PART FIVE

1. Food of the Second Body and Mont St. Michel

Upon her return from China Lisa faced my illness seriously for the first time. She changed our diet fundamentally. We began using olive oil, got rid of most milk fats, introduced plenty of fish and vegetables to the table. She lit tiny candles under bowls full of sweet-smelling oils, and bought Bulgarian soaps scented with roses. She hung mirrors far from the entrance door, on it she suspended Tibetan bells and in one corner of the room placed a small copper pot with several coins in it so that money wouldn’t flow from the home. She obtained homeopathy manuals and read passages from them to me. I remember one such case:

BEANS OF SAINT IGNATIUS

“These beans are the main cure for acute sadness. This is especially beneficial for the elderly grieving a loss, preventing them to die of the grief. Ignatius oils the cogs of the grieving mechanism and causes crying.

Signs and symptoms: suitable for those that react badly to consolation, for those persons convinced that the problem is best not talked about, for those suffering in silence, for those that fall ill of a problem, for those that sigh constantly, for the persons that do not wish to eat fruit…”

We traveled to relax.

In Paris we bought a beautiful cushion for the bathtub and visited a gallery that left a permanent trace. We went to the Grand Palais to the display entitled “Melancholy”. The history of melancholy in the West portrayed through works of art. Lisa paused by the Greek tombstone of some Demokleides. Beneath the exhibit stood the sign that it was excavated in Hungary somewhere. The stone slab showed a soul looking at its deceased body in a stone coffin, but the soul itself had the very bodily, very carnal appearance of a beautiful buxom girl.

- That’s how I want to look eternally – exclaimed Lisa as she pointed towards the second body of Demokleides on the slab – can we not achieve that?

Somewhat saddened, Lisa and I went to an inn to rest for a while. Lisa was silent, and then suddenly seemed as though she had reached a decision. She did not want to order a thing:

- We have to pay attention to what we eat and drink. The body of that Greek at the display certainly did not eat at guest houses along the way, but was careful about what it ingested. That’s why it had such a beautiful second body. You have to preserve your earthly body as well, for your second body will bear the image and energy of your first body. That is why we have to take care in which state we shall give our first body to our second as a draft. The second body is similar to the one that we can see on our old photographs. We carry it in our memories from the past, except the second body is not in the past but in the future… Do you remember that television show on organ transplants?

- No – I replied curtly.

- They transplant the liver of someone who liked peanut butter to a patient that never enjoyed peanuts. And after the successful surgery the patient recovers and is very surprised. He suddenly starts liking peanut butter. Therefore the liver retained the memory of its first body, and its second body took on the habits of its first. So do not forget in which condition you will turn over to your second body not only your spirit but your first, earthly body as well. It is part of the evolution, part of the purification that can last for millennia, but Jesus tells us that it is possible. Eternity is inscribed within us and we believe in eternal life whether we are religious or not. Christ did not fast only to keep his earthly body in good shape, but also to show us how we should purify ourselves if we wish to be eternal.

- In one place Christ said to Judas: “You shall sacrifice the body of man I am in now”, and then indeed discarded his “earthly body”.

- Where did you get that from? – asked Lisa.

- From an apocryphal manuscript from the 4^th century.

- What does it mean? That Jesus came into his “earthly body” from some previous body? And then returned to that original body from his “human one”? And we?

- You ask difficult questions. But what made you, too, so convinced that our second body exists?

- Are you joking? Are you not, like all men, convinced that you will live forever? We are born with hope of eternal life. Look at yourself. Who would make such perfect software and hardware for something disposable? Do not forget that God created man “after his own image”!

Since then Lisa began to cut down on the number of meals we partook of at inns where she could not control the food that we were given. She began to seek out well-known resorts with marine spas. She proclaimed the new French cuisine healthy, we had a glass of red wine with our meals, in short, she began to pay extreme attention to what our bodies lived off. She was at some turning point, so full of energy that light bulbs exploded whenever she pressed a switch in haste, and microphones attached to her clothes shorted out as she gave television statements about the ruins she was working on. She wrote everything without punctuation marks or capitals like in SMS messages. She took yoga and learned new breathing methods, other than those that we had practiced on our terrace. She told me that with yoga she had begun breathing through her pussy. She told me, speaking more to herself:

- Human beings should be careful what they ingest when they eat. To take as much care what they eat as they do whom they let into their beds. In that sense there is no lunch for free! Cows turn grass into milk, and of that milk we create thought. It makes a great deal of difference what your thought is made of. What our body is sustained on. Which grass the cow eats… It is terribly wrong and harmful, the way we use our bodies! If we could only avoid unnecessary and useless meals! Not to mention all those other things that cause our bodies irreparable damage! I will never go unnecessary things again!…

To this I added, pouring oil onto the flames:

- It is not enough to purify ourselves, we also have to purify the spiritual and physical surroundings we live in…

On the Easter of the year that I fell ill she caught the television broadcast of the special service held in the magnificent cathedral on Mont St. Michel. The gothic church was built on a peninsula as if on a giant pan the handle of which tied it to land. The Roman Catholic priest, a Frenchman, who served in the Holy Land and had come from Jerusalem to hold the Easter sermon in the mentioned church, impressed us both, although he was neither of her Protestant nor of my Orthodox faith. She watched the program, petrified.

- Did you hear what this man is telling us? – she asked me without looking away from the screen – he is reminding us that Christ resurrected in his own body, not in spirit, but in body. In a body of the very same kind as ours. He has something essential to tell us. Jesus is sending us the message – you too can attain eternal life, and in your own bodies – His example says – just follow in my footsteps… But, what does that mean? Explain to me, what does it mean?

- It means – I told her – that Jesus feels that our body can be perfected as well as our spirit, so much that it can withstand time.

- I want to know what that means in practice? What should we eat to make our bodies fit to resist time? Did He eat after rising from the grave?

- He did. The Gospel cites the words of Christ: “I have food to eat that you do not know of.” That is the food of the second body.

- Leave that. Do we know what he ate when he rose from the grave?

- We do. He ate fish, he ate honey on the comb.

- That, then, is one of the messages. Fish means phosphorus, necessary for developing mental capacities. Therefore the mind needs to be improved to a higher level than the one we are at now. What does honey mean?

- Neither animal nor plant. The Ancient Egyptians used honey as medicine, for fractures…

-Honey is beauty transformed into energy. Beauty captured in food. Honey also means pollination, spreading life all around by air… The thing about the honey on the comb I don’t fully understand, it’s too profound… Something eludes me. The builders of the pyramids used honey as medicine… And did he eat bread after rising from the grave?

- Yes – I replied – he ate bread as well. On one occasion upon rising from the grave his disciples knew him that way, because he broke bread before them.

- I don’t care about that. I want to know what message Jesus is sending us. Let us see. He is telling us that apart from fish and honey on the comb we should eat grains… No, that we should eat something bearing germ within it… Whatever that might be. Wheat, barley, rye, rice… So that is the way to the second body, to the conquering of time. You know, I think that there are people on Earth that are already going in that direction. I don’t mean now, but through the generations, at least as far as food is concerned, they travel that path. The ones in Asia, from India, China and Japan, who have been feeding on precisely such food for centuries. Fish, germ and honey. And their bodies already differ from ours. They are leaner… Somehow… Are they on a higher level of awareness than we are in the matter of food?… But what lies at the bottom of it all? What does the food that Christ ate upon rising from the grave feed on? What does germ, flower, fish, feed on?

