being on the street in my slippers like some old curmudgeon, and I turned to go back in. The man kept staring at me, no, the man was fixed on me, that is how I'd describe it, and suddenly I desperately wanted to go up to him and pluck those glasses off his face, and just then he lifted his hand, removed the glasses, and smiled. I turned to check whether there was someone behind me. There wasn't. I looked again at the man, who was now approaching, still smiling. I can always take off my slippers, I thought, and if need be, sprint barefoot. I have never cared for being barefoot, even as a child, but if that was the only way for me to flee, being barefoot wouldn't bother me. Margareta and her bare feet flitted through my mind, and I wondered what a barefoot flight would mean to a Shekhinah, or more precisely, would the Shekhinah aid or obstruct the flight, and then I had to stop moving and thinking, because the man was in front of me. He had sky-blue eyes. What, he said, you don't recognize me? No, I said, and I truly had no idea who he was, though his voice began to take shape in my consciousness, and the longer he spoke, the more the oblivion waned, and finally, when he mentioned Paramedium, our gymnasium biology teacher, the name and nickname hit me: Steva the Horse. There was nothing horsey about him, and while he chattered on about old friends, and about how happy he was to see us, and about how much it meant to him when he returned to Canada, my only thought was the delicate question of his name's origin. Would I hurt his feelings if I reminded him of this nickname? He'd eagerly carved it into old and new school desks, and even, in some instances, into the blackboard and the lectern. One of the things he'd started appreciating more since he'd moved away, he said, was the marvelous informality of the people here. To come down in slippers like that, he said, went beyond anything he'd seen in Edmonton. I don't know where Edmonton is, but if I were there, I said, I would not so easily abandon my comfortable slippers. Steva chuckled, and then I remembered how he'd acquired the nickname Horse: he didn't laugh, he neighed, though by now it sounded more like a frog's croak. In any case his laugh was awful, much worse than my slippers. All the while I was inching toward the door to my building, but he followed me, never letting the distance between us grow. I don't know why I wanted to put space between us, maybe because of those sky-blue eyes whose translucence had always stirred distrust in me. The lighter someone's eyes, the greater my suspicion. A prejudice, naturally, though harmless, if that's any consolation. I nudged open the door to the building with my back, preparing to slip in, but just at that moment Steva started listing everybody he'd seen, and after a few women's names, which I didn't recognize, he mentioned Dragan Mišović, with whom he had spent a marvelous evening, he said, only yesterday. I stopped pressing against the door. A marvelous evening with Dragan Mišović? I asked. Was he sure it hadn't been someone else? No, Steva replied, he was sure, Dragan the mathematician from whom we always cribbed solutions in math and mechanical drawing tests. He asked after you, said Steva, and said something about parallel worlds, repeating patterns, that sort of thing. The door suddenly felt so heavy, I thought it might snap my spine. Had I made the wrong choice, perhaps, when I recently decided not to call Dragan Mišović? I can't remember when that was, but I do recall the alacrity with which I had made that decision. Now I dared admit that it was out of vanity, anger that he'd so casually blown me off two or three times, or sneered at me because I couldn't keep up with his mathematical reasoning. Are you sure? I asked Steva needlessly, that Dragan mentioned me? Actually I was trying to gain time, to figure out what to do, to evaluate everything from a new perspective. Steva didn't hesitate. Of course Dragan Mišović had told him all that, he even made a special point of saying, Steva added, that he was very pleased to be in touch with me again. He looked at me with those sky-blue eyes and blinked as if wind was blowing in his face. Was the blink a sign of insecurity, or was he not telling the truth? Who knows why Steva blinked? He realized, said Steva, that he'd run into me at an awkward moment, being in slippers on a Sunday was a sure sign of a wish for rest and relaxation, but would I be willing perhaps, he asked, to join a group of old school friends for dinner in a restaurant by the Danube? They had agreed to meet at the Harbormaster's at seven o'clock, then decide where to eat. And Dragan Mišović will be there too? I asked with a dose of incredulity, are you sure? He promised, answered Steva, and as far as he knew, and he was prepared to stand corrected, Dragan Mišović always kept his promises. I couldn't muster a single example, but all the same I nodded. So, said Steva, you'll join us? I consented, and he reached forward and patted me on the cheek. Leave those slippers at home, he said, and neighed again. Once a horse, I thought, always a horse. Little things are sometimes the most telling about the truth of people and the world, the tiny cracks signaling the