Deja Vu (12 page)

We traveled for four months. In my previous life with Amir, we went to the United States for a much shorter trip in the spring of 2010. We left Nofar with my parents, so we had to settle for a short, two-week trip that only took in New York, Washington DC and Niagara Falls. I remembered my trip with Amir, and I was surprised at how easy it was to travel to the United States before 9/11. When I went with Amir in 2010, we spent half a day at the US embassy getting a visa. This time, the travel agency just sent our passport to the embassy and we got our visa. When David and I landed at JFK, I was surprised at the sparse security forces and inspection facilities compared to what I remembered from my 2010 visit with Amir. In the spring of 2001, reality was completely different. David didn’t understand why I insisted on visiting the Twin Towers and going all the way to the top. To him, they were two skyscrapers just like dozens of others, not very tall, not very old, and not very interesting architecturally. He didn’t understand why I insisted on standing in line on the ground floor to reach the observation deck.

Half a year later, as we sat, stunned, in front of the TV, he didn’t stop reminding me how lucky we’d been to have gone there when we’d had the opportunity. I looked at the TV screen, my eyes were flooded with tears. The first time I witnessed the disaster, I’d sat, simply stunned. This time I cried… I felt guilty. I kept thinking that maybe I could have prevented the disaster, but I hadn’t. I knew I couldn’t do anything. Reality was somewhat more complex than my little world. I couldn’t fix the world all by myself. Dozens of attacks and disasters occurred during my former life, but I just couldn’t remember their dates. The minute Google became available, I could research past events, but not future ones. The fact that Inbal, Daria and I hooked up with the same three guys proved to me that it was impossible to change the future substantially, but I decided that, since I had the opportunity to relive my life, I wouldn’t waste it. I'd try not to make the same mistakes I’d made in my previous life.

.

Once again, Daria got married first. I couldn’t remember the exact date she married Asi in my previous life, but I remembered that it was in the spring of 2003. Once again, she stood under a canopy in April 2003, but this time she was standing next to Amir, my previous husband. In my previous life, Amir was the one that was anxious to get married. His parents were traditional people, and it had bothered them that he was living in sin with me. This time, he had no trouble convincing the bride to settle down. Daria was glad of any opportunity that allowed her to be the center of attention. In the past, I had downplayed the modest diamond ring Amir had given me. Unlike me, Daria made sure that everyone admired the impressive diamond ring Amir gave her. Although I wasn’t a fan of diamonds and jewelry, I couldn’t help but be secretly angry at Amir for investing much less in me and our previous existence together.

A year later, exactly one week before the original wedding date Amir and I had chosen, Inbal and Asi also got married. I couldn’t help but love this couple. Asi, in my previous life, had always looked nervous and obsessed with pleasing Daria and her endless whining and requests. Inbal was a much more relaxed and pleasant woman than Daria and, with her, he blossomed. When he was with Daria, Asi could barely squeeze a sentence in, and if he did, then he was interrupted because Daria always made a point of finishing his sentences and speaking for him. Now that Asi was married to Inbal, I got to know him a little better and found out that, apart from being a great trader, he was, just like Inbal, a bookworm and loved to travel. With Daria, he only went on short trips to various European capitals, with the main goal of shopping. With Inbal, he traveled to exotic and fascinating places.

When Inbal was with David, the two of them had lived on the salary of a teacher and a firefighter and had to settle for simple vacations in the country. With Asi, she could afford to travel to places she could only have dreamed about in my previous life. Although Daria was a very impressive woman, especially compared to Inbal, who was always a little chubby and never bothered to pamper herself, Asi had never seemed as in love with Daria as he was now, but with Inbal. Due to the time that had passed, his image in my memory from my previous life was a little vague, but my feeling was that he’d become a more handsome man.

I waited impatiently for Inbal and Asi’s wedding. I remembered Inbal’s exciting wedding to David, which had overwhelmed me with feelings of negative jealousy. I wondered if she would get married at the same intimate café. I knew that she had planned her wedding with David and assumed she’d probably plan this wedding too. When I received the wedding invitation, it became clear to me that this wedding wouldn’t be a repeat of the other exciting occasion. Asi had a huge family and, this time, the bride didn’t have a limited budget. Although Inbal’s wedding to Asi wasn’t as ostentatious and extravagant as Asi's previous wedding had been, this time it was a prestigious garden event, not in a tiny café.

