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In retrospect, given all the interruptions, I’m a little surprised that I managed to get through my university studies. My classmates helped. They were incredibly generous in going through with me what I’d missed, and sharing their notes, whenever I returned for an extended stint of reserve duty. I’ve seen interviews with university friends saying I was one of the top students in our class. But that is more generous than true. It would be fairer to say I was a good student. Working hard in the final year, I did finish in the upper quarter of the class, and several of my math and science professors strongly urged me to go on to graduate school.

But my mind was made up on returning to the army. And as I balanced my studies with plans for the future during my final months, I still hadn’t given up hope that Nili would be there with me. When she returned from Paris, we had started seeing each other again. Whenever I could, I would take the bus down to Tel Aviv and spend the weekend with her. Everything I’d loved about her since that first meeting in the kirya, everything I valued in our relationship, was still there. Yet so, too, were the doubts: whether she was ready to commit herself to sharing our lives together; and whether a kibbutznik like me could ever truly fit in to her Tel Avivi world. Shortly before Karameh, she’d invited me to a Friday-night party with a group of her friends. It was the first time she was including me, as part of a couple, in her social circle. But almost from the moment we got there, I felt out of place. For her, it was just another party, one of dozens she must have been to since she was a teenager. But I immediately felt out of place. I didn’t drink. I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t help feeling like a wallflower, or an alien presence.

Now, I decided there was no point in waiting and wondering. I borrowed a Jeep from an army friend, with the idea that Nili and I could spend three or four days together, driving south from Jerusalem into the Negev and the Judean desert: to be alone, to talk, to see whether we actually had a future. I wrote her a note, took the bus to Tel Aviv while she was at work, and dropped it through the letterbox. “I am going on this trip, into the desert,” it said. “I’d love it if you could come with me. I think it’s important for us.”

I never heard back. I felt crushed, though I tried hard to tell myself it was better to know where we stood. Years later, she told me the envelope had ended

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