advent of huge catastrophes. As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, questions were jostling in my mind about Dragan Mišović's unexpected willingness to appear in public, and to go, no less, to a restaurant. I remembered clearly how the person who had helped me find him several weeks before, and who had moved to Banovo Brdo, had cautioned me that he was odd and that he never, which I knew, attended group gatherings or alumni reunions. When I add to that the fact that Mišović had asked after me, it was a miracle that I had not instantly gone to the Harbormaster's. I managed to hold off until six o'clock, and at six-thirty I was out there in front of the gallery. My head swung left-right like a pendulum, and even so I missed seeing Steva the Horse arrive with a plump woman whose hair was tied in a bun. I could have sworn I'd never seen her before, but she claimed we kissed on New Year's Eve when we were fifteen. Steva neighed when she tweaked my ear and said it was never too late to pick up where we had left off. Pick what up, I asked, and Steva nearly fell on the floor. The woman with her hair in a bun giggled, hands on hips, her belly shoved in my direction. Who knows how long this torment would have lasted if two other women hadn't arrived and I recognized them as Zlata and Dragana, best friends and straight-A students. I had never kissed either of them, that I knew, though I wouldn't mind, I thought, kissing them now. There is nothing more beautiful than middle-aged women. Sure, the body no longer has the firmness and flexibility it had in youth, but there is that fullness instead, the stable hips, the generous bottom, and the air of well-being. Zlata and Dragana squealed when they saw us, and as we were hugging and kissing three times on the cheeks, Svetlana and Radomir arrived, frowning as ever. Though we knew that the frown was a mask of sorts, every time I saw them I thought that their identical frowns must have brought them together. They had been, one might say, the mascots of our class: they had started dating in our first year, married a week after graduation, and had stayed together ever since, judging by an email I received, don't ask how, from Zlata and Dragana. Over the past few years Zlata and Dragana have been tirelessly organizing annual reunions of our class, and several weeks before the gathering they send out bulletins with up-to-date information about the lives of our former schoolmates. By my name it says "gone," which means nothing, and suits my desire to lay low. "Gone" is certainly better than "deceased," which is what they wrote, regrettably, next to some of the names, including the name of the homeroom teacher, Milenko Stojević, whose heart, someone said at one of the earlier reunions, broke when the new war started in Yugoslavia. I don't know if that's true, though I believe that many hearts were broken when that happened, some forever, as was the case with Milo the Silo, as we called our homeroom teacher, some temporarily, though with a permanent scar, while some only pretended, feigning a despair that didn't leave a mark in their atria or ventricles. They said nothing about my heart, what matters is that it still beats evenly, and that, knock on wood, it shows no strain at maintaining a regular rhythm. To knock on wood I had to get up from the old armchair and go over to the windowsill, just as I rose at the restaurant back then, to go to the door, restless because Dragan Mišović was late. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, but there was no sign of him. I came back to the table, where the conversation was in full swing, and where the plump woman with her hair in a bun managed to maneuver Svetlana away and sit on the chair next to me. Until then I hadn't joined in the conversation, but when she began leaning her breasts against my left elbow, I completely shut off. No, it was not her breasts I was thinking of; what bothered me was that Dragan Mišović had changed his mind, assuming, of course, that what Steva had told me was true. He was sitting at the head of the table, ruddy with many glasses of red wine, and when he saw me looking at him, he winked. I don't need winks, I thought as the plump woman pressed against me, I already have more than enough of those, what I need is something clear, tangible, something authentic beyond any doubt. Was I prepared to interpret Dragan Mišović's arrival that way? I didn't know. The desperate, as the saying goes, grab at straws. The saying presumably refers to people who are drowning, but wouldn't anybody drowning be desperate, even somebody who had voluntarily gone into the deep water? Suicide may be a choice, but I'm convinced that no one walks calmly to death, there must be a moment at which the body sheds the raiment of consciousness and rebels against the inevitability of the end. Somebody might assume that I was suicidal because Dragan Mišović hadn't made an appearance, which, I assure you, never for a moment crossed my mind. Not then, and not now. Actually, during the years when I was growing up with the people who were now sitting around our table at the Sent Andreja restaurant, who were not heavy back then or balding, I chose as my mantra a line from Faulkner's