de, on a sheet of red paper, in letters cut out of newsprint, was a brief message: You haven't got much longer, Judas!!! I noticed that each of the three exclamation points was different, the one in the middle was thicker and the one on the right-hand side was longer. It's no picnic finding the right-sized punctuation marks in newspapers, as anyone would agree, except in the gossip rags with those bombastic headlines, a gold mine of question marks and exclamation points. And besides, the size of the lettering in messages like that isn't coordinated anyway. I turned over the paper, there was nothing on the back, only several uneven blobs of glue. First I said, This is ridiculous; then I said, We should go to the police. Nonsense, said Jaša, what can they do? I said nothing. I could hardly praise a police force that was interested only in propping up the regime in power, motivated solely by their own survival, because if I did, I'd be flying in the face of my own actions. After all, I hadn't turned to the police when I was beaten up, nor did I call them to take a look at my shit-covered, pissed-on doormat, and I made a point of dissuading my well-intentioned neighbor from calling them for me. In return, sometimes I would wash the entire stairwell. Cleanliness is always calming. I asked Jaša whether any of his acquaintances had received similar threats, had Isak or Jakov, or maybe old Dacca? But Jaša shook his head and said, If I was keeping silent about it, why would they say anything? And what happens next? I wanted to know. Jaša shrugged. One death threat, he said, is not the end of the world. The preparations for the art show are coming along, the catalog is at the printer's, the invitations too, life goes on and there is no point in paying this any mind, which has always been the case and always will be. Isak Levi wrote the text for the catalog, said Jaša, and the art show was planned for the following Tuesday at the Jewish Historical Museum. Perhaps that space, he said, wasn't the best possible, but I would surely agree that there was no more fitting place for such a show. I agreed, and then we washed that down with our topped-off glasses of brandy, drinking to the prosperity of the museum, the success of the show, and good reviews, for peace on earth and a speedy change of government in our country. For this last wish Jaša filled our glasses yet a third time, so from that moment on my recollections fade, and no matter what I do, I can't bring them back into focus. I remember, and only with great effort, the moment when I left his building to wait for a cab: I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and though I'd done this slowly, looking to the side made my head spin. I had to sit down, and I sat on the highest step. I kept thinking I was hearing leaves rustling, though when I looked at the treetops, they were still. Is that, I later asked the cab driver, the sound of alcohol in my bloodstream? The cab driver glanced at me sullenly in the rearview mirror. He was probably afraid I'd throw up on the seat next to me, which was not out of the question, so, just in case, I opened the window and took a deep breath. There is another bit that has since vanished from my memory, because all I remember is how I suddenly opened my eyes, how I stared at the cab driver's hand on my knee, shaking me, and how, little by little, his words reached me. I paid for the ride, tried to kiss his hand, which he had extended to take the money, got out of the cab, and then I emptied the contents of my stomach by a newspaper kiosk. As the last droplets were spewing from my mouth, I thought I should get my cleaning equipment and restore everything to order. I mustn't forget my plastic gloves, I kept repeating to myself. Of course, as soon as I stepped into the apartment, all such thoughts vanished. I flopped into the armchair, and I was still there when I opened my eyes the next morning, stiff, with a disgusting taste in my mouth, pain in my stomach, tacky fingers, and a headache that threatened to blast my skull to pieces. I'd been wakened by the reflection of the sun's rays, which had found their way to me from the windows of the facing buildings. I squinted at the sunshine, belched and groaned, hoping that by some miracle I might start to feel well again. I was hoping in vain. Some people don't even know what a hangover is, but I am of the kind for whom every hangover is a disease, and when I finally managed to get on my feet, I filled a hot-water bottle, got undressed, and crawled into bed. The next day, Marko gave me a lecture, his favorite lecture on the theme of how impossible it is to reconcile cannabis and alcohol, and how my hangover and headache, which caused me to open the door to him with my eyes nearly shut, was one more proof that he was right. According to him, the earth was divided into regions of unequal size in which various means for altering consciousness dominated: the Near East, for instance, was a hashish region; the Far East an opium region; in South America it was coca; alcohol ruled in Europe; the native populations in North America had tobacco. However, he maintained, one's background does not necessarily oblige one to embrace the preference of a particular geographic region, rather, each of us was born with a predisposition, and if that predisposition were to connect one to, say, cannabis, then the other substances would hold no interest. In a search for the right substance, Marko explained, you try different mind-altering substances, and when you find the right one, all others become