The Well in the Dark Forest. His stories were full of Kabbalistic themes: perhaps he knew something about wells, I thought, could his well be the well I am after? Nonsense, I said aloud, I am beginning to behave like a paranoic obsessed with the idea of conspiracies. The words rang in the room, bounced off the walls and windows, dropped to the floor, as they do here when I stop writing and start talking to myself. Sometimes so many words are on the floor that I have to lift my feet high as I cross this sparsely furnished room from end to end. One of these days, it occurred to me, I might slip on a squashed word, fall, and lie there, buried under the detritus of language, and no one would find me until we started to decompose, the words and I, one corpse next to the others. I should have made stronger coffee, I said, my thoughts would be more upbeat, though words probably have nothing to do with it, nor does lack of sleep, it was simply Sunday, a day with no future, as Rasa Livada wrote many years ago. Did he write a poem about the Zemun synagogue, or about Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai, the forefather of Zionism, or maybe about the destiny of the Zemun Jews, or something along those lines? Now, according to the logic of paranoia, I should find him and ask about the well, or, better still, about the sounds and lights that emanate from the attic of the synagogue, or about the water carrier. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, I repeated, then sipped a little coffee, closed my eyes, and leaned my head on my hand. The day of the week didn't matter, I had to admit, Sunday or Tuesday, Wednesday or Saturday, the calendar was of no help, I had reached a dead end. The world, or so it seemed at the time, had an end. It seemed so then, and it seems so now, nothing in that regard has changed. I am far away from it all, yet from time to time it feels as if I have never been closer. In short, I think more and more about my childhood, about little moments of happiness, such as when I ate rice pudding with raspberries at a restaurant called Zdravljak, or something similar, at the entrance to the Zemun marketplace, or when I had ćevapačići at the Central, while music that I can no longer recall, probably old standards, blared from a small stage. I read somewhere, who knows where, that childhood recollections multiply as life draws to a close, and the closer it draws, the more numerous the memories, as if we were trying to slow down the passage of time and keep ourselves on this shore a little longer. On the other shore, after all, we'll be spending, I almost said, our whole life, when it's our whole death we'll be spending there. I'm tired, who knows what I'm saying and writing, but I myself noted the absurdity of the rapid transition from raspberries to heavenly perfection. None of this contributed to my ruminations about the Well, here I was at a standstill, until Marko, in a phone conversation later that afternoon, said that I should think about the Well as if it were my own body. Your body is a well, said Marko, if you toss a coin in, after a long silence you'll hear it plunk on the surface of the water, with the same sound you'd hear if you dropped a coin into a real well. You might even make the same wish, he continued, which won't come true any more than the wish you'd say over a real well would. Yes, I should have thought of that, I said to myself in an almost chiding tone. Margareta said something similar to me, I believe, though she didn't compare my body to a well, but rather to a cosmic tree full of Sephirot. It comes down to the same thing, because if our body corresponds to the entire system of the cosmos, why wouldn't it correspond to a well? This offered no answer to the question of where the Well was located, or to the question of how one finds one's way in. A leap from a great height would not do, and as far as I recall, there was no mention of ladders in the manuscript. Ladders, Marko said, are a system of exercises to achieve a goal in a given religious or mystical system, and I almost hung up on him. Of course ladders represent an upward or downward system, he couldn't have been thinking that I would load an honest-to-goodness ladder onto my shoulder and, like a chimney sweep, clamber up to the roof. That reminds me, yesterday I saw a chimney sweep here: he looked the way chimney sweeps looked there, sooty, with a jaunty black cap, and his teeth, as he spoke to my landlady, gleamed like polished ivory. I quickly reached for a button, then realized that on the clothes I was wearing I didn't have a single button: a long-sleeved T-shirt and a blue sweatshirt both pulled on over the head, a zipper on the jeans, and shoelaces on shoes don't count anyway. So I stood there by the window, feverishly patting my body, wondering if I had the time to take the sweatshirt off and pull on a button-up shirt, but by then the chimney sweep's conversation with my landlady was over and he walked away with a jocular salute. A red ribbon dangled from the top rung of his ladder, probably a warning to passersby and vehicles, and as I watched it leaving, I said to myself that my happiness too was leaving, never to return. But back to the Well. It was one of those things where, the closer we get to them, the farther they are from us. Luckily this was not a real thirst, because I'd never get a drink of fresh water at that Well, I kept seeing it in the distance, in the morning or evening