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 kept climbing. One floor, the next, and I was in front of the door to his apartment, breathing with difficulty, as if I'd climbed to the top of the Avala television tower. I leaned on the handrail and waited for my breathing to become inaudible. The cat clearly had nothing better to do, I felt it between my legs. I leaned over to pat it and heard the sound of steps in Marko's apartment. I grabbed the cat, and, leaping up two steps at a time, went to the floor above. The cat was purring as if it had an electric motor in its rib cage, and as the minute vibrations of its body were transmitted to my heart, we seemed to be rumbling in unison. There was the sound of a key in the lock, the door opened, someone stepped into the hallway, took a step or two, stopped as if listening, then flicked on the stairwell lights. The cat and I exchanged glances, it meowed, pushed away with its paws, sprang from my embrace, and scampered down the stairs. I inched over to the wooden banister and peered cautiously over it, and right below me saw someone looking up at the cat that had left the stairwell and was winding in and out of the iron balusters supporting the stairwell railing. I stepped back and the voice beneath me said, There's no one out here, it's only the cat. The door closed, the key turned twice in the lock, the chain rattled, and everything went quiet. I waited for the light to go off and walked slowly down the stairs. The cat was not in front of Marko's door or on the lower floors, it must have gone into Marko's apartment, though when it comes to cats, one can never be certain, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were to turn up here, after all these years, as if nothing had happened, as if we were still on the stairs, which to some extent is true, since all the unresolved moments in our lives contain a tiny segment of our being in the constant replay of each, and the more such unresolved moments, the greater the fragmentation of our being, or the less of us left in the reality in which we dwell. Each time the light goes out in the stairwell of Marko's building in my memory, a part of my being disappears, and considering how often I think about it there is not much of me left, just as there isn't much ink left in my pen. I noticed a while ago that I had written out some letters only partially, two vowels and a consonant, which is the most serious warning I have had that the end is inevitable, even as I try every trick to postpone it. Now, for example, I am wondering why I didn't knock at the door of Marko's apartment. What did I have to lose? Nothing I hadn't already lost, or at least had begun losing, though that evening a hope may have still lingered that all of it might yet change and that the loss wouldn't be total, so I slid once more through the front door of his building, this time going out, and found myself in the street. I took a full breath of air into my lungs, looked to the left, looked to the right, and tried to decide where to spend the rest of the night. I didn't come up with anything, or everything I came up with sounded unsafe, especially the thought of spending the night at the home of an acquaintance, which might have exposed them to danger if someone was following me, so I spent the night wandering aimlessly, which wasn't so much aimless as it was a deliberately evasive approach to my apartment. I don't know how far I walked that night, ducking into entranceways and behind shrubs and into the dense shadows whenever I came upon something potentially dangerous, but I know I was staggering by the time I walked into my apartment on Tuesday morning, with the latest editions of the papers under my arm. As before, I was a little disappointed at finding nothing nasty in front of the door and for a moment felt like someone who, against his will, has seen his importance diminished. Vanity is a strange thing, I said that already, it needs no repeating. I fell into my armchair. The soles of my feet were burning, my hands shook, my eyes teared as if my eyelids were lined with sand. The papers were packed with op-ed pieces, rebuttals, and polemics, including an official statement by the Jewish community, condemning every form of hatred and denying, along the way, any tie to me, which was true enough. A letter to the editor signed by fifteen prominent individuals of Jewish background demanded in much harsher terms an investigation to ascertain under whose orders I was working to corrupt the traditionally good relations between Serbian and Jewish people, and expressed unwavering support of the government, which, and I am quoting based on dim recollection, was doing all in its power to secure a dignified place for our country in the merciless ghettoization of the new world order. As a rule, I avoided reading such sycophantic praise, but now my own skin was at stake and it was expedient to offer me in exchange for a promise of peace, therefore I needed to get as detailed a picture as I could about those involved as the only way to ready my defense. Of course anything that would have provided me with evidence — information about the slogans, attacks, the vandalizing of monuments, and the public accusations — was not cited by the newspapers, claiming that this, to quote a television commentator, would have interfered with the investigation. At that point I didn't know everything there was to know, so all I could do was observe with horror the quantity of the attacks and the support they received from certain politicians, church dignitaries, and ordinary citizens. A year later, when Serbia was bombed, the business of forgiving themselves completely overwhelmed all else, allowing the resistance to be focused on the international enemy who in turn could be blamed for everything, for everything that happened and what was going to happen, whatever that was. By then I was somewhere else, not where I am now, but once you leave, all other places are the same, so in a sense it made no difference where I was, and I remember thinking I should write about it, about the magnificent and grandiose yet failed attempt to revive the supernatural in the construct of the world, as well as a deliberate move by a government to play the difference card, to encourage a rift along subtle, often intricate, ethnic and religious lines in an act of self-preservation. Unlike the failed Kabbalistic experiment, this other policy still prevails, but in a reduced form, and was additional inspiration for my resolve, which has meanwhile evolved into desire, then to a feeling of obligation, then to a pledge, and that is where I came to a stop, here by this window, rolled up my sleeves, and got down to work. Yes, writing is work, I repeat that for all those who think of writing as pleasure, and when sometimes, like now, I look up and out the window into the night, I see the face of a tired man. And worried, also, because the ink tube inside the pen is nearly empty. Who knows where all these letters come from, how all the words are born? I asked myself the same question as I leafed through the newspaper, while the soles of my feet burned, my thighs ached, and the phone rang insanely. At one moment I got up, limped to the side table, and picked up the receiver. The voice at the other end delivered a hysterical sequence of curses, threats, and burps. I went into the kitchen, put the kettle on for tea, spread some honey on a slice of bread. If the explanation I got from Jaša Alkalaj was right, and we were all caught up in a double game of sorts, then none of us was what we seemed, which seemed clear enough in the cases of Margareta or Dragan Mišović, but it did nothing to explain Marko. Yet perhaps it does, I thought, except that I don't see it. I should have rung his doorbell, I chided myself, to see who was there, instead of deciding that Marko wasn't there and that the entrance to his apartment was a passage into a trap. After talking with Jaša Alkalaj, at whose studio I was expected again later that evening, I would return, I told myself, to Marko's apartment, nothing would hold me back. I waited for the phone to stop ringing for a moment and called Jaša Alkalaj. I left a message on his answering machine that I would be there around nine o'clock that evening, and then, though the phone kept ringing, I lay down to rest. I woke up late in the afternoon in an apartment where sil