unappealing or damage you, as my poor reaction to Jaša's brandy demonstrated. He offered me his cure for a hangover, a plump joint of marijuana, but I waved him away: the very thought of smoke made my gorge rise, and I was in no mood to test what real smoke would do to me. The headache settled like a veil over my eyes, and I felt I was looking at Marko through my lashes, eyelids half closed, from a great distance. All right, said Marko, if you won't, I will. He lit the joint and for a moment his head disappeared in a cloud of smoke. I closed my eyes and pinched my nose, which was the only way I could shield my stomach from temptation. I even turned my head to the side and tried to point my mouth as far away from him as possible. In the end, fearing I might succumb, I went to the kitchen to make some mint tea, but once I'd made it, I stared into the cup, unable to bring myself to lift it to my lips. Meanwhile, Marko had smoked his joint and had joined me at the kitchen table. He had clearly read the papers that morning, he showered me with minute details on what was happening locally and in the world. The members of the Atlantic Pact had yet again threatened to bomb Serbia if there wasn't an acceptable resolution to the Kosovo crisis; the German mark was still worth six dinars, which was what a liter of gasoline cost; stray dogs were a growing problem; in an apartment frequented by the homeless, in the heart of Belgrade, the dead body of an unknown male was found; the preparations for the referendum were underway; the weather showed no sign of stabilizing; Chinese merchants were flocking to the Belgrade markets; the taxi drivers were calling for higher rates and were threatening a strike that would paralyze the city, as if the city, Marko said, was not already paralyzed. Depressing news sometimes has a bracing effect, if for no other reason than because you realize how paltry your troubles are compared with all those tragedies and cataclysms, so I perked up, sipped some tea, and finally was able to see Marko clearly. Marko, naturally, offered to roll another joint, but my insistence in turning him down surprised even me. All right, said Marko, he had come to show me something, or take me to where he'd show me something, something he felt I had to see, as it was directly related, or at least that was how he perceived it, to stuff that had been going on with me recently, and even if he'd read it wrong, which was not impossible, he said, anyone can make a mistake, I'd be interested in what he had to show me, and we should get going as soon as possible, so he was getting up, which was a good thing because tangled sentences like this were terribly draining for him. All right, I said, went into the bathroom, washed, confirmed that I looked haggard, brushed my teeth, splashed lotion on my cheeks, and came back to the kitchen. I'm ready, I said. Marko looked at me slowly, and suddenly, as I saw his bloodshot eyes, it crossed my mind that I shouldn't trust him. It's a horrible moment when you doubt a person you think of as your best friend, especially when it's not you doubting him over facts, but something inside you, some minuscule signal warning you, so at first you want to ignore it, persuade yourself that it is all a mistake, a short circuit, a disturbance sending you a false image as a foil. But had I not already decided not to tell Marko everything, especially when it came to Margareta? Now my intuition was merely confirming something my subconscious had known for a long time, as it knows everything else, both what has already happened and what is to happen. I am not talking about destiny here; I am not a believer in destiny, I have always favored the notion of free will and the freedom of choice. The blind given, a life spent in writing out an unchanging destiny, I never found such notions appealing — they reduced me to an automaton who goes through life simply to acknowledge that he's but a grain of sand swept along by events, stripped of any meaning. That biologist, I can't recall his name, hit the nail on the head when he said that destiny does exist but is not predetermined, we are the creators of our destiny, but what we choose to do, seen in retrospect, becomes an inevitability, not because of divine intervention but because the past can no longer be altered. Enough of that. Marko waited patiently for me to get ready, then got impatient. He kept hurrying me along, urging me to walk faster, he grew nervous and agitated as if he had snorted cocaine. He was taking me straight into the lion's den, I remember thinking at the time, though now I have to laugh, because there were no lions nor did the place we went to resemble a den. I was still hung-over, and I had the feeling that my stomach was an inflated balloon that I was carrying on a string, high above my head, and my head throbbed whenever we hit the bright sunlight. At the same time, I admit, I was figuring out how to run away at the slightest sign of danger, and I kept lagging a few steps behind Marko. Of course, this bothered him, so he'd grab me by the elbow and pull me along, cursing, though he never once explained why the rush. Even so, we made progress: we passed by the Faculty of Agriculture, entered the city park, then left the park near the hospital and turned onto a street that led to the synagogue. Once long ago, when a discotheque was located in that building, Marko and I went dancing there, as we used to say, to reel a girl in on our fishing line. The past few years there had been quite a public controversy over the synagogue, because the