boza and a cream puff, and slowly, through the center of town, I set out for the pastry shop on Makedonska Street; Marko called it the last oasis, one of the rare places in Belgrade that had held on to the spirit of the old days. Again I wondered what Marko was up to, why he had vanished, if indeed he had vanished, and then I stopped whistling. When you miss someone it's hard to whistle. Your mouth turns dry, your heart sinks, nothing comes out of your puckered lips. I drank the first glass standing by the counter, then ordered a second and another cream puff, and sat at a table. I saw a face in the mirror that was supposed to be mine, though I wasn't sure. I glanced at the newspaper that the owner was reading at the next table before he got up to serve me. My attention was not drawn to a headline or a photograph, but to a poem at the top of the right-hand column. I assume that the owner didn't read verse but had lingered on the page because of the left-hand column, in which were headlines about traffic accidents and a family tragedy in Zaječar. Though spring was in the air, the title was "Winter Poem." I later bought the paper, cut the poem out, and held on to it until it got lost in one of my moves, if you can use the word move to refer to traveling with a suitcase and a backpack in which I kept my most treasured possessions: documents, some photographs, my shaving kit, manuscripts, a small English-Serbian dictionary, pencils, and a fountain pen that I kept because I was convinced that nothing would happen to me until the pelican spread its wings. I used to know "Winter Poem" by heart because I'd convinced myself that armed with a poem, I would have no fear of winter and cold, wherever I might be. Then forgetfulness began to take its toll, and I only remembered the opening and closing lines of the poem, and since then I have no longer been able to find my way to warmer places. Once I forget the beginning and the end, I'll go so high up north that my entire world will become a curtain of frost. The poem began with the words "Good morning I wish to you, Winter and Cold, you who make ice of the water and the oil viscous," and ends with "the little blaze of wild truth that grows cheerfully" or something like that, "in this beggar who begs not out of need but for others to give." That ending completely undid me, and I nearly began to cry. Luckily, the pastry-shop owner took the paper, and I consoled myself with the drink, then left. I walked toward Terazije. The day was sunny and warm, with lightning speed women stripped down to their summer finery, which exposed more than it concealed. At Hotel Moskva I descended into the underground walkway, crossed over to the other side of the street, and headed for the building of the federal assembly, then across the park and into Palmotićeva Street. This was no random stroll, I was following a route Marko had often taken, and I peered into the small cafés he frequented. No sign of him. I went on to Takovska, where I waited for the bus, got to Zeleni Venac, and after elbowing my way through the teeming throngs of street vendors, got onto the bus to Zemun. Why didn't I go to Marko's apartment that day? Because something inside warned me, though perhaps that isn't quite true, but that is how my memory dictates it to me today, and it is a fact that memory is the greatest liar and that it takes it upon itself to change day by day. Hour by hour, to be more precise, just as it would be more precise to admit that I don't know why I didn't go looking for Marko. Perhaps he was on one of his romantic binges, I thought, which happened with every new girlfriend. For days he would not leave the house, actually his bed, but after two or three days, he'd call to say he was in seventh heaven. Once he called while they were making love, and when I picked up, he put the phone on the pillow and for the next ten minutes or so I listened to their panting, moist kissing, the creaking of the bed, and the slapping of their thighs like the clapping of damp hands. What do you say, he asked as he grabbed the phone again, how did we sound? I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say, how to answer, so I said that it was a catchy refrain. Marko laughed and I heard him repeating it to his girlfriend, she also laughed, said something, and the sounds started again, and gingerly, so as not to disturb them, I hung up. He never told me who the woman was. Memories are a lure for the gullible, how often do I have to say that to myself? At some point in life, however, what had happened becomes more important than what is about to happen, though it should be the other way around, and insignificant details, like the panting in the telephone receiver, begin to look like crucial factors in what life could be. By then I had reached my building, unlocked the front door, stepped into the stairwell awash in the stench of mildew, opened my mailbox, in which I found several fliers, mostly advertising apartments for sale. I crumpled them up and was about to toss them into a cardboard box, which someone had thoughtfully left under the mailboxes, when I noticed on one of the fliers a circle with an intertwined yin and yang. I retrieved it and smoothed it out. Beginner's class in tai chi, the flier announced, Tuesdays and Thursdays from six P.M. to eight P.M. Next was an address that meant nothing to me, which could mean that it was a street in the upper reaches of Zemun or that it was one of the many streets that had changed names over the past few years. Impossible, I thought, that this flier, most likely related to the poster I'd seen two months earlier on the gate at Zmaj Jovina Street, had no significance. Of course, Marko would have said mockingly, had he been standing there next to me, because we read meaning into things that, in and of themselves, mean nothing. I shut the box and went upstairs. Differences were what had drawn us to each other all those years, no reason for it to be otherwise now, though Marko was no longer a real presence. There was nothing nasty waiting outside the door to my apartment, nothing scribbled on the door, the doorbell had not been smeared with excrement, the wall by the door was clean: all in all, I could breathe a sigh of relief. I entered the apartment, full of greenish shadows from the lowered blinds, and tumbled into the armchair, where, eyes shut, I massaged my forehead and the base of my nose. I could have fallen asleep right then, I was so exhausted, and the sleep probably would have done me good, but I didn't dare relax because Margareta had told me the day before that she'd call me in the evening. Did I make it up or had she said that the triangles were starting to open? Pressing lightly with the tips of my fingers, I began to massage my eyes. When I opened them, it was not completely dark in the room, but the green shadows were denser. I looked at the clock: I'd slept for about forty minutes and probably had been snoring with my mouth open, because the left side of my face, part of the chin and cheek, were caked with dried saliva. I went to the bathroom. In the mirror, my face was crumpled like a discarded piece of paper — I splashed it, rubbed it with lotion, smoothed my hair. I thought of Margareta