- Liquid. Christ drank as well, of course.

- There are some tales about a wedding in Kana of Galilee. There he turned water into wine. What is he telling us with that? – remarked Lisa.

- Wine, according to the general belief of Christians, is the blood of Christ. So he turned water into blood. And blood is life. And this he did at a wedding, at the time when in a new marriage there was to be the conception of new life, of issue. Blood is the very same nourishing liquid that sustains life in the body. The turning of water into blood, into life, was an act suggesting conception.

- What does it mean? That water is life?

- Jesus tells us that he who is not born of water may not enter the Kingdom of God.

- What kind of magic water is that? The water from the christening?

- Yes.

- Does He mention water anywhere else?

- He does. In some strange prophecy that happened to him on the Olive Mountain, After the “last supper” he went with his disciples to the Olive Mountain and left them there at the distance of one stone’s throw. He prayed, and that is when it took place.

- What did? You are more familiar with the Bible.

- He prayed to God for the bitter cup intended for him to pass him by. And then an angel from the heavens came to him to “give him strength”. Bloody sweat began poring down Jesus’ body.

- Medicine calls that hematohidrosis.

- Never mind what we call it, what matters is the message that this conveyed to Jesus. At the Olive Mountain something that Jesus had already done before was repeated.

- But there, on the Olive Mountain?

- There it was a proclamation that resurrection was possible. Meaning to give him strength at that difficult hour, the angel brought him the message in answer to his prayer. As though he were telling Him: you can turn matter not living, water (or sweat) into living matter, that is, into blood (namely into life), which means that you can rise from the dead…

- But sweat is not water. Besides, it is slightly salty.

- That’s the point. Woman’s milk is salty too, and so is male seed. The liquids within us are salty, our sweat is salty, and so are our tears. Therefore the water turning into life is salty as seawater. There is an old legend about droplets of the Madonna’s tears scattered through the universe. These drops are like guiding stars by which deceased souls seek their new life borne by their second, children’s body. They seek droplets of water to, like Jesus, turn them into blood, into new life.

- Does that mean that the universe contains nourishing liquids, water, which can be turned into life? Where did the water on Earth come from? Did it fall from the heavens?

- The origin of water is a mystery. The traditions of Essen tell of the water of life poured into our blood by an angel.

- Why does water exist? Why does it answer to pretty and ugly words, why can it listen to music and read? – as claimed by a book.

- It is believed to have fallen from the universe in the form of rain. This celestial rain still falls upon the Earth every day, but in such small amounts that are barely noticeable compared to the total precipitation here. However, this celestial rain has been falling on the Earth for over four hundred billion years, so one could imagine that this was sufficient to fill the oceans, seas and rivers.

- If there is water in the universe, then we can also expect there to be life. Perhaps even my life in some other body, in some other present, as you say. Perhaps I can expect that somewhere in the universe there is a drop of nourishing liquid and some other now of mine, where I am some kind of alien wearing my celestial body like a space suit…

2. Satan drinks Apple Juice

A dozen days or so after a new bout of my illness I dreamed that I was sleeping in an old-fashioned wooden four-poster bed. The posters of these beds had balls on them. In the midst of my dream the devil sat on my bed with a violin. He had three noses and looked astounding. He was no more than seven or eight years old and he was – a girl. Before he began to play, I asked him:

- What’s your name, love?

- You can see for your self, I’m Baphomet.

And Baphomet sniffed with one of her three little noses.

- And where did you come from? – I wanted to know.

- If you frow a stone into the deep from here it will fall after the fird day. Now you, daddy, judge where I come from.

- Since when have you little satans changed gender and become female?

- We follow the developments here. We became female when women here on Earth gained rights. Now your women are becoming all the more powerful and influential, so we too adapt. We too have our developments in that direction. To stay a la page, we update, daddy!… I won’t always be vis small! The stronger the position of women, the stronger I will be… But you’ve asked enough and don’t do that any more, because you don’t know how to ask. You always ask wrong. Listen to what I have to say to you…

And she began to play. In my dream I even knew what she played. I listened to the trills and felt the devil hide a smile in a tear, a minor in a major, hot in cold, time in eternity. When she finished her playing the three-nosed little girl put down the violin and asked:

- Did you understand what I was saying?

- Yes, I did. You’ve become forgetful. You’re repeating yourself! You’ve already said all that some two hundred years ago, when you were sill male, to an Italian named Tartini. And he memorized what you said word for word. And recreated it on his violin as soon as he awoke.

- Recreate it he did, but without understanding a fing! Music, daddy, can be decoded in words, vat’s what I’m saying! Turn sound into numbers, and numbers into letters and you’ll understand what I’m saying. But you people have to be told everyfing several times before you hear it once. I want to tell you what the real big bang looked like, how the universe was created.

- I’m not interested. So many creatures are born and die without knowing what the real big bang looked like, myself as well.

- But daddy, where will your second body go, if not frough the universe and the centuries? And do not tell me that you’re not interested in how the cosmos was created and what it looks like.

I was astonished in my dream and in some way that I can no longer recall I retorted affirmatively, to which the little girl snapped:

- I truly, as you like to say, do not see the future, I am blind to tomorrow, but my memories are deep as the universe and I remember how vis world around us was created… So I can tell you about the big bang. But you already know vat yourself. Fink back!

- Think back to what? The big bang?

- I can draw it for you, if vat would be easier for you to understand.

And the little girl took from her pocket a piece of colophonium used to lubricate the bow and drew two crossed lines on the floor.

- Vis here is eternity, and vis here time.

Then she tossed the colophonium as though she were playing a children’s hopping game and moved it with her foot to the precise intersection point of two lines. Then she crushed it with her tiny hoof with tiny bells hanging from it.

- Did you hear vat? Vat was the big bang! Vat’s how the universe was created: time cut eternity into two. It made two eternities out of the one: – the past and the future. However, severed eternity is no longer vat, but just past and future time. No more of the Holy Ghost of yours vere!

- Then there is no life either! – I retorted, and it suddenly stopped with its baby-talk and began speaking properly as it continued:

- So, in conclusion: when the first intersection of Eternity and Time took place, there was a big bang and from it the universe was formed. As an echo of that big bang there were countless small bangs, countless new small intersections of eternity and time in which life began to thrive. And those are your “presents”… But let us leave the grand tales aside. Let us return to your little tale. You claim, daddy, that after death you will have a second body. That is not true! If there were a second body I would have one! After falling into sin we dressed into animal hides and that is all we have! What was before – has been and no longer matters.

- And Jacob Beme?

- Ah! He says that before falling into sin we had bodies of glass. So that each, even the slightest, of our thoughts could be seen. Why did you and I after falling into sin dress into animal hides? Your Beme does not say that. So that all within us could no longer be seen and monitored! For lust, daddy, lust itself is inside!… But you are not interested in this glass body from Paradise. You are interested in whether there is a second body, the one after death. Do you really believe such nonsense, with which you poison yourself and others? Forget it! Even if it did exist you would never wish for it!

- What do you mean?

- It’s not what I mean. You yourself described this second body excellently! Think back!

- Where did I describe it?

- Think back! Did you not tell your wife of the carnival in Venice? Think back! That is where one of your favorite authors met a vampire. That second body of man was tiny, old, it bleated, ate butterflies, was filthy and lying. It was an upir. You say so yourself. Would you wish for such a second body? There are even worse examples. Think back to the Egyptian mummies! They were preserved to give strength to the Pharaoh’s second body! Look at the museum of Cairo! All the preserved Egyptian pharaohs are displayed there, or rather, their bodies. You saw the strength that can be expected of such bodies? Would you want one of those after death? To nourish your second body?… Of course not. So your calculation is no good! Erase it all! Think of something else! Think back!