municipal authorities at the time were accused of having illegally taken over the building, but then it turned out there had been no violation of the law, though the story about the scandal resurfaced from time to time, always tinged with political overtones. As we approached the building, I wondered what Marko had in mind: a nostalgic return to the discotheque where Zoran Modli used to be the disc jockey, if I am not mistaken, or an attempt to draw me into some resurgent political dispute. It turned out to be something altogether different. We stepped into the courtyard. Though it was not an enclosed space, I felt a change from the street, as if the air was denser, no, as if something was in the air that could not be felt outside that space, a condensed sanctity, as Marko later said. He was surprised that I hadn't felt that change when I entered the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue, though that didn't necessarily mean anything, since our reaction to the sanctity of a place, he said, need not always be the same. When he visited famous monasteries, he said, he seldom felt a thing, while, on the other hand, the pressure of sanctity would be nearly unbearable in a ramshackle little church in a village off the beaten track. Everything can be explained, he said, all you need is the will to do it. We were standing in the yard in the increasingly warm sunlight, looking at the synagogue as if expecting it to address us. I still felt a fast-paced throb in my head, but the pain had mostly subsided. I was even able to look at a window refl ecting the rays of the sun, and the glare didn't make me nauseous. Marko called me over closer to the building and pointed to a rock with the number 1863 carved in it. He said he wasn't sure what that number meant, but that it probably was the year the synagogue was built. I knelt and touched the number, as if it could tell me something by touch. The number said nothing, instead it scratched the skin on my fingertips with its rough edges. Marko mentioned that the sum of the first two numbers was nine, as was the sum of the second two, and he was convinced that between those two sums there was a connection. I thought of Dragan Mišović. But why would every combination of numbers have an additional, hidden meaning? Couldn't a number be a number and nothing more? How could each number seem mystical, as if filled with secret missives, while words seem like a parody of reality, and the more words there are, the more ridiculous they are? Perhaps I should have wondered how Marko had discovered that number, what he had been looking for in the synagogue courtyard, or, who knows, in the building? I was passing by here the other day, said Marko, and suddenly it looked to me as if someone was waving to me from the corner of the building. And you wondered, I said, whether it was me? Exactly, answered Marko, how did you guess? Who else would have been waving to you, I said, from the synagogue courtyard? Whatever the case, he went into the courtyard and looked behind the corner of the building. No one was there. He had noticed the rock with the numbers, bent over to take a closer look, then heard a voice behind his back. He turned and saw an old woman in black: she even wore black lace gloves and a little hat with a short black veil. She raised her hand and pointed to the top of the synagogue. There, she said, by the chimney, you can see a light at night and those who know how to listen can hear a banging, rattling, and garbled words. Marko tried to ask for details, but she said the light was like no other light, it sometimes burned all night, and the sounds would become so loud that sleep was out of the question. Suddenly she fell silent, pointed up at the roof of the synagogue again, and with quick small steps, left. And you, I said, you came the next night to see what was going on, didn't you? Yes, said Marko, but I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, some commotion and the cooing of pigeons. And what did he expect from me now? I wanted to know. I have enough mysteries going at the moment, I said, that I don't know what to do with, I don't want to add one more to the burden. And besides, I continued, isn't there a bar here that stays open until late at night? All those sounds, the racket, the trembling light, doesn't that sound like a bar or club making noise and music? To a lady in black lace gloves, that might seem like the devil's work. Clearly I had not convinced him. He shook his head, blinked, wiped his nose. I suggested we find a café, and reluctantly he agreed. He stared up at the roof and stood on tiptoe, as if that would help him reach the attic. We set out along Dubrovačka Street, but at the first corner we bumped into a man, someone Marko knew, who apparently had something more attractive in mind for Marko than the planned cappuccino, because after conferring briefly they headed off in a different direction. I was left alone. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then turned to look back at the synagogue. I thought of Dacca's story about making a golem or finding some other Kabbalistic weapon; could there be a better place for work on that assignment than a synagogue? Then I remembered Volf Enoch, the water carrier, who passed through these same places more than two hundred years before, changing names the way someone else might change hats. Perhaps he was still walking around, under yet another name and with another occupation. What if, I said to myself, I am Volf Enoch, and that thought made me stop. I am Volf Enoch, I said alou