They Divided the Sky

First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of
a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship
is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually
develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13,
1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high cold war tension
between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people
were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) in order to
seek better lives in West Germany. The construction of the Wall put an end to
this haemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers,
for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between
characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that
Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher’s
college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and
academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that
send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks
that make up the narrative.

Luise von Flotow

has published literary

translations from German and French since
the 1980s. Her interest in Christa Wolf and
the re-translation of Der geteilte Himmel stems
from her family background (origins in the
northeast of Germany), extensive research
and travel in East Germany (1986–1990),
and the discovery and study of the existing
translation (Divided Heaven, Seven Seas Verlag,
East Berlin, 1965).

Christa Wolf

was a German literary critic,

novelist and essayist. She was one of the best-
known writers to have emerged from the
former East Germany. Der geteilte Himmel was
her first full-length novel, published when
she was thirty-five years old; it was both a
great literary success and a political scandal.
Accused of having a ‘decadent’ attitude with
regard to the new socialist Germany and
deliberately misrepresenting the workers who
are the foundation of this new state, Wolf
survived a wave of political and other attacks
after its publication. However, she went on
to become the best-known East German
writer of her generation, a writer who
established an international reputation and
never stopped working toward improving the
socialist reality of the GDR.

Christa Wolf passed away in December 2011.

A WO

They Div

ided the Sky

They Divided the Sky

A Novel by Christa Wolf

Translated into English by Luise von Flotow

Wolf cover final mechanical with correct spine.indd 1

12-12-07 4:24 PM

and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

The University of Ottawa Press acknowledges with

gratitude the support extended to its publishing list by

Heritage Canada through the Canada Book Fund, by

the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Federation for

the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards

to Scholarly Publications Program, by the Social Sciences

and Humanities Research Council, and by

the University of Ottawa.

We also gratefully acknowledge the Goethe-Institut

whose financial support has contributed to the

publication of this book.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in

Publication

Wolf, Christa

[Geteilte Himmel. English]

They divided the sky / Christa Wolf ; translated

by Luise von Flotow.

(Literary translation) Translation of: Der geteilte

Himmel. Includes bibliographical references. Electronic

monograph. Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-0-7766-2034-3

I. Von Flotow, Luise, 1951- II. Title. III. Title:

Geteilte Himmel. English. IV. Series: Literary translation

(Ottawa, Ont.)

PT2685.O36G4813 2013 833’.914 C2012-907609-0

Another Time,

Another Text

From Divided Heaven

to They Divided the Sky

Luise von Flotow

n the late 1980s, during the years in which the East Bloc was heading
into collapse along with East Germany, I spent several long periods

in East Berlin, officially attending courses for Germanists at Humboldt
University, unofficially getting to know the many different oppositional
movements that were gathering strength there: among them the
Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte and the people who assembled
at the Umweltbibliothek in the church buildings at the Zionskirchplatz
and who used an ancient hand-cranked Gestetner to produce their
illegal Umweltblätter (information leaflets on environmental issues
and social justice). I met with and interviewed young writers of the
Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood in East Berlin—Rainer Schedlinski
(later revealed to be a secret police informant), Wolfgang Koziol
and Uwe Kolbe. I acquired a few of their artsy, handmade samizdat
journals, talked to literature and art critics and with the help of curator
Christoph Tannert organized a large travelling exhibition, through the
United States and Canada, of hitherto unshowable artworks, entitled
Schrittwechsel

[Change of Gait]. It was an intense time, especially as

these young, politically uncooperative and critically creative people
were news to the West. They were the new generation of the so-called
Hineingeborene

—people who had been born into the system.

At the time (and probably still today), Christa Wolf was the best-

known East German writer of her generation. She had just published
Kassandra

(1983), a work often read as a feminist rewriting of the

ancient misogynist and male-triumphalist myths around the Trojan War,
and around war in general. Her status in the West was as important as

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

in the East, though different. The younger generation of East Berlin
writers I spent time with largely admired and respected her for standing
up to the ongoing pressures of East German Kulturpolitik, maintaining
her integrity as a writer and functioning in some ways as a protective
guardian who would speak out for lesser-known, younger authors
who had not yet developed the connections in the West necessary to
protect their critical voices. When Wolf produced Störfall in 1987—a
response to the Chernobyl disaster—I was witness to the wrangling
over who should translate the novel into English, a rather surprising
event, as post-war German literature has not often been of great sales
interest in North America. In other words, at the time, Wolf was an
important and respected figure—on both sides of the Wall, and in
German as well as English. Indeed, most of her work was available in
English translation, though there were odd stories around some of these
translations: the English title of Kindheitsmuster, for instance, changed
from A Model Childhood in its first incarnation to Patterns of Childhood in
later ones. Perhaps the oddest English translation is the one of Wolf’s
first full-length novel, Der geteilte Himmel (1963, trans. 1965), which is
set just before and immediately after the building of the Berlin Wall, and
had a very loud and controversial reception in East Germany. Despite
the ideological “scandals” created around the book and its author, the
English translation, Divided Heaven, appeared only eighteen months later,
in an East Berlin publishing house, Seven Seas Verlag, presumably in
order to export a new young socialist talent to the West.

In the late 1980s, an article about this 1965 English translation

surfaced via other Germanists

and opened my eyes to a very particular

politics of translation that ruled that version, allegedly grossly distorting
Wolf’s German text. I decided to one day re-translate the book. Living
in Germany in the early 1990s, I corresponded with Wolf about the
project, and tried to locate the 1965 translator, Joan Becker, and find
out more about Seven Seas and its policies, but the disruptions caused

Eithne O’Connell, Dublin City University, and Marilyn Sibley Fries, University

of Michigan, drew my attention to Charlotte Koerner’s text.

vii

Luise von Flotow

by the collapse of the East Bloc presented enormous obstacles. While
some help was forthcoming, it was not the moment to pursue matters.
Now, almost twenty years later, I have found the time, the publisher

and some translation funding.

In what follows I discuss the original

German text, its reception in East Germany in 1963, its English
translation, Divided Heaven, prepared in East Germany in 1965, and
the new translation I have just completed: They Divided the Sky.

Der geteilte Himmel: The Source Text
The German text, Wolf’s first full-length novel, set in the two years
preceding the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961,
and ending in the autumn of that same year, tells the story of Rita
and Manfred’s doomed love affair. Recovering in a sanatorium from a
physical and nervous collapse, Rita remembers their time together and
certain incidents in her life before and with Manfred that are particularly
poignant. In the process of this memory work she recovers her health
and reaffirms her belief in the new socialist Germany. The political and
social tensions leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall repeatedly
crop up in these memories, as people suddenly disappear from work or
school to “go West,” and politics colour every conversation and many
personal decisions. Rita, aged twenty and a teacher training student,
has a summer job in a train carriage production plant and is learning
about industrial labour—as a good socialist teacher should. Both at
college and in the factory she experiences the effects of dogmatic
ideology first-hand—for instance, as an older and particularly zealous
fellow student sets an intimidating Stalinist tone at college, and when
the workers in her brigade engage in highly politicized stratagems
around their production norms. Manfred, her lover, who is ten years
older and a rather sceptical and increasingly disillusioned academic,

The University of Ottawa Press has launched a new series in literary translation

of world literature. They Divided the Sky is one of the first volumes to appear in it.

I anticipate it coming from the Goethe-Institut in Munich.

viii

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

does not believe in the new socialist regime or its discourse and finally
decides to stay in West Berlin after an academic conference. Rita’s
collapse follows closely upon a visit she makes to him there, during
which she decides to opt for her life in East Germany and thus gives
up her love. Written in plain language, the story is told in flashbacks
largely from Rita’s point of view, and from Rita’s hospital bed, an aspect
of the text that some contemporary East German critics found not
only displeasing but indicative of the author’s dangerously ambivalent
political stance.

The East German response to this book in 1963 was intense. First,

Wolf (then in her early thirties) was awarded the Heinrich-Mann
literary prize, the government’s highest award for literary achievement,
worth 10,000 marks at the time—a fortune! And though the feuilleton
and other critics admitted that Wolf was a gifted writer, there soon
developed an aggressive ideological controversy that was fuelled by
articles such as one by Dietrich Allert and Hubert Wetzel, published in
the daily Freiheit [Freedom] on August 31, 1963, in Halle, the city where
Christa Wolf had herself worked in a train carriage production plant.
The Freiheit critics suggested that Wolf’s view of the new socialist society
was twisted and “decadent,” and did not reflect its true nature:

Von der alles verändernden Kraft unserer Gesellschaft ist in der
Erzählung zuwenig spürbar. Überall schimmert der Gedanke
durch, den die Autorin in einer Fernsehsendung nach Erscheinen
des Buches äußerte: Sie habe auf das Unglück hinweisen wollen,
das durch die Spaltung in Deutschland besteht. Ist das wirklich
ein Unglück?

[My translation: There is far too little evidence in this story of
the power our society wields to bring about total change. The
author’s notion, which she expressed in a recent television program
after the book appeared and according to which the division of
Germany is a tragedy, comes through clearly. Is this indeed a
tragedy?]

Further, they objected to the characters she devised, claiming that they

Luise von Flotow

are too negative and too problematic, and that her portrayal of industrial
workers is incomplete and out of synch with socialist reality:

Männer wie Meternagel oder Ermisch können doch nicht in der

von Christa Wolf gewählten Darstellung allein und einzig den
Genossen unserer Tage verkörpern. Damit wird die Wirklichkeit
verzerrt. Auch hier kommt die dekadente Lebensauffassung bei
Christa Wolf zum Ausdruck.

[My translation: Surely men such as Meternagel or Ermisch, as
described by Christa Wolf, cannot be the only representation
of our comrades today. This is a distortion of reality. Here, too,
Christa Wolf reveals her decadent view of life.]

And finally, they wonder if Wolf has in fact found the right tone for her
portrayal of the new German society: While Allert and Wetzelt admit
that the book may be a literary success in how it describes and develops
“intime Gefühle” (intimate feelings), they doubt that it properly
describes “unser Lebensgefühl” (our feeling of life). They suspect that
it has been deprived of “notwendige rationale Elemente” (necessary
rational aspects) and declare it not “auf der weltanschaulichen Höhe
unserer Tage” (in line with the apex of today’s Weltanschauung). Wolf’s
perspective is seen as riddled with ideological errors, which cannot
possibly lead to an acceptance of the true nature of and need for the
division of Germany or help smooth the way for the general public to
see the positive impact of the Wall.

These accusations of “decadence,” of a twisted and negative portrayal

of industrial workers and other citizens of socialist East Germany,
and of a wrong, irrational and retrograde tone, set off a flurry of other
commentaries in newspapers, journals, radio programs and public
meetings of the Writers’ Union, Journalists’ Union, public seminars
at universities and so on, many of which Wolf attended. And while
the book continued to be available, the author went on to many other
problems with the authorities, having later books such as Kindheitsmuster
(1976) (Patterns of Childhood) withdrawn from circulation or accepting
censors’ demands in order to be published, as was the case, minimally,

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

with Kassandra (1983). Despite the ideological scandals around it, Der
geteilte Himmel

became a film in 1964, with a screenplay by Christa

Wolf and her husband, Gerhart Wolf. And the book was prepared
for export. The newspaper that originally set off the fuss around the
book in August 1963 summarized the events a few months later as a
demonstration of the extraordinary willingness and need within East
German society to talk about “the problems of our contemporary
literature” openly, freely and in real confrontation.

This, it announced,

was all the more necessary as new young writers take the “new society”
and its problems and conflicts into their sights to turn them into literary
works. Though the paper recognized Wolf’s literary talent, it reiterated
its original condemnation of her work as revealing a decadent concept
of life [“eine dekadente Lebensauffassung”]. Indeed, it insisted, it
was the paper’s job and the critic’s responsibility to “help” the new
young GDR writers find the right tone and correct their mistakes.
As one recent commentator stated, East German doctrine of the time
required that writers follow party discipline and write according to
those partisan principles, regardless of the resulting literary quality
of their work:

Die Schriftsteller wurden in die Pflicht genommen: Wenn sie
sich bedingungslos der Parteidisziplin und den Prinzipien der
Parteilichkeit beugten, fanden sie höchstes Lob, unabhängig
davon, wie es um die Qualität ihrer künstlerischen Leistungen
bestellt war. (Gong 241)

[My translation: Writers were required to unconditionally bow
to party discipline and its partisan principles; then they would
earn the highest praises, regardless of the quality of their artistic
productions.]

It seems that this party discipline along with its partisan principles

“Die ganze Diskussion beweist, daß eine ausserordentliches Interesse besteht,

offen, freimütig und in echtem Streit über die Probleme unserer Gegenwartslite-
ratur zu sprechen.”

Luise von Flotow

may be what guided the English translation, which corrected Wolf’s
“inappropriate” tone as well as her “decadent descriptions of socialist
society.”

The English Articles on the Translation: 1985 and 1992
Only two academic articles have addressed the English translation
of 1965, which was published by Seven Seas Verlag in East Berlin.
Charlotte Koerner’s work begins with a very tolerant tone: translation
and adaptation of literature can only be “creative transposition” (214).
She cites Roman Jakobson, claiming that “such is the nature of verbal
art,” and adopts the new word “refraction” (213) to describe what a
translation often does to an original text. However, this tone, which
recognizes the textual differences inevitably created by translation,
soon subsides, and Koerner writes: “Literary translations […] —the
results of interlingual transposition—have always been expected (at
least by the readership) to be near-equivalents of the originals’ message,
meaning, tone and quality” (215). Her short outline of the “message”
of Wolf’s first novel then quickly moves on to condemn the Seven
Seas version of the book. The message, Koerner says, is the following:

[A]t its core, Der geteilte Himmel was meant to carry the author’s
impassioned appeal to the citizens of the fourteen-year-old new
Socialist state not to desert their homeland, to understand the
permanent division of Germany as a moral necessity rather than
the result of Big Power economic politics run amok and to accept
even this latest blow—a Wall that was to keep people in, not just
out—as an act of protection against fascism and war. Though
never explicitly noted by the critics, this must certainly have been
understood by those readers who had read the original closely and
picked up its clues. Obviously, a translation of this kind of story
should allow the foreign readership the same insights. Becker’s does
not

. (215; my emphasis)

While this was probably Wolf’s most obvious message, and one she

xii

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

was to repeat twenty-five years later in her ill-timed attempt to move
the masses assembled in East Berlin on November 4, 1989, just days
before the Wall opened, there are other, more subtle messages in
the book, which Koerner details as equally important. The first and
perhaps most important is Wolf’s “literary representation of candor
and outspokenness—that is, her representation of freedom of thought
and speech in the GDR” (214). Her characters are outspoken and
opinionated; they engage in political talk and discussion that, given
the tensions of the time, are daringly forthright and critical of existing
conditions. But they are also vulnerable: the protagonist, Rita, a young
woman who decides to stay in East Germany rather than follow
her lover to the West, suffers enormous uncertainties and personal
trauma in coming to this decision. Wolf thus creates a character who is
embroiled in ugly and confusing political forces far beyond her control
and understanding yet who must adapt her personal ethics and life
in order to survive. Much of Rita’s pondering over this dilemma is
related in the first person, an aspect of the narrative that is completely
erased by the translation. As Koerner summarizes it, the translation
“fails to render the book’s unmistakeable internal awareness that […]
ideological ‘truth’ has neither absolute nor eternal validity but rather
represents an individually chosen commitment” (214).

Other important themes developed in the text concern a woman’s

“painfully unresolved ambivalence about her passions, her sexual
role, her fulfillment as a complete person” (215), and this within a
“new” society, where a “new” social order confronts deeply ingrained
cultural traditions with a “new morality.” This is a problematic that
Wolf engaged with in many of her subsequent texts: Nachdenken über
Christa T.

, Kein Ort, Nirgends, Kindheitsmuster, and of course Kassandra.

As Koerner succinctly says, “The manner in which the love theme was
handled in [Wolf’s] early narrative affords important clues about the
conflicts to come—clues unfortunately lost in translation” (215). The
same goes for the encounter between two moralities: tradition versus
“new society,” where the text carries a “countercurrent of doubt,” a
theme made glaringly obvious in the many political discussions and

xiii

Luise von Flotow

confrontations related in the text. The translation of these details could
provide the English reader with a “cultural document,” an account and
greater understanding of the conflicts that underlie the characters’
actions. The existing translation simply removes or tones down this
material.

Finally, Koerner comments on the importance of Wolf’s innovative

narrative style—a “message” in itself—since it routs the stance of the
omniscient narrator and instead fragments the narrative perspective,
an attempt on Wolf’s part to “convey certain inner truths as
authentically and realistically as she could while arousing maximal
reader involvement and identification” (216). Again, this concern of
the author, which seeks to overcome the “artificial separation of the
results

of writing from the process” (216), is in its early stages in this

book, and was to develop further in her subsequent works. For an
understanding of Wolf’s literary path and her innovative work at a
time of intense political control of literature, the translation needs to
render this work on “process.” However, the existing English version
conflates the voices and perspectives—the narrator tells it all, and in
the third person—and returns the text to the most traditional forms
of fiction writing.

Katharina von Ankum’s 1993 essay on the same translation concurs

with Koerner’s interpretation of the “meaning” of the original text.
She writes: “[O]n a surface level [Der geteilte Himmel] reads like a
political vote for the socialist experiment in the GDR as well as the
writer’s support for the division of Germany” (225). Ankum claims,
however, that its very complex narrative style seeks to “express a female
subjectivity” (225). While this may be debatable, it is true that Wolf uses
a multifaceted style to tell this story, switching, sometimes mid-sentence,
between a first-person perspective and a narrative written in the present
tense to a third-person narrative in the simple past, and interspersing
the narrative with ironic or self-conscious commentary from both
the characters and the narrator. Ankum notes that this unorthodox
narrative process is evidence of Wolf exploring “specifically female
ways of constituting the fictional self” (224), which, Ankum tells us,

xiv

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

brought her into regular conflict not only with the advocates of Socialist
Realism in the 1960s but also with the authoritarian Western journalists
of the early 1990s.

In regard to the 1965 translation, Ankum shows

how it expressly undoes this narrative fragmentation, reducing the story
to a third-person omniscient narrator perspective and, thus, removing
the ambiguities and subjective uncertainties the female protagonist
voices, and imposing the closure and certainty required by “Lukacsian
Socialist realism” (226). Indeed, she shows how translator Joan Becker
brought Wolf’s text back to the expected literary form “by replacing the
changing point of view by an omniscient narrator [and modifying]
those passages of the text that contest and even ridicule the notion of
fictional totality” (233). For Ankum, these are the translation’s most
important characteristics, which clearly support the socialist dogma
under which it was completed. Critic Koerner concurs. Both critics
emphasize the difficulties Rita encounters and has to confront as a young
woman

in this new society, where she faces the “often ambiguous and

ambivalent play between the expression of a deeply ingrained cultural
tradition and that of a ‘new morality’” (Koerner 215). This is a theme
whose beginnings are clearly located in Der geteilte Himmel and that was
to become a constant thread in Christa Wolf’s work, culminating in
her rewritings of the ancient Cassandra and Medea myths. As Koerner
puts it, “Two kinds of consciousness, two selves [are] at war [in this
text]: a creative transposer must reproduce this style and structure to
give the English-speaking reader a ‘cultural document’” (215). The
English version of 1965, however, seems to undermine if not obliterate
Wolf’s early musings around women’s roles in the GDR, destroying the
coherence and innovative character of not only this particular text but
also Wolf’s work as a whole. It provides instead “a familiar formula”
of a heroine facing a difficult life choice that is expressed in what the

A detailed account of the conflict of the 1990s is available in Walter Pape, ed.,

“Intellectuals, Unification and Political Change 1990: The Case of Christa Wolf,” in
1870/7–1989/90: German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse

(Berlin/New

York: De Gruyter, 1993).

Luise von Flotow

only US-English review (in The Nation 1967) described as a “fatigued
traditionalism of style and structure” (cited in Koerner 215). Such
are the views of the only two critics to have taken an interest in this
translation.

Divided Heaven
Translated and Published by Seven Seas Verlag, East Berlin
Seven Seas Verlag was founded in 1958 by Gertrude Gelbin, wife of
Stefan Heym, a German socialist, who had spent years in American
exile, returning after the founding of the GDR/East Germany in 1949.
Seven Seas’ publication strategies and plans seem to have been at least
partly inspired by the cultural politics of the new Germany, where
literature was assigned a pedagogical role and was not only funded
but also controlled by the state. As one recent piece of research on this
publishing house puts it: given the recent Nazi dictatorship, a specific
literary canon was considered necessary that would help construct a
new society and form the “‘neue sozialistischer Mensch’ (new socialist
person) through the emphasis on socialist virtues such as collective
behaviour, a socialist humanism and work ethics and anti-fascism and
“the attempt to free the high literary canon from class-bound access”
(Jany 12). The literature was typified by “a positive hero whose actions
serve as a model for identification for the ideal socialist society, the
depiction of class struggle, socialist development and its successful
realization and the depiction of workers and revolutionary situations”
(13), not exactly what Wolf produced in Der geteilte Himmel. In terms
of poetics, this literature was typically defined against other literary
movements.

Expressionism, formalism or modernism that used new formal
concepts like defamiliarisation, alternating points-of-view or
montage were the main currents against which the socialist realist
concept of the work of art as a closed system, reflecting the whole of
‘reality’ in each of its components, was defined. Equally central were

xvi

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

the construction of a partisan (“parteilich”) standpoint, orientation
towards the positive and construction toward closure. (13)

Neither in content nor structure did Wolf’s book conform to these
expectations. Editor Gelbin at Seven Seas seems to have promoted
just such a cultural-political agenda. Her publishing venture produced
work in English by English and American authors “at the left end of
the political spectrum” (Jany 17) as well as her husband’s two-volume
novel, The Crusaders (Heym 1958). But Gelbin soon introduced East
German authors, translated into English, into her publication list. With
these and a lengthy paper she submitted to the Ministry of Culture
describing her intentions and seeking funding, she made her political
position very clear. Seven Seas was to be “a propaganda project on an
international scale,” similar to other projects such as “the foreign service
on the radio” or “publications service of the Committee for Cultural
Relations with Foreign Countries” (cited in Jany 17). Indeed, Gelbin
assigned a high political purpose to Seven Seas publishing: the role
of a “psychological warfare weapon”

that would not only counteract

the capitalist propaganda advanced through American and British
paperbacks but also publicize the democratic nature of the GDR, all
the while bringing in foreign currency through sales abroad.

It is in this ideologically tinged atmosphere of socialist realist literature

produced within a publishing house that pursued a precise cultural-
political agenda that Joan Becker “creatively transposed” Christa
Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel into English.

The ambiance in which the

translation was produced was doubtless also affected by the preceding
six months of noisy public debate on the political correctness of the
source text and the author’s supposed decadence. Today’s translation

The CIA also used the term “psychological warfare” for its cultural and translation

activities in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s.

She is also listed as having translated a number of other works: Lesen und Schreiben,

also by Christa Wolf (1977), Anna Seghers’ Benito’s Blue and Nine Other Stories (1973),
Franz Fumberg’s Conversations in the Night: Three Works (1969), Franz Fühmann’s Car
with the Yellow Star, Fourteen Days Out of Two Decades

(1968) and Johannes Becher’s

Farewell

(1970). This list may not be complete.

xvii

Luise von Flotow

scholars would surmise that such a “horizon of translation”

might

influence the final product, and I agree. But there exists no specific
document from which rules of socialist realist translation might be
gleaned, and which might help explain the thorough-going changes the
text underwent; nor is there information on Joan Becker herself. Jany
notes that “official policies concerning translation in the GDR seem to
have been mostly concerned with what got translated and only to some
extent how texts were translated” (14), but does refer to some attempts
to tie the poetics of translation to Marxist-Leninist theory and promote
a form of parteiliches Übersetzen [partisan translation]. Yet it appears that
such partisan translation was never defined or clearly implemented
as policy. Within the confines of Seven Seas itself, there may well
have been editorial interference to political ends; Gelbin, for instance,
described her job as follows: “The Chief Editor not only handles the
jobs specified in her contract, she also re-writes manuscripts for books
as require reworking, or such books as require the same, whether these
are written in English or are translations from the German” (cited in
Jany 19, in the original English). This mix of politics, of correct socialist
thinking, of “required” rewriting of manuscripts and books by zealous
editors, in the end led to the product known today as Divided Heaven,
the only English version of Wolf’s work to date.

As for the translation, Ankum’s and Koerner’s assessments are spot

on: the translation definitely provides a strong variation on the source
text, at times inexplicably altered, at times adjusted according to a
method of sorts. An analysis of the first few pages of the book and
any

random passage throughout shows that the narrative style of the

source text has been completely changed by the translation. This is
the most immediately striking difference: the often hesitant, uncertain,
questioning, subjective and self-analytical voice of the protagonist has
been replaced by that of a rather dry and dispassionate omniscient
narrator. The intimate, emotional tone of the source text, the intime

Term from Antoine Berman’s Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (Paris:

Gallimard, 1995).

xviii

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

Gefühle

aspect that the East German critics grudgingly admired, has

been flattened significantly, so that the English text reads like a neutral
report rather than the slow, painful, pondering memories around a
powerful love that has been disappointed and abandoned. The narrator’s
sly comments on the “new” society in which these events unfold are
often adulterated or simply eliminated. A wonderful example of this
dulling of the narrator’s position, which undermines Wolf’s feminist
position, comes very early on, in the third paragraph of the book, and
presages the many adjustments to follow: Wolf’s scepticism in the face
of science, and particularly in the face of arrogant scientific know-how
espoused by men, is well known.

An early and very direct expression

of this scepticism occurs here: Rita, the heroine, has just awoken. When
the nurse sees that her eyes are open, she addresses her; Rita turns
away in tears and cries all night and is unable to answer the doctor
when he questions her the next morning. The first line of paragraph
three then reads, “Aber der Arzt braucht nicht zu fragen, er weiss ja
alles, es steht auf dem Unfallblatt.” The important phrase here is “er
weiss ja alles,” boldly inserted in this opening sentence. Translated
literally, it says, “But the doctor doesn’t have to ask any questions, he
knows everything anyway, it’s all in the accident report.” The irreverent
implication is that the doctor is a know-it-all, an arrogant, overbearing
man who abuses the power vested in his (male) status. This implication
is carried by the German particle ja, which also transmits the narrator’s
wry criticism of this arrogance. The particle ja in question here is
difficult to translate, because on the one hand it calls for and assumes
the readers’ complicity with such an opinion, but on the other hand it
appears to be quickly mitigated by the next part of the sentence: “it’s
all in the accident report.” In the excerpt below, the 1965 translation
solves this problem by completely undoing this line, its emphasis, its
position at the beginning of a paragraph and also the implied criticism,
integrating it instead into a nondescript bit of information about the
doctor and his patient, “for he knew about her case”:

This scepticism was perhaps most emphatically expressed in the book Störfall,

written just after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

xix

Luise von Flotow

She wept all night, and she could not speak when the doctor came
to see her in the morning. Neither was there any need to speak,
for he knew about her case, and that she was a student and had
only been working in the factory during the holidays. (8)

This version excludes the doctor’s arrogance, and the narrator’s quick
and sassy mention of it, thereby wiping out Wolf’s nascent feminist
politics. Is this a result of “partisan translation” specific to socialist
realism? Who knows. It provides evidence of a deliberate stylistic
change that removes a telling ironic moment meant to set a certain
tone early in the text: Rita will have many more encounters with men
who dubiously (and often inadequately) fill positions of power, and this
wink from the narrator prepares the readers for the young woman’s
developing attitude.

The translation’s tendency to excise remarks and interjections by the

narrator that undermine what is meant to be obvious, or that question
excessive certainties and add an important ironic tone, runs throughout
the text. But it actually begins on the first page, in the prologue, where
four introductory paragraphs describe the city and its polluted industrial
environment, and refer obliquely to the frightening political tensions
that preceded and accompanied the building of the Berlin Wall. The
text is heavy with allusions that an East German reader in 1963 would
doubtless have picked up immediately. Again, it sets a tone: terror,
exhaustion, difficult living conditions, expressing the people’s fear in the
face of Cold War tensions, their irritation at the polluted and unpleasant
atmosphere they live in, and their withdrawal into the private realm:
“Die Luft legte sich schwer auf sie, und das Wasser—dieses verfluchte
Wasser, das nach Chemie stank, seit sie denken konnte—schmeckte
ihnen bitter.” Here, the point is “dieses verfluchte Wasser,” set off
in dashes and deploying the invective verflucht (damned). It carries a
subjective reaction to the vile physical and political environment of the
story. Predictably, the 1965 English translation reads as follows: “The
air weighed heavy, and the water, with its ugly smell of chemicals, tasted
bitter.” The invective “damned” has gone, as have the dashes that mark

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

the phrase as a personal aside. The strong and crude verb stinken has
been refined, and the fact that the personification of the air—which
lays, or drapes, itself suffocatingly over the people—has turned into
a mere adjective: “heavy.” A more literal translation might restore the
power of the line as follows: “The air laid itself heavily upon them, and
the water—that damned water that had reeked of chemicals for as long
as they could remember—tasted bitter.”

Koerner writes that the “deep emotional involvement” expressed in

the German version of this prologue is meant to “lead the readership
in a step-by step process toward the desired sense of identification
and agreement” with the heroine’s moral choice to stay in East
Germany. However, the various grammatical and stylistic changes
in the translation obliterate this function. In the prologue, the effect
of such translation is to annihilate the mood of the text before the
story even starts: “the ideological premises and the personal appeal
of the German text are missing. Lost are ideologically and culturally
significant connotations and symbols” (Koerner 218). These are lost not
only with the German adjective verflucht and the expressive proximity of
“dieses verfluchte Wasser” but also in the refusal to translate numerous
other words that imply forcefulness, movement, anger—which leaves
the prologue flaccid and grey.

While Koerner’s analysis focuses on the prologue as a strong example

of this kind of flattening of the text (217–220), many other descriptive
adjectives and adverbs have been censored or excised—for example, the
doctor who first examines Rita describes her as a “hübsches einfühlsames
Mädchen” (a pretty, sensitive girl). The 1965 translation refers to her
simply as a girl (9). Why? Was this a partisan attempt to perceive all
young women as the “socialist” same? In the initial flashback, Rita
sees Manfred, her love interest, for the first time standing “halbnackt”
(half-naked) at a pump, washing. The 1965 English version renders

Unwittingly, the translator or publisher may have undermined their purpose

here—creating a text that due to the many omissions and changes is rather unread-
able rather than a convincing example of socialist realism.

xxi

Luise von Flotow

this as “stripped to the waist” (11), which may describe him correctly,
but leaves out the immediate sexual attraction the man’s half-naked
body exercises on the nineteen-year-old girl. Worse, the descriptive
details that relay information about relationships are often simply cut:
when Rita moves into the city to study at the teacher training institute,
she lives with Manfred and has supper with his parents every night.
She is witness to and participates in a most fearful exercise of dinner-
table conversation where both family and societal politics engender
enormous stress and help explain the personality of the young man
she is with. Again, the cuts are drastic, turning the direct speech of
sour remarks, quarrels and tantrums into third-person accounts and
emptying the description of this family’s life of its emotional volatility
and terrible discomfort. Access to the German text allows a much
clearer understanding of Manfred’s character and of his subsequent
decision to abandon the country.

But enough of the drawbacks of the East Berlin Seven Seas version

of Christa Wolf’s first great novel: it is far easier to criticize a translation
than to produce one.

They Divided the Sky: The Translation of 2012
Interestingly, Suhrkamp Verlag, who holds the rights to Wolf’s oeuvre,
does not know about the Seven Seas translation.

It has presumably

been discounted. Nonetheless, I have tried to use some of Becker’s
translation to help with mine. Becker knew the system much better
than I ever will, and since much of Rita’s socialist development and
moralism stems from her work within the brigade at the factory and the
relationships she forms with some of the men—notably Meternagel—
this aspect of the system is important to understand. Rita’s decision
to abandon her love in West Berlin in order to return to the more
wholesome and honest labours of East Germany is a direct result
of her life within the system, and Joan Becker’s translation serves

E-mail communication with Petra Hardt, Suhrkamp Verlag, July 13, 2009.

xxii

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

to explicate some of its intricacies—those around worker politics in
industrial production in East Germany, for example. This brigade
has been slacking, as have the “new socialist” workers and bosses
in most of the new Germany, a situation that has been aggravated
by the Cold War atmosphere as skilled workers go west, managers
disappear overnight and nothing is stable. Specifically, Rita’s brigade
comrades are quite satisfied with the money they earn and are therefore
unwilling to increase production, since this would establish a new norm.
Meternagel, Rita’s foreman and confidante, and a stalwart socialist,
tries to mobilize them to work harder and more honestly, for the good of
the new socialist Germany. The details of this plan and of the brigade’s
resistance are arcane, mixing hard political “union-type” strategies and
personal grievances with feelings of shame about war experiences and
disdain for the almost feudal pre-war lives of some of the men, and
putting them all under pressure as the plant hovers on the verge of
bankruptcy due to lack of know-how, materials and skilled labour, poor
leadership, defections and systematic “pressuring”

by West Germany.

The brigade is one place where the new socialist Germany could, and
perhaps should, be developing; however, the stakes and strategies
are not always obvious fifty years after the fact. Becker’s translation
clarifies them, pitting the two main characters against each other in
unionist versus “new” moralist attitudes.

However, the translation obfuscates or simply deletes the details of

the other socialist event that Wolf builds into the text: the moment of
public criticism that occurs at the teachers’ college when it is discovered
that the entire family of one of the students has “gone West”—that is,
fled the country illegally—without the student reporting this. Mangold,
the accuser, a dogmatic socialist who cites chapter and verse of socialist
writings and insists on punishment for the student’s “crime,” produces
reams of spiteful and party-prone tirades when the class meets to deal
with the offender. This is conveniently deleted from Becker’s translation.

A term used by the plant director to describe the West’s refusal to sell them

required raw materials.

xxiii

Luise von Flotow

And to retain and reproduce in English the narrator’s summary that
he “sprach über die Parteilinie, wie Katholiken über die unbefleckte
Empfängnis” (he talked about the party line the way Catholics talk
about the Immaculate Conception) (130) was presumably beyond the
pale of Seven Seas editorial politics. It was deleted.

Perhaps the most important aspect of my translation (apart from

the fact that it follows and seeks to reproduce every detail and nuance
of the source text) is the title: They Divided the Sky. It is drawn from
the last pages of the book where the lovers prepare to separate at
the end of Rita’s day in West Berlin. Gazing at the sky (which has
been a constant figure throughout the story) as the long northern
twilight sets in, Manfred says, “Den Himmel wenigstens können
sie nicht zerteilen” (At least they can’t divide the sky) (187). The
reference to the generic “they” for the forces of evil and tension and
oppressive politics struck me as key. “They” come up throughout the
book to refer to all manner of powers that influence and control an
individual: for Manfred “they” are the forces of earlier Nazi politics
that affected his childhood, and “they” are also at the source of the
mismanagement and propagandistic idealism that have driven him into
exile. For Rita, “they” are less present as a discursive item, though
the term does appear at threatening moments, for instance, in the
discussions at college around the Stalinist Mangold and the fear the
villagers demonstrate when she visits. “They” are the invisible forces
evoked in the prologue—in the radio announcer’s neutral voice, in the
threats hanging over the land. Turning around Manfred’s “spöttisch”
(mocking) comment, which he makes at the very moment when the two
are about to wrench apart, forced to go their own ways in the East and
in the West, seemed a more appropriate expression of the book’s force
than the original translation Divided Heaven. Koerner, I think, would
agree: though she sees Rita’s decision to return and stay in the East as
“based on feeling and faith” (217), which might justify the reference
to “heaven,” Rita’s is actually a “Marxist’s choice, and the concept of
a spiritual heaven belongs to the Judaeo-Christian tradition” (217).
Again, tradition and “new” society are in conflict, as is the double

xxiv

ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TExT

meaning of the word “Himmel” in German (sky and heaven) with any
attempt to render this ambiguity in English. My solution points to the
unnamed and powerful political forces that caused many deep and
tragic post-1961 rifts between the two Germanies and in the lives of
several generations of individuals living there. Perhaps it also evokes
Wolf’s ongoing interest in how these nameless and irresponsible geo-
political forces affect “die Leute” (the regular folks) she alludes to in
her prologue and throughout the book.

Thanks to Ekemel in Paros, Greece, a translators’ and writers’ residence where I
was able to do much of this work in 2011. Also, thanks to the Canada Council for
the Arts for a travel grant to facilitate my travel to Greece in 2011. And thanks
to the Goethe Institute for supporting the translation.