-You are scaring me, sweetie, with a scarecrow! Driving a bear away with a sieve! You, as we know, are blind to the future and do not see it since there is none of your fabric in it, in future there is no time. A mummy is a sample of an individual, it preserves all the important components of an organism, its DNS – bones, hair, nails and embalmed skin. Based on this biological formula a being can be established, a new body created by those samples. Perhaps this new body will have what this one has as well, namely apart from the physical its ethereal, astral and mental body as well, we do not know. It doesn’t even matter… A vampire is a type of mummy as well. It only lacks bones, but has teeth, skin, hair and nails…

The little girl did not like my story. She sniffed with one of her three little noses as though she was about to burst into tears and asked interrupting me in mid-sentence:

- Do you have a little juice somewhere for us to drink?

- What would you like?

- If you have some, apple juice would be fine.

I went over to the table and spotted apple juice on it. I took a glass and poured some juice for the little devil.

- Thank you – said the “little girl” and as soon as she had taken a sip she was duplicated. One was still sitting on the bed holding her instrument, and the other had sunk into my biedermeier armchair drinking from her glass of juice. I remembered that this armchair had long since ceased to exist, for my hounds had torn it to pieces in a bout of rage. Something else amazed me as well. Neither of the devils was aware that the duplication had taken place. When the one in the armchair stretched out his hand for me to pour him more juice, the one on the bed, without a glass, stretched out his hand as well and I poured some more for him as well. To my surprise the apple juice did not spill on the bed. I wasn’t sure if they were pulling my leg, or were themselves also deceived by their duplication stunt.

When the one on the bed finished the second round of juice from something that I was unable to see, he gazed at me with the following words:

- Don’t you know me? Think back!

And on my bed I saw a beautiful female figure with that same violin. She was wearing a rococo dress very low-cut in front. And on the hand in which she was holding the bow a green ring.

- Remember me! I am Zabetta. The violinist from Venice. Conservatorio degli incurabili! Incurably ill in my first body, in my second body I sought out health. This second, healthy body of mine set forth into the endless universe, for endlessness corresponds with health. Unfortunately, my universe was false. It was as though you had sneezed and then breathed in the air. This universe experienced a big bang in fixed time, and then having reached maximum expansion, the universe began to contract. This endless universe is breathing. But this particular universe has a flaw, it does not possess eternity… It was created in the endless space in which it spread faster and faster, but in finite time, without eternity. And so I did not manage to seek eternally through the endlessness for the drop of drinking water, and did not reach the “food for the lamb of God”, the Tears of the Madonna. Drops of water are scattered throughout the endless universe, and it takes you centuries to drink your fill. And so I perished of thirst, or as the legend from the 18^th century says, fell into the hands of the black knights… And who falls into their hands is dead forever.

Suddenly the other devil sitting comfortably in the armchair spoke to me and said:

- Do you not recognize me either? Remember me!

He was wearing a monk’s habit and his arm bore a slight cut through the fabric of the sleeve. He wore a blue ring.

- I am hieromonk Gabriel. I didn’t have love in my first body, so I sought it in my second body through a universe possessing eternity, for eternity corresponds with love. This was shown by my ring that turned blue. But that did not help me survive. Now I know the difference between Christ and us. The difference is in the death. They are two different deaths.

- In what way? – I wondered, dreaming though I was.

- He resurrected towards eternity, and we, after death, still go towards our future.

- What does that mean?

- We still have not learned to choose the right direction on the vertical line of eternity. As the Holy Scripture would say “our eyes stand fast” so we do not see where we should take a turn. We have not matured, our body is not sufficiently purified. The first body. And so this projects onto our second body as well… Perhaps one day, if we purify it…

- What actually happened to you?

- I strayed into a cosmos spatially finite, but dipped into eternity. It is timeless. In it there truly is no survival, for eternity does not intersect with time in it, since there is none there, and so a man does not have the conditions needed for life. In such a place you will not find what we called the “stable for the lamb of God”. You need go no further even, for the effort is fruitless…

And with those words the monk discarded his habit and rose to reach for something on the bed. He was single again, for the one on the bed had disappeared. Only a violin and a bow were there. And in my dream I thought – will I find a violin and bow on my bed when I wake up?

- Now we come to the third option – he continued – and this model of the cosmos is of particular significance for you. At the beginning the universe distributed its centers of gravity evenly, the density of matter was quite low. However, matter thickened, contracted and whenever this self-compressing universe reaches maximum density, it begins to expand once again to infinity. You must not forget that time breathes here as well, and not just space! Time also expands and compresses, daddy, think about that. Time converts. It eats itself. And what happens if time expands endlessly and before it begins to contract? It becomes eternity for an instant, as you yourself say! So here you have both time and eternity, and space at your disposal as well. The big bang takes place here in the proper fashion. That means that in the bang, borne by your second body, you will go very, very far, but will then, since you have enough time at your disposal, return engulfed in the compression of space and eternity (which, if you recall, breathe). And do you know what will happen then?

- What?

- Then your second body will return and face your first body. From that point you can say: the second body exists! You will be able to say: my second body will have the luck of surviving only in this third form of the universe. But think about it, is such luck worth it? Facing oneself? If it is so, as it is in this simulacrum, then there is no salvation. Where do you put our second body so as not to come face to face with it? Had I found where to run from myself, I would have run long ago! And the same goes for you as well!

- I am afraid it does not. If our second bodies are those aliens about whose existence or non-existence we have been racking our brains for centuries, if our second bodies set forth into the universe searching for their new now and for drops of water, it could be that this universe which is constantly expanding more and more swiftly will take them so far from us that we will no longer be able to connect by thought even, it will be forever too late for our thought to reach them and we will not be able to determined any more if we have a second body or not, if there are aliens in the universe or not…

- Wonderful! – exclaimed the “little girl”. – So that is what you are hoping for. Your motivation for escape into the universe is the fear of facing yourself. There is no better motivation. You hope that you shall not have to face your first body in your second body. For, do you know what the facing of your first body and your second body would mean?

- What? Let me hear your thoughts on that?

- This facing is what Jesus called in your sacred books the last judgment, and Buddha called reincarnation. If you bear that in mind, I believe you would wish to avoid your first body being faced by your second, would you not? Or at least to delay it as much as you can. Right? You would be afraid. Right? Jesus himself barely managed to come to terms with that himself. Recall the words he said to Mary Magdalene: “do not touch me, for I have not yet returned to my father…” He could barely control his two bodies facing one another at the same time.

- And what follows from these tales, in your opinion? – I asked as I sat down on the bed.

- Luckily for you, none of these models is the real one. They do not show the true state of the cosmos.

- Well which is the real one then? – I asked and almost woke of the tension I felt as I was awaiting the reply.

- The right one is the fourth, undreamt of by your astronomy.

- What is this real one?

- That I shall not tell you. For me this right one has no significance. You will see for yourself.

- When?

- As soon as you die – concluded little Baphomet, sniffed with one of her three little noses and started towards the door. She had a slight limp. As she was leaving her bow began bending and turned into a tail, and the violin into a bottom. At the door the “child” turned and added:

- Just so you know, this was not you dreaming me. It was me dreaming you.

