The Well, the museum staff members listed it under this title in the inventory that was later signed by Alfandari's widow and the director of the museum. But you should know, said Margareta, this is not the same manuscript you have, though it carries the same title as the Hebrew original. As it later transpired, when domestic and foreign Hebrew scholars analyzed the text, The Well in Hebrew turned out to be a Kabbalistic text, written some two hundred fifty years ago at the crossroads, as the manuscript said, between two empires, the Habsburg and the Ottoman, and between two worlds, this world here and the one beyond. There was nothing to suggest which worlds those were, said Margareta, and while it was possible that "this world here" refers to the world in which we live, that other world, "the one beyond," could be anywhere. Two years passed but the translation was not completed. The manuscript, the translators said, hadn't been completed either, there were several junctures at which it stopped abruptly and then would start again with sentences that had nothing to do with the passages preceding them. Besides, the manuscript was teeming with quotes from other Kabbalistic sources, sometimes with the source cited, much more often with no citation to indicate where they had been taken from. The same quotes are, for example, copied several times, and sometimes attributed to different editions and authors, which contributed to the theory that the author meant to obscure all traces of himself. The manuscript, one of the translators said, seemed alive, and, in a curious way, was itself dictating how they should proceed with it. During that time, in one of the realities, said Margareta, the war began, and after that the outbreak of hostilities in Slovenia and Croatia, then it was Bosnia's turn. Sensing that where there was the most talk of friendship the worst strife would erupt, the Sarajevo Jews began evacuating. Among the several hundred Jews who arrived in Belgrade was a fellow by the name of Pavle Salom, a distant relative of Solomon Alfandari's. In his suitcase, with a change of clothes, a warm sweater, and slippers, there was room for two more things: a family picture album, now at the museum, and a manuscript in Hebrew, which turned out to be an addendum to the manuscript that the translators had been unable to handle. It took several months for the various parts of the manuscript to be arranged in the proper order, though there were plenty of sentences that couldn't be placed, and which spun around the manuscript like planets. The Belgrade Hebrew scholar Eugen Verber first elaborated on the notion of the manuscript as a living organism, which, as I just said, said Margareta, the interpreters and translators had already ascertained. According to Verber, the author of the manuscript had based the text on the Kabbalistic technique of bringing to life nonliving matter, hence on the technique of creating a golem, which had been modified in such a way that the text itself came alive, was designed to be self-sustaining but not also physically mobile. In other words, the manuscript was not a bizarre ambulatory creature, but it did possess the capability of refashioning itself, as if it were searching for the most apt structure for its meaning. Verber was also the first to note that the manuscript can propel itself forward, Margareta said, like a sort of virus: if a complete fragment of the manuscript were to be introduced to any other text, in any other language, that text too would begin to behave in the same way, in other words, it too would be alive. This is the way the manuscript in my apartment had originated, she told me. Actually, fragments of