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his chest. 
                  "Have you been here long?" I asked uncomfortably.
                  "Since the first day."
                  "And what's this place like?"
                  "A hole, like the others:  a church, a few houses, refugees.  Boring."             
                  "And the inhabitants?"
                  "They're alright.  At the beginning they threw rice and flowers at us.  They've calmed down now."
                  I went into the room and thumped the bed.  Dust rose up from the mattress.  Scheckler lingered in the doorway:  "If you're interested in a watch or transistor radio, I can get it for you cheap, without taxes..."
                  "Thanks, maybe some other time."  Gently I edged him across the doorstep and closed the door.
                  That night I couldn't sleep.  I took the books out of my kitbag and arranged them on the marble windowsill.  There was an old novel by Graham Greene, some new books in French and the collected short stories of an Israeli author which I had bought because of the blurb on the back cover which promised 'an encounter with a mature and many faceted writer.' 
                  What should I begin with?  Which of the books was powerful enough to take me out of the strange sense of oppression that this place cast?  In the end I lay on my back in the dark, so tense it hurt.  I listened to the noises of the walls, the firing in the distance and the steady murmur of the refugees in the garden.  At the third watch I took a pen and paper out of my kitbag.  'Jonathan, my son,' I wrote at the top of the first page and crossed it out immediately, 'Dear Jonathan,' I wrote on the next page and fell asleep.
     
    ***
     
                  Morning found me fully dressed.  I got up slowly and went over to the window.  The houses of the village were enclosed in the silence of Sunday.  Between the tents of the refugees some children were standing in a long row organized by a tall, thin man in a suit.  Their little behinds were turned to the Athenaeum, as if in a strange ceremony of humiliation.
                  I went to the bathroom and bent under a stream of water.  Why did I sense whatever was strange and worrying about every place?  I was dying for some coffee.  When I went downstairs, to a large, gloomy room which was the dining room, someone shouted at me from the kitchen window,  "It's closed now, come at twelve."  Four small, hard apples had been left on one of the tables.  I stuffed them into my pocket and went back to the corridor, where someone emerged from a room with a notice on the door saying, 'Communications.  No entry.' on the door.  I opened the door nevertheless.  The duty officer, behind a high counter, was dialing an endless number. 
                  "I'm from Intelligence," I said.  "If cables come..."
                  "Whatever comes I give to Scheckler," he replied without looking at me.
                  Through the arched window the line of children wound around the grounds until it reached the barbed-wire fence separating the garden from the Athenaeum.  The duty officer glanced at it and began speaking into the mouthpiece.  A command was given and all the children opened and closed their mouths soundlessly.
                  I went outside.  By daylight the Villa Athenaeum made me feel uncomfortable.  It was impossible: buttressed at the front and wide open at the back, splendid wherever the army had not yet reached and heartbreakingly shabby where it had.  No object bore any relation to another, just as no event bore any relation to the next.  I wandered around the walls of the building somewhat mistrustingly.  Somewhere in this mélange someone would try to contact me, and I would not know until the moment he actually touched my