I decided to keep the café for my wedding to David. I wanted to recreate the exciting wedding David and Inbal had enjoyed, with me as the excited bride to be this time around. To be honest, it wasn’t that important for me to get married. Neither David nor I came from religious homes, and a religious ceremony meant nothing to us. But I wanted to get married in an exciting and intimate ceremony, like Inbal had, back then. Although it was hard to watch Amir fall in love and marry Daria, I didn’t regret the choice I made in my new life. David was a loving and romantic partner, and the sexual chemistry between the two of us was unending, even after years together. I knew that, this time, I’d be extra cautious and not get pregnant as soon as I did with Nofar. I decided that, this time, I wouldn’t have any regrets about my professional life.

“Would you like to get married?” David asked me in an amused voice as we left Inbal and Asi’s wedding.

“You know the answer… not yet.”

“I'm just checking,” he explained. “We received so many good wishes in the past three hours, I thought you might change your mind.”

“I do want us to have a little ceremony,” (I knew exactly what kind of ceremony), “but only in a year, when I finish my studies.”

“I don’t think I'll finish my studies in another year,” he said. David began working as a firefighter after his military service as a temporary job to support us and his geology studies. I knew from my past life that, in the end, he wouldn’t make use of his degree, and would become a permanent firefighter.

“Like if you were studying, you’d lift a finger and help me plan the wedding,” I laughed. “The bride’s always the one who plans everything… you'll just turn up like one of the guests.”

“I’ll try not to be late,” he laughed and I joined him.

We got married a year later, six months later than David’s original wedding to Inbal. The café I so wanted to get married in closed down two months before we got married. The building was to be demolished, and in its place they were going to build a luxury apartment hotel. I remembered that the place had been shut down, but I didn’t remember that it was right then. I wished I hadn’t postponed the wedding. I didn’t have time to look elsewhere for a place with a similar atmosphere. Everything in my head was in accordance with David and Inbal’s previous wedding, and once I realized that I couldn’t replicate the experience that I’d fantasized about, marriage no longer interested me. If it were up to me, we could have canceled the wedding or gotten married in a civil ceremony, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She was happy that my delusional idea of a wedding in a café had fallen through and arranged a wedding that, unsurprisingly, resembled my first wedding to Amir.

My first disappointment from David came without him even realizing what he did wrong, or rather what he hadn’t done. It was a hundred days after we got married. I was hoping that David would celebrate our first hundred days as a married couple with me, just as he had with Inbal.

One hundred days just after we were married, I was all prepared for the surprise awaiting me. I was careful not to make any appointments for that day, and I managed to avoid tiring duties in court. I wanted to leave early and be fresh and alert for the ‘surprise’ David was supposed to set up for me. I came home relatively early, showered and prepared clothes for the ‘spontaneous’ outing I was expecting. By nine o'clock, I really was surprised - David didn’t even come home.

“Where are you?” I asked in an angry voice.

“What do you mean, where am I?” he replied, shocked. “I'm at the station. I’m on shift now. I was sure you knew.” To be honest, I hadn’t bothered to check his shift pattern. I was just confident that, for our hundredth day, he’d organize a romantic surprise for me.

“I was sure you wanted to do something…”

“What?” he asked aloud in a curious voice.

“I don’t know… go out and celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“We've been married now for exactly one hundred days.”

“Really?” he asked and his question stabbed me right in the heart.

“Yes, really,” I replied angrily. He didn’t understand why I was angry. We hadn’t made plans, but I couldn’t help thinking that I wasn’t getting enough attention. Amir had bought Daria an engagement ring that was much bigger and more impressive than the one he’d gotten me, and David had remembered to surprise Inbal when they celebrated their first hundred days as a married couple, which, of course, I couldn’t tell him. Why didn’t I get that sort of attention? Why was I not able to awaken such romantic feelings in either of these two men?

