Minut and concluded that I was the perfect solution: I had access to the public, I could transmit information, I could get temperatures to rise. I could provoke the other side while at the same time nudging them to react the way Margareta and her collaborators had planned. Of course, said Jaša, not everything could be predicted, especially when the pieces in Minut began to take on a life of their own and provoke a far more tempestuous reaction than had been anticipated. I hoped, I said, that he wasn't suggesting that the break-ins at the Jewish Community Center and the butchering of his paintings were all just a foil, because I couldn't bear that blow. Jaša told me not to worry, those were real, as real as the beating I got at the beginning of the story. I didn't remember telling him about the beating, but it was clear that many people knew far more than I had assumed. All in all, on the basis of Jaša's story, which became more detailed and tangled with every glass, I could conclude that my task had been to stir up the public with my writing, luring various enemy groups to come after me, thereby deflecting attention from the real intentions of the conspirators. That word conspiracy again, except this time it had far more credence. Somewhere deep down I saw the flash of Margareta's thigh, which I still blame for everything, I could not believe it had such a hold on me, more powerful than any word. Again I felt discomfort at thinking about Margareta's thigh in front of her father, but his half-closed eyes forgave me in a way. Jakov Švarc snored on the sofa. I looked out the window, wishing I could see the sliver of the new moon. I didn't see anything. I got up; it was time to go. I had, I told Jaša Alkalaj, just one more question: did something happen that night, and if so, what? I would save all my other questions for my next visit. He looked at me drunkenly, bleary-eyed, and said: Yes. Then: No. Yes or no, I asked, there is a difference between those two words, especially when they are in answer to a question. Yes, Jaša repeated, no. He let his head drop onto the arm of the chair, smacked his lips once or twice, and fell asleep. It occurred to me that I should look for blankets and cover him and Jakov Švarc, but who could ever have found anything in that studio? I gave up, lurched over to the front door, locked it, and put the key back in its place. The elevator was there, and when the cabin began its descent, I went down on my knees and threw up in the corner, careful to keep the sticky liquid from touching my pants. There was no one in front of the building, at least I didn't see anyone, and my walk home progressed more calmly than I had anticipated. Actually, I don't remember the whole walk back, only fragments, a part in which I see myself crossing the highway near the Sava Center as cars zip past, honking, then I remember unlocking the door to my apartment and listening, certain that in the depths of the apartment someone was breathing deeply. There was nobody there, I made sure, turning on all the lights and peering into every room and every wardrobe, I even took a look under the sofa, and then I could lie down, calm, satisfied, though I was hurt too in a way, amusing as that may sound, because I had fully expected to be attacked, physically and symbolically, as the author of the piece in Minut. Vanity is strange, I have to admit. I couldn't believe I would wish for any sort of assault on my person, and be disappointed that it had happened to others and not to me. From various sources I learned subsequently why no one had time for me that night: the wall of the Jewish cemetery was scrawled with anti-Semitic slogans; a huge swastika was drawn on the door of the synagogue; the entrance to the Jewish Community Center was buried in heaps of garbage; a doll dressed in a camp inmate's clothes was left on the monument to the Jewish victims at Dorćol with a yellow star on its left arm and a little black cap on its head; threatening notes were dropped into the mailboxes of many Jewish families; unconfirmed stories circulated about attacks on the elderly, a big fight down by the Sava, knives were drawn and apparently, as the woman I was talking to claimed, even gunshots were heard. When asked how she knew the shots were from guns and not from rifles, or perhaps automatic weapons, she couldn't say, but that was how her neighbor had described it, and her neighbor had been on the front in the early 1990s and knew a thing or two about weapons, and he had been wounded, she said, and still limped with his left leg. It wasn't so visible, she added, but you could hear, since she lived downstairs from him, the sole of his shoe scraping the floor when he moved around his apartment. The first attacks on my piece appeared in the papers that Monday. The church authorities bitterly denied any anti-Jewish sentiment among their leaders, as did several of the political parties, though one party proposed that anyone who didn't like it in this country was free to go elsewhere. No one asked you to come, it said, so no one has to tell you to go. It was announced that an article would run the next day under the title "What? You Haven't Left Yet?" revealing the "truth" about what the Jews of Belgrade controlled, with special emphasis on their role among the Serbian Masons. That Monday I also smelled smoke coming into my apartment from the stairwell, and when I opened the door I saw a small bonfire on which a Jewish star made of yellow cardboard was burning. I called the editorial office of Minut, but the editor couldn't or didn't want to speak with me, and the secretary called me later to say that I needn't hurry with a piece for their next issue. Much later, when I was already far away from Belgrade and Zemun, I learned of the lawsuits, the fines, and the confiscation of the property of Minut, but all I could do was raise my hands, which I do again now, though this time it has nothing to do with a feeling of helplessness, but because I need to rest my stiff muscles and stretch out my fingers cramped around the pen. The pen is see-through and its heart will soon be gone. The end of its heart will be the end of the story, fitting enough, since when a heart is no longer beating, the story is silent, just as the story is silent when the heart beats too fast and words tumble out, choking one another. That happened to me after the makeshift fire, so much like child's play, and in the evening I went to the quay, convinced that the river would soothe me as it had so many times before. On my way to the promenade I went by the high-rise where the book-filled apartment was; I turned toward the entrance, then decided against it. At the entrance I saw a man who looked familiar, and on the way back toward the promenade I saw two more who looked like him. I turned in another direction: there were more of them, at least six. The distance between them and me was not negligible, but I felt completely surrounded, as if they were standing right next to me. I could have started running, which would have been just as ludicrous as taking them all on at once. Then I noticed another group approaching down the promenade: fifteen elderly people, men and women, moving along at a slow pace but in lively conversation, and