he 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 close of the twentieth century, because only then would the picture of the events in this part of the world be complete and it would be made clear that there always was an alternative to nationalism gone berserk. Of course, he went on to say, I shouldn't think he was promoting an interpretation of history in support of Margareta's idea on how to resolve the political and national problems facing our country. Margareta herself would be horrified at the thought, he had no doubts on that score, which, however, did nothing to gainsay the fact that all those issues, like it or not, were connected, and once you started poking around in one of them, you'd find all the rest. Meanwhile Margareta heard of a strange manuscript, rumors about it had circulated in the Jewish community, and when she got hold of the translation, she found she had hit on a pattern that seemed like the ideal key for her plan, but nothing of that would have worked, said Jaša, had not a mathematician shown up who'd shed light on the mathematical elements in the Kabbalistic instructions. I know the man, I said. He knew I would know, said Jaša, though he also knew that I didn't know it was the mathematician who had chosen me, if that is the right word, for the role they felt was vital to seeing the plan through, except that the plan had become so byzantine that Jaša himself, he said, chose to pull out. I stared at him and blinked, trying to remember where I had heard all this before: had I not wondered about it at the very beginning, only later to convince myself to doubt my doubts? How was I chosen? I asked. Did I get more votes than the other candidates? Jaša reached for a new bottle, the brandy gurgled into the emptied glasses, Jakov Švarc's head dropped and his breathing became deeper and more even, and I had difficulties now and then seeing Jaša clearly and following what he was saying. This was a classic feint, Jaša went on, while the front appears to be opening on one side, it actually opens on the other. The mathematician, Jaša explained, read my writing in