I was angry and I was frustrated, but I decided I wouldn’t become such a bitter woman in my new life or, at least, I’d try not to be. I started my internship with a prestigious law firm and decided that, in my new life, I would achieve everything I hadn’t in my previous life. This time, I didn’t get pregnant unexpectedly. This time, I went to school and chose the right major for me - law and accounting. So what if we didn’t celebrate our hundredth day anniversary? I still had a whole life to relive again, and I was going to make the best of it. 

I tried to get accepted as an intern with the firm where Aya had interned, but they wouldn’t take interns who had graduated in my semester. I sometimes got to see Aya and Lior in the faculty. It was strange to see them as young adults. I decided not to approach them. I didn’t want to change the way of the world. We weren’t supposed to know each other yet. Occasionally, I encountered them and once I borrowed Aya’s summaries of corporate law, but beyond that I treated them like the rest of the students, although I knew them well, mainly due to the fact that their future lay before me like an open book. My future, however, was an enigma to me. I had changed the course of my life and that led to a change in the life-course of everyone around me.

A year after we failed to celebrate our first one hundred days of marriage, my parents, David and I went to Jerusalem to get my license to practice as a lawyer, six months earlier than I had received my accountant’s license in my previous life.Studying law takes six months more than accounting, but accounting has a year-longer internship. I worried for the entire ride. I remembered that, in my previous life, I’d figured out I was pregnant with Nofar on the ride to my graduation. My period was a few days late, and I began to fear that history would repeat itself. I remembered that in the pregnancies I’d experienced in my previous life, one of the first symptoms I’d noticed, besides the nausea, was my enlarged breasts. I had no nausea, so I decided to feel my chest and check if there was any change.

“What are you doing?” David whispered with a smile. “Your parents are in the front seat.” He thought I was trying to seduce him.

“Nothing,” I said. “Someone at work found a lump in her breast, so I'm worried.”

“What lump?” My mother turned around in panic.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“What’s nothing?” My mother wouldn’t calm down. “Who has a lump in her breast?”

“You don’t know her.”

“We’re lucky Rose didn’t study medicine,” David chuckled. “She’d probably think she’s sick with every disease she’s studied!”

“It's not funny.” My mom wiped the smile off his face. “Breast cancer’s no joke, but don’t you worry,” she looked at me reassuringly, “you’re still very young and we’ve no family history of the disease.”

I smiled and she returned to sitting upright in her seat facing the road. Breast cancer didn’t bother me at all. I knew with complete certainty that I didn’t have breast cancer and that I’d be quite safe from it at least until the age of thirty-two. I was afraid that I was pregnant.

I asked to stop on the way, and I went to the same Super-Pharm store where my mother had bought me a pregnancy test almost sixteen years earlier. I said my head hurt and I wanted to buy some Advil. This time, my mother didn’t come in with me; she didn’t suspect a thing. I went to the same cubicle and did the test.

Only one bar appeared on the stick.

It didn’t calm me down because I knew that in the early days of pregnancy, the hormones aren’t strong enough and sometimes you don’t see a positive result on the first try with a home test. Two days later, I woke up and discovered to my delight that I wasn’t pregnant. I’d probably just been nervous about the ceremony and because the partner at the firm I worked for told me that they couldn’t hire me after my internship period. He was nice enough to allow me to work in the office an additional month after the end of my internship, so I’d be able to find an alternative job. When I worked at the accounting firm, it was understood that after the internship was over, interns stayed on as a permanent employee. There was no justice: the story here was different, and I wasn’t ready for it. After a year of being used as an errand girl and being sent on a variety of boring missions, I thought that getting my license would allow me to be assigned to more challenging cases so I could really find my niche in the office. However, they had no need of another lawyer in the office, and I didn’t want to continue to do the work of an intern. That wasn’t why I’d changed my profession.

