thirty-eight
Nicole stood under a canopy of autumn-hued leaves only blocks from the football stadium, staring at a tidy white frame house with drawn shades. Everyone knew who lived there. But no one she knew had ever been inside.
She rang the bell beside the front door. No answer. She rang again, more insistently this time. Finally, the door opened With a book in her hand and reading glasses dangling from her neck, there stood Ms. Zooms.
“Miss Burns,” the teacher said. “Good to see you hale and hearty, though I can’t say I expected you at my front door. Perhaps you’ve heard that even God took a day of rest?”
“I’m sorry for bothering you at home, Ms. Zooms. But just now I was at the football game and I got this weird feeling, you know? No, how could you know. I’m babbling, right? Right. What I’m trying to say is, I remembered. So I had to come find out the truth.”
Ms. Zooms looked at her curiously. “Remembered what, Miss Burns?”
“The Holocaust. What happened. I was there.”
Her teacher put a bookmark into her book, then opened the door wider. “Come in,” she said.
The living room was surprisingly feminine looking, the couch and matching chair covered in shiny floral material, the carpeting pale rose. Ms. Zooms motioned Nicole to the couch, as she took a seat on the chair. “Now, please explain.”
“This is going to sound crazy, Ms. Zooms, but I swear it isn’t a prank or anything like that. While I was unconscious I remembered I was a French girl. I was born in Paris in 1927. My father was a doctor—”
“And your name was Nicole Bernhardt,” her teacher filled in impatiently “You’re smart but you don’t like school, and you play the piano.”
“I’m not crazy, Ms. Zooms. I know that’s from the biography you gave me at the museum. But the thing is, I really was there. My little sister’s name was Liz-Bette and my father looked just like Mr. Urkin. And you were my mother.”
Ms. Zooms blanched. “Highly doubtful.”
“Then why do I remember things that weren’t in the biography?”
“Maybe you were paying better attention to our guest speaker than I thought.”
“No, I wasn‘t,” Nicole insisted. “So you have to tell me. Nicole Bernhardt actually existed, didn’t she? You couldn’t have made her up.”
“I didn’t.”
“I knew it!” Nicole jumped to her feet, trembling. “I was—”
“Sit down, Miss Burns.”
“But—”
“Sit. And I’ll tell you all about Nicole Bernhardt. Excuse me one moment.” Ms. Zooms disappeared into the back of her house briefly, then returned with a massive book in her arms. She set it on the coffee table in front of Nicole. French Children of the Holocaust, A Memorial, by Serge Klarsfeld. On the cover was a French identification card with the photo of a pretty young girl.
Ms. Zooms opened to the author’s preface. “Read the first paragraph, Miss Burns. Aloud.”
“The eyes of 2,500 children gaze at us from across the years in these pages. They are among the more than 11,400 children whose lives are chronicled here, innocent children who were taken from their homes and put to death in the Nazi camps. Here are the names, addresses, birth dates, and the truth about what happened to all of these children. Their biographies are brief because their lives were brief. On behalf of the few survivors of their families, this book is their collective gravestone.”
Nicole looked at her teacher. “I’m in this book?”
Ms. Zooms opened the book at random and turned her head to read the page number. “Page five hundred. Suzanne Berger, a teenager. Born in Paris, deported August 7, 1942. She looks rather like you.”
Nicole frowned. “I don’t understand. You said—”
Her teacher moved ahead a few hundred pages, passing pages filled with photographs and brief biographies. “Ah, look. This girl’s name is Nicole. Her photo was taken with some other students. That could be you, too. Born June 5, 1927. Deported January 20, 1944.”
Faster and faster, Ms. Zooms flipped. “This girl had a sister a few years younger. This one must have loved to dance, she’s dressed for a recital. And here are lists of thousands more children who have no photographs.”
Nicole slumped down on the couch. “You made your point. You’re telling me that Nicole Bernhardt didn’t exist.”