3. Chapter for Those that Prefer not to Think

- Will beauty and the beast come over to my place for dinner on Tuesday? – Teodor Ilić Češljar asked me one Friday.

When I repeated the same question to Lisa, she asked:

- It’s not really a good time for me to go out then, but tell me do you want us to go? As far as I can recall, there’s no love lost between you and this Teodor. Whom does he want to show us to?

- I think he wants to show us his lady friend. He intends to get married and this would be some sort of engagement dinner. He’s ordered young sharks and a special wine.

- Isn’t it a bit late for him to be getting married?

When we found ourselves in Teodor’s apartment in Belgrade the following Tuesday, everything was set, but the person that was to surprise us was still nowhere in sight. Teodor looked very handsome, he wore braces and smoked a pipe the tobacco of which rolled the mild scent of apples and cinnamon around the room. He was nervous and when the doorbell finally sounded, he brought into the apartment a person who astounded both Lisa and myself. Both of us in our own way. She wore a long black vest of Chinese grass over a white dress and an enchanting smile over a surplus of dazzling teeth. Around her waist was a male necktie in all colors of the rainbow.

- I have the pleasure of introducing to you Miss Lydia Sakač – Teodor began, but to my amazement Lisa interrupted him with the curt statement:

- There’s no need. The two of us already know each other.

Now it was Lisa’s turn to be surprised, for Lydia addressed me:

- We know each other as well. We went to school together.

- All three of us! – Teodor added and immediately asked:

- How did you two come to know each other? – to which Lisa replied dryly that they had met at an archeological site in China.

- I expected anything sooner than to see you here tonight, I thought you were French – added Lisa and stared at Lydia’s hair. My friend’s guest had an unusual Chinese needle stuck into her bun. The needle was of the kind used at meals, made of red wood with a butterfly sculpted on the handle.

When we sat down around the table, Teodor poured us some chilled purple wine that smelled of roses, took his misty glass in his hand and said as though proposing a toast:

- Tonight I would like to make an announcement very important to me. I have proposed marriage to Miss Lydia, and this evening we shall hear her reply.

The reply was the second shock of the visit. It did not come right away, but some time towards the end of the evening during which none of us knew what was supposed to take place, nor what actually would take place. A certain tension lingered in the room, as though the wine that we were drinking was evaporating and the energies of salt, sugar, lemon and absinthe, all that when combined makes wine good, were floating above us. Although that evening these energies somehow did not cause joy. As thought they were hesitating somewhere over our heads and the wine was not gripping us. None of us knew what we were eating. Conversation died off at the tip of the knife and fork…

Finally, Lisa spoke, twisting her glass around musingly:

- Before I give you my reply, dear Teodor, I think there are some things from my life that you should know, especially from the period when we lost each other from sight, since we were both absent for years. Perhaps you have set us a trap, since my confession will be made here before present witnesses, but there you have it… Let me start with the fine period when we were at school together, a Belgrade high school near Tašmajdan. And when we began going out, as we used to say. At the skating rink with music and hot kisses in the chilly air of the park. Everything began well and as you know, the high school remembers us as one of those ideal couples of which there is only ever one per generation. And then you went to visit your auntie in Italy, and left me here. You did not deflower me because you were jealous and feared that I would become a slut here if you did not leave me virgin. So we parted, believing it to be for a short while. You remember there was a popular song at the time, one that we both knew:

Be there at five to five

If you’re not angry I’ve something to tell you

Be there at five to five

And this time I’ll surely be there too…

I was there at five to five, and you were not. You, cookie, were about four thousand years too late. I do not know and do not want to know what you found there in Italy and who knows where after that, but since you’re proposing, it would be fair of me to let you know what went on with me in the meanwhile, which, I must say, lasted for quite some time…

The silence that came over the table was even deeper than our memories and only Lisa’s spoon clattered once more before the incredible thing took place and Lydia began speaking again. She talked slowly and clearly aiming at Teodor first with one eye and then the other through the prongs of the fork that she was holding up in front of her face:

- As is the case in all lives, my life had visitors as well. They cut into my body sometimes deeply, sometimes more shallowly. These second bodies, as all visitors were more or less welcome, more or less loved. The first to bring his heartbeat into me through my girlish aura was a teacher of Chinese, Professor Aleksey Skobtzoff. He was a sinologist at the Parisian high school called Institut de Langues et Literatures Orientales, Rue de Lille. He had multicolored eyes and a male member similar to that of his famous compatriot Rasputin, which is preserved in a jar with formalin to this day. Apart from Chinese he taught me that the future was renewable. The next was Jan Ruijsbroeck, expert for Norse magic at the University of Columbia in New York. He had a slight squint and it suited him very well. He held me captive in his apartment in 42^nd street for a month, fed and clothed me like an empress, while he neither washed nor got dirty. After the four weeks were up he released me back out into the world and never looked at me again. Shaqiq Sohravardi from the Institute of Modern Art in London taught me yoga and how I could (if I wanted to) pronounce the sacred syllable “OM” to expel his seed from my body. The next, if I remember well, was a Milan doctor Eduardo Frutti. He had been nominated for an Academy Award for film music in his youth, and at the time I met him he had been nominated once for the Nobel prize in the field of medicine. He was rich, and made money by fitting women out with fake hymens taking the skin from the eyelids of his patients. One day he offered me this intervention free of charge, but I refused and left him for ever…

- That, Lydia, was not OK, it was, as they say, a fine miss – Lisa interrupted this confession that we were listening to in some kind of frozen silence – perhaps the man wanted to take your second virginity, since he couldn’t take the first, to have your second, virgin body..

It was not quite clear whether Lisa had turned the conversation around to make it less tense, or to pave the way towards some informal and perhaps even joking tone. This was also sensed by Teodor Ilić Češljar who put on some oriental music. A voice from the east was singing as though through a cloth gripped tight with the teeth..

- That was very finely put – Lydia retorted through the music – but I knew full well that he hadn’t intended the defloration of this second hymen of mine for himself. It was to have been some sort of parting gift from him to me, so that I could cash in on this virginity with some Teodor, or some other hunter of love late in life. I was sorry to leave, to be true, for my surgeon was handsome, drove a Bugatti, played the piano beautifully, had a Stainway that I wanted to be buried in, curly hair, shiny groomed nails, white teeth and smooth skin, all in all, his DNA could have continued after his death. He died three years ago somewhere in Asia, of the avian flu. I was comforted by an Armenian, a computer expert in the European Educational Network who taught me to be a porno gladiator; it was something like sex between sports and murder. He had very strong calves, always urinated sitting down, he was a rowing champion I don’t know in which kind of boat and I don’t know at which kind of college. He took me to Constantinople, and there at the Misir-bazaar bought me a necklace of woven gold thread (22 carats, 12,000 knots per square decimeter) and was lost for good in the alleys of the Kapali quarter chasing after some lad. He left me all alone in the capital of Turkey, and the lad he must have caught up with, because later on, as far as I know, he found himself in a sanatorium for AIDS patients in France.

- This list is like a catalogue of ships in Homer! Did you want to have children with all the races in the world? – exclaimed Lisa and burst out laughing, but Lydia paid no attention. She was looking straight at Češljar and continued filling out her catalogue. Dinner was lying untouched, getting cold beside the glasses of purple wine that were inconsolably becoming warm.

