Minut had hit the newsstands, and my piece had apparently irritated some readers, as had been the intention, or rather my intention, since texts don't write themselves. I didn't know whether this should gratify or alarm me, perhaps ultimately every piece for the papers is written with this intention, and so I decided to take a shower and attend to the painful throbbing that had taken over my body. They say lukewarm water is the best cure, and after I had toweled down and changed my clothes, some twenty minutes later I felt the pain only in my neck, and I got rid of that with a series of small exercises I learned many years ago when I happened to tune in to a fitness program on channel one. I still remember how the instructor moved his head left-right, demonstrating how to stretch the neck, how far to drop the lower jaw or fling back the head. The only other thing I recall from television are the dance classes, broadcast, if my memory serves me well, from the Ljubljana studio, and a voice that repeated, One step forward, one step back, one-two, cha-cha-cha. I never learned how to dance, just as I never sang in the shower, though when I discovered rock-and-roll in the early 1960s I liked to imagine myself as the front man of a successful band, which I so fittingly dubbed the Invisible Lads. Ah, the comfort that comes from images of childhood and youth! And the misery when one realizes that life has become a series of memories, an album with choice photographs. Why must everything have a reverse side? Why does what caresses you in front, slap you from behind? That's the sort of thing I mused on while I shaved, and dried my hair, clueless as to what was waiting for me out there. The chaos of that day can be put in order now, but it seemed then that order had been irrevocably lost, from the moment I stepped out to buy Minut and saw copies of it strewn around the entrance to my building, through my flight across the gardens of Zemun, to the moment when illusions ceased to exist, when all was reduced to a single word: death. When I saw the sea of newspaper pages through the glass entrance doors, I didn't go out. I turned around, went back into the apartment, and plugged the phone in. It rang instantly, and a torrent of curses and threats spewed from the receiver. I hung up, the telephone rang again, and I had to wait for the ringing to end so I could get a connection and call the Minut editorial office. The secretary picked up, and her tearful voice turned into a sequence of deep sobs when she realized who was on the line. No, she said, the editor wasn't there, he was on his way to the office, the police had just arrived, the windows had been smashed, black paint smudged everywhere, and she had before her two letters, and here her voice quavered — I had condemned myself to the worst punishment. What punishment did they have in mind, I asked, but she could no longer speak, she squeaked unintelligibly, and all I could do, after reassuring her that I'd be there soon, was hang up. The phone rang again and it kept ringing while I got ready, had some cold coffee, and made my way downstairs. The jangling sound had replaced, in a sense, the painful throbbing in my veins, my blood, with the phone. Someone had picked up the sheets of newspaper by then, but when I stepped out into the street I saw a group of young men clearly waiting for me, because as soon as one of them spotted me, they all turned to face me. We stood that way for an instant, then I took two or three steps to get a better view of the cabs parked at the taxi stand at the next corner, and then moving fast, though not running, I took the first cab and gave the driver the address of the Minut editorial office. I kept looking back but didn't notice any cars following us. The taxi driver, to my amazement, paid no attention to my fidgeting and simply asked toward the end of the ride whether it had to do with a woman, was her husband after me. Those men back at the cab stand, he said, they must have been related. By the time I reached the Minut offices the editor's secretary had calmed down, and offered me coffee and whispered in confidence that the editor was drinking whiskey, and indeed, when I walked into his office, he was pouring whiskey into a big glass. He raised the bottle in my direction, but I shook my head, and he added a little more to his glass. So what do you say, he asked, should we be drinking to celebrate or to forget? I said I hoped he didn't feel that what had happened was my fault. If anyone was to blame, he said, it was he, because it was my right to write whatever I felt like writing, but the decision to publish was his alone, and anyway, he said, I surely remembered that he'd been of two minds, though as far as he was concerned, this was over and done with, what had happened should not be forgotten, it was now a matter of what to do next and how, the material damage was of the least importance, there were many more delicate issues, he added, and waved a sheet of paper. It was a letter from the church authorities bitterly protesting the insinuations in the piece in which the author (I noticed