“On the contrary, I’m telling you she did. Pieces of her are in hundreds, thousands of children recorded here.” Ms. Zooms closed the book, her hand resting on the cover. “All murdered.”
“It’s not the same. I was going to ask you for the other envelope, where you said what happened to me. But I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She stood; her teacher walked her to the door.
“Something about the experience yesterday touched you so deeply that it felt real to you,” Ms. Zooms said to her at the doorstep. “That’s a good thing, Nicole. I suggest you embrace it.
Nicole found her father and Mimi in the kitchen, on the verge of calling the police. Neither of them believed her when she told them that she’d been at Ms. Zooms’ house. She apologized for worrying them, and promised Mimi she’d call later. Then she went up to her room, where she lay on her bed, trying to fathom the unfathomable.
If Zooms had invented Nicole Bernhardt, why were so many things about Nicole Bernhardt so vivid? How could she, Nicole Burns, know the things she knew? How? Her eyes lit on Anne Frank’s diary, which was on her desk. She stood to get it, and blood rushed to her head in a sudden hot burst. She bent over, hands to knees, temples pounding, a fevered freight train rushing headlong into the tunnel of her mind. Things melted away to other things; another time, another place.
‘All that suffering and death. I can’t make any sense of it. So I really want to know, where is God now?”
“Right here. Right beside us.”
“We’re in a cattle car!”
“But we can still see the stars.”
“Anne, are you scared?”
“Yes.”
“Even though you have faith in God?”
“Yes.”
“Nicole, I want to ask you something. If you really are from the future, and you read my diary, then you must know what happens to me.”
“No—”
“You can tell me. Please.”
“I never finished it.”
Nicole searched her mind for more. But the train had passed. It felt so true, that she had known Anne Frank, been on a transport with her. But how could it be, when none of it was real?
When she stood again, the world remained intact. She got Anne’s diary from her desk. It wasn’t very long; she could read the entire thing tonight. She opened to the first page. Whether or not what she thought had happened to Nicole Bernhardt was real, at least she would know everything that had happened to Anne.
She read for hours. When her mother called her for dinner, she said she wasn’t hungry. When she finished the actual diary, she read an afterword that explained what had happened to Anne and her family after their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There was also a lengthy appendix, a report by an independent Dutch commission, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the diary was genuine.
She fell asleep with the book in her hands.
I am so scared. Thousands of us are crammed inside some kind of arena. No food, no water; a terrible stench from people relieving themselves in every corner. How did I get here? An old bearded man in a tallis is praying, a woman croons to her sick baby. A beautiful girl with golden hair takes care of her mother. Her name is Paulette. How do I know this? She looks at me and says, I know you.
But she is too far away for me to hear, so how can she know—
“Nicole? Where is my sister? I lost my sister!”
“Here, Liz-Bette. I’m here!” I take her hand. We’re on the platform at a place called Birkenau.
“Schnell, Juden, Schnell!”
A skeletal prisoner calls across barbed wire. “Vel d‘Hiv girll I know you!” It is Paulette.
“You had golden hair!” I call back.
“Go to the right!” Paulette cries. “Always go to the right!”
“What do you mean, to the right?” Liz-Bette lets go of my hand. She runs to the left.
“No, Liz-Bette, no!”
A plinking. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can‘t—
Nicole woke up gasping, soaked with perspiration. From down the hall she heard her parents’ television, the laugh-track from a sitcom. She was completely safe, at home in her own bed, in the burbs of America, in the twenty-first century.
But she had been there, too. She had.
“Always go to the right!”
Nicole closed her eyes again. She could still see Paulette, with her long golden hair. It was so clear in her mind now. The girl who had tried to save her life at Birkenau had also helped Claire escape from the Vel. Against the darkness of Nicole’s eyelids, Paulette’s face aged, like a time-lapse photograph, until she became a woman in her seventies standing before a tenth-grade English class.
