w. I collapsed like a half-empty sack, which softened the blow of the body on the ground, though it couldn't prevent my head from hitting the metal leg of the bench. And when I touched the crown of my head, I found a painful bump, though when it happened I hadn't felt a thing. If I may put it that way, the film I then watched was silent; today's version has long since been overdubbed, and, as is always the case with subsequent interventions, it no longer corresponds to reality. Everything that happened was without sound, the rising of a transparent shape from my body, and a broad opening high above me, or above us, because the shape leaned toward me and whispered something in my ear, or at least it seemed to, and the leap of the shape toward the opening, which was both as real and unreal as the transparent shape itself, and which at one moment was high among the clouds and the next moment right above the bench, and when the shape reached the rim of the opening and disappeared inside it, into the tunnel, which, as Margareta had said long ago, was leading upward, it rose to the top of the Sephirot, to the very Crown, and when the shape appeared again at the opening, it was suddenly a fully formed face, with gentle lines and dark eyes, and it soundlessly spoke a word I hadn't recognized then, but now I did, while Margareta's blood and my blood pulsed in tandem, and I said: Eleazar. Yes, said Margareta, Eleazar, though I was sure she didn't know why I had said the name. Several hours earlier, when I was watching the mouth of the shape in perfect silence and the forming of the word I hadn't understood, I thought it wished to give me instruction for my next assignment, perhaps the kind of mathematical puzzle Dragan Mišović had alerted me to, and then I thought with perfect clarity, as if I were reading a prepared text: He must be barefoot. I didn't know to whom the sentence referred: the shape vanished into the tunnel, my body was still lying by the bench, I too was a bodiless shape, and there was no one in the space between the high walls. I approached my body, which is an entirely arbitrary description, because I wasn't sure whether I could move at all, it could be more accurately described as a camera moving, which, when it focuses on a scene, remains in place and the lens turns, and the closer I got, the more clearly I understood that bodiless shapes could not perform physical obligations, nonetheless I continued to approach my feet until they, shod in suede shoes, filled my entire view, and then two hands entered the scene that tenderly, but with confidence, unlaced my shoes, removed them from my feet, stripped off my socks, placed them outside my range of vision, then one hand began to rise toward my gaze and a moment later covered the source of my vision, and the image filled with darkness. I moved Margareta's palm and looked at it, then slowly rested it on my eyes. She knew why I had said the name Eleazar. The palm that had prevented me from seeing had been hers, I was certain, though this further tangled the net. With an open tenderness I thought of Marko, his advice would have done me good, as would have one of his joints. Reality had become so skewed that being high on marijuana now seemed a normal state of mind. I still felt the pulsing of Margareta's blood, but our rhythms were no longer in sync. I released my grip, and she readily withdrew her hand, now our eyes met and I saw that each of her eyes was a different color. Don't ask, said Margareta, just listen. I listened and heard the siren of a fire engine approaching from far away. No, said Margareta, she hadn't meant the siren. She wanted, while there was still time, to offer an explanation. Because things didn't go as they were supposed to? I asked. Oh no, answered Margareta, because they went exactly as they were supposed to. I let her answer slowly sink in. I don't know how long that lasted, that slow sinking, because my mind resisted like a child who refuses to put his pajamas on before bed. Margareta stood patiently by the armchair. She wasn't touching me, she wasn't trying to touch me. She knew she should wait, and she waited, and my first thought was: The King lost his Queen, as if it were a move in a chess game, which ended in an irreparable loss. Margareta sniffled, and I sensed she was crying. Soon after that she left. On her way out, at the door, she stood on tiptoe, touched her lips to my cheek, and whispered in my ear, Go to Jaša's, he'll explain. I watched her go down the stairs, then I heard only the sound of her footsteps, the opening and shutting of the front door, and I never saw her again. Of course I didn't know that at the time; had I known it, perhaps I wouldn't have been so quick to turn the key in the lock, hook up the safety chain, go back to the living room, and sit back down in the armchair in front of the television set. I could have thought of a million things, but I didn't think of anything. Actually, I thought of switching on the TV to see whether at that late hour, on one of the private channels, there were pornographic movies. That would have calmed me, the mindless erotic endeavor and futile spending of semen, the whole farce to demonstrate absent passion. But I didn't turn on the television. I sat there, as the pain spread to my neck and temples again, stronger than before Margareta's arrival. When I asked her, just before she left, how she had got into the apartment and how I had turned up there, she said she'd been helped by friends. Then she left, but I already said that, or wrote it, or whispered it in the dark, bent over my desk. I reach out and switch on the desk lamp. Light is always a comfort, even when the dark doesn't bring fear. And the words I've been jotting down feverishly for days, as if my life depends on them, offer some consolation, though I cannot, when it comes to words, deny the possibility of manipulation, which is not the case with light. Words are like the things left behind after someone close to us dies — do we throw them out or save them, either would have its drawbacks and its advantages, but if we are perfectly frank with ourselves, we will acknowledge that their value is exhausted with the departure of the owner and the only choice is to throw them into a sack or box and deposit them in the garbage bin, which is what we do in the end, though we always hang on to something, something that allegedly means the world to us yet turns useless in the years to come and ends up in the rubbish heap, but as a tribute of sorts to our inability to ignore the customs and habits that shape our lives. I don't know who will be sifting through my things after I die, but that's why I have more or less decided that, when I reach the end of this narrative, not so long from now, there isn't much ink left in my pen, then I'll write in capital letters on [>], BURN AFTER MY DEATH, but then again I won't, not because I will have given up on the idea, but because that gesture guarantees nothing. The number of manuscripts preserved against the wishes of their authors is not small. If you want something burnt, do it yourself, I told myself, and I prepared a box of matches and a vial of lighter fluid, but then I found myself faced with a conundrum — if I meant to burn the manuscript, why did I write it in the first place? Why not burn it to start with, and save myself the trouble, to say nothing of the paper. The environmentalists would be grateful to me, I'm sure. When once in a while I believed I was a writer, interestingly enough I never asked myself why I was writing a poem or a story, but now that I am writing only for myself, that question obsesses me. Yet I am writing about it anyway, spending the precious heart of my pen. Enough of that. If there is a need for fire, fire there will be. Where did I leave off? I sat in the armchair, staring at the blank television screen, listening to the pain throb in my temples as if it were a disco beat. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, it was day. My head was still throbbing, but more slowly, as if the disco beat had changed to truculent, heavy blues. That is how I moved, slowly but steadily, avoiding looking out the window, as the bright sunshine made my head spin. It took me fifteen minutes to walk to the phone, though it was no more than five meters to the front hall where the phone was recharged at night. It was early, but Jaša picked up right away. He knew what I wanted to talk about, and he suggested that I stop by his studio, Isak Levi, he said, would come by, Jakov Švarc too, he had no secrets from them anyway, and it wouldn't be the first time, he said, that he had had to manage things when Margareta's plans fell flat. I decided not to ask questions at that point, and said I'd come by. No sooner did I hang up than the phone rang. Thinking it was Jaša with something more, I said, We're all set, aren't we? An unfamiliar man's voice, making no effort to mask the loathing or scorn, or similar emotion, growled, Your time has come. I heard him hanging up, and I put down the receiver. The phone rang again. Another voice, just as unfamiliar, asked how it felt to be up the ass of the Jews. I heard snickers in the background, the person hung up, the phone rang again, someone informed me that I'd signed my death warrant, and then I yanked the phone line out of the wall. At first I was surprised by this inexplicable flood of loathing, but then through the slowness that besieged my body and soul the simple fact dawned on me: it was Saturday, the new issue of