they spelled my name incorrectly) linked the Orthodox Church to the unacceptable manifestations of anti-Semitism. The church has always made every effort, the letter continued, to stand up to this, and reiterates that it has no history of negative relations with the Jewish people, who have always been received with hospitality in this community. I handed the letter back to the editor. I could write a protest protesting their protest, I said, which made the editor clutch his head. That's all we need, he said, we have enough trouble as it is, I don't need any new headaches, and besides, he grabbed a sheaf of papers, there are plenty of other messages from various parties and concerned individuals, just as, he added, there are open threats directed at me, you, all of us. This one is particularly intriguing, he said, and handed me a leaf torn from a school notebook. For those who do not understand the need to have our nation cleansed of foreign parasites, it declared in letters of unequal size, and who contribute to spreading texts in which our people are accused of various evils, there is only one fitting punishment: impaling on a stake. We will impale you, and display you on Terazije so that everyone can see how our enemies fare. Nor should you expect any mercy. No one among us feels pity for Yid scum and their helpers who drink our blood, and it is the duty of every one among us who has knowledge of the evil deeds of the Yids, from the betrayal of God's lamb and the spilling of the blood of Jesus Christ, to destroy every Yid or other degenerate who stands in our way. I read no further. The secretary appeared at the door, walked to the editor's desk, and deposited another pile of messages. This has been going on since last night, said the editor, since the moment the distribution started. And that was how it was for the next few days: every time I came to the office, the editor showed me the letters and the comments that stood out from the general tone of revulsion and scorn. There were, of course, those who agreed with my piece and called for an investigation, punishment for the guilty, respect for the law, and a public apology. And then, one morning, three or four days later, the editor hugged me and said Feliks had come home. Worn out, thick with fleas and filthy, said the editor, he had lain down in his basket the night before and was lying there still this morning, clearly at the end of his rope. If he hadn't come back last night, said the editor, he wouldn't have lived to morning. I said something about seven lives, or was it nine, I'd forgotten, I was never a big fan of household pets, dogs or cats or canaries, any little animal, for me they were always a sort of elemental disaster, far from stirring in me a sense of serenity, goodness, or any special emotion. A person who gets along with other people, I told the editor's secretary that day, has no need of animals. Feliks is different, said the secretary, her eyes flashing, which led me to conclude that it was better to say no more. There is nothing so easy to promise as silence, and no promise so difficult to make good on, because the more we insist on silence, the stronger the urge to speak, like the story about the shepherd who knew the emperor had the ears of a goat and who, compelled by the urge to speak, tells his secret to a hole in the ground, which he carefully covers up, but the earth speaks through a reed pipe, if I remember it correctly, and the whole world learns what was supposed to be a secret. I thought of this story several days after Feliks's auspicious return, the evening I went to see Jaša Alkalaj. Shabbat was ending; the curses and threats were multiplying; no matter where I turned I was sure to see someone threatening me with a clenched fist or an index finger drawn across the throat; my visit to Jaša's studio felt like entering the garden of primeval serenity. Jakov Švarc was already there. Isak Levi hadn't come, and the glass set out for him was left untouched. Jaša pulled out a bottle of brandy, the time had come for us to make a toast, he said, and before I had the chance to ask what we were toasting, the glasses were full, we clinked and drank up. I asked whether Margareta might join us, and when Jaša gave me a look torn between anguish and relief, I should have known instantly that I would never see her again, but at the time I interpreted it as an expression of parental concern. On the other hand I may have sensed the answer, and for that reason hurried to ask the next question about what had happened to the Well manuscript. Let's say, said Jaša, that it has been returned to its proper owner. So the living version of the manuscript was back at the Jewish Historical Museum, which I still believe, especially after reading a story about a secret transfer of metal chests from the Jewish Community Center to the safe at the National Bank, or some such place, several days after the bombing of Serbia began. I was reading the newspaper that published this news item, or leafing through it rather, because I didn't know the language, in mild spring sunshine, savoring a double espresso, while