The Well. I opened to the last page from my dream, and as had happened before, I was certain I'd never seen it. The part about Enoch did, admittedly, sound familiar, but the illustration, a square-shaped labyrinth in several colors, almost like a mandala, was entirely unfamiliar. The drawing was centered on the page with the text around it. Enoch, son of Jared, it said, walked one fi ne day by a stream, listening to the song of a bird, when suddenly the sky darkened, and from a great distance, like vast boats, black-and-white clouds piled in, and from them, with a rumble, appeared the hand of the Lord and a voice was heard mightier than a choir of trumpets, and this mighty voice said to Enoch that it had come for him and that it would raise him to heaven, where he would make Enoch a witness to all the shameful things people did on earth, which sullied God's majestic effort, so that he, Enoch, would comprehend the measure of God's anger and the righteousness of his wish to wipe humankind off the face of the earth, just as Enoch might wipe a tear from his cheek, and having spoken these words, without waiting for Enoch's answer, the hand coiled around him like a swirl of smoke and shot upward so fast that Enoch feared his shoes would come off his feet, but in the blink of an eye he found himself in a marvelous palace, surrounded by inquisitive angels, and here the Lord gradually transformed him into a superhuman being with seventy-two wings and an infinite number of eyes, as large as the whole world, which at the time was lost under the vast waters of the flood, and then he called that being by the name of Metatron, and proclaimed it a prince of divine presence, pure fire, fire that walks, fire that flows, fire that feeds the blaze of the heavens, and from which all springs, and into which all runs, with the condition of finding the right path. The path, I assume, was to be found in the square labyrinth, but for that I needed better lighting and a large magnifying glass. A lamp to bring closer I could find; a magnifying glass, however, I didn't have, just as I had no binoculars and who knows what else. Once and for all I should make a list of all the things I need, then I should go out and look for them and buy them, so that I wouldn't have to fume at wasted opportunities. I could already see the first part of the list: binoculars, magnifying glass, pencil sharpener. I leafed through several more pages of the manuscript, but neither Metatron nor Enoch was mentioned again. Two pages described the proper handling of leeches; one page provided the transcription of a letter in which there was a debate on the opening of a Jewish school in Zemun, which the Slavonian general command definitively denied in January 1814, invoking regulations from 1753, which allowed Jews the right to live only on property they already owned; that same regulation comes up later on, in a letter dated June 12, 1808, with a warning that the Jews in Zemun and Belgrade should be watched closely, as rumor had it that the French consul in Travnik was trying to influence the Serbian rebels through the Jews; on the last page there was a list of Jewish tradesmen in Zemun but with no indication of the year, and below the list a petition of the association of Zemun tradesmen to the effect that the Jewish tradesmen were stealing the bread from their mouths, that without bread they would not last long, which the government should have known without being warned. This reminded me of the fact that, except for that cream puff, I'd had nothing to eat since breakfast. I went into the kitchen, scrambled some eggs, poured myself a glass of milk, spread apricot jam on a slice of bread, and ate it all in a split second. I could have eaten more, but my search around the kitchen turned up nothing; and just like those Zemun tradesmen of two centuries ago, I no longer had any bread, though, unlike them, I had no one to blame. Margareta said I shouldn't get there until after eleven but before midnight, and for some reason, while I waited, time passed more slowly and the second hand needed more than sixty seconds to circle around the entire face of the clock. I remembered Marko's explanation of what happens when cannabis enters our physical and mental system: time, Marko said, passes agonizingly slowly at breakneck speed. And every time I was high, I'd think about how precise that definition was, but now I wasn't high, which could only mean that something else, and it wasn't the eggs, had taken over my consciousness the same way the ingredients of hashish or marijuana do. I wondered whether Margareta smoked, and I couldn't decide. During the seventies and eighties of the last century it seemed as if all younger urban residents consumed cannabis, but this had changed in the early nineties. Drugs got more expensive and less accessible, and alcohol made a big comeback. Hard liquor fl owed like rivers, and the end of the century was filled with the consumption of sedatives. All of Belgrade was on valium, their eyes gleaming like car headlights. Margareta, however, didn't have that glassy stare, nor did she have the slightly out-of-focus look or the bloodshot eyes typical for people on hashish. These thoughts made me contemplate having a joint, and I started digging around for the papers, but then gave up. For my encounter with Margareta I needed a clear mind. I looked at my watch: it was time to go. Margareta opened the door, and we stood for a moment, looking at each other, waiting for her breathing to slow. No, she said, she hadn't been racing to the door, she'd been up on a ladder to get hold of some books, then lugged the whole pile, like an armload of firewood, to the table when the doorbell rang. Everything's fine, she said, but she hoped she hadn't pulled a muscle. She lifted both arms and examined them, then lowered them and walked into the apartment. I had only had the chance to catch sight of golden hairs on her lower arms, like those on her thigh, though now I was thinking that I had imagined the hairs on her thigh. Certainly, my vantage point then was better, I didn't need glasses the way I do now, but in that instant I wouldn't have noticed larger markings, such as a mole or a bruise, let alone minute golden hairs. There, I am writing about little hairs as if they were crucial to this story, though many other things, much more serious and full of meaning, wait in some cranny of my mind. This is one more distinction between the real and the recorded: in writing our choice is unlimited, whereas in reality it is a limited selection, and sometimes not even that. Some are