ed 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 started again at the beginning, so that I had to make yet another pot of coffee, stronger and more bitter than the last, and after Dragan left, I felt the acid rising to my throat, and, standing by the window, ate a crust of dry bread, hoping that, like a sponge, it would sop up the acid in my stomach. Each time, however, when I leafed through the papers on which Dragan had written out the calculations and instructions, the power of the acid revived, and when I had used up all the bread I stopped studying them. I was furious that my knowledge of math wasn't better, which was probably where the stomach pain came from, but what really got me was Dragan Mišović's passing remark that I should be ready to answer in case someone asked me a question. Whom did he have in mind? And did I dare believe this story about a plot within another larger plot, which was probably only part of an even larger plot? In any other situation I would have answered in the negative; I do not know why I hesitated at the time; perhaps because of the manuscript, which had demonstrated its supernatural power and kept reminding me that language, and therefore writing, is a living organism, a sort of benign virus that dwells in a person, and can survive on its own. I flipped the manuscript open the way I used to open the Chinese Book of Changes, without making an effort to cast the sticks or coins and work up the trigrams and hexagrams, leaving it instead to chance, which is just another word for destiny, to answer my question. I opened the manuscript to [>], and in the left corner read that Eleazar had once been angry at God and told him he had seen through his explanation that it had not been possible to create a perfect world because in doing so he would have been making a copy of himself, in which case there would have been two identical gods, and if there could be two, why not three or four? You are talking in vain, Eleazar upbraided God, you should at least know that the truth cannot be hidden. A perfect world was not created because in a perfect world there would be no need for any god, not for one, nor for a whole multitude, ranted Eleazar, or else the world is perfect, because the evil is as much yours as the good is, just as the night and all its living and not living creatures are as much yours as the day full of radiance and serenity, then in that scheme of things you appear as someone who can offer protection, though in moments of great testing you hide like a bashful bride or a child who has broken a bowl and, fearful of being punished, points at whoever is standing nearest him. There was no indication as to whom Eleazar had in mind, who was bowing down under the weight of God's index finger, because that fragment, as kept happening with the manuscript, turned into a copy of a document of the Royal War Council of November 1781, communicating the emperor's will that the Zemun Jews, like all the Jews in the empire, would be allowed to use their language for religious services, but that within two years' time they'd have to expunge it from their business ledgers and documents, including their wills and contracts drawn up for regulating business. I closed the manuscript and opened it again to [>]. The part about Eleazar was still there, but it was up in the right-hand corner and it melted into another text, a document on the relationship between God and the Shekhinah. The ten Sephirot, it said, are the presence of the being of God, but Adam sinned, and he thought that the tenth, lowest Sephirot, called Malkhut, or Kingdom, was the whole of the divine being. This separated the Shekhinah, the feminine presence of God dwelling in that Sephirot, from the wholeness of the divine being, and it left God and the Shekhinah in a mutual yearning and a desire to reunite. To this day they are sometimes joined and sometimes not, depending on whether people sin, which drives them apart, or perform good deeds, which brings God and the Shekhinah close again. It should be repeated time and time again just how important it is to perform good deeds, for if God is not with the Shekhinah, he is seeking another female companion, and that other female companion will be Lilith, mistress of the demonic hordes, prepared to destroy everything that can be destroyed. So this is the obligation, then, I thought, this union of the male and female elements, which, if done properly, secures the normal functioning of the supreme being. Man must move God, so that God can move man; one influences the other, the one cannot exist without the other. I closed the manuscript and went over to the window. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then up, then down, but nowhere did I see anyone looking like God. Yes, it was Thursday, a working day, and he prefers to appear on Shabbat, who knows where he was just then. Here Marko would have elbowed his way in, if only he had been there beside me, and he would have said that what I was saying was absurd, for if God was omnipresent, he did not come and go, he was always there and missed nothing. I might have argued that God could shrink, reduce himself to the size of a dot, then there would be things good and bad beyond his ken. I would have hoped that Marko would not ask why God would shrink as if he were cheap fabric, because I had no answer. I knew that he shrank once long ago, when he created the universe, and I knew that he could be no larger than he was, though he could be smaller, but I also knew that my knowledge was shaky and would not serve me. I ought to calm down, I said to myself, my nose glued to the windowpane. The day wore on, it would soon be over, and then it would be Friday, and the beginning of Shabbat, and the obligation I had to Margareta. And not just to her. That too Marko would have loved: that I'm referring to the sexual act as an obligation, and if one thing is not an obligation, and cannot be an obligation, he'd say, it is the moment of union. And I would have had to admit he was right. I stepped back from the window, wandered aimlessly through the apartment, and ended up in the kitchen. The very thought that I should not be nervous as I awaited Friday sundown was making me nervous. Maybe, I thought, I should meditate, erase all from the mirror of my consciousness, but when I tried to imagine myself sitting in a chair, back straight, harmonizing my breathing with the general rhythm of the cosmos, I gave up. I had only one possibility left: to eat something. I remembered how as a boy I liked eating bread spread with lard and sprinkled with sugar, and at the thought my mouth watered, but I had nothing to stop it with. Lard had been replaced with cooking oil, and I could have gone up and down the entire stairwell and rung the doorbells of all my neighbors, and chances were I would not have found anyone who had a spoonful of lard to lend me. I had sugar, true, and I remembered another treat from my childhood: a slice of bread soaked in water and sprinkled with sugar, but I felt like eating lard and the thought of water had no appeal. I noticed a sheet of paper on the table with the yin and yang symbol on it, the one I had crumpled, then smoothed out, with the announcement for the tai chi course, to be held on the street I wasn't familiar with, so I had to look it up on the commercial map of Zemun. It was not in the upper part of town, as I had assumed, but near the city park, and it had indeed changed its name: the earlier Slovenian or Croatian locality had been changed to the name of a Serbian scientist, though my friends still referred to it by its old name. Odd, isn't it: when street names were changed after World War II, many people, possibly out of spite, continued using the prewar names, but once the new government imposed new names after the 1990s war, they preferred, at least for a time, the names from the Communist era. Perhaps it would be best to call the streets by number: governments change, the numbers remain the same. I have a feeling Dragan Mišović wouldn't agree, though I don't see why he wouldn't, but this only goes to show that there's always someone who has an ax to grind, though it also may mean that I'm overly anxious to please, and that, by always making sure I have an exit strategy, I invoke, or rather invent, the ax grinders myself. All in all, this unnecessary suspicion was one more proof that I needed t