Two months later, I was sitting in my new office in a new fancy office building. The fact that I had a double degree in law and accounting helped me get into Cohen, Lifshitz & Co., one of the leading law firms in the commercial sector in Israel. One of the partners in the tax department had been my professor on the accounting faculty, and he had recommended me. I was now in his department, which was the most prestigious and central department in the office. I was happy. I felt that the experience I’d gained in my previous life had finally come in handy. I couldn’t remember the exact amount I’d earned with the accounting firm where I’d worked at this exact time in my previous life, but I had no doubt my salary as a junior lawyer was significantly higher than my salary as a junior accountant. At first, I thought I got a salary that was especially high due to the fact that I had been on the Dean's List and because of my double degree but I soon discovered that, in the prestigious tax department, there were people who had excelled more than I had and had more impressive diplomas. My starting salary was standard for a junior lawyer.

About three months after I started working at Lifschitz, Cohen & Co., I was still in my office. It was already six in the evening, but I had no intention of calling it a day yet. I was absorbed in reading the reports and analyzing the income tax affidavits of a company whose tax plans were on the verge of being canceled by the tax authorities. 

The phone rang. “Rose!” Sarah, the secretary with the squeaky voice squeaked out my name.

“Yes?” I asked impatiently.

“Where are you?”

“What do you mean?” I panicked. I was afraid that someone thought I’d left for home before six. “I'm here at the office.”

“No,” she laughed, “I know you're in the office. I saw you before.” I was surprised because she usually left at five. “Why aren’t you in the conference room?”

“There’s a meeting?” I panicked again.

“Your head’s in the clouds!” She roared with squeaky laughter. “There’s the Chanukah candle lighting in the conference room. Come on. Everyone’s waiting for you!”

I marked my place in the document and ran to the conference room. The second I entered, I saw Lior standing next to Jacob, the senior partner. I gaped at him in amazement. What was he doing here?

“Ah!” Jacob said in a slightly reproachful tone. “Now that everyone’s here, we can get started, but before we begin, I’d like to welcome Lior Steinfeld back from the United States!” He tapped on Lior’s shoulder. “To our great satisfaction, Lior’s chosen to return to the Holy Land and not settle in a foreign one. I'm sure he can help us all with the knowledge he acquired in studying for his master’s degree and the connections he made in New York.”

Everyone applauded and welcomed Lior until Jacob silenced them all and asked one of the staff to light the Chanukkia and say the blessing on the candles. After the Chanukkia was lit and we all finished singing Chanukah songs with our out-of-pitch voices, I approached the fancy buffet that was laid out for us, filled my plate with good food and planned to return to my desk to spend the rest of the evening there.

“Rose!” Saul, my former professor, who had recommended me for the job here, startled me when he called my name. My plate jerked in my hand, and I watched the variety of appetizers I had selected so carefully scatter all over the floor. I turned to him with an embarrassed look.

“Oops, sorry,” he said in a fatherly tone and signaled the cleaner over to come and pick up the mess. “I want to introduce you to Lior.”

“Hello,” I said without interest.

“Do you know each other?” Saul was interested and immediately grabbed his forehead. “Of course you do!” he said. “You were both my students.”

“True.” I smiled.

Lior smiled back. “You do look a little familiar.”

“I remember you… your wife also studied at the faculty.”

“You know Aya?”

“No.” I panicked ! I was talking too much. “I remember you always hung around with someone who also studied at the faculty.”

“Yes, I met my wife in college, but how did you know she was my wife? We got married after college.”

“I just assumed…” My heart was racing. I knew I could never reveal the real reason I knew him and that all the knowledge I had of him was simply inexplicable. “You were always together, so I assumed you were married.”

“Yes,” he shrugged and smiled, “well, we are now.”

“I understand that you’ve just returned from the United States.”

“Yup.”

“What did you do there?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what they’d done in the United States in the past year.

“We both got our MBAs in business management.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Yeah, it was really fascinating. Highly recommended.”

To be honest, I’d already researched the possibility of going abroad and getting my master’s degree, but I found that I couldn’t afford such a trip. Unlike Aya and Lior, who could travel together, David would never have joined me, so I put the idea to rest.

“My husband’s a fireman,” I informed him. The last time we spoke of my husband, he’d been a software engineer. “He doesn’t have much reason for taking that long a time abroad.”

Lior nodded understandingly. “How long have you been working here?”

