ted 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 to go out to walk off a little of the tension and edginess, as well as my nervous hunger. I had to hurry, because it was past six, which was the time the class started, so I dashed to the city park, making my way through longer and thicker shadows. The address on the flier took me to spacious rooms on the ground floor of a shabby five-story building, which probably used to house the tenants' building council or a branch office of the civil defense system, and there was a slightly lighter patch on the grimy wall where Tito's portrait used to hang. It felt as if that portrait had had its day a century ago, though only fifteen years have passed since then, and now it seems, maybe because I no longer live there, that its day never happened. Then again, maybe that's the way it is, maybe nothing ever exists, it's only somebody's thought, upon which we stumble accidentally and believe it to be our own. I will never find out, of course, just as I will never find out so many other things before death knocks on my door, or, as things now stand, at my heart, which a doctor here described to me in the past tense, as if it no longer existed. He clenched his fist and said: This is how your heart used to be. Then he opened his hand and said: This is how it burst. He stared into the palm of his hand and said: Goodbye, heart. I too stared at his hand and saw nothing. Goodbye, heart, I repeated after him, just as I am doing now, but back then, in the rooms that, despite the Eastern energy, were utterly gloomy, my mind was not on my heart. I looked at the fifteen people, mostly middle-aged women, doing warm-up exercises, as a young woman who introduced herself as the instructor of the Taoist version of tai chi courteously explained to me. She repeated that this was Taoist tai chi, as if I knew that there were different schools for the study of the martial arts, which, unlike others, is not in the service of attack or defense. The young woman clapped her hands and announced that the class would show me several characteristic postures, and while the group moved smoothly, wavelike, giving me the feeling that I was under water, she called out the names of individual postures, colorful names that were quickly self-explanatory, such as "grasps the bird's tail," "white crane spreads its wings," "arms move like clouds," or "creep low like snake." Maybe I should have joined in to learn how to master my inner energy, maybe then I never would have met that cardiologist for whom the heart is a balloon, though in the end, I admit, it makes no difference. Sooner or later every heart pumps its last, no matter what we call it, or whether we speak of it at all. Silence is a wall around wisdom, but if the wisdom is lacking, the silence can't bring it into being. So I stood there, watched the harmonious movements, and wondered why I was there. Nothing in the room or in the appearance of the people seemed to have anything to do with the rest of what was happening, so I could move on. If I did move on, however, I thought, then I'd be bringing everything into doubt, because if I doubted one of the possible threads, wasn't I questioning all the rest? And what does it mean, to doubt or to believe? What makes these similar and what distinguishes them, and is it possible to believe in doubt while at the same time doubting belief? No, Marko would have said, you don't need a cardiologist. The balloon you've got, he would say, isn't in your heart but in your head. You could do a circus act, he would tell me, with the rest of the freaks, and over your cage there would be a sign: THE HUMAN BALLOON. That's not funny, he would have said to me if I had started to laugh, though tears would have been more apt. Tears are always apt, I concur with that, though they are never good if you are crying over yourself. Two or three times, alas, I did just that, I was trapped in a dead end and thought tears were my only solution. I'm not ashamed of those tears, even the balloon doctor would have approved, the one Marko was thinking of, or the one I was thinking Marko might have been thinking of, as I thought of our conversation and his presence. The previous sentence just shows the insecurity that possessed me then, the chaos that had become my order, the instability that had replaced my sense of balance. It would have been better if I had, without any thoughts, watched the postures of the introductory tai chi class as they spread waves of calm with their harmony, especially when they leaned sideways, like clouds, as their instructor said, though to me they looked more like sea waves, or better yet, like grain swaying at the lightest breath of wind. I had one more thing to try: I leaned confidentially over to the instructor and asked whether in tai chi there was a movement called "triangles opening." She looked at me, a wisp of doubt flitted across her eyes; in tai chi, she said, as far as she knew, there was nothing mathematical. It was true that the feet had to rest on the ground at a forty-five-degree angle to the axis of movement, but that could be learned without the use of a protractor. She drew my attention to the feet of the class participants, and indeed, they were all at forty-five-degree angles, then all lifted their right leg at the same time, and I saw that row of legs slowly straightening as if dealing a slow-motion blow as a farewell. A moment later I stepped out into the street. From the window of the barracks across the way, a soldier watched me. I recalled my own military service and the loneliness that fed on me like a bedbug, so I waved cheerfully, but he didn't react; instead, if I could trust my eyes from such a distance, he scowled and pursed his lips with scorn. I pictured a company of soldiers doing tai chi early in the morning instead of their routine morning limbering exercises, and that image of the soldiers in their olive drab uniforms moving slowly and mindfully over the concrete surface of the exercise grounds restored my good mood. I loathed the army and was sorry I had spent a year of my life in it, but an army using tai chi would, no doubt, be something different. I remembered our portly sergeant, and when I pictured him trying to stand on one leg like a rooster, I laughed out loud. None of that, however, could alter the fact that there was no connection between the tai chi class and the Well, which I found bewildering, since everything else had been tied in some way, or at least I'd been able to construe something that was convincing enough. For example, I had interpreted the car parked in front of the pharmacy as a lure, to draw me further into a story that I myself had constructed. Had that been the intention of the conspirators, if I can call them that? To persuade me to create a framework of my own, to be the protagonist who invents himself, chooses those elements he finds most convincing, rejects those that have no place in the construct of a reality that, in essence, did not exist? I came to a stop, then moved slowly on. Had I allowed myself to be drawn into a game in which I was by no means in control, as I'd thought I might be not so long ago, but rather an auxiliary piece, a pawn someone was skillfully moving while the pawn was certain that the choice of moves was his alone? I paused again, by the department store, and turned and hurried back to the building near the army barracks. The soldier was still staring through the window, scowling, and when he saw me watching him he winked, or at least so it seemed to me as I walked quickly by. There was no one in the tai chi classroom except that patch on the grimy wall where the picture of Tito had been. Where had they gone? How long had it taken me to leave the building, cross in front of the barracks and walk toward the department store, sidling between parked cars: Five minutes? Ten? I tried to reconstruct everything in the room when I first entered: I remembered a hat stand, on which hung items of clothing, as well as two large boards with diagrams of various postures, sketches showing dance steps, but no one was there. The walls were bare, the floor clean, the window shut. I walked around, knocked on the walls in search of a secret passageway, banged the floor with my foot to detect an echo of emptiness, then opened the window, looking for a ladder or signs left by people who had jumped out. I found nothing. Some