Bibliography

Allert Dietrich and Hubert Wetzelt. 1963. “Die kritische Stimme der

Arbeiterklasse,” excerpts from Freiheit, 31.8.1963, 12.10.1963, and 30.11.1963.
In “Der geteilte Himmel” und seine Kritiker, Martin Reso. Halle: Mitteldeutscher
Verlag,1965. www.zum.de/Faecher/D/BW/gym/cwolf/rezens_ost.html (accessed
February 2012).

Ankum, Katharina von. 1993. “The Difficulty of Saying ‘I’: Translation and

Censorship of Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel.” Studies in 20

Century Literature

17 (2): 223–41.Gong, Seon-Ja. 2006. “Christa Wolf’s Roman Der geteilte Himmel im
Zusammenhang der historischen Entwicklung des sozialistischen Realismus,” http://
kgg.german.or.kr/kr/kzg/kzgtxt/100-12.pdf (accessed February 2012).

Jany, Rebecca. 2007. Rewriting as Cultural Politics: The Role and Function of the

Publisher Seven Seas.

Master’s thesis, published as e-book. http://www.grin.com/en/e-

book/89052/rewriting-as-cultural-politics-the-role-and-function-of-the-publisher
(accessed February 2012).

Koerner, Charlotte. 1984. “Divided Heaven—by Christa Wolf? A Sacrifice of

Message and Meaning in Translation.” Germanic Quarterly 57 (2): 213–30.

Wolf, Christa. 1963. Der geteilte Himmel. [1973] unabrid. ed. Munich: Deutscher

Taschenbuch Verlag.

———. 1965. Divided Heaven. Trans. Joan Becker. East Berlin: Seven Seas

Publishing.

lmost autumn, and after a cool rainy summer, the city was
plunged into seething heat, and breathing more heavily than

usual. Like a clenched fist its smoky breath came driving up out of
the hundred factory chimneys into the pure sky, but then lost its
impetus to move on. The people who had long grown accustomed to
this veiled sky suddenly found it strange and hard to tolerate, much as
they let out their sudden anxiety on the most trivial things.

The air weighed down on them, and the water—this damned water

that had reeked of chemicals for as long as they could remember—
tasted bitter. But the earth still carried them and would do so as long
as they were there.

And so we returned to our daily tasks that we had put aside for a

moment as we listened to the neutral voice of the radio announcer and
even more intently to the silent voices of very nearby dangers, which
are all deadly in these times. For the moment they had been averted.
A shadow had fallen over the city, but now it was hot again and lively,
birthing and burying, giving life and demanding it, every day.

And so we take up our conversations again: about the wedding,

should it be at Christmas or do we wait till spring? About the children’s
new winter coats, about the wife’s sickness and the new boss at work.
Who would have thought this could all be so important?

We get used to sleeping quietly again. We live fully, as though there

were too much of this strange stuff called life, as if it could never run
out.

they divided the sky

In those last August days of the year 1961 the girl called Rita Seidel
awoke in a small hospital room. She had not been asleep, she’d been
unconscious. As she opens her eyes it is evening and the clean white
wall, the thing she sees first, is in shadow. This is the first time she
has ever been here, but she knows immediately what happened to
her, today and before. She’s returning from far away. She still has a
vague feeling of great space, and depth. But the return from endless
darkness to limited light is terribly swift. Oh yes, the city. And closer
by, the factory, the factory yard. That point on the tracks where I
passed out. So someone must have stopped the two train cars, the
ones that were coming right at me, from the right and the left. They
were coming straight for me. That was the last thing.

The nurse steps up to the bed; she’s seen the girl wake up and

look around the room with a strangely quiet gaze. She speaks in low,
friendly tones. “You’re back,” she says brightly. That’s when Rita
turns her face to the wall and begins to cry, and cries all night, and
when the doctor comes to see her in the morning, she can’t answer
him.

But the doctor doesn’t need to ask any questions really, he knows

it all, it’s in the accident report. This Rita Seidel is a student, and was
only working in the factory during her vacation. There are certain
things she’s not used to—the heat in the train cars, for instance, when
they come out of the drying sheds. It’s forbidden to work in the cars
at high temperatures, but no one can deny the pressure is on. The
toolbox is heavy—sixty or seventy pounds. She dragged it as far as
the tracks where the cars were being shunted, and then she collapsed.
No wonder, seeing how delicate she is. And now she’s bawling again.
We know all about that too.

“It’s the shock,” says the doctor, and prescribes a tranquilizing

injection. But when days go by and Rita still can’t have people talk to
her, he becomes a little less sure of himself. He thinks how he’d like to
get his hands on the guy who put this pretty, sensitive girl in such a

Christa Wolf

state. For him it is clear that only love can make a young thing so sick.

Rita’s mother, summoned from her village, is helpless and can’t

provide any information about her daughter’s strange condition. “It’s
the studying,” she says, “I thought all along it would be too much.” A
man? Not to her knowledge. There was one, a chemistry doctor, but
he’s been gone half a year already. Gone? says the doctor. Well, yes,
you know, he’s over there.

Rita gets flowers: asters, dahlias, gladioli, bright spots of colour

in the pale hospital. No one is allowed to visit, until one evening a
man bringing roses refuses to be sent away. The doctor relents. A
repentant visitor could perhaps heal the sorrow at once. A short
conversation, under his surveillance. But there’s nothing about love
or forgiveness, you’d pick that up even if only in the glances. There’s
talk of train cars, surely not important, and five minutes later a polite
departure. The doctor learns that this was the young director of the
factory, and he calls himself an idiot. But he can’t help feeling that
this young man knows more about Rita than her mother, or than he
himself, her doctor, or any of the other visitors, who now arrive in
greater numbers. First of all there’s the carpenter from the Ermisch
Brigade, with all twelve of the rest of them showing up in turn; then
a dainty blond hairdresser, Rita’s girlfriend; and once the holidays
are over, the students from the teachers’ college and some girls from
Rita’s village. Clearly the patient did not suffer from being alone.

The people who come to visit all like her. They are gentle with her,

and their glances brush over her face, which is pale and tired but no
longer so sad. She cries less often now, usually in the evening. She
will learn to control her tears and despair, because she doesn’t indulge
her distress.

She tells no one that she’s afraid to close her eyes. She still sees the

two train cars, green and black and enormous. Once they’ve been
set in motion they run along the tracks; it’s a law and that’s what
they’re made for. They work. And where they meet, that’s where she
is. That’s where I am.

they divided the sky

And she cries again.

The sanatorium, says the doctor. She doesn’t want to talk. Let her cry
herself out, let her calm down, let it all heal up.

She could go by train, she’s made that much progress, but the

factory sends a car. Before she goes, she thanks the doctor and the
nurses. They all like her, and if she doesn’t want to talk, that’s her
decision. All the best.

Her story is dull, she thinks, in some ways even embarrassing.

Besides, it’s over. What she needs to struggle against now is this
insistent feeling: they’re coming right at me.

When he arrived in our village two years ago, I noticed him right
away. Manfred Herrfurth. He was staying at a relative’s place and
she wasn’t one to keep secrets. So I soon found out, as did everybody
else, that the young man was a chemist and that he wanted to spend
some time in the village to rest before writing his doctoral thesis,
which was then accepted “with distinction.” I saw it myself. But
that’s later.

Early every morning, when Rita pushed her bike up the hill from

the tiny house by the edge of the woods where she lived with her
mother and her aunt, up toward the main road, the chemist would be
standing half-naked by the pump in his cousin’s yard, running cold
water over his chest and back. Rita would gaze up at the blue sky,
into the clear morning light, trying to gauge whether it might provide
relaxation for a tired mind.

She was pleased with her village: red-roofed houses in small

groups, and woods, meadows, fields and sky in the right proportions;
you could hardly imagine it any better. A straight road led from the
gloomy municipal office into the setting fireball of the sun in the
evenings, and to the right and left of this road lay the small towns. At
the turn-off to her village, this chemist would be standing by the only
tree to be seen far and wide, a wind-worn willow, holding his bristle-

Christa Wolf

haired head into the evening breeze. The same longing that brought
her home to her village in the evenings took him up to the road that
led to the autobahn and, if you will, to all the roads in the world.

When he saw her coming, he would take off his glasses and begin

to carefully polish them with his shirttail. Later, she would see him
slowly walk toward the blue shimmering woods, a tall, rather skinny
figure, with arms that were too long, and a hard, narrow boy’s head.
He’s someone you’d like to knock off his high horse. You’d like to see
the way he really is. She feels tingly. That’s something you’d really
like to do, very much. Too much.

Sunday evening at the dance, she found that he looked older and

harder than she had imagined, and her courage waned. All evening
he watched as the village boys swung her around. The last dance
was beginning; they were already opening the windows and letting
draughts of fresh air fray the clouds of cigarette smoke draped over
the heads of those who were drunk and those who weren’t. That’s
when, finally, he came up to her and led her to the middle of the room.
He was a good dancer, but offhand, looking around at other girls and
making comments about them.

She knew that early the next day he would be returning to the city.

She knew he could very well say nothing, do nothing. That’s how he
is. Her heart tightened in anger and fear. Suddenly, straight into his
mocking, bored gaze, she said, “Is it hard to become the way you are?”

All he did was pinch his eyes shut.
Wordless, he took her by the arm and led her outside. They walked

down the village street in silence. Rita picked a dahlia that was
hanging over a fence. She saw a shooting star but didn’t make a wish.
I wonder how he’ll go about it, she thought.

And there they were, already at the garden gate. Slowly she took

the few steps to the door—oh, how her fear rose with every step! She
already had her hand on the door handle (it was ice cold and without
feeling, like a completely lonely life) when she heard him say in a
bored and mocking tone behind her, “Do you think you could fall in
love with someone like me?”

they divided the sky

“Yes,” Rita answered.
She wasn’t afraid anymore, not at all. She saw his face as a lighter

spot in the darkness, and he must have seen hers the same way. The
door handle grew warm from her hand, from the minute they stood
there. Then he cleared his throat quietly and went. Rita stayed by the
door, quite still, until she could no longer hear his steps.

That night was sleepless, and in the morning she started waiting

for his letter, amazed at this turn of events but unsure about their
outcome. The letter came a week after the village dance—the first
letter in her whole life, after all those official letters at the office that
didn’t concern her at all.

“My dear brown miss,” Manfred called her. He described

everything that was brown about her, in great detail and with self-
deprecation; he wrote about all the many ways this had surprised
him who, for a long time, hadn’t found anything surprising about
girls anymore.

Rita, who was nineteen and quite often dissatisfied with her inability

to fall in love like other girls, did not have to learn how to read such a
letter. Suddenly it was clear; the sole purpose of these entire nineteen
years of wishes, actions, thoughts, dreams had been to prepare her for
this precise moment, to read this particular letter. Suddenly there was
much accumulated experience that wasn’t even her own. Like every
girl, she was sure no one before her and no one who would come after
her had ever felt or would ever feel what she was feeling.

She stepped to the mirror. She was blushing to the roots of her hair,

and smiling, in a new modest way, in a new superior way. She knew
there was enough about her that pleased him, and that would always
please him.

Since the age of five Rita has known that you have to expect sudden
changes in life. She vaguely remembers her early childhood in a
bluegreen hilly land, her father’s face behind the magnifying glass,

Christa Wolf

the fine brush in his hand rapidly painting tiny precise patterns onto
mocha cups that Rita never saw anyone drinking from.

Her first long journey coincided almost exactly with the end of the

war, and took her forever out of the Bohemian forests among a group
of sad and angry people. Her mother knew of her father’s sister in a
village in central Germany. One evening they knocked on her door,
like survivors of a shipwreck. They were let in, were given a bed and a
table, a narrow room for the mother and small whitewashed box room
for Rita. And no matter how often her mother repeated “I will never
stay here,” they stayed, tied to the mad hope that one day news of her
father, who was missing in action, would reach the safe little place.

As hopes receded and were replaced with sorrow and then painful

memories, the years went by. Rita learned to read and write in this
village, she learned the counting rhymes of the local children and the
traditional tests of courage at the river. Her aunt was dry and precise;
her life, bound to this house, had provided her with great joy and
great sorrow, sucked every ember of yearning out of her and finally
also every last vestige of envy of others. She insisted on her rights as
the owner of the two rooms and the little box room, but she loved Rita
in her particular way.

For her mother, sharing a hearth and her child was a greater test

of strength than she let on. Rita was affectionate and friendly to
everyone, and everyone was friendly to her, and thought they knew
her. But what really made her happy or sad, she revealed to no one.
The young teacher who later came to the village saw that she was
often lonely. He gave her books and took her along on his walks in
the country. And he knew how much it cost her to leave school and
go to work in that office. But she stubbornly stayed with her decision.
To support her, her mother had worked in the fields, and later in the
textile plant. Now that she was sick it was her daughter’s obligation to
care for her. “You’re going to have a few difficulties in your life,” the
teacher said. He was angry with her.

Rita was seventeen years old at the time. Stubbornness serves

a purpose when you have to go against yourself, but it doesn’t last

they divided the sky

forever.  Making  a  courageous  and  difficult  decision—making  a
sacrifice,  for  instance—is  not  the  same  as  sitting  in  a  narrow  little
office  day  after  day,  alone.  How  many  employees  did  the  country
office of a large insurance company actually need to write down lists
of numbers every day and use the same words to remind the same late
customers of their responsibilities? Bored, she saw cars arrive that
managers would get out of, always the same ones, who would emit
praise or criticism. Bored, she saw them drive off again.

The enthusiastic, pallid young teacher had once encouraged her in

her life expectations: she’d hoped for the extraordinary—extraordinary
joys and sufferings, extraordinary events and knowledge. The country
was restless, there was a feeling of commotion (she didn’t notice this,
she was used to it). But who would help her lead just a tiny portion
of this enormous current into her own small, important life? Who
would give her the strength to correct a bad, blind coincidence? She
was shocked to notice how soon she got used to the one-dimensional
life she was leading.

Again it was autumn. For the third time she would watch the leaves

fall off the two enormous linden trees in front of her office. Sometimes
the life of these trees seemed more familiar than her own. Often she
thought: I will never get to see anything new through this window. In
ten years the mail will still be delivered here, on the dot of noon, and
my fingertips will be dusty dry and I’ll wash my hands before I even
know it’s time for lunch.

During the day, Rita worked; at night she read novels, and a feeling

of being lost spread through her.

Then she met Manfred, and all at once she saw things she had never

seen before. This year the trees were losing their leaves in fireworks
of colour, and the mail sometimes came a terrible few minutes late.
A taut and reliable chain of ideas and yearnings linked her to life
again. She was quite happy during this period, even if she didn’t see
Manfred for weeks. She no longer knew what boredom was.

Then he wrote he would be coming at Christmas. Rita met him at

the train, although he’d asked her not to.

Christa Wolf

“Oh,” he said, “the little brown miss in a brown fur hat. Like in a

Russian novel.”

They walked the few steps to the bus stop and paused for a moment

at a shop window. It quickly became clear that when you correspond
in writing you can still be formal with each other but slowly grow
intimate; in person this is much harder.

“See,” he said finally, and formally, and for a second she was afraid

she might already have disappointed him forever, “this is what I
wanted to avoid. Standing in mushy snow, staring at watering cans
and babies’ baths, and not knowing how things will go on.”

“But why?” Rita said. She learned very quickly when she was with

him. “We’ll just let the novel take its course.”

“For instance?” he said, curious.
“For instance, the female protagonist now says to the male

protagonist: Come, we’ll get on the blue bus that’s just coming around
the corner there. I’ll take you to your place now, and later you can
meet my people who hardly know you exist and who have to get
to know you so they can invite you for the Christmas goose. Is that
enough plot development for today?”

She met his gaze in the shop window. “Enough,” he said, surprised.

“More than enough. You did that really well.”

They laughed and got on the blue bus that stopped at the window,

and she took him to his cousin’s place, and later he accompanied her
to her people, who hardly knew he existed, and who took minutes to
study him in silence. Very masculine, the aunt thought, but too old
for the child. A chemistry doctor, the mother thought. If he takes her,
she won’t have to worry again, and I can die in peace. And they said
simultaneously, “Will you come for the Christmas goose?”

When Rita thinks about it today, Christmas in the snowy village—

the snow had come on Christmas Eve, as it should—and them walking
quietly down the empty village street, arm in arm, she asks herself:
When was it ever like that again? When will it be like that again? The
two halves of the earth fit together exactly, and they were walking
along the seam, as though it were nothing at all.

they divided the sky

At her door, Manfred pulled a narrow silver bracelet from his

pocket and gave it to her, more awkwardly than he had ever given a
girl a gift. Rita had already understood that she would have to be the
more adept of the two. She pulled her hands out of the thick woolen
mitts, which dropped into the snow, and laid them on Manfred’s
cold cheeks. He held quite still and looked at her. “Warm, and soft,
and brown,” he said, and gently blew the hair off her face. His eyes
swelled, and he looked away.

“Go ahead, look at me,” she said quietly.
“Like this?” he said.
“Like that,” she answered.
His gaze was a blow to her heart. All evening she had to dissemble

her trembling hands, and then he ended up noticing and smiling, and
she blamed him for smiling even though she had to keep on looking
at him. She was a little too lively, but her aunt and her mother had
never experienced or had long forgotten the feelings of a girl trying
to conceal the torments of love. They were worried about the success
of the roast.

Later, they raised their glasses and toasted each other. “To your

exam,” her mother told Manfred. “I hope it goes well.” “To your kind
parents,” was the aunt’s attempt. She hadn’t yet learned enough about
the young man.

“Thank you” was his dry response. Still today, Rita could laugh out

loud about the look on his face. He was twenty-nine years old then
and was definitely not suited for the role of the loving son-in-law. He
said, “Last night I dreamed we were celebrating Christmas at home.
I dreamed my father raised his glass to me. And—in my dream!—I
grabbed all the plates and glasses I could get my hands on and threw
them at the wall.”

“Do you really have to frighten people like that?” Rita asked him

later at the garden gate.

He shrugged, “How did I frighten them?”
“Your father … ”
“My father is a German man. In the first war he prepared for the

Christa Wolf

second by losing an eye. He’s still doing that today: sacrifice an eye
and keep your life.”

“You’re not being fair.”
“If he leaves me alone, I leave him alone. But he’s not allowed to

toast me, not even in a dream. They don’t realize that we’ve all grown
up without parents.”

They spent New Year’s at a small inn in the foothills nearby. In the
afternoons they skied down the soft white slopes, and in the evenings
they celebrated the beginning of the new year, 1960, with the other
guests at the inn, all young people.

The nights they spent together.
Rita discovered how much this cold, ironic person yearned to be

warm and intimate. She wasn’t surprised, but she cried a little, from
relief. Muttering, he wiped her eyes with his fingers, she drummed
her fists on his chest, quietly at first, then angrily.

“Hey,” he said quietly, “what’s all this drumming?”
She cried harder. She’d been alone too.
Later, she turned his face to hers and sought his eyes in the snowlight

that came through the window.

“Listen,” she said. “What if you hadn’t danced that last dance with

me that night? And what if I hadn’t asked you that strange question?
And what if you’d kept quiet when I was already at the door?”

“Hard to imagine,” he said. “But I planned it all beforehand.”

That was how he was: arrogant to the very end and hard to take.
Once, on one of the few Sundays they spent together, she asked, “I’m
not the first woman you’ve liked, am I?”

She fiddled with the buttons of his jacket, he held her hands and

thought, She can actually call herself a “woman” and be like all the
others! He was moved, even as he had felt unsettled earlier that she
was different from all the others.

they divided the sky

“No,” he said earnestly. “Not the first one.”
Much later she asked lightly, “Have you had lots of women?”
He’d quietly watched her ponder and worry over this question.

Then he admitted, “Several.”

She looked up at him, uncertain, but he wasn’t joking. “Oh well,”

she said after a while, “you’re getting me used to all kinds of things.”

He raised her chin and waited for her to look at him.
“Hey,” he said, “will you promise me something? Never try to get

used to something impossible for my sake, all right?”

She pressed her head against his chest, let him stroke her hair like

a child’s, swallowed and sniffed, and feeling consoled, thought, what
impossible things could ever come from you?

The weeks between Sundays sometimes stretched out thick and
viscous; sometimes a few tears fell on his letters. Once, when her
mother asked, “Are you happy, child?” she was surprised.

Happy? She felt alive like never before.
Manfred, who’d got to know many kinds of women and many kinds

of love, knew better than Rita herself what was special about her
love. He had never felt bound to a woman because of shared nights.
He approached every relationship with the coldness of inevitable
separation, and each time, he became more indifferent. This girl had
tied him with the first word she spoke. He’d been touched; in an
almost improper, shameful way he’d been wounded to the quick. For
a few indecisive weeks he’d tried to free himself, until he realized it
was beyond him.

He was suspicious. He tested Rita in different ways. She passed

every test, smiling and unaware. He was won over because she wasn’t
conscious of her attractions, which he discovered for them both. He
was angry that she awakened hopes he had buried. Then he hesitantly
resigned himself to hope.

“My little brown miss,” he said, “unfortunately you are a child, and

unfortunately I am an old man. This cannot have a happy ending.”

“Oh,” she replied, “I’m used to people thinking they’re smarter than

Christa Wolf

I am. But I am smart enough not to let go of a man who has seduced
me.”

“I am your ruination,” he said.
“Better you than someone else,” she said.
That’s how things were. Life stretched out in front of them, and

they had to make decisions about it. Everything was possible, except
that they lose each other. That was impossible.

In early March a teacher recruitment agent arrived in Rita’s region.
He was a tall, gaunt, dark-haired man who carried everything he
needed with him in a large briefcase. Since there was no workspace
available, he was assigned room in Rita’s office and she was asked to
help him with secretarial work.

She watched him with interest. He would spend the whole day

on the road, sometimes calling to say where he was. In the evening
he would return with a few questionnaires that prospective teacher
training students had filled out, which he would hand to Rita, with
comments. “One really ought to have a haircut more often” on the
resume from the little blond hairdresser at the corner. Or, “Foremen
are my natural enemies; they won’t give up a single one of their men.
But now I’ve even fished a foreman.”

Then he would hang his jacket on a hook and suddenly have

lots of time. Relaxed, he would hear about the angry remarks local
administrators made about him—they actually came to Rita’s office
to complain about the problems they had finding workers, as though
she could help. Erwin Schwarzenbach never bothered to justify
himself. He sat down, smoked, and talked to Rita about all kinds of
things—she was surprised to see how interesting even the newspaper
got, when he read it—and then he would ask her about all kinds of
people she knew and write down their names.

Rita got home late every evening, and grew more and more excited

the longer Schwarzenbach stayed. For the first time she saw a
higher power reaching into people’s lives, the little hairdresser’s, the
foreman’s, the local city manager’s. Him too? she sometimes thought

they divided the sky

doubtfully. And her? Maybe she didn’t have enough imagination to
see these ordinary people outside of their usual environments. Why
did it take someone like the sensible Schwarzenberg to come from
far away for her to imagine ordinary people capable of all kinds of
extraordinary things?

“Twenty,” Erwin Schwarzenberg said on his second last evening.

“Not bad for one small area.”

“Nineteen,” Rita corrected him. She concealed a light tugging

disappointment. Wherever did that come from?

“Twenty,” he said, and matter-of-factly handed her a questionnaire.

It was still blank but he’d written her name in the first space.

Me too? she thought, and was not as surprised as she might have

been.

“What are you thinking?” Schwarzenbach asked her after a while,

during which the room had been very quiet.

Rita thought: I’ve always wanted younger brothers and sisters.

Manfred, she thought. He’s studying in the same town. She thought
about trains and noisy streets; suddenly she remembered her teacher’s
pale face—where was he now? She thought about school books, city
lights, and the smell of children, and last of all she saw a class of
children walking from the woods to her village singing, “I love to go
a-wandering.”

“I’m afraid,” Rita said. Schwarzenbach nodded. He sometimes had

a very attentive look. He really wants me, she thought. “I can’t do
it.”

“Yes, you can,” Schwarzenbach said. “You know that. Who else

could, if you can’t? So just write out your resumé, please, and I can
head home a day early and make up for the evenings I’ve spent wooing
you like a lover.”

Rita did not usually rush things, but really important decisions she

made in seconds. As she looked for her pen, she was quickly able
to turn this coincidence that would change her life into a necessity.
Hadn’t she been waiting long enough? Was this not meant to happen

Christa Wolf

sooner or later? Would it not bind her even more closely to Manfred,
without whom she would never—ever—have had the courage to
make such a decision?

As she wrote she noticed, somewhat embarrassed, that her entire

life could be summarized in half a page. Every year, she thought, there
should be at least one more sentence worth adding to your resume.
That’s how it’s going to be from now on, she thought.

Erwin Schwarzenbach skimmed over the questionnaire and added

it to the others in his briefcase. “We’ll see each other again,” he said as
he left. He was a lecturer at the teachers’ college.

The two hours Rita spent before she got home, and during which
all the commotion she’d expected broke out around her, were among
the strangest of her life. Was this still the same day, the day she had
headed towards earlier that morning as she pedalled down the country
road? Was this still the same little town, overgrown with grass, the
town she knew wearily, from the inside out? Rita greeted people left
and right, the same people she met every day; this time she turned
around to look at them.

They knew nothing. Not a single person except her and the man in

the departing train knew anything. It was possible; it was possible that
someone could just come along and say, leave all that. Start something
new. And if this was possible, then any fairy tale wonder was possible,
any great deed. This dreary little town could wake up and find itself
hurled from the edge of the world into the centre. Who knew what
important questions might one day be decided in its small offices?

Rita rode down the straight road, and before her the last light of

March slowly withdrew behind the woods. However many more
times she would ride down this road, she was taking her leave now.

Shortly before darkness fell, the countryside that flowed off in

waves on either side grew strangely clear. The white patches of snow
on the brown sea of earth were crisply outlined. Tomorrow the first
warmer breeze from the west would dissolve the contours and let new,

they divided the sky

harder ones appear. Snowdrops were waiting millimeters below the
surface. Rita smiled. How well she knew all this! It was a part of her.
Thank you for every bird call, she thought, for the cool water in the
stream, for the morning sun and the shade of the trees in summer.

She rode faster. She didn’t notice her legs, she knew nothing about

them, they were doing their work. But the wind! The wind grows
stronger the faster you go. She was glowing. Who said she was weak!
Yes, I will go. We’ll see what I can make of this …

She looked beautiful as she came in the door, hot from the ride

and shining from within. Her mother’s response was fear, as usual,
since for her anything new was always worse than the old. When Rita
finished telling her story, her mother burst into tears, but as always
tried to hide her own sorrow. What would Manfred say to all this, she
moaned. She had never felt as much anxiety about her own marriage
as she did about this relationship of her daughter’s, which she couldn’t
really warm to but that she yearned for.

The aunt, indignant at Rita’s high-handed decision, went to her

room in silence.

“Nobody understands,” Rita wrote to Manfred after tearing up a
long, confused letter. “I want to become a teacher. I’m not going to
say anything more. Do you understand?”

He responded thoughtfully that apparently it was impossible to

know what she would decide from one day to the next. Maybe he
would learn that later on. By the way, she could live with him, or
rather, at his parents’. “But you won’t see it through to the end, my
little brown miss; believe me, you don’t know life.”

Christa Wolf

Manfred knew exactly: there is a kind of efficiency that leaves the
efficient person cold. Only now that he couldn’t stay cold any longer,
he wondered what was actually wrong with him. When did it all start,
this indifference I felt toward everything? he asked himself. Why did
no one tell me? Why did I have to wait for this girl to come along and
ask, is it hard to become like you?

There was a new intensity to the way he now dipped his synthetic

brushes into different-coloured liquids whose composition he
constantly changed, subjecting them to the most complex tests, and
then selecting the most beautiful and most resistant dyes for the next,
even harder, test.

His work was nearing its end.
Just a short time earlier he hadn’t been able to imagine what would

come next. What should he wish for when he reached this point? What
new goal could he set himself? Now, all of a sudden, one plan followed
closely upon the next. He saw factory halls, smelly steamy places that
were beautiful in his imagination because they were implementing
his method for dyeing fibers. He saw himself in a white lab coat
inspecting the vats, checking the samples, correcting the composition
of the dyes. He was valued because he had the knowledge and wasn’t
arrogant. Yes, all of a sudden he saw modesty, a quality he had long
thought stupid, as desirable.

That’s when he got her letter: I’m going to become a teacher. Why

do that? he thought. Now? And without asking me? Will that mean
exercise books and pupils to tutor and complaining parents when I
come home from work, and behavioural problems to discuss at night?
He felt a twinge of jealousy: she won’t be living for me alone.

She won’t see it through to the end, he thought. Sensitive as she

is! She’ll get some experience, and then she’ll have had enough.
And that’s what he wrote her. She was already forcing him to make
compromises. His irritation made him somewhat short-sighted.

He had to make sure she would stay close by. And so he dryly

they divided the sky

reported Rita’s existence to his mother and saw to it that she got his
room. He’d moved into the attic room long ago.

His mother fiercely resisted taking in the girl who was stealing her

son. He knew in advance what she would say, and uncurious about
her weepy face, he watched her coldly until she was finished.

“I have my reasons,” he said. “Maybe she can stand it here with us

for a while.”

“The way you talk!” she objected. Then she quickly lowered her

eyes under his gaze. She was used to him being closed and resistant,
inflexible in regard to everything that was important to him. She was
thankful for the small mercy that for some time—ever since he had
stopped caring about her and her husband—the hate-filled outbursts
between father and son had ended.

On a cool April Sunday, when she moved in, Manfred showed his
future wife his parents’ home. “The coffin of my life. Divided into
living coffin, dining coffin, sleeping coffin, cooking coffin.”

“Why?” Rita asked. She was a little intimidated by this elegant side

street, the older villa, the dark, heavy rooms.

“Because nothing to do with life has ever happened here,” he said.

“As long as I can remember. Nothing.”

“But your room is bright,” Rita consoled herself. She had to take

care that her decision didn’t fall apart here, shattered against these
indifferent old pieces of furniture.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll show you where we’ll actually be

living.”

They stood at the door of his attic room, and Manfred watched her

from the corner of his eye to see if she would notice what this untidy
place meant for him.

“Ah,” she said, and let her eyes roam slowly: the writing desk under

the small window, the couch, the shelving with the rows of untidy
books, the few bright-coloured prints on the walls, some chemistry
equipment in the corners. She never asked questions, and now too

Christa Wolf

she looked at him calmly, maybe a little too intensely, and said, “I
suppose I will always be responsible for the flowers.”

He pulled her to him. “You’re a good person,” he said earnestly.

“You are as good as a girl can be. That’s why I’m going to concoct the
best salads up here in the evenings, and in the winter we’ll make toast
on the stove.”

“Yes,” Rita said, solemnly. “That’s how it will be.”
Then they burst into laughter, and loved each other, and later they

lay exhausted and waited for the night. Spring arrived with the sharp
whistle of a locomotive fading out far across the river flats. The little
room with all its stuff and its two inhabitants turned into a gondola,
part of an enormous swing that someone had attached to the blueblack
dome of the sky, and that swept back and forth with broad, quiet
movements you could only feel if you closed your eyes.

So they closed their eyes.
Up they went to the first stars of the evening, then the gondola

brushed past the lights of the city, and swung them back through
the night toward the yellow arc of the moon, slim as a breath. When
they came back more stars had come out, and there were more lights
on earth, and it went on and on until they got dizzy and held tight to
each other and caressed and silently reassured each other, as lovers
do everywhere.

Gradually the lights went out down below, and the stars dimmed

up above, and at last the moon paled in the reddish grey light of dawn.
They stood side by side at the window. The wind blew in. They could
see a piece of the city from above, a few trees, a strip of the river, and
the way it all slowly emerged from the night.

They too emerged from the night, looked at each other, and

smiled.

they divided the sky

Did the smiles stay? Weren’t they just too precarious? Would they be
sacrificed to shrill laughter, the sign of unconquerable solitude?

The smiles stayed, for a long time, even behind a light veil of tears.

A wonderful secret signal held fast between us: Are you there? And
the answer? Where else would I be?

The sanatorium is white, like grief itself. When Rita moves in, it is

still warm and summery outside but it is the kind of summer that can
drain your courage. One breath of air, and the leaves drop. What’s the
point of all this magic just before things close down?

Rita smiles weakly at the new doctor’s quiet reserve. Is he really not

curious? She’ll see. There’s time. It’s not important where she spends
these weeks. There are probably important things, somewhere. She
will probably come across them again one day. Now, in the evenings,
she takes the small glass that smells of ether from the nurse’s hand,
gulps it down, hands it back, and waits for sleep to come, certain that
it will come and last till morning.

Whenever Rita opens her eyes there is a green meadow covered

with red poppies. A dainty woman walks along the foot of a cliff
where the red is particularly intense; she has a little parasol in her
hand and a child at her side that is dressed in the same kinds of frills
and skirts as she is. Higher up and farther away, there are a few other
people who seem to have nothing else to do but view the meadow and
the poppies. In the background, the meadow is edged by a row of
trees and there is a small, square white house with a red roof, the kind
that children draw in their sketchbooks. Clouds that everyone knows
from their childhood and that you seldom see later on in life move
across the sky, which is a natural washed-out blue. And the people
in the picture don’t look up; they miss the opportunity to see these
clouds, and it’s too late now because they’ve been dead for almost a
hundred years. So has the artist, but he saw everything.

I can move to the window and see the sky and the clouds above the

tall old trees of the park as much as I want. That is the advantage of
being alive; maybe not a great advantage, but still.

Christa Wolf

Much as Rita thinks about it, she has never in her life seen such

a meadow full of poppies (and she knows meadows!). At first she
detests the painting because of its affable sweetness, but then she asks
herself, Why should meadows and trees not have looked different a
hundred years ago? Same as that dainty, pallid woman? Then she
notices that the picture changes with the light of the day, and she likes
that. She knows: that’s possible. That’s right.

That’s what so amazed her when she first came to the city. She

hadn’t known any cities, except to go shopping or for a visit. She
was curious about everything. Her heart beat faster as she stepped
out to explore the theater of her future adventures. She wanted to be
perseverant, unafraid and thorough.

She noticed: here are several cities in one! They’ve grown in rings

around each other, like an old tree. She wandered through the rings of
streets and covered centuries in only hours. She liked the city centre,
whose design did not accommodate all the traffic or the crush of
people, and that burst at the seams when the evening rush of heading
home, going shopping, and leaving work started. But she liked that
and let herself drift along and get pushed by the crowd or stood in a
corner and watched as the lights came on all around.

She was also a little afraid. Nobody pays attention to anybody

here; how easily you could get lost, she thought. In the tram, young
people keep their seats and let old women stand; the cars splatter
your legs with the dirt from the street; in the shops people slam doors
in each other’s faces as they rush off, and in the department stores
loudspeakers summon the salesgirls to the manager’s office …

She wandered along the long, faceless rows of workers’ housing;

she read the plaques at a number of street corners: “Comrade … died
here in the street battles of March 1923.” Many a street suddenly
acquired a year and a face.

The two hundred thousand people did not live there because it

was particularly pleasant. You could see that in their faces: a mix of
tension, craftiness, doggedness and fatigue marked them. Probably
nobody came here voluntarily. What was it that forced them?

they divided the sky

For twenty cents, Rita climbed to the top of the tall, old tower on

the central square; she stayed up there for a long time, scanning the
distance for the range of hills near her home. But she couldn’t find it.
The wind drove directly into the city across the wide, treeless plain.
Any child could tell where the wind was coming from by the smell in
the air: chemicals, or malt coffee, or brown coal. A thick haze hung
over everything, industrial fumes that were hard to breathe. The
four points of the compass were marked by the outlines of factory
chimneys, chemical plants massed like fortresses before the city.
None of this is old, not even a hundred years. Not even the dispersed
light, filtered through dirt and soot, that illuminates this landscape is
old: one or two generations, perhaps.

I don’t pay attention to premonitions, but as I stood up there on my

tower, I knew I would be sad from time to time. A hundred thousand
faces, if I wanted. Among the hundred faces in my village, I never felt
so alone.

It can still happen today that a young woman comes to a big city for

the first time in her life.

For a few seconds a slanting sunbeam lit up her tower, and her

with it. She saw the clouds moving more quickly. The April wind
was rapidly clearing the sky. Soon the sun’s rays would reach into the
streets below. She climbed down the many steps and slowly walked
back to the old green-hung street with the villas.

Manfred watched her expectantly as she arrived. She sighed.

