o 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. Someone had made an extraordinary effort to clear out all I had seen, that much was obvious, but why? Was it because they hadn't expected me to come back, or was it precisely because they knew I would come back? If the latter, how could they have known? I shuddered at that thought, because if they had known, then they knew everything else, or they were managing my choices and actions with such precision that never for a moment did it occur to me that I was someone other than myself. I'm not thinking here of Enoch the water carrier or Eleazar or an ancient Kabbalist, which I was more prepared to believe, but someone I knew nothing about, someone about whom, clearly, I was not supposed to know. I walked around the room one more time, pausing below the space where Tito's portrait had hung, as if I could learn something from it. I learned nothing, though for a moment I thought perhaps I was overdoing things, the tai chi lesson had simply ended, and the people who had attended it left, taking with them their props. I went out into the street and walked by the barracks. The soldier was in the same place. I asked him if he had seen some women with a hat stand. The soldier tapped his forehead a few times with his index finger, then vanished. Such is my fate, I remember thinking, the closer I get to something, the farther it gets from me, and in the end it will all disappear, just as it had in the past, until I end up alone and disappear myself. I say I remember, but in fact I don't remember whether I remember or not, and I am guessing I say that because I did indeed end up alone and because nothing remained for me except to anticipate that I too would vanish. I don't regret that; everybody, after all, can expect the same fate, and it makes no difference whether a person has made peace with the fact or not, the fact that the only clear meaning of life is death, and all other interpretations, philosophizing about the fullness of life on this earth and the necessity of happiness or the promise of another life as a reward for obedience, are just empty prattle. This has never been as clear to me as it is now, as I stand by the window, alone, owning nothing that anyone could covet except this pen, which is spending its inky heart as I spend mine, torn between fullness and emptiness, between insight and exhaustion. Words, of course, don't count; they're something else, as someone wrote recently, they never say what the speaker means for them to say, but what the listener wants to hear. I'm a little like the soldier whom I asked about the hat rack, except there's no one here to ask me, and the tapping of the index finger on the forehead can refer only to me, or more precisely, to my reflection in the mirror, to whom I sometimes turn even if I am not shaving, with a question requiring an urgent answer. I knew none of this while I stood under the barracks window. The soldier had left, a heavy cloak of grief settled on me, and when I turned to go, I staggered under its weight like a believer bearing a cross in a Christian procession, the difference being that unlike zealous believers, I did not want the cloak. It was smothering me. When I got home, I was barely able to stand, it was even a strain to sit, my only comfort the thought that Thursday would soon be over, and I fell asleep, repeating the word