David Albahari - Leeches

Jewish Encyclopedia dedicated to entries starting with the letter G, as confirmed by the title of the entry " Gilgul," which I did manage to glimpse in passing. I paced a little longer, stared into the dark windowpanes, glanced at two or three books, leafed through Moshe Idel's study on the golem, and promised myself that I would definitely read it at some point. I notice that I am inventing reasons more and more often now to digress from the story, or slow it down, or even to avoid telling it at all, as if keeping a record can be called storytelling, and as if all this sounds like a story to anyone but me. After all, what is a story? A question to which, of course, I will not respond, because that answer too would only be yet another form of postponement, unlike the answer I got from Margareta when I asked her, pointing to the open volume of the encyclopedia, whether she was getting ready to travel. The question was meant to be witty, but Margareta answered in all seriousness that preparations mean nothing here because souls are traveling all the time, and it is certain that we do not make those decisions. The only decision we make, she said as she poured the tea, is what we'll be like in this life, because good souls seek out good people, just as evil souls search for the bad. That, she said, is one of the explanations as to why a good person becomes better sometimes, or why an evil person suddenly feels the evil urge. I sipped my tea. There are souls, Margareta continued, who circle the world for centuries doing whatever they can to contribute to the spread of good because that is the only way for evil to be gradually crowded off the face of the earth, to make the whole world a mirror for the good. She spoke with a fervor that in those years could only be heard, in an entirely different context, in the rabid tirades of political agitators on television news, and it was astonishing for me to find that such earnestness still existed in some other realm of the spirit. Margareta suddenly stopped talking, and tilting her head to one side, she looked at me intently. I hope, she said, that I'm not burdening you with things that don't interest you. There is nothing worse, she continued, than making people listen to something that means nothing to them, and it had seemed for a moment to her, she said, that she detected a shadow of boredom in my expression. I touched my face with the tips of my fingers, as if to check whether such a shadow was there, but the only thing I felt was the rough tips of my fingers on my chin and cheeks. If she had seen something, I told her, then it was fatigue, because if I'd been bored, I would have left long ago. In that case, Margareta told me, she would like to hear how I explained the presence of evil in the world. I shrugged. It is here, I said, like everything else, and if there is an explanation for other things, then the same holds true for evil. Margareta raised the cup to her lips, sipped a little tea, smiled. She had already taken note, she said, of my skill at speaking without saying anything, while leaving space in the process for further maneuvers, for affirming or denying or for totally withdrawing from further conversation. Now it was my turn to smile and raise my cup to my lips. I'd noticed, I said, that she never used more words than necessary, so that in some sense we complemented each other because I used the largest number of words, while she used the least possible number, which meant, statistically speaking, that on the average we used the same number of words. We'll never get anywhere if we fall back on language games, said Margareta. I agreed and took another sip of jasmine tea. The problem with evil, she said, is that its existence brings into question the assertion that God is good and omnipotent, because if he truly is, why did he need to create evil in any form? Maybe he didn't mean to, I replied, and instead, all on its own, evil transformed itself into a force opposing the one God had intended for the world and people? Margareta said that there were such interpretations in all religions, and that many rabbis, among them Kabbalists such as Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, felt that evil had been created so that the very act of overcoming it would bring people to understand the oneness of God. The Kabbalists determined the place within the system of the Sephirot where the source of evil lies, she said, and that is the Sephirot of Chesed and Gevurah, as shown by Rabbi Isaac the Blind. She spread her hands to remind me that these Sephirot assume the realms of the right and left hands on the human body, that the white and red colors belong to them, which she, for some reason, called angry colors, and silver and gold, or water and fire, all of them opposites, which, she added, through their friction probably encourage the emphasis on evil. All in all, she said, lowering her hands, whatever the sources of evil may be, no one can gainsay its existence, so there is no point in dwelling too long on the question of where it comes from, especially, she said, if the source is taken as Adam, or his tasting of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Even if we wanted to, she said, we couldn't go back in time and stop him from separating the tree of life from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by his action, so by picking the fruit he was sundering the thread that connected the fruit to the original source, which led to the creation, in his heart, according to the Kabbalists, of malicious intention. After that, she said, after taking apart what should have been joined, evil could have easily used the newly formed conduit