nd 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-rehearsed scientific approach subverted by technical perfection. All I could do was wait another few hours and test this in practice, but my excitement was mounting and I could no longer concentrate on the conversation with the group of the faithful in the synagogue courtyard. The three Fates walked past and I could have sworn I heard a snipping sound of scissors opening and shutting, despite their smiles. I watched them walk toward the gateway and thought how odd it was that people were so calm, going through their daily and weekly routines, while only a few kilometers away their fellow countrymen were preparing for a decisive battle. The people with whom I was standing, not counting Jaša Alkalaj, obviously had no clue, and I was only guessing that Jaša knew, because in no way did he let on that he knew what was happening, or that I was a part of the story. When I told him I had to leave because of obligations that could not be put off, he merely nodded, which could have meant anything. A body is not a book, just as gestures are not words written down, hence the possibilities for interpretation are all the greater, though a lack of precision is characteristic of both words and gestures, and they both mean several things at once. I didn't want to assume that Jaša Alkalaj was nodding merely to say goodbye, so I told myself that in this movement, just as in some secret Masonic greeting, there was tacit respect and support. One thing I could not understand was why Margareta had insisted I go to the synagogue, yet she herself didn't feel it necessary to do so. For the second time recently I felt I'd been lured onto the wrong path, as if someone deliberately meant for me to be at one place instead of another. When I left the synagogue courtyard, I came across the three elderly ladies standing one right next to the other, whispering as if someone on the street might overhear them. They stopped when they saw me, their gazes were inquisitive while their lips curved in a trace of a smile. For a moment I shifted aimlessly from foot to foot, then walked by them and headed for Zeleni Venac. This time I heard no snipping of scissors. I decided not to take Carica Milica Street but to go down Pop-Lukina and from Pop-Lukina I turned onto a street that ran to a little park, from which narrow, steep stairs led straight down to the bus station for Zemun. A dog took a long time sniffing at my shoes, refusing to obey a woman calling to it from the other end of the park. I looked across the river at the sky over Zemun and saw a ray of light piercing a cluster of clouds. I looked down at the dog, fearing it might pee on my shoes and pants, and when I looked back at Zemun the ray of light had gone and the clouds dispersed, and I wondered whether I'd seen it at all. Sometimes we see what we want to see, I know that, but I didn't want to see anything in particular, just as I wasn't looking in the belief I'd see something. The dog was finally satisfied with the smell that wafted from my shoes and it scampered back to its owner, while I stared for another fifteen minutes in vain at the sky over Zemun. Only later, in the bus, did I realize why the dog had been so taken with my shoes: I had stepped in dog shit somewhere along the way, which was always an unwanted possibility on the streets of Belgrade, and I would have to go home and change my shoes. The first thing I noticed when I got off the bus, before I crossed the street, was that the lights were on in my apartment. Sometimes I leave a light on deliberately, usually a table lamp in the living room, but I would never leave all the lights blazing, and I surely wouldn't do that in broad daylight, because evening had only begun to slink along the sky when I left for the synagogue. Every nerve, every inch of my body shouted: Run! However, I walked slowly, full of caution, one foot after the other, like the pensioners who walk along the Zemun quay, my muscles trembling from the effort of restraint, like a flag in the wind. Why do I compare muscles to flags, perhaps because, walking and trembling, I was visualizing a charge from one of the partisan movies, with banner in hand and a shout on my lips, a machine gun at the ready to spray everything in sight as I entered the apartment, or the bunker, in my thoughts. Instead of stepping into a bunker, I stepped first into the musty hallway of my building. The door to the building was locked, I unlocked it cautiously, as if the enemy was lurking right behind. Then, stair by stair, my back propped against the wall, I went up to my apartment. As I climbed the stairs, the stink of the dog shit on my shoes filled my nostrils and I could barely keep from vomiting. I assume that when the body is tense and the mind focused on possible danger, the senses are sharpened owing to some chemical fusion in the brain. I don't know how else to explain it, though the explanation is moot; I mention it only because I thought I ought to remove the shoes, and with them in my hands, if need be, I could lunge at the people who had broken into my apartment, and the image of me lunging at a band of burglars, brandishing my foul-smelling shoes, flinging myself every which way, made me laugh out loud. I managed to calm down after a few moments, wiped my tearing eyes, went up the remaining four steps, and leaned my ear on the door. Not a sound. If anyone was still in the apartment, they were keeping quiet, waiting for my next move. I conjured that image: me listening at one side of the door, my opponent listening on the other side, so our ears are nearly touching. I pressed my ear against the door until it hurt, then carefully turned the doorknob. The door opened. I went into the front hall, listened, and, spurred on by the silence, stepped into the living room. I took a few steps, then went back to get an umbrella that was hooked over the coat tree; an umbrella is no semiautomatic weapon, but it is a weapon of sorts, and that gave me a measure of security. There was no one in the apartment; I looked behind the wardrobes, under the bed, moved the armchair and the curtain, checked the pantry; the person who had been in the apartment had long since gone. There was nothing that even suggested anyone had been there, nothing had been moved, none of the things on the tables or shelves, none in the cupboards. I'd imagined entering an apartment in which nothing was in its place, but instead of stepping into chaos I walked into an order that had been preserved. This was comforting, but it did nothing to diminish the sense of insecurity, and moreover, the certainty that the apartment was polluted by the very fact that someone had been there. An apartment is part of one's body, and if someone intrudes on it, it is as if they have intruded on one's person. In this case, since everything was untouched, it wasn't like a symbolic rape, though it could be compared to someone pressing up against you, uninvited, in public transportation. But time was passing, I needed to get moving toward the center of the Sephirot, and it was not until I started switching off the lights around the apartment that I noticed what I should have noticed straight away: the manuscript of