“THE SUMMER AFTER the protest I was already in Berlin,” he said with fixed sighs between sentences. He told her that three hours after landing in Berlin he had already rented an apartment with some hipster drummer. He spent the following two weeks like an overenthusiastic Japanese tourist, trying to capture the city through his camera lens and, for a few moments, even felt he had almost succeeded. He took a guided tour of the Reichstag and got drunk in six different pubs in Kreuzberg. He said the hipster drummer even hooked him up with a job at a record store in the neighborhood, and the Lebanese chick from the apartment upstairs had already hit on him twice.

“Sounds great,” she said, to which he replied that indeed it was. “But after a month I realized there was no chance in hell I was staying there.”

He explained that from the very first moment he couldn’t stand the cold. All that fatty food. The German language and the ticket inspectors on the U-Bahn who had issued him two fines within less than a month. “I couldn’t even stand the people who were genuinely nice to me.” He described his period there like the first night of summer camp: feeling like you can’t breathe, like someone’s holding a staple gun to your neck. “The problem was I didn’t want to stay in Germany, but I couldn’t come home.”

“Why not?”

He said people wouldn’t understand. Not after he had told his boss he was leaving. Not after he had given up his sweet pad near the market. “Not after lecturing everyone about how no one in Israel had the guts to go after their dreams.”

He told her how one night, in Berlin, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he pictured himself as a wrinkly eighty-year-old who had lived an entire life he had never wanted.

A tremor shot through her. She felt as though he’d stolen a thought right out of her head and passed it off as his own. He proceeded to say that later that evening, he was browsing Facebook and for a moment, felt an overwhelming desire to take a selfie, lying in bed in his grubby wifebeater and with a dejected look on his face. To upload it onto the social network, “to show everyone how far a cry my Berlin life is from what they thought.” He was about to take that photo but decided at the last moment there was no point. He clicked on his profile and studied the hundreds of pictures he had posted over the years, and felt they all portrayed someone else’s life.

“So you realized Facebook was a giant lie? How perceptive of you.”

He said she was right, but that’s exactly what he found absurd about it. “Everyone knows their virtual persona is a big fat lie, and yet they insist on maintaining and even perfecting it.”