I simply slid in among them, striking up a conversation with two short women about the problem of late pension payments and whether mosquitoes should be sprayed the minute they hatch or when they are more mature. The women showed no surprise at all that I had joined their conversation, and based on their accent and what they were saying, I determined that they were from southern Serbia and on their way to Hotel Yugoslavia to attend the opening ceremony of the annual conference of some association that, if I had understood correctly, protected the rights of retired people threatened by what was happening in politics and the economy in the 1990s. I nodded, took one step after another, and kept an eye on what that other group of people was up to. They came closer and closer, until they had surrounded the pensioners, and I found myself in the center of concentric circles. The pensioners then proceeded to a lower walkway, by the river, and the men with the crewcuts followed along on the upper walkway, and I sensed that their patience was ebbing and that they would lose it altogether when the two levels joined at the pier by the entrance to the hotel. I only had one choice, and as we approached the slope that led to the pier, I bent over abruptly, grabbed one of the women, and shouted that she had been taken ill and dashed with her to the entrance of the hotel. The woman was shocked silent for a moment, then wriggled and screamed, and the more she screamed, the louder I shouted that she was suffering from a seizure and needed emergency care and demanded that the way be cleared for me. The men following us halted, uncertain what to do. I galloped toward the hotel, drenched in sweat, because the woman, though short, was plump and wriggling free of my grasp. Some other people rushed over, one man grabbed her legs, another took her under the arms, the woman shrieked, we yelled at her to calm down, that everything would be fine, then we were at the back entrance of the hotel where a largish group had gathered, pushing and cursing, and I took the opportunity to slip into the stairwell and out to the front entrance of the hotel, and from there sprinted across the street and ducked in among the facing apartment buildings. I stopped at a deserted playground. My clothes were drenched with sweat, the shoelaces on my right sneaker untied, my hands trembling, I was panting like a dog in the summer sun. Do dogs pant in the dark? I'll never find that out, like so many other things, from the simple ones, such as how fireflies glow, to the more complicated questions, such as the purpose of color in nature, to say nothing of places I'll never visit or music I'll never hear, and that certainty, the fact that our life, seen through the reflection of human knowledge, is by necessity partial, no matter how we may try to make it complete, always filled me with a greater or lesser degree of despair. It is not a fear of death, it is foolish to fear the inevitable, but the thought that I'll die before I've had the chance to see Bombay and Melbourne, for instance, can bring me to tears more readily than I care to admit. Back then, that evening, in the playground, it was Tokyo and Montevideo I was thinking about, but I didn't cry, mostly because I was gasping with laughter at the thought of the poor woman flailing in my arms and staring at me, eyes swimming with horror. I could no longer stand, I was laughing so hard, and I sat on the nearest swing. The seat was small, I could barely wedge myself onto it, and when I started swinging, I had to lift my knees nearly up to my chin. The chain links creaked, the swing groaned, and when I turned around I saw the moon in the sky. Who knows, it may have been there earlier, I am never sure where to look for it, sometimes it pokes out from the horizon or struts above my head, often it is not there at all, one more thing I will not learn before I depart for the other world: all the trajectories that delineate the movements of the celestial bodies across the cupola that arches over us, resembling graphs indicating economic surges and downturns and, I assume, violent catastrophes resulting in utter destruction. The seat of the swing cut into my buttocks, the moon swung back and forth above me, or maybe it was me swinging back and forth beneath it, who could say, everything is relative in this world, anyway, especially when one is swinging with the head flung back, with the blood rushing to the brain, prompting thoughts one might never otherwise think, or hear, just as I thought I heard a familiar voice ask, What are you doing here? I dropped my feet, touched the ground, stopped swinging. I lifted my head up, shut my eyes, waited for the blood to stop gurgling and go back to where it had come from. The voice that had asked the question belonged to Marko, but when I opened my eyes he wasn't there, just as he hadn't been there for the past few days. And nights, of course. When he left, Marko left for good. I couldn't remember when that happened; I knew, or I sensed, why; in a way, I had had a hand in his leaving, by choosing to believe Margareta's story above all and not trying harder to bring Marko into the game, which, in the end, turned out to be precisely that: a game. Besides, I was relieved that he wasn't here, because his jeering would have been merciless. First he would have ridiculed me, then he would have rolled a joint in honor of my recklessness, then another joint in honor of the joint that, he would have said, had burned for the truth, then another one, in honor of that second one, and so forth. I extracted myself from the tight swing seat, looked to the left, looked to the right, but nowhere did I see the source of the voice that had asked what I was doing there. Had I treated Marko's disappearance too lightly? People don't disappear just like that, or more precisely, people don't disappear for no reason, and then and there in that playground, lit by the moon, I decided to go over to Marko's apartment. The routes that led to my apartment were probably blocked anyway: the men I'd managed to evade were likely to be waiting at my door, and it wouldn't surprise me if one of them was at that very moment straining in the hallway and leaving a semicircle, or perhaps a full circle, of his excrement on the threshold. I set out for the center of New Belgrade, leaving Hotel Yugoslavia behind, and along the way I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to a street not far from Marko's. When we got there, I waited for him to drive away, then walked in the thickest shadow, which was not difficult in a city where the system of streetlights had almost completely collapsed, until I came to Marko's street and reached his building. I looked up at his windows and couldn't believe my eyes: a light was on in his bedroom. I crossed the street. His building had an intercom system, but the front door, like so many front doors and entranceways in Belgrade and Zemun, was always unlocked. I pushed it, slipped in, and, without turning on the light, started up the stairs. Something touched my leg, I nearly screamed, however, it turned out to be a cat that arched its back, purred, and rubbed up against my shins. Pssst, I said. Its eyes flashed in the dark and I