- Then came Dr. Winston Hew Fitzgerald, expert in biological engineering from the Institute of Biochemistry in Boston. He had crooked hairy legs that he secretly shaved and claimed that he had a second body. And that he could scratch it. What does that mean? I asked him and received an explanation. It was the favorite topic of his narrowest specialization. The Church believes that sin causes all illness, and to it death is also an illness, though we do not think so. If you had not died today, who would have? The cells of our first, earthly body are struck by atrophy and that is why we die, the cells of cancer never die, they are eternal. In a suitable manner some other cells similar to those of cancer enable our second body to survive after death… To this I retorted that I too had a second body, but would not give him my second pussy, since I was saving it for someone better than he… Do not rejoice needlessly, cookie – Lydia interrupted her confession and spoke to Češljar – I am not keeping my second body for you…

Lisa could not help herself and said:

- I don’t think you were joking about everything concerning the second body.

- Well, let me tell you right away, My lover from China, Horace Keruak, was not killed as you are now insinuating so that I could perform the sorcery with the ring that you saw on his dead hand that day. Keruak was killed in an encounter of intelligencers, as could have been expected. Collateral damage of his profession! But also a real shame. He had a perfect, fast body. He himself was aware of how dangerous his job was and how precarious his position in China. He was the one performing the sorcery, my dear Lisa, and I merely obtained for him a mantra that he needed for it. Besides I was thinking in my sleep as well…

Here Lisa and I looked at each other, remembering what Teodor had told us about trading with mantras for fortunetelling. Then Lisa spat out the mantra itself:

- attor uf aiv iuq ehc eipmoc inna. That is what you got him, isn’t it?

- How do you know? – asked Teodor, shocked, who had until then been keeping silent into his glass, so to speak, and Lydia snapped at Lisa furiously:

- You rummaged through my belongings in China?

- I didn’t have to rummage. I was just shown to the room earlier than you had expected. That’s not the point, the point is what you did with the mantra.

Teodor was now sitting as though he had sunk into his chair, and Lydia retorted defiantly:

- Your question, Lisa, is formulated wrong. It’s not about what I did, but what Keruak did with the mantra. He was determined to perform the sorcery, he used the mantra and then wore the bio-ring all the time, just in case, so that if he were killed I would at least know if man had a second body or not.

- And did you find out? As soon as we found him in your bed you removed the ring from his hand. So you know, you saw by the color of the ring.

- Yes, I saw everything and found out everything, but I will not tell you. I can tell you this much, just for your information, that the aura, the luminous casing of the being, or mandorla, separated from Keruak’s body as he was lying there in our room with the Chinese needle for rice sticking out of his nose, and vanished bearing the memory of some parts of his body.

- What parts? – Lisa asked quietly.

- You already know that. All that women bear in memory of a man that they care about, namely the memory of teeth, moustaches and beard, the memory of his skin texture and nails. Perhaps the memory of his voice.

- And where did this thing vanish to?

- You tell me! Have you ever duplicated yourself? And seen yourself peeing on a toilet bowl the make of porcelanosa or Shoimo. That’s that. The other woman saw you from some other present, her own, from the present moment that is not yours, but parallel to your reality. Bear in mind that the person that sees you as you sit on that bowl you cannot see.

- Is that some kind of one-way, non-returnable gaze?

- Something like that. Imagine two evening trains not going in the same direction, but meeting for an instant at night. And now imagine that one of them is illuminated, the other is not. The ones from the train in the dark can see everything in the illuminated one, while those from the lit train cannot spot the people in the other, non-illuminated one. That is how Keruak could see, there in our room, the two of us and his dead body, from his other present. From his second body. And so that one-way, non-returnable gaze that we can call “Keruak’s gaze” in honor of my late lover, cuts countless tracks, landscapes and regions and stretches out into infinity, continuing into endlessness and eternity, for you can imagine that gazes are endless…

- And what is simultaneity? – Lisa wanted to know with tireless curiosity.

- That could be achieved only by Jesus. Simultaneity is to light up the second train as well. But Keruak was unable to do that and so his spiritual body roamed around in some other reality, in some other train near us and was able to see us, but we could not see him…

- Then how do you know that he could see us?

- I know, because we had agreed that he would give me a sign.

- Tell me about it, as kids would say! And he gave you a sign?

- He did. And that’s all I have to say about it.

- And I will tell you that a Chinese needle for rice with a butterfly on the handle such as you are wearing in your hair has its counterpart. Needles for eating rice always come in pairs. There are always two. The counterpart of your needle of red wood was used to kill your lover Horace Keuak in China! Did you kill him? He was found in your bed in that room of ours.

- Don’t be ridiculous. That’s exactly why I’m wearing this “sister” needle to the one my lover was killed with, to remind me of him. Do you think his people would have let me leave just like that had they suspected me? Had they suspected me, neither you nor I would be here now.

- Why me?

- Because they would have wanted a confession from you on how aware you were of my intentions. But they knew who had killed him before they even called the two of us in for an interview. The interview was on their part merely a token of fine treatment of the deceased and part of their business routine. Besides, I didn’t have a single reason to kill Keruak. He was great in bed. And his seed was hotter than that of others. Hotter than your seed even, cookie – concluded Lydia firing these words straight out at Teodor through the fork.

- Stop harassing Teodor – Lisa snapped suddenly – at least in front of us. Put that fork down! We don’t have to put up with that as well. And it would be best if we were to leave!

And with those words Lisa rose from the table. At that moment I felt so uncomfortable that I threw my napkin down onto the table with the words:

- That’s a good suggestion. Let us leave you two to discuss matters in peace and alone. In private. We have begun to be in your way. And we are drawing you away from the topics of your conversation.

- No way! – Lydia interrupted me, and then turned to Lisa:

- Your beloved husband is a part of my story as well.

- What do you mean? – Lisa asked, shocked, and sat down. Then she slowly, slowly turned towards me and looked at me. From the gaze that causes ears to wither and drop off all of her names sorted by generations jabbed into me: Amava, Arzuaga, Eulohija, Ihar, Swift. Finally her nickname, Imola, also lashed out at me through the gaze. I was petrified before that barrage fire from the various periods.

- Yes, my dear, your beloved cookie was also one of those that did not dare deflower me, although I gave him more than one chance. I told him: better you than some stranger…

- Let’s get out of here! – exclaimed Lisa and rose again, and I, although I believed like all men that things could still be fixed, even though the opportunity for that had been hopelessly missed, got up, and we left the pair to their tale…

What happened with them later on I did not ask, Lisa behaved as though nothing had taken place, although from then on and until the rest of my life she never spoke anything but English with me. Besides, that did not last for very long.

As for Teodor, I expect that she and Lydia had broken up, as she had wished. For he no longer mentioned Lydia or his marriage. And Lydia?

She continued to think in her sleep.

4. The Dreams of Lisa Swift

One morning Lisa once again told me what she had dreamt:

I’m dreaming that my husband and I are trying to fall asleep somewhere in some yard, on the ground, wrapped in some kind of blankets. It’s dark, muddy but dry, we’ve chosen a spot beside some small building, barn, or chicken coop, trying to find some kind of shelter. We make something like a bed there. We’re started from our slumber by an apparition sneaking up on us from the nearby woods, or dark space, which we already feared. Like a whitish ghost it’s trying to get close to us furtively. I shout at it and it retreats, but does not give up. It approaches again, this time as if it wants to attack us, or to drive us away from the spot we are in. We move around the building a bit, but it continues to drive us away and terrify us. I know that I’m yelling at it, but is it yelling as well I don’t know, it seems not. But it is threatening and getting closer and closer. In the midst of its most ferocious attack we can suddenly hear a sound behind our backs and on the building next to which we placed our bed a door opens and out comes another, smaller figure, but also all wrapped in white. We are horrified and don’t know which apparition to defend ourselves from. Then the larger apparition rushes at us and we move out of its way, but see that (without the barrier that we had formed) the smaller one is rushing towards it. Then we realize that these beasts are in fact a mother and her cub, which it was trying to get close to in vain while we were standing in its way not even dreaming of what was going on.