to pour into the world, where it would then keep growing, establishing a counterbalance to good and offering itself, shamelessly, to the human race and its right to free choice. I'll never understand, I said, how someone, faced with a choice between good and evil, chooses evil. She couldn't understand either, Margareta replied, but the fact remained that human history is a series of disgraces springing from wrong choices. She sipped a little tea, wiped her mouth, and repeated that no matter how interesting the question of evil might be, what really interested all of us here was how to respond to it, how to stand up to it, and, finally, how to overcome it. I asked, staring at her feet, whom she had in mind when she referred to all of us here. Margareta fell silent for a moment, took another sip of tea, and said we would talk about that another time. Behind her head, through the window, I saw the sky begin to lighten. There are some, Margareta continued, who see no point in tangling with evil and feel that a focus on doing good deeds is all that is needed, leading to an increase in the quantity of goodness and a total liberation from evil, therefore, to an establishment of a world in which there will be nothing but goodness, not even free will, because there will no longer be a need for man to choose. There will be nothing to choose from, said Margareta, because everything a person does will be good, and each person will be good, and so will the whole world. Regrettably, she sighed, in the times we live in we don't have the luxury of waiting patiently for that day to come, because the lunacy of evil is growing, and there is nothing left for us but to take on the fight with evil, not just individually, each in our own heart, she said, but more broadly, just as the sons of light battle the sons of darkness. And what, I asked, does this have to do with me? Margareta hesitated for a moment, then shook her head as if she was persuading herself of something. This was still not the right time for an answer to that question, she said, but soon enough it would be, she couldn't say when, but she could promise that I wouldn't have long to wait. So does that mean, I persisted, that there's an explanation for everything that's been happening to me? There is always an explanation, Margareta replied, nothing happens outside the larger flow of all things. I know that, I said impatiently, but there are ways to channel that flow, to guide a person to a path that someone else has defined, and what interests me is which path that is. Margareta touched her finger to her pursed lips, then reached over and with the same finger touched my lips. There would be time for that, she said, first she had to wrap up the description of the fight between good and evil she'd begun, and she had to finish it before the day had fully dawned. We both looked out the window at the pale sky. Whatever the evil is, however it came to be, said Margareta, it is always growing, threatening to squeeze all the good out of the world. In the process, the evil is nourished, if one can put it that way, by the evil deeds people do, even by their impure thoughts, especially thoughts of committing sins, and as the evil gains in strength the bond is severed between the lowest of the Sephirot, called Malkhut, or Kingdom, and the other Sephirot, and this redirects the emanation of the divine to charging and boosting evil, while the feminine nature, designated as the Shekhinah, is threatened and forced into exile, and when it is exiled, we become one-sided, stripped of the balance of oppositions, and we become easy prey for surging evil. The entire system of Sephirot is threatened, said Margareta, from the Crown to the Foundation, in other words, from the top of the head to the genitals the world goes awry. And to keep that from happening, she added, the Shekhinah must become a part again of the system of divine meaning, so the feminine presence of reality has a role equal to the masculine presence. She turned and looked at the sky, now bright. Even to herself she was sounding like Scheherezade, she said, but her story had to end as morning came. If we were going to spend another night awake, I said as I stood up with effort, she might as well be Scheherezade, because I was not the kind likely to lop off heads, the kind that had to be distracted from the sword. Margareta didn't answer. Morning, apparently, contributed to her change: she was no longer talkative, the smile vanished, and as she hastily rinsed out the cups and spoons, it was as if her whole body went stiff, she became formal. A little later, as I kept talking, she put on white socks. When I saw that my attempts to keep our conversation going were floundering, I too fell silent, and the brief ride in the elevator was extremely awkward. There is nothing more unnatural than two people standing next to each other, nearly touching, saying nothing and looking for something to stare at. How many places to stare at could there be in a filthy, close, graffiticovered elevator cabin? I could not understand Margareta's unexpected transformation, though I decided immediately, as both of us, were staring fixedly at the same upper corner of the elevator cabin, that I would pay it no mind. The fact of the matter is that the number of unknowns in my equation was no smaller than it had been, but that didn't mean that I should allow it to grow. So, showing nothing, I said goodbye to Margareta, though I couldn't resist turning to see the direction she took as she walked away from the quay. It occurred to me to follow her, it wouldn't have been difficult to do, and following her might have helped to resolve the dilemma that Margareta hadn't wished