Deja Vu (15 page)

Adi was born in January of 2010. I didn’t remember the exact date of Adi’s previous birth, but I assumed it was the same date exactly. David was disappointed that, once again, he didn’t get a son, but he hoped for one “next time.” I knew for certain that I wouldn’t conceive again before September of 2012, and, to be honest, I had no intention of having another child. I was glad I was done with the baby making period of my life. I realized that I didn’t enjoy parenting, no matter who the baby was. I just wasn’t born to be a mother. If I hadn’t known I was scheduled to give birth to Coral and Adi, I might not have had any children at all. I just didn’t want to prevent them from entering this world. I had an advantage that no parent ever experienced in their life: I knew what it meant to be a parent before my daughters were even born. I had no doubt that many parents would give up parenting if they knew beforehand what the experience entails. Despite these feelings and although I felt that Coral and Adi were imposed on me in some mystical way, I didn’t regret parenthood as much as I had in my previous life. Even though I knew I would never be Mother of the Year, I loved my kids and was glad I had a family. For David, anyway, there was no other option. It was obvious to him that we’d start a family, so, in that respect, I really had no other option.

We decided to mark Adi’s birth with a small event. Little Coral turned one a few weeks before Adi’s birth, so we combined two events into one little party at a restaurant we liked. Lior and Aya arrived late, so they had to sit with Inbal and Daria, instead of with the people from the office who were seated at a nearby table. In my present life, I had no social ties with Aya. The circumstances were not as they were in my previous life, and past experience had taught me that our friendship was destructive for me. 

“Wow, what a snob!” Daria declared to me the next day.

“Who?” I asked.

“Come on...” she said with an impatient tone, “the two pompous people you sat us with.”

“Lior and Aya?”

“Yes, Lior and Aya…” She pronounced Aya’s name like she was going to vomit.

“They’re actually a very nice couple.” I defended them. They really were very positive people.

“I don’t know...” She began to reconsider a little when she realized I didn’t share her feelings. “She seemed cocky to me, and he was kind of a putz.”

I agreed about Lior being a putz, but I didn’t want to share my opinions with Daria. I didn’t know when and where Daria might blurt out what I’d said about one of the partners of my firm. “I don’t really know her,” I lied. I knew her very well, only not in my current life. “He’s a partner at my firm.”

“He’s a partner?” she asked in amazement. “He looks very young.”

“He's really young… he’s simply a genius.”

“Wow,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed. He looks like such a nerd… I was sure he’s a bank clerk or something.”

“He's not,” I explained. “He’s one of the best attorneys in his field.”

“Okay…” she said humbly. Her theory proved to be false.

“Why do you think his wife’s cocky?” I was curious. I remembered Aya well and arrogance wasn’t one of her most prominent traits. If anything, she was generally modest about her successes.

“No reason,” she replied, considering her thoughts again. “Amir mentioned a law that was being discussed in the Knesset about sanctioning employers of contract workers and she said it was discussed in the Finance Committee meeting this week and she was on the committee.”

“Because she probably was.”

“Really?”

“Yes, she’s a lawyer who works in an office with a lot of lobbyists.”

“Wow!” Daria realized she was way off track. “Then they really are a successful pair!”

“Absolutely.”

In my previous life, I busied myself constantly with Aya and Lior’s success and choosing to study law in my present life was rooted primarily in the fact that I wanted to be like Aya. Now I was a lawyer in a job just as respectable as Aya’s, but I was still careful not to make personal contact with her. I didn’t want my negative feelings to come back again. Now, I actually knew Lior better and already had enough negative feelings toward him: I felt he had been promoted because of me, and I didn’t want to develop feelings of envy again regarding his wife. I had to admit to myself that I took evil pleasure in inviting Aya to our event in honor of Adi’s birth. I knew Aya was struggling to conceive at that time, but I knew the advantage I had over her in the fertility department was temporary, and she was going to be pregnant soon, within a few months.

Daria's interest in Aya and Lior told me that it wasn’t just me who found Lior and Aya a source of interest and jealousy. Daria, in her current life, could only boast her external appearance. This time, she didn’t enjoy living in the top hundredth percentile, and envy was burning her inside. I was glad I wasn’t there this time. I felt that my present life was in my hands, under control.

Again, after Adi’s birth, I returned to work immediately after my maternity entitlement. As long as Adi was nursing, I had to work limited hours, but when she was six months old I stopped breastfeeding her and went back to work full time - and then some. I remembered Inbal still nursing Coral well after her first birthday, and I knew that, this time, Coral’s and Adi’s diets wouldn’t include my milk. I knew now that pregnancies and births were behind me, and I gave my all to work. To my great joy, I was surrounded by women who were as devoted to their careers as I was. None were concerned about the quantity and quality of family pictures in their offices. I didn’t feel abnormal as I once had. To be honest, I didn’t understand why most of them bothered to have children. The hours we spent with our families dwindled to weekends only. I often stayed at the office until late at night, and almost every day I came home when Coral and Adi were already asleep. My salary allowed me to hire a part-time nanny who watched over the girls when David worked his shifts at the fire station. Since I spent most of the day at the office with people whose priorities in life were similar to mine, I didn’t often hear the criticism about my life that my family and friends might have. My lifestyle drove my mother crazy. She didn’t go to work until my youngest sister was seven, so a woman who worked for days without even seeing her little girls - sometimes even on weekends - was abnormal in her eyes. Tamar, my older sister, was married and was a mother of three herself, and she couldn’t understand me. From Nurit, my little sister, I got a little more encouragement, but probably only because she was still single, which helped me a lot because she babysat for my daughters sometimes.