“There’s no spot that isn’t already taken. Only at the top of the tower
… ”

He laughed, and then went with her. He had the key, called memory,

to all the strange, boring, closed streets and squares. He opened the
city up for her and she saw that it had hidden beauty and wealth.

As Manfred walked with her, he dipped into his childhood and

youth. He cleansed himself of fears and anxieties, of bitterness and
shame that were still with him from those partly unconscious years.
And the things he didn’t express directly—not everything can be
said—came undone, and he felt himself grow lighter than he had been

Christa Wolf

in a long time. Later, he sometimes thought about this: the spring
time city, washed clean by quick bursts of rain, Rita’s face before the
gray, discoloured facades of the houses, a skimpy park, the shadows
of crowds hurrying by.

And the river.
They were in the poor part of town that bordered the finer

neighbourhood where his parents lived, slipping over crumbling
wooden staircases that led from one dark inner courtyard to the
next, and creeping through damp, dry-rot infested passages laid
out with shards of roof tiles trampled into the dirt—his childhood
Indian trail—and suddenly, surprisingly for Rita, they arrived at the
river. Since Manfred’s childhood, it had become more useful and less
friendly: it now carried, from the chemical plant onward to far beyond
the city limits, puffs of white foam that smelled foul and poisoned the
fish. Today’s children could not even contemplate learning to swim in
the river, although its banks were smooth and edged with grass and
willows.

But the river valley remained the access route for every season.

Through this valley winter blew its frosty breath into the empty
city streets, and now spring was gathering its strength here. It had
already added the first tinge of yellow blossom to the green bushes,
and tomorrow it would conquer this earnest, busy city and flower
shamelessly in its gardens.

And the river had not forgotten how to reflect people’s faces if, at

some quiet spot, they leaned out far enough and, holding their breath,
looked down into the flowing water.

Manfred had never seen a woman’s face reflected next to his in

the river. It moved him to see this for the first time. He watched Rita
gently help a small black beetle back onto its legs, then pulled her up
toward him, and gazed at her, as though for the first time, until she felt
embarrassed. He shook his head, as though in amazement.

In the quickly gathering twilight they followed the path to the

point where the river left the city at the last house. They turned back.
Suddenly they felt like being among people again. They drifted into

they divided the sky

a small movie house, narrow as a tea cloth, straight into a children’s
show. The old machines creaked and the picture wobbled, but that
didn’t bother the children, and they accepted it too.

The face of the young boy on the screen caught their attention. It

was intelligent, made for sorrow and joy but not evil or stupidity; it
was clever, disappointed, desperate, joyous. It could be transformed
by dirt and hunger, by obsequiousness, baseness and hatred; it could
retain its purity and, along with knowledge, also acquire kindness. It
was worth every effort and every sacrifice.

At the end, when the boy, trembling with anticipation, rode off into

the world with his parents on the back of a drafty old truck and in
the middle of the fiercest winter, the children’s stored-up tension was
released in a polyphonous sigh. The lights came on. Manfred saw
that Rita’s face was wet with tears and that she was still not able to
control them.

For the second time that day he shook his head over her. “Oh, you

child,” he said, almost sorrowfully, “whatever am I going to do with
you?”

Overnight the weather changed its mind. The wind came from the
east, grew into a gale, and in the morning it looked like frost.

It was Rita’s first day in the factory. “Tally-ho!” Manfred called, as

she pulled the door shut. He kept making fun of her but she insisted
on keeping the promise she’d made to Schwarzenbach (“these days
a teacher has to know a big industrial plant”). Manfred’s father had
found her the job; he was director of sales in the factory that produced
train carriages.

She was timid and had no one to encourage her. And so she gave

herself the order: don’t look left or right, and get moving. Keep your
eyes open. If you make a mistake, make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Don’t let anyone know how you feel. Just decide to do this on your
own.

Christa Wolf

Along the way she realized that the weeks ahead would not be like

anything she’d ever known. Her life in the village was growing quite
faint, distant and cool. She had no time for regrets. She adjusted her
step to the hasty rhythm of early morning. She stood at the tram stop
as the first drab, cold, gray crept across the sky. She was shivering
and happy to push her way into the full tram. Then she counted the
stops until it was time to get out.

She joined the crowds of workers streaming into the plant. The

wind blew straight at them and scared up the dust as they came down
the long, bare street lined with poplars that led to the factory gate.
The workers held their briefcases across their faces. They greeted
each other with gestures and calls, walking along in twos and threes,
talking. Only Rita walked alone among all those groups. She turned
up the collar of her coat and held it tight with one hand, so that it
half covered her face. She didn’t want to see any surprised or curious
glances.

At the entrance to the plant she took one look back. The sun was just

reaching the tips of the poplars and making a few new silvery leaves
glisten. Today the sun and the wind will do their work on them.

Inside the factory gates, the seasons were dedicated to production.
It wasn’t a gate she entered, but a rather narrow door, and there

she was: in a factory yard, the kind everyone knows these days, even
if they’ve never been inside such a place, and still the new experience
hadn’t started. I will never find my way, she thought, I’ll get lost every
morning; better come ten minutes early. She asked for directions to
the Ermisch brigade. An older man didn’t know (“I’m new here … ”),
and then others came up. They argued: Don’t go telling the lady the
most complicated way to get there, just say how she’s most likely to
get there! So, listen up …

Just as I thought, I’ll never find them!
She memorized a few landmarks along the way: leave the notice

board to the left (Carriage builders! Work to fulfill the plan for March!—
March? Why March?), cross a triangular patch of yard, then enter
the deep throat of an enormous building full of half-finished, dull-

they divided the sky

grey carriages, leave the welding shop with its flying sparks to the
right, walk through a new building and up some wooden steps that
lead to the workshops of the carpenter brigades.

So far she’d been brave, but then she was suddenly there, facing

the entire brigade, twelve men in a circle around her, and even Günter
Ermisch, the foreman, a man known for quick decisions, had no idea
what to do with her. She thought angrily: What do I need this for?!
Schwarzenbach’s nonsense. I’m going to think this over again.

The men made no jokes, but their faces showed that they were

thinking some up for later. These days Rita hardly recognizes herself
in the awkward person she was then, helpless and lost among all those
people. In less than a year, the little greenhorn who still smelled of the
family nest has become a wide-eyed young woman, learning to look
life in the face, laboriously and for the long term, learning to grow
older but not harder.

Ermisch, a wiry, black-haired guy in his mid-thirties, quickly went

through the people in his brigade, and then assigned the girl to Rolf
Meternagel and Hänschen. A brilliant decision, they all realized.
Rolf, with grown-up daughters of his own, was too old for Rita and
was obsessed with his work, and Hänschen was far too young and not
enterprising enough, and to be honest, not too bright either. The men
grinned as the three of them set off, not completely comfortable with
the new situation.

There was little talk over the first days. It soon became obvious that

Rita didn’t have the faintest idea of the processes involved in the work.
They had to huddle down beside her in the narrow compartments and
corridors of the carriages, and in the dangerous final crush as each
carriage came off the line, and show her every move. It would have
been faster to do it alone, which she realized. But that seemed to be
exactly what Hänschen liked. There were lots of others who were
quicker than he was; now, for the first time, he could show someone
else what to do. “Installing pressure frames looks pretty simple,” he
said. “But you have to know what you’re doing.” It made him work
faster than usual.

Christa Wolf

After a few days, Rolf Meternagel, who never stopped moving,

began calling Rita “kid.” She shyly called him “Herr Meternagel,” and
began to trust his gaunt face. She watched closely when he showed
her: this is how you have to hold the screw so the drill can get a grip,
and push hard or it’ll slip off.

Rita began to look around. The plant was a confusion of

screeching, dirty noise, a warren of buildings and workshops and
houses, crisscrossed by tracks, carriages, cars, electric vehicles, all
squeezed into far too small a triangle edged by the main road that led
out of town, another factory and the train line. “They never built as
many carriages here as we do today,” Meternagel said. “Next thing
we know we’ll be stacking them up on top of each other.” “Or not,”
remarked Herbert Kuhl, cool Herbert, as he was called. “Did you
say something?” Meternagel asked, in an irritated tone. “Nope,” Kuhl
responded, indifferent. “After all, we’re a famous brigade.” “Exactly”
was Meternagel’s reply.

Rita looked from one to the other, but they went on eating their

lunches as though nothing had been said, and no one wanted to
explain what this little fight was about. She hadn’t yet exchanged one
word with Herbert Kuhl; he was the only one she was wary of, who
never made a joke, said little, and didn’t change his behaviour when
she was around. Nothing moves that guy, she thought sometimes, and
was glad she didn’t have to work with him. Günter Ermisch passed
around a newspaper article about them (“Twelve Industrious Men!”);
one after another they read it, chomped on their sandwiches, and said
nothing. Ermisch tacked it onto the noticeboard.

The coffee from the big pot tasted of aluminum; it made you sleepy.

Rita’s back and shoulders ached; as usual, she had overestimated her
strength that morning. But then the hours leading up to the evening
siren passed, and she walked back up the dreary poplar-lined street,
very slowly with the wind at her back, and the sun too.

In the first weeks, Manfred looked for signs of disappointment or

weariness in her face. He’d often noticed that she wouldn’t persevere if
she didn’t see the purpose of something, or got distracted. He enjoyed

they divided the sky

giving her things, a blouse that suited her, or showing her how she
should wear her hair, and she followed him blindly in everything.

But gradually he began to realize that she was as resolute about

her goal of becoming a teacher as she had been about him. It was
something he would have to accept, without ever letting on that it was a
question of “accepting.” Some evenings she was so tired, so completely
exhausted, that he felt sorry for her and angry at this useless waste
of her energy. “Why don’t you just quit?” he said. But she would
shake her head. “It’s not a job you can just quit,” she said. You can do
whatever you want to, he would say. “Then I don’t want to.”

And in the evening they all sat around the Herrfurth family’s big

round dining table.

Herr Herrfurth would unfold his serviette like a signal flag, and

always with the same spirit of enterprise he would lift the lid from
the soup terrine and say in ceremonious tones, “I wish you all a very
tasty meal.”

Herr Herrfurth was still good-looking, slim and tall, his hair

thinning but hardly grey, and his glass eye scarcely noticeable. Rita
felt he was someone you could get along with, but Manfred seemed
to hate him. His mother, whose rather sour elegance intimidated Rita,
got on Manfred’s nerves.

There was almost nothing to talk about. It was impossible to imagine

a greater contrast than the frenetic activity in the factory halls and
the stillness at the Herrfurth’s supper table, where a constant threat
seemed to hang in the air and make things even quieter. Both places
made Rita feel edgy. She didn’t fully understand the activity of the
people in the plant or the Herrfurth family’s tense silence. She was a
spectator seated before a stage with alternating lighting and sets; she
watched the actors act and thought that in the end all these fragments
might come together as a play, whose meaning would be meant for
her alone.

She didn’t talk about this with Manfred. When he cast her a worried

glance she would smile, and when he asked, she would say, “I’ve got
you as support.”

Christa Wolf

“You think that’s going to help?”
“More than you think.”
Sometimes Herr Herrfurth would find a topic on which he could

hold forth; that was a good day. His words would trickle along, well-
formed, and all the others had to do was nod. At the end they would
know a little more about the harvest prospects for the year or the
weather conditions in Europe.

Unfortunately, Frau Herrfurth could not stand listening to her

husband for any length of time. She would pepper his even word flow
with quick, pointy remarks, which added a little dramatic effect.

Usually, she would turn to Rita, whom she couldn’t attack openly

but, given her personality, couldn’t leave in peace either.

“In the past,” she would sigh, “girls got ready for marriage in

boarding school. These days, they’re stuck into factories to work
among a lot of men they don’t even know … ”

Frau Herrfurth looked after herself. She wore her short white hair

carefully arranged; she pulled on rubber gloves to do her housework,
and the colour of her hats exactly matched that of her suits. She
despised her husband, and may well have accumulated reasons for
this in thirty years of marriage, but she made sure he was presentable.
Under the caustic influence of bitter, envious thoughts, her face had
taken on hard, mannish traits where powder and make-up looked the
opposite of natural. She watched her weight, rigorously following
strict raw food diets; she regularly participated in the televised exercise
shows broadcast by a station in the West, and held herself rigid as
a pole. No one would have imagined her capable of the hysterical
outbursts she sometimes produced.

Because Rita was at the table, Herr Herrfurth had to respond

hastily to his wife’s comments, which was not like him. “Elfriede!”
he admonished her gently, but unfortunately his wife did not avoid
confrontations with him. As he produced three or four sentences of
measured criticism she would gaze at him with interest as though she
were still awaiting the miracle of hearing one unique thought come
from his mouth. When he finished, she would sag a little and continue

they divided the sky

eating, half-satisfied, half-disappointed. She was capable of saying
something like, “Isn’t it after hours, Ulrich? Your party insignia is in
the closet.”

Herr Herrfurth was a master of the art of overhearing things.

But he also enjoyed watching his wife try to draw their son into the
conversation. She knew how these attempts would end, but a certain
masochistic urge made her turn the girl into a regular witness of
her defeats. Anxious, Rita would wait for the change in Manfred’s
face when his mother posed her insistently loving gaze upon him.
He would respond with a cold glance, maintaining a minimum of
politeness. Frau Herrfurth, however, would seize upon the sentence
fragments he uttered, twisting them and kneading them until they
became a son’s professions of love for his adored mother. It could
even happen that she would inform her husband, “My son told me …
”; she often used this phrase, probably also in her thoughts.

When the meal was finally over, when they had finally left the room,

followed by a few of Frau Herrfurth’s weepily insulting comments, and
closed the door to the apartment behind them, then the transformative
power of their little attic room proved itself anew, every evening.
They would laugh a little and shrug their shoulders—Manfred never
talked about his parents. Rita would turn to her English grammar,
which gave her the feeling of at least doing something to prepare for
her future profession, and Manfred to his formulas.

He had the gift of being able to plunge into his work from one

moment to the next. He would turn on the little old radio that stood
on the corner shelf and only seemed to make crackling noises. Then
he would dig his hands into his trouser pockets and begin to wander
around the room, all the while keeping his eye on his writing desk
like a fox watching its prey. Rita remained motionless until she knew
he’d caught the bait. Then he would growl nervously and whistle
snippets of the tunes from the radio (das sollst du du du mir verra-ha-ten
… ). He would lean over his papers, still unsure and perhaps a little
bored, and then suddenly start wildly looking for something, piling
charts and calculations in heaps on the floor. Finally, he would find

Christa Wolf

what he was after. “Ah!” he’d mutter. Then he’d sit down and start
writing.

Rita looked at his profile, the narrow temples, the finely chiselled

straight nose, his head, which was not concerned with her at the
moment. She suspected that before he could sit down to work every
day he needed to overcome a strong inner resistance, a feeling of
inadequacy, a fear that, over time, he might not be up to the task.
Faced with the facts he was expected to uncover, he was as timid as
a child. She made sure he didn’t notice all the little things she was
learning about him. And so he hid nothing from her.

“Now we’re moving!” he announced after a while, and raised his

fist threateningly when she laughed at him.

“What are you writing right now?”
He read her a sentence that was peppered with formulas and Latin

terms, and she nodded her head. “And what are you really writing
about?”

“About your future pullover being a more gorgeous blue if I soak it

in this liquid for a certain amount of time and not in the other.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s a good idea. Do you think I should wear

blue?”

“Absolutely. Cobalt blue, no other blue.”
And then she worked a while longer on the thick brown sweater

she was knitting for him and that was growing as slowly as the year
was moving toward the distant winter. It made her grow quiet and
sleepy. Thoughts moved through her mind like clouds. She was
dealing with a lot in these weeks, the hectic days in the factory, the
tensions at the supper table, and her mother’s forlorn letters from
the village. But in the evenings, when she leaned over her English
grammar and the thick brown sweater, she felt she was handling
things rather well.

they divided the sky

“Visitor for you,” the nurse says one afternoon. “An exception, outside
visiting hours.”

Startled, Rita looks up and watches in disbelief as Rolf Meternagel

comes in, looks around, ducks his head as though he is afraid the
ceiling might be too low and finally sits down on her bed.

“Well,” he says, “I guess somebody has to come and get you moving

again.”

He has no time at all, he’s just been on potato harvesting duty in

the northern counties; of course it’s him again. He’s got a truck full
of potatoes outside, several tons, you bet. It’s right out there on the
street, and the driver won’t wait more than ten minutes, at least not in
this godforsaken place.

“I’m happy to see you,” Rita says, and he laughs. He’s a little harried,

she can see. He hasn’t taken his cap off all day, and it’s pressed an edge
into his hair, right around his head. He keeps wiping away sweat.

“It’s not even warm outside, Rolf.”
“You think people only sweat when it’s hot?”
They’re quiet. “What’s new?” Rita asks after a while. Rolf glances

at her. Does she really want to know? Then he says, “We’re building
twelve windows per shift now.”

He says it just like that, but they both know there’s a whole novel

hidden inside such a statement. Passions, heroisms, intrigues—
anything you might want. You can read ten statements of that sort
in the paper every day, but this particular one Rita understands
completely, every word.

“Oh,” she says. And because she can’t think of anything more

forceful, she adds, “Well, you are a famous brigade.”

They both have to laugh at that.
“You know,” Rita says, “train carriages were just the right thing for

me. I’d have adapted to any other kind of place as well, but I can’t
imagine liking anything else as much as the whistle of our locomotive
when it tows two new cars out of the plant every evening … ”

Where do they go, I often wondered. Everywhere. To Siberia, the

Christa Wolf

taiga, the Black Sea … Sometimes I sent along a greeting, I’d pull a
thread out of my red head kerchief and tie it around a pipe. A thread
of hope that one day I might be able to follow.

And now the tears are back, because she remembers how Manfred

always teased her about the red kerchief: Little Red Riding Hood,
hey, little Red Riding Hood, when’s the big bad wolf coming to eat
you up?

“Not getting out of bed yet?” Meternagel asks. The girl’s not going

to start crying, is she?

“Yes, I am,” she says. “A little more every day.”
But he was really thinking about something else, about himself a

year and a half ago, pacing through the shop. Like a madman, he
thinks now, a wild bull. Stopping here and there, and telling people in
the brigade, you’ll see, one day we’ll be building ten windows a shift,
you mark my words, and their pitying glances and comments, you’re
crazy, man. And here I am, telling this girl, twelve windows a day. As
though it were nothing. As if it all just happens by itself. It’s a good
thing if there’s always someone around who is still surprised by all
this. I’ve forgotten how to be surprised anymore, and there’s nothing
I can do about that. But the kid here, once she’s back on her feet, she
won’t stop being amazed.

“Remember when I explained the brigade to you?”
“Yes,” Rita says. “I remember.”
He’d just exploited the fact that she was interested in people. She

can’t help it, like others can’t help smoking. Schwarzenbach had
noticed it right away too, and that’s what had made him so sure he’d
get her. Meternagel is even smarter than Schwarzenbach that way.

He’d watched for a while, seeing how carefully she dealt with the

men in the brigade, as though each one were loaded with sticks of
dynamite, and how the men had joked about it. Then he thought, why
should she make all the same stupid mistakes everyone makes at the
beginning? And he took her aside.

“Listen, kid,” he said. “You know we’re a famous brigade.”
“I know,” Rita said obediently, but not just obediently. She thought

they divided the sky

about the awards they’d won, and about all the newspaper articles, but
she also thought about the conflict between Meternagel and Kuhl.

“Good,” Rolf continued. “In that case you know what’s most

important. Now I’ll tell you what’s second most important: how to
deal with famous people.” He was dead serious, and his voice made
her a little uneasy. His eyes are something else, she thought at the
time. I wonder how old he is.

Meternagel didn’t say a single word about himself. In fact, he didn’t

tell her everything, just enough so that she wouldn’t be too careful,
or too daring. She learned that the brigade is a little country in itself.
Meternagel showed her who knew the ropes and who let those who
knew tow them along. He showed her who were the rulers and who
the underlings, who were the spokesmen and who the critics; he
explained open and hidden friendships, open and hidden animosities.
He drew her attention to undercurrents that sometimes drifted
dangerously close to the surface—in a sharp retort, an uncontrolled
glance or a shrug of the shoulders.

She began to find her way around. “I’d still like to know,” she says

thoughtfully now, “how you knew all that then.”

“All what?” Rolf asks.
“What you told me once: ‘Things won’t stay the way they are now.

Mark my words!’”

Meternagel laughed. He got up and took her hand to say goodbye.

“Did I say that? And did you think about what I said?”

Rita could not have imagined that the mention of Rolf Meternagel’s
honest name would have such an explosive effect. One evening,
when Herr Herrfurth asked her about her colleagues, she casually
mentioned Rolf Meternagel.

She knew immediately that this was not the first time the name had

come up here. The silence around the table changed.

Everything would have gone quite well had Frau Herrfurth

known to keep quiet. But she didn’t. She called out, “Oh, is he still
around!”

Christa Wolf

Manfred looked at her, and she would gladly have taken back her

exclamation, but it hung in the room, resonating.

“You think that just because father trips someone up, he’s going to

keel over and die?” Manfred sneered.

At that, Herr Herrfurth leapt to his feet. Nobody saw him switch

from excessive friendliness to excessive anger. But he was already at
the peak of a rage. He was already shouting at the top of his lungs, and
like people who are unsure of themselves, he missed the right register.

He yelled all kinds of things that had nothing to do with the subject

at hand, and in particular forbade his son’s deliberately rude tone
and ongoing defamations. “My son,” he said, in order not to have to
address anyone in particular. He worked himself into a state whose
conclusion was unpredictable, and then, suddenly, he stopped, as
abruptly as he had started. He’d noticed that Manfred was quietly
continuing his supper, unmoved.

The way Herr Herrfurth sank into his chair, wiped his face with a

handkerchief and helplessly muttered a few words about the emotional
brutality of the younger generation made him believable.

Manfred got up.
“That’s a broken record,” he said, “and I really don’t feel like

listening to it today. In fact, I don’t feel like listening to anything you
have to say anymore.”

His mother stepped into his path, she held him back, begging him

in tears not to go, not to cut the cloth, to respect his father, he’s your
father after all, think about what that means …

Manfred had gone pale. Stiffer than usual, he strode past his mother

to the door.

Rita saw and felt everything at once: the sharp pain in her chest as

the door closed quietly behind Manfred; sympathy for the woman,
who dropped into her chair, sobbing; abandonment.

How will all this end?

they divided the sky

After she’d waited long enough for Manfred in the attic room, she
went out into the street. She stood there until just before midnight,
when he came home.

“Hey,” he said, “maybe you were meant to sleep alone tonight.”
She shook her head. “Next time, take me with you,” she said.
He cast her a quick glance. “I’m not sure I should take you with me.

I’m really not sure.”

He was leaning against the rough post at the garden gate, and Rita

couldn’t take one step toward him. But she clung to the memory of
him waiting at the willow tree, every evening, and that wasn’t even so
long ago. Every time she’d seen him standing there, she’d been struck
by the realization that she knew everything about him.

I’m always going to have to be the one who holds on to him, she

thought. And if I don’t think of something to say right now—no, not
just something, but the only thing, the right thing—then his face is
going to stay the way it is, and he’ll be gone forever tonight.

And he really did go, but she could see by the way his shoulders

were hunched that he knew she would stay by his side.

After a while he said, “I could just keep quiet, like God, but I might

as well tell you. It’s nothing special, you’ll see. Just that I still can’t get
used to … Actually I almost did get used to it. But then you suddenly
got mixed up in things, and now, it makes me sick to my stomach the
way it always did.”

It was hard for him to get beyond the beginning. So don’t say

anything! she would have liked to say. Did he really have to tell her,
as though he owed her an explanation?

Maybe he did owe her an explanation.
Maybe I was the one who was supposed to acquit him, then and

there, she thinks now, because she cannot stop thinking about it over
and over again. For the first time she realizes that someone is always
having to confess something to the other one, who then has to be able
to accept the confession. The air was rife with confessions, as though
much depended on truth being brought to light from human depths.

She thinks: Did I know how to deal with his truth?

Christa Wolf

“Rolf Meternagel isn’t all that important,” Manfred said. “I don’t
know him at all. So if you tell me he’s a good man, I’ll take your word
for it.

“Last year he was still a foreman in your plant. He didn’t tell you

that, eh? He was apparently pegged for further promotion. But it was
his bad luck that some of his men were dishonest or sloppy, and that my
father was his boss. My father just sat back and watched accounts that
Meternagel was signing grow more and more confused as the months
went by, and when he’d collected enough evidence, he made his move.
Set up a big investigation. And found that there really was something
wrong. Errors worth three thousand marks. Meternagel was demoted.
Apparently, he went wild, which just made everything worse. He’s been
a part of the brigade, where you met him, ever since.

“Why does my father do something like that, when he’s normally a

coward and a weakling, and doesn’t stick his neck out? I suppose it’s
something he needs to do.”

Rita kept alongside him, taking the same big steps. She waited until

he found a new start.

“You once said I wasn’t being fair to him. Let others be fair. I’ve

been trying to look after myself for as long as I can remember …

“The oldest story I know—I’ve heard it hundreds of times, like

other children hear the story of Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding
Hood—is the fairy tale of my birth.

“It goes like this: once upon a time there lived a man and a woman

who loved each other very much, the way people can only love each
other in fairy tales. Actually, under normal circumstances, she would
never have married him, but she was almost thirty and she’d scared
off all the other men with her outrageous demands, and so she was
left with this one, an unimpressive sales representative from a shoe
factory. That’s not part of the fairy tale. I’m just telling you this. The
fairy tale goes on like this: They loved each other, but they couldn’t
have a child. There were miscarriages, my mother plied me with all
the details later—but here I’m going off the fairy tale track again.

they divided the sky

Then, when the miraculous love child did finally materialize, a boy—
me—he was premature and too weak to live. That’s what the doctors
said.

“Along came the fairy from the fairy tale, the good nurse Elizabeth,

who fed the little weakling another woman’s breast milk from a tiny
spoon until he could be handed over to his own mother for further
feeding. This woman, my mother, sees her destiny in the child. She
chains it to herself with all the ties of egotistical mother love. She pays
the price that miracles in fairy tales always demand, and expects that
I will continue to pay it.

“That’s where the fairy tale ends, and my life begins.”
Manfred was relieved at finally being able to talk. But at the same

time he felt anguished at not being able to say everything. The girl
beside might be able to hear between the lines; in the end she’d know
more than any one person can tell another. But still, a host of images,
smells, words, glances, and thought fragments slowly drew past,
making up the unspeakable subtext of his story.

He remembered photographs from the family album in which his

mother looked beautiful and had a soft glow in her eyes that she must
have lost over the years of living with this man. He had often searched
through his memory for fleeting traces of the gradual changes she’d
undergone, had remembered times when she was energetic, or warm-
hearted and loving, and kept trying to imagine what this woman might
be like today, outside the prison of this family, without the dreadful
impoverishment of her existence.

“You could feel sorry for her,” he said to Rita. “I don’t deny that.

As a child I used to hear shouts and tears coming from the bedroom
all the time! When she discovered, yet again, that her husband was
being unfaithful. He’d become the head buyer for a shoe factory,
partly due to her own ambitions. He rarely came home, drove around
in a company car, and felt he was in charge. My mother was in a
constant sulk, and so he found enough other women willing to adore
him. But really, leading this kind of double life was too stressful for
him …

Christa Wolf

“Of course he became an early member of the SA. I remember him

preening in his new uniform, in the mirror in the corridor and in front
of my mother. I must have been about four. I saw their eyes meet in
the mirror. To see them agree on something was even more sinister
than to hear them fighting. I hid among the coats.

“Then came my father’s friendship with his boss. He’d become the

head clerk, and acceptable in polite society. On Sundays, we’d join
the boss’s family; sometimes they came to visit us.

“Before that I’d rarely been allowed to play with other children.

My mother would peer out from behind the curtains and interfere,
“Those horrible children are hurting you, Fredie!” Suddenly, Sunday
after Sunday, I was handed over to Herbert, the boss’s son, who
was three years older and could do what he wanted with me. He
forced me to do stupid things. I always got the blame. My father, who
normally hardly looked at me, that’s how indifferent he was, would
beat me in front of these people, to show his boss who had the say in
our house …

“I hated him before I even started school. And that’s the only thing

I am still absolutely sure of today.”

He tried to look Rita in the eyes, but she avoided his glance. She

looked down at her feet, which kept on walking, taking regular steps,
through the pool of light from a streetlamp, and then in the dark. She
didn’t notice that Manfred had reached for her hand but then let his
arm drop again.

“So far, I have managed pretty well without a listener,” he continued.

“Maybe I should have left it that way?”

Rita shook her head. She avoided listening into herself. Later on,

she would see what had gone on inside her. Now, it was important to
listen to him. Maybe everything would be different in the morning.
Maybe they wouldn’t be up to the change; but it was too late now to
be afraid of that.

“I was always the best student at school,” Manfred said. “They called

me the ‘seven-month kid.’ Once a week mother would show up with
some complaint for the teacher, and so they finally stopped bullying

they divided the sky

me and just avoided me. At home, I told bald lies about friendships,
achievements, things that had nothing to do with me at all.

“When they signed me up in the Jungvolk, the war was already on.

My father was needed in the factory and couldn’t be called up. So,
we didn’t suffer. At that time, everybody was happy to get a pair of
peace-time shoes.”

Why am I telling her all this? Manfred thought. How can she know

what was going on then? She wasn’t even born … Funny, somewhere
between her and me is where the new generation starts. How can she
ever understand that we were all infected by this deadly indifference
that is so hard to get rid of again?

“What were we talking about?” he said. “Oh, yes, I was never

absent from the Hitler Youth, even though I hated it. I’d jump off any
wall with my eyes closed if they ordered me. I would have done all
kinds of other things, too; nobody needs to tell me how fear can turn
you into a criminal. But they didn’t really get me; I wasn’t their kind.

“Finally, when my father was recruited for homeland defence, I got

in with a gang of boys all my age. That got rid of my fear and made
me normal, or what was called normal in those days. I smoked and
was rowdy, I shouted in the street, and at home I put my feet up on
my mother’s table. Finally, in a history class, I fired a shot from an old
Colt that went straight through the teacher’s desk. The teacher was a
faithful Nazi; if they hadn’t had to use the schools as military hospitals
I would have been expelled.

“We hung around for a whole summer and had a good look at what

the adults had achieved with all their righteousness and know-how.
‘They’d better watch their step!’ we said. We laughed out loud when
we read posters saying,\ ‘Now everything will be different.’ Different?
Who with, exactly? The same people? In the fall, the schools opened
up again. We roared at the tops of our lungs as we pulled the old Nazi
songbooks off the shelves in the classroom. The new people hadn’t
even had time to get rid of the stuff.

“One April night in 1945 my mother burned the picture of the

Führer. Since that night, an autumn landscape has been hanging

Christa Wolf

above the writing desk, remember? It’s the same size Hitler used
to be, and today nobody can say why there’s a lighter spot on the
wallpaper. Anyway, the wallpaper is new.

“When my father showed up again, a year after the end of the

war, looking pretty ragged and rundown, he couldn’t find his brown
uniform anymore either. My mother had chosen not to dye it a different
colour, the way others did who didn’t have a small warehouse full of
shoes they could sell.

“My mother suddenly got very busy. She did all the bartering.

Thanks to her, we didn’t go hungry. What was left of my father? A
man with a record and a mortal wound to his self-esteem. A joiner-
upper, nothing more, as he often assured me, and it’s true. A German
joiner-upper. He was never passionate about anything. And he
doesn’t have any crimes on his conscience either. People can still
shake his hand. There are probably letters he wrote in the archives of
the shoe factory, letters he would be embarrassed about today—but
just embarrassed, not disgusted.

“By the way, Meternagel knows him from that time in his life—

since you asked why my father would deliberately trip him up. I don’t
want to say anything more about that.

“My mother unleashed an enormous amount of energy in order to

get my father back into business. She succeeded. She finally defeated
him.”

And lost me, he thought. Though even today she won’t admit it.

It was easy for him to talk now. Too easy almost; he was afraid he might
not be able to stop again. And it was way past midnight. The streets
stretched before them, cold, damp and lonely like impassable canyons;
they had just gone by the front entrance for the third time, and the girl
at his side was shivering from fatigue. But she stayed by him.

“One day,” Manfred went on, “the new party insignia appeared in

my father’s buttonhole. I burst out laughing when I saw it, and he’s
been insulted ever since, just at the sight of me.”

He wasn’t the only one, Manfred thought; some were far worse.

they divided the sky

But many had been lucky too, meeting up with honest people just
when they needed them. That’s not what happened to me. Whenever
I took a closer look, the other colour would shimmer through. Where
were all the honest people supposed to come from in this country?
And, did I really look for them? And is it that important to find them
as long as you’re honest yourself, to the very end and with all the
effort required? Can’t I become that way if I really want to?

“We finished up school in a very leisurely way. At that time, the

fifteen-year-olds were the oldest group that didn’t have a list of
fallen classmates hanging on the wall. An aging spinster teacher
discovered my talent for acting. You won’t believe it, but I was
soon reciting poetry at every celebration in this city. There were
lots of celebrations. What did I recite? All kinds of things. With a
lot of feeling, and no real feeling. ‘Wie im Morgenglanze du rings
mich anglühst, Frühling,Geliebter,’

and ‘Diese Zeit braucht deine

Hände!’

; meanwhile, in our secret basement club I yelled,‘Glotzt

nicht so romantisch!’

or I’d purr, ‘Es fragt die Hanna Cash, mein

Kind, doch nur ob sie ihn liebt.’

With feeling.”

Man, he thought, those were wild times! And she was just learning

to read then …

Now he wanted to finish.
“At every event, my mother would sit in the front row, tears in her

eyes. She was convinced I’d be an actor. I would supply her with the
fame that life owed her.

“I didn’t become an actor, as you know. I screwed up my mother’s

plans with a vengeance. My happiest day was when they registered me
in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. She cried and made an enormous
scene, just as I expected. But it wasn’t fun anymore. Nothing was

Goethe, “Ganymed”: “How in the bright of morning, you o’ershine me, Oh

Spring, beloved.”

Walter Dehmel, from his poem, “Die Zeit braucht deine Hände”: “This time

needs your hands.”

One of Bertolt Brecht’s mottos as a playwright, meaning, Don’t stare so romantically!

Bertolt Brecht, from “Die Ballade der Hanna Cash”: “What worries Hanna

Cash, my child, is whether she loves him.”

Christa Wolf

really fun anymore. Only my profession—that’s good. Just enough
precision, just enough creativity. And you, you’re good, too.”

“Just enough precision, just enough creativity,” said Rita in a small

voice. Manfred took it seriously.

“Yes, little brown miss,” he said. “That’s how it is.”

10.

Today she knows: that night she had the first, still unutterable
premonition of danger. She kept her sense of helplessness to herself;
it was her unconscious way of being brave, a way that didn’t hurt
Manfred’s feelings. She had exactly the kind of courage he needed.

She was getting along better in the plant. Gradually she lost her

fear of everyone looking at her. She was still amazed that every day
two shiny, dark green railway carriages—streamlined, solid and
brand new—could come out of the hectic confusion, the shouting and
the yelling. At the end of the shift, they slowly rolled out of the plant
on the internal track. Even as they move, the last installers would
leap off, their toolboxes in hand; sometimes Rita was one of them.
She would join the others laughing about the daily desperation of the
quality control inspector, and then they’d all stand there and watch
the little train until it was swallowed up by the city smog.

“When you think … ,” Hänschen said, lost in thought. That was his

favourite phrase, but for some reason he never managed to say what
happened when you thought. “Oh, don’t even start,” the others would
gently warn him.

All in all, they had a good time together, though they didn’t talk

about it. Everybody did what they had to do; nobody quarrelled. Even
Meternagel, who could be unpredictable, kept a low profile. At lunch,
they sat together on raw planks in a green corner of the yard, their
legs stretched out, their backs pressed into the boards, their hands
dug into their pockets, and everything seemed just fine the way it
was. They squinted into the sun that was still mild, they watched the
clouds drift by and followed the individual white feathery ones take

they divided the sky

the same route across the sky; they were surprised at how transparent
the air was at lunchtime.

Far away from the city, supersonic jets broke the sound barrier with

a deafening noise, and were suddenly over them, flying very high,
very fast. They watched them lazily, and grew even more placid.

This feeling was probably strongest the day before the big ruckus

broke out at the plant. They were celebrating the five thousandth
train carriage that had rolled out of production since the end of the
war, and also their foreman’s birthday.