to speak of, meaning the question of what all these events had to do with me; but after she had opened up to me that night, it seemed dishonorable to follow her. If I had made it this far, I thought, I could last a little longer, so I went home. If I had known just how far off I was in my estimate of how long this would go on, I probably would have set off after her, regardless. Now, of course, it's too late, as I've said, or written, I'm not sure because several times I noticed I've been talking to myself, even as I sit at the table bent over the paper. Somewhere I read that this is called mixing the real and imaginary levels, and that movement between what is real and what is imaginary is most common in children, not counting mentally disturbed people. If that's true, I hope it's a child I'm becoming, and not a person with a dislocated consciousness, though it is the same either way, because no change can alter the past that preceded it. I used to think about that a great deal more, especially at a time when I dedicated myself to studying the Chinese Book of Changes, and I did what I could to find an arrangement of the hexagrams that would prepare me for the arrival of future changes, so that when they occurred I would not experience them as changes but as continuity. I do not remember whether I found the best arrangement of hexagrams; most probably not, because I never really understood the system of broken and unbroken lines, just as I do not now fully understand the system of the Sephirot. If the Chinese hexagrams represent a picture of the world, and if the Kabbalist Sephirot also represent the world, do the hexagrams and the Sephirot reflect the same world, or are these worlds so different that one could say with certainty that each of us has our own, unique world, which is not repeated anywhere? I know that in the end everything comes down to moral purity, and that between the Jewish tza dik and the Chinese superior man one could place an equal sign, but what about all of us who do not attain these pinnacles of virtue? I never had a chance to discuss this with Margareta; when I went off to see Jaša Alkalaj with the same question, I learned he was preparing for an art show. These were the paintings, he told me at his studio, he had been working on for the past few months, and most of them were dedicated, he remarked, to the theme of racial misunderstanding and prejudice. Until that moment I'd paid no particular attention to his work, because what I'd seen earlier had little appeal for me, and he was still convinced that, belonging as we did to different generations, guided by different poetics, we had nothing to offer each other. He invariably dismissed postmodernism with a shrug, while I was prepared at any moment to swear by that same postmodernism, and with the same intolerance I heard his positions on the political and social engagement of the artist. Our discussions, therefore, about the Kabbalah and mysticism had not strayed into the realms of art and politics. The art show was something very different, just as the paintings he showed me were altogether different from my simple-minded impressions and ill-conceived notions. Unlike the earlier paintings, many of which were abstract, not including the Kabbalistic canvases I had seen on my first visit, the new pieces, which Jaša showed me one by one, embraced the most varied influences and styles; they included direct references to other works, ranging from impressionism to pop art. Instead of a connection through stylistic expression, the paintings were linked by an openly political theme. Two or three paintings were references to famous canvases by the painter Mica Popović, while Slobodan and Mira Milošević appeared in a direct quote from Warhol's works portraying Mao and Marilyn Monroe. The most interesting, at least for me, were paintings using hyperrealism techniques, I wasn't sure of the source, to respond to the recent upsurge in anti-Semitism. I assume these were based on photographs, though I'd never seen the original photos, except one. A group of paramilitaries poses next to vandalized Jewish tombstones, for instance, one of them holding a severed human head. The damaged tombstones, I sensed, were photographed at the Zemun Jewish cemetery; I don't know where the paramilitaries were from because they wore no insignia on their clothing or uniforms, but regardless of who they were in the original photograph, the accusation of racism and intolerance referred to the many irregular troops that had gone into the war from our regions. One of the other paintings depicted a fragment of a slogan scrawled across the wall of the Belgrade Jewish cemetery, and in front of it a group of young men with closely cropped hair; some were sneering with hatred, others had their hands raised in quasi-Nazi salutes, yet others brandished a banner, painted as a reverse pirate flag: a black skull and crossed thigh bones on a white ground. The photograph looked familiar: they were soccer club fans before a match in the cup finals or perhaps qualifying matches for the World Cup. In these paintings, as in the others, there were Kabbalistic symbols here and there, Hebrew letters, illuminations from ancient books, six-pointed stars, menorahs, and mezuzahs. Meanwhile, Jaša poured brandy into two glasses, we clinked our glasses, raising them to the paintings, which, as he said, through the art show were becoming a part of the world, we drank to the show, and to him, and, he added, with each of his paintings a piece of himself was subtracted and hence he was becoming an ever smaller part of the world. When he put together all he had done, he said, a few crumbs were all that was left of him, a handful