again and felt myself hardening. There was nothing I could do. That creature had a life of its own and the less I get involved, I said to my reflection, the better. I slipped my hand into my pants to free it of the constraints of the fabric, and just then the phone rang. I didn't pick up. It was too early for Margareta to be calling. I stood there holding my rigid penis and waited for the phone to stop jangling. I had not counted, however, on the persistence of the caller, because the ringing didn't stop, my penis went limp, and my legs ached, and a feeling spread through me that the person calling could see me, knew I was here, standing next to the phone, and that he was not calling for the same reason he had called at the start, but because he wanted to fling into my face, or my ear, what a nobody I was, what a horrible soulless man, that it was high time for me to forget that limp organ and reach for the smooth, hard curve of the receiver. Carefully moving through the apartment, crouching behind furniture, I hopped from window to window, watching from behind the curtains the buildings across the way in the hope that I might catch sight of the person who was after me. The roofs were empty, as were the balconies, the windows shut and so distant that I couldn't be sure whether anyone was peering out from behind the curtains or through the slats of the blinds. I cursed myself for not buying a new set of binoculars or a telescope or a camera with a telephoto lens, whatever would have allowed me to see into the distance, while the phone kept ringing furiously behind me. I occasionally turned around and glared at it, as if it would be shocked by my ferocity and stop the noise. Why didn't I instantly yank the cord out of the wall? When I finally did, the silence fell like a balm on my ears. I made the rounds of the windows but spotted no changes. I remembered the man in the treetop by my building. Marko laughed at me at the time, but I myself had found no traces around the poplar later that day, though that didn't completely convince me to the contrary. I am one of those for whom any shred of suspicion, even the tiniest, leaves a permanent scar, and it is enough for me to touch that wrinkled trace with the tip of my finger for the suspicion to come back in full blaze, or in full darkness, which, when I think of it, is actually the more accurate. Suspicion leads to the dark, hope leads to the light, there is no simpler equation. Dragan Mišović would agree, though he might say that I should not associate light and dark with mathematical abstractions, which, despite everything, don't exist anywhere. Numbers are not fruits ripening on a slender or a knobbly tree, they are not berries sprouting on prickly bushes, they are not anything in fact, and just when you think you have numbers the most present, that is when they are the most absent. Now you see them, he'd say, raising two fingers, now you don't, and he'd fold his hand in. I can go on opening and shutting my hand as much as I like, but I have never managed to repeat the magic. I could conjure no magic at all, I should say, though I know that it was a mistake to call anything that happened during those nine weeks magical, for magic, as someone said, is tied to belief in the absolute power of language, and what was happening back then, no matter what language was involved, had to do with the other side of language, where the mystical realm of the ineffable exists in the serenity of silence and the music of the spheres, that which no measure of effort can express in words. Even what I am jotting down now with increasing interruptions, with longer intervals spent by the window, though there are no roofs or balconies here from which my actions or what I've written down in fine print with a ballpoint pen might be observed, wouldn't have changed anything, because all these words, all these tangled sentences, can do nothing more than crack open the narrow door leading to the room wherein dwells the truth, wherein reality is true reality and not a series of multiple reflections, including the one in which our face resides. I leaned over, reached for the cord, and plugged the phone back in. I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. The line was free, I could breathe and wait for Margareta to call. I put the phone down and went into the bathroom. I almost never look at myself now in the mirror, except when I shave, because I can't bear to see what the years have done to my face, but back then, when all this was happening, I gazed at the mirror like any vain man, I rubbed lotion into my cheeks, slicked back my hair, squeezed the blackheads, snipped the whiskers, brushed my teeth. There was always one more distraction, one more attempt at sidestepping the sequence of events that is key to the story. So be it, but no one can convince me that real life is as orderly as a novel, and that in real life everything is tidy and purposeful, that people appear precisely when their arrival fits into the plot, not a moment too soon or a moment too late, and that everything leads to a climax and a resolution, after which there is nothing left unexplained. Life, to put it mildly, is chaos, a chaos that is not without an order of its own, I agree, but that order is so complex, so tangled, that even with the best of intentions we cannot divine it as order. I note that occasionally I write in the first-person plural, as if I were authorized to speak in the name of a group or a specific segment of the population. There is no one, I am alone, I can barely speak in my own name, and certainly not in the name of anyone else. But enough about me. I am not jotting this down to portray myself in a favorable light or to create an alibi. In fact, I don't know why I am doing it. It's easy to say "I don't know," Marko once said. Not true, was my response, "I don't know" was the hardest thing to say. We quarreled over that, foolishly, of course, but without consequences, as happens between friends. Who are not friends anymore, I must add immediately, a friendship that ended with no pointless words of accusation, like a fine-tuned divorce. Marko went off one way, I another, and we never looked back. I should be saying I never looked back, for how could I tell whether Marko turned around if I wasn't looking back? So I sensed that he didn't look back, just as I sensed that a tear welled in his eye, that he strained his ears to hear the echo of the footsteps receding irrevocably, that he clenched his fists and ground his teeth, and that he battled the inner voice urging him to act in the best possible way, though there were a few times when it seemed his shaking knees would betray him. It sounds like a farewell scene between Romeo and Juliet, I know, but friends are lovers, no quibbling about that here, at least. I hadn't been thinking about any of this, of course, that Wednesday, late in the afternoon, as I waited for Margareta to act on her promise. The only thought that obsessed me was how to continue what had gone on the night before, and this seemed more important than finding answers to the many questions that had been making my life a misery, though when Margareta finally did call I lied shamelessly, saying that I could har