Гарри Тертлдав - The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging

“Aww,” a couple of girls said.

“And I lived by myself and took care of myself till about a year and a half ago, when I finally got too frail. And now”—Anne shrugged—“I’m here.”

“We’re glad you’re here. We’re glad you’re here all kinds of ways. And we’re so glad you were kind enough to take the time to talk with us this morning,” Mr. Hauser said. “Aren’t we, kids?” The children clapped. A couple of them whooped. It wasn’t the kind of noise the Hebrew Home for the Aging usually heard. Anne Berkowitz liked it anyhow.

Vicki came up to her and held up a phone. “May I take your picture, please?”

“Go ahead,” Anne said. The others had snapped away without asking.

“Sweet.” Vicki took the photo. She turned the phone around and showed it to Anne.

“Looks like me,” Anne admitted.

“I’m gonna put it up on my Facebook page and talk about all the things you told us,” Vicki said. “That was awesome!”

“Facebook…” Anne smiled in reminiscence. “We had nothing like that back then, of course. But I used to keep a diary when I was all cooped up. About a year before the end of the war, one of the Dutch Cabinet ministers in London said on the radio that they were going to collect papers like that so they could have a record of what things were like while we were occupied. I went back and polished mine up and wrote more about some things.”

“So you gave it to them?” Vicki’s eyes glowed. “You’re part of history now, and everything? How cool is that?”

A little sheepishly, Anne shook her head. “While the war was still going on, I intended to. But almost the first thing I did after we could come out was, I threw it in the trash.”

“Why?” the Asian girl exclaimed.

“Because I hated those times so much, all I wanted to do was forget them,” Anne Berkowitz replied. “I thought getting rid of the diary would help me do that—and some of the things in there were pretty personal. I didn’t want other people seeing them.”

“Too bad!” Vicki said, and then, after a short pause for thought, “Did throwing it out help you forget?”

“Maybe a little,” Anne said after thought of her own. “Not a lot. Less than I hoped. When you go through something like that, it sticks with you whether you want it to or not.”

“I guess.” Vicki’d never needed to worry about such things. She was lucky, and, luckily, had no idea how lucky she was.

From the doorway to the little meeting room, Mr. Hauser called her name. “Quit bothering Mrs. Berkowitz,” he added. “The bus is waiting to take us back to school.”

“She’s not bothering me at all,” Anne said, but Vicki scooted away.

Lucy walked up to Anne. “I think that went very well,” the outreach worker said. “I’m sure the children learned a lot.”

“I hope so,” Anne said.

“I know I did,” Lucy told her. “So scary!” She gave a theatrical shiver.

To her, though, it was scary like a movie. It wasn’t real. It had been real to Anne, so real she’d wanted to make it go away as soon as she could. As she’d said to Vicki, though, some ghosts weren’t so easy to exorcise.

Lucy wanted to talk some more, but one of the privileges of being old was not listening when you didn’t feel like it. Anne walked out of the meeting room, out of the visitors’ center. She blinked a couple of times as her eyes adjusted to the change from fluorescents to bright California sun.

She started back to her room. She wouldn’t get there very fast—even before she came to the Home for the Aging, one of her grandsons had taken to calling her Flash—but she’d get there.

Or maybe she wouldn’t, not right away. There was a bench by the garden path where the olive tree gave some shade. She sat down on it and looked at the flowers swaying in the soft breeze. A lizard skittered across the concrete and vanished under a shrub.

No, tossing out the diary hadn’t helped that much. She could still remember some of what she’d written in it, better than she could remember most of what happened the week before last. She’d wanted to be the best writer in the world. If she’d stuck with Dutch, she still thought she could have done well enough to make some money, anyhow.

In English, it hadn’t quite happened. She’d taken too long to feel at home in the new language. The quiet help she’d given Sheldon, the brushes with Hollywood… She shrugged. She’d had more, more of almost everything from adventure to love, than most people ever got.

A hummingbird hovered above the path. After a moment, it decided it couldn’t get any nectar from the flowers on her blouse. It zoomed away. She smiled and watched it disappear.

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