Minut, on the power of rumor, on blind hatred, on simple human envy, if envy is as simple as it is human. I must lie down, I thought when I got home, and dropped, fully dressed, into bed. I fell asleep instantly and was woken by the doorbell. I opened my eyes, looked at my watch: I had been sleeping for twenty-five minutes. I had been dreaming, but couldn't remember what. The doorbell kept ringing, longer rings then shorter, and finally I had to relent. I would rather have stayed in bed, trying to remember the dream, but I got up, went to the door, and just as I reached for the key, the ringing stopped. I looked at the key as if it could give me an answer. The key was silent, the doorbell was silent, and, not breathing, I leaned my ear against the door and imagined someone on the other side, also not breathing, who had leaned his ear precisely where mine was, and the ear of that person was listening to the silence of my ear, while my ear carefully listened to the silence that came from that other ear, which reminded me of the dream, or one part of the dream, the part when, as I tried to get out of a large room in which someone had inadvertently locked me, I stopped and put my ear to an opening under a mirror, the function of which I didn't know, the function of the opening, that is, not the mirror, of course, because in my dream the mirror was an ordinary mirror, but the opening was mysterious and I couldn't decide whether it was part of the system of ventilation or of the heating system, or whether there might be a single system for both heating and cooling, it certainly couldn't have heated and cooled at the same time, and in my dream I leaned my ear against the opening in hopes of hearing somebody, because if I heard somebody, somebody could hear me, and I tried to come up with what I might say, and of all words the one I couldn't retrieve was the word for the thing one uses to unlock a door, just as I wasn't sure whether the same word was used for the thing for locking the door, because a locked door, I thought in the dream, is not the same as an unlocked door, and the door you lock is not the same as the door you unlock, which meant that the things that lock or unlock ought to be different too, and at that point a voice reached my ear through the opening under the mirror, an entirely ordinary voice that said, Turn the doorknob, damn it, turn that doorknob, and suddenly I asked myself whether I was dreaming what was happening to me or had the dream reminded me of something that had already happened, and I stretched out my hand, turned the doorknob, and the door opened. It hadn't been locked. Not once since the night I was beaten up in the nursery school yard had I forgotten to lock it. I broke out in a cold sweat, completely absurdly, of course, because it was the response of my body to the possibility that something might have happened, though nothing did happen, but that is the structure of the human soul, or at least the autonomic nervous system, that reacts equally to a real and an imagined threat, to what really occurred and to the prospect of what might have occurred. No matter how paradoxical it may sound, the nervous system is blind and believes itself, or its imaginings, just as much as it believes real stimuli from the outside world. Marko, of course, would have warned me that this could be proof that there was no difference between the outside and the inside worlds, and that the outside world was merely a projection of the inside world, and that we project our own existence in a movie, say, in which we play protagonists directed by insecure, waffling directors who are themselves protagonists. A little complicated, but that's Marko for you. Actually, when the buzzer started to ring, or when I started hearing it ring, my first thought was that Marko was finally back, and even when it stopped ringing and I pressed my ear to the door, I still wondered whether he was standing out there in the hallway, a little impatient, a little irritated, a little unhappy. When I opened the door, it was not Marko, but Dragan Mišović, which exceeded the power of any dream of mine, so I stood there and blinked until he asked if he might come in. I moved over to let him by, adding that I hoped he wasn't expecting me to solve any math problems. This early in the morning, he said, even I can't add two and two. I'd be surprised, said Dragan Mišović, how many people weren't able to do that much later on in the day, even after they'd had a cup of coffee. I brought him into the living room, waited for him to take a seat, then I went into the kitchen to make coffee. If there was someone I was not expecting to see that morning in my apartment it was Dragan Mišović. I wondered what the woman who had often run into him and later moved to Banovo Brdo would have said, or would she simply have refused to believe me? While I waited for the water to boil, I peeked into the living room. It was Dragan Mišović, there was no doubt. I brought in the tray with the coffeepot and two cups. I served the coffee and sat across from him. We said nothing, and it seemed as if we'd never say anything again. Dragan sipped the coffee, a little loudly for my taste but with gusto, so I took that as praise of my culinary talents. I'm not certain, to be frank, that making coffee counts as a culinary talent, but praise is praise, and no one could take that from me. He'd been passing by, he said, and he thought