When she woke up Lisa understood nothing at all of this dream, but the following day what she had dreamt made itself apparent to her. She had dreamt of death. Its child, the child of death, was under our control. Had we not returned it to her, she would have had to kill us to get to her offspring. Since it so happened that we returned her cub, or rather freed the approach to it for her, she left us alive.

- Next time we might not be collect enough to move out of its way – remarked Lisa fearfully and asked me:

- What is the child of death?

I replied without thinking:

- Perhaps death is not what we think it is. Who can know? Perhaps it is something completely different? Perhaps death also has a second body, like we do? Small, not yet developed? Perhaps we all have two deaths, and think that we have only one? Or several?…

After this dream Lisa became scared of me. Still, every evening she would in her thoughts draw a circle around our bed in the hope that it would protect us. It did not. One night we did not let the second body of death go to its mother and I died. We did not adjust.

My eyelids somehow grew thicker, some blackness started welling up from inside, I heard that sound and then it happened. The world turned into water from which I finally, after seventy years, surfaced into a dream as though I had come out to shore to catch my breath…

A few days after my death Lisa dreamed that she met me in the street by the crossroads in front of London Square. How are you? – she asked me. I showed her my right arm. It had no hand. Instead of a hand I stretched out towards her as though for a handshake a divining rod – the device used to discover where there is water. Lisa woke up in amazement with a question that nobody was there to answer:

- Did he lose his hand in the netherworld? When he died, his hand was whole…

5. Bunker near the Village of Babe

Lisa was surprised to see Teodor Ilić Češljar at my funeral. Dressed very politely for the occasion he looked fine and was extremely attentive. He had the walk and leg construction of those rare people that do not crease their trousers. He escorted her from the cemetery realizing that there was nobody else to do so in Belgrade. They went to a pub for a drink and she burst into tears.

- What happened to him? – Teodor asked. She burst into tears again, took him by the hand and led him to our Dorćol apartment.

- What’s this? You’re whitewashing? – Teodor asked in amazement as soon as they entered the apartment.

- That’s what I wanted to show you – Lisa said.

All of the walls were covered in something resembling scaffolding along a building, except that this scaffolding was on the inside. It was small, as though constructed for builders a foot and a half tall. These were empty book shelves. The book shelves had even been placed over old book shelves. They also rose in front of the glass wall resembling an aquarium, which was dry as a desert now. And all of the book shelves were empty. There was not a single book on any of them.

- I don’t understand – said Teodor as he sat down on a chair. – Why are all the shelves empty?

- That’s the point. He kept telling me that books were arriving for him from all over the world. His books. He claimed that they were being sent by publishers and readers and he kept ordering more and more new shelves for the books in the terrible fear that he would not have where to put them and would have to throw them away. He went to the post office every day to collect parcels with his books, which did not arrive, but he believed that they had. He believed that they had until the very last moment of his life and sorted these non-existent books onto the book cases complaining all the time that there was not enough space… And then last fall he claimed that all the books had flown out of the window and moved to warmed parts together with the migrating birds. He ran out into the street and watched them as they flew south. He claimed that some of them had caught on to the power lines in their flight, that they had been injured and fallen to the ground. There he saw, he told me, a copy of the Inner Side of the Wind rolling around hurt and muddy in some puddle.

***

When Lisa found herself in the village of Babe after the commemoration forty days upon the funeral, Teodor Ilić Češljar passed by our house, waved to her and asked her to join him for a cup of coffee at the only inn there, called “The Hot Raven”. They sat under a maple tree, drank Nescafe and chatted trying not to start any conversation that had anything to do with me. It was clear that such a conversation would only aggravate existing wounds. Beside them in the little garden the cat that hunted with its hind paws as well was playing. Up from them at a curve in the road a round concrete building surrounded by woods could be seen.

- What is that over there? That bunker! – asked Lisa as she stroked the cat that was cuddling up both to her and to the chair beneath her.

- That’s an old German defense building. The Germans raised it during World War II and when they retreated they left it padlocked. The Russian units tried to destroy the bunker in 1944, but they did not have the time. Since nobody was putting up any resistance from it, they continued towards Belgrade, and the Partisan officer that found himself in the village ordered the padlock from the bunker to be broken. The only blacksmith in the place was called for, my father. He broke the padlock easily, but it turned out that the thick steel door of the bunker was locked and that no skeleton key could open it. And so they placed guards beside the bunker and let time go by. After several weeks they packed up and left, and the bunker was forgotten. Then the local people from the village of Babe began taking interest in the bunker. They wondered what could be inside. Dead soldiers? Weapons? Gold deutschmarks of the Third Reich? Imagination raced, but cracked on the steel and concrete that was guarding the secret. The bunker was first grown over by brush and woods, and then by oblivion…

Looking at the bunker musingly Lisa told Teodor:

- I keep thinking about wars. We archaeologists always have to pay attention to such matters. Without war no archaeological calculation can be correct. And I wanted to ask you something related to this. Who do you think the Byzantines were? They were here. In a sense you too belong to their “Commonwealth”, as they say in the field these days.

- That is something that you, as a learned archaeologist, excavating the ancient Greek underworld, could tell me.

- No, what do you, mister Teodor, think of them? What my husband thinks, that I know. But what do you think?

- Byzantines are Greek that have forgotten how to sail.

- What do you mean?

- Byzantines have forgotten that they once used to be Argonauts, they forgot that Greece is by the sea and how boats are constructed and what they are used for. Byzantine never had a fleet, to transport wheat from Bulgaria to Constantinople to feed the Byzantine capital they hired Venetian galleys. The most important part of the town, Gallata, guarding the marine entrance into Constantinople from the Golden Horn, was built by the Genovese for the needs of their trading fleet. It’s no wonder that the firm walls of Constantinople fell under the attack of those with boats. Under the attacks of two mighty fleets – Venetian and Turkish. But that was not the end of the matter. Other countries belonging to the so-called “Byzantine Commonwealth”, as you mentioned, namely Serbia, Bulgaria and Russia fled from salty water as if from ancestral sin.

- And Dubrovnik?

- I’m glad you asked. That is different. Almost all Serbian kings in the middle ages besieged Dubrovnik with the desire to rule this small but diplomatically and commercially mighty Roman Catholic republic on the Adriatic Sea, which possessed safe fiscal deposits (like Switzerland in our day and age), a good geographical position and a strong trading fleet. However, all Serbian sieges of Dubrovnik failed for the same reason.

- Which is?

- Serbs did not know how to swim.

- Indeed?

- Of course, this was put metaphorically. None of the Serbian Medieval rulers had a fleet, and so the sieges turned out to be barren, because the people of Dubrovnik received by sea all that they needed to withstand the sieges and attacks from land. The same goes for Russia as well. It was not until Peter the Great that the Russian fleet was constructed, and he did not build it on the sea either, but deep inland at first at a river shipyard called Voronyez.

- Fascinating! – Lisa concluded as she rose to start home.

Then Teodor asked her if he could come to her assistance in any manner, to help her with anything. Lisa said that she had already gotten everything done and then he offered her another suggestion.

