Friday as if it were a mantra of the days of the week. I woke up with an erection so hard, it almost hurt. Not yet, I said to my penis, and it sagged obediently. I took a shower, washed my hair and shaved, put the water on for coffee, and went out to get my paper. At the front door I was greeted by a familiar sight: a plastic bag reeking with a heavy stench. I leaned over to pick it up and jumped back horrified: instead of the usual excrement, the severed head of a cat leered from the bag. It was lying in a bloody heap of intestines and innards, undoubtedly from its gut, and heaving with maggots. The cat's eyes were open, the teeth bared, and I could imagine the terrible agony it had gone through. The message was crystal clear, but I would have understood it had it been written on a piece of paper or on the wall of the stairwell, no need for a cat to suffer, and the feeling that filled me was not dread, but fury. I took the bag down to the garbage bin, and for a few moments I stood by it, mutely paying my respects while fat blowflies buzzed around, then I bought my paper, went back to the apartment, and made my coffee. The weather forecast promised a nice day, the only bright news item in the paper; everything else was gloom and doom, even the commentary on the fl ights reinstated to Sarajevo and trains running again to Zagreb and Ljubljana. There were too many obituaries, with photographs of the deceased who looked as if they had been dead long before they died. It was a horrible beginning to a day that was supposed to change the world, not the entire world, naturally, but the one part that stubbornly defied change. I got up and started pacing nervously around the apartment, staring at the pieces of furniture and various objects as if seeing them for the first time. I looked at the phone in the same way and then it rang. Margareta had promised to call in the morning, to give me the final instructions; the voice coming from the receiver, however, belonged to the editor of Minut. He didn't know what was going on, it looked as if I had jangled someone's nerves, he said, maybe more than one person's, and I should watch what I did for the next few days, especially tomorrow, when Minut would be distributed. Someone had attempted to break into the editorial offices the night before, but the night watchman had called the police and their arrival, speedy to everyone's surprise, chased the burglars away. If they were burglars, I said. Of course they weren't burglars, agreed the editor. Also, a young man had made an attempt to get into the printing press where Minut was typeset and printed. He claimed he had been sent by the editorial office to make some last-minute alterations to the computer type for the issue. He had a pass and a note written on Minut letterhead, but the porter insisted on calling the editor, which the man tried to prevent, unsuccessfully, hurling insults at him and threatening to thrash him. Something dangerous is cooking, son, said the editor, and a bit of extra caution would not be a bad idea. He had never called me "son" before, and tears nearly welled in my eyes. I thought of his cat Feliks, and I could hardly speak. My eyes are tearing now too, even though several years have passed since then, and Feliks is probably in cat heaven. If my soul is ever assigned to pass into the body of an animal, I will dispatch it to Feliks, I've decided. I don't know whether the soul chooses its next host or someone else sees to that, someone in charge of the archive of the living and the dead, responsible, so to speak, for the database in the celestial computer. The celestial computer, of course, is God, since he knows everything, including what he doesn't know. The conversation with the editor of Minut left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and I could hardly wait for Margareta to call. I said nothing to her about the conversation with the editor, nor would I have had a chance to, because she didn't let me get a word in edgewise. She recited a long list of my duties, which I assiduously noted on the pad by the phone. I did manage to complain about how many instructions I'd been given by Dragan Mišović, and she consoled me, promising she would be by my side and she would help, if help was needed. She didn't know, or pretended not to know, what was to happen as we went down the Well, or more precisely as we ascended the Well, no matter how preposterous that might sound. One certainly goes down most wells, she said, but in this one you ascend, because it is a path to higher spheres and the Sephirot. Everything else would be synchronized with the beginning of Shabbat: the people writing the prayer with their bodies would be taking their places at 6:22 in the evening, when the sun goes down; the preparation of the mixture for the golem would start immediately thereafter; at the same time another group would be placed in the area of the Well and they would take upon themselves the structure of the Tree of Sephirot; finally, after midnight, the union of the King and his Saturday bride would complete the process, and they would enter the Well, which would be open wide. At that point Margareta stopped and there was no way I could get her to proceed with the details. Should I have given up, or at least felt concerned? Now I'd know the answer, but then, no reason to hide it, I was longing for the possibility of union with Margareta, and that was all I could think of as she elucidated their strategy. Of course, she said, we are making a symbolic golem, not a real one, except it will have real powers. Something like an invisible man, I said, except it's an invisible golem. Margareta laughed, then coughed and said I should be taking this more seriously. A single mistake, one little mistake, she said, and everything will fall apart. I hope I won't make a mistake, I said, and remembering the morning, and the taxi ride, I felt the beginning of a new erection, as if I were talking to one of those women who touch themselves and pretend to come while the phone bill mushrooms with lightning speed. It wouldn't be a bad idea, Margareta recommended, for me to go to a service at the synagogue, because that would help me focus my spirit on all that was happening, and there was no reason to be at the Well before midnight. But I am not a believer, I defended myself weakly, knowing that in fact I wanted to attend the service. When all this was done, she felt I should become a Jew. I thought I was one already, I answered, because of the soul I carry. Yes, said Margareta, but don't forget that there is also the body, and it is necessary to commit the body to God, otherwise