of bits. They shouldn't even be calling him Jaša anymore, he said, but Little Jaša, there was so little of him left. I laughed, he was serious. What's going on, I asked, with the show coming up, shouldn't you be in high spirits? Jaša went over to the table, brushed the papers and newspapers aside, and handed me a folded envelope. Inside, on a sheet of red paper, in letters cut out of newsprint, was a brief message: You haven't got much longer, Judas!!! I noticed that each of the three exclamation points was different, the one in the middle was thicker and the one on the right-hand side was longer. It's no picnic finding the right-sized punctuation marks in newspapers, as anyone would agree, except in the gossip rags with those bombastic headlines, a gold mine of question marks and exclamation points. And besides, the size of the lettering in messages like that isn't coordinated anyway. I turned over the paper, there was nothing on the back, only several uneven blobs of glue. First I said, This is ridiculous; then I said, We should go to the police. Nonsense, said Jaša, what can they do? I said nothing. I could hardly praise a police force that was interested only in propping up the regime in power, motivated solely by their own survival, because if I did, I'd be flying in the face of my own actions. After all, I hadn't turned to the police when I was beaten up, nor did I call them to take a look at my shit-covered, pissed-on doormat, and I made a point of dissuading my well-intentioned neighbor from calling them for me. In return, sometimes I would wash the entire stairwell. Cleanliness is always calming. I asked Jaša whether any of his acquaintances had received similar threats, had Isak or Jakov, or maybe old Dacca? But Jaša shook his head and said, If I was keeping silent about it, why would they say anything? And what happens next? I wanted to know. Jaša shrugged. One death threat, he said, is not the end of the world. The preparations for the art show are coming along, the catalog is at the printer's, the invitations too, life goes on and there is no point in paying this any mind, which has always been the case and always will be. Isak Levi wrote the text for the catalog, said Jaša, and the art show was planned for the following Tuesday at the Jewish Historical Museum. Perhaps that space, he said, wasn't the best possible, but I would surely agree that there was no more fitting place for such a show. I agreed, and then we washed that down with our topped-off glasses of brandy, drinking to the prosperity of the museum, the success of the show, and good reviews, for peace on earth and a speedy change of government in our country. For this last wish Jaša filled our glasses yet a third time, so from that moment on my recollections fade, and no matter what I do, I can't bring them back into focus. I remember, and only with great effort, the moment when I left his building to wait for a cab: I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and though I'd done this slowly, looking to the side made my head spin. I had to sit down, and I sat on the highest step. I kept thinking I was hearing leaves rustling, though when I looked at the treetops, they were still. Is that, I later asked the cab driver, the sound of alcohol in my bloodstream? The cab driver glanced at me sullenly in the rearview mirror. He was probably afraid I'd throw up on the seat next to me, which was not out of the question, so, just in case, I opened the window and took a deep breath. There is another bit that has since vanished from my memory, because all I remember is how I suddenly opened my eyes, how I stared at the cab driver's hand on my knee, shaking me, and how, little by little, his words reached me. I paid for the ride, tried to kiss his hand, which he had extended to take the money, got out of the cab, and then I emptied the contents of my stomach by a newspaper kiosk. As the last droplets were spewing from my mouth, I thought I should get my cleaning equipment and restore everything to order. I mustn't forget my plastic gloves, I kept repeating to myself. Of course, as soon as I stepped into the apartment, all such thoughts vanished. I flopped into the armchair, and I was still there when I opened my eyes the next morning, stiff, with a disgusting taste in my mouth, pain in my stomach, tacky fingers, and a headache that threatened to blast my skull to pieces. I'd been wakened by the reflection of the sun's rays, which had found their way to me from the windows of the facing buildings. I squinted at the sunshine, belched and groaned, hoping that by some miracle I might start to feel well again. I was hoping in vain. Some people don't even know what a hangover is, but I am of the kind for whom every hangover is a disease, and when I finally managed to get on my feet, I filled a hot-water bottle, got undressed, and crawled into bed. The next day, Marko gave me a lecture, his favorite lecture on the theme of how impossible it is to reconcile cannabis and alcohol, and how my hangover and headache, which caused me to open the door to him with my eyes nearly shut, was one more proof that he was right. According to him, the earth was divided into regions of unequal size in which various means for altering consciousness dominated: the Near East, for instance, was a hashish region; the Far East an opium region; in South America it was coca; alcohol ruled in Europe; the native populations in North America had tobacco. However, he maintained, one's background does not necessarily oblige one to embrace the preference of a particular geographic region, rather, each of us was born with a predisposition, and if that predisposition were to connect one