disgusted by hairs as much as others are disgusted by leeches, and the fear of a hair in soup may be the same as the fear of a leech latching on to the warm hollow behind the knee. Whatever the case, Margareta was wearing black jeans that evening, so I couldn't expect any proof, at least not any time soon. The apartment looked as it had before, though I couldn't shake off the impression that this time it was in a state of disorder. There's tea in the kitchen, juice in the fridge, there may be a beer, said Margareta, and added that we didn't have much time, though she didn't say for what, and while I poured jasmine tea into a cup I sensed that there wouldn't be time for what I'd had in mind. I went back into the living room, one foot in front of the other, while the cup joggled on the saucer and the tea sloshed over the lip in thin streams. Margareta was sitting at the desk, sifting through papers. I looked around: there was nowhere to sit. I could sit on the floor, but then I wouldn't be able to see Margareta, or I would be looking at her from an odd angle, so I chose to stand. I put the teacup down on the nearest pile of books. Margareta didn't even glance at me, instead she kept flipping from one page of writing to the next, and I chided myself for my naivete in thinking her invitation implied a continuation of what had gone on the night before. I know what you're thinking, said Margareta, without raising her eyes from the page that was now consuming her attention. No, you don't, I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering. Margareta looked at me, and looking back, I realized her eyes had changed color again. Now they were greenish blue, but I could have sworn that they'd been a gray blue earlier, though at the same time I was certain they'd always been light brown. After what went on in the cab, Margareta continued, you're wondering why we're wasting our time on papers instead of picking up where we left off. I felt my ears burning. Don't feel awkward, said Margareta, and at that moment I thought my ears would grow with shame, the way Pinocchio's nose grew with greed. All in the fullness of time, said Margareta, which is an old turn of phrase but still a good one. She put down one page and took up another. Besides, she said, the Kabbalists thought that the night between Friday and Saturday was ideal for lovemaking, not just ideal, but obligatory, and it was even believed that the best time was Friday after midnight, but before dawn, because if a man and a woman were to do it early in the evening or at dawn they might hear the voices of people, which might encourage the man to think of other women, and that would be a sin. She looked at me, and I nodded, as if I had been expected to give my approval. By that act, Margareta said, consummated on Shabbat, which starts on Friday at sunset, a man and a woman help the Shekhinah unite again with God and so renew his divine substance and restore balance to the world. I had to confess I'd never accorded the act of love so much importance, but I liked the image of the lovers carrying the flagging world on their backs, then sinking into each other to return the exaltation to the world. This made the male sexual organ seem like the lever with which someone, I can't remember who, sought to move the entire planet earth. I couldn't understand, however, why Margareta was telling me all this. If she didn't want, as she put it, to pick up where we'd left off the night before, she could have said so without reciting all the stuff on the role of sexual intercourse in the Kabbalistic notion of the cosmos. In the Talmud, she said, it's written precisely how often men should make love with their wives. Workers should do so twice a week, donkey drivers once a week, camel drivers once a month, and sailors once every six months. More than that, she said, was permissible, but less than that would be grounds for the woman to call for dissolution of the marriage. And writers, I asked, what about them? Margareta shuffled through the papers and said that writers were not mentioned anywhere. Maybe there were no writers then, I said, or maybe they weren't expected to couple with their wives. I'm not sure, said Margareta, but it looks as if a man whose work is less strenuous and who spends no time away from home is supposed to make love with his wife more often. Then a writer, I said, is condemned to sex every night. If you consider that a condemnation, replied Margareta, the answer is affirmative. I laughed. Everything is relative, I said, even sex, so the night between Friday and Saturday is more important than the other nights in the week? Yes, confirmed Margareta. For a while we said nothing, then I spoke up again and asked whether that meant what I thought it meant. Yes, she said, it does. She didn't inquire as to what I had in mind, just as I didn't ask her for any further explanation, but the answer was clear: we would have to wait for Shabbat. The silence settled again between us, a little weightier and longer than before. Margareta went back to her papers while I looked aimlessly at the books on the floor and shelves. I went into the kitchen and poured myself another cup of tea. Why don't you sit down, Margareta advised me when I came over to the desk, because she meant, she said, to tell me a story that was not short. There is nothing I like so much as a long story, I said. The longer the better. I sat down on the floor by heaps of books on which I again set my cup of tea. Don't worry, Margareta smiled, the story won't last until Shabbat. She picked up a sheet of paper and glanced at me almost sternly, with eyes that I was certain were a feline green. This story, like so many others, said Margareta, begins with a death, in the mid-eighties, when Solomon Alfandari died in Belgrade. He was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Zemun, because, native of Zemun that he was, he was part of the local Jewish community there. Several months later, his widow brought three large boxes to the Jewish Historical Museum containing his books, letters, some documents and photographs, and manuscripts in Serbian and Hebrew. For the next two years the boxes gathered dust in a corner of the museum, then, no longer able to fend off the daily pestering of Alfandari's widow, members of the museum staff inventoried the entire contents of the boxes, and so it happened that a manuscript written in Hebrew finally saw the light of day, actually the neon light of the museum storage room where the inventory was being drawn up. The manuscript had no title page, but since it began with the words