Deja Vu

by Michal Hartstein

  “I don’t think you and Inbal have problems and difficulties.”

  “Sure we do.” He looked at me in a familiar way. I recognized it from the hospital, when I was sixteen. “But we overcome them.”

  I looked at him quizzically. This man could have been my husband. This amazing man, with the beautiful blue gaze, had loved me once. I knew he had loved me, but I couldn’t ever remember the feeling. For the first time since the accident, sixteen years earlier, I had the strange feeling that I was beginning to remember the way I’d felt.

  We were sitting next to each other, and suddenly I pressed my lips to his. I have no idea where I got the courage to do that. At first, I felt him respond to my kiss, but suddenly he grabbed me by the shoulders and distanced himself from me forcibly.

  “What are you doing?” he said, shocked… or angry. I couldn’t quite interpret his response.

  I looked down and when I lifted my eyes again, he was walking determinedly toward the hall. He was just across the road, and I wanted to say something… apologize, explain, try to kiss him again… I didn’t know what I wanted, but I didn’t want him to go further away.

  “David!” I shouted. He turned to me. “Wait!” I begged, and I started running toward him.

  PART B

  CHAPTER 11

  I woke up in a hospital. This time, I remembered the accident. I thought the odds were amazing: exactly sixteen years after I turned sixteen, I was injured in a car accident in exactly the same way. Although I didn’t remember anything from my first accident, I knew what I’d been told about it. Just like the first time, David was on the other side of the road, and I was running to him when a car hit me.

  When I opened my eyes, I didn’t know how long I’d laid there in the hospital. Once again, I was surrounded by a whole team of doctors and nurses who looked at me in surprise. From the first moment I opened my eyes, I had a strong and strange feeling of déjà vu. The staff seemed familiar to me.

  “How long have I been here?” I asked in confusion.

  “Two weeks,” replied one of the doctors.

  I thought it was more than strange, even funny, that I’d woken up two weeks after the accident, just like last time. I was terrified by the fact that, once again, I’d had an accident, and I was in the hospital - again. Have I forgotten anything? I asked myself and the question itself made it clear to me that, this time, I hadn’t suffered memory loss.

  A few minutes later, the staff dispersed, and one of the nurses called my parents. I was surprised they hadn’t called Amir. I figured that Amir was probably concerned about bringing little Tom to the hospital because he might catch something. My parents approached my bed… and I looked at them in amazement. They looked considerably younger than I remembered. Maybe I was just confused; maybe my vision was blurred.

  “Rose,” my father whispered. “I'm so glad you woke up.”

  “We were so worried,” my mother said, sobbing.

  “I'm fine,” I muttered. I couldn’t tear my eyes from my parents… They were so young! I studied my mother, who was wearing a dress I hadn’t seen in years. “Where’s Amir? And the children?” I asked, and my parents looked at me like I’d just arrived from the moon. I couldn’t understand why my question seemed so strange to them.

  Then my father asked, “Who’s Amir?”

  I opened my eyes wide in surprise, and Mom started crying.

  My father dragged her out to the hallway. I overheard the doctor explaining to them that it made sense that I’d be confused and that it was possible that I’d suffered temporary or permanent memory loss. In the background, I heard Nurit, my younger sister, asking to enter my room. The nurse waved her in and, to my amazement, the sister who entered my room wasn’t the twenty-eight-year-old version I remembered, but her twelve-year-old self. I let out a cry and covered my mouth with my hand. Nurit fled, and my mother ran into the room.

  “What happened, Rose?”

  “Uh... oh... can I…” I stuttered heavily, “Uh... could I... have a mirror?”

  My mother stroked me gently. “Rose, you’ve been through a pretty bad accident… your face is a little swollen. Are you sure you want a mirror?”

  “Yes... yes...” I continued to stutter. “I need a mirror.”

  My mother left the room and returned after five long minutes with a small mirror. She handed it to me… I raised it slowly. I closed my eyes and opened them when I knew that the mirror was right in front of me.

  The image reflected back at me was my sixteen-year-old self.

  It took me two days to get over the shock. The doctors and my parents thought I was just disoriented from the accident, but this time I wasn’t confused at all. I remembered every detail up until the accident. That is, up until the accident I had when I was thirty-two. In my head, the year was 2012, and I was a thirty-two-year-old accountant and a mother of two. But the reality was that it was 1996; physically, I was sixteen and a high school student.

  At first I thought I was dreaming, but I didn’t seem to wake up from it, and the reality was too tangible. Then, I developed a theory that the years I thought I’d experienced from age sixteen to thirty-two were all just a dream. The problem was that this time around, I still couldn’t remember anything that happened to me before the age of sixteen. I knew everyone around me, not because I remembered my childhood memories, but because I remembered all the stories people had told me about my life up to the age of sixteen. That’s what I started calling my memories of the last sixteen years, which were seared in my mind - my previous life.

  This time, the doctors didn’t diagnose amnesia. I remembered all the names of my family and friends, and I had some idea about the events that had taken place prior to the accident, including the accident itself. My knowledge came from the stories that people had told me in my previous life. I didn’t actually remember anything that occurred before my sixteenth birthday. It took me a while to understand that the information I had about my life didn’t come from my memory, but from stories people had told me. When there was a missing part of a story, my memory couldn’t fill in those missing pieces and those around me simply assumed that the accident had caused me some confusion.