Rita can still see it all before her. She realizes that she didn’t miss a

thing that day. The yard had been swept clean; the wind was blowing
across it. On one of its narrow sides stood the anniversary float
draped with garlands, and the number 5000 could be seen from far
away shining brightly next to the date, April 20, 1960. A band played
enthusiastically, and a few speakers had their say. Everyone got
their applause; everything was the way it should be. Rita, standing
between Meternagel and Hänschen, as always, happily clapped her
hands with the rest of them. She kept having to laugh even though
she’d only had malt beer. When the dance troupe arrived on stage in
their white blouses and colourful skirts, the mood got even better.
They laughed as they saw Ermisch quietly make his way to the front
of the crowd because his invitation to the podium had been forgotten,
and he could see no other way to get attention.

In the end, the dark grey lowering sky opened up for a downpour

and they all dashed off. They’d known it was going to rain: all day the
smell of malt coffee had hung in the air, which meant a westerly wind.
The wind pressed a few remaining scraps of paper into the board
fence, and then the yard lay abandoned.

Ermisch’s men went off to the nearest pub with their birthday boss,

a place where they were well known and could push a few tables
together at a corner window. It could rain as much as it liked; they
would let Ermisch buy them beer and schnapps and they would drink
to his health.

The light in the smoky, narrow room was dim. Rita sat with a

Christa Wolf

glass of lemonade wondering how much they would drink and how
long she would have to stay. The pub owner busily ran back and
forth; they were his best guests. Smoke like a foul-smelling fog rose
from the table; they drank and were raucous. Rita grew quieter and
quieter.

She’d never yet had the time to study these twelve men carefully.

The oldest one was sixty, the grey-haired Kar

βuweit from East

Prussia who was only ever called by his last name: Hey, Kar

βuweit,

why don’t you tell us the story again, about the baron and the eggs!
He’d been the carpenter on a large estate owned by a real baron,
and here he was today still just another peasant among the workers.
Hänschen, the youngest, who was only ever called by his first name,
was drinking with them for the first time and glowing with pride. He
hadn’t exactly been born lucky, and didn’t even have the courage to
look for a girlfriend, but he was always cheerful.

“ … And then he came out to the field where the seasonal workers

were and said, ‘Bet you I can eat more than a dozen eggs all by myself,’
and they said, ‘Impossible, Herr Baron,’ and he took the basket of
eggs and started eating and literally ate sixteen—” Ermisch would
interrupt the old man at the same place every time, and shout, red
with laughter, “And you stupid fools admired him for eating up all
your eggs!” and the whole brigade would bray as though at the best
joke. And Kar

βuweit, who could always be persuaded to talk about

his baron, made a dismissive gesture and didn’t reply.

Average faces, most of them, faces you could meet on the street.

More old faces than young ones. They’ve made it this far, somehow,
better not ask too many questions. Not unscathed, most of them. Not
without reaching for the ceiling, or bending down before authority,
depending. Not without desperately looking for the only way out of
hopeless situations, alone.

“That’s nothing,” Franz Melcher was saying quietly to the man next

to him. “Paris, yes, great. But have you ever seen Bedouin women
washing at dawn at a spring, when you’re close by with binoculars …”
He suddenly noticed that he was the only one talking and the others

they divided the sky

were all listening to him; he glanced at Rita and fell silent. “A song!”
someone shouted from the other end of the table. “Three, four!”

Von den Bergen rauscht ein Wa-ha-sser

…

The experiences they’d had! Brothers who fell in the war, friends

killed in the prisons, women in different countries of Europe, their
traces in many parts of the world (Glücklich ih-ist, wer da vergih-ih-
ißt, was nun einmal nicht zu äh-ändern ist!

). Now, day by day, their

experiences were losing value; they were nothing to build upon. But
could they be undone? Every ten days they brought home their wages
to two or three or four people waiting at home: food, rent and the
music on the radio.

That was still what it was all about, wasn’t it?
“A long life!” Hänschen called down the table to Ermisch, and

raised his glass.

They seized their schnapps glasses and downed them in one gulp,

all with the same movement. They followed up with big draughts of
beer.

O, du schö-hö-höner We-he-hesterwald, tada, tada, tada

… Was she

imagining things or had the sarcastic look on Herbert Kuhl’s face
grown deeper? He wasn’t singing along, but his face seemed to say
that the songs confirmed what he had always thought. He just wasn’t
sure if he should be happy about this.

Uber deine Höhen pfeift der Wind so kalt, jedoch

… Suddenly another

man came into the bar: Ernst Wendland. Rita saw him for the first
time. He seemed too young and unprepossessing for his job as the
production manager of such a big plant—well built, a trifle pale,
with straight blond hair. Ermisch waved him over to their table, and
Wendland sat down, a little reluctant. Rita saw how he tried not to
disrupt the general cheeriness. He clinked glasses with Ermisch and
made a few jokes (“Where do you go when you’re thirty-eight?”), but
he didn’t get very jolly. The noise at the table didn’t diminish with
Wendland’s arrival.

Yet something changed. It was no longer the same celebration.

From the distance that only time can provide, Rita saw the table with

Christa Wolf

her brigade seated around it in the dull light of the bar; she heard
their voices both more quietly and more precisely. Wendland had
disrupted things because he tried to fit in, just as anyone is disruptive
who goes against their own way of being for the sake of others.
Suddenly, the others began to question their way of being. Were they
being judged?

The men became noisier and more aggressive, slamming their

glasses down on the table. Was he begrudging them their birthday
party?

And yet, the discomfort set off by Wendland didn’t strike them

as particularly strange. It was to be expected. Over the past fifteen
years, experience had shown that just when you were feeling really
good, just when you were all around satisfied, they would manage to
make you feel miserable and edgy again.

But Wendland didn’t say one inappropriate word. In fact, he grew

quieter. He drank up quickly, tapped the top of the table with his
knuckles to say goodbye, and left.

In the resulting silence, Meternagel said, “I knew that, or maybe

not?” He was half angry, half content.

Nobody argued, though it wasn’t clear what it was Meternagel

might have known. The fun was over. Hänschen, sad to see this turn
in the party, wanted to avenge them at Wendland’s expense. “Pretty
young, isn’t he?” he said, as indignantly as he could. Which made
them all laugh again. But then the first goodbyes were said—“Your
beer’s no good anymore, sir. You’ll have to drink it yourself!”

Rita left with them.
The rain had stopped, and a damp, warm band of air moved through

the city. Feeling tired but also tense, she would have liked to go for
a long walk, down the country road, for instance, that led past the
wind-worn willow tree, to her village.

When she got off the tram, Manfred was there. “You were waiting

for me?” she asked in surprise.

“Let’s assume so,” he said.
“For long?”

they divided the sky

He shrugged. “If I say it was a long time you’ll imagine God knows

what and start coming home late every night stinking of beer and
cigarette smoke.”

“Other people’s beer and smoke!” Rita reassured him.
“Can you prove that?”
She laughed and rubbed her face on his sleeve. And so you came

home in the evenings like everyone else, and there was someone
waiting for you, and you had to account for your day, and get scolded
for being late. So much for the country lane and the willow tree.

At the door, they ran into a man who was lighting up a cigarette

as he stepped out. In the flame from the match, Rita recognized him:
Ernst Wendland. Flustered, she said hello; he looked up and only
then realized there’d been a girl among the twelve men in the bar. He
tipped his hat, and quickly walked over to his car that was parked
under the next streetlight.

“Who was that?” Manfred asked.
Rita told him.
“I think I know him,” he said, pensive.
Herr Herrfurth was in his study, looking distraught. Forgetting

about the argument with his son, he burst out with the news: the
director of the plant had not returned from a business trip to Berlin
(West Berlin, you realize!). He had probably not wanted to face the
consequences for the production slow-down that would hit the plant
next month. He must have seen the disaster coming.

Ernst Wendland was the new director, as of that day.

11.

Rita will always connect the memory of those weeks with dark smoke
rising before fiery red sunrises, with sinister, dissatisfied days and
strange ideas reaching right into her dreams.

She was not alone. Everyone seemed to have the feeling that all

kinds of things depended on what was happening at the plant, which
was not very big or very modern, and which had been largely ignored

Christa Wolf

by the central authorities. It seemed as though the tensions the entire
country had been subject to for years had now come to a head right
there. Even the people “on the other side” were focused on the plant.
Their radio stations were not too proud to provide a daily update
on the “imminent closure of the once booming Mildner-Waggonbau-
GmbH”—truths, lies, half-truths. Even the former director spoke on
Western radio. He’d long known that he was in a no-win situation,
but only recently had friends helped him make the right decision to
remove himself from the moral conflicts. He sent greetings to his
workers, whose freedom-loving attitudes he knew well, greetings
from the happier part of Germany, and he urged them to do what he
had done.

The next day during the morning break at the plant, this speech

was broadcast via the public address system. After every paragraph, a
very young and unschooled female voice they all knew well, the plant’s
communications assistant, interrupted, “Comrades! Colleagues! This
is the language of a traitor. He has betrayed our factory! He has
betrayed our state! He has betrayed us!”

For the next two weeks production declined every day. At the end

of a day the little locomotive would have had just half a carriage to tow
out of the plant, if such a thing were possible. Committees of worried
specialists in blue and white lab coats worked their way through the
plant, tapping on its large body and listening. The workers watched
them, mocking at first, then worried and finally with real alarm.

Rita anxiously listened as the shouting, thudding, screeching

noises that usually came from the production halls grew dimmer.
She observed the resigned, expectant faces of her brigade intently,
comparing them with the faces in the news articles that still hung on
the noticeboard in the lunch room. She wondered, who’s telling lies
here? The rest periods were growing longer by the day (“There’s no
work! No materials!” Ermisch would announce early in the morning
when the shift began) and were filled with nasty comments and
belligerent arguments.

Rita did not know what it means to pull such a large operation out

they divided the sky

of the dirt. As always, before any solutions to a problem can appear,
there are many discouraged, bad-tempered and malicious folks.
Some even seemed to gloat over the fact that the ship in which they
themselves were sailing was foundering on the high seas.

“What is going on?” she asked Rolf Meternagel.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on. Exactly what you can expect, exactly

what had to happen. When nobody feels responsible and everybody
just fusses in their little corner, and it’s that way right up the line,
right to the director’s office—then all the dirty little tricks one day
add up to one great big mess. Then the people in charge of materials
have no idea what’s happening in the new production cycle, and so
the materials aren’t there and the technology isn’t ready and nobody
knows what they should be doing. And then all you need is for a
couple of suppliers to slow down, which is what just happened, and
you’re all set.”

“And are we going to get out of this again?”
Meternagel only laughed.

Manfred could see that Rita was at a complete loss. He thought,
hey, look at that! So soon! He consoled her. He encouraged her. He
provided examples of far more serious situations that had turned out
well. He didn’t complain that her only topic of conversation anymore
was the factory. “Just wait,” he said, “pretty soon you’ll be smiling at
how desperate you felt.” He couldn’t know how right he was.

Rita was surprised to see how on the blackest days, when there was

hardly any work and the brigades huddled together in evil silence, her
own discouragement would turn into impatience and a willingness
to support any change, should it come, with every ounce of strength
she had.

She noticed many little things. More and more often she’d catch

glances that passed between Ermisch and Rolf Meternagel, mocking
glances from Meternagel sent out like probes into unknown strata. At
first, Ermisch rejected them, then he became uncertain, questioning.
Unexpectedly for most of them, these days were showing them that

Christa Wolf

Günter Ermisch was a good foreman in good times, a foreman for
meeting high production standards and for high wages, for radio
reporters and general assemblies and a seat on the podium on May
first. But he wasn’t steadfast or confident enough for bad times. “What
are you staring at me for?” he asked Meternagel. “What’s there to see?”
“All kinds of things,” said Rolf. “You should take a look yourself.”
There was nothing he could do. Ermisch couldn’t stop what he didn’t
like: he had to let his rival, Meternagel, come up beside him.

More and more the men from the brigade were turning to Ermisch;

he stayed calm and pretended he’d seen it all coming and it was nothing
extraordinary. Everybody, including the strategic Ermisch, could
sense an upcoming mood swing in the brigades. He was planning to
be right in there with his people. If only he knew how to go about it!

Meternagel said nothing.
At the Herrfurth’s supper table, however, there was now something

to discuss. This, more than anything else, bolstered Rita’s confidence.
Herr Herrfurth flapped his white serviette far less briskly and could
no longer use it to sweep unappetizing events of the day off the table.
The disorder in the plant had disastrous effects on the well-oiled
mechanism of the Herrfurth family dinners.

At first, while the investigations about the former director’s flight

were underway, Herr Herrfurth worried about certain documents he
had signed, orders for materials and such things. “After all, you can’t
check everything, and I’d like to see the man who refuses to sign what
the director of the plant hands him!” But then, when he got off with
warnings and a strong dose of self-criticism, he relaxed. “A breeze!
Where are they going to suddenly find a new director of sales who
knows what he’s doing?”

But then he was gripped by a deeper, more lasting uncertainty.

It came out in brief comments about the new director of the plant,
whom he didn’t dare criticize but who struck him as strange. “A
young guy,” he said, “new know-how, healthy ambition. Why not?
Rome wasn’t built in a day either.” Another time he said, “Fine and
dandy, an exceptionally good organizer. But let’s see how his system

they divided the sky

works in our plant, and with our people … it’s too bad, a young guy
like that isn’t given the time to learn the tricks of the trade here. It’ll
destroy him.”

Frau Herrfurth, who did not understand any of this and who hadn’t

even seen the factory from the outside since it was nationalized,
reacted most precisely to the disaster that was so moving people. She
knew her husband, and she watched the girl her son wanted to marry,
and she had seen the face of the ambitious, determined Wendland,
if only for a few seconds, this man who’d suddenly been installed
as her husband’s boss. That was enough. Hatred sharpened her
perceptions.

What had been going on outside her own four walls for more

than a decade had so far only annoyed her because it forced her into
conformist manoeuvres. But it was all quite stupid and absurd, really,
and wouldn’t last. Suddenly something she had been waiting for was
happening: the tedious new reality was under threat, only a part of
it, that was true, but still—it always starts bit by bit. And now she
was watching the efforts underway to thwart the danger. No one had
issued orders; such labours are voluntary, and only carried out when
people are facing heavy personal loss.

And so, in all these years, something serious had happened out

there. Those fanatics had managed to infect others with their mad
ideas. She would have to draw conclusions.

Frau Herrfurth took up correspondence again with her sister, the

widow of a post office secretary, who lived in West Berlin.

12.

Imperceptibly, amid all the other events, Rita had not stayed “the
new girl.” She now knew which tram to take in the morning to
meet acquaintances, and in the evenings she walked home with Rolf
Meternagel, who took the same route. They would talk about work
and plans for the upcoming Sunday before they went their separate
ways, always at the same corner where, over the course of their

Christa Wolf

relationship, a lilac tree had sprouted buds and produced dark purple
flowers that were now starting to wilt. One afternoon in June, Rita
asked him a question that she herself found surprising, “How much
longer are you going to watch what’s going on, Herr Meternagel?”

He knew immediately what she was referring to. He was irritated

that this girl had noticed his reticence in the factory, and at first his
annoyance was directed at her. “How much longer are you going to
keep calling me ‘Herr Meternagel’?” His name was Rolf, a name that,
so far at least, everybody else had been able to remember.

Then they were silent. When Rita timidly started saying goodbye,

he said, in a voice that allowed no protest, “Come along, you’ve got
time, haven’t you.”

They walked a few steps in silence, then he eyed her suspiciously

from the side as though he wanted to make sure she was really the
person he was about to tell something important. In as casual a tone
as possible, but as though this sentence could explain it all, he said,
“I’ve actually had the pleasure of reverse management training.”

She realized that he had probably never before uttered these words,

but had often thought them. What she heard next from Meternagel
came to mind whenever she was with him again. What was most
surprising was that he thought his story was quite mundane. Only
much later did she realize how true that was. He was one of those
people who had been propelled from obscurity directly into the
limelight, and who were still a little unsure about how to move in the
blinding glow where all eyes were upon them.

“What did I used to be?” he said to Rita. “A carpenter, and proud

of it. But they could do whatever they wanted with us. It seemed as
though the war was just waiting for us to finally grow up.” And so
he’d joined up, been wounded in different countries; several times
he’d been the only survivor.

Rita wondered how old he was, and when he told her—almost

fifty—she thought his bright, sharp eyes made him younger.

“Then I felled trees for three years and built barracks, out in the far

east. You can imagine that it took me awhile to realize that carpentry

they divided the sky

was more my thing than aiming and shooting at living targets.” But
she’d agree that if that was all he’d learned; it wasn’t much, and not
really enough to go to party headquarters afterwards and sign up,
which is what he did when he got back, at the age of thirty-six. At that
time, people didn’t ask many questions about how much somebody
knew or understood, as long as he was honest (and they even took
on a few dishonest ones in their haste, who were later kicked out
or turned into honest men—that can happen too). He’d soon met
up with an old friend who was happy to fill the instructor’s chair in
the next room with a “reliable element.” He’d said people like them
now had to exercise power—who else, if they didn’t?—and then he’d
turned to other urgent matters with a sigh.

The next years hurtled by like a wild dream. With a momentum he’d

never before experienced, he was flung upward and much more was
demanded of him than he could ever give; he was presented with tasks
he had never envisioned, with new words and expressions he used to
somehow cope with these tasks, but which he never found the time to
really understand. Time took over, gobbled up his nights, estranged
him from his wife, let his daughters grow up beside him without him
noticing (and he’d hardly known them when they were children), and
kept handing him new assignments. Only occasionally, in moments
of total quiet, had he asked himself, am I in control of all this or am
I being controlled? He rose higher and higher, and observed himself
in the process—is that still me? He learned to use bigger and bigger
words, though he failed in his desperate attempts to understand what
they meant; he found his way through many different situations, he
learned how to give orders, he even learned how to shout at someone
he couldn’t answer in any other way.

“You don’t believe me? You should have seen me!” he said in grim

self-deprecation, and Rita thought how long it must have taken him
to be able to talk about it all like this. The inevitable happened:
one day, after he’d long stopped expecting this to happen, he was
accused of a serious failing, was found inadequate for the large tasks

Christa Wolf

he’d been assigned and was transferred to the factory as a supervisor.
His fall from grace was as just in regard to the general good as it
was unjust to him; he had served the general good—unselfishly,
that was clear. He could not repress feelings of bitterness as he
watched younger people move into positions he had held; while he’d
soldiered on doggedly without the necessary knowledge, they’d had
all the peace and quiet in the world to learn what they needed to
know to take over.

He didn’t come right out and say it, but Rita could hear that the

second demotion, the one discussed at the Herrfurths’ supper table,
had hit him harder than the first. He’d failed in a position that seemed
made for him; this time there was no excuse. Under his supervision
money had been paid for processes that had stopped weeks earlier.
He’d let himself be duped, like some greenhorn, some beginner, and
by men he was now working next to and whom he had once trusted.
Was there any way to prove that they’d deliberately foisted erroneous
accounts on him? Mistakes made by the foreman are the supervisor’s
responsibility.

And now he was supposed to help this same foreman, these same

colleagues, with his greater know-how? Men who still called him
“super” behind his back and laughed about him.

He invited Rita up to his apartment and had his wife make her a

coffee, and then, after his wife quietly left the room, he pulled a big
book, bound in black oilcloth, from under the radio. He opened it to
the first page, which read Studies in the Workplace. “It’s all in here,” he
said quietly and tapped the hard cover. He hadn’t combed the entire
plant over the past weeks for nothing; nobody could pull the wool
over his eyes anymore.

“Ermisch knows something is afoot and he’s hovering like a tomcat

around a cat in heat. But I’m not opening the book yet. If there’s
one thing I’ve learned over the past twelve years, it is ‘wait.’ There’s
nothing as stupid as being a hero in the wrong place. Wendland—I
know that guy—he’s kneading and massaging the entire plant right

they divided the sky

now, you can bet on that. And one day he’ll show up where we are.
That’s the day I’m waiting for.”

Rita would have given much to take just one look at the mysterious

book. But Meternagel had already put it back under the radio.

At home in the village everything had been simple, transparent,

familiar from childhood. A hint of the last day of creation’s “and behold,
it was very good!” had hung over the tranquil natural surroundings
and the people living there. If there was such a thing as an untouched
soul, she had once possessed it and was now losing it. The mirror that
reflected the world for her seemed dimmed by a cold mist.

So a man like Meternagel had been simply assigned tasks and

abandoned to his fate. He’d been cheated—unthinkable!—by men
she shared a table with every day! Men who continued to make fun
of him. And she was supposed to come to terms with such injustices,
the way Meternagel had apparently done?

Rita felt that she was only now crossing the first threshold into

adulthood, a realm where only results decided a person’s fate, not
their willingness, or even their efforts, if they were insufficient. She
objected to the strictures of such a life.

Surprisingly little was said in the brigades about the big assembly

that was finally announced and that, contrary to tradition, everyone
attended. They huddled on temporary benches set up in the biggest
production hall, between half-finished train carriages. The heavy air,
a mixture of metal, oil, sweat and tobacco smoke, rose to the ceiling
where dull daylight filtered in through the dirty glass roof. At the
front gleamed a narrow, bright red banner, but no one bothered to
decipher what it said.

“Comrades!” someone called into the microphone, and the

conversations about the colour of the garden fence and holiday pay
subsided.

The many different committees had indeed produced a report.

This was read out by the party secretary, a stout, white-haired man.
The report was not long, and it assigned everyone a certain blame.
There was not much to say against it, and those who had expected

Christa Wolf

sensational revelations were disappointed. People were surprised that
such minor issues had caused such great problems.

Ernst Wendland was called to the microphone. A few people

applauded. Rita thought, has he grown taller since I saw him in the
bar?

The director of the plant was hoarse. He hadn’t slept much in the

past weeks and was finishing up a coffee as he stood there. “I wouldn’t
want to be him,” somebody said behind Rita, and it didn’t sound as
bitter as earlier comments about the new management.

Ernst Wendland was no orator, and an orator was the last thing

anyone needed. He described the situation in neutral tones: the
percentage of unfulfilled production requirements, the lack of
materials, the lack of semi-finished parts, and in particular, the lack
of skilled labour. He gave figures: so many mechanics, carpenters,
welders were needed in the plant, so many in the entire region.
“Nobody’s going to help us out,” he said. “And we’ve worked long
enough with overtime. The only solution is for everyone to do the best
they can, and in all honesty.”

The day of the assembly had been well chosen, and so had the tone.

Over the past weeks everybody had already expressed their distress at
the situation, and now they wanted to fill the void that had developed.
Promises would have been rejected, thoughtful suggestions were
listened to. What more was there to discuss!

As the first people went to the front of the hall to announce their

approval and their commitment, Ermisch became restless. Had he
missed something? Were he and his people too late? Meternagel
cast him a challenging glance. “Now I’m going to open my book,”
he said.

Rita got home late and went straight up to the attic room. Manfred
could see she was excited and not wanting to show it. He put
sandwiches and a pot of tea on the table and complained that she was
already making him wait for her, even before they were married.

“So, what happened? Who’s to blame?” he asked.

they divided the sky

Rita looked up in surprise.
Or maybe it hadn’t been necessary to crucify the guilty party?
“Yes,” Rita said slowly, “Wendland made a good speech.”
“And now everything’s going to change, right?” Manfred said, with

a sneer.

“I hope so,” Rita replied, a little uncertain.
“And you really think that after the assembly things will be better

than before the assembly? All of a sudden there’ll be enough materials?
All of a sudden the useless functionaries will become useful? All of a
sudden the workers are going to think about the big picture rather
than their own wallets?”

“Maybe everything will stay the way it was,” Rita answered

thoughtfully.

It was a still, moonlit night. They lay side by side in bed, wide

awake.

“Every factory has had dozens of assemblies like that one,” Manfred

said. “You’ve just experienced one of them.”

So what, Rita thought stubbornly. That one was important. How

can he be afraid that something I think is important could drive me
away from him?

“Listen,” she said after a while, “let’s decide not to be jealous of

assemblies, all right?”

13.

September has gone by. One night, unexpectedly, the autumn rains
set in, grey-shimmering drapes that cascade down the windows of
the sanatorium and don’t lift for days and nights. The trees, stained
black from the damp summer, drop their last leaves. The soggy park
lies abandoned.

She has recovered, Rita tells the doctor almost daily, who has

maintained his reserve and discretion. He nods and thinks that at that
age she ought to be able to get over whatever it is more quickly. It’s
hard for sensitive people these days, he thinks. He doesn’t like the

Christa Wolf

look of determined courage that her face acquires when he gazes at
her. Nor does he like the dark circles under her eyes, but they are real,
and tell the truth. This patient is tired.

For a long time she tried to forget; now she’s afraid at the thought

that she might forget. At night a wave of memories overwhelms her,
swells as she shuts her eyes, and then closes over her, painful-sweet.
His face, over and over again, his face. Hundreds of times she follows
every line of this face that recedes as she tries to grasp it. And the
touch of his hands. It makes her tremble; she clamps her teeth. Her
heart beats hard.

She has lost this summer; is it really over?
One day comes back to mind, a perfect midsummer day. They had

lived it lightly; it had seemed one of many more. Now she remembers
it as unique—the climax of her life, its summit—and the strength to
rise so high again seems forever gone.

Early in the morning they’d left the circle of smog that envelopes the
city. They travelled through the blue-grey Kupferschiefer hills and
their hard-edged cliffs. They breathed the pure air of the unspoiled,
hilly countryside more easily. A rich spread of colours rose out of the
morning mist.

Manfred had bought the car, a used older model, on the day he

defended his doctorate, and Rita jokingly accused him of being
happier about the car than about his new title. They waxed and
polished its dull finish until it shone, and now, as the early morning
landscape swiftly rolled past them, Rita could see herself sitting at the
top of one of the green hills watching the little grey car creep along
the road like an armoured beetle.

“Can’t you go faster?” she demanded.
Manfred stepped on the gas.

“Faster!” she cried. They slipped into a curve, and a straight stretch

lay ahead of them, with apple trees on either side of the road.

“Faster!”
Manfred was not an experienced driver. He was tense at the wheel,

they divided the sky

unsure of himself, sweating, nervous, listening to the sounds of the
engine.

“Faster!” Rita cried again.
The sound of the apple trees hurtling by grew louder.
“Haven’t you had enough yet?”
“More!” Rita repeated. “More, more!”
She caught his glance and sent it back, a blatant challenge. There

was a new expression on her face, one she didn’t know herself. This
was thanks to him, and she would only show it to him, today and
always.

She was his equal!
Suddenly Manfred understood the double meaning of the words,

and his eyes grew hot; he reached for her fingers and pressed them
hard.

Far ahead, the asphalt road was a rippling, reflective band of water.

They were approaching a bridge at high speed; it appeared in the
distance, got bigger, came nearer. A small stone gate beyond which
the world opened wide, a new yearning and a new dimension.

They tore over the bridge.
“Enough,” Rita said. The car rolled to a stop. She closed her eyes

and leaned back in the seat. She felt exhausted and happy.

Manfred sat at the wheel, relaxed. He lit a cigarette and blew the

smoke out the window. This road, the bridges, the trees rushing by,
he had it all under control. He’d tested it out.

Manfred bent over toward Rita and touched the tip of her nose.
“You can do magic, young woman,” he said.
They drove through a twisty old mining town toward the nearby

mountains, easily climbing steep streets, driving through colourful
half-timbered villages, and following dizzying hairpin curves down
into a ravine hemmed by evergreens where a river, today a narrow,
dancing stream, must have carved its path over the course of many
ages.

They took a rest in a sunny, open clearing by the water. Rita

stretched out on a bank of grey-green moss, folded her arms under

Christa Wolf

her head and gazed at the cool blue sky. Manfred sat down beside her
and observed her attentively.

“And now?” she asked after a while.
“Here, let us build our home,” he said, not hiding his emotion.
The essence of their love was acquiring an ever sharper focus, free

of deception, wishfulness or delusion, and ensured through knowledge
and decision. Manfred thought, This surface I’m moving on no longer
pitches and rolls. For the first time I am on solid ground. She anchors
me in life. How could I have thought that you can replace the capacity
to be happy or unhappy with something else? How can you ever get
used to feeling jaded? Orpheus fetches Eurydice from the world of
shadows, but the first ray of light that strikes him subjects him, once
again, to the laws of reality.

At noon they reached a neat, bright town on the northern slope of

the Harz Mountains. It lay at their feet, as though constructed from
a child’s building blocks, and they entered it to the ringing of the
noon bells from countless little churches. The blue of the sky grew
lighter in the sun’s glow, and its dome became weightless. But the
heat pressed the people into the small strip of shadow that edged the
streets.

After lunch they did the tourist rounds, which drew them lazily

and with uncanny instinct past all the sights of the old town and, with
one last effort, brought them up to the battered old castle on the hill.
Tired, they let towers and turrets, knights’ armour, old dishes and
pots, history and interpretations, move past. They even climbed the
two hundred steps to the top of the viewing platform, and held their
faces to every direction of the compass, gorging themselves on the
green of the land, wordless.

Toward the northwest, said the guide, you can see the city of B—,

which is in the West. Only when the weather is good.

The weather was good. Everybody on the platform crowded into

the northwest corner and stared off into the distance, at the misty hint
of a West German city that lay there like a mirage.

For some reason, for many reasons, no one said a word.

they divided the sky

On the way down Manfred said, “Soon they’ll add it to the tourist

brochures: ‘a view of West Germany.’ The strangest sight of all.”

They drove on, feeling drowsy in the afternoon heat, following

the northern edge of the mountains until people with red armbands
stopped them in a small town. Could they wait, please, a procession
was about to come along. The little town was holding its annual
celebration commemorating some event from centuries past, whose
details had been forgotten.

Paper garlands were draped across the streets, from one attic

window to the next. “Here they come!” murmured the crowd lining
the edge of the street. The older folks padded their low windowsills
with cushions and leaned out; the children sat on the curb in their
party clothes.

Rita insisted on watching the procession. Marshals in dark cloth

uniforms and white gloves with gauntlets came first. They were
followed by maids of honour in airy dresses, looking more cheerful
than chaste, who managed not to wave at the people on their right
and left who were calling out their names. A sprightly older man,
standing behind Rita, seemed to know everything, and was a little
put out. So they’d included the butcher’s daughter Lisa in the
procession and not Beckmann’s Regina, he called to his trembling
wife who was at a window. In fact, it seemed that his suggestions
had been generally ignored, and he was irritated by details in the
costumes of the knights who were now riding by and being pelted
with flowers by the girls.

The old man’s discontent diminished when Rita turned to him with

questions. It turned out that he’d been in charge of the procession for
years, a bricklayer who knew the city’s history like nobody else, and
now that the celebration was being arranged without him, he was
feeling useless in his old age. He kept interrupting his explanations of
the historic pageantry with calls to the performers who were boiling in
the costumes that represented various counts, mayors, town builders
and its destroyers. Salt-workers and miners from the Kupferschiefer
hills marched by in separate groups, unlike the representatives of

Christa Wolf

the modern-day chemical plants who rolled by in comfort on trucks
carrying entire labs.

Gymnast Jahn also appeared in a wig and costume of his day, with

a brick-red face and a few pounds too many. “Bravo, Heinrich!” the
bricklayer called out to the figure that had nothing much to do with
the town’s history but which he had personally included years ago
because he so liked the sport. “Hale ’n’ hearty, healthy ’n’ happy.”

The sun gleamed down on the living and the dead, on oppressors

and oppressed, on the just and the unjust. The procession ended
with flags and songs and blue neck kerchiefs, and the old man lost
interest.

He insisted that the two young people try his wife’s cherry cake,

which she handed out the window. “Cherry cake with a blanket,” he
said with relish, “it’s hard to find these days.”

The crowd—headed by the children and young people—made for

the festival grounds at the edge of town. Rita had never been able to
resist the attraction of fairgrounds. Happy, she breathed in the smell
of dust and sweat, and other strange, sweet and spicy odours that
hung in the air. She got Manfred to ride on the ghost train with her
and revealed her love of cheap sweets. He bought her candy floss and
peppermint chunks, and then he had to throw dice for her.

It was no surprise that they were on a lucky streak. The first

thing Manfred won was an enormous velour cat stuffed with wood
shavings; then came glass dishes and bowls and a coffee pot with a
pattern of forget-me-nots. Pink with joy, Rita received the winnings,
and passed them straight on to the children who had collected around
the lucky couple. Unsure if Rita’s generosity was real, they quickly
made off with the gifts.

A little girl was left with nothing. Manfred’s luck at the dice ran

out, and tears were imminent. When asked what she really wanted,
she finally said a balloon. A red balloon. It didn’t take long to find a
balloon man. Rita watched the girl run off.

“So,” she said, “that’s how things get sorted out. That’s the balloon

my aunt once refused to give a child because she was saving it for me.

they divided the sky

It was just as red. She was bringing it home from the city. A child
on the bus begged her for it. ‘I’ve never had one’ is what she said,
apparently. But my aunt wouldn’t give it to her, can you imagine? I
could still cry about that today.”

And tears actually came to her eyes. Manfred put his arms around

her in full view of everyone. “You’re a white raven,” he said. “And the
best thing is you don’t know it.”

“What I don’t know, you know,” she said.

14.

As twilight fell, they walked back through the town, tired and still.
Sentence fragments were enough, or the weight of a hand. Rita was
proud of the dark red paper rose that Manfred had won for her at a
shooting stand. It gleamed brightly as the daylight grew weaker.

Suddenly, at a small garden café decorated with coloured lanterns,

he stopped short. “Of course!” he said. “Of course! Now I know
where I know him from.”

Rita followed his gaze and saw Ernst Wendland at a table, in

conversation with a somewhat younger man.

“Where from?” Rita asked in surprise. “Where do you know him

from?”

“Just a minute,” Manfred replied. He was trying to recall something,

a particular event, and he couldn’t quite decide whether this chance
encounter was pleasant or not. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let’s just
go on over.”

But he didn’t head for Wendland. Instead, he approached

the younger, somewhat darker man, who looked up as Manfred
addressed him, then hesitated and took a few seconds to collect
himself. Rita saw the same uncertainty on his face that she had just
seen on Manfred’s. Should they enjoy this encounter or not? The
stranger must have come to the same conclusion: it depends on the
other fellow.

Meanwhile he had leapt to his feet, was shaking Manfred’s hand,

Christa Wolf

and even turning toward Ernst Wendland: “You must have seen him
too, in those days.”

“Yes, I did,” Wendland said. He did not have to carefully consider

the attitude he would take. “I even know where.”

“So do I,” Manfred said in a formal tone.
“I do, too,” the third man said, who had now decided to make the

best of things.

The three men suddenly realized that Rita was the only one who

knew nothing. They sat down around the table and began to explain.
The younger man, Rudi Schwabe, had been Manfred’s schoolmate; he’d
been in a higher class but as secretary of the FDJ, the Free German
Youth, he’d been well known. “One time he helped us out of a big mess,”
Manfred said, affecting a tone that was unnaturally light. “I told you
about the cellar club.” Glotzt nicht so romantisch! I know, she thought.
“It was suddenly supposed to be a centre of political opposition, which
could have been very serious for us. But in the big assembly, that they
all attended with their knives sharpened, Rudi Schwabe and that man
over there”—he pointed at Wendland—“saved our skins. Weren’t you
part of the FDJ leadership in town at the time?”

“Right,” Wendland said. “It was too obvious that there were

teachers who wanted to destroy you. That’s why we were able to help.
Although I’m not sure even today if the thing shouldn’t also have been
dealt with politically, in some other way … ”

“Doubtless,” Manfred said touchily. “At least according to the

theory that everything a person says, does, thinks or feels is political.
We happen to be the political generation, wouldn’t you say?”

Wendland scrutinized him but stayed friendly. He wasn’t willing to

go that far, he said.

The waitress brought ice cream with whipped cream on top. They

ate in silence. Suddenly, the electric lights in the coloured lanterns
that were wrapped around the café came on, and a modest little band
began to play. Rudi Schwabe, ever polite, asked Rita to dance, but
she found the courage to decline, saying she wanted to have the first
dance with Manfred.

they divided the sky

He was still out of sorts. Wendland had irritated him. He directed

his anger at Rudi Schwabe. “Did you see how he keeps checking with
Wendland before he dares to laugh? He used to be different; he used
to take risks. But from what I can see he hasn’t managed to acquire a
serious profession … all-round functionary … is that a profession?”

Rita asked no questions and didn’t answer any either; she just

forced him to dance more quickly. She was enjoying it all, and wanted
to let him know: the little dance floor that floated, brightly coloured,
above the street, the soft evening light with its apricot tinge, the many
people in a party mood. She also liked that Manfred was introducing
her to his acquaintances, and that they must all realize they were a
couple; she liked the down-to-earth, thorough Wendland, who was so
different from Manfred.

