard with a bench, two flowerpots with barberry plants, and a water pump. I couldn't remember when I'd last seen an old-fashioned pump like this, with a long handle, and I stared at it as if I had just arrived in a spaceship from another planet. I circled around the pump cautiously, first in one direction, then in the other. Someone watching would probably have thought we looked like a hunter and his prey, though when I looked up, it turned out no one could have seen us. None of the walls facing the courtyard had windows. The courtyard was tucked in behind a building that faced the street. I went over to the bench and sat down, and silence instantly settled around me. I saw every inch of the barberry bush down to the finest detail, as if I were studying it through a microscope, and the gently curving line of the pump handle was so precise that it looked as if it were fashioned from pure radiance. I didn't breathe, or I thought I was not breathing, my heart was beating softly, as if not to disrupt the stillness. I looked up and the surrounding walls seemed to have suddenly lengthened, nor could I see where they ended, though the piece of sky arching over them was still recognizably blue. I shut my eyes. Someone was playing a musical instrument, not in one of the buildings but far away, yet the notes reached me, and somehow I knew they were intended for me alone. The moment I opened my eyes, the music stopped. The glow above the pump slowly faded, my heart began to pound again, my temples throbbed. When I stood up, my knees buckled. I don't know how that could have happened, I said to Marko that evening. We were sitting in his kitchen, listening to