to, say, cannabis, then the other substances would hold no interest. In a search for the right substance, Marko explained, you try different mind-altering substances, and when you find the right one, all others become unappealing or damage you, as my poor reaction to Jaša's brandy demonstrated. He offered me his cure for a hangover, a plump joint of marijuana, but I waved him away: the very thought of smoke made my gorge rise, and I was in no mood to test what real smoke would do to me. The headache settled like a veil over my eyes, and I felt I was looking at Marko through my lashes, eyelids half closed, from a great distance. All right, said Marko, if you won't, I will. He lit the joint and for a moment his head disappeared in a cloud of smoke. I closed my eyes and pinched my nose, which was the only way I could shield my stomach from temptation. I even turned my head to the side and tried to point my mouth as far away from him as possible. In the end, fearing I might succumb, I went to the kitchen to make some mint tea, but once I'd made it, I stared into the cup, unable to bring myself to lift it to my lips. Meanwhile, Marko had smoked his joint and had joined me at the kitchen table. He had clearly read the papers that morning, he showered me with minute details on what was happening locally and in the world. The members of the Atlantic Pact had yet again threatened to bomb Serbia if there wasn't an acceptable resolution to the Kosovo crisis; the German mark was still worth six dinars, which was what a liter of gasoline cost; stray dogs were a growing problem; in an apartment frequented by the homeless, in the heart of Belgrade, the dead body of an unknown male was found; the preparations for the referendum were underway; the weather showed no sign of stabilizing; Chinese merchants were flocking to the Belgrade markets; the taxi drivers were calling for higher rates and were threatening a strike that would paralyze the city, as if the city, Marko said, was not already paralyzed. Depressing news sometimes has a bracing effect, if for no other reason than because you realize how paltry your troubles are compared with all those tragedies and cataclysms, so I perked up, sipped some tea, and finally was able to see Marko clearly. Marko, naturally, offered to roll another joint, but my insistence in turning him down surprised even me. All right, said Marko, he had come to show me something, or take me to where he'd show me something, something he felt I had to see, as it was directly related, or at least that was how he perceived it, to stuff that had been going on with me recently, and even if he'd read it wrong, which was not impossible, he said, anyone can make a mistake, I'd be interested in what he had to show me, and we should get going as soon as possible, so he was getting up, which was a good thing because tangled sentences like this were terribly draining for him. All right, I said, went into the bathroom, washed, confirmed that I looked haggard, brushed my teeth, splashed lotion on my cheeks, and came back to the kitchen. I'm ready, I said. Marko looked at me slowly, and suddenly, as I saw his bloodshot eyes, it crossed my mind that I shouldn't trust him. It's a horrible moment when you doubt a person you think of as your best friend, especially when it's not you doubting him over facts, but something inside you, some minuscule signal warning you, so at first you want to ignore it, persuade yourself that it is all a mistake, a short circuit, a disturbance sending you a false image as a foil. But had I not already decided not to tell Marko everything, especially when it came to Margareta? Now my intuition was merely confirming something my subconscious had known for a long time, as it knows everything else, both what has already happened and what is to happen. I am not talking about destiny here; I am not a believer in destiny, I have always favored the notion of free will and the freedom of choice. The blind given, a life spent in writing out an unchanging destiny, I never found such notions appealing — they reduced me to an automaton who goes through life simply to acknowledge that he's but a grain of sand swept along by events, stripped of any meaning. That biologist, I can't recall his name, hit the nail on the head when he said that destiny does exist but is not predetermined, we are the creators of our destiny, but what we choose to do, seen in retrospect, becomes an inevitability, not because of divine intervention but because the past can no longer be altered. Enough of that. Marko waited patiently for me to get ready, then got impatient. He kept hurrying me along, urging me to walk faster, he grew nervous and agitated as if he had snorted cocaine. He was taking me straight into the lion's den, I remember thinking at the time, though now I have to laugh, because there were no lions nor did the place we went to resemble a den. I was still hung-over, and I had the feeling that my stomach was an inflated balloon that I was carrying on a string, high above my head, and my head throbbed whenever we hit the bright sunlight. At the same time, I admit, I was figuring out how to run away at the slightest sign of danger, and I kept lagging a few steps behind Marko. Of course, this bothered him, so he'd grab me by the elbow and pull me along, cursing, though he never once explained why the rush. Even so, we made progress: we passed by the Faculty of Agriculture, entered the city park, then left the park near the hospital and turned onto a street that led to the synagogue. Once long ago, when a discotheque was located in that building, Marko and I went dancing there, as we used to say, to reel a girl in on our fishing line. The past few