“Do you realize this is only the second time we’ve danced together?”

she asked him.

“You’re right,” he said, “we can still count each one of our little

moments.”

“You like that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like being able to hold on to something forever, no matter

how small it is.”

“Then hold on to this day, and forget about Wendland.”
“But you don’t even know that old story.”
“I know you,” she replied, “The look on your face right now tells me

you’re wrong and don’t want to admit it.”

“Oh, so now you’re going to start making improvements on me?”
“You never wanted that kind of woman, right?”
“That’s true,” he said, “but what can I do?”
Later, as Rita was dancing with Rudi Schwabe, she was happy

to see Manfred and Ernst Wendland strike up a conversation at the
table. She learned later that Wendland had asked Manfred, “How do
you find Rudi?” and that in a sudden urge to be open Manfred had
responded, “Very different. I remember him quite unkempt, like a wet
puppy. He’s been completely tamed.”

Wendland burst into a laugh, a little surprised, but didn’t reply.

Christa Wolf

“You’ll see him more often now,” he said. “He’s been assigned a post
in the office of student affairs at the university.” That didn’t bother
Manfred. He had little contact with the university authorities.

Together they walked a little way down the street, which had grown

quieter. Ernst Wendland stayed beside Rita.

“So how is the Meternagel brigade doing?” he asked. Rita had to

laugh at how clearly he knew who was in charge in their brigade. She
looked back at Manfred to see if he could listen in, and instinctively
lowered her voice, as though what she was about to say concerned
only her and Wendland. She hadn’t told Manfred that he was right:
nothing had changed after the assembly.

“They keep quarrelling,” she said.
Wendland understood immediately. “Meternagel is putting on too

much pressure, eh?”

“But he’s right,” Rita said. “Why don’t they believe him?”
“Do you find that disappointing?” Wendland asked, without a trace

of condescension in his voice. It was easy for her to say yes. “That’s
how I feel too, sometimes, still today,” Wendland replied. There was
suddenly an openness between them whose source was hard to define.
The old, dark street had made it easier, and so had the day that lay
behind her.

She didn’t ask what put Wendland in the same mood.
“Distrust,” he said. “It hits you again and again. But just us younger

people, have you ever noticed? For the older ones, it’s like a second
skin. A kind of historical protective layer, I think … .”

He fell silent as though he’d said enough, and she thought about

his words. She was glad that he spoke without prejudice or irritation.
Only now did she realize that with most people you couldn’t speak an
honest word.

They stopped at a tiny house that leaned in a crooked little row

of miners’ cottages. “This is where we live,” Wendland said. “Once
a year, for mother’s birthday, all the brothers and sisters meet here.
Rudi Schwabe joined us this time.”

He put his fingers in his mouth and produced a shrill whistle. A

they divided the sky

child appeared in the darkness, a thin, quick little boy with big dark
eyes. “My boy,” Wendland said. Rita was surprised that he had a son.
She tried to imagine a wife for this man, but couldn’t. An expression
she hadn’t expected now came across his face: tenderness with a
touch of sadness.

Then Rudi Schwabe and Ernst Wendland followed the boy into the

house—the two men ducked their heads to get in the low doorway,
and the boy, who didn’t need to do so yet, copied them. For a few
seconds a reddish-yellow triangle of light lit the street, then the door
closed and Rita and Manfred were standing in the darkness.

They wandered over to the next restaurant, a small, older wine

cellar, found a spot in a corner, and Manfred put together a meal that
surprised Rita.

“You don’t know this part of me yet,” he said. “I like to eat. I’d like

to have breakfast like the president of the United States, grapefruit
juice. Later in the morning, a light snack with tea, like the English.
For dinner, a French meal; in the afternoon, good old German cake
and coffee, and for supper, rich, heavy food like the Russians have.”

“I hope you know I can’t cook,” Rita said, in a fright.
“I’ll cook,” he assured her.
They had cool white wine that they diluted with water. Their hands

lightly touched when they clinked their glasses. Everything can always
start over again, Rita thought, with him, always. They now knew each
other just enough to be sure of one another, but not enough to no
longer be surprised. Even the confidential little chat with Wendland
that Rita kept to herself brought her closer to Manfred.

“You know I have never had this kind of food before?” Rita said

after a while, “And that I’ve never had such a lovely day? That I
couldn’t even imagine how lovely days can be?”

It was late when they finally got back onto the country road. The
moon, hidden by a thin, even blanket of clouds, provided an unreal,
ghostly-blue light that clearly marked the boundary between the
dome of the sky and the round, black circle of the earth. Rita

Christa Wolf

couldn’t get enough of this light, which she couldn’t name and that
compared with nothing she knew, that was both soft and hard at
once.

On their left, just at the spot where heaven and earth met, an island

of light popped up. They drifted toward it. Soon they could discern
the differences in the colour and power of the lights: yellow chains of
light on the ground, and higher up, individual red lights. Then black
shadows of chimneys could be made out against the lighter sky. A
stench wafted into the car; they had to roll up their windows. They
were back under the spell of the big plants.

Rita was already in bed, her face turned toward the wall, when she
heard Manfred come in quietly. She heard paper rustle. He said, “At
this very moment, somebody is turning twenty. It’s midnight.”

Rita turned toward him. He stood there with a large bouquet of

carnations. She counted them: twenty.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

15.

Nobody could have imagined that the first hot days of summer that
year would bring on many more weeks of a malevolent, scorching
sun. An unearthly being spewed its searing breath over the land.
They got out of their beds exhausted, and over the course of the day,
watched with burning, light-sated eyes as the glowing planet made its
majestically slow way across the pale blue sky. They saw the meadows
wither, the grain burn down on the stalk. At midsummer, trees lost
their leaves and produced new ones, a phenomenon they’d never seen
before. In the gardens, the fruit ripened, fat, sweet and juicy, like the
fruit that usually only came from the south. Nobody could deal with
the bounty, and at night they would hear ripe apples and pears thud
to the ground.

Rita was unaffected by the strange indifference of the forces of

nature. The image she recalls most strongly from this time is that of

they divided the sky

Rolf Meternagel’s face. His eyes, which she had known as mocking
and expectant, were now attentive, energetic, hard and intransigent.
Sometimes, in moments of doubt and desperation, these eyes were
the only real thing she could hold on to. Later, she knew that this
gaunt, dogged man had, more than anyone else, saved her from
placing fruitless hopes in some phantom solution. Here is what
really happened, and not in the name of any self-delusion: she saw a
man take on an enormous burden; of his own free will and without
demanding extra wages, he began a struggle he had virtually no
hope of winning—like some valiant hero in the old stories. He gave
up his sleep and his tranquility, was jeered at, harassed, ostracized.
Rita saw him so downcast she thought he’d never get up again. But
he got up again, with a frightening, almost wild look on his face, and
just at that moment, others quite unexpectedly stepped up beside
him, and said what he said and did what he suggested. Rita saw him
breathe a sigh of relief and finally win; it was something she never
forgot.

Rolf Meternagel opened up his book. He passed it around and let

everyone read a number, in red, on the last page: a number made up of
three figures. “Time wasted by our brigade over the past month.”

They shrugged. This was nothing new. They glanced at Günter

Ermisch. He was scribbling in his account book and said nothing.
Who was the foreman around here anyway?

“I’ve been compiling the reasons,” Meternagel said.
“Why don’t you just go talk to management,” one man said.
Meternagel opened his book at another page. He was patient and

careful, which irritated the others even more. “Downtime due to poor
organization is one reason.” He read out the number of hours they
hadn’t worked. “It accounts for half of the hours lost. I’m concerned
with the other half.”

“I’m not,” Franz Melcher said, and he got up and left.
“Why do you have to keep on arguing?” Kar

βuweit muttered

reproachfully.

Meternagel looked at Günter Ermisch until he got up, collected his

Christa Wolf

things and said, “There’s definitely something we can do about that.”
When Ermisch talked like that, not much could happen to them.

“If the cockerel crows on the dung heap, the weather may change

or it may just keep,” Herbert Kuhl said with a sneer as he ambled past
Meternagel.

“Just make sure you’re right!” Rolf shouted after him. That man

always made him angry. The others had grown accustomed to Kuhl
using every opportunity to mock him and everybody else. Rita
sometimes wondered, Does he really enjoy that? Can anybody enjoy
that?

The next morning Meternagel brought along a white sheet of paper

that he pinned to the noticeboard among the dusty news articles from
the time when they were a famous brigade. Commitment is what it
said, but nobody wanted to read it. They turned their backs to it and
continued chewing on their sandwiches. They talked to each other in
loud, joking voices, but left Rolf out. Rita saw his face grow more and
more tense, but he controlled himself until the end of the break. Then
he jumped up suddenly, startling the others, ripped the paper off the
wall and slammed it on the table.

Commitment

is what they all read. Instead of eight frames a day, he

wanted them to install ten each. “And don’t tell me it’s not possible.”

“Anything is possible,” said Franz Melcher. “Except washing your

dirty linen in public. That’s impossible for a normal person.”

“What do you mean by normal?” Herbert Kuhl asked quickly. Rita

thought she could see a spark of real interest in his eyes, but it quickly
fizzled.

“What’s normal?” Rolf Meternagel said in a dangerously low voice.

Only now that he was allowing himself the pleasure of letting go could
the others see the tension he’d been under. “I’ll tell you what’s normal.
What is useful for us, what makes us human, that’s what’s normal.
And what’s abnormal is anything that turns us into ass-kissers,
cheaters and joiner-uppers. We were in that role long enough. But
that’s something you’ll never understand, you … lieutenant.”

The room got very quiet. Why is nobody saying anything? Rita

they divided the sky

thought. Why did he never tell me Kuhl used to be a lieutenant? Only
Herbert Kuhl’s face remained unchanged: mocking, cool. But he’d
gone chalk-white.

So there was still something that could touch him.
“You made a mistake there,” Günter Ermisch told Meternagel later.

Rolf could have relented at that point but he remained stubborn.

“What if I did,” he said. “I’d gladly make that mistake again.”
Nobody signed Meternagel’s commitment paper.
Why are they so unwilling? Rita asked herself. And what are they

resisting? She went over what she’d learned about each one of them
over the past three months. What was important for them? The
fiancée, the small plot of land they’d inherited, the motorcycle, the
garden, the children, the aging mother who was blind and needed
care, new demands at work, photos of movie stars. Many different
things tugged at them; some were unwelcome but others were
carefully tended little indulgences. Modest little amusements that had
replaced the greater pleasure they were deprived of: the opportunity
of living full lives. Now, they clung to their little habits, and bitterly
pecked away at Meternagel.

But one or two of them slowly began to realize what it might mean

if they continued to cling to this thing that had taken hold of them.
One morning, the commitment paper that still hung white and empty
on the noticeboard bore an additional signature: that of the quiet,
unprepossessing Wolfgang Liebentrau. Confused, Günter Ermisch
asked him what this was all about. Liebentrau was always embarrassed
when people addressed him, apologetic that such an unimportant
person as he should attract attention. He was embarrassed now too
when he said, “I just thought, either you’re in the party or you’re not.”

“Don’t you think I’d do anything for the party?” Günter Ermisch

asked, indignantly.

“Of course, we all know that,” Liebentrau said in a fright. How

could he possibly compare himself with Foreman Ermisch! Without
a word, Günter Ermisch walked over to the noticeboard, licked his
foreman’s pencil, and added his own name to the paper.

Christa Wolf

Then Meternagel, Liebentrau and Ermisch hunkered down

together at the brigade’s table, and Hänschen, who was very happy to
see people talking to Meternagel again, stood at the door and kept the
others out. “Party committee,” he said.

Two weeks later the newspaper published another photo of the

Ermisch brigade, under the heading “They’re Leading the Way.” In
spite of her protests Rita had been pressed into the front row, right
beside Hänschen, who bought twenty copies of the paper and always
had the cut-out photos with him, like those of his favourite movie
stars. But the victor, Rolf Meternagel, had stepped back behind the
others, behind his people, against whom he’d struggled and with
whom he’d won the day.

Rita studied the photograph carefully, always beginning with

Meternagel’s face, which was hardly visible in the back row behind
all the other heads. Then she turned her attention to the others, often
returning to Meternagel’s worst opponent, Herbert Kuhl. He stood
in the front row, and would doubtless attract the interested gaze of
the hundred thousand people who would see the picture, especially
the women among them. He was sporting his usual cool, mocking
look, and stared out at her and everyone else with a disdain she found
frightening. But Rita understood why Meternagel had stepped back,
even back behind this Herbert Kuhl. He was not only courageous, he
was smart, and also crafty. He’d put Kuhl in the front row and himself
in the back so that all the attention would be focused on Kuhl. Maybe
the feeling that he was the centre of many people’s attention would,
in time, make him warmer and friendlier. Meternagel, Rita thought,
could do without this attention.

What with all this excitement, Rita had forgotten her own fears and

apprehensions. She knew she would wake up at the right moment
every morning and that she’d get off the tram at the right spot even
with her eyes closed. She always met the same people at the same
place in the poplar-lined street, and she recognized all the little signs
that it was time for lunch or time to go home.

Usually, she and Hänschen worked alone in one of the carriages.

they divided the sky

Meternagel would come by now and then, when he was exhausted
and hoarse from talking to the others, to recuperate with them. They
showed him their work, and he nodded and sat down with a sigh on
one of the still unfinished wooden benches. They’d sit facing him—
they always had time for this—while he quietly had a smoke, ignoring
the electricians’ swearing as they pushed their fat cables through the
windows and installed them here and there in the carriages, and
the painters operating above their heads, painting the ceiling. They
would just sit there with Rolf and be still. His face was growing more
gaunt than ever, and only his eyes flared up, beaming ice-blue and
intense. Sometimes he would give Rita small assignments that she
carried out conscientiously. She had become fearless about going off
into any corner of the plant, and would talk to anybody.

After a while Meternagel would pull out his watch—in an old case

with a scratched-up lid made of horn—gaze at it for a moment, lost
in thought, and say, “These days the whole plant knows Meternagel’s
watch.” He’d utter a growly laugh, and go.

Hänschen and Rita would get back to work, Hänschen always with

two big screws tucked into the corners of his mouth, one on the left,
the other on the right—steel fangs that gave him a certain self-esteem.
One day, Hänschen said, “I wonder why he does it?”

Rita didn’t answer. She knew a few reasons but they seemed too

pretentious to even utter.

Hänschen wondered aloud, “Do you think he wants to be the

supervisor again? That’s what they all say. But maybe he just wants
to get on the good side of the director-son-in-law.”

“Who?”
Hänschen was pleased that she wasn’t clued in yet. A year ago Ernst

Wendland had still been married to Meternagel’s eldest daughter. But
while Wendland was away for a month on a training course she’d
taken another man, under the very eyes of her father, in whose house
she was living. Everybody knew that Meternagel couldn’t forbid or
deny his daughters anything; maybe he felt he’d never acquired the
right to parental authority.

Christa Wolf

But Wendland couldn’t forgive him this tolerant attitude, and bore

a grudge even after he’d divorced his wife. The two men avoided each
other.

Rita spent days thinking about that piece of news. She had got used

to constantly learning new things about the people she worked with,
but in the case of Meternagel this was a surprise. So he had raised a
daughter who cheated on her husband, and out of weakness he’d lost
a son-in-law like Wendland, who was now without a wife, and without
a mother for his scruffy, wide-eyed, little boy, and had perhaps given
up completely on women—she’d heard that this was possible.

Still, there was no reason why someone like Meternagel, with all

his rushing around, should not have some personal motive for all
that activity—for instance, impressing Wendland! Did this make his
honest efforts any less honest?

Rita told Hänschen what she was thinking as they had a hurried

breakfast in one of the carriages. He nodded. In return for her
taking him seriously, he showed her his most recent movie stars,
knowledgeably comparing them with one another. He probably
thought these women were putting on their seductive smiles just for
him when he lay in bed at night.

In the evenings, Rita was overcome with fatigue. Eyes half-closed, she
sat at the Herrfurths’ bright round supper table, seeing everything and
nothing, present and absent at once. Manfred would glance at her often
and press her hand under the starched white tablecloth. She would
hold onto that hand, not caring if Herr or Frau Herrfurth noticed,
and imagine the same bright round table zipping off into the distance,
leaving them far behind, getting smaller, tiny, yet keeping its sharp
outlines, bright and round: a small magical island where outcasts lived.

The conversation around the table dully reached her ears, and

now and then she’d hear her name and listen up: “Miss Rita,” Frau
Herrfurth was saying, “I would really like you to know this: rugs
really must be vacuumed every day; they get terribly dusty.” “Yes,”
Rita said politely, but she was nowhere near thinking about rugs.

they divided the sky

Manfred was at a good stage in his life, basking in the happy, relaxed

feeling of completing a difficult piece of work that had demanded a
great effort and was now paying off. Not only his colleagues were
interested in the solutions he had found; he was kept busy answering
questions from elsewhere, preparing his dissertation for publication,
and giving talks to other professionals in the industry. He saw that
he was needed, and that was as good for him as the recognition and
respect he was getting all around.

This rare and precious harmony with the world made it easier for

him to be available for Rita. She was always surprised to see how
quickly he understood her, even when she was excited, fragmented or
spoke only in allusions. He encouraged her to talk on their long walks
through the city on warm evenings, during the quiet hours they spent
alone by the willows at the river. He especially liked her describing
her colleagues at work. Her humorous and precise observations
amused him, and sometimes she only really saw a person when she
described him to Manfred.

“And what is your Wendland up to?” he usually asked at the end.

He’d taken to saying “your Wendland.” She protested until she
realized that he just didn’t want to admit how preoccupied he himself
was with the man. “We rarely see him,” Rita said. “But we can feel
his influence in the brigade.” Every day she could see how Wendland
and Meternagel’s actions meshed with and depended upon each other
though they hadn’t expressly coordinated them. She was convinced,
she told Manfred, that the right thing was being done, from the top
down and the bottom up.

“Well, that’s good,” Manfred said. “It doesn’t happen very often, as

you’ll find out.”

Often he would get her to talk just so he could watch her. Her face

never bored him. He saw that it had changed over the time he’d known
her, though it was still smooth and clear, matte and light brown. But a
new firmness was developing behind the girlish traits, a new maturity
that he liked very much and that also made him uneasy.

He kept having to reassure himself about her. He’d run his

Christa Wolf

fingertips over her face, over her forehead and her lightly concave
temples, from her eyebrows to her velvety cheeks. She’d lean back.
Her skin knew the path his fingers would take. Through him, his
lips, his eyes, his hands, she’d come to know herself—from the tips
of her warm hair that slipped though his hands to the thin-skinned
soles of her feet. He couldn’t stop being amazed by her, and she saw
that he did things for love of her that he had never done for love of
anyone else. And again and again he found that she was moved by
his tenderness.

Like all lovers they feared for their love. They felt chilled by an

indifferent glance from the other, and an impatient word darkened
the day for both of them.

When they opened their eyes and the weak green glow from the

radio lit up every item in their little room, everything neat and in
its place while they’d been far away and in great commotion, then
Manfred would ask quietly, “Now what do you wish for?”

“Always the same thing,” Rita replied. “One skin around us, one

breath for the two of us.”

“Yes,” he said. “But isn’t that what we have?”
She nodded. That’s how it was as long as the yearning didn’t leave

them.

One night they were awakened by rain drumming on the roof. They
stepped to the window and greedily inhaled the fresh, damp air. They
stretched out their arms and pulled them in again, wet and cool; they
splattered droplets of water into each other’s faces. Their eyes got used
to the dark outside and eventually they could distinguish the silhouetted
houses against the flowing black sky and the occasionally blinking river.
No one lived as high up as they did. The rain came to them first.

“I had a dream,” Manfred said. “We’re both sitting in a small wet

boat and floating down the streets of a city. It’s raining and raining.
The streets are empty, the water is rising. The churches and trees and
houses are going under in the flood. Just the two of us are rocking on
the waves, all alone in a very fragile boat.”

they divided the sky

“I wonder where dreams like that come from!” Rita said

reproachfully. They stayed there, leaning on each other, gazing out
the window.

Suddenly a light flashed over the river, weak but recognizable.

Excited, Rita grabbed the lamp from the table, held it up into the
window and turned it on off on off.

“What are you doing?” Manfred asked.
“We are the lighthouse. Out there, at sea, is our little boat. It is

sending out distress signals. We’re responding.”

Manfred took the lamp, held it high and left it on.
“Will it reach the harbour?” he asked.
“Of course,” Rita said.
“And will there still be people in the submerged city?”
“Yes,” she said. “The city hasn’t gone under. The boat just drifted

too far away.”

“So anybody in distress can see our lighthouse?”
“Yes,” Rita said. “Anybody who wants to see it can see it.”
“And nobody will go under, all alone, anymore?”
“No,” she said. “Nobody.”
They switched off the lamp. The strange light above the river had

disappeared—gone under or gone home? The rain continued to
stream down above their heads, long after they’d gone back to sleep.

In the morning, transparent drops ran along the thin telephone

wires that led past their window to the roof. They came one after the
other, at a constant speed, the same distance apart, quietly, endlessly.

16.

Nine months later the boat had gone under. They stood on opposite
shores. Had no one answered their signals or seen their distress?

Rita has been working hard on herself during the pallid, repetitive

weeks in hospital, and she keeps returning to the same question: Did
she not see the danger in time? Instinctively, and because time is not
on her side, she stacks up thoughts between herself and the event,

Christa Wolf

thereby slowly moving it far enough away from her so that she can
see it unfold from beginning to end.

As luck would have it, the evening reception that was organized

at city hall for the employees of the train carriage plant, to celebrate
the fifteen years since one of the biggest factories in the region
had been nationalized, coincided with the first day in months that
they had met production plans. So that was mainly what they were
celebrating. Only now could they feel how oppressive the past
weeks had been. A strong yearning for light and happiness had built
up in all of them.

The hairdressers in town had done their best. In the cloakroom a

cloud of perfume floated above the heads of the women, who were
more comfortable in this formal situation than their men in their stiff
dark suits.

Manfred accompanied Rita reluctantly. He wasn’t good as a prince

consort, and besides, receptions were boring.

“Not for me,” Rita replied. She prepared herself carefully for the

evening.

A crowd had gathered at the big entrance doors to the reception

hall, and they met Meternagel and his wife there. After many
rounds of shaking hands, they finally entered the hall and there
was Hänschen, right in the middle of the shiny parquet floor, under
hundreds of sparkling lights, bursting out of the suit he’d worn for his
confirmation, and with a beautiful girl on his arm, who was at least
two years older and looking around eagerly.

“He must have cut her straight out of one of his postcards!”

Meternagel said. But the girl was flesh and blood, and she let
Hänschen lead her across the room with great dignity. Her name was
Anita and she was very adept at using her big doll’s eyes. Rita gazed
at her as though she were a vision, and then studied Hänschen, seeing
him for the first time. He was sweating and trying hard to control the
wild turmoil caused by a mix of mortal embarrassment and unbridled
pride. “I like him,” Manfred whispered in Rita’s ear. “He’s a kind of
prince consort too.”

they divided the sky

Manfred stood straight and tall beside Rita. He nodded when

people greeted her and was surprised to see how many she knew.
They walked the length of the hall and back, like most of the others.
It was the spectacle before the party, the moment to show off and
compare. “Madame,” Manfred said, “you are the queen of the ball.”
She blushed because she felt that herself.

She wore a corn-gold dress that he had given her and looked just

the way he’d imagined. And people turned to gaze at her, openly or
furtively. All the attention from the men made her flush. She tried
to hide the brilliance of her eyes behind her lashes and gripped
Manfred’s arm in confused embarrassment. Manfred couldn’t stop
looking at her.

“How could I ever have thought a reception is boring?” he said.
In the meantime, at the narrow end of the hall, where the large

horseshoe-shaped table was laden with cold cuts and salad bowls,
the speeches had begun. Worthy gentlemen extracted white sheets
of paper from their left breast pockets and read out the texts that
earlier in the day they had dictated, cursing, to their secretaries.
Earnestly, the guests listened to the earnest speeches, and even the
carefully placed humorous moments hardly drew laughter. (How
did the great Goethe put it: “Work by day, guests by night”

….) Of

course, a speaker would refer to an idea a previous one had already
uttered, but never fail to credit his predecessor, and so everything
was in order.

Hänschen’s ears were bright red with all the ceremoniousness, a

sight Manfred enjoyed immensely. Rita stepped on his foot, and he
held back until the signal was given that food was served. Then he
smoothly stepped up to the table and in no time filled two plates.

“It’s hard to be an official speaker,” he said, chewing. “Especially as

a part-time job. Just imagine, by day you’re in charge of the ministry
for mechanical engineering, say, and by night you have to hold
speeches. You end up not being able to think of anything but “and so,

From Goethe, “Der Schatzgräber”: “Tages Arbeit abends Gäste.”

Christa Wolf

always and forever … ” or “We march onward, valiant and victorious
… Horrible.”

“The people liked it,” Rita said.
“They did? They think it has to be earnest and boring, and

dribble pompously down over them. Normally, when they’re among
themselves, they’re offhand and relaxed.”

“Pass me some more salad,” Rita said, “and maybe consider that not

everybody is as disrespectful as you are.”

“Right,” Manfred said. “Hänschen isn’t.”
“And Meternagel isn’t, and I’m not,” Rita said. And they left it at

that.

The music was starting up in a side room. The feeling of being

guests in their own place made people increasingly relaxed. The
curious were still wandering around the edge of the hall, but there
were fewer of them as more groups formed in the middle, where
waiters were having difficulty getting through with their bottles and
glasses. Only a few couples, younger people, were on the dance floor.
Manfred liked how Rita, who had grown used to the many admiring
glances, moved to the dance floor on his arm, graceful and proud. She
didn’t look in any of the mirrors they passed by. She knew all she had
to do was be herself, and everyone would be enchanted.

Manfred whirled her around—how long ago was that evening

when he’d been all stiff and cold dancing with her!—and she couldn’t
get enough. He caught a triumphant glance when several young men
came up to her for the next dance. He danced with no one else, while
she moved from arm to arm, radiant. Hänschen was the last one to
steer her across the parquet floor.

Hänschen was unhappy. It was predictable, but they still felt

sorry for him. Anita had found suitors who were a better match
than Hänschen for her big eyes and small, sharp, perfect teeth. And
Hänschen confessed to Rita that he’d borrowed her for the evening
from a friend, whose girlfriend she was. There was no consoling him.
Rita was angry with Anita, but Hänschen understood all too well why
she’d left him standing there.

they divided the sky

When Rita was free for a moment, Manfred would step up and ask

mockingly about her wishes. “Dance with me!” she said each time.
And they danced.

They hardly knew anymore what they were saying. They were

alone, among all those people, and they confirmed this to each other
with smiles and glances. But at some point this party will come to an
end. Doesn’t matter. We’re going to have lots of parties, aren’t we?
The lights of the hall spun past, reflected in the eyes of the other, and
they couldn’t tell anymore what was moving and what was not. Out
of breath, they sat down on a couple of forgotten chairs in a corner
of the hall.

The invisible turning point arrived, the point that occurs at every

party, the moment before people’s faces pale with fatigue, before the
women’s hairdos flatten and their smiles go limp, before the shadow
of the early morning hours dims the glow of the chandeliers and the
leftover food loses its freshness. The glasses still tinkled brightly
whenever people brought them together, the dancing was still airy,
and the smell of perfume and wine was still pleasantly light. But every
additional dance step, every drink, every smile brought them closer to
the fine line between enjoyment and effort, between bliss and boredom.
Rita closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, Ernst
Wendland was standing there in front of her. She looked past him at
Manfred’s face, which had changed completely in a few moments. It was
closed, almost distrustful. She looked up at Wendland with trepidation.
She understood immediately what had happened: Wendland had been
wandering through the hall for hours, shaking hands with everyone,
having drinks, still tense from the efforts of the past weeks. Finally,
tired of all this, and in need of peace, he’d seen Rita dancing and had
followed her instinctively. He’d walked right past Manfred, ignoring
him completely. Now he stood before her with a relaxed smile and a
look on his face that had sobered Manfred and frightened Rita.

The band was still playing the same tune, but everything had

changed. Ernst Wendland bowed to Rita and asked her for a dance.
She got up, and looked at Manfred, uncertain. He responded with a

Christa Wolf

bored shrug, which made her angry, and she let Wendland lead her
to the dance floor.

“I saw you dancing,” he said. Rita was happy no one else heard him

or saw him. She stiffened and felt awkward in his arms. Wendland
knew immediately he’d gone too far. The almost ecstatic expression
on his face changed swiftly, the yearning in his eyes faded. This
metamorphosis hurt Rita. She felt sad to hear him say in his ordinary
voice, “A lovely evening, after so much work, don’t you think?”

What had happened? Nothing, less than nothing. So little, it would

have been impossible to talk about, now or later, because even the
briefest mention would have been petty and awkward. But both Rita
and Manfred knew what they’d seen. They wanted to forget it, and
they did—if you can forget what you refuse to think about.

When Rita came back to Manfred, he rose and mockingly

responded to Ernst Wendland’s bow. A proper salutation took place:
well-behaved acquaintances were saying hello to each other at a
reception. Wendland took three cups of coffee from a tray. They sat
on low chairs with their knees drawn up, and balancing the coffee
cups in their hands, had to see how they would get along.

Manfred asked Wendland about his work as the director of the

plant. A lot of responsibility, I imagine. Yes, Ernst Wendland said,
but you get used to it.

“Of course,” Manfred said, sounding more sarcastic than the

moment required. “Our entire history is based on that: people getting
used to things.”

“Are you sure?” was all Wendland responded. He was exhausted

and not looking for a fight.

Their conversation became strange. Thinking about it later,

Rita tells herself that at the time she was blinded by female pride
(“they’re fighting over me!”), and didn’t fully understand. She
knew how carefully Manfred had been observing Wendland from
a distance, and now that he was here with them, he’d turned
obstinate. He produced a long-winded justification of his comment,
that human history was based on apathy. He didn’t notice that no

they divided the sky

one was listening. He talked and talked, embarrassingly insistent,
and concluded with the statement, “After all, people are all cut from
the same cloth.”

Why is he holding forth like that? Rita wondered. She felt she just

had to keep still. Any word from her would just irritate him more.

“Cut from the same cloth?” Wendland said. “Possible. If you ignore

how differently our reasoning develops...”

Manfred pretended that he had been waiting for just that argument.

He burst out laughing. His laugh was artificial, too. “Oh, go on!
Reason has never been a factor in historical developments. Since
when have humans experienced the benefits of reason? Better not
count on that.”

Wendland smiled, so that Rita blushed for Manfred. “So,” he said,

“abandon hope all ye who enter here?”

“Maybe not hope,” Manfred replied. “But illusion.”
That was the second time, Rita recalls, that she felt a twinge of

disquiet. This was it. She suddenly realized that jealousy or injured
pride was not the issue. The issue was exactly what they were talking
about.

Wendland, who was less engaged than Manfred, didn’t insist on

having the last word. He rose to greet Rolf Meternagel, who was
approaching hesitantly with his wife. Feeling anxious at Manfred’s
bitter outburst (he even seemed disappointed that Wendland hadn’t
answered), Rita grasped the meaning of the other two men shaking
hands, the younger one offering his hand to the older man.

“Well, Rolf?”
“Well, Ernst? Hard times, eh?” And Meternagel’s smile lit up his

whole face, a smile Wendland returned.

“Seems that way.”
Hard times, but we seem to have put the worst behind us, right? So,

let’s drink to that. They clinked their champagne glasses. Champagne
never really chimes, but that doesn’t matter. They emptied their drinks
and set them aside, then remained standing together.

“You heard about the new model?” Wendland asked. Of course

Christa Wolf

Meternagel had heard! Several tons lighter than the old one, a
downright poem of a model.

“I think you could be part of that team,” Wendland said.
“Me?” Meternagel asked in disbelief. He quickly regained his

composure. “If that’s what you think, Ernst … ”

“Yes,” Wendland said. “With your experience. Why not come by

tomorrow morning, the development team is meeting.”

Meternagel laid his hand on Rita’s shoulder. “Well, kid,” he said.

“Looks like we’re moving into research. Did you hear that?”

“Good for you, Rolf,” Rita said, as matter-of-fact as possible. “But

I’m not going. My time’s up. Or can I stay longer?”

Meternagel laughed, and suddenly Rita felt happy again.
She got Manfred to dance the last dance with her. On the way home

through the dark, hushed city she hooked her arm into his. They were
quiet, satisfied with the evening.

A short while later the holidays began. Together—on foot and in their
little grey car—they explored the region around Rita’s village, went
swimming in forest lakes and soaked up the clear, unspoilt air and
summer lightness, right to the tips of their fingers. Then Manfred
spent two weeks on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria with his future
students, and came back relaxed and tanned, with a little grey-brown
turtle as a gift for Rita. They named her Cleopatra and set her in a box
of sand in the attic next to their little room, to which they returned at
the end of summer, unlike the migratory birds who were just leaving
the northern realms.

They loved each other and were full of expectations for their second

winter together.

17.

There was no third winter together.

The memory of the leaves again changing colour in the square little

attic window during the last quarter of the year—from garish and

they divided the sky

hot and bright to dim and cool and pale—is bitterly painful in its
uniqueness. And so is the memory of the gradual change in the light
over the city roofs, the bend in the river and the expanse of plain, and
its inimitable, precious reflection in Manfred’s eyes.

We didn’t know then, none of us knew, what kind of year lay ahead:

a year of the most exacting ordeals that were not easy to survive. A
historic year, is what they will say later.

Those who live through the searing banality of history can find

it hard to endure. Reflecting on this year, Rita thinks: I came to
understand the difference between that strict but steady light and
the fluctuating light of every day. She knows that on many people’s
faces light and shadow flicker according to moods and momentary
opportunities. She sees people waste enormous amounts of energy,
interest, passion, and talent on the daily grind, which, fifteen years
after the end of the war, is admittedly still difficult to manage.

So was he right, she wonders, when he kept saying, these days love

is impossible. So is friendship, and hope for fulfillment. It’s silly to
struggle against the powers that stand between us and our desires.
We cannot even imagine their omnipotent reach. If we succeed at love
in spite of it all, you and I, then we’ll have to hold really still. We’ll
always have to think about the “nevertheless.” Fate is envious.

Was he right? And was I wrong? Was the hard position that I took

against us unnatural? You won’t see it through, is what he kept saying.
You don’t know life. But he thought he knew life. He knew you have to
wear camouflage if you want to pass unnoticed and not be destroyed.
He knew, and that made him lonely and arrogant. Sometimes bitter.
But I was never afraid I would lose myself. I had no idea I’d been
born into an unpropitious moment until he told me. He used to think
up scenarios: living a hundred years earlier or a hundred years later. I
never played this game with him, and he’d sometimes accuse me of a
lack of imagination. Manfred could see that the adventure of her one,
innocent life kept her completely busy. He knew her well enough by
then not to misinterpret or misuse the surprising despondency that
overcame her after the first high-energy weeks at the teachers’ college.

Christa Wolf

He listened up when one evening, when September was almost over,
she asked him in all seriousness and for the first time ever, “Do you
love me?” “You’re not bad,” he said, and eyed her more closely. Then
he felt guilty for not having seen the fatigue around her eyes or her
pallor. He put his book aside and suggested they take a drive out of the
city, right then, that evening, even if it was raining and autumn cool.

He turned on the heat and let the radio play softly. He drove

through the streets, heading south, and was silent for a long time until
he could feel Rita quietly relaxing beside him, and no longer shivering
with cold. As usual, she had no idea where they were after a while,
and as usual, he made fun of her when she asked. Slowly, carefully,
he got her to talk, and discovered that she was feeling quite alone and
a stranger at the college.

Nothing had happened; he was finally willing to believe that. Nobody
had insulted or criticized her, but no one paid her any special attention
either or encouraged her. She wasn’t having difficulties learning.
That’s not what it was about.

“They’re all so clever,” she said. “They know everything. They

aren’t surprised by anything at all anymore.”

“I know that attitude,” Manfred said, and he really did, and again

he had the upper hand. “It usually doesn’t last. It goes away when
something happens.”

“Nothing will happen to them,” Rita said. “That’s the problem.”

Manfred laughed. “Things happen to everybody, you can depend on
that.” For instance, he thought, what happened to me is that I met
you. Ever since, I’ve had doubts about being the imperturbable tough
guy.

But it was wrong not to take her worries seriously from the very

start. He shrugged them off too soon, all the more so because when
he waited for her in the afternoons, he’d often see her come happily
down the steps of college, at the side of a very blond, boyishly slender
girl. This was Marion, from the hair salon in the small town where
Rita had long ago worked at the insurance office. Manfred was happy

they divided the sky

to see Rita with this girlfriend; the friendship would not go beyond
certain limits, and that was exactly what he liked about it.

