Work Text:
Eva Stratt had tried just once to count the stars. She hadn’t managed it.
She remembered a soft bed, floral bed linen, a teddy bear, a warm tiredness in the comfort of her childhood bedroom, a lullaby, her grandmother’s voice.
Weißt du wieviel Sternlein stehen an dem blauen Himmelszelt?
“How many stars are there?” she had asked.
“Nobody knows,” her grandmother had replied, tucking the duvet tightly around her. “Only God.”
“But you just have to count them.”
“Nobody can do that, my little angel.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are so many.”
A kiss on the tip of her nose, a soft “Goodnight”, a sign of the cross on her forehead.
And she had lain awake, peering through the gap in the curtains at the night sky and started counting.
She’d fallen asleep at 58.
“There are at least 59 stars,” she had declared the next morning at the breakfast table – and been annoyed that the adults were laughing, because she had at least tried to count all the stars, something that, as far as she knew, no one had dared to do before her.
She hadn’t known that one day she would witness stars dying before anyone had counted them.
The lullaby went round and round in her head without her falling asleep.
The cot had turned into a hard pallet, the floral bed linen into a scratchy blanket, the teddy bear in her arms into her own fingers, digging into her flesh, and a rosary she wound around her hands until the beads dug painfully into her nerves; the sleepy sense of security into a leaden, frightened exhaustion; her grandmother’s bright lullaby had turned into the harsh voices of the guards.
The goodnight kisses and the signs of the cross had turned into a contemptuous remark, a spit at her feet or a kick to her ribs.
The world’s scapegoat, locked in a cell, at the mercy of the hatred of people who saw only that the world was growing darker and colder, that children were starving and wars were beginning, and that she had not saved humanity, but had merely squandered money and sacrificed a harmless teacher and two astronauts, against their will.
Who did not share her hope that one day a star would appear in the sky and bring salvation.
At least she was slowly fading into oblivion.
After all, she had now been sitting in that cell for months, after having been transferred to the next prison, sometimes after just a few days, so that a new state, a new government, could parade her before the press, condemn her and thereby briefly buy the sympathy of its people, so that they could all pounce on her and hurl their hatred at her, before turning on one another again in their hunger and fear and rage.
At least her bones could heal.
And she could sit for hours by the window, which was nothing more than a narrow hole in the wall, barred and glazed, but a small peephole into the world, into the stars.
When the sky was clear, she could see 59 stars.
Had the Hail Mary flown past one of them?
Could he see one of them now?
Was he thinking of her and feeling anything other than hatred?
She had resigned herself to becoming the world’s scapegoat.
Someone had had to do it, and that someone had been her.
Someone had to take a bite of the forbidden fruit and, above all, she had once told herself in a fleeting moment of doubt, she had the right name for it.
Eve, the foremother of sin.
Eve, who had plunged humanity into ruin.
Eve, who did what had to be done because no one else did it.
Eve, who was responsible for the death of mankind – including his death, after he had pleaded and begged and wept. Perhaps the death of everyone, because the mission had failed and she was rightly sitting here.
Once, it was so quiet in her cell for hours on end that she wondered if it was already over.
Whether everyone else had already died and only she was left behind – whether God had decided not to take her to Him, but to leave her behind as the last human in a dying universe.
And she clutched her rosary and began to pray, “Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary…”, just those two words, over and over again, because she could think of nothing but the rocket that had borne that name, and no longer of her grandmother who had taught her the prayer, only of the rocket and its passengers and their death, high up among the stars and even lonelier than she was in her cell.
Sometimes she would gaze at the rosary and the thin bars of the radiator, as if that were a solution. But the rosary was cheap, the cord linking the beads thin. And it was no solution – God would not be able to forgive her for the sins she had already committed; she would not take on any more for which, in the end, she could not even ask for forgiveness.
59 beads on the rosary.
59 stars in the sky.
And an old lullaby in her head, which she sometimes hummed as she let the rosary slip through her fingers and tried to forget that she could no longer say her prayers.
Weißt du wieviel Sternlein stehen an dem blauen Himmelszelt?
Weißt du wieviel Wolken gehen, weithin über alle Welt?
Gott, der Herr hat sie gezählt, dass ihm auch nicht eines fehlet,
an der ganzen großen Zahl, an der ganzen großen Zahl.
And the song calmed her thoughts, because God might have forgotten or punished her, but he still knew all the stars, had counted them all—something she had never managed and never would—and he made sure that none were lost to him—not even the one star she had sent on a journey of no return.
The Hail Mary lay in his hands.
She tried to think of that when the silence roared in her ears or when the guards did, for once, remember her and she tasted blood for hours afterwards.
Her life didn’t matter.
She had done what had to be done to save billions of lives.
Eva had taken a bite out of the apple and was damned for all eternity, but in return, humanity lived on, able to think, feel and know – and was ultimately saved.
She was damned, but she could see the stars.
And when the stars vanished behind the clouds or nightmares chased her through the night, she had a lullaby and memories.
And perhaps, just perhaps, he had memories too. Not of her, because he had to hate her – but of her voice.
Of her song.
She had asked for five minutes when he was already comatose, five minutes alone with the man she had forced to a heroic death, five minutes with a sleeping, dying man.
She had stood beside him, next to his head. She had looked at his face, committing every laugh line, every freckle, every lock of hair to memory, in case, unexpectedly, she were ever asked what he had looked like for the many statues of him that would be built.
She had asked him for forgiveness, without hoping for an answer or actual forgiveness.
She had not allowed herself to cry, alone with this hero who would soon be sleeping for eternity, even though no one would have noticed. She had allowed herself only a lump in her throat, a tremor in her fingertips, a bitter taste on her tongue.
And with a breaking voice, she had softly sung the song into his ear.