It smelled like anti-septic. Like fake flowers and white sheets and, I thought meanly, old people.

Sara, Rachel, and I needed a few more points for the Mivtzoim (the Hebrew word for helping out others)project mandatory for all ninth graders. Hense, there we were, preparing to sing for elderly ladies.

We weren’t prepared for Margarita. Her skin was leathery and wrinkled, weathered with age and pain. Her eyes were the color of the sea. A bluish green tint- drops of the sky. But they were puffy, those sad beautiful eyes, rimmed with a red that told a story of tears, of nights spent crying into a soggy pillow. I thought: What does this woman weep about?

“Oh, beautiful girls!” she exclaimed and reached out her weathered hand to pat my shoulder. The rabbi who worked at the old age home led us to a room. We told her to sit down, introduced ourselves.

She looked so happy that we were there. She looked like we had made her day- her week!

Margarita started talking. It didn’t take much prompting, we asked “how are you” and she began the tale she was so desperate to get out.
She spoke about her husband first, lovingly. “He was such a good man,” she said it like it hurts. “We were neighbors. His father was a rabbi, he went to Yeshiva. Oh, I hope you each get such a good husband.”

And we all smiled, she was so sweet when she spoke about the man she loved.

“But Hitler came. He killed eight million Jews.” We nodded, and she repeated- “eight million Jews!” She said it like she knew every one of them, every single victim of the genocide. She said it like it was happening now. As if each and every one of the eight million souls were caged inside of her clawing to get out, scratching her insides, staining her heart with grief.

“I was in Auschwitz. I saw Hitler. He killed everyone. Nobody came out. None of us. We all died there. Hitler killed us all.”

“I saw him. I was with my three nieces. They were beautiful, and I was so young! Three girls, they stood in a row,” she gestured to us the way her nieces were set up, “and I knew Hitler was going to kill them.”

Margarita referred to Mengele (who I am assuming she was talking about in her story) as Hitler. To her they were the same person. The Malach Hamoves- the Angel of Death- can clothe itself in different bodies, but Margarita knew him under his various human form.
“I told him- ‘don’t kill them! Kill me instead,’ but they didn’t listen. They didn’t listen.”

Her eyes watered and mine did too. All of ours did. An eyelash, I told myself, there’s an eyelash stuck in my eye.

There was no eyelash.

“They killed them. Three little girls and they wouldn’t kill me.”

She looked up at us, painfully, “I wish I was dead. I saw them being killed and that’s when I stopped living.”

“What is this life?” She gestured around the room, and I saw. I saw that she lived every day in this place, where nobody came to visit, nobody cared. She’s lonely, she’s sad, and she holds the kind of memories no human should ever know.

Margarita quickly cheered up again, and she glowed about her husband. He survived the war and she married him when she was fourteen. “I miss him so much,” she said. Though she didn’t tell us exactly when he died, the rabbi in the old age home, the one who brought us to her, told us that she has no family. “He never insulted me. And he was so handsome.”

“You know, I was very good looking when I was younger. I was so skinny and elegant, and we loved each other.”

She kept repeating that we should all get such good men, like her “Shloimenke.”

She told us that she had pictures of her and her husband, and of course we wanted to see them.

She opened her closet and pulled out bags. Rummaging through parcels and scarves and assorted sweaters, she tossed things behind her, shoved stuff aside, the room was fast becoming a wreck. We told her to forget it, clothes were strewn everywhere, but no, she would not forget it.

Finally, in a blue woolen sweater, wrapped up for safekeeping, she pulled out the picture and held it up like a trophy.

In the cheap plastic frame was a photo- a glamorous, lovely blonde, a man looking at her like she’s the world. That was our Margarita. A younger, happier version but that was definitely her. Although the picture was black and white, I recognized those eyes.

“Some nights I sleep with it under my pillow, and I cry on it, I cry the whole night!” Her eyes grew damp again and she cradled the photo.
Sara pulled out her camera and took pictures. Pictures of her pictures. Of her. She looked strangely at the phone/camera contraption, held it upside down, and I wanted to hug her. I patted her shoulder in the same exact way she’d done fifteen minutes earlier.

Someone called - the whole bus is waiting!- it was time to say goodbye. We put down the pictures and thanked her for talking to us.

On the bus everything was normal, everyone was laughing, kidding around. But a woman with sky blue eyes, the women on the sixth floor, was begging me not to forget her.
I won’t, Margarita.