“Sleeping on a dust floor in a friend’s shack, getting up at 4.a.m. every day and making happy sounds for the next few hours takes some doing”, Jonathan wrote to his mother.

This was hardly what he had come to Cyprus for, but it was where he wanted to be. As luck would have it, he happened to possess exactly the sort of voice that the Forces Broadcasting Corporation in Nicosia needed at that moment. They were short of a station announcer *** disc-jockey who would pump out songs, deal with weather forecasts, local news, and so on.

Not precisely his cup of employment! However, he managed to reduce any of his own musical agony by maintaining the control-room volume at an absolute minimum and keeping a tight eye on the turntable.

Once off-duty, he ambled around creeks and dales, lazed in cafés, and relished the tranquility of it all; (a great contrast to a somewhat edgy Tel-Aviv, where he had last been working.) One might say also, that he was waiting for the finalization of his divorce - from a 36-day marriage!

They had met he while he was on holiday in France and he had ‘fallen in love’ with her. (And she with him? He never found out. Perhaps she had only married him because of the earnestness of his proposal.) Her name was Pierrette. She was a nurse, and, (of course!), pretty.

Here in Cyprus, the entire event now unrolled before him with a free-wheeling clarity. He had to have lost his mind: or perhaps that’s what ‘falling in love’ is all about anyway. Pierrette’s parents were not in the country right then, and he didn’t know any of her friends. Not only could he hardly speak her language, knew nothing about her culture, and certainly didn’t share her religion, but many of her habits struck him as, well, peculiar. During their month of marriage, only at night, - when a body answers all questions without the aid of its voice - did they dwell in the same world.

Reviewing things so lucidly in this boiling little mediterranean oasis, he reckoned
that if he’d been acting ‘logically’ at the time, the two of them probably wouldn’t have managed more than a single conversation.

Nevertheless at least he could now look forward to a new challenge. It would be a type of guessing-game. For instance, which of his next perfectly rational actions, would reveal themselves later on, as having been utterly daft?!
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