When you were with Marion, it was impossible to be sad. She

couldn’t keep anything to herself—joy, sadness, anger—and
immediately shared it with a friend. Rita was only now discovering
whom she’d lived next to for years in her boring little town, and every
evening she would amuse Manfred with stories about the odd little
misadventures of her former fellow citizens.

Marion could spend hours engrossed in fashion magazines. That

was the only time she was completely absorbed. She began making
changes in Rita’s habits.

“You probably still wash with soap and water every night,” she

said. “That would be just like you. You have no idea what you could
make of yourself. Without me around, you would keep on wearing
that impossible dark red lipstick that really doesn’t suit you, right to
the end of your life.”

Rita enjoyed bringing Marion and Manfred together, seeing his

mocking politeness and her girlfriend’s cheerful, flirtatious chatter.
Manfred was the only person for whom Marion felt some respect.
But she let Rita know that a boyfriend like that would be much too
stressful for her.

Over time she grew to trust Rita more and more. She not only told

her that her real name was Marianne and that she’d changed it to
Marion herself (“who’s called Marianne these days anyway?”), but
also let her in on all the phases of her happily dramatic love story
with a young mechanic from the neighbouring engine plant. Soon,
Jochen, the mechanic, joined Manfred at the door of the college.
They shared the melancholy of the autumn evenings, and Manfred
reconciled himself to the role of co-fiancé. He and Rita never tired
of observing the majestic grace Marion displayed as she made her
way toward Jochen’s motorcycle, the greeting ceremony between
the two of them, and then the sudden roar of the engine as the bike
swooped off across the twilit square, leaving behind a trail of smoke
as it disappeared around the next corner.

Christa Wolf

But after a while it became obvious that the friendship with Marion

could not remedy Rita’s need for help. For a long time Manfred
convinced himself that he could see no change in Rita—but there
was an almost imperceptible, rarely visible expression on her face.
Manfred hesitated for a long time before he tried to find out what that
was. He understood it was serious when his mother started making
sympathetic overtures toward Rita, pressing her to take the best cuts
and encouraging her to eat. She looked pitiful—no wonder, what
with all those demands on her! “Look after your fiancée!” his mother
told Manfred in private, as though she were telling him a secret.
He couldn’t ward off this intrigue on behalf of Rita with his usual
rudeness.

He didn’t believe in any altruistic intentions on his mother’s part;

he knew she had a fine nose for her own advantage. She could detect
signs of weakness and vulnerability in Rita, the ones he himself had
wanted to see months earlier, like a sickness. So he now went so far
as to cautiously ask Marion about Rita. She felt honoured, looked up
to him and assured him that no one could admire Rita’s intelligence
and talent more than she, who unfortunately did not have enough
of either. “She’s in the right place,” Marion said. “It could make you
jealous.” She sighed, indicating that she did not feel she was in the
right place at all. Manfred ended the conversation there.

He made moving attempts to help her through the difficult period.

He overcame the jealousy he felt toward anyone and everyone who
approached her, and even introduced her to Martin Jung, who visited
Manfred every three or four weeks from the little Thuringian town of
S— to discuss the progress on his thesis. Manfred was his supervisor,
and admired how much work the younger man could get done in addition
to his job as a chemical engineer in synthetic fibre production. Martin
engaged him in practical questions around the “spinning jenny” he was
trying to improve, a machine he could be just as enthusiastic or angry
about as a girlfriend. “See!” Martin told Rita when she commented on
his hermit’s lifestyle, “She leaves me no free time for other girls!”

Martin was an easygoing but not superficial young man. Everything

they divided the sky

interested him, most of all his topic, and least of all girls—maybe
because they chased after him.

“You’re just too handsome,” Rita would say. “That’ll make any man

arrogant!” Martin tolerated all her criticisms. Whenever he called, the
mood picked up. He brought along new records and cheap candies
for Rita, the kind Manfred wouldn’t buy her because he detested
them. Their small room, which some evenings seemed just a little
quiet, immediately filled with life when Martin arrived. He danced
Rita around the dark and dusty attic to the music on his records, or
lectured them on the topic of jazz, which he loved.

“It makes me feel like an old geezer,” Manfred said sometimes

when Martin had gone. He was attached to Martin, which Rita saw
with pleasure and surprise. This boy, who was more than five years
younger than Manfred, had developed a kind of timid, enthusiastic
awe for the older man. And Manfred, who had suffered from not
having a friend, attributed the disappearance of this blemish, which
was the fulfillment of a secret wish, to Rita coming into his life.
“You’ve brought me luck,” he said when Martin had been there and
the air in the room still swirled in his wake, and they stood there alone
smiling at each other in the quiet that now felt good.

She still lay beside him at night, with her head fitting into the

hollow of his left shoulder. His breath raised the outer tips of her
fine hair, and as always she praised his warmth, and he exclaimed
over the smoothness of her skin, which made him feel tender. But
it could happen that he’d wake up after midnight because Rita had
cuddled up, and he’d see that she was lying there with her eyes open.
“What’s wrong?” he’d ask, stroking her hair. She shook her head and
pretended to have been asleep. She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t
know how to express herself and felt he didn’t really want to know
what was upsetting her.
The autumn had turned dark and damp. The leaves slapped down
onto the grimy streets like wet rags and were swept into heavy, dirty
bales to be carted off. In October, the fogs set in, fogs that don’t exist
anywhere else, heavy and thick, infused with a bitter taste. They

Christa Wolf

cover the city for weeks. You have to feel your way along the fences,
you sit alone in a gloomy room, a fog chamber, and it’s hard to fend
off the sorrows about all the missed opportunities in life—lost love,
unacknowledged suffering, unknown joy, and a never seen sun over
a foreign land. Out on the streets, the traffic grew sluggish. Even
the strong headlights of the trucks, whose loads of materials were as
eagerly awaited in the plants at the city’s edge as bread was elsewhere,
could hardly make it through the reddish-white walls of fog.

One such evening, Manfred waited for Rita in vain. At supper he

invented some excuse for her, which no one believed. Of course, his
parents noticed his disquiet and exploited it shamelessly, the way only
unreal love can. The mother expressed concern for Rita’s fate—they’d
all heard about traffic accidents, hadn’t they?—but then she forgot
all about that, and with a conspiratorial look on her face spread out
the contents of a package sent by her sister from the West. The first
package after many long years! Finally, they would belong to those
who could invite a neighbour lady over for a cup of West-coffee.
Manfred didn’t care. He hardly knew this aunt, but accepted the
cigarettes she’d sent for him and wrote a greeting at the bottom of the
thank-you letter.

Bored, he asked about the aunt’s daughters. Photographs were

hurriedly brought in. Now he had to look at the photos as well—oh
yes, I remember, the one was short and fat and the other one tall and
skinny, light blond and boring, both of them—and he cocked his ears
for any sound at the door, but could not get away from the warm, cozy
circle of light made by the lamp above the family table.

“The streetcars,” said the mother, who missed nothing. “This

afternoon they were moving at a snail’s pace, some of them weren’t in
service at all. You really can’t do anything but wait.”

And the lamp kept giving out light. It had done so years ago, when

he was a little boy leaning over his homework at this same table.
Hadn’t his mother sometimes come up behind him then and placed
her hand on his head, a light, warm hand that had felt good? Who
was to say there was a false note in her voice when she worried about

they divided the sky

Rita? Who was preventing him from feeling sorry for his father who
really was a gentle man and, in his own way, always wanted the best
for him? Something kept pulling him back into the stuffy warmth
of this family room; he felt himself weaken, and struggling against
this, he leapt up and left, with a rage against something imprecise,
something he couldn’t name; and this grew as he stayed alone in his
room. He smoked and listened to the news. There were accidents due
to fog on the autobahn. He paced up and down. Suddenly he had more
room than he needed here. Gradually, but then with the destructive
force of an avalanche, the certainty swelled up in him: something had
happened to her! Just as he had overcome the paralysis this horror
had set off and was about to go out to the nearest phone booth to
call the hospital emergency rooms—he was already getting into his
coat—the door opened.

Her coat and hair were covered with the fine condensed droplets of

water the fog had deposited; they glittered all over her as she moved.
Her face was rosy, with no trace of guilt.

It is impossible to count the number of times he would see her like

this—much later, when he was far away from her—standing there in
the door, glittering, fresh-faced, wrapped in a cloud of mist, with a
hardly perceptible look of defiance on her face (or was it really just
tranquility?). Every time, he would feel himself go stiff, as he had
then.

“Where were you?” he asked. It wasn’t fright that sounded in his

voice but a demand for an explanation. “At Schwarzenbach’s,” she
said. She set aside her supper; she’d already eaten. But she had some
tea.

Manfred watched her. At Schwarzenbach’s. The recruiter for the

teachers’ college, whom she’d encountered again at the institute in his
role as a history teacher.

Didn’t she have anything more to say? No. She had nothing more

to say to that closed, cold face. She went to bed, and he sat down at
his writing desk. She didn’t sleep and he didn’t work. He could feel
her eyes on his back, and he stiffened. She waited for a sign from him.

Christa Wolf

For God’s sake, do we have to behave like little children?

That evening he managed, once more, to overcome his rigidity. He

was able to go to her in bed. He bent down to her and said, “You still
smell of fog.”

That same night she told him much. They spent hours—reports,

questions and counter-questions. The fog had time to retreat, draw
back or dissolve into nothing—who knows where the fog goes when
it finally goes. In any case, the next morning the city was visible again.
Suddenly people noticed things they’d missed before.

“Schwarzenbach,” she said. “I ran into him on the stairs in the

institute—not completely by accident, by the way.” He was the only
person who could understand her now. There was still some of the
trust that had developed in their evening conversations in her office.
Right away he’d remembered the exact words she’d used to reject
his offer, and now teased her with them. She replied, almost as he
expected, “But I was right, you know. I should have stayed there.”

“Really,” he said. “Have you got some time?”
She nodded, though she knew Manfred would be worried.
They walked out into the fog, walked for a long time because no

streetcars were running. Luckily, Schwarzenbach lived in the same
part of town as she did.

At his door, they ran into a woman with two children: that’s his

wife, those are his children. They immediately flung themselves at
their father. Both of them have pitch black hair and get picked up
every evening from two different kindergartens.

“He gave his wife a kiss in the entry way, it didn’t matter that I

was there.” She liked the family a lot. No chance of talking to
Schwarzenbach right away, because first came the evening activities
of a busy family that spent the day apart: preparing food, washing
the children, and at the same time listening to their experiences and
putting them into the right perspective. The tasks were clearly divided
between the parents, and Rita enjoyed watching it all, and even got
permission to check the older boy’s arithmetic. Steep, self-conscious
handwriting with cute little hooks.

they divided the sky

“I felt completely happy in that noisy crowded room. At first I was

surprised that Schwarzenbach lived that way. I’d imagined that he
liked things quiet, with a gentle, thoughtful wife. His wife is the exact
opposite: much younger than he is, and energetic and cheerful. She
has thick, curly black hair that was sticking out all over from the
damp outside. I’ve never seen anything like it. But on the whole she
seems really bright.”

She’s a teacher, Erwin Schwarzenbach’s wife, and she joins her

husband and the girl when they sit down together after supper.
“She’s going to tell me off,” Erwin Schwarzenbach tells his wife, “for
dragging her off out of her village and her quiet office; this is the girl
who helped me shorten those long evenings.”

“By that time, things weren’t so bad anymore,” Rita told Manfred

that night. And in fact she feels as though she’s got answers to all her
doubts before they even exchange a word. “I really didn’t know if I’d
been getting tangled up in fantasies. But the Schwarzenbachs didn’t
try to talk me out of anything. And they didn’t say, oh, just wait a bit,
you’ll get used to things, either.”

That’s what Manfred said sometimes. “But what was it all about?”

he asked now. “What makes it so hard for you?”

“They asked me that too,” Rita replied. “It’s not easy to explain. It

sounds stupid when I blame it all on somebody else, but Schwarzenbach
understood me right away when I said: they keep telling us to learn
from Mangold. I can’t! And I don’t want to. Do I really have to be
like him?”

“Mangold?” Manfred asked.
“You know. I’ve told you about him: he was a manager in some

council before he joined us. He’s in my class. He’s not much more
than thirty. You’d be amazed at all the things he’s done already. I
really can’t imagine how they put up with him wherever he was
before. There’s nothing he doesn’t have an answer for. He intimidates
us all.”

“God,” Manfred exclaimed. “Aren’t you being just a bit too

sensitive?”

Christa Wolf

“Schwarzenbach said that doesn’t matter. He said, ‘Sensitive people

are what we particularly need. What use are the thick-skinned ones?’”

“He can talk,” Manfred said. “I can only advise the sensitive ones

to give up their sensitivities. No need to exaggerate. Listen, it’s really
nothing new: young people rush into life with enormous ideals, they
hit the rough, real world—un-gently, of course—they upset the old,
and sometimes even proven systems, they get knocked on the head,
three, four times. That’s no fun. So you pull in your head. What’s so
new about all that?”

You sound as if you’ve already been through all that, Rita thought.

“Schwarzenbach was just as upset as I was when I told him what
happened today: Our young sociology teacher, who is pretty insecure
and keeps looking over his shoulder to see if he’s done something
wrong, was attacked by Mangold in the middle of class for misquoting
some important phrase. Mangold knows all the quotations by heart,
he must have spent years learning them. The frightened look on the
teacher’s face at Mangold’s tone of voice—he’d let him know that
misquoting this particular phrase was not without implications—the
way his face turned all red … he barely managed to bring the class
to an end. Mangold totally exploited the situation, and worst of all,
everybody else kept still, not daring to look at each other, without the
courage to fight back … It was awful.”

“All progress has its price,” Manfred said. “Dealing with these

Mangolds is the price we have to pay.”

No, Rita thought. I don’t believe that. “Schwarzenbach says we

don’t have the right to tolerate them. He’s quite serious. And his
wife! She got really angry. It’s us or them she said. She included me
in the ‘us.’ ‘There’s nothing more resilient than the petty bourgeois,’
Schwarzenbach said. ‘When we first appeared on the scene, they
crept into their rat holes. There, they made a few adjustments,
quickly and quietly, and now they’re showing their faces again,
latching on, pretending to serve us and doing a lot of damage in the
process.’”

“Schwarzenbach is a Communist,” said Manfred. “But you’re not.

they divided the sky

Let him fight as much and against whoever he wants. What does he
expect from you?”

“I don’t know. He seemed to assume that we all see eye to eye on

these things.”

“You know what,” Manfred said, “if you want to know what I think:

you should try to keep out of all that!”

“That’s what I want to do,” Rita replied. “I’m not looking for a

fight.”

She fell asleep quickly after that, with a calmed, childlike face.

Manfred lay awake, as though her unease had now entered him.

18.

One morning—it is her fourth week at the sanatorium—Rita is out on
the balcony that runs along the entire southern front of the building,
and suddenly everything is different. Quite abruptly, without
warning.

The first clear, cold autumn day after a stormy night. She hasn’t

slept much, but doesn’t feel the need. In the night the storm howled
and screeched through the park. A threatening buzz came off the
telegraph wires. Around midnight she awoke from her own voice
calling, “Help! Help!” She cut short her ungrounded screams.

She would like to remember the early morning dream that

seemed so clear and permanent in the first seconds after she woke,
understandable even and interpretable, if only she could think about
it long enough. But she can already feel it dissipating within her.

She can still see the strangely long street, a street she doesn’t know;

but she does know the feeling she has walking down this street (a
mixture of fear and curiosity), and it’s not Manfred at her side, which
is odd. It is Ernst Wendland, who doesn’t belong there, and even in
her dream she finds his presence perplexing. He acts quite normal
and repeats several times: I’m the one you have to forgive, not him!
Before she has time to answer or ask him something, they are already
sitting in Rita’s girlhood room in her aunt’s little house (she realizes
this when the air blowing in the open windows smells of meadows).

Christa Wolf

They’ve never been here together, and her astonishment grows.

That’s when she woke up and was already beginning to forget

the dream, or rather that’s when the dream, like a breath of air,
began to pull away from her grasping thoughts. What remains is
the bewilderment, comparable to the amazement a child may feel
when for the first time in its life it thinks me. Rita is pervaded with
a grownup’s astonishment. There’s no sense in being sick any longer,
and besides, it is no longer necessary.

The plain, clear light of day blinds her a little—who doesn’t

occasionally yearn for the slightly blurred contours of childhood?
But she doesn’t tend toward being sentimental. She will deal with
this light.

For a long time she stands there in her corner of the balcony,

looking down into the park until the sunny triangle on the stone floor
grows too narrow and pointy and no longer warms her.

The wind has lessened. Rita stands there and for the first time in

her life she sees colours. Not the red and green and blue of children’s
books. But the twenty different shades of gray on the ground, and the
countless variations of brown in the trees, including the leaves, which
are more brown than coloured as they fall after so much rain so late
in the season. All this below the quickly moving cloud mass that lets
tatters of blue sky shine through: more and more blue as the day goes
on. And then the pale cold sun comes out and changes it all again.

Light and air and cold slice into the matted blanket of daily habits

like a blade, ripping them open. Well, so be it! She looks around. Well,
well—life is possible after all. Things have sorted themselves out on
the quiet. Now make use of the clarity the way you use your hands.
You’ve seen all kinds of things, tried a few of them. This morning the
awareness is there: you’re getting to taste it all, the harsh, the bitter,
the pleasant, the sweet.

Rita goes down to the park. She feels like touching everything: the

wooden back of the bench, the cracked bark of the bright red beech
tree, leaves, branches, dried-up moss. In much the same way as she
turns to the things that can exist without her help, she now turns

they divided the sky

100

calmly toward herself. She can see and feel herself; she is no longer
this thing that was tossed into the bottom of a pit.

Inevitably, she pays for this new sense of self with a loss.

The night that she and Manfred talked about Mangold marked the
end of the feeling they’d had of floating somewhere above it all in
their gondola room, sufficient onto themselves. This feeling never
really returned in all its purity. Instead, there were conversations.
Manfred tried to present the world to her as he saw it: recognizable,
but still unrecognized. Or recognized to a certain point, but without
that recognition having much of an effect. A heap of untamed,
contradictory material, along with humans, who like to feel they are
masters and hardly ever apprentices. With a grim kind of satisfaction
he outlined the attempts by mathematicians to make predictions
about all kinds of things, including many that had nothing at all to
do with mathematics: the success or failure of extensive economic
planning or the outcome of future wars. But the prognostications by
these electronic brains did not change the fact that the earth (at least,
one part of the earth) was still speculating in grand ways, and buying
arms in grand style.

“But what about the people?” Rita asked.
“Most human fates run along side by side, along parallel lines

that only come together in infinity,” Manfred replied. And he added
smiling, “Determined by infinity, as they say.” Manfred clearly
considered himself one of the guild of augurs. He was content with
the large part that his own science played in people’s futures, and if
ever he got impatient, it was just the impatience of the scientist, who
cannot wait to get access to entire cities and countries as objects of
investigation.

“What people want,” he told Ernst Wendland one day, “is a house

that works like a well-oiled machine, that cleans and heats and
repairs itself. Cities where the carefully planned cycle of human life
ticks over without friction or blockage, where children are raised
automatically—yes, even that! In any case, a life where there is no

Christa Wolf

101

time wasted due to technical imperfections. Extending life through
intensification: that’s the scientific challenge of the century. And in
the natural sciences, we can guarantee that.”

“Better hurry up,” Wendland replied.
He’d come to the institute to pick up an analysis for the factory, and

it wasn’t the first time. It was not the first time he’d walked down the
long corridor past the door with Manfred’s name on it. This time, after
briefly hesitating, he decided to stop in. Manfred was just checking
over a long row of test tubes with his students and was surprised
that Wendland of all people should come to see him. But the chill
glance Wendland had expected and that would have made him turn
around and leave didn’t cross Manfred’s face. He was not at all put
out by the visit. Herr Wendland, director of the train carriage plant.
My colleagues. Dr. Müller, Dr. Seiffert. Please, thank you, very good.
How do you do?

Wendland, who was clear-sighted to the point of being over-

sensitive that day, took everything in: the functional lighting in a
room that looked bare and clean despite the many brightly polished
instruments, the strict purposefulness of every object, the faces of the
chemists. Younger faces, all of them, who looked up from their work
and for his sake turned their focused, objective gaze into politeness, a
politeness that did not fit here.

Wendland looked along the row of test tubes. “Is it all the same

stuff?” he asked Manfred, who smiled the way a professional would
smile at an amateur.

“Not quite. In our field the tiny differences are what count.”

Manfred led him over to his colleagues—after all, how often did a
factory director come for a visit?—and explained what they were
working on. He presented himself as a closer friend than Wendland
would have expected him to, and exploited the fact that he had his
opponent in his own territory. Wendland didn’t bat an eye.

Towards the end of the tour, their eyes met—no longer than you

usually need to look at one another. Manfred caught a mocking little
sideways glance from Wendland, but Wendland held fast. He smiled

they divided the sky

102

openly and disarmingly, and Manfred smiled too, though his smile
was thinner. He shrugged: all right my friend, you’ve seen through
my game.

Cease fire. Who would be so unfair as to exploit an opponent’s

temporary weakness? And what’s with this word opponent? Because
of the girl? Maybe. But doesn’t that kind of thing also make for
connections between men?

Not something you talk about.
Manfred offered cigarettes. They stepped over to one of the wide

windows and looked down at the busy street stretched out in the milky
pre-winter light they both took in consciously for the first time. They
smoked. Manfred started talking about the future of his academic
field, a logical topic of conversation, and Wendland repeated his
response, “Better hurry up. Or were you expecting to hear something
critical from me about the natural sciences?”

“Critical? Not exactly. That would be retrograde. But maybe a little

reservation. A little damper on the arrogance of science?”

“Not science, but scientists are the ones who may be a little

arrogant,” Wendland responded.

“So let’s just leave arrogance out of it.”
They eyed each other, savouring the moment. Man! Why don’t we

just get to the point!

“Well, all right,” Manfred said. “Since you’ve seen through me,

don’t you think there are other parts of the world where science is
making its way into daily life more quickly?”

“Such as west of the Elbe River?” Wendland said, without any

reproach in his voice.

“For instance,” Manfred said. He took a glossy magazine from his

table and opened it for Wendland. “Here, look at this, we should be
this far already, too. And why aren’t we?”

“Ask the people who are responsible.”
“Why don’t you ask them yourself!”
Wrong. Manfred slammed shut the magazine and put it back on

his table. They were all the same. Brushing you off. Doesn’t he know

Christa Wolf

103

what kind of answers someone like me would get if I asked such
questions? At best, lectures. Kindergarten lectures.

He was angry. Why did he let this guy taunt him? He tried to pull

back. He’d had enough practice not showing his colours.

“You know,” he said, “as a chemist I explore the cosmic chance that

allowed life to develop on this planet, including creatures like you and
me. Don’t you think we expect too much from such a chance event?
Who is to say it wasn’t a pretty trivial coincidence? Why take it (and
us) so seriously?”

“Listen,” Wendland said, not in an unfriendly tone. “That’s not

something you can do with me. If I want to see a pirouette, I’ll go to
the circus.”

They laughed. A feeling akin to appreciation for the other man rose

up in Manfred. He immediately agreed when Wendland, looking at
his watch, suggested they go for lunch together.

The two men, young enough to feel rather comfortably confident,

stepped out of the door of the institute into the pale December light.
They both felt it had got cold, and turned up their collars. Then, of the
same accord, they headed down the gently sloping street, edged on
one side by leafless brush, encountering other people, most of whom
were leaving town at this time of day.

“You should have seen us,” Manfred later told Rita, not reporting

every little detail of the encounter but telling her the most important
facts. “You would have enjoyed the sight.”

Rita had never heard so much about Wendland from anyone else

as she did that evening from Manfred. After he and Wendland had
found a table in the crowded corner bar, which Manfred knew well
and where farmers were the main clientele, and after they’d ordered
the special, pork hock with sauerkraut, and been served their beer
by a no-nonsense waitress who was good at repartee (she just set
the beer right on the wooden planks of the table and wiped away
the foam that spilled over the top with a cloth), and after they’d
said cheers and eaten their lunch with good appetites (the pork
hock is the best here, tender but never greasy, I don’t know how

they divided the sky

104

they manage that!)—after all that, peace and quiet set in, and if
you looked closely, also a kind of emptiness. The beginning of an
emptiness, perhaps, but still.

Wendland ordered coffee, and as they waited for it in the bar that

was growing steadily quieter, he began to talk. Maybe he had only
just decided on this conversation, maybe it had been his purpose
from the outset. In any case, Manfred realized he was an accidental
conversation partner, and he played the role well. Besides, Wendland’s
story was interesting for him too.

“This is a special day for me,” said Ernst Wendland. “It’s my birthday.

Thirty-two. But don’t start in on the congratulations. I’ve already had
those today. But since we were talking about mistakes a while ago, I
suppose you must know that train carriages have electrical systems?
Well, we have always bought them from a particular Berlin company,
and four weeks ago this company stopped delivery.” Wendland spoke
more slowly than usual, the only sign that he was agitated.

“Of course, letters went to Berlin; they didn’t get answers.

Telegrams, phone calls. If people don’t want to talk, you can’t find
out anything. Meanwhile, the carriages are standing around here,
ready to go, but with no lighting. So, I go to Berlin. And what do I
find out? The company simply shut down its production of electrical
systems—you can imagine what that means. For four weeks now
they’ve been producing other things. Instructions from higher up.
The plant director is on holiday—what kind of a director goes on
holiday just before the end of the year?—the ministry bureaucrat
who is responsible is out of the country at a conference.

“We don’t take this lying down. I send the director a telegram in

the name of the absent bureaucrat: end of holiday! He’s spitting fire
like a volcano when he gets back and sees what’s going on. I finally
convince him to continue building our systems. Afterwards, he sends
in a complaint about me. Logical.

“I was at the regional offices today. Congratulations all around.

‘You’re fulfilling the plan, Comrade Wendland. Excellent! But what
kinds of methods are you using?’ And then I got the full talking-to:

Christa Wolf

105

anarchism was the least of it, factory egotism, lack of self-control,
presumptuous abuse of my professional functions, etcetera.”

Midway through, Wendland thought, and why exactly am I telling

him all this?

Manfred could feel that Wendland was thinking just that. He was

sure that this time he was not on the receiving end of a lecture.

“I’ll keep it short,” Wendland said. “They raked me over the coals

and I let them. What can you do? They’re right and I’m right too.
That can happen.” He fell silent and downed his coffee in one gulp. It
seemed he was finished, but he set in again as though he’d forgotten
what was most important, “What about your IG-Farben people? Do
they make mistakes?”

“Not any more, as far as I can see,” Manfred said. “It’s a smooth

operation that eliminates anyone who blocks its path.”

“Right,” Wendland responded. “That’s what I told them: why don’t

you just fire me if you’re not satisfied! That didn’t impress anybody.
‘Even if we weren’t satisfied with you we’d still need someone better
to replace you with. So, keep at it!’ Logical, eh?”

“Logical, if you’re looking at it from the top,” Manfred said. He

wasn’t used to thinking his way into people like Wendland. “But from
your perspective … ”

Oh, you couldn’t be too squeamish about these things. Wendland

had already had a similar experience, in ’forty-five. An older sergeant
sent home a group of young Luftwaffe workers; Wendland was one
of them. Sent them home! Easy to say in the chaos at the end of the
war. They were all young boys. For two weeks he and his friend
walked from Hamburg to the little town in the Harz Mountains, to
the crooked little house that was his home. Sometimes they’d had to
swim, and sometimes they’d crawled—the Elbe River was in the way
and so were various military controls, some of them representing the

“Antifa” is derived from the German Antifaschismus, meaning anti-fascism.

Freie Deutsche Jugend [Free German Youth], socialist association for young

people.

they divided the sky

106

old regime, others the new one, and all equally dangerous. When they
got home their feet were bloody, but they were as happy as children
can be who have made it home after all. He spent one night in his old
bed—that was some night! At dawn the house was searched. Not
because of him. The Soviet patrols were looking for bigger fish. But
they found the pistol on him, the one he’d pulled out of a ditch along
the way and had intended to throw away the minute he got home.
He’d forgotten! Damn! “Come along, you!”

“So,” Wendland said, “I spent three years in a mine in Siberia. Hardly

logical, eh? I can tell you that’s what I thought too! I took a nail and
scratched a phrase into the chalk wall by my bed: Is this why I got away?
Of course, I have no idea what I would have done here. At the end of my
three years there, I was sent to antifa

classes. When I came back I went

straight to the FDJ.

By the way, my friend, the guy I walked home

with and who threw his pistol away in time, went over to the other side
long ago … Maybe the logic of an event can’t really be distinguished
from above or below, maybe just from your own position?”

Manfred thought: I know what’s next. The usual political line. He

got up to go. Maybe the other man knew more about him than he
wanted and was being clever. But what exactly could he know? Did
he have anything to hide?

“I have to go,” he said. “Your problem is really very interesting.”
Wendland looked at him, disconcerted. Manfred impulsively gave

him his hand—let’s set aside all this damned distrust!—and he said
again, with more warmth, “It really is interesting. And now, let me
congratulate you after all.” They stepped out into the street; the sun
was still there, pale and powerless. They squinted, said goodbye at the
door, and went their different ways.

19.

The year has been moving on. Time is no longer slipping away; that
flow has stopped. Long nights, filled to the brim with dreamless sleep
and short days scheduled according to the doctor’s orders—that’s the

Christa Wolf

107

way things are now. That inexorable flow of time, the images rushing
past—that was then.

And the moment everything stood still and you looked at each

other and you both felt you wanted to stop your watches … Wasn’t
that at the reception, that one evening, remember? At the end of the
reception held at the home of Manfred’s professor. “The one with
the carefully parted hair?” “As if that were the most important thing
about him.” “Of course not. But I need something to remember him
by.” “What about his wife.” “That slim blond woman, who was much
younger than her husband and who gushed about him, wherever she
was?” “Oh, god, yes, I’d forgotten all about that … ” They’d stayed in
town over Christmas for that one evening.

I was longing for the village. Maybe those big twinkling winter

stars don’t really exist. Maybe I never saw them. But I thought they
always stood over the village and the woods in the nights between
Christmas and New Year.

Memories are deceptive, and cannot really serve as objective

evidence. But there was that incredibly high wind just before Christmas
that attacked the city from all sides. Broke into the sea of houses as
though it were nothing. And then—where did it come to rest? The
silence of those holidays. The boredom that poured into the streets
along with all the well-dressed people! Was this what they’d all spent
weeks preparing for? It wasn’t easy to hide one’s disappointment.

They would not be driving to the reception at the professor’s house,

at least not in this particular car that they owned. It could not be seen
parked in front of the house beside the others’ shining automobiles.
It was better to go on foot. “Of course, fine with me. But how do the
others have that kind of money to spend on cars, at your salaries?”
“They’re more interested in appearances. Just look at Dr. Seiffert’s
and Dr. Müller’s wives. How much time they must spend on every
little detail.” “That’s something I will never learn … ”

The first half hour was spent talking only about cars. The professor

was an eminent man, which doesn’t mean he was an eminent human
being. Or to say it more directly, he was vain. A great chemist.

they divided the sky

108

Manfred had described moments when he’d been able to summarize
all their efforts in one inspired thought, but above all else he was in
love with himself. His success. His fame. Why couldn’t he be satisfied
with the admiration that his efforts had afforded him?

“Yes, indeed! I’ve had my own car for over thirty years. You cannot

imagine, gentlemen, the performance of a DKW!”

His wife, a prim little blond, interjected that as usual he was being

far too modest and forgetting the prizes he used to win for cross-
country racing “during the period of our engagement!”

And then everyone talked about the professor’s modesty, while he

stood there, his hands raised, as though he were capitulating in the
face of such odds, though with some reservation.

But was this actually about the professor? For the first time Rita

was seeing Manfred among these people—more than a dozen guests
had assembled—but if she were asked today whether she’d had as
critical a view of the event as she does now, she would have to say
no. Time has cast another, sharper light on that evening, given it an
additional dimension. That evening, Rita was just astounded, and
only later did subsequent events colour that astonishment with anger
which, if you thought about it carefully, was excessive.

You could, if you wanted, see a little sadness in the professor,

whenever his eyes came to rest on one of his students; but he
would quickly catch himself. He may have been telling himself
that everyone has the students they deserve. Then he would glance
over at Manfred, with a friendly look—more often, in fact, than
Dr. Seiffert or Dr. Müller liked. In a whisper Rita drew Manfred’s
attention to this but he pretended not to hear anything and raised
his glass to Frau Professor, the wife. There was no secret hand-
clasping under the overhanging edges of the stiff white tablecloth.
No smile, no glance just for her.

Rita had to resort to Martin Jung, who had shown up unexpectedly

in the city, and whom the professor had invited for Manfred’s sake,
although he did not belong to the “inner circle.” His only ties to
the famous man were through his work. What a pleasure it was

Christa Wolf

109

to see him in this circle of people who were inhibited by so many
considerations.

Martin was sparkling with mockery. “Idol worship!” he whispered

to Rita. What did he mean? Were they all—Manfred, and these men
Müller and Seiffert—were they all paying homage to the professor as
their idol? Would Martin go that far to criticize his friend? Or did he
mean that they were all paying homage to a greater authority? But
which one was that? Scholarship?

Seiffert kept spouting that word, scholarship, though people would

remind him of the agreement: no shop talk tonight! But then, what
else did Dr. Seiffert have to talk about?

He was tall and bony, had carefully parted mousy hair, and a

carefully selected wife. His wife seemed unable to conceal a constant
bad temper. But she’d married Seiffert of her own accord, and couldn’t
hold others responsible for that.

Seiffert belonged to the generation that had been conscripted

into war early on, been terribly decimated by it, and had to work
especially hard afterwards to find solid ground under their feet. This
kind of effort is not for everyone. It was known that Seiffert was very
hardworking and ambitious, and that the professor did not like him
much but couldn’t evade his onslaught of correctness and zeal. As the
most senior assistant, Seiffert was closest to the professor’s chair. He
was next in line if ever that chair should one day, in the far distant
future, be vacated. One can have opinions on such things, but those
were the facts. Those were the facts that determined Manfred’s daily
life. Or should one say they encircled him?

Is that what I was already thinking back then? I don’t think so. I
remember being very disconcerted by Rudi Schwabe and Dr. Müller’s
fiancée. The fiancée was short and very thin. She wore her hair in a
pitch black tower and had little to say; it became all too obvious that
she was not expected to say very much at the side of stout, rosy-faced
Herr Müller. Herr Seiffert found it hard to hide his contempt for his
friend’s taste in women. Many things are possible, even inevitable.

they divided the sky

110

There are uncontrollable moments in a man’s emotional life; that
was not the problem. But why get engaged right away, and drag the
girl over to the professor’s place, and wear such a primitive look of
pride of ownership? This is where a sense of tact should come in. But
such opinions were, of course, left unspoken during the meal, which
was excellent if a little on the standard side, having been delivered
along with all the plates, cutlery and service personnel from the city
kitchens.

Remember, Manfred, there were those younger people too, who

were just starting to work with the professor. They were sitting at the
far end of the table and seemed to feel like laughing and making fun
of things. I was attracted to them; you weren’t. And then there was
Rudi Schwabe. The man we met on the trip to the Harz Mountains.
Right, he was now part of the inner circle: the professor was the dean
of faculty and Rudi his contact with the central students’ council.
Rudi, who would never have attended such an evening voluntarily—
he had a hopelessly low position—wanted nothing more than to
pass unnoticed. That could only happen if he demonstrated silent
approval. But they rejected his approval, and exploited the fact that
they outnumbered him.

I don’t remember exactly when the game with him began. I was

paying attention to Manfred who had gone into the side room with
Martin Jung. They were standing at the buffet, pouring themselves
a cognac each. Then they briefly spoke to each other. How important
can that have been?

Martin said, “Keep smiling, boss. We’ve been refused.”
Refused? Our new spinning jenny with the improved exhaust

system has been refused? Just like that? After months of work! If it
were only the work …

Suddenly Manfred realized how much he had invested in this thing,

this machine. He felt he’d kitted it out as an oracle: if this works,
everything else will work; if not, I won’t succeed at anything else. A
friendly oracle, as long as it didn’t raise any doubts about his success.
Now it was revealing its ugly side.