it won't work. I imagined a surgical blade on my penis and the blood dripping, there had to be blood involved, and I shuddered. Don't worry, announced Margareta, who seemed able to see me through the phone line, it doesn't hurt at all with a little local anesthetic. The thought of blood reminded me of the severed cat's head, and that reignited the fury in me, which, as is the case in this sort of chain of cause and effect, produced more acid in my stomach, and after the conversation I ended up curled in a ball in the armchair, beset by acid indigestion and gas pains. So undignified for a person who was shortly supposed to play a decisive role in a tangled game of an ethnic group's attempt to secure peace for itself in a place where more and more people had both symbolically and literally been taking potshots at all the ethnic groups living there. Finding an enemy in such places is a favorite pastime, relished in equal measure by ordinary people, the political elite, intellectuals, and artists. There is nothing better than a well-laid-out conspiracy about the existence of conspiracy, for everyone except those singled out as the conspirators, whose repeated denials are seen as proof of the very opposite intentions. Of course it's one thing to practice this as a theoretical discourse and another to be part of it at the crossroads of converging hatreds. But, to come to the point: at six o'clock I was in the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue. Around the table were seated people, most of whom I had met before, though Dacca and his hat were not among them. Three elderly women were there, and that led me to think of the Fates, though the Fates belong to another tradition. Someone must have to snip the threads of life for Jews too, because they do not live forever. True, the women looked nothing like the mythological beings, and one of them was so tiny that she was more likely to have come from the world of dwarves than from Olympus, where the Fates, I'm only guessing here, dwell. I was surprised to see Jaša Alkalaj at the table, though I'd assumed he was involved in some aspect of the conspiracy, as Margareta was his daughter. But maybe it was just as natural for a father to be somewhere other than where his offspring were? Also, more and more often I refer to the plan that Margareta and her friends were devising as a conspiracy, giving credence to Marko and others who mock the notion of conspiracy, at least as rendered in American movies. This is not a case of conspiracy, but a case of my lack of concentration, my haste to bring this document to a close, if I had the time, I'd carefully peruse all the pages, and wherever the word appeared, I'd replace it with another, but I haven't got the time, because as it is I fear that it will all slip out of my grasp, if it hasn't already done so. This is not a book of sand, after all, that can be read however the reader may wish, but a text the reader's soul should use to climb with the same effort my soul needs to descend the written pages, nearing the inevitable end. Yes, it is terrible that a book has an end, yet life goes on, somehow that fact cheapens every effort at writing, because it means that books are always the measure of something finite, they remind us that we have before us only a limited number of days, weeks, months, and years, that afterward nothing makes any sense anyway, though it is just as possible to claim the opposite: that the finality of the book helps us free ourselves of the illusion of eternal life, whether as a real possibility or as a religious symbol. I don't know if during the service the rabbi said anything about eternal life, I know no Hebrew, but after a while I got bored and started looking around. Maybe the person speaking wasn't the rabbi but his assistant, I didn't understand what Jaša Alkalaj had whispered in my ear as we entered the synagogue, and later I forgot to ask. The service ended, the worshipers started rising and congratulating one another on the beginning of Shabbat, and a line quickly formed in front of the rabbi, which I joined behind Jaša Alkalaj. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but the rabbi merely pressed my hand, saying, Shabbat shalom, then extended his hand to the next person in line, one of the Fates, behind whom waited the other two. He didn't even look me straight in the eyes, I told Jaša as we left the synagogue courtyard. I sounded like a jealous teenager. What were you thinking, answered Jaša, that he'd kiss you on both cheeks and on the forehead too? Besides, he continued, chances are he noticed you weren't listening too closely to the service, and that is unforgivable. He saw my anxious expression and laughed. On his face I recognized features that had been copied into Margareta's face, and I thought that it was absurd to be standing here, talking to a man with whose daughter I was supposed to make love later, though not for pleasure but for a higher purpose. The pleasure would actually be a bonus, because I couldn't imagine a mere mechanical performance of intercourse, though only then, as I spoke with Jaša Alkalaj, did I realize how many subtle and not so subtle levels this entailed. We'd have to make love carefully and in harmony with a ritual that had not been fully explained to me: staying mindful of the obligations that were apparently awaiting as I went down the Well, or ascended it; prepared to answer questions in which there was more math than I cared to know; and finally, ready for consequences that I had not been alerted to, because they were nowhere written down or spelled out. Most mystical texts set out preparations for travel in the finest detail, but very little space is devoted to description of what has been accomplished by following those instructions. I had always assumed that every mystic began from scratch, which may well be true, because to be a mystic is something so personal, something above and beyond a mere set of rules applied to life. No one has achieved illumination by simply going off to a Zen monastery, getting up at dawn, scrubbing the common rooms, eating rice, and going out to beg. For illumination something else is required, something that belongs to that person alone, something that is that person and is activated when they begin the mystical practice. In brief, if I was not mistaken, Margareta and her co-conspirators had not been through a Kabbalistic experience of their own before, which didn't mean that this wasn't available to them. Indeed, sometimes a game — if we can call a game this stab of theirs with no anchor in experience — may produce results more serious than a well-r