Daria didn’t bring the issue up often. I assumed she was uncomfortable criticizing me about a field she’d failed in. She wasn’t a devoted mother to Nofar, just as I wasn’t in my previous life. Because I remembered that she wasn’t particularly maternal in her previous life either, I realized that it had nothing to do with Nofar herself. In her previous life, Daria had a whole fleet of nannies and maids who’d raised her children. Now that she had to take care of her child herself, she did so grudgingly. She had no patience like Inbal had, for example. Inbal, who was now married to the richest person in our group, hadn’t hired a nanny to raise Roy and Shira for her. I was happy for her because I knew that in two years’ time, she was going to become the mother of Galia, the sweet little baby I met on the day I had my second accident. Inbal never talked about my poor parenting and my non-presence at home, but I knew that she didn’t approve of it. Whenever she took an interest in me and my daughters and saw how little I was involved in their lives, I saw her eyes sadden. She felt pain for my daughters. I also hurt, but I knew that I couldn’t give them more. I felt that by bringing them into the world, I’d already done my part.

The criticism that hurt me most was David's. He was deeply disappointed with the way I raised my daughters. Before I became pregnant with Coral, I’d told him I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a mother. He pleaded with me to allow him to become a father. I explained to him that I wanted a career that wouldn’t leave much room for children, but he insisted and promised that he would agree to raise our children, just as long as we had some to raise. I guess the fact that I brought two girls into the world with such a short gap in between, and that I’d agreed to freeze my career for a year and a half confused him a little. He thought I’d change my mind and fall in love with motherhood. Soon, he was disappointed to discover that I felt I’d kept my part of the deal. I’d brought two daughters into the world and started our family, but once I stopped breastfeeding my younger daughter, I went straight back to where I’d left off before the birth. David knew how to live modestly. In their previous lives, Inbal and David lived off his modest salary as a firefighter, so I knew that his pleas to cut my working hours down, even at the expense of our financial quality of life, weren’t just true in theory. In my previous incarnation, I lived frugally, and I knew I could get along with less, but I didn’t want to compromise as I’d had to in my previous life. Now, my salary at Lifschitz, Cohen & Co. was more than double what I’d earned with Smart Green. I enjoyed my professional success and enjoyed our financial security. After all, I already knew from my former life that, even if I came home early every day, I wasn’t going to be a very good mother. I preferred to focus on what I was good at.

I was a good lawyer. That, nobody doubted. Not my family, not my friends nor my colleagues. The senior partners valued me and told me more than once that they saw me as a future partner.

I was good.

But not great.

They appreciated my work, but I never got admiring looks like those Lior received. Lior wasn’t alone. There were several lawyers like him, most of them older than me, but some new young lawyers began to appear and managed to grab the limelight while I remained in the shadows. In most cases, my knowledge and diligence exceeded theirs. I’d been a lawyer for nearly five years, most of them in the Cohen, Lifshitz & Co. tax department. I worked full time plus extra hours, and most of my hours I spent reading and studying verdicts and memorizing sections of the law. I had an enormous knowledge that very few people in my field had and therefore I made a good salary. However, I didn’t belong to the elite group, a small number of lawyers who received superstar treatment. Most of them couldn’t compete with my knowledge, but every one of them had an ability that I found hard to develop - they knew how to bend the law, speak convincingly to clients and judges and compete with other lawyers. They knew how to lie and manipulate. I didn’t do it well enough. I felt I was already kind of living one big lie because of my previous life, which occasionally forced me to pretend. I had no more room for lies in my life.

Before I started studying law, my mother tried to discourage me from that profession. She claimed that I didn’t know to lie well enough and that, in order to be a good lawyer, you must know to lie. “You need to constantly be an actor appearing before a changing audience,” she’d said. “And you don’t know how to act at all,” she’d added. I thought she was wrong. I was, indeed, a poor actress, but I didn’t believe you had to be a liar and a manipulator to succeed in court. I found out that I was wrong; to reach the summit, you must know to lie. This reality hurt me, because, again, I felt that there was no reward given to me for the time and effort I invested, that slackers’ voices were better heard because they knew how to speak convincingly. I wanted them to have more appreciation for knowledge and professionalism. I came across more and more cases in which solutions that were too creative caused more problems than if the client had simply followed the law. Various tax planning created in the minds of the firm’s superstars, even some designed by Lior, failed to withstand the test of time. The Israeli Tax Authorities didn’t always accept the plans, and the cases returned to us for a second round of discussions in the courts with the tax authorities, so that their work was in vain. In some cases, I calculated that if they weren’t trying to be so clever and bend the rules, then the client would have been better off by simply not paying the firm to reduce his tax bill. I once dared to present the data I’d found to one of the partners. The result was that I picked up cases in which the communication with the customers was limited. I was an amazing source of knowledge, but they didn’t want me to talk with customers.

I felt that, even though I’d chosen a new path in my life, the sense of déjà vu was strong. Just like in my previous life, the field of law didn’t put enough emphasis on professionalism, knowledge and efficiency, just like the field of finance. Senior jobs were filled by smooth-tongued people regardless of their professional skills, which were often insufficient in my opinion. The difference was that, as a lawyer, they gave me a little more respect for my knowledge and my salary was much higher, which somewhat quieted my feelings of bitterness and jealousy. I knew it could be worse.

When Saul asked me to join him for a meeting with a new client, I was surprised. I wasn’t used to being invited to meetings, certainly not first meetings with clients. It soon became clear that the customer had been referred by the department that dealt with white-collar crimes, so they needed a lawyer with a background in accounting. On the way to the boardroom, Saul briefed me and informed me that this was a relatively small company as opposed to the many large companies we worked with, but it was a subsidiary of a giant American corporation, which had asked us to handle a scandal discovered in the company. Embezzlement of over a million dollars was at the root of it. The full circumstances were not yet clear, but the story was discovered by chance as the result of an unexpected income tax audit.