Christa Wolf

111

Manfred said nothing. He just gazed at Martin. His pupils narrowed

a little, then he emptied his glass as though nothing were the matter.
Martin, who had already indicated earlier that there were likely to be
problems, spoke his mind for the first time: another project, one that
had also been developed in the factory and that was clearly not ready,
was going to be funded instead. Strange things were happening.
“We’ll have to go talk to them. But there will be trouble.”

Manfred didn’t want to hear any more. “Well,” he said, unmoved,

as though the question didn’t interest him much. He returned to the
others. Much later, Martin told Rita he’d had to stop himself from
grabbing hold of Manfred at that moment and giving him a good
shaking, and that for quite a while he’d kept thinking, I’ll show you,
man. I’m going to show you!

But that was no use to Manfred. He now had proof that they didn’t

need him. Somewhere there were people who, with the stroke of a
pen, could destroy a person’s hopes. All this talk about justice was
nothing more than talk.

Wasn’t Seiffert already looking over at him with a sneer on his

face? No, he wasn’t, he was busy with Rudi Schwabe. There was
something about that poor guy that they all found amusing, even if
they couldn’t show it openly. But he knew them well enough. They
were the same people they’d been five minutes earlier, and they would
always, disgustingly, be the same.

It was just that they didn’t concern him any longer. In an evil sort of

way, Manfred felt light and free. He could see himself and the others
clearly now, through Rita’s eyes: this evening (Rita was right, for
what that was worth when she wasn’t involved), the weeks before,
during which he’d expended an enormous amount of nervous tension
and set all his hopes on this project (how else could he ever show the
Seifferts and Müllers of this world, and liberate himself from them?),
and finally, all the years of his conscious life, had prepared him for
this moment. He would relinquish all responsibility, in the here and
now, and in the future. He’d almost stumbled into the trap. That was
a mistake and it wouldn’t happen again.

they divided the sky

112

A new feeling of cold invulnerability swept over Manfred. Pale, but

with a smile on his face, he returned to the others. Into the half-light,
where they felt comfortable.

There was Rita. She was the only one who could still cause him pain

and joy. What was she angry about? She didn’t even know yet. What
was going on? Oh yes, Rudi Schwabe, that eternal child. Of course, it
was inevitable … Someone, probably Dr. Müller, had started asking
him questions. Harmless questions at first, which Rudi had been a little
too eager to answer. They saw they could go further, though without
the professor’s approval. He kept out of it. They were talking about
old-age pensions. Thirty-year-olds were discussing state pensions as
though this were their most urgent problem. But the feeling that this
was funny soon faded. Instead, it felt as though they were witnessing a
subtle form of blackmail. Rudi Schwabe, the representative of the state,
was being blackmailed. The names of colleagues in the same academic
discipline came up—“first class scholars, you know”—who had taken
steps when their merit privileges were delayed. These days, everything
is done twice in Germany, chemistry as well. Of course, the departure
of such people is most regrettable—most of all for the state, which
depends on its scientists after all … Every state does, doesn’t it?

Rudi agreed. Someone dropped the word “risk.” You didn’t want

to take the risk of losing your best minds, no, you couldn’t take the
risk. In the upper administration, people had realized that it was best
to avoid any such risk as far as scientists were concerned. There was
already enough risk involved in their lab experiments, wasn’t there?

Rudi was sweating. No one had told him this would be his life! He

thought about his instructions and agreed with everything.

“Germany,” someone said. It was Seiffert. Everybody else stopped

talking when he started. “Germany has always been a leader in
chemistry. That’s not something you jeopardize. The only question
is: Which Germany will continue the tradition? West? Or East? That
depends on realities, not on politics, by the way. One of those realities
is our brain power. And I would venture to say it’s one of the more
important ones. The proletarian state will have to put up with its

Christa Wolf

113

undesirable bourgeois chemists for the sake of their desirable output.
Isn’t that right, Herr Schwabe?” Rudi’s weak protest could hardly be
heard. Seiffert looked at Manfred. He wasn’t saying enough. Seiffert
was one of those people who know more about others than they allow
others to know about them.

“Indeed,” Manfred said, and Seiffert smiled, although it wasn’t

clear how this response was meant: as a capitulation? A rejection?

The younger people, the extras of the evening, who had kept out

of the conversation, remained still, embarrassed looks on their faces.
What did they say when they were alone? How long would it take for
them to agree with Seiffert, as Manfred did?

And now they began to go at Rudi Schwabe, baiting him like a dog;

they’d show him a bone here, a bone there, and quickly pull it away
when he was about to bite.

Manfred did not participate. He finally looked over at Rita. She

was gazing at him with exactly the expression in her eyes he had
expected. He felt sorry for her. He was familiar with this, but how
would she survive it? He would have liked to stroke her hair, but he
stayed where he was, quiet under her gaze.

Was she seeing him for the first time? No, not really. But who

hasn’t experienced how hard it is to really see the person they love?
In those few seconds Manfred moved out of the blur of proximity into
a distance that allowed her to examine, measure and judge him. They
say this inevitable moment is the end of love. But it is just the end of a
spell. One of the many moments love has to withstand.

The fact that they both recognized this was meaningful. A silent

accord. Any word would have been hurtful, but a gaze … In his eyes
she read the decision to no longer build on anything, to set aside all hope.
And in her eyes he read the response: I will never ever accept that.

At the same time she felt this was not about consoling or encouraging

him. He had just realized that life could go wrong, that it had perhaps
already gone wrong. Things that were still thinkable yesterday were
forever out of the question today. And he was no longer one of the
youngest. It was too late for miracles.

they divided the sky

114

Rita shuddered a little. She suppressed her desire to go up to him

and lean her head against his shoulder. But the superstition that
someone suffering a spell could be set free with a touch of the hand
had gotten lost, along with her childhood. Manfred was not trying to
hide anything from her. She’d seen him in many different guises. Now
he was showing her what she really had to deal with.

Their gaze relaxed. They heard what was being said. Rudi Schwabe

had gone on the defensive. “No,” he was saying, “no, that’s where
you’re wrong. But there are people who need the mistakes of the
revolution.”

“And what for, do you think?” That was Seiffert, pointedly polite.

“Why do these people need these … mistakes? A word you used by
the way, we didn’t!”

Rudi gestured disparagingly. Leave words out of this! I know

exactly how you can trap someone with words. “What for?” he
said. “As a pretext, of course. As a pretext for their own laziness,
or cowardice … ” Well, well, well. He wasn’t exactly clever, but he
wasn’t giving in either. He was fighting back, spoiling the game of
allusions they were so good at, ignoring conventions. Of course he
doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. In this environment you
need a stiletto, not a catapult. And he’s often mistaken, defending
what is indefensible. Making prophesies that are ridiculous. He says,
one day you will be happy if people don’t remind you of the opinions
you hold today!

But still …
Rudi believes what he says. A romantic, if you like. Rita imagines

herself in Rudi’s shoes, trying to talk to these people, and to Manfred!
as well. What kind of answer could you give someone like Doctor
Müller?

“Revolution … ” he was saying in a dreamy voice. “A revolution in

Germany? A contradiction in terms, don’t you think? In Russia, yes!
Admirable. You mustn’t think we are so narrow-minded that we can’t
see that. But why does every revolution in Germany have to end up
in such an amateurish mess?”

Christa Wolf

115

Rita listened impatiently to Rudi’s long-winded response.
“But Herr Schwabe,” Seiffert said. “Please don’t label us the scum

of all reactionaries! Revolutions. Why ever not? Just spare us your
illusions, please … By the way, you should know this best of all of
us: a revolution eats its own children. And if it doesn’t, it shoves them
into … well, let’s say, a student council.”

Touché. That shut you up, my friend. They kicked you out of the

local management of the FDJ as a punishment, and now you’ve
landed here with us and are trying to cozy up to them again and
undermine us …

Rudi had turned bright red. So everyone knew. How was he

supposed to do his work?

Rita hadn’t known. She was not adept at quick answers, but this

time she said, quite loudly into the silent room, “If you ask me, I would
prefer the person who makes mistakes and isn’t selfish to the one who
always puts himself first.”

Seiffert composed himself. “You said it!” he cried, and toasted Rudi

and Rita and heartily agreed with Frau Professor who complained
that now even the ladies were being drawn into the political debates.

Rita didn’t ask Manfred if he agreed with her, not even later, not

even with a glance. She answered Martin Jung’s enthusiastic nods
with a smile but felt no less awkward, no less wretched than before.
She didn’t even like Rudi Schwabe. What drove her to defend him?
If Manfred had done that she would have been happy.

It was next to impossible to embarrass Dr. Seiffert, but he could

easily be insulted. He’s going to take it out on me, Manfred thought,
but he didn’t care. Later, he never once talked about this evening
with Rita. All things considered, too much was accumulating that
they couldn’t talk about honestly or in depth.

Now that Rita is pondering it all again, a year later, she has to admit

that she didn’t really know what was going on that evening. This
not-yet and no-longer situation that they were all stuck in—Seiffert,
Müller, Manfred, yes! Manfred too—it was something she had never
experienced. Maybe it’s impossible for an individual to make that leap.

they divided the sky

116

But they were all individuals. Ah! Who could ever be truly just!

Rita went into the side room where the bar was. People were

drinking copiously. The evening was a failure in any case. The
professor would have to deal with the fact that not everything could
be smoothed over. Please make yourselves at home, dear guests, we
have to do something with the rest of the evening. As you can see,
there’s no lack of fuel! The professor was mixing drinks according
to his own recipes. He had them celebrate his concoctions. He called
out, “A bonbonnière or a bottle of champagne for the best name for
this cocktail!” What a wonderful idea! They all came back together,
and were merry.

“This one is for the ladies!” Glasses holding a red liquid were passed

around. “So, what shall we call it?” “Phenomenon!” Excellent, Frau
Professor! But Dr. Müller’s fiancée whispered, “Love Potion.” That
was the first word they’d heard from her all evening, and it was a little
embarrassing, as could be expected. But she won the prize.

And now, the gentlemen. Careful, don’t spill a drop, please, it’ll

burn a hole in the carpet. Clear as glass, looks absolutely harmless.
That’s the trick. “Cheers!” Agreed? Yes, I think so. “What do you
suggest?”

“Murderous!” “Firewater!” From the younger people. The

professor smiled indulgently. Then Dr. Müller, coughing and already
half-drunk, produced, “I would say, ‘Scorched Earth!’”

Laughter. Then sudden silence.
A prize for ‘Scorched Earth?’
Silence.
An open wound. Not a pretty sight.
There they stood, the adults. They’d been part of it, they were there

when such slogans thundered across city squares packed with people;
they’d repeated them, shouted them, marched along behind them as
though following a flag, across half the world. And here we were, the
children. Shut out, the way children always are shut out of the serious
concerns of the adults. An aftershock of horror at the terrible secret …

And where does this shared memory take them? These thickets

Christa Wolf

117

that stand between people! How many generations are they being
hurled backwards? Ice age, stone age, barbarism?

And then Seiffert’s strident voice. “You shouldn’t be drinking if you

can’t take the alcohol!”

They call a taxi for Herr Müller. Frau Professor looks after that.

She is easily embarrassed by things, a dropped serviette, and worse,
certain kinds of jokes. But this, she can handle.

It’s time to go. But first, one for the road. They all gather around

the professor again. He’s not someone who has sought out the most
strenuous events of this century, but he is no longer young either and
there are moments when he feels a warning flutter on the left side of
his chest.

So now it’s champagne. For some unfathomable reason they are

short one glass, a champagne glass—a calamity Frau Professor will
never forget. But before she rushes off to find another glass, Manfred
says, “The two of us prefer to drink from one glass.”

He looks at Rita. She nods and blushes. The professor, who wants to

salvage what he can of the evening, is the first to applaud. He puts on an
understanding face; yes, I can approve of that, when you are so much in
love. Suddenly, they are the centre of attention. Rita’s agreement with
Manfred vacillates. In this environment you expose yourself by saying
such things. But he knew that, and still he didn’t shy away.

The professor raises his glass. What shall we drink to?
“To our lost illusions,” Manfred says loudly. Again, that’s not going

to work. Why are these young people so intent on causing their
teacher problems today, a teacher they have so much to thank for?
The professor bows to his wife and at the same time raises his glass to
Rita, “To everything we love!”

And so they drink to very different, to the most contradictory,

things. Manfred just takes a sip and passes the glass to Rita. She
empties it in one gulp. They don’t look at each other. But they both
make the same wish: may time stand still from this point onward.
Later, Rita clearly remembers her confusion and how she wondered,
do we have anything to fear from time moving on?

they divided the sky

118

Quickly, almost hastily, the guests departed, as though driven by

guilty consciences.

20.

Time has not left the professor’s evening parties untouched. While
politic get-togethers may be attractive, the attraction wanes when the
politics change. New wishes and yearnings develop much less quickly
than huge factories built on sand.

Of course there are always facts that carry their own weight, but

does that mean that these facts must also pave my way? No real life
can be built on mere hopes for the future. Days, nights, weeks and
years with one woman, an apartment, a car, food and drink … That
requires clear thinking, doesn’t it?

Manfred, who liked to come across as hardboiled, was used to

disappointments but not failures, which came out now. So far, he had
reached his goals easily. The country was in desperate need of talented
people; he had increased their number. But so much depended on those
few drawings, on the birth certificate for a new machine, a being he had
created, that was as perfect as only invented beings can be. And now
the birth would not take place. He was surprised by how despondent
he felt. Only now did he become aware of how, for years, he’d been
propelled forward by the strong wind at his back. Only for love of
Martin Jung—he couldn’t afford to disappoint him—did he decide
to spend the first weeks of the year in Thuringia, in the factory that
refused to test their machine.

He made preparations as though he were planning an expedition

into an unknown part of the world. This was not his first visit to a
factory, but it was the first time he thought about how best to make a
good impression.

“So much can depend on details,” he said. “For instance, should I

wear a tie or not? A cap? Or a hat? What do you think?” He asked
Martin Jung, who was watching him pack and laughing at him.

“No cap and no hat,” he said. “Patience.”

Christa Wolf

119

“And ‘confidence’ is probably what you’ll say next.”
That would be the best. It was hard to resist a confident person.

Rita noticed that Martin was preparing his friend as gently as he
could for unpleasant experiences. Did Manfred not feel this?

He glanced at Martin disparagingly. “Do you have to talk to me as

though I were a sick horse?” he asked.

It was good to see Martin laugh; he was still very young.
Rita huddled there, her legs tucked up, watching what was going

on between the two of them and not knowing if she was happy or
sad. “Misty weather” was Manfred’s term for that condition, and she
protested every time, fighting back with accusations.

“Why didn’t you at least give me a budgie instead of Cleopatra? She

sleeps in her box all winter. A bird would sing to me. Especially when
I’m alone. People need something to look forward to every day.”

First of all, she wasn’t alone, Manfred informed her, when she had

so many friends. Yes, friends. I know what I’m saying. Second, no
respectable girl would deliberately give a man a hard time when he
has to go on a trip. And third...

Martin knew this scenario. He turned away when they kissed each

other.

“By the way, nobody there knows that we’re coming,” he said after

a while.

Manfred looked at him in surprise. “Shall I just unpack?”
“Do whatever you want.”
What he wanted! He wanted to see the machine working, right

away, and problem-free. But he was gradually realizing that there
were other things involved, beyond the machine. Martin, for instance,
whom he now gave a ferocious scolding.

Rita had cheered up; she didn’t know exactly why. She made coffee

and set a plate of ginger cookies on the table that she kept refilling
from what appeared to be a bottomless box from home. In thanks,
Martin played her a serenade on the long ruler Manfred used to draw
lines under his long formulas. He handled it like a zither. He sang
whatever they wanted to hear. It was good that no one else could hear

they divided the sky

120

them. You felt happy about yourself when you could say: this is our
friend.

Rita could talk to Martin about Manfred. “Keep an eye on him

please!” she said. Martin bowed, ironic. “Listen, Martin. If he does
anything rash … he’s easily rude. That can be hurtful.”

“Rude?” Martin said. “More like brutal. He doesn’t know how to

talk to people. He upsets them. He’s patronizing. But the machine is
good.”

Rita sighed. “You know, he’s not really a hero either … ”
“A hero!” Martin laughed. “They need a chemist and an engineer,

they don’t need heroes. There are no jobs for heroes.”

“Yes, I know, you want to make me feel better. That’s nice of you,

really very nice. You’re truly a nice guy. But try and keep him on a
short leash, won’t you?”

“Rita,” Martin said, “why don’t you just sit down a minute and wipe

those worry lines off your face. Right. Now, I have always admired
how cleverly you manage Manfred. It’s a pretty rare gift. Just stay as
clever as always and let me keep admiring you.”

They wouldn’t be away much more than a week, at most two. But

the time dragged on for her. First, she had Marion come for a visit.
A dull, dingy day in February. Hardly any snow but a sudden stark
cold spell, icy winds howling down the straight road that leads to the
college, and this unbearable, ongoing longing for spring. The embers
below the ashes … .

Marion came home with Rita to the warm little attic room and

let her boyfriend, the motorcyclist, drive off alone. They sat facing
each other at the narrow table, both engrossed in their assignments
on the same math problems and formulas, which turned to dust under
Marion’s unhappy gaze. With an evil gulp, a single dead number could
drain the life out of the whole bright, busy world for her. Sighing, all
Marion could do was step up to the little window above which the
real sky was growing darker.

She couldn’t understand how Rita could see a real world unfold from

their books, but she had to admire it. It was an ability Schwarzenbach

Christa Wolf

121

had noticed too, and he smiled at Rita. See? I was right, wasn’t I?
From now on, not much can go wrong. Once you start enjoying being
close to the cleverest new findings of your time …

Manfred did not write once. Not a line. Martin sent a card from the

railway station of the little town in Thuringia that showed the town
as lovely as it really was. “We’ve arrived, and are in the process of
taming the century. Love Martin, Love Manfred.”

Nothing more came. Some nights the whole big city pressed down

on her chest like a heavy block. “We’re getting married at Christmas,”
Marion said and looked up from her books. “What about you?”

“Us? Soon, I think … ”

Rita goes on longer and longer walks from the sanatorium. She is not
particularly affected by autumn. She stands beside the shiny railway
tracks that run through the lightly rolling landscape, and is happy
when the stokers in the locomotives wave at her, and she waves back,
cheerful and open, but also longingly. The days are clear and cool,
which goes well with her state of mind. She takes herself in hand and
learns how to speed up her convalescence through precise thinking.
She also learns not to touch the wound— that too.

She sets twigs of mountain ash into a vase on her bedside table, has

friendly conversations with her roommates and the nurses, and in the
evenings, she reads under a shaded light. Outside, the night trains go
by and the trees in the park move lightly, their dry leaves rustling. She
is receptive to the attempts poets make to little by little cast light on
the enormous dark realm of what has never been said.

But her real life in these last weeks at the sanatorium is compressed

into a daily quarter of an hour, into fifteen exhausting minutes, that
she must withstand.

Not far from the still white house a path leads through the fields at a

sharp angle to the asphalt road that connects a number of small villages
and country towns to the city. At the point where the path meets the
road, right by the yellow road sign, is where Rita stands every day at
the same time, waiting for the bus that comes from the afternoon train.

they divided the sky

122

Someone has to give her a sign. Someone has to break through the

instructions that she be left alone. Someone has to feel that this is the
moment to get her used to commotion again. Marion would be best.
Marion would know the right tone of voice, because she wouldn’t
even realize that there were problems.

Rita spends days wishing Marion would come. Marion left the

training program some time ago already. In March. There was no
trouble they all wished her the best and had good memories of her.
The girls kept having her do their hair and telling her all the news,
and Marion enjoyed hearing it all. Marion should come, that would
be the best.

One day she actually does come, by bus, and is not at all surprised

to see Rita standing there, waiting for her. She wobbles confidently
down the country lane on her high heels, next to Rita; they laugh as
if they’d seen each other just yesterday. But they would have nothing
to talk about if they couldn’t mention Manfred’s name and so they
don’t even try to avoid it. And Marion manages to utter this name as
naturally as other people might say “house” or “moon.”

Marion knows that you can suffer terribly for love, although she

herself wouldn’t put up with that. They skirt the edge of the woods,
a thin stand of fir trees behind which the sun is setting red and gold.
The shadows of the trunks flit across their faces, Marion’s shoes
make the walking difficult but the description of her bridal treasures
requires her entire attention.

“How is Sigrid doing?” Rita asks. Sigrid sends her greetings. Rita

smiles. Of course, Sigrid and Marion have spent hours and hours
talking about her … .

Sigrid, one of the most inconspicuous girls in class, had a desk next

to Rita. They’d been on friendly terms but knew nothing about each
other. Until one day Rita saw what Sigrid spent over an hour scribbling
onto her blotting paper: what should I do, what should I do … That
afternoon, in the darkest corner of a small café Rita discovered that
her intuition had been right: Sigrid’s fear and inexperience had landed
her in a dangerous situation. Two weeks earlier, her parents, with

Christa Wolf

123

whom she lived, had “gone away” with her two younger siblings—and
everyone knew what that meant. She had known about their plans.
She’d spent one night away from home (where does a girl go, alone in
a winter cold city?); she kept away the whole next day too. Late that
evening she found the apartment empty, as she had hoped and feared.
Of the many fears that had ruled her life so far—she’d been terribly
afraid of her father whom she could never stand up to!—only one
fear remained: when they find out, they’ll kick me out of the program.
With energy and imagination she constructed a foolproof wall around
this exodus. She told the neighbours her parents had gone off on a
winter holiday, quite suddenly, yes. Nothing strange about that. She
phoned her father’s factory—he was a welder—to say he was sick;
they would drop off the medical certificate later. She excused her two
brothers’ absence at school.

She’d needed all the strength she could muster to maintain this web

of lies for two weeks. Rita suddenly saw a new Sigrid before her, a
girl with a tough core inside her weak exterior. But two weeks were
over now, and Sigrid was completely worn out by the question, what
should I do now?

She knew very well: there was only one answer. But she waited for

days, and Rita didn’t push. Then, in some innocuous conversation
when someone asked what her father did, she said without hesitation,
“He’s gone away.”

Rita was the only one who was not surprised. She had the leisure

to watch all the astonished faces that for the first time all turned
toward Sigrid. After a while the jumble of questions and answers was
interrupted by Mangold’s voice, incisive and cool, “And nobody else
knew about this?”

Yes, Rita said calmly. She’d known.
So, she’d known about it. A fine little conspiracy! A worker

abandons his state, the republic. His daughter lies to the very same
state. Her friend, who is also supported through a scholarship funded
by the workers’ state, aids and abets her. “That will have to be
discussed.”

they divided the sky

124

The faces all turned away from Sigrid, as though attached to a piece

of string someone tugged on, as though they’d been looking at her
for too long already. Now they were focused on the helpless young
teacher who was never quite as quick as Mangold at citing the right
sources, and who now simply repeated, “That’s something that will
have to be discussed.”

Rita thinks: it’s good that Marion came. She walks along beside her,

hardly listening to her stories. She’s just describing her new suit. She
is one of those lucky people for whom a new suit can improve things,
and who can, unwittingly, be just a little disdainful of perpetual losers,
like Sigrid. Marion acquires her self-esteem in simple ways, unlike
Sigrid, who will long suffer from the effects of her childhood fears.
Unlike Rita too.

She remembers all the details of that day, although she was so

distraught she couldn’t take them in consciously. At first she’d thought
that decisiveness might bring about a solution: if we need to discuss
this then let’s do so right away, she’d told Mangold. He rejected her
outright: this sort of thing needs preparation.

Such moments make you sensitive to deliberately guarded looks.

What happened is that no one spoke to Sigrid or Rita, at least not
when Mangold could see. (Marion, who was not interested in all that
“gossip,” was the exception, of course.) “They’ll kick us out,” Sigrid
said. “I knew it.”

Rita spent hours every afternoon sitting alone in her room,

motionless. She didn’t ask herself how exactly the opinion of someone
like Mangold might affect her. Of course she was afraid of a decision
that might throw her back to a point that already lay far behind her. But
above all, she felt that if Mangold got his way it would destroy much
more for her than just the chance to become a teacher. The attitudes
of people such as Meternagel and Wendland and Schwarzenbach had
not yet been firmly established as guiding principles that everyone
would live by one day. And yet her first experiences of these vulnerable
principles were already very dear to her.

Without them, the Herrfurths of the world would prevail. All

Christa Wolf

125

across the land, at their laden supper tables, they were waiting for
just that. They were already beginning to test the way the wind was
blowing. The friendlier Frau Herrfurth was, the less responsive Rita
became. In silence she listened to the stories the woman would tell
her: strange things were happening, more and more good friends from
way back were fleeing—incredible, wasn’t it, with the lives they could
lead here!—and honourable citizens were being exposed as criminals
and given terrible labels by the judges who were running the trials:
(“Touts! Human traffickers! I ask you: Are we living in the Middle
Ages?”) … the people, Frau Herrfurth said, the people think: things
can’t go on like this!

Why did I never notice how similar Frau Herrfurth and Mangold

are, Rita thought. The same blind zeal, the same lack of moderation,
the same egotism … Can the same methods be deployed for completely
different purposes?

She tried to picture Mangold’s face. She remembered that he

always wore a grey suit. But she couldn’t see his face. It was one of
those faces you can’t remember once you’ve seen them—not because
it was particularly common (she could see individual features: a
strong nose, a soft mouth, pale, rather full cheeks) but because it had
gone rigid. As though he were wearing camouflage, Rita thought.
But who’s the enemy? Can he hide the real reasons for his actions
for any length of time? And what are his real reasons? Is he truly
worried about something? Or is he using the usual pretense of public
concern to exercise power? Is he cynical? Selfish? Insecure? Her
fear grew.

In the evening she went over to Meternagel’s. This was not the

first time. His wife silently pointed to the living room door, behind
which loud voices could be heard. Four or five men were there, all
people she knew from the factory. She could hardly see them through
the thick clouds of smoke; they greeted her with shouts of welcome
and pulled her straight into their project. They were writing up a
complaint to the management about the ongoing delays in the work
processes. A complaint, Rita recalls, that made waves in the plant

they divided the sky

126

the next day, and later even appeared in the paper. She basked in the
easy friendliness, in their teasing comments about her new scholarly
status, and their request for her help in formulating their letter. But
she didn’t stay long. She’d wanted to speak to Rolf alone. “Come back
tomorrow,” he said at the door.

“It’s all right.”
She went to Schwarzenbach’s. His wife opened the door too. Was

this the same strong, happy woman? Her face looked as though a
sudden fright had torn it open and left it paralyzed. Rita stepped past
the silent woman into the room where Erwin Schwarzenbach was.
He sat there in his armchair, listless. He looked up. “Oh, it’s you,” he
said, almost relieved, as though just anyone might have come in.

At that very moment, their son was being operated on. A light

pain for days, on his right side, and then a rapid, quickly spreading
infection, and a complete collapse in just a few hours; the child at
home alone, the parents arriving when it was already too late … .

“I will never forgive myself,” Frau Schwarzenbach said. It was the

only thing she could think. She sat by the phone. It would provide
deliverance or damnation. The germ of self-destruction had entered
her and was gaining power. Schwarzenbach, also in the grip of
this almighty fear that pushed everything else that had once been
important aside, laid his hand on her arm.

When Rita was back in the street, she could see the Schwarzenbach

boy’s notebook in front of her, the work she had once corrected: stiff
lettering, with thick vertical strokes, neatly separate columns.

A light, early spring rain, its quiet, almost cheerful sound mixed

with occasional gusts of wind, drew sighs of relief from the city, so
long frozen into immobility. Rita was stepping over crusty edges of
old snow but soft, gentle spring rain was already washing over them.

She met few people. And she didn’t want to meet any. By some

chance, nobody in the entire city was available for her to talk to
today—she accepted that. This was not the first time she’d felt like an
outsider. But it had never before felt so painful or so shameful. The
usually familiar face of the city had turned into a grimace.

Christa Wolf

127

Everything has changed, she thought. Everything has changed.

And it serves me right. She had believed like a child. How could
she forgive herself! She’d fallen for all the talk, nothing but talk:
people are basically good, you just have to give them a chance. What
nonsense! How stupid to think that the naked selfishness visible in
most people’s faces should one day be transformed into benevolence
and understanding.

She had failed, as probably everyone except she herself had known

she would, and there was nothing else for her to do but avoid the
consequences. It wasn’t worth it.

Her spiritual energy was suddenly completely spent.
She went home, as though it had long been planned, packed her

worn, old suitcase, left the house unnoticed and caught the night train
that stopped in her town. She spent a few hours huddled, shivering
cold, in a draughty corridor at the station because small towns are
not set up for desperate nighttime travellers. Her memory, which was
operating autonomously, reminded her that at this time of night the
milk delivery truck from the dairy headed out into the villages. The
driver was the same one as always. He knew her, and she took her seat,
comfortable, warm and quiet, between him and his assistant in the cab.
They reached her village by roundabout ways, but that didn’t matter.

Slowly, daylight came, a milky-grey, misty twilight. Next came the

colours. First, the artificial ones: the red of the newly roofed houses
at the edge of the village, the green of the garden fences, a poster.
Then, the pastels of the countryside: the rich dark grey of the fields
set off against the lightening pale grey of the sky, which birds, still
silent, were darting across; the mahogany of the slim beech trees in
groves along the roads, and finally, a touch of blue over the jagged
dark forest edge, before which, regardless of what happened, there
stood a wind-worn willow tree, and a road that turned off to the right,
went up a slight rise and then dropped quickly into the village that
had reliably stayed in its place, and that she now walked across to
its very outer edge to reach that unspeakably small house and find
everything a person needs.

they divided the sky

128

21.

Rita slept the whole day and the entire next night. The church
bells ringing on Sunday morning woke her up. She’d forgotten
nothing, but she knew she’d made the right decision in coming. The
high, lightly veiled vault of the sky, the most important feature of
this landscape, unspoiled by apartment blocks and chimneys, was
supported by a painfully familiar line of woods, fields, and a small
row of hills, structuring everything around a naturally central point
that left no room for over-wrought agitation. Rita revisited the land
of her childhood, walking one hour in each direction. She smiled. A
little realm! And as it turned out, not at all resistant to the outside
world. The people she met were full of news. They all seemed to be
more agitated than Rita remembered. Some held their hands over
their mouths as they whispered to her, others stopped mid-sentence,
listened for something and then walked on, shaking their heads. She
had never noticed how many children there were.

Gradually she discovered new lines in the face of the countryside:

fields whose boundaries ran at different angles to the horizon than
those marked by the ancient wrinkles of years earlier. The new traits
did not show up as quickly in the faces of the people. But Rita could
almost physically feel their anxiety, their fear of loss, and their still
uncertain hopes for gain.

In the village she met a few other students on holiday. They

stopped to say hello and stood there together for a few minutes, a
little awkward although they knew each other well. It was clear: they
were all aware that they’d finally outgrown childhood.

Is this what she had come here to learn? Or had she expected to

find some little spot, forever unchanged, as a refuge? Is that even
what she wanted?

Suddenly she thought how despicable it was to feel so lethargic

and discouraged. For the first time, she realized that one day every
person must look back on their life, with satisfaction, resignation or
the contentment that comes with self-deception.
That was eight months ago, and she hasn’t thought about it since. But

Christa Wolf

129

today, as she walks along beside Marion, who is oblivious to whether
anyone is listening and is rattling on happily, today it is all coming back
to her. And she knows why: the same impatience, the same discontent
with herself and everything she knows that forced her to return to the
city the next day—that same feeling has gripped her today, ever since
Marion, a perfectly competent and complete creature, got off the bus
and came toward her. “I think I’ll be coming back soon,” she says to
Marion. “Of course,” Marion responds, unruffled, “Why ever not?”

On her way back to the city from her village, Manfred’s little grey car

must have met her train and continued on past. Manfred hadn’t found
her at home when he returned, and hearing from Marion what had
happened, he drove off to bring her home. When Rita found his note in
their little attic room, she ran to the nearest post office to call him.

She met Hänschen there. He’d been sick and was bored. He might

just as well wait with Rita until the operator located Manfred in Rita’s
village. Hänschen whispered that he would soon be moving out of his
sister’s place, who’d raised him since their parents died. She wasn’t
forcing him but the apartment was too small, two and a half rooms,
and with the two children! His brother-in-law preferred to be alone
with his family, and he, Hänschen, really had no place there. Rita
thought: how hard it must be for him to make a life and find a place
where he is absolutely needed … God, she thought, he must have
got there by now, or maybe they’ve missed him, and I’ll have to wait
another two hours, and I just can’t take that! “The kids,” Hänschen
said, “are really attached to me. They really are.”

The name of her village was called out. Rita ran to the phone booth

and pressed the receiver to her ear that was still warm from someone
else’s hand. Manfred’s voice was there immediately, very close.

“I guess I drove away from you.”
“Yes,” she said, “and you didn’t write once. In two weeks.”
“That’s right,” he said.
They were quiet and could hear the hum of the many kilometers of

telephone wire connecting them, which the wind thrummed along.

“I can see your face. You don’t need to sound so ironic, I know

they divided the sky

130

what’s going on. I know you like I know myself. Not well enough, is
what you’ll say. But you haven’t managed to pull off everything you
had in mind with me either, and I agree there may be some good to
that … Anyway, we don’t need to say anything right now, not the
least little thing. We’ll just leave it all to these telephone wires that are
used to all kinds of situations.”

“Are you mad at me, little brown miss? Do you still get that wrinkle

when you’re angry?”

“Yes, it’s still there. And furthermore, I’ve grown quite ugly because

for two weeks now nobody has looked at me. Only looked at you?”

“Oh, go on. Every time I went out at night, I left the green lamp on.

That way, when I came home, I could imagine someone was waiting
for me.”

Rita doesn’t know if they said all that but in her memory there was

this conversation, and there was his face—very close but still out of
reach, as only a very familiar face can be—and the sudden dreadful
attack of physical weakness and longing for him.

“Well, I’m on my way,” Manfred said, and the exciting hum from

the serenely indifferent distance came to an end.

So the most important things had already happened by the time

the group meeting that Rita had been so afraid of took place. What
she might learn now, she had already learned on her own, which
was the most likely way to become more intelligent. She nodded
when she was criticized for missing classes, and the helpless young
teacher announced a reprimand—the least he could do in the face of
Mangold’s indignation.

Mangold spoke at length. Rita knew what he would say. She hardly

listened, but watched him carefully. It seemed as though a spell had
been lifted from him. Did no one else notice how empty his words
were? How laughable the pathos of his arguments. She felt she could
see the little mechanisms that were running this person. She was
ashamed for everyone who lowered their eyes before him.

Sigrid was close to tears. Rita smiled at her reassuringly. It didn’t

hold water. Mangold might be able to intimidate the others for a

Christa Wolf

131

while, but in the end he was condemned to fail because he was of no
use to anybody, not even himself. And as it turned out, he couldn’t
intimidate them any longer either.

“On whose behalf are you speaking?” Erwin Schwarzenbach asked

him. They all stopped short, Mangold too. On behalf of the comrades,
he said, in a provocative tone. There was a decision … .

“A decision,” Schwarzenbach said. Rita had not been able to talk to

him since that evening. I wonder how his boy is, she thought. He must
have survived, otherwise Schwarzenbach wouldn’t be so calm. She
heard him continue, “What does the decision say about the reasons
for Sigrid’s behavior? Why couldn’t she trust her classmates?”

This question, Rita thought, would open everything up and clear it

all away. Everyone would get a chance to talk. But still only Mangold
carried on, as though assigned everyone’s good faith. He talked
about the party line the way Catholics talk about the immaculate
conception. Which is what Schwarzenbach told him with a smile,
making Mangold helplessly angry. True, without Schwarzenbach
things could have turned out differently. Why could they not trust
their own judgments? What prevented them from asking simple
human questions the way Schwarzenbach did, and listening intently
to someone’s response without feeling suspicious? What prevented
them from breathing freely every day the way they were now? Or
always looking at each other so openly?

“We have to tighten the screws!” Mangold called. Tighten the

screws on each question to get at the very core of the contradictions!
That

would be in line with the party.

This is where he got the only sharp retort from Schwarzenbach,

for whom it was probably important that everyone take part in the
debate, and see that he was rigid on exactly this point. They had
never seen him so worked up. He told Mangold, “Maybe you’d better
make sure that someone like Sigrid knows the party is there for her,
regardless what happens. Who else should it be there for if not for
her,” he added more quietly.

At this point in the meeting, Sigrid did finally break down and cry,

they divided the sky

132

as inconspicuously as possible, but they all noticed, and it calmed
them. Except Mangold, who kept on with his program.