  Everyone was sure it was a miracle I’d survived the accident. I heard the doctor tell my parents that he was pleased I hadn’t suffered a serious head injury in the accident. To him, my brain seemed fine. No severe injury was diagnosed, but I knew that the truth was not as it seemed. I knew I had some problem that conventional medicine couldn’t explain: In my mind, I was thirty-two, not sixteen. I also knew I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening to me; stories about previous lives would land me straight in a psychiatric unit.

  I was lonely. I’d been through a trauma, and there was no one I could share it with. Despite the difficulties I’d experienced with Amir in the weeks before the accident, I missed him. I needed him. I needed to hear him, wanted him to calm me down. In addition, I missed my kids so badly, especially Tom. Now that the children were only a memory from another life, I could admit to myself that he was my favorite child. During the first weeks of my new life, I dreamed of Nofar and Tom almost every night and ended up waking up in tears. I was a mother without children; I had no apparent reason to mourn children who, in my new reality, had never even been born.

  About two weeks after I woke up, David came to see me, just like last time.

  Because in my previous life, I chose not to continue my relationship with him, I had very few stories to compensate for my erased memory. He sat on my bed and held my hand.

  “How are you?” he said, holding back his tears.

  I looked at him, transfixed. He was the last person I remembered seeing before the accident, but the memory I had was of the thirty-three-year-old David, not the seventeen-year-old David. I preferred him as an adult. He was a fairly handsome boy, but was much more impressive as a grown man. His body was still adolescent and he had unflattering facial hair adorning his upper lip.

  “I’m okay...�
�� I replied. “I mean, so-so… I'm very confused.”

  “Of course, you’ve been through a terrible accident,” he said, leaning over and kissing my forehead. He smelled strongly of sweat, the sweat of a teenager who was not yet used to using scent and deodorant or shaving his face. I longingly remembered his pleasant smell and the masculine stubble on his face when I’d kissed him only a few weeks earlier.

  Suddenly I realized that, dream or no dream, I now had a chance to fix what I’d done wrong in my previous life. Last time, I’d chosen to leave David; this time I could choose to stay with him. Last time, I’d left David because I hadn’t known him, but this time I knew him - I knew him as a loving husband, a devoted father and a very sexy man.

  This time he’d be my man, the father of my children.

  Nofar and Tom.

  Were they a hallucination? Or reality? Their memory was so strong and real. Should I give up a man I knew I desired and was in love with just because of a memory of something I wasn’t even sure was real? Should I give up a man - a boy - who was in love with me with every fiber of his being?

  David put his head to my head, our eyes met, and I smiled at him. I raised my hand and pressed his mouth to mine. I kissed him and he kissed me back. This time he didn’t object. didn’t run.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said in a trembling voice.

  “It's okay,” I smiled. “I won’t break.”

  For David, we simply continued where we had left off. For me, it was, in fact, a completely new relationship. I didn’t know David as a partner. I didn’t have any memories of us as a couple. While I could bridge the gap between my missing childhood memories with the ones I had in my past life, I had no memories of David. In my previous life, we broke up after the accident and, apart from when I met him as Inbal’s husband, I had no shared memories with him. I had to lie a lot. I didn’t want to reveal the fact that I mostly didn’t remember him. I didn’t want to hurt him. When there was no choice, I’d confess that I probably didn’t remember because of the accident, and I usually allowed him to rehash shared memories while I nodded in agreement as if I recalled them as well.

  Going back to school was difficult. I felt out of place. In my head, I was thirty-two, and returning to my youth wasn’t easy. My parents didn’t understand why the accident had made me so stubborn and impatient. They said that before the accident I was easy going.

  That was because I wasn't just a child.

  I woke up as a woman.

  Slowly, I began to get used to my situation. I managed to stop seeing everything through the eyes of an adult and went back to enjoying the youth I’d regained. This time, I went back to high school as David’s girlfriend, which made my return easier on me. Last time, I’d been confused; this time, I knew exactly what I wanted.

  I wanted David.

  Whenever David and I could find somewhere to make love, he’d tell me that, while he obviously wasn’t happy that I’d had the accident, he had to admit that, now, the sex was absolutely amazing! Theoretically, we were the same age, but in terms of sexual development, we were each at our peak and every encounter between us created sparks.

  Reuniting with Daria and Inbal as girls was also strange. I always remembered Daria as a stunning girl. She was, indeed, very beautiful, but my memories had intensified her beauty. Inbal, on the other hand, was engraved in my memory as a plump girl. In reality, she was only a little larger than us. As a grown woman, she was bigger. She seemed far more beautiful than I remembered, and I was afraid that, in this second chance I was enjoying, she’d steal away my David and take my place as his spouse. I observed her many times, watching her intently. Were it not for the memory of my past life, I wouldn’t have imagined she was secretly in love with David. She was a loyal friend and knew to keep her distance.

  .

