Deja Vu

by Michal Hartstein

  CHAPTER 14

  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.”

  “Of course, yes,” Jacob said. “Rose has a degree in accountaning too. You have a winning team here.”

  Although I’d also received a compliment, I didn’t know how I was showcased when I wasn’t there. If not for Lior’s comment, Jacob wouldn’t have even bothered to bring up my name.

  Almost a year after I started working at Cohen, Lifshitz and Co., Saul summoned me to his office and told me that, in honor of the Jewish New Year, I was going to get a slight raise. He explained that, usually, talks about salaries were held in December, but they decided to give me the raise earlier because of the remarkable work I’d done on the case with Lior. I was happy, but not for long. At the toast they made for the Jewish New Year, I realized that the slight salary bump I got was nothing compared to the raise Lior got. Jacob also announced that Lior was about to become the youngest partner in the firm's history. Later, putting together all of the office gossip, I slowly realized that Jacob was mainly concerned that Lior might leave to go to a different firm that was trying to attract him, and so he’d promoted him to the position of partner.

  I’d done most of the work and was silenced with a meager wage bump while Lior received the prestigious status of a partner, a corner office with a sea view and a salary I could only dream of. I wondered if, in our previous lives, Lior had become a partner so quickly. Who had helped him with the case last time around? In my previous life, I had only met Lior three years after that case, and he was a partner by then, although he might have been appointed later in his previous life… so, maybe I had accelerated his promotion?

  .

  CHAPTER 15

  I was so busy working that I was almost completely disengaged from my personal life. Since David was a firefighter and worked shifts, I could afford to work long hours without significantly hurting our relationship. David was actually the only person outside of work I was in touch with. One Friday night, when we arrived for dinner at my mother’s, she complained that I didn’t bother calling her like my sisters did.

  “You only call when you need something,” she said.

  “But I hardly need anything,” I said defensively.

  “So you don’t call at all!” she said sadly.

  My friends got the same treatment, or rather the same non-treatment. Since starting work at Cohen, Lifshitz and Co., I’d spoken with each of them maybe twice. I knew Daria was pregnant, and was especially glad to hear that, this time, Inbal had gotten pregnant faster than in her previo
us life, only five months after Daria.

  I wasn’t as involved in the details of Daria’s and Inbal’s pregnancies as I was last time. In my previous life, I was pregnant myself at that age, so the stories about the nausea, the heartburn, and other uncomfortable things interested me. This time, I was too preoccupied with my career. David asked when we’d try too. I had no answer. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t know if I even wanted to become a mother. I had been a mother. I hadn’t enjoyed it. This time, I felt that my life was going in a more positive direction. Although I wasn’t a mastermind in law, my career had progressed in a satisfactory fashion. My salary was already higher than at Smart Green, where, in my previous life, I’d started working only a year-and-a-half later. I didn’t have the money issues that I had then, and my marriage was more stable. It was much easier to be a couple with no child to get in the way. I considered not having any children. I didn’t understand why everyone had to have a child. When I dared raise the subject with David, he immediately dismissed the idea and said I just wasn’t ready yet. He, too, was still enjoying life without children, but he knew he wanted to be a father at some point. I wasn’t sure at all that I wanted to be a mother, especially because I'd been one in the past.

  When Inbal texted me that Daria had given birth to a girl, I was very happy for her. I was also happy for Inbal, because I knew she wouldn’t be saddened at the sight of this baby. She was already four months pregnant this time around. I remembered my Nofar. Despite my difficulties with motherhood, I was suddenly washed with a wave of longing for my lost child. I thought the timing of Daria's pregnancy was amazing. In contrast, there was no doubt in my mind that Inbal’s current pregnancy wasn’t due to social pressure; I knew she’d been trying for a baby for a long time before Daria, and also before I’d tried (the last time around) and I assumed this time was no different. The fact that Daria was the first to fall for a baby surprised me. Perhaps her pregnancy was unplanned. That thought dazed me. I looked at the calendar and was shocked to discover that it was Nofar’s birthday… it was exactly the date of Nofar’s birth in my previous life. I knew I had to see the new baby… Nofar’s replacement. I hadn’t planned on visiting Daria at the hospital - our relationship wasn’t as strong as it once was - but I wanted to see her daughter.