reynardo | What there should be.

There should be a little old lady living across the road.

There should be a little old lady living across the road, complaining because she has to move out of her old house and into a retirement village.

She should be stopping to talk to us as we pass and she digs in her garden. She loves her garden - wants it full of light and life and especially scent. She spends as little time as possible indoors. Even on those suddenly-cold Melbourne evenings, she puts on a scarf and keeps on weeding, or just sitting on the verandah, watching the light change as it filters through the chestnut tree she planted.

She ought to be grumbling again because her grandson doesn't want a Bar Mitzvah. If pressed, she doesn't care too much about the religious part of it all - she just wants a chance to have the family together. Her parents died about thirty years ago, and she wants to be with her close ones as long as possible. She's worried that, once she's left this old house, no-one will come and visit.

She would like visitors. If you were to press her, she might say that the light and the visitors and the garden and the family are things she had to do without for several long years, back when she was a teenager. Except that they didn't call them "teenagers" then. Or even tieners. Her accent is still more Dutch than Jewish, with hints of the Germany she was born into, but she learned the word in Australia when her own children reached that age.

She ought to be complaining about the government, and poring over the books she wrote when she emigrated to Australia and married and had children and then went to University and discovered her voice. She should be baking rich pastries for the grandchildren, and missing her husband who died ten years back. She should be leaving a bag of lemons from her tree on the doorstep of the neighbours, who looked after her cat when she had that nasty fall a few months back.

And she should have made it, instead of dying in a concentration camp of starvation and typhus at 15, after hiding for so long in that little set of rooms in Amsterdam.