The Lost History of Stars

Her grandmother’s framed “honeymoon sampler” occupied a parlor wall in Tante Hannah’s house. She explained that young brides created these to represent their dreams for the future. Her ouma’s was simple: A step-gabled house with silken smoke weaving from the chimney, with a garden of bloodred tulip blooms and a windmill in the background. A boy and a girl in oversize wooden shoes stood holding hands in the yard. The scene hardly foretold her grandmother’s future in South Africa.

“She told me that you may stitch your wishes, but God has his own pattern for you,” Tante Hannah said. “When I started mine, she said I should create scenes I hoped would be God’s Providence. Lettie, someday you’ll want to make one of your own.”

Her own sampler was on the wall of her bedroom. The scene was dominated by a low, red-roofed house with two children and two sheep in the yard, and a tree abundant with colorful fruit. It looked nothing like her life.

At times she leaned over the back of my chair, arms on either side of me, and operated my hands for me as if I were a kind of puppet. I finished it, poorly, and declared myself fully taught and ready to retire my thimble.

Although she hovered over me most times, occasionally she stopped talking and clouded over, her lips pressing so tightly the pink parts disappeared. She would stitch intently, and when she put the cloth away, I could see a white, bloodless line marking the deep imprint of the needle at an angle across her fingers.

Place, press, pull. The stitching, the cloth, the letters—these were her unchanging things. A design crafted with a delicate hand would be beautiful for decades, she said with such emotion I was sad for her. And a scene, or the letters of a name, might go on forever, even though they were only a thread of silk knotted into a piece of linen.

“You can stitch a line in fabric and it will last,” she said. “This is not the Holy Scripture, but it is true just the same.”

This woman took embroidery far too seriously. But she had so little else.





27


August 1901, Concentration Camp

Dear Lettie,

It appears it is safe to write, but we should be cautious. I’ve missed you so much and think often of our lessons together. I know you liked them better than the times I tried to teach you to stitch. You should have seen your face! But I’m not giving up on you yet. You might come to like it later. Please tell me of Willem and Cee-Cee as I’ve heard nothing about their well-being.

I know you don’t want to hear about Oom Sarel, but he is having a difficult time, never sleeping, gone at all hours. He seems tormented. He will not speak of your oupa, but I will tell you some of the things I have heard from him about Schalk and your father. He tells of your father having been a loyal brother, and Schalk a peacemaker for them all. None had been harmed when Oom was last with them.

I’m so happy to hear of your Copperfield book, and that you’re not holding Dickens responsible for the war. There’s probably no better time than this for reading, or writing. At least there’s that.

Thinking of you always,

Love,

Tante Hannah

Other voices intruded, crowding out my own. The struggles went on mostly at night and churned like eddies in a stream. I didn’t know whether this meant I was going insane or becoming an adult.

Oupa and Vader appeared, speaking their favorite phrases, repeating their themes, the ones I’d heard for years, the ones I accepted without question. Oupa, clouds billowing from his pipe, proclaimed us “God’s tools of righteousness.” I pictured him on a windblown hilltop.

The beauty of these phantom appearances was that I was unafraid to talk back to them. But if we have no dominion over our lives, Oupa, why strive to be righteous? If we have no part in our fate, what is the point?

Vader’s voice remained forthright, as if he were standing tall beside me. The voice itself reflected his strength. It’s never wrong to do the right thing, Lettie . . . and obey your moeder. You are a Venter. Yes, Vader, but so is Oom Sarel.

Most nights, Bina’s voice seemed to take over, with her songs and sayings, and in my sleep I was able to understand them better. A person is never gone as long as you feel her shadow beside you, she said. And that explained the sense that Janetta was still with me when I walked.

The voice of Klaas joined in, speaking to me from his seat in front of the photographer. Lettie, dear Lettie, you finally noticed me. He had cared for me, and I had given him fewer than a dozen of my words in response. And now he was dead. I tried to push him aside . . . the sound . . . the sad end of it all . . . those eyes. How cold was I that I dreaded the idea that his shadow might follow me? How does one hold some shadows and cut others loose?

At times, everything hurt, and the voices would pop in to explain those problems or revive the memories attached to them. The voices were sometimes consoling, sometimes judgmental. And at times now, they did not always bother to wait until I was asleep to begin their repetitive lectures. They kept me unsettled, on the brink, unsure whether I would be in tears from minute to minute, breath to breath. Look at Moeder, I told myself. But as much as I wanted to be like her, I wanted less to be with her. The tightness in the tent . . . the power of her presence . . . something was pushing me away.

Prayers calmed the voices, if I repeated them, time after time. Other times the voices just became more insistent when I prayed. I added another request to my nightly prayers: Help me to be strong, dear God. I considered the wording for some time, wanting to be concise and to the point. I wanted a small phrase that would cover a variety of situations; I decided the best way to reach God’s ears was to be respectful of his time.

One morning, my legs began twitching toward dawn, and I changed positions. Since I had washed my pinafore, I no longer used it as a pillow. I stacked my shoes with toes in opposite directions so the center was level and cradled my head. I slipped back to sleep, and the voices started, all at once, trying to claw their way out of my head this time. I tried to make them stop, but they echoed in there and made my head itch, so that I wakened again as a relief from their chatter. But the itching remained, and I dug at my head with more energy.

“Who’s doing that?” Moeder asked.

I paused but couldn’t stop.

Moeder struck a match.

“Oh . . .”

“What, Ma?”

She reached into the bag she had taken from home and kept hanging from the back post of her cot. She handed me her mother’s fancy mirror. When she lit a match and held it toward me, I saw small trails of blood seeping down my forehead and parting on either side of my nose.

She put down the mirror and used her sleeve to wipe the blood from my face.

“Let me see.”

She tilted my head down so that she could get close enough to see. She groaned louder.

“Lice,” she said.

“No . . .”

“Yes . . . you scratched yourself bloody.”

“No . . .”

I cried and turned to bury my head in my blankets, but I knew there would be more vermin hiding there.

“What?” Willem heard the shouts.

“Lice,” Moeder said. “Don’t go near her. Feel your hair.”

“Ahhhhhh,” Willem said. “We’ll have to put her in the dipping trench.”

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