And in August 1961 Yael and Efraim Nisan were married in the small flat his father had bought him on the edge of Kiryat Yovel on the edge of Jerusalem, after Fima had given in and signed in the presence of a notary an agreement drawn up by his father, containing a solemn undertaking to refrain henceforth from any act that his father might define as an “adventure.” He also undertook to begin, at the end of the wasted year, studying for a master’s degree. The father, for his part, agreed to finance his son’s studies as well as the final stage of Yael’s training, and even granted them a modest monthly allowance for the first five years of their marriage. From then on Fima’s name was no longer mentioned in Jerusalem gossip. The adventures had come to an end. The billy-goat year had finished, and the tortoise years began. But he did not go back to the university, except perhaps with one or two ideas that he gave to his friend Tsvi Kropotkin, who had meanwhile proceeded without a pause from M.A. to doctorate and was already laying the foundation for a great tower of historical articles and books.

In 1962, at the urging of his friends and thanks to special efforts on the part of Tsvika, Fima published the cycle of poems he had written during his short-lived marriage in Malta: The Death of Augustine and His Resurrection in the Arms of Dulcinea. For a year or two there were some critics and readers who saw in Efraim Nisan a promise waiting to be fulfilled. But after a time even the promise faded, because Fima’s muse fell silent. He wrote no more poems.