“That’s politically naïve,” he said. And he did not shy away from

using the term “world imperialism” in connection with Sigrid, who
was still in tears. He, at least, had been through tough training in the
party.

“I believe you,” Schwarzenbach said quickly as though a suspicion

had just been confirmed. He now spoke in a warmer tone of voice, as
though he were alone with Mangold. This made Mangold appear in a
different light, and the need to see him proven wrong disappeared.

“You know,” Schwarzenbach continued in the same quiet tone,

“that when the war came to an end, as a son of the working class, I
wanted to join the werewolves or kill myself.” He was bringing his
whole life into the argument, for them, for his students.

“At that time,” he said, “we had earned hatred and disrespect. And

that’s what we expected. The party was lenient and patient with us,
but also demanding. Ever since, I have felt a certain appreciation
for those qualities: leniency and patience. Revolutionary qualities,
Comrade Mangold. You’ve never needed them?”

Mangold shrugged. Leniency, patience! Who had time for that

these days? He sounded bitter.

“Maybe so,” Schwarzenbach replied. “But I often think, what

would have become of me in this Germany … How old were you at
the end of the war?”

“Eighteen,” Mangold replied, hesitating, as though he were

revealing an intimate secret.

They sat together for a long while yet. There was no more talk

of punishments. Mangold was quiet. He was a vulnerable person; it
couldn’t be easy for him. Schwarzenbach had managed to defuse the
situation so that no one was happy at Mangold’s capitulation. It was
the first time Rita was able to think about him without dislike.

That evening she told Manfred, “He’s probably had too many bad

experiences to be able to trust people.”

“What about you?” Manfred asked. “Can you trust people? Listen,

Christa Wolf

133

I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. “I haven’t told you this before—I
wanted to forget it.

“You think Martin is the first friend I’ve ever had. But there was

another one, years ago. Just as good as Martin. God, yes, he was
just as good. Just that the roles were reversed: he was older than
I was, and I looked up to him. The nights we spent sitting together
talking! The books he hauled in for me to read! The years during
which nothing could separate us, not a girl, not an argument …

“Until one day separated us forever. A glance he refused me. A

statement he did not make. An article he wrote. He’d become a
journalist in Berlin. We didn’t see each other for a long time. Then I
met him again at a university conference. We met as friends. Hours
later we parted without exchanging a word.

“What happened? Not very much, really. Terribly little. I gave a

talk about errors made in the administration of university programs.
About the tremendous baggage that weighed us down. About
hypocrisy being rewarded with good grades.”

“That’s what you talked about?” Rita asked in amazement.
“Do you think I was always as silent as a fish?” Manfred asked. “As

I left the podium, they all started attacking me. They said my opinions
were dangerous and corrupt. I looked over at him. He knew me. He
knew exactly what I meant. I wrote him a little note, ‘Why don’t you
say something!’ If only I hadn’t written that note! Hadn’t asked him
for help. But I didn’t know then that that was not my friend sitting
there but a Mangold. I’m still ashamed for him, after all these years!

“He was one of the first to leave the room,” Manfred said. “And

then he wrote that article that I read over and over again, the way
some people can’t stop taking the poison that is destroying them.
He wrote about me. He wrote about ‘the intellectuals in their ivory
towers who are entangled in mistaken bourgeois thought labyrinths
and want to drag our universities back down into the ideological
swamp.’

“If he were standing here in front of me today, I wouldn’t even

shake his hand. What’s your problem, is what he’d say; aren’t today’s

they divided the sky

134

papers full of the stuff you were asking for then? I wouldn’t even
answer him. He’s the one who forced me to become more and more
like the false image he had deliberately created of me.”

Manfred was very tired. He was already regretting this conver-

sation. This is my issue, he thought. Why drag her into it?

Rita laid her hand on his shoulder. I ought to contradict him, she

thought. But what can I say? I’m no use to him.

I really should be older, she thought unhappily.

22.

These days Rita smiles when she looks at the painting of the meadow.
She will miss it, she thinks.

Then she gets the letter. Two letters actually, in one envelope,

with Martin Jung’s handwriting on it. But this one is the one that
counts. She can feel herself grow cold and heavy. It’s a letter written
by Manfred. A crazy flash of hope—still, after all these weeks! How
could she have thought everything was over, forever …

She has to wait before she can read it. She looks at the painting.

Please don’t abandon me now, God, not now. The delicately pale
woman smiles at her blankly. Oh, what do you know, Rita thinks
scornfully.

The letter, recently sent to Martin Jung from West Berlin, begins

without a salutation. Rita reads:

Just to be fair, I want to let you know that I actually met Braun from S— in
one of the many government offices here. You guessed right. And you are still
right. And I want you to know that I know, because why should my distance
destroy the fair play between us? But I really don’t care anymore. You know I
felt like killing him then. Now, I don’t even want to talk to him. Why should
I try to find out what was really going on there: was it deliberate? Or were
they just incompetent … It makes no difference. I’m not one to make regular
pilgrimages to the Wall for cheap thrills, but I still listen to your radio stations,
and I haven’t been away long enough to forget everything. The sixties—

Christa Wolf

135

remember our discussions? Do you still think they will go down in history as one
of humanity’s great moments? Of course I know that you can deceive yourself
about many things (and that you have to, in order to stay alive). But after the
disclosures made at the last party congress in Moscow you must all be horrified
by human nature. How can we go on and on about social order when history’s
bottom line is the despair of the terrorized individual … I can hear you say
“not very original or very grand.” Like you always used to. And I don’t want to
start all over again. What could be said has been said, a long time ago already.

I wish you luck.
Manfred

It’s not over yet. The pain can still touch her. She has to hold still. She
reads the letter until she knows it by heart. She stays in bed and asks
the others with whom she would otherwise be going for a walk to
leave her alone. She feels better as the room empties and the sounds
in the corridor grow fainter, and the whole building is quiet.

After a while, which she has spent lying there with her eyes closed,

and outwardly calm, she also reads the letter from Martin Jung.

Dear Rita,

It took me a long time to decide to send you this letter—the only one Manfred

has written to me (he’s no exception to the rule that everyone who goes away
writes to those left behind to justify their decision because there is something
dishonourable about it). I think it is more appropriate for you to have this
letter.

“Just to be fair” … that was a kind of slogan between the two of us. It came up

in S—. Every morning we went off to battle with that in mind. I don’t know how
much he told you about all that. But believe me, it was very hard. The opposition
was vicious, intangible, and impenetrable. Especially this man Braun, whom
he’s now run into in West Berlin. An expert in our area. He opposed us out of
pure malice. But we couldn’t get anyone to see that. He went over four months
ago already—they say he was called away.

I am writing in haste. There’s a party commission at the plant right now.

They’re interested in our machine. Couldn’t Manfred have stuck it out for eight

they divided the sky

136

months longer? That’s what upsets me the most when I think about him: if he
had stayed, if he’d been forced to stay, today he’d have to find a way to deal with
all this. He couldn’t just run away … .

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. Get better soon!
Martin

Rita holds Martin’s letter in her hand. She lies quite still and stares at
the ceiling, following the pattern made by cracks and water stains.

Martin would have been a good friend for him, and I would have

been a good wife. For the long term, I’m sure of that. He must have
known that, or he wouldn’t have been so unhappy when he came
back from S— worse than rejected, all hopes for the future dashed.

But his unhappiness made him accessible, for the last time. Fatigued

but willingly, he described to her the conspiracy they had encountered
in S—, the cold rejection, the distrust from everyone they tried to
convince. Strangely, it was Martin and not Manfred who became
rashly impolite and imprudent. Rita guessed why: Martin mobilized
every possible tactic for Manfred’s sake. He must have seen in what
direction this experience was driving his friend who was less well
armed for such struggles than he was. Rita was appalled to hear about
Martin’s angry outbursts, his mad rages, his disregard for who the
adversary was or his status and reputation.

Manfred stayed home from the institute for a week or two, in bed

with the flu. That suited him perfectly. He read a lot, especially early
Heine. Nur wissen möcht ich, wenn wir sterben, wohin dann unsere Seele geht?
Wo ist das Feuer, das erloschen? Wo ist der Wind der schon verweht?

“Heine

couldn’t tolerate his good old Germans either,” he said.

“It’s the other way around,” Rita said. “The Germans couldn’t

tolerate him.” Manfred smiled. These days she made him smile more
often, the way children make adults smile. She did not comment. At
that point she was not yet afraid for him or herself. But he was—

Heinrich Heine, from “Clarisse”: “All I want to know is where our souls go when

we die, where is the fire that is spent, the wind that has gone?”

Christa Wolf

137

maybe, secretly, he had already made his decision and was directing
all his energy to destroying them both.

His mother’s contentment should have made her suspicious. It was

hardly likely that he’d discussed the events with his mother, but she
must have gauged his condition correctly by instinct. She would nip
upstairs to see him, the sick boy, when Rita wasn’t home. She liked
having him helpless and dependent again. Rita sometimes returned
to find him moody, like a spoiled child. She laughed at him, in the
bantering tone they used with one another, but those days he was
feeling sorry for himself and didn’t engage with her.

However, once Martin Jung was expelled from his program of

studies, Manfred’s dour mood tipped into cold wrath and open scorn.
The last concession he made to Rita was to visit Rudi Schwabe and
speak on Martin’s behalf. “I would never do that for myself!” he said.
He returned in a state of despair, satisfaction, and cynical resignation
that was new for him. Oddly, he extracted some pleasure from the
fact that Rudi Schwabe had shown himself to be the very weakling
he had thought him.

“The way he looked at me when I said Martin was my friend! As

though it were unnatural to say you are the friend of an outcast!”
‘Your friend? Well, we’ve unfortunately had to exmatriculate him.
Those recent events at the factory … he is obviously not mature
enough to follow a program of studies. But you know how it is: we
never give up on anybody.’ And so on, all the usual clichés.

“He doesn’t listen to what you tell him! I talk and talk, until I am sick

to death of it. But he’s not allowed to listen. He couldn’t care less about
some Martin Jung. Do you think he’d have that job if he couldn’t do
what’s required, and that is carry out orders without hesitation?”

“But what did Martin do, exactly?” Rita asked.
What did he do? He blew a fuse, that’s what. At one of the plant

assemblies he stood up and told them straight to their faces what they
really are: unprofessional, scheming obstacles to progress. And now
he has to be punished. Herr Schwabe is the executioner. “God, I’m
sick of it all!”

they divided the sky

138

Martin was expelled. But since hardly anyone except Manfred

knew him, the agitation was kept to a minimum. He kept his job,
without much fuss, but it was not an easy situation for him to be there
among the others whose conditions he didn’t know. Eight months in
such a situation can get pretty long, Rita thinks. He must have stood
the test. Manfred didn’t. Eight months were too long for him.

I don’t know when he realized that he found life unbearable, Rita

thinks. I don’t know when we began to talk past each other. I must
have overlooked the first signs. I’d become too sure of him. I deceived
myself by constantly repeating, whatever happens, we love each
other. I gave him good reason to believe this—and he did.

She still has Martin’s letter in her hand. The afternoon is coming to

an end. She sits up and slips the letter into the drawer of her night table.

The pressure of these unspoken self-accusations!

23.

Shortly after Manfred took up his work at the institute again, healthy
and outwardly almost unchanged, Wendland phoned. He was inviting
them both, Rita and Manfred, to a test run of their new lightweight
train car. Manfred hesitated. He’s inviting her, he thought, not me.
But then he accepted. Rita could feel him just waiting for her to say,
“Oh, let’s stay home.” But she didn’t.

On a cool, gray April morning in 1961 they drove out to the plant

early, and for the first time walked down the poplar-lined street
together, which was empty because the early shift had already started.
The wind always blew in your face on this street. Rita turned up her
collar, and put her hand in Manfred’s coat pocket to let him know she
felt cold and get him to put his arm around her shoulder. She stayed
close by him, keeping up with the rhythm of his long legs and rubbing
her head against his shoulder. From far ahead a boy was approaching
on his scooter. He gave a tremendous push and let out a joyful yell as
he tore past them. Rita felt a strong echo of this shout inside her. She
breathed deeply.

Christa Wolf

139

“Spring has actually come again,” she said.
“Are you surprised?” Manfred asked.

She nodded instead of telling him everything that was going through

her head: never before had she felt such a longing for warmth, space,
movement and light. The monotony of her days: walking to the college,
classes, conversations, arguments, exams; the quiet winter afternoons
in the library, solitary readers, always the same ones whose places lit up
gradually with little green lamps as dusk fell, signs of a contemplative
atmosphere she sometimes fled as though it were an evil spell.

“Next I’ll hear one of your famous unfulfillable wishes,” Manfred

said.

“Yes,” she replied quickly. “To wear beautiful clothes and travel far

away. Very beautiful and very far.”

“And without me,” he added.
That was something she feared in him: that he could turn any

complaint from her into an accusation. She didn’t respond. They
were already near the plant. We’re not going to have a fight now,
she thought. With a quick gesture she led him into a narrow passage
between two factory buildings, a shortcut for those who knew. They
walked a few steps, still silent. Then Manfred said, “Can’t I even talk
to you anymore?”

Rita felt caught out and looked for excuses, but he said quietly,

“Oh, never mind. I know.”

“What do you know?” she asked.
“That I’ve become unbearable. Unbearably suspicious.”
“Sometimes you like imagining things … ” she said hesitantly.
“Yes, I know,” he repeated. “It’s not very pleasant for me either. I’m

not in very good shape right now.”

“People only change their shape in fairy tales,” she said. “And it’s

only after pretty terrible adventures that they realize what shape
they’ve ended up with.”

“That may be,” he said. “But this is no time for fairy tales. You

should know that. I don’t like having to tell you. Do I have to be the
one who destroys what I like best about you?”

they divided the sky

140

Later, she often thought about that sentence. It was a line that all

her tears hadn’t been able to wash away. But at that moment there was
no talk of tears. They were standing in the narrow passage between
two high, formerly red brick walls, with a small strip of flecked sky
above, machinery noise pounding through the walls and no one else
around.

“Give me a kiss,” Rita said. Strangely emotional, Manfred placed

his big, warm hands around her face and kissed her. “We fit well
together,” she said quietly, looking at him. “Your hands are just right
for me, and so is your mouth.”

He laughed and tipped her on the nose, as he always did when

he felt much older. They followed the passage to its end. Rita’s nose
knew before her brain did that there would be a smell of burning from
the welding shop, and seconds later she breathed it in contentedly,
though she didn’t like it. She was remembering everything. As they
walked along she explained to Manfred what exactly went on inside
the factory halls: this is where they build the turning mechanisms, here
they stamp out the side and end pieces … See how tight a space they
work in? It’s almost impossible to have a steady production rhythm!
They walked past the forge. The ground under their feet shuddered
from the thundering beat of the enormous, pounding hammers. Rita
tried to explain to Manfred how inconvenient the location of the forge
was, the birthplace of the train cars.

They came around the corner. The wind swept toward them again.

They were reaching the tracks and less than a hundred meters away,
in a dramatically shortened perspective, they saw the test cars: ten rich
green cars, shining in the early morning light—the result of several days
of work by two thousand people, their functional beauty set free of the
dust and dirt and noisy confusion of the factory halls. Among them was
the new lightweight car, indistinguishable from the outside.

Rita noticed signs of heightened agitation and excitement in the

people standing around in groups, smoking and engaged in desultory
conversations. She knew nobody and was beginning to feel like an
outsider when someone grasped her by the sleeve. She turned around

Christa Wolf

141

and there was Meternagel. He was happy to see her. “You’ve gotten
thin,” Rita said.

“You too,” he countered. She smiled and they felt comfortable

again, as though they saw each other every day. Ernst Wendland
waved hello from a group of men, and gestured toward the train: they
should go ahead and get in.

Rita hadn’t yet unlearned the leap required to reach the first high

step. She pushed open the door into the corridor of the carriage and
stopped: how empty it looked!

“Like a church,” Meternagel said. Rita could still hear the wild

oaths he would utter when, in the last stages of finishing, the crowd
of workers got too thick.

“So take off your cap,” she said.
He did. He took off his dark grey, dusty, brimless cap, without

which his colleagues in the plant wouldn’t recognize him. He shook
out his hair, which was flattened and falling forward. He knocked the
cap against his thigh, folded it up, and tucked it into the pocket of his
overalls.

When people have light-coloured hair, it’s hard to tell when they

turn grey. “How old are you?” Rita asked.

“Forty-eight, why?”
They walked down the passage, past the doors of three

compartments. They slid open the fourth door and entered. It
smelled of paint, sponge rubber and synthetic fabric. “Nothing
made of wood anymore,” Meternagel said. “I don’t know why we’re
still called carpenters … installers of synthetics would be more
correct.” They ran their hands over the upholstery covers and took
their seats.

The people still standing outside were hustled into the car by a

sudden cold shower. Wendland looked in and asked them to save
him a seat. The quality controllers took up positions throughout
the train and began their work. Soon, a pop song was sounding out
of every speaker as the radio system was tested. Outside, the wind
picked up.

they divided the sky

142

At seven o’clock the train slowly started moving, without the

whistle, the station noise or the usual waving of handkerchiefs; after
a few minutes it reached the main track and left the city through the
northern suburbs. They would be back in five hours.

At that time of the morning, the day was not yet showing its real

face. The track cut straight through the countryside and on each side
of it the web of the day was being woven from thousands of human
activities. Life drew past them at intervals made up of seconds. Rita
noticed this and didn’t notice it, until the news arrived and tore the
mask of normality off the face of the day.

They travelled across a plain, whose distant horizon was marked

by poplars and which was criss-crossed by straight roads plied by
rapid, lively cars. A field of green and red high tension poles—a black
filigree of wires against the grey sky—revolved past them as they
drew a wide curve around it. Then they plunged straight into the
realm of coal and chemistry. Below them, a diesel locomotive crossed
their path towing wagons filled with thick, dark brown clods of soft
coal. A moonscape of slag heaps came into sight. A farmer with seed
potatoes in his wagon was waiting at a level-crossing. Here and there
wisps of smoke rose from fires in the turf. In the bushes along the
edge of the track two boys were smoking their first pipe. Older people
were busy in their gardens where, the travellers only noticed now,
they could detect a light green hue.

None of them—the drivers of the cars, the engineer at the controls

of the locomotive, the farmers, workers, children or old folks—had
yet heard the news. They were busy creating a day from millions of
actions and words and thoughts, an ordinary day on earth, which in
the evening would come to rest with the others, content with the little
it had added to life: barely visible but irreplaceable.

Rita felt sleepy. The carriage had grown warm (so, she thought,

the heating must be working), and half asleep she listened to the
electricians making routine comments that the quality controller noted
in his book: numbers, defects … She leaned her head back and gazed
out the wide window; the sky had grown higher, lighter—it was a thin,

Christa Wolf

143

grey, breakable skin stretched over an endless amount of transparent
blue that, here and there, was starting to shine through the rips in it.

The colourful palette of the earth was a feast for my eyes. A light blue aureole

lay around it. Then this strip of colour gradually grew darker, turned turquoise,
blue, violet and moved into pitch back. This transition is a very lovely sight …

Oh, stop it, she thinks. That’s something I didn’t know then! She’s in
her white hospital room. It is night. She is not asleep but she is not
afraid of sleeplessness either. Shadowy figures cast by the branches of
a tree are moving on the ceiling.

How can one compare what I was seeing, what everyone was

seeing—the soft blue flecks of sky through the openings in the
clouds—with what that one man saw for the first time for all of us?
Still … It could have been possible for our eyes, from above and from
below (although now there was no more below and above), to meet
at the same point in the sky, couldn’t it? Or was this absolutely and
completely impossible?

Because at that point, the clock was already running very quickly.

The ninety breathless and significant earth minutes had begun ticking.
And we hadn’t yet received the news.

We were travelling in our beautiful, comfortable, modern shell past

the corroded old back walls of city streets, past new apartment blocks
with brightly painted balconies, past flooded meadows and a willow-
edged river, past hills with stands of birch and pine and past a series
of once red-brick but now weather-beaten ugly and unkempt villages,
built not according to any rules of logic or beauty but plastered
together in fear and greed.

“Take a look at that, will you,” Manfred said. I had hardly noticed

that Wendland had joined us some time earlier, and I didn’t know
what they were talking about. But it was before the news, I know that,
because afterward the tone of their conversations changed. “What do
you, as a realist, make of that? Is this the material from which you
want to create something brilliant?”

“What’s your point?” Wendland asked.

they divided the sky

144

“Just a minor point,” Manfred responded. “The fact that in this

country it is too late for certain types of endeavours. Historic delays,
we Germans should know all about that. It’s as though socialism had
been designed for the peoples of the east,” he continued. “Unspoiled
by individualism and advanced civilization, they can truly appreciate
the benefits of the new society. But for us, there’s no going back.
What you need are unbroken heroes. And what you have here are
broken generations. It’s a tragic contradiction. A counter-productive
contradiction.”

See, my friend, I know the language you speak … “Lots of

misapprehensions in such a small space,” Wendland said. He didn’t
much enjoy rearranging this doctor’s world view, irritating as it was
to always see him at the side of the girl. But he was polite enough to
respond. Manfred must be confusing the ruling classes of the western
peoples with the people themselves.

Manfred smiled disdainfully at this response, which he had

expected. Wendland realized it was lame and felt angry. “Centuries
ago,” he retorted, “one of your great predecessors, an alchemist—
and probably also a humanist—attacked his diabolical opponent:
Du Spottgeburt aus Dreck und Feuer

He was furious, not resigned or

melancholic.”

“Exactly,” Manfred said. “But there are centuries between that

Faustian anger and us. That’s what I’m saying.”

Disgruntled, they fell silent. Rita saw Meternagel observing

Manfred, silently, attentively. But he noticed immediately when the
train began to slow down. They’d been travelling for more than an
hour. As they got up and headed into the passage to find out the
reason for the delay, the sixty-first minute of the ninety significant
minutes of the day began.

And they still hadn’t heard the news. Rita remembers: as we were

leaning out of the windows, we saw the signal set to “Stop” in front
of the locomotive. Just when the brake testing was supposed to
start and we needed to be at high speed! We all muttered dutifully,
but we actually had no objection to the break. It was the engineer’s

Christa Wolf

145

problem to get his machine back up to speed. We looked out the
window: pastures, bordered by a village on the right, and by a slightly
curved line of woods on the left, before which stood a solitary, dark,
motionless man.

Later I remembered the words of the pop song sounding out of the

speakers in every one of the ten cars at that moment: Weil er ein Seemann
war, fand ich ihn wunderbar, denn auf dem weiten Meer war keiner so wie er

can never hear those lyrics today without also seeing the young guy,
one of the workers repairing the other track fifty meters back. They
were mostly older people, their caps pulled down over their foreheads,
who hardly bothered to look up when the train stopped alongside. But
this young man thrust his pickaxe into a pile of dirt and sauntered over.

A stranger, someone none of us will see again, brought us the news.

He stood there in the gravel on the other track and looked up at us.

“Have you heard the news?” he said, not particularly loudly. “The

Russians have had a man in space for an hour now.”

I saw the clouds and the light shadows they cast on the lovely, distant earth.

For a moment, the peasant’s son in me awoke. The pitch black sky resembled a
freshly ploughed field, and the stars were the seeds.

When did the thunderous silence that followed the boy’s words come

to an end? This gave meaning to everything that had happened so far: a
peasant’s son ploughing the sky and sowing stars as seeds …

When did the silence come to an end?
But no one was silent. There were shouts, questions. Somebody

even whistled, long and shrill, like at a good boxing match. The boy,
happy at his success, smiled broadly, showing a strong set of teeth.
And the pop song, with the same voice, continued to reverberate from
the speakers.

But there was silence too. A silence in which everyone listened to

the new tone that these past minutes had added to the familiar old
concert of the earth.

Faust to Mephistopheles, Gretchen’s Garden, Faust I.

“Because he was a sailor I thought him wonderful, for on the great big sea there

was no one quite like he … ”

they divided the sky

146

Familiar? Really? Wasn’t the shadow of the flashing capsule tearing

by up there cutting across all the meridians like a scalpel, slicing open
the earth’s crust right down to its glowing red-hot core? Was this still
the earth, round and leisurely, making its way through the cosmos
with its living load? Had this son’s challenge, in one fell swoop, not
made it younger and angrier?

Will this world of yours now go completely berserk? This world

that held you in its embrace, in the only possible version of existence,
regardless what it might have done to you. This painful tugging on
the ties that have held the world in place so far … Will you be able to
withstand the sudden liberation from this-is-all-there-is? Do we have
enough human warmth to contend with the cosmic cold?

The village over there, the men busily at work on the track, the

silent, motionless man by the edge of the woods—were they still the
same? While the news hurtling around the earth burned off the mouldy
skin of centuries; while our train, slowly starting up again forever left
behind the stretch of pasture, the village, the lightly curved edge of
the woods with the man standing in front of it …

They drifted apart, under various pretexts, afraid of giving

themselves away. Suddenly the train car was empty. Rita went to
stand behind the head brakeman, who opened up his notebook on the
window ledge and in the space labelled April 12, 1961, wrote, “8:15
a.m.: just received news of manned Soviet spacecraft in cosmos.”
Then he pulled his stopwatch out of his pocket, unwrapped the soft
old wool cloth protecting it, and set it out beside the notebook. The
engineer knew what was required. He quickly increased the speed
(there was only a small stretch of track ahead where the testing could
occur: they would have to brake there or miss the opportunity). The
brakeman took up his watch. He stared fixedly out the window at the
milestones that were rushing by faster and faster. He hardly needed
the stopwatch; he’d tested the brakes in every car that had left the
plant over the last ten years. But he was conscientious, and made
a note of the growing speed (the train had to be moving at no less
than eighty kilometers an hour when the test was done). His thumb

Christa Wolf

147

with the thickened and split thumbnail pressed down on the start
button. Time raced by. The next milestone. He pressed down again.
A lightning calculation turned the recorded time into velocity.

Ernst Wendland wanted to pull the emergency brake himself that

day. He was already at the door, gripping the brake handle, his eyes
glued on the brakeman. His face concentrated. All he had to do was
wait for a sign from the brakeman, who still wasn’t satisfied with
the speed. Finally, he raised his arm. Wendland tensed. Just as the
next milestone flew by, the brakeman dropped his arm. “Now!” In
the same moment, Wendland yanked on the emergency brake. The
dreadful shriek of the brakes set in, and kept on and on, not wanting
to stop.

The brakeman looked out the window expectantly. The telegraph

poles were slipping by more slowly. Finally, the train came to a
standstill, reluctantly, unwillingly, forced to give in to reason.

Before they even got out to measure the distance it took them to

come to a stop, the brakeman shook his head; the other old hands from
previous test rides jumped down out of the other cars and collected
around him; without making a single calculation or measurement,
they all knew it had taken too long.

This hadn’t happened in years. Rita shared the discomfort and

worry they all felt but didn’t express. She knew what would come
now, what would be discussed and agreed upon. This was something
she knew more than superficially: she could see below the skin of this
car whose exterior was so bright and shiny. This made her happy. I’m
a part of all this, she thought.

Manfred, who had left her alone, came up and saw her discomfort

turn to laughter. One of the mechanics who heard that they had
overshot the limit by 200 meters had shaken his head in disapproval,
and pointing over his shoulder into the sky, said “What if something
like this happened to that guy!”

Manfred saw Rita laughing and knew she was feeling a happiness

from which he was excluded. She caught the change in his expression
and asked herself fearfully: now what have I done to hurt him?

they divided the sky

148

In the meantime, the other man, whose day it was, had returned to

earth singing, and in a ball of flame. He had doubtless landed with a
“clean conscience” and been welcomed home by a woman, a little girl,
and a spotted calf.

But we set off home, successfully tested another brake mechanism,

and were now stretched out in the midday sun on the train embankment
after the old locomotive gave up the ghost. Manfred couldn’t tolerate
the silence.

“I know what’s coming now,” he said, keeping his eyes shut and his

face in the sun. “I know exactly. A propaganda war of the finest, all
around the first cosmonaut. Hot, humming telegraph wires. A flood
of printed paper that people will survive, like they always do. That
farmer over there,” and Manfred pointed to a man working with a
team of horses in the distance, “that man will hitch up his horses again
tomorrow. And our worn-out old locomotive, a vehicle from the last
century, has already abandoned us today, as though it were making
fun of us. What a lot of unnecessary daily struggle! None of it will
be made any easier because of this extravaganza in the stratosphere
… ”

No one responded. Wendland was too tactful; he was never good at

fighting someone who was obviously weaker. Rita was embarrassed
and angry. That’s not you! What are you doing putting on that stupid
act?

She understands him better today: “History’s bottom line is the

despair of the individual.” He was already doing everything he could
to consolidate that unnerving idea.

After a while Wendland asked politely, “How has your father

adjusted to his new position?” He showed that his thoughts had gone
the same way as hers.

Manfred listened up. A new position? What new position?
Oh, he didn’t know? Herr Herrfurth had been made head

bookkeeper four weeks ago.

“Ah! A demotion?”
Wendland cursed under his breath. The conversations with this

Christa Wolf

149

person were nothing but a series of embarrassments today. Maybe the
older Herr Herrfurth had covered things up at home. His problem.
That would be like him. But what could he say to the younger
Herrfurth? This difficult, arrogant man, who had God knows
what kind of big ideas in his head, and kept going for the weakest
arguments? Oh, never mind. Hadn’t they had a good lunch together
(pork hocks and sauerkraut in the corner bar), and hadn’t that been
an honest handshake at the end?

Wendland reminded him of that now. “Not everyone,” he said, “needs

to wait until the very bitter end, until the job that has gotten too hard for
him kills him. The way I do, unfortunately,” he said, joking. “As for your
father … I think he probably feels better now.” He was building golden
bridges for Manfred, who had no intention of crossing them, however.
Who could have guessed that he would take his father’s demotion so
badly? Not wanting to show this made things even worse.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The same old story. The old man’s done his

job, he can go … .” Of course he wouldn’t dream of setting himself
up as his father’s mouthpiece. That would be risible. But he did think
it appropriate to enquire about the excessively widespread distrust
these days, called vigilance.

“You’re confusing a few things, there,” Wendland said gently.
This gentleness was the last straw for Manfred. “Is that so,” he said.

“I’m confusing things. Very well. I may be lacking the adamantine
objectivity of scientific thought. But I do have quite a developed
sensitivity for racy contradictions. For example, for the contradiction
between the means and the end.”

Of course, Wendland replied, it was often hard to coordinate those

two aspects.

“Why not come right out and say it’s impossible!” Manfred

interrupted. “Honesty is the best policy.”

“For you, too!” Rita exclaimed.
He controlled himself, bowed from his sitting position, and said

coolly, “I will do my best.” Turning back to Wendland, he went on,
“I think I’m being misunderstood. I’m being seen as a prosecutor.

they divided the sky

150

Nothing could be further from the truth! I simply regret the enormous
quantity of illusion and energy being wasted on the impossible, all in
the name of bringing morality into this world! That’s what you’re all
after, isn’t it?”

“That’s an existential question for mankind,” Wendland said.
“Precisely,” Manfred responded. “The last hope. A failure, the way

things look today. One day you’ll have to admit it.”

Wendland had sat up. He responded sharply, “And why, exactly, do

you need that camouflage?” Rita was alarmed and didn’t understand.
Manfred understood but was not alarmed. He acknowledged
Wendland’s perspicacity. Then, in an insulting, offhanded tone, he
donned his mask again.

“Camouflage?” he asked. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m talking

from experience. Experience with human nature. When things get
tough, morality is the first thing that falls apart. But you can always
count on other qualities: greed, selfishness, distrust, envy. Good old
habits from pre-human times. But morality?”

“Dirt only gets dragged along while there’s a use for it,” Wendland

said. “But we’ll be needing hatred for a long time yet … ”

“What about love?” Rita asked shyly.
Unwittingly, Wendland blushed deeply. He stayed silent.
Manfred got up. “I don’t consider myself responsible for grand

sentiments,” he said rudely.

Much later Wendland told Rita, “You always think there’s a lot

of time left to set things right. But it should have been clear to me
then.”

Manfred turned back once more before he got back on the train (the

new locomotive was just arriving). He showed them his face, pitifully
exposed. They understood that he could not tolerate the word “love”
in use between them, in whatever context. “Yes!” he called, incensed.
“Wipe them away! Those grand sentiments, those resounding slogans
… wipe them away! That’s all there’s left for us to do.”

Rita was paralyzed with pity and sadness. She knew: he had hurt

himself most of all.

Christa Wolf

151

When they got home that evening he took her past the door to

his parents’ apartment, where their supper was waiting for them. He
led her into their little room, pulled her over to the window that was
framing a cloudy-pink sunset. He took her face in his hands and looked
at her closely. There was no trace of arrogance or provocation.

“What are you looking for?” she asked fearfully.
“The fixed point,” he replied. “The fixed point one needs to not get

completely lost … ”

“You’re looking for it in me?”
“Where else?” he asked.
“So weren’t you sure of me anymore?”
“Yes, I was, my little brown miss,” Manfred said. “Please let me

always be sure.”

“As sure as you want,” she replied.
They kept their eyes shut. How far and how long and through what

strokes of fate could love offer certainty?

24.

May was cold that year. The people, who longed for warmth, felt
cheated and grumpily kept stoking their stoves; the fruit trees in the
gardens blossomed in vain. The wind swept the snowy petals into the
gutters. But still, all this—the cold, the sadly swirling useless blooms,
and the penetrating wind—should not have been reason enough to
make a person feel cold and fearful to the very depths of their soul.

Rita had come to know the city well. When she closed her eyes she

could see every detail of the streets and squares in her head, the way
you retain images you have seen a hundred times. But in the light
of these May days the city felt strange. A vague menace hung in the
heavy clouds covering the sky, and a sombre flood of lies, stupidity and
betrayal seemed to be collecting below ground. This was still invisible,
but how much longer would it take for it to start seeping through the
cracks of houses and basement windows into the streets?

The people’s deep discomfort was sometimes vented in oaths and

they divided the sky

152

furious outbursts in the overcrowded streetcars. Rita was equally
perturbed by Erwin Schwarzenbach’s tense and focused manner
whenever he stepped into the classroom, as though he were ready
for any kind of surprise, primed for any kind of fight. He was more
sensitive than usual, but at the same time demanded more from them,
and combatted any sign of laxity with unusually severe sanctions.
But worst of all was the change in Manfred. Distress and danger had
combined to narrow his focus to one point. Only sometimes, when he
was with her, did he have the burning desire to at least suffer.

She was the only person he was still careful with. He was openly

hateful to his parents. Every evening Rita expected the worst when
she sat in the circle of light cast by the Herrfurths’ lamp. She hardly
knew what she was eating, and paid no attention to the paltry
conversations. She listened only to the smooth, trained voice of the
radio announcer (Eine freie Stimme der freien Welt: A free voice from the free
world

), who provided Frau Herrfurth with her dogma. When would

this voice drop its civility and strike? When would it make the shift
from promises to threats?

Rita looked up from her plate at the faces of the others: the nervous,

irritated flicker in Frau Herrfurth’s eyes, Herr Herrfurth’s pathetic
indifference, Manfred’s impenetrable hatred.

No one kept up appearances any longer. Not even the most

superficial conversation. Naked alienation.

Only once was there another flare-up: one night Manfred pressured

his father so savagely that he finally admitted: yes, I was removed
from my position at the factory. Yes, I am now a bookkeeper. Frau
Herrfurth reached for her heart and ran sobbing from the room.
Manfred kept up a stream of ridicule until Rita sharply told him off.
He stopped in mid-sentence and left the room. Rita stayed behind,
alone with his father.

Herr Herrfurth looked at her plaintively, not trying to maintain any

of his usual pose, his manliness, his chivalry. “Miss Rita,” he said, “I
believe you are a good person. Maybe you can tell me, what did I do
to deserve this?”

Christa Wolf

153

“And you find that upsetting?” Manfred asked her later. “The

same old story of the toothless old folks who don’t want to harvest
what they’ve sown? Who deploy their helplessness to attack us?
Sympathy? Not from me!”

“Your mother seems to be ill,” Rita said. “She’s secretly taking

drops.”

“My mother has been hysterical ever since I’ve known her.”
“Let’s move somewhere else,” she said.
“Where?” he replied, disheartened. It was all the same to him.
She wanted to say, I’m afraid. I’m going to lose you here. Instead

she said, “You’re wrecking your whole family.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Here, at least, I don’t want to silently tolerate

hypocrisy.”

“Because they’re weaker than you are.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Could be,” he said. “I’m no martyr.”
“That’s what I told Martin: he’s no hero.”
She was risking much. But he just laughed. “Clever girl,” he said.

“You’re forgetting one thