košava wind was blowing at the time, as it was blowing several days later when he was buried, and I remember the voice of a woman saying in muffled tones, If this curse doesn't end, I too will kill myself. It was around then that someone told me how important rituals were in sustaining a certain level of normalcy and keeping one from sinking into despondency and despair. I don't remember who said it, but I know we were talking about the ordinary activities, such as taking walks, visiting museums and galleries, reading classics, listening to music, or, and why not, the routine dusting of the apartment. That is when I began my ritual Saturday stroll, which, unlike my other walks, did not take me to the quay. Every other day belonged to the Danube; Saturdays I explored the less well-known parts of Zemun and Belgrade, sometimes walking quite far afield, nearly out to the edge of town. I walked like an old man, a pensioner, one foot in front of the other, hands crossed behind my back, and those walks had a remarkably calming effect, like, I'm guessing, the practiced moves of the Eastern martial arts. I don't believe my walks could be described as a part of the Samurai codex, but in the course of those walks my senses became purer, and at the end I felt as serene as Buddha. That particular Saturday I decided to walk along Kosančićev Venac and through the neighboring streets. Something about walking on cobblestones is different from walking on sidewalks; a person who walks on cobblestones is more mindful of his body, keeping it in balance and coordinating the movements of all his limbs. Many people slump as they walk on paved surfaces, their spine is curved, their legs unstable, so they easily fall, and sink into a bad mood. On cobblestones a person is always spry, poised to adjust his step, his spirit is alert and attentive, the eye sharp, the ear attuned, the nostrils flared. On cobblestones, I once said to Marko, I am a hunter, on the pavement I am merely the prey. Ah, how Marko laughed. We were younger then, of course, and the young find it easy to laugh; as the years pass, laughter often cloaks itself in sneers, disdain, caution, sarcasm, cynicism, and other garments. When you are young it is nicest to be naked; later taking your clothes off is agony because it's not easy to face the creature staring at you from the mirror. I don't know why I am thinking of this now. I have definitely never walked around naked on cobblestones: a swaying penis, no matter how large, will more likely provoke a snigger than an erotic response. So I walked down to Kosančićv Venac, walked to its far end, came back, having passed the Faculty of Theology twice, went down Zadarska Street, then down Srebrenička, and down the stairs to the bus stop at the foot of the bridge. I hated the jostling buses and the crowds, but I didn't have much choice, or actually it was money I didn't have, so taking a taxi was out of the question, as was walking all the way to Zemun. It was time, I thought, to write a new piece for Minut. I couldn't have known it would be my last. What I am writing now, of course, doesn't count because this is not a piece like other pieces, this is a whisper into the dark from my window, a dark so dense that no light can penetrate it. So I stand by an open window, I utter the words and watch them burrow their way molelike through the dark. I bit my tongue before I'd even finished that sentence, not because I dislike the notion that my words are blind, but because I remembered that years ago I helped a neighbor, who had a weekend house just outside of Belgrade, get rid of moles. He poured water into one end of their underground tunnel, and I waited at the other end, shovel in hand, and bashed each mole that emerged until it was a bloody rag. And we were laughing as we did this, we even took pictures of ourselves with all those mashed little bodies, first he took a picture of me, then I took a picture of him, and no doubt those photographs still exist somewhere. Someone is sure to hold on to what we'd most prefer not have saved. One day I'll open a newspaper and on the front page I'll see those photographs, I'll see my face triumphantly grinning above the mangled moles, and I will know that the entire world, along with me, will be horrified at my heartlessness, despite the fact that moles are the most ordinary of pests. Fine, I'll use a different comparison then, and say that my words were twisting their way through the dark like corkscrews through cork, though it sounds as if the words are tied by threads to whoever is saying them, as if that person can easily, whenever he'd like to, yank them out and return them to his embrace. Nothing is further from the truth, because words, once they venture into the dark, even when the light is the brightest possible, never return. I don't know precisely where they go. Maybe there is a cemetery for words somewhere, I wouldn't be surprised. I have no more time for surprise. I have no more time. Being alive is being constantly amazed at life itself, and once the amazement is gone, so is life. A text isn't life, is it? No point in cocking my ear to listen: no one here will tell me anything, and the dark never has any answers anyway. I can sit again at the table and hold on to a glass of water, as if it will keep me floating. That night, the night after the encounter with Dača and the stroll along Kosančićev Venac, I couldn't fall asleep. This had happened to me before, there was no cause for alarm, I could explain it by restlessness, insecurity, uncertainty, ignorance, and I could lie there hoping to fall asleep at some point. I lay on my back, my hands crossed behind my head, breathed deeply, and stared at the ceiling, barely visible in the dark. I did what I could yet again to pull myself together and find an answer to what had gone on in my life over the past few weeks, but I kept coming back to the questions. Had someone truly tried to make a golem in Belgrade, and was this intention somehow'related to the group on the ridiculous artificial hill by Hotel Yugoslavia? And what sort of role was Volf Enoch playing in all this, if indeed he was involved? The thought of Enoch unnerved me, as if someone were stretching inside me, straightening up to see who was summoning him. This time I reacted far more calmly to the possibility that I might have become Volf Enoch, my breathing may have quickened for a few minutes, but that's all. Margareta I couldn't forget, never would. I sensed the diagonal whiteness of her thigh, then her bare foot, but had to make an effort to recall her face. Then again I saw her thigh and felt my penis stiffening, until like a bar it