hundreds of kilometers away bombs were falling in unintelligible patterns on military and civilian buildings. One of the people sitting next to me translated into awkward English the brief article, with a blurred photograph of the Jewish Community Center, in front of which several people were loading two large chests into a van that resembled a police vehicle. The article speculated that the chests might contain the manuscript of the Sarajevo Haggadah, about which various stories had circulated during the siege of Sarajevo and after, including the claim that the original was no longer in Bosnia. I told my reluctant translator not to bother, because if the story about the transmittal of the chests was true, I knew what the chests contained, along with other museum valuables: the Well manuscript, on which, some day in the future, a researcher will discover my fingerprints that will be duly noted as prints of an unknown person who, judging by their frequency and age, was in possession of the manuscript during the last decade of the twentieth century. This researcher will have to start work soon, because fingerprints don't last forever, they don't fossilize, at least not the ones left on books, especially on books of sand that are constantly shifting, like all deserts. Jaša Alkalaj meanwhile refilled our glasses. If he kept going, I said, I would believe he didn't want to answer my questions. It wasn't that, answered Jaša, he just wanted to encourage me to ask more questions, since I hadn't asked him about anything but the manuscript. In that case, I said, I would like to know what really happened, I mean, did anything happen? Jakov Švarc grinned, as if he concurred with my question, though even today I can't tell whether he had any idea what we were discussing. Why was he even there? Did Jaša Alkalaj ask him to attend because Švarc was an historian, and Jaša saw him as the most objective possible witness or else as the most impartial chronicler of events? If so, then Jaša's error in judgment was odd, in light of his exhibition of paintings, which had originated in a playful mingling of history and art, yet such an error was also understandable in the context of all that was going on in the country, where a distorted image of history was being embraced as the standard and where people of the most varied political views believed that the history of their nation was exceptional and no one but they could understand. After all, why wouldn't Jaša feel and think as they did, even if he wasn't, in fact, a member of that nation? The political conflicts and the struggle for power were based on diverging approaches to issues, such as the economy or the relations to Europe and the world community, but the ideology of the nation was most often considered beyond reproach. All that became far more obvious a year later, during the bombing and in the months after the devastation, but other people should write about that, the real witnesses, and not people like me, who followed the events from a safe distance. Whatever the case, Jakov Švarc and I sat there, sipped brandy, and waited for Jaša's explanation. Hours later, the bottle was empty, Jakov Švarc was asleep on the sofa, and Jaša was still talking. He may not have stopped talking even after I'd risen to go, promising to come back on Tuesday or Wednesday to hear the rest. Most of what Jaša said I already knew, and most of that, perhaps because of Jakov Švarc's presence, referred to what for me was the least interesting part, the history of the idea of Jewish self-defense, which, according to Jaša, sprang from Margareta's dread that the Jews would disappear from the face of the earth. From the start, said Jaša, he felt that this was an idea doomed to failure, not because it seemed so fantastic and unreal, there was nothing that seemed more unreal and fantastic, he said, than our country in the 1990s, but because the Jewish community was too scant for such an undertaking, which just for the unusual form of physical prayer required more than one hundred participants. When Margareta realized this, said Jaša Alkalaj, she got in touch with public and secret organizations that supported calls for political change yet maintained a critical distance from the national euphoria, which had become stronger, and threatened, said Jaša, to destroy the finest minds of my generation, not with drugs, but with the pure evil of ethnic hatred. I didn't know what to be more startled by: Jaša's paraphrase of Ginsberg's "Howl" or his references to secret organizations. Whom did he have in mind? The Masons, members of an assortment of nongovernmental organizations, Theosophists, the Jehovah's Witnesses? All of them, said Jaša, but many more as well. I'd have been surprised, he told me, had I known how many people sought comfort from the madness of everyday life in secret societies, where they renewed their sense of purpose in life by dedicating themselves to charitable works and gestures of goodwill. Now was not the time for that story, but he hoped, he said, that in the future someone would write a real history of Serbian secret societies at the