- I would like to show you something. More precisely, I would like to disclose to you a secret. I did not even disclose it to your late husband, although we were close.

- What could that be? – asked Lisa, interested.

- It’s that German bunker. Join me for lunch at the bunker. I will prepare a small feast, and you just need to show up without drawing too much attention to yourself as you approach that concrete monster.

- You are inviting me to lunch at the bunker? You must be joking? How will I get in there? With a bazooka?

Teodor laughed and gave her a key. The key was a work of blacksmith art, it had a handle like all keys do, although slightly longer, but the opposing end was cut out in the form of a swastika.

- Where on earth did you get that thing? Lisa asked.

- I thought of it and crafted it myself. It opens the door of the bunker with the greatest of ease.

- And all this time, for decades, you have been entering there while the village was racking its brains in vain for a way to break down the door and rob the bunker?

- Of course, but I did not rob it, because that would have been known of, no matter what I brought to the light of day from there. Besides, you’ll see when you enter.

When Lisa Swift came to the bunker at the arranged time, black cats were poised on the branches above them like crows. The key easily slipped into the lock and unlocked the door with ease, but the door was hard to open. When she stepped inside she realized that darkness reigned there. It occurred to her to look for a switch and to her surprise the light suddenly shone out, startling her. She did not immediately realize where she was. Before her there was a table set for two full of crystal and silverware. Behind it was a salon in the style of Louis LVI, a sofa, a desk and an incredible amount of drink and tins of food. What drew her attention was the French cognac Courvoisier, English Johnny Walker whisky, American bourbon, and a great choice of French and Italian wines. Mostly the years of 1938, 1939 and 1940. Lisa also noticed cans with goose pate, tins of salmon and tuna, and stacked beneath the window like yellow, red and blue bricks were American army rations from 1944 containing breakfast, lunch and dinner. The yellow breakfast packets coated with wax (to prevent them from getting wet – plastics had not yet been invented then) contained: a ham and eggs can, coffee, sugar and powdered milk, a pack of Chesterfields, chewing gum and cookies. Lunch, apart from the already mentioned also contained a can of fish, and some Camels, the early dinner consisted of cheese, butter, cookies, a condom and powdered fruit juice. Along with that were a bar of chocolate and a jar of cherry jam…

Lisa noticed in surprise that the relay station still worked, as well as the ventilation system. Obviously, Teodor Ilić Češljar had been keeping everything in perfect order. On the desk there were books, and on the wall some kind of inscription. Lisa read what was on the wall and it surprised her. The words were:

EVA SHAKESPEARE

Lisa went over to the desk and looked over the books. Ezra Pound and “The Importance of being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde.

- Surely German soldiers and officers didn’t read Shakespeare, Pound and Oscar Wilde? – she wondered and looked once more at the graffiti on the wall, trying to remember who Eva Shakespeare might be.

And then she heard a voice behind her back:

- That’s the name of Ezra Pound’s wife – Teodor explained as he stepped into the bunker…

They stood there indecisively for a few moments. Then he offered her a seat in one of the two armchairs and told her that he would prepare lunch in two steps. He swiftly and deftly opened one tin, lit a primus cooker and made a scrambled egg on caviar. He placed the content of one Foie gras can on the table, fried some bread and served onion jam in a small glass dish. Finally he poured two glasses of champagne and invited Lisa to the table.

As they ate, Lisa Swift asked Teodor what he had been doing in Paris.

- All sorts of things. But I preferred going to the cemetery.

- To the Per la shese?

- Yes.

- What did you do there?

- I went to visit two graves.

- Whose?

- Chopin’s, and the grave of a compatriot of yours.

- ?

- Oscar Wilde… You know, he too supported himself for a while in the same manner as myself. It was from him that I learned that verses, and words in general, can be cashed in very well.

- ?

- He sold his ideas for literary works like I sell old sorceries. His grave, if you haven’t been, is a veritable museum. The exhibits change every day. From hour to hour, so to speak. His readers constantly bring all sorts of presents to his grave and leave them there. At the time when I used to visit it you could find various things there: a female high-heeled shoe, a half-drunk bottle of Bordeaux, a love letter addressed to Oscar Wilde – Per La shese, a photograph of a naked girl dedicated to him, a bottle of perfume, Maxfactor lip rouge, verses written with a charred match on a subway ticket, a handkerchief doused in the male scent Givenchy, a copy of the novel “A Picture of Dorian Gray” translated into French, published in 1936, the imprint of reddened lips, a lock of hair… I felt through my pockets to see what I could leave him and didn’t find anything suitable. Yet I didn’t want to depart and not leave a present for him like so many others had done. So I finally took out my pipe, filled and lit it. I drew from it twice and left it for him lit as it was, full of aromatic smoke. And so I parted from my pipe. Now I smoke this cheaper one…

- And what did you say that he had sold? – asked Lisa and straightened out her legs beneath the table, stretching. Lunch was over, Teodor put on some music and I waited for what was about to happen knowing that it certainly would take place sooner or later. Probably right there in the bunker.

- You asked what he had sold? That’s a lovely little tale. In a pub or on some bench somewhere Oscar met one of his French author acquaintances. The writer sat deep in thought and did not even notice Oscar.

- Why are you so pensive? – Oscar asked him.

- I’m thinking of a topic for my new book.

- Why should you rack your brains with that? I have heaps of topics each of which is better that the one you will come up with. I can sell you one if you want.

And Oscar Wilde sold one of his topics to this French friend who used it and gave the novel to a publisher for printing. And then complete chaos took place. In a French theater a new play by a famous French playwright was being shown, in which to his amazement the French novelist discovered the topic that he had just used in his novel. Livid with fury, he attacked the author of the play accusing him of stealing the topic from him at the publishing house.

- And what happened in the end?

- Nothing. Oscar Wilde had sold the same topic to both of them.

- So that is how you also sell to all and sundry the magic basmas and sorceries from Italy?

- No. Or yes, but I take care to whom. In fact, those basmas are fake.

- Fake?

- You I can tell, but bear in mind that you will destroy me financially if that news leaves this bunker. None of those sorceries is worth a thing, although they have been traded for over three hundred years now. They are said to be in Etruscan, but they’re not. In fact, all of these sorceries are part of the same whole, but were in the interest of more lucrative trade split up into several parts and each of these parts is sold and bought separately. As was once (and sometimes now as well, though) done with the paintings of the great masters, which were cut up into little pieces, and then disposed of piece by piece. These pieces of “magical” basmas have been given various names. One, sold as the Letter of Artemis, reads as follows.

Teodor took a slip of paper and wrote out several letters on it:

atto’tseuq ehc ero euqnic ertlo uip rei

- Another sorcery usually called Kibela’s smile does not mean a thing at first glance. It is the most expensive at that, for it has, so they say, a numeric value as well… Finally, the third that I got my hands on some call the Seal of Mary – concluded Teodor and handed Lisa a note with the following:

attor uf aiv al iuq ehc eipmoc inna

Although they have been paid dearly for centuries, sometimes even in blood, these sayings are not worth a penny. That can be seen when they are read in the mirror. Then you can see that they are verses in old Italian, but younger than the Italian in which Ancient Sicilian poets sang, such as Kompiuta, for example. It is very easy to read them in the mirror like that and realize that they were all sung in the metrics of a once very popular poetic form – the triplet.

