Minut, said Jaša, and he spun around and left. I left too. I took the stairs, sidestepping people and the police. The elevator was stuck between the first and second floors: I assume that they'd had to pull someone out of the cabin. I thought I heard the meowing of a cat but couldn't place the sound. In front of the building several policemen were milling around; a police car was parked by the hotel across the street; passersby paused and looked up at the roof, as if expecting someone to jump. I hate Mondays, I thought, and walked to Student Square Park where I had once got so stoned that I had tumbled off a bench. The bench was still there, though perhaps not the same one; two girls were sitting on it and when I passed them both crossed their legs, as if on command. That reminded me of the dazzling flash of Margareta's thigh. The flash was so emblazoned in my memory that I had to close my eyes and pause. When I opened them, the girls were no longer there, but I had already grown used to the vanishing, nothing could surprise me. That was also how I began the piece for Minut: I recently thought, I wrote, that nothing more could surprise me. We live in a time in which the absurd and the irrational have been expanded to ridiculous proportions, and in which the imitation of reality has become more real than reality itself. Not to speak of life. It's not an imitation, or a simulation, or an improvisation, it's nothing. We live in a country that does not exist, composed of refracted reflections in a game of light and dark, and so we do not exist, or rather we exist only as shadows on a wall, with no substance or duration. And the wall is so slippery, the shadows cannot cling to it for long. They slide down before they've climbed up. Yes, some might say, life with no support is no life, and many will agree, but what about those who slide down the wall? Should they be denied even a moment of desperate clinging to the slippery surface, should they be denied the hope of an uneven patch that might delay the inevitability of their plunge? No need to couch this piece in such abstract terms. Things have names, and these names should be said clearly and precisely, especially today, in a country in which clarity has become a negative category. From one day to the next we are witnessing, at all levels of society, especially in the government and church, an indifference to the flood of ethnic intolerance. Usually those who are indifferent are drawn to the opposite course of action: obstructing any attempt at ending the intolerance. Hordes of young people with similar haircuts on square heads are attacking Gypsies and Jews, taking to task all those who think differently, especially if those who think differently are themselves Serbs, claiming all the while that they are doing this for the good of the government, invoking the support of the church. The church is silent, the government is silent, we all are silent. Isn't silence a sign of consent, or have I got something wrong? Does the silence of the church imply that they acknowledge in their ranks an inflexible anti-Semitic current, ready to assume complete control in the new ecclesiastical hierarchy? Does the silence of the government imply that the surge in anti-Semitism has come in handy, as they assign guilt to the "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" for all that happens in this country, as a way of shrugging off responsibility for the insane political decisions and provocation of the world powers? Last night a hard-core detachment of fellow thinkers tried to destroy the works of a painter whose only sin is being born a Jew. Tomorrow, I assume, they will be burning the books of Danilo Kiš, Isak Samokovlija, and Stanislav Vinaver. The day after someone announces that all Jews are parasites who suck the blood of the Serbian people. By the end of the week, who knows, there may be calls to bring out the yellow armbands, and lists will begin to appear, there will be attacks on apartments, property confiscated… Then, finally, a trembling voice will say that history is repeating itself and that we have reason to be concerned, but by then it will be too late, because history began repeating itself the moment none of us said a word. Here I stopped. It occurred to me that I ought to devote part of the article to the opening of the show. I submitted my pieces Wednesdays for the