he might drop in. He saw my dubious expression, and laughed. Don't say, he said, you don't believe me. I won't, I said, though that doesn't prevent me from not believing you. Dragan Mišović sighed. It is time for us to take off our masks, he said, and touched his face with the tips of his fingers. For a moment I actually thought he'd peel some sort of mask off his face, but he only scratched himself on the cheek and chin. Margareta has already told you everything, he said, all that's left is the mathematical part, and she was never big on math. I couldn't believe my ears. I might, of course, have picked up something from that evening at the restaurant, when he slipped me the message about the triangles opening, however then, if I'm not mistaken, it seemed like yet another coincidence in the abundance of coincidences, and I realized that so many coincidences were indeed statistically feasible, but that in practice, just another word for life, the number of genuine coincidences is minimal, and that most of the other things could be neatly explained and tied to certain events. She didn't tell me anything, I said hoarsely, about mathematical calculations, and as you know, one could never say of me that I'm at home in that universe. Dragan Mišović undid three buttons on his shirt, slipped his hand inside, and pulled out a thick hardcover notebook. Don't worry, he said, you needn't learn all of this, but it will be useful for you to know at least some of the foundations of mathematical calculations that may come up. I stared, incredulous, at the notebook in his hands. What foundations? I finally asked. And who might bring them up? What I really wanted to ask was what sort of relationship he had with Margareta, I even felt a dagger of jealousy, which slowly, though implacably, pierced my heart. The problem with Margareta, said Dragan Mišović, is that she spreads herself too thin, and I've told her a thousand times to prepare her concept, and, more important, to follow through consistently, but she is never willing to accept this. He shrugged. There are things, he said, we'll never understand, no point in fussing about them. If he keeps on talking about Margareta like this, I thought, the dagger might fly in the opposite direction. I am still astonished today at the thought: Is it possible that I'd succumbed to jealousy like a hot-faced teenager? Why was I so jealous anyway? Because of what I'd imagined might happen, not because of anything real, but something unreal, nonexistent. On the other hand, isn't all jealousy like that? Isn't jealousy always something we're imagining might happen between a person we love and somebody else? So I stood there, or actually sat there facing Dragan Mišović;, and while he talked about calculating probabilities, permutations, combinations and variations, or whatever all those mathematical functions are called, I was mending my broken and pierced heart. You never know, Dragan Mišović was saying, how the descent will actually work, whether the guardians of the Well will step forward with questions, or whether they'll only watch, perhaps concealed, through a hole or from behind a corner. The question, therefore, he continued, is how to respond if you are told, for instance, that the person who is entering, or going down, or climbing up, should know all the alphabets, must be familiar with the combinations of all the letters, as well as with the two hundred thirty-one gates of the alphabets, which are inscribed in the ninth sphere and divided into sixty parts? I had no idea what he was saying. That is Abulafi's text on making the golem, said Dragan Mišović, and the bit that comes next is especially important. He cleared his throat as if getting ready to recite: Take pure powder, spin a wheel, start running the permutations until you have done all two hundred thirty-one gates, and then you will receive the influence of wisdom. Afterward take a cup full of pure water and a spoon, and fill the spoon with powder. Sprinkle the powder into the water, and in the process blow gently over the powder. In a breath say God's name until the breath is spent. Start with the head, until you have completed the first eight rows, in order to save the head. And so it goes, in sequence, said Dragan Mišović, bearing in mind that Abulafi warns that the point is not to teach a person to act as God does, but to understand the Lord better, and cleave unto him like a plant in the wind. That means, he said, that if someone asks you to calculate the combinations of God's name of seventy-two letters, you must know the number of combinable letters, and that this number is the same for every place in the name. Listen, I told him, don't you think you are expecting a bit much of me, not even Superman would be able to understand all of this in such a short time. The difficulties are only superficial, answered Dragan Mišović, but, of course, first you must shed your fear of mathematics. No one has ever prepared for a math exam in two days, I shouted, perhaps a little louder than I'd meant to. I was burning with a desire to ask what his role was in all this, which I didn't ask, allowing the number of unknowns I'd brought in with me to be nearly equal to the knowns, and that therefore, at least for me, this complex equation had become insoluble. Dragan Mišović didn't give up. He leafed through his notebook, quoted various sections, wrote out examples, underlined things, then star