“I started in October.”

“Nice.” He kept nodding. The conversation was stuck. I knew that Lior wasn’t good with small talk, and I was afraid to speak. I was afraid that, once again, I’d blurt out information that would reveal the fact that I knew him much better than I was supposed to.

Lior returned to work, and I soon realized why it was important to Jacob to give him such a warm welcome, and how he’d gained the prosperity that I remembered he and Aya enjoying. Lior was one of the brightest guys I'd ever known. In the world of law, lawyers can be divided into two groups: attorneys in the first group are walking-talking encyclopedias, the kind of people who remember sections of the law and legal matters from the early years of the country; the second group includes the lawyers who barely remember the ground rules, but they always find a way to cut corners and bend the law to suit their clients’ requirements. In most offices, there were lawyers of both categories, and they helped each other. Lior belonged to both categories, which was why he was so respected by the other partners and clients. He knew the Income Tax Ordinance almost by heart. He knew the tax regulations fluently, and, in addition, he amazed his clients again and again with his tax planning, which saved them millions of dollars. Jacob wasn’t bragging about Lior’s return to Israel for nothing. The rumor about Lior being headhunted by one of the major offices in New York had spread quickly, but he’d turned that offer down and returned to Israel for Zionistic reasons, a fact that only intensified people’s tremendous admiration for him.

It soon became clear that I myself belonged to the first group. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I liked to flaunt it when I could, but I found it hard to shine with bright new ideas. I didn’t have the legal creativity that more senior lawyers in the company had. I found out quickly that, if you didn’t have both talents, as Lior did, or at least the ability to creatively bend laws and agreements according to the customer’s specification, then your chances of advancing further in the firm or in the business world were limited. It was very difficult for me to accept. In fact, I wouldn’t accept the fact that, if you weren’t conniving, you wouldn’t make it far in the field. I loved the world of law. It was orderly and logical. The accountant in me hadn’t disappeared completely and was probably ingrained in me. I went ‘by the book’ and was angry when my work wasn’t sufficiently appreciated.

Lior, essentially, only had one year’s experience more than I did. He finished his degree two years ahead of me, but had spent over a year in New York. Nevertheless, his status in the company was that of a lawyer with at least ten years’ experience, and I figured his salary suited that status. I tried not to compare myself to him; we were different people, but the comparison I made between myself and the other lawyers was hard on me. I was happy that at least I didn’t know everyone's salary. I remembered how knowing about everyone’s salaries had made life difficult for me in the past. Many lawyers around were trying to make comparisons and find out how much the others were getting paid, but I preferred not to know. My source of comparison wasn’t my salary, but the clients I signed. I kept comparing my clients and clients of other attorneys. I always had a feeling that I was getting the less interesting and less challenging cases. Once they discovered my skills in the field of report reading, they buried me under piles of paperwork. I hardly ever went to meetings or met with clients. I was the brains of the operation, sitting in the office and learning the material so that others could rest on their laurels. Even Lior benefitted from my knowledge, which helped him move forward and succeed. Six months after he returned to Israel and the firm, he began working on a complex portfolio that included the restructuring and transference of assets between companies. I joined him as a junior lawyer, which seemed a bit strange to me due to the fact that the gap between us in terms of seniority wasn’t very substantial. I thought they could pair him with an intern and let me lead another case, but this time my fine reputation with financial reports was what set me back.

We sat for weeks and weeks, reading the material. Lior complimented me on my knowledge and diligence, and I had to admit that he was absolutely brilliant. He never stopped coming up with new ideas and finding loopholes in the law that would suit the clients. Because he was responsible for three cases, I was the one who did most of the work. I loved working with him. I learned a lot, but in my heart, I couldn’t help but feel that I was doing most of the work and he was getting the credit. On one of the few occasions I went to a meeting with the client, the client gushed with admiration over the ideas we put forward.

“I told you,” Jacob told the customer, “you have our most lethal lawyer on your case.” He was referring to Lior.

Lior looked at me sheepishly and immediately said, “It's really not just me. It was teamwork.” He smiled at me. “Rose Evrony did incredible work here.”