d, and I didn't feel that I was not speaking the truth. But, I went on to say, how could I be Volf Enoch when I'm not a Jew? How do you know, I asked myself, that you're not a Jew? Just as I was about to voice my response, I noticed a little boy and girl staring at me, probably happy to see a crazy man talking to himself. I turned and started running. I don't know why I was running, but when I stopped, my head was clear, as if the increased amount of oxygen that had entered my lungs and blood as I ran absorbed every remaining trace of the discomfort from the hangover. And not just my head; my vision was sharper, more precise, so that I saw everything, as they say, as clearly as if it lay in the palm of my hand. My palm was sweaty, however, and so was my forehead, my lungs were still huffing with effort, my leg muscles quivered, my knees were buckling gently. I looked around: I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how I'd arrived there, obsessed with the thought that no matter how it had happened, I was in fact Volf Enoch. To the left of me was a toolshed, to the right a rickety fence, in front of me were tended garden beds. I was standing in the backyard of one of the old Zemun houses, that much was clear, all I had to figure out was how I'd got here, if I'd got here. I turned again and saw the house to which the backyard belonged. The door was closed, the curtains drawn, a broom and shovel lay next to a cracked set of stairs, a washbasin with a hole in it was on the roof of a vacant doghouse. I saw a pair of old slippers, though I couldn't tell whether they were a man's or a woman's. As I took note of all that, the door opened and an old man appeared, with a rag in his hand. The rag had probably served for dusting, because as the door creaked open, he thrust out his hand and shook it out. When he caught sight of me, he lifted his other hand and waved, as if strange people walked into his backyard every day and stomped around his garden. We exchanged glances until my breathing had slowed and he had shaken out the dust rag, and then I moved slowly toward him. The whole time, however, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was sleeping and that none of this was happening, but when I got closer to the house, the old man, instead of vanishing as in a dream, came down the worn steps and held out his hand. I took it, expecting my fingers to find only air, but his hand was real and warm. He asked if I'd like to come in. I answered that I didn't know, because I genuinely didn't: I had not the slightest idea how I got there, so how could I know what I'd like to do now? The only thing I wanted was to ask where we were, but I couldn't bear to ask the question, because, as usual, I was embarrassed by my ignorance. So I stood in front of the old man, smiling, waiting for his next question. The old man asked if I'd like something to drink. This must be a dream, I thought, only in dreams do things like this happen, but if this is a dream, how could I have fallen asleep midstride, and if I really am asleep, then am I back there, still running? The old man was patient. Two or three times he rubbed his hands together, he coughed once, he scratched himself once, but he didn't rush me, just as he didn't prompt me to answer. Thank you, I said finally, a little water. The old man clapped his hands, and went back into the house. He closed the door and I heard him turn the key. A minute ago he was inviting me in, I thought, and now he is doing everything to make sure I don't follow him. So I stood there and waited for him and got more and more thirsty. The old man didn't reappear. I suddenly recalled the pump in the courtyard at Zmaj Jovina Street, and the thirst became unbearable. I went up the steps and knocked at the door. There was no sound, even when I leaned my ear against the peeling surface. I knocked again and pressed my ear even more closely to the door, and stayed there until my ear began to smart. I'll be going now, I said to the door, and stepped back. When I turned around, meaning to go down the stairs, I saw that I was in a city park. I sat down on a bench near a children's playground, a little dog sniffed the leg of my pants, two girls were making a sandcastle, a flock of pigeons waited at a safe distance, a woman on the next bench over was embroidering or crocheting, I was never sure which was which, and when I looked up, I saw blue sky and curly clouds. To this day I have not been able to figure out what really happened — had I run, or had I been sitting on that bench the whole time, and if so, how did I get there, and did it all happen because I, or at least something inside me, was truly Volf Enoch? But how could I have become Volf Enoch, and why me, of all people? Perhaps that was why I'd suddenly found myself caught up in these events, as Marko would say, though helpless to extricate myself from them. The universe is a weird place, said Marko, and there is so much stuff in it that makes no sense, which never bothers us except when the lack of sense comes crashing down on us. I had always felt this was empty talk fueled by cannabis smoke, but as it so happened I had personally experienced how emptiness can turn into fullness. I sat on the bench, wondering whether to approach the woman who was crocheting or embroidering and ask if she knew how I'd got there. Of course I didn't, but I could imagine how she'd have looked at me, and who knows, thinking I was attacking her, she might have brandished her crochet hook or embroidery needle, or whatever the device was that she was holding, as a weapon. So I sat there quietly, looking up from time to time at the clouds and waiting for my muscles to stop twitching. The little dog had by that time sniffed his fill of the fragrance in the cuffs of my pants and started sniffing other things in the vicinity. Volf Enoch, the water carrier, I repeated to myself, and tried to imagine what his work had been like back then. Did he have a barrel he filled with water, then lugged on his back from house to house? Where did he fill it? Did he receive a wage for his labors from the Zemun Jewish community, or did he charge by the water flask, bucket, or trough, depending on what he poured the water into? Later, of course, the leeches had their day, and when I remembered them I shivered. It was agonizing enough for me to be the person I was, and now I had to be a water carrier and a leech gatherer, too. That was not all, as it turned out. I stopped by the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue on Saturday morning, hoping I would find Dača there and perhaps learn more about Volf Enoch. Dacca was indeed there: he was sitting at the table, under the tree, wearing the hat. For two days now, he said, he'd been waiting for me to get in touch, and had I not turned up that morning, he would have gone out looking for me. Where would he have looked for me, I asked, since he didn't know where I lived? He would have looked for me where he'd find me, he said. He raised the hat, wiped his brow, then lowered the hat onto his head. I sat on the other bench, right across from him. Crumbs were visible on the table, left there after a meal. The crowning success in the first Serbian uprising, said Dacca, was the taking of Belgrade, as any historian would agree, but history is always a mother to some and a stepmother to others, he said, and it was stepmother not only to the Ottomans, but also to the Jews, who were accused of having served the Ottomans, for which some were killed, others forcibly baptized, and some crossed over into Zemun. And now, said Dacca, there are documents in which a certain Solomon Enoch is mentioned as the person who brought the ransom for the group, mostly women and children, though in the registers at the time of the Jewish families of Zemun there is no mention of a single Enoch. There is, however, a Jakob Volf, a widower and trader in used goods, but he surely could not have played that role because it is said of Solomon Enoch in one place that he was very young, while this trader must have been older if he had had the time to marry and, regrettably, bury his spouse, who died young. So who is Solomon? asked Dača, taking his hat off and looking at me as if I knew the answer. I don't know, I said. Of course you don't, replied Dača, but we can believe in the possibility that it might have been Volf Enoch, or, he added, putting his hat on again, whoever represented his essence. He saw my confused look. I am thinking of his soul, of course, he said, what were you thinking of? Nothing, I answered, I stopped thinking ages ago. Dača grinned. It won't help you, he said, especially when I tell you one more thing. He leaned toward me as if to impart a secret, so I leaned toward him, feeling conspiratorial. When, at the start of the uprising, said Dača, Father Matija Nenadović crossed secretly over into Zemun to ask Bishop Jovan Jovanović for a cannon, involved in all of this was a Jew, as Nenadović writes in a letter, a man named Enoch who was damned capable, though Nenadović doesn't specify capable of what. It appears, Dacca continued, that he was involved in supplying a second cannon, a cannon that Father Luka Lazarević had helped bring to Serbia, which, he said, is strange, to say the least, because later the Belgrade Jews suffered at the hands of the Serbian rebels, but so it goes in history, at one moment you're up, up high, then you're down, very low. So it came about, he said, in Belgrade too, where, when Prince Milos came into power, better times came for the Jews because the prince granted them full civil rights while they were in Zemun; in the other empire, they were still undesirables, which would last, he said, another thirty years or so. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead again, then he flipped the hat over and set it on the table, as if expecting a piece of fruit to tumble into it. I looked up into the crown of the tree. Dacca was quiet, his eyes were closing, so I hurried to ask the question I'd come to ask. On the basis of what he'd told me, was I to conclude that Volf Enoch was not one man, but several, and if this was so, how many people were we talking about, no, that's not what I meant to ask, the number was moot the moment it went beyond one, but could he, I asked, explain how this had happened? Where had all these Volfs and Enochs in different places and times come from, and how did water carriers evolve into gun runners? Dacca sat bolt upright when I said this and swiftly put on his hat. What runners, what guns? he asked, he had never said any such thing, and if Volk Enoch had ever run anything, it was leeches. Fine, I said, leeches and guns aren't so different after all, both subsist on bloodletting, but what I really want to ask, I added, is where Volf Enoch is now, today, at this moment? Dacca stood up and spread his arms. If we knew everything God intended, he said, we'd have no need for him. He turned and walked toward the gateway, bent, tentative as he negotiated the uneven surface of the courtyard. At one moment he paused and called to me over his shoulder not to forget the opening of Jaša's art show on Tuesday. No need to worry, I called back, I am thinking of Jaša even when I am not thinking of him. I stayed a while longer in the shadow of the tree, then set off on my Saturday stroll. This was one of my little rituals, one of those intimate routines that help us, or at least helped me, preserve my sanity during the recent years in Belgrade, the lunacy years, as a friend of mine dubbed them. That friend managed to alert me but not himself, and at a moment of distress and confusion, in the middle of the day, he leaped from the terrace of a New Belgrade high-rise. The