haze, and no matter how far I walked, I got no closer. The sun would cross the sky, followed by the moon, the haze would be a golden net at one moment and a silver spiderweb the next, and I would continue to be just as far off, like the people who stride along on the moving strip at the fitness club, while always staying in the same place, Sisyphuses unaware that they are Sisyphuses. This is, perhaps, fine for the heart and physical fitness, which would be useful if one were to dig a real well, but I was interested in the Well within me, which was at once a reflection of the one outside me, and I doubted that a fitness club would take me in the right direction. The day was passing, I needed to write the piece for Minut, and all I could think of was that I was sinking into a swamp and that the only way I could extricate myself was the way Baron Münchhausen had done when he was in a similar predicament: grab my pigtail and wrench myself free of trouble, however, my hair was so short at the back that I had nothing to grab hold of, let alone to tug at and yank myself up into the heights. I might as well, I thought, admit that I was lost; admission of defeat is sometimes the greatest victory and may offer possibilities earlier hidden or inaccessible. I didn't know where all this was headed, which was probably the most appropriate feeling for that aimless Sunday morning, or afternoon, keeping in mind how fast the time was passing, in fact by then it was nearly evening, with night in tow, just as a mother or father drags along a child reluctant to go shopping or to visit people with no children of their own, where the child is painfully bored despite being plied with cookies or ice cream. At the thought of ice cream I licked my lips and thought of how with the first nice days of spring they started selling a variety of ice cream treats out in front of my building. Unlike the dreary newspapers, the ice cream had magical power, and I soon found myself, still in my slippers, on the sidewalk. The ice cream vendor, however, was not where she was supposed to be. The refrigerator was locked, the sunshade down, the chairs chained to a nearby tree. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and next to the newspaper kiosk I saw a man in dark glasses. Unlike the earlier figures lurking in dark glasses, this one was not wearing a trench coat, though he was in a black suit. No, I said to myself, you will not add him to your list of plotters; this is Sunday, the man may be going to a wedding and has stopped to buy mints or chewing gum. The man looked at me. Suddenly I felt awkward being on the street in my slippers like some old curmudgeon, and I turned to go back in. The man kept staring at me, no, the man was fixed on me, that is how I'd describe it, and suddenly I desperately wanted to go up to him and pluck those glasses off his face, and just then he lifted his hand, removed the glasses, and smiled. I turned to check whether there was someone behind me. There wasn't. I looked again at the man, who was now approaching, still smiling. I can always take off my slippers, I thought, and if need be, sprint barefoot. I have never cared for being barefoot, even as a child, but if that was the only way for me to flee, being barefoot wouldn't bother me. Margareta and her bare feet flitted through my mind, and I wondered what a barefoot flight would mean to a Shekhinah, or more precisely, would the Shekhinah aid or obstruct the flight, and then I had to stop moving and thinking, because the man was in front of me. He had sky-blue eyes. What, he said, you don't recognize me? No, I said, and I truly had no idea who he was, though his voice began to take shape in my consciousness, and the longer he spoke, the more the oblivion waned, and finally, when he mentioned Paramedium, our gymnasium biology teacher, the name and nickname hit me: Steva the Horse. There was nothing horsey about him, and while he chattered on about old friends, and about how happy he was to see us, and about how much it meant to him when he returned to Canada, my only thought was the delicate question of his name's origin. Would I hurt his feelings if I reminded him of this nickname? He'd eagerly carved it into old and new school desks, and even, in some instances, into the blackboard and the lectern. One of the things he'd started appreciating more since he'd moved away, he said, was the marvelous informality of the people here. To come down in slippers like that, he said, went beyond anything he'd seen in Edmonton. I don't know where Edmonton is, but if I were there, I said, I would not so easily abandon my comfortable slippers. Steva chuckled, and then I remembered how he'd acquired the nickname Horse: he didn't laugh, he neighed, though by now it sounded more like a frog's croak. In any case his laugh was awful, much worse than my slippers. All the while I was inching toward the door to my building, but he followed me, never letting the distance between us grow. I don't know why I wanted to put space between us, maybe because of those sky-blue eyes whose translucence had always stirred distrust in me. The lighter someone's eyes, the greater my suspicion. A prejudice, naturally, though harmless, if that's any consolation. I nudged open the door to the building with my back, preparing to slip in, but just at that moment Steva started listing everybody he'd seen, and after a few women's names, which I didn't recognize, he mentioned Dragan Mišović, with