And Teodor read out the verses in a very fine Tuscany accent:

Ier piu oltre cinqu’ore che quest’otta…

Anni compie che qui la via fu rotta…

- Let me conclude – he said – those are Dante’s verses from the “Divine Comedy”, and can be found in the XXI verse of “Hell”. They refer to the date on which the bridge passing over the “sixth pit” collapsed. The bridge fell at the time of Christ’s descent into Limb. Some say that these verses already existed before Dante inserted them into his work and that they were used for sorcery, as a mantra for calculating the day when Christ would reach Had. I do not know if they can be used to find out the date of the second coming of Christ, but I do know that they are of no assistance in sorcery.

- Incredible. How come nobody discovered their origin for so long?

- Nobody discovered the deception because when they were written down the verses were always spelled out backwards, from right to left. Besides, the sorcery with these fake mantras was always combined with another spell. They are said to help in fortunetelling with some ring and holy water used to find out if a person is to have happiness, health or love in his life. I do not know about the water from the Spring of the Virgin Mary, perhaps it does give health, love or happiness to some second body of ours. The same goes for the stone ring, which I have never seen, perhaps it is also of some use there, but I know for a fact that the verses, mantras or basmas that I and others sell to ostensibly assist in this sorcery are not worth a thing. Just as, in general, literature as a whole is not worth a thing. There is much more value in those anchors that were once inherited or given as dowry.

- And the basma that you wished to sell my husband? The one that a woman should whisper to a man with whom she would have a child? You called it Kibela’s smile. Would you sell it to me?

- I would not.

- Why? For fear I would abuse it with you?

Teodor Ilić Češljar laughed at those words. Then he embraced and kissed Lisa Swift.

And then in that kiss Lisa said to him a mantra from which he didn’t abort only because he was male. In that kiss Lisa said a number:

- Mille dugento con sessanta sei…

And she kept on repeating it for as long as that union lasted in which he penetrated the aura of her body and entered his aura into her.

- Mille dugento con sessanta sei… Mille dugento con sessanta sei… Mille dugento con sessanta sei…

***

After their lovemaking they lay there as if destroyed. She was lying on her bun as though on a pillow, and he with his head thrown back. Finally Teodor broke the silence.

- How come you know Kibela’s smile?

- I have known it for a long time. I found it in Ephesus. It was just a number at the time. 1266. Since the number was accompanied by a note in Italian: Sorriso di Kibela which I translated as Kibela’s smile, I translated the number into Italian as well. I said the number out loud: Mille dugento con sessanta sei…The words reminded me of something, but I didn’t know what. When you were citing Dante’s verses from “Hell” today and mentioned Kibela’s smile, I remembered where I had read the verse. And I knew immediately that you had left out one of the verses from the middle of the triplet. This very Mille dugento con sessanta sei… which you sell as Kibela’s smile. And the veil finally fell from it all.

- From what? – asked Teodor, throwing Lisa a smile that singes the ears.

- The verse that promises the conception of a child you left out before me just now on purpose, so that you could cash it, sell it to somebody… although you are convinced that it is not worth a thing… Perhaps that is why you did not want to foist it off on me.

And with those words Lisa rose because mild smoker’s agitation was gripping her more and more forcefully.

- By the way, does this bunker have any ventilation? Can I smoke in here?

Not waiting for a reply Lisa reached for her purse with the intention of taking her cigarettes from it. Suddenly she let out a cry and dropped the cigarettes staring in shock at something in the purse.

- Is it a snake? – asked Teodor, laughing.

- Don’t laugh, don’t laugh! It’s not a laughing matter. Look, the ring of my late husband has changed color!

And Lisa Swift took from the purse her handkerchief with which my ring had been tied. She had been carrying it around with her ever since my death. The ring had indeed changed color for the first time since I had received it. It was red. While it had been on my finger during my lifetime it had always been black. That meant that it had not shown a thing. And now it had suddenly turned red.

- What does it mean when the ring changes color? – Teodor asked in a calming tone of voice.

- That depends on the color.

- And the red that it has now turned into, what does it mean?

- It means something horrible! It means that the ring is showing that my husband is happy now.

- How do you mean happy when he has been dead for over 40 days now?

- You tell me. But that is precisely what the ring is saying. Horror! Where is he happy? Can he see us like this, embraced?

Lisa pulled away from Teodor’s arms and got up… Her eyes were empty as the two champagne glasses on the table in the bunker.

- If he can see us, how can he be happy?

- Wait a minute – Teodor calmed her – all that is nonsense. Just like my magical verses!

- You could be right, but the ring is not nonsense. It really does change color depending on the bodily energy that a person emits…

- The bodily energy that a person emits? Do you realize what you just said? – Teodor asked in amazement.

Lisa could barely hear him. She couldn’t stand questions anyway and was not prepared to reply to them. Instead of answering, she rushed out of the bunker and ran home holding the ring before her eyes the whole time.

6. Kiss on the Neck

She flopped into one of the wicker chairs on our terrace. She placed my ring on the table before her and looked at it, barely recognizing it red as it was. Perhaps the ring really did get its color depending on what my body was emitting. My second, spiritual body. And perhaps it was telling the truth. Despite everything, Lisa thought, perhaps I, her husband, truly was happy now. Though not in this “present”, hers, but in some new “now” of my own. Then Lisa suddenly heard the sonic thread. It was descending down on her from the heights and Lisa thought:

- Perhaps somebody wants to speak to me…

Then the sonic thread was severed by a different sound that was entering one of her ears and exiting the other. Panicking, Lisa began breathing deeply. Deeper and deeper, until it turned into the breathing exercise that we both used to practice right here on this very terrace in the village of Babe. After inhaling several times Lisa felt herself duplicate. Just as she had then. Now she could see herself sitting back in the wicker chair, with raven hair curly as a fur hat. She could even see on the windowsill behind her back a bottle of white wine and read the letters on the label: Duša Dunava (soul of the Danube). The person that was watching her could clearly see not only her, Lisa, but the past and the future as well, but between them this person did not have a “now”. It did not have a present. And so Lisa recognized her observer. It was myself watching Lisa sitting in that wicker chair. And Lisa could not only see what I saw (namely her) but could also think what I was thinking. To feel what I felt at that moment. Like in those dreams where Lisa and I turned into one another. Now it seemed as though she was I and she knew that my energy after death still existed. Now it was clear: the ring told us of the happiness, love or health of some second body, no the one we are in here and now. The ring does not lie. But something new was taking place with the energy of that second body.

During my lifetime my body held this tiny, terrified soul within it like a slave. Now it had all turned upside down. Within me, whoever I now was and wherever I had found myself, a tremendous change had taken place, my time had turned the lining inside out like a sleeve. My soul had broken free of the body in which it had been enslaved, it had experienced something like a big bang. By energy after death, my tiny second body was now traveling joyously, young and happy, through its enormous astral soul as though through the universe. It was seeking a drop of time and a drop of water. It desired the golden intersection of time and eternity and with it a sip of the Tears of the Madonna to feed its new “now”…

- So that is the true form of the universe – thought Lisa and cried out. My ring had changed color before her eyes once more. Now it was completely black again. Lisa’s duplication was gone as well. But the frequency was not entirely disconnected. In losing touch with my second body she felt something like a light itch on the neck. She touched the spot and felt something that resembled the trace of a touch. The itch was spreading outwards in four branches. It was in the form of the Hebrew letter Shin. Since she knew how to read kisses, Lisa read it. The reader has surely recalled it as well.

In my kiss Arzuaga Ihar Lisa found the following message:

Be as happy as you can!

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