Of course! Nicole had felt a connection to Paulette when they’d met after Zooms’ class. Now she felt giddy, electrified, vindicated. Zooms was wrong. Nicole really had been there, with Paulette. She had to call Mrs. Litzger-Gold immediately; she ran to get the phone directory from her closet.
Litwin, Martin
Litza, Charles
Litzger-Gold, P
She reached for her phone and glimpsed at her clock. It was past midnight, far too late to call. What would she say: “Sorry to wake you, Mrs. Litzger-Gold, but could we chat about how we went through the Holocaust together?”
She’d have to wait until tomorrow. What she could do now, at least, was record everything she remembered. She went to boot up her computer. The printer caught her attention. Its power was off, but she never turned it off. Obviously someone else had been using her equipment without permission. Guess who?
She turned the printer on and its red malfunction light blinked—that was why Little Bit had shut it down. Nicole opened the printer. A tiny wad of paper was jammed in the rollers, preventing them from turning smoothly. She plucked it out with her tweezers and closed the cover. What Little Bit had been writing printed out.
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
A BOOK REPORT BY ELIZABETH BURNS, GRADE 5 (Miss Nolan—this book report is for extra credit)
This book is a diary of a Jewish girl named Anne Frank who hid in an attic in Holland so that she wouldn’t get caught by Nazis. She was there with her whole family. There were other people there too. She had a cat and kisses a boy named Peter. This was a very good book with a lot of emotions. But many people don’t know that some very intelligent scholars think that Anne Frank did not really write this diary and it is a big fake.
Nicole was enraged. How could her sister write this drivel? But she knew how. Little Bit had been right there when she’d chatted online with Dr. Butthole Bridgeman, too ignorant to refute a word he’d said. She felt like putting her fist through a wall. Better yet, through Bridgeman’s face. In a blind fury, she hurled her math book at the wall, cursing at the top of her lungs.
“Nicole, sweetie, are you all right?” Her mother hurried into her room, her father close behind.
Nicole sat on her bed, gingerly rubbing her foot. “I’m fine,” she fibbed. “I stubbed my toe.”
“It’s not your head?” her mother probed, tipping Nicole’s face to hers. “No pain, nausea, double vision—”
“No. I’m fine, Mom. Really.” Suddenly she felt galvanized, and jumped to her feet. “I have to talk to Little Bit—”
“She’s not here.” Her mother still looked concerned. “She’s sleeping over at Britnee’s.”
Nicole sank heavily onto her bed again. She couldn’t tell Little Bit the truth until tomorrow. It was maddening.
“Are you sure your head doesn’t hurt in any way?” her father asked. “Because your behavior is very erratic, Nicole.”
“Maybe I’m just weird.”
“Are you on drugs?” her father asked sharply.
“No, Dad, drug-free.” She held up Anne Frank’s diary. “In fact, I’m the only girl in the neighborhood doing homework on a Saturday night. You should be proud.”
After five more minutes of parental quizzing on the state of her head and mental health, they left. Nicole stared at Anne’s photo on the book cover for a while. Then she reopened the diary and started to read it again, from the beginning.
NOTES FROM GIRL X
CAUTIONIII WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTIONIII
Day 5, 2:56 a.m.
Frightening Thought du Jour: Time ticks away. Days, years, entire lifetimes. Amazing things happen to people. Then they die. If no one remembers their stories, the memory of who they were and what they did blurs, like watercolor paintings left in the rain. Until, finally, nothing is left on the canvas.
People Who Suck: a. Chrissy Hair-Toss Gullet
b. Dr Martin Bridgeman at the Center for the Scientific Study of ull. Denier of the truth. Memory stealer. Thief. Liar.
People Who Don’t Suck but We Never Tell Each Other the Truth: a. My mother: Sweet and clueless.
b. My father: Judgmental and clueless.
c. My sister: Future prom queen and clueless.
d. Me: So clueless I didn’t know I was clueless. So now I ask myself, “Girl X, just who is it you want to be?”
000001 MAGIC COUNTER