  CHAPTER 12

  If, during the first year of my ‘new life,’ as I’d nicknamed my life after the second accident, I still thought my ‘previous life’ was a dream or a hallucination, time showed me that my previous life had been real. I didn’t know what kind of reality it was and exactly how I’d changed my life and traveled back in time, but I knew I was reliving my life.

  Toward the end of my studies in high school, I relived the death of my grandfather, who had died on exactly the day he’d died in my previous life. I was very close to Grandfather Reuben, my mother's father. He had been a legendary commander in the Independence Day War and most of the stories about him had never been told. Although he was a military man, he was an extremely gentle man and treated his children and grandchildren with dedication and love. This time, because I knew the date of his death, I made sure to spend time with him in his last hours. It was also the only time I nearly told my mother the strange reality of my life. She noticed that I initiated a visit to him the night before he died. She asked me if I knew he was going to die. Her question startled me and for a moment I thought maybe she’d noticed that I often knew what was going to happen, but she actually suspected that my grandfather was very sick and only I knew about his illness. I was glad he was the only relative of mine who had died in my previous life, because knowing when a loved one was going to die and having to wait for it was unbearable. On the day of my grandfather’s death, I had no doubt that I was reliving my life. This wasn’t a fleeting feeling of déjà vu. I remembered incidents that occurred in my private life, in the country and the world. I had never been a big follower of current events, so I didn’t remember most events in Israel or worldwide. I remembered more or less who was prime minister, but I couldn’t remember exactly when the elections were held or when we had wars.

  Surprisingly, I didn’t experience the butterfly effect. I remembered seeing that film starring Ashton Kutcher, which was released only eight years after I awoke. My new life surprisingly resembled my previous life except that, this time, I chose to be with David. Most of the time, I didn’t bother comparing the two, but just got on with living my life as if it was the first time. I’d forgotten most of the experiences, so I didn’t feel like I was in an eternal rerun.

  When Daria invited me to her discharge party, I knew I had to go. I wanted to see Amir again. I remembered how, in my previous life, Asi was actually more interested in me, which increased Daria’s interest in him. This time, I went with David. We met Inbal at the entrance to the club, and we all went in together.

  Once again, Daria was going around the club surrounded by friends and admirers. She was wearing the same bright mini-dress that I remembered. We went over. She was talking with Amir and Asi. I knew their names despite the fact I’d never met them in my new life.

  “Inbal! Rose! David!” She jumped on us. “I’m so glad you came.”

  “As if we could have missed this party!” I smiled warmly.

  “Inbal said she wasn’t sure she’d come.” Daria looked at Inbal accusingly.

  “I was supposed to stay on the base for the entire weekend,” Inbal tried to defend herself.

  “What’s important is that all of us are here,” I said, and the three of us had a group hug.

  “Meet,” Daria introduced the two men who stood beside her as we approached, “ Amir.” She pointed to my previous husband. “And... ” She tried to remember.

  “Asi,” I whispered in my heart.

  “Asi,” Asi put in and reached out his hand to shake ours.

  This time Asi didn’t blush in embarrassment. He immediately understood I was with David and showed no interest in me.

  I found it hard not to stare at Amir. I knew him better than anyone else in the world. I’d lived half of my life and almost all of my previous life with him. My heart ached. He was so strong and handsome, and I remembered that he’d neglect himself over time and would end up gaining weight. Even though we’d had difficult times, I missed him. He was the closest thing to home I’d ever had.

  “Amir,” she tapped lightly on Amir’s shoulder, “is our new operations officer, and Asi is his friend from basic training.”


  “Where are you based?” Asi took an interest.

  “I’m in Zrifin, David’s in Central Command and Inbal’s in Tel Hashomer,” I answered for the three of us.

  “Nice.” He smiled.

  His smile was devoid of any interest in me, and I wondered if, this time, Daria would make him a target. I soon realized that her goal this time was completely different.

  “What do you think about Amir?” she asked me when we both excused ourselves to go to the bathroom.

  “Amir?” I opened my eyes. Never in a million years would I have thought that Daria would be interested in Amir.

  “Come on... the cool officer I introduced you to earlier.”

  “Yes,” I pretended to remember. “Amir...”

  “Did you look at him? What do think?” she asked briskly as she fixed the makeup under her eyes.

  “I didn’t really notice him that much,” I lied. From the moment we entered, I used every opportunity I got, when no one was paying attention, to stare at Amir. This situation, where I could watch Amir as a young man again, appealed to me. “I haven’t got much to say about him,” I lied again, because, honestly, I could tell her how he liked his coffee in the morning and that his most obnoxious habit was sitting and picking his belly button. I knew what excited him, what made him laugh, what he liked to eat, and where he’d rather go on vacation. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve got a small crush on him.” She smiled a crooked smile, and I felt all the blood in me rush straight to my feet.

  “Is he really your type, anyway?”

  “I’ve decided I don’t have a type,” she laughed, pleased at her own joke. “He’s just cute and has a good head on his shoulders. He also gives the impression of being a very sensitive guy.”

  Daria was exactly right. Amir was all the things she’d said. I didn’t fall in love with him in my previous life for no reason.