whom he had spent a marvelous evening, he said, only yesterday. I stopped pressing against the door. A marvelous evening with Dragan Mišović? I asked. Was he sure it hadn't been someone else? No, Steva replied, he was sure, Dragan the mathematician from whom we always cribbed solutions in math and mechanical drawing tests. He asked after you, said Steva, and said something about parallel worlds, repeating patterns, that sort of thing. The door suddenly felt so heavy, I thought it might snap my spine. Had I made the wrong choice, perhaps, when I recently decided not to call Dragan Mišović? I can't remember when that was, but I do recall the alacrity with which I had made that decision. Now I dared admit that it was out of vanity, anger that he'd so casually blown me off two or three times, or sneered at me because I couldn't keep up with his mathematical reasoning. Are you sure? I asked Steva needlessly, that Dragan mentioned me? Actually I was trying to gain time, to figure out what to do, to evaluate everything from a new perspective. Steva didn't hesitate. Of course Dragan Mišović had told him all that, he even made a special point of saying, Steva added, that he was very pleased to be in touch with me again. He looked at me with those sky-blue eyes and blinked as if wind was blowing in his face. Was the blink a sign of insecurity, or was he not telling the truth? Who knows why Steva blinked? He realized, said Steva, that he'd run into me at an awkward moment, being in slippers on a Sunday was a sure sign of a wish for rest and relaxation, but would I be willing perhaps, he asked, to join a group of old school friends for dinner in a restaurant by the Danube? They had agreed to meet at the Harbormaster's at seven o'clock, then decide where to eat. And Dragan Mišović will be there too? I asked with a dose of incredulity, are you sure? He promised, answered Steva, and as far as he knew, and he was prepared to stand corrected, Dragan Mišović always kept his promises. I couldn't muster a single example, but all the same I nodded. So, said Steva, you'll join us? I consented, and he reached forward and patted me on the cheek. Leave those slippers at home, he said, and neighed again. Once a horse, I thought, always a horse. Little things are sometimes the most telling about the truth of people and the world, the tiny cracks signaling the advent of huge catastrophes. As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, questions were jostling in my mind about Dragan Mišović's unexpected willingness to appear in public, and to go, no less, to a restaurant. I remembered clearly how the person who had helped me find him several weeks before, and who had moved to Banovo Brdo, had cautioned me that he was odd and that he never, which I knew, attended group gatherings or alumni reunions. When I add to that the fact that Mišović had asked after me, it was a miracle that I had not instantly gone to the Harbormaster's. I managed to hold off until six o'clock, and at six-thirty I was out there in front of the gallery. My head swung left-right like a pendulum, and even so I missed seeing Steva the Horse arrive with a plump woman whose hair was tied in a bun. I could have sworn I'd never seen her before, but she claimed we kissed on New Year's Eve when we were fifteen. Steva neighed when she tweaked my ear and said it was never too late to pick up where we had left off. Pick what up, I asked, and Steva nearly fell on the floor. The woman with her hair in a bun giggled, hands on hips, her belly shoved in my direction. Who knows how long this torment would have lasted if two other women hadn't arrived and I recognized them as Zlata and Dragana, best friends and straight-A students. I had never kissed either of them, that I knew, though I wouldn't mind, I thought, kissing them now. There is nothing more beautiful than middle-aged women. Sure, the body no longer has the firmness and flexibility it had in youth, but there is that fullness instead, the stable hips, the generous bottom, and the air of well-being. Zlata and Dragana squealed when they saw us, and as we were hugging and kissing three times on the cheeks, Svetlana and Radomir arrived, frowning as ever. Though we knew that the frown was a mask of sorts, every time I saw them I thought that their identical frowns must have brought them together. They had been, one might say, the mascots of our class: they had started dating in our first year, married a week after graduation, and had stayed together ever since, judging by an email I received, don't ask how, from Zlata and Dragana. Over the past few years Zlata and Dragana have been tirelessly organizing annual reunions of our class, and several weeks before the gathering they send out bulletins with up-to-date information about the lives of our former schoolmates. By my name it says "gone," which means nothing, and suits my desire to lay low. "Gone" is certainly better than "deceased," which is what they wrote, regrettably, next to some of the names, including the name of the homeroom teacher, Milenko Stojević, whose heart, someone said at one of the earlier reunions, broke when the new war started in Yugoslavia. I don't know if that's true, though I believe that many hearts were broken when that happened, some forever, as was the case with Milo the Silo, as we called our homeroom teacher, some temporarily, though with a permanent scar, while some only pretended, feigning a despair that didn't leave a mark in their