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up under a pile of mail. She hadn’t seen it until a week afterwards. She said that of course she would have come with me. She felt angry with herself, and with me too, for not simply having phoned. But since I didn’t contact her in the weeks that followed, she figured this was just another one of our times apart. Or “stupid pride”. A few months later, I heard she was engaged to be married, to a young man she’d known since their high school days at the Alliance.

I had first met Nava Cohen, the woman I would go on to marry, the previous year. It was through another Cohen, though they were not related: Nechemia, my sayeret friend who was killed in the 1967 war. He invited me to Tel Aviv for a party in the spring, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and introduced us. Nava was just nineteen, five years younger than me. I was struck not just by the fact she was attractive, but by her poise, warm-heartedness, and her obvious intelligence. But she had her boyfriend with her, and I still saw myself and Nili as life partners. Now, she was studying her studies at Hebrew University as well, and, in a way, it was again Nechemia

Cohen who brought us together. Since his death, those of us who knew him from the sayeret had been looking for a fitting way to remember and to honor him. We finally decided to set up a living memorial in his name: a Moadon Sayarim, a center to train young people from all over Jerusalem in scouting and navigation. We spent six months getting it up and running, and Nava pitched in with the work.

It wasn’t until a few months after I heard of Nili’s engagement that I finally asked her on a date. We were in the university library, which had a space where you could listen to tapes through headphones. I would go to hear classical music. Nava was studying English literature, and I’d sometimes see her there, engrossed in recordings of Shakespeare with the text of Hamlet or Macbeth in front of her. Since I wasn’t shackled by the need to follow the alacks and alasses, I read the newspaper as the music washed over me. I turned to the movie section. I circled three films, drew a question mark in the margin and passed it to her. She looked puzzled for a second. Then she smiled and put a checkmark next to one of them.

While we came from different backgrounds, the gap was narrower than it had been with Nili. Her parental home was in Tiberias. Her parents were from old Sephardi families, with a centuries-long history in Palestine, and were also solid Ben-Gurion Labor supporters. Her father had fought in the British army in the Second World War. He now ran the branch of Bank Leumi in Tiberias. Her mother ran a shop in what was then the city’s best hotel, the Ginton.

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