Deja Vu

by Michal Hartstein

  “He only came to us recently… it's too bad it only happened now that I’m being released.”

  For a moment I relaxed; perhaps nothing would come of this crush.

  “But I'm not about to give up such a catch just because I'm not a soldier anymore!”

  I wanted to see Amir again, but only as a one-time thing. I hoped that what was the beginning of the most significant relationship in my previous life would be nothing more than a fleeting acquaintance in my new life.

  A week later, we - Amir, Asi, Daria and I - were once again sitting in the little café where we’d met in my former life, and where Amir and I started our relationship. This time, there were six of us since David came with me, and Daria made sure Inbal came so that Asi wouldn’t feel alone. Daria continued her efforts to conquer one of the guys, only this time she had her sights set on Amir.

  “Where do you girls know each other from?” Amir asked in interest.

  “We’ve been friends since kindergarten,” Daria replied immediately.

  “Oh, wow...” He was impressed. “Well done. I was in the United States with my parents and only came back when I was in second grade, and later on we moved around, so I’ve no friends from way back.”

  “Wow, lucky you,” I said, just as I did last time.

  “That I moved?”

  “No,” I laughed. “That you got to grow up in a different country.”

  “I don’t remember a thing.”

  “Why?” Inbal asked with interest. I already knew the answer.

  “I don’t know… I have fragments of memories of our stay in the United States. We were there for a total of three years, and I was very young. Do you remember yourself in kindergarten?”

  “We do.” Daria pointed at Inbal and herself. “But she ,” Daria pointed at me and smiled, “ she doesn’t remember a lot of things.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I had an accident when I was sixteen, and some of the things that happened to me before the accident were erased from my memory,” I explained to him again, only this time I was lying when I said that my memory was only partially lost.

  “You're not serious,” he said in a manner implying it was both a statement and a question.

  “No. Really...” This time I was less embarrassed than the last time. To me, it felt as if he’d already heard this story.

  “Wow.” His eyes opened wide once again. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of someone who’s forgotten their past.”

  I smiled.

  “Did you have to learn to read and write again at sixteen?” he continued.

  “No, my semantic memory wasn’t damaged.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I remembered how to speak, write and read, even in foreign languages. I remembered how to solve mathematical equations and all sorts of historical facts.”

  “Did you remember your friends?”

  “Yes. I mean, not everything, but most things I remember,” I lied. I couldn’t remember a thing.

  “Well, we didn’t become friends for no reason,” Daria answered for me. She didn’t like that attention had been focused on me and changed the topic of conversation to her favorite subject : herself.

  Two days earlier, she’d enrolled in beauty school. She told us about an unpleasant incident: one apprentice dyed another apprentice’s hair a shocking pink. Daria told the story and couldn’t stop laughing. We mainly sat around her and smiled embarrassed smiles; we didn’t really get the joke.

  “You had to be there to really understand how funny it was,” she giggled when she realized she was the only one laughing.

  “What are you going to study?” Amir asked Inbal, David and me.

  “They have some time left to serve,” Daria replied immediately, fearing that the conversation would again focus on others. “They won’t be released from the army until after the academic year begins, so they won’t begin going to university this year.”

  “Bummer,” Amir said. “I’m not going to be released for at least another eight months, so it won’t affect my school year in any case.”

  “You know what you want to study?” David was interested.

  “Amir is a computer genius,” Daria immediately interrupted and bragged.

  “I'm not a genius,” he smiled modestly. “Just interested in it. I’ll probably go in for software engineering.”

  “Rose is also a computer genius.” David showed off and I looked at him in surprise. Where did he get that from? “At the beginning of the year, when everyone was scared about the millennium bug,” David went on, “she was the only person I knew who kept saying nothing would happen.” Obviously I knew - it was the second time I’d ushered in the new millennium.

  “So you also plan on doing something with computers?” Amir asked.

  “I'm really not a computer genius,” I corrected the wrong impression that David had given. “And, no, I'm not going to go into that field.” I smiled.

  “Rose is going to be a lawyer,” Daria said knowingly. ”If you get into any trouble, you’ll know where to turn.” She winked. The previous disappointments in my past life had led me to change my career path and study both law and accounting, just as Lior and Aya had, rather than economics and accounting as I had the first time around.

  After a few months, I had to just accept that Daria and Amir’s relationship was a sealed deal. I had to repeatedly meet my husband from my previous life, pretend every time that he was a stranger to me and that it was the first time I was hearing all of his stories. What was equally surprising, though not as interesting to me, was the fact that Inbal and Asi struck up a relationship, too. In my previous life, I’d never have imagined Inbal and Asi becoming a couple. I’d fantasized often about David as a partner and had a feeling that Amir had, maybe, harbored a little crush on Daria, which was probably the reason that Daria’s relationship with Amir was intolerable to me, but Asi and Inbal getting together was a really strange surprise. He came across to me as a suave, materialistic guy,while she was always humble and spiritual. I soon discovered that, at least in Asi’s case, his choice of partner made a dramatic change in his life.

  Four years of my new life passed, and I thought less and less of my strange situation. I was just living my life. The fact that we got settled again in pairs with the same three guys, just in a different order, fascinated me. I thought that was probably the universe’s way of maintaining balance.

  David and I were released from the army almost at the same time and planned our after-army trip. David wanted to go to India, and I wanted to go to the United States. In my previous life, David went to India with Inbal and that’s where their love story began. I was supposed to go with Inbal and just gave it up. I ended up going to France for a short trip. I decided that, this time, I wouldn’t give up, because we were released at the end of 2000 and planned to travel in the spring of 2001. In September 2001, I knew that New York would change forever and never go back to being the same New York. I thought a lot about the 9/11 attacks. There were very few historical events that I remembered from my past life, let alone their exact date, but September 11th was a universal concept. I considered contacting the security forces or the secret services, but I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make me sound completely crazy or utterly suspicious, especially since I knew my prophecies would come true. David found it difficult to give up on his trip to India, but after I planned a trip which included a whole month trekking in the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Park, he was convinced.

  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 tr
avel 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.

  .

  CHAPTER 13

  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.