years there had been quite a public controversy over the synagogue, because the municipal authorities at the time were accused of having illegally taken over the building, but then it turned out there had been no violation of the law, though the story about the scandal resurfaced from time to time, always tinged with political overtones. As we approached the building, I wondered what Marko had in mind: a nostalgic return to the discotheque where Zoran Modli used to be the disc jockey, if I am not mistaken, or an attempt to draw me into some resurgent political dispute. It turned out to be something altogether different. We stepped into the courtyard. Though it was not an enclosed space, I felt a change from the street, as if the air was denser, no, as if something was in the air that could not be felt outside that space, a condensed sanctity, as Marko later said. He was surprised that I hadn't felt that change when I entered the courtyard of the Belgrade synagogue, though that didn't necessarily mean anything, since our reaction to the sanctity of a place, he said, need not always be the same. When he visited famous monasteries, he said, he seldom felt a thing, while, on the other hand, the pressure of sanctity would be nearly unbearable in a ramshackle little church in a village off the beaten track. Everything can be explained, he said, all you need is the will to do it. We were standing in the yard in the increasingly warm sunlight, looking at the synagogue as if expecting it to address us. I still felt a fast-paced throb in my head, but the pain had mostly subsided. I was even able to look at a window refl ecting the rays of the sun, and the glare didn't make me nauseous. Marko called me over closer to the building and pointed to a rock with the number 1863 carved in it. He said he wasn't sure what that number meant, but that it probably was the year the synagogue was built. I knelt and touched the number, as if it could tell me something by touch. The number said nothing, instead it scratched the skin on my fingertips with its rough edges. Marko mentioned that the sum of the first two numbers was nine, as was the sum of the second two, and he was convinced that between those two sums there was a connection. I thought of Dragan Mišović. But why would every combination of numbers have an additional, hidden meaning? Couldn't a number be a number and nothing more? How could each number seem mystical, as if filled with secret missives, while words seem like a parody of reality, and the more words there are, the more ridiculous they are? Perhaps I should have wondered how Marko had discovered that number, what he had been looking for in the synagogue courtyard, or, who knows, in the building? I was passing by here the other day, said Marko, and suddenly it looked to me as if someone was waving to me from the corner of the building. And you wondered, I said, whether it was me? Exactly, answered Marko, how did you guess? Who else would have been waving to you, I said, from the synagogue courtyard? Whatever the case, he went into the courtyard and looked behind the corner of the building. No one was there. He had noticed the rock with the numbers, bent over to take a closer look, then heard a voice behind his back. He turned and saw an old woman in black: she even wore black lace gloves and a little hat with a short black veil. She raised her hand and pointed to the top of the synagogue. There, she said, by the chimney, you can see a light at night and those who know how to listen can hear a banging, rattling, and garbled words. Marko tried to ask for details, but she said the light was like no other light, it sometimes burned all night, and the sounds would become so loud that sleep was out of the question. Suddenly she fell silent, pointed up at the roof of the synagogue again, and with quick small steps, left. And you, I said, you came the next night to see what was going on, didn't you? Yes, said Marko, but I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, some commotion and the cooing of pigeons. And what did he expect from me now? I wanted to know. I have enough mysteries going at the moment, I said, that I don't know what to do with, I don't want to add one more to the burden. And besides, I continued, isn't there a bar here that stays open until late at night? All those sounds, the racket, the trembling light, doesn't that sound like a bar or club making noise and music? To a lady in black lace gloves, that might seem like the devil's work. Clearly I had not convinced him. He shook his head, blinked, wiped his nose. I suggested we find a café, and reluctantly he agreed. He stared up at the roof and stood on tiptoe, as if that would help him reach the attic. We set out along Dubrovačka Street, but at the first corner we bumped into a man, someone Marko knew, who apparently had something more attractive in mind for Marko than the planned cappuccino, because after conferring briefly they headed off in a different direction. I was left alone. I looked to the left, I looked to the right, then turned to look back at the synagogue. I thought of Dacca's story about making a golem or finding some other Kabbalistic weapon; could there be a better place for work on that assignment than a synagogue? Then I remembered Volf Enoch, the water carrier, who passed through these same places more than two hundred years before, changing names the way someone else might change hats. Perhaps he was still walking around, under yet another name and with another occupation. What if, I said to myself, I am Volf Enoch, and that thought made me stop. I am Volf Enoch, I said aloud, 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. TheЧитать дальше