reached across my belly. I should have called her, I thought. I didn't move. I trembled, stared into the darkness, and waited for the blood to seep back out of the spongy tissue. That was the first time I thought that Margareta might actually be the Shekhinah, the female presence of the divine, tied to the tenth Sephirot, Kingdom, situated on the map of the human body in the soles of the feet. Wasn't Margareta barefoot during our conversation at the apartment in the Zemun high-rise? But even if she was, does that really mean anything? People go barefoot, after all, because they like to and not because they mean to carve the shards of a secret message into someone's consciousness. The times we were living in required a haven from reality, which could be found only by living everyday life in a fantasy or by reading meanings into reality. If I go on this way, I thought, I will never fall asleep. My penis had wrinkled and curled up by then like a pup weary of chasing cats. I touched it with my fingertips; it raised its head sleepily, then flopped right back onto my crossed hands. Good, I said, at least you're asleep. My voice sounded hollow in the dark, like any voice that knows it can expect no answer. My eyelids were starting to droop, my head lolled on the pillow, my limbs grew heavier, and I could tell myself that finally I was on the verge of sleep, and, of course, the minute that thought occurred to me my eyes snapped open, the ceiling stared me in the face, and I knew beyond a doubt that I'd greet the morning. Now when I think about it, I am amazed that anyone slept at all in those days, or rather, those nights. Reality had reached a mind-boggling degree of ugliness: we were living under a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy, which was closing in ever more tightly around anyone who dared voice a divergent opinion. The divide between the cynical government, obsessed with material possessions, and the population pushed into gloom and poverty was deeper than the Grand Canyon, and the feeling of powerlessness to change anything ate at people like a stomach ulcer. You couldn't see all of it in Belgrade yet, but in the heartland of Serbia a true darkness reigned, both spiritual and otherwise. Such thoughts unsettled me all the more, so I got up and started pacing around the apartment. I didn't turn on the light; I shuffled around, though not barefoot like Margareta, but in soft slippers, until I got to the desk and the manuscript, which, it occurred to me, I hadn't looked at for a long time, so long, in fact, that I felt I'd never read it at all. I got back into bed, switched on the light, opened to [>], and read yet again what was written on the facing page: A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unread. I resisted the temptation to look again at the pages I'd dreamed of, so I flipped ahead to [>]. Enough about the soul, it said at the top, though it should be noted that the soul of a deceased Jew will not stop migrating until it fulfills all commands and gains insight into the many secrets hidden in the Torah. Those who know, it said, know that there are 613 commandments in the Torah, of which 248 are positive and 365 are negative, which, as it was once believed, correspond to the number of 248 bones and 365 sinews in the human body, and they will therefore know that a human body that fulfills all the commandments is like the Torah itself, or that he who achieves spiritual perfection creates and repeats God's form within himself. In other words, he who accomplishes this, whose body blazes with heavenly light, allows the Shekhinah to dwell within him. There will be more on the subject of the Shekhinah, it said, because one might assume that the way to her is easy, bearing the water carrier in mind, but this is a task measured not by hardship or complexity but by the way it is performed; a person carrying water may do so with more dedication than a teacher who pursues his high-minded job in a laggardly manner. It should also be added here that Rabbi Chaim Vital instructed how one, or two, or three, or four souls may enter into a single body, but never more than four. Here I stopped. The next section, judging by the opening sentence, was about lighting the Saturday candles, and that was not a skill I needed. I reread the passage at the top of the page. The connection between the migration of souls and the fulfilling of the commandments in the Torah was easy enough to see, though I couldn't figure out why that section ended in Chaim Vital's words. Four souls in one body — that concept had never crossed my mind. As it was, I wasn't doing too well with one; what would I do with several? However, I was most confused by the sentence referring to a fuller description of the Shekhinah and the water carrier who could have been none other than Volf Enoch. Perhaps Vital's reference is to him? It is also stated that he, the water carrier, found it easy to reach the Shekhinah, whatever that means, as the reader is cautioned that the path is not easy. How, then, did the water carrier accomplish this? Toting a yoke with pails, maneuvering a wheelbarrow with a barrel, lugging pitchers and gourds brimming with water? I turned to the preceding page and, of course, as I might have guessed, on that page, though it was marked as [>], there was nothing about the soul, the Shekhinah, or the water carrier; instead it was mostly about the building of the Sephardic synagogue in Zemun, the corner stone was laid in 1871 and built according to plans by a Josif Marks. The synagogue was damaged in the Allied bombing of 1944, it said in closing, and has not been restored; it was in fact razed to the ground, except for a few fragments near the Well, for those able to see them. I should put this manuscript aside, I thought, for if I come across one more ambiguous reference my difficulty sleeping will become chronic and I'll never shut my eyes again. Until that point I'd understood the title of the manuscript to be symbolic, the manuscript to be a well of sorts in which all of us dwell, the entire world, and now I had to forget that thought and accept that there really was a well somewhere from which that manuscript derived and to which it was heading. The pale morning light began slowly seeping through the window, as if to help me illuminate the words that were pulling me into the depths of the Well. Alas, there is light that obscures instead of illuminating. There was no longer any reason to stay in bed. I got up, made the bed, made coffee. I didn't feel like going down to get a paper because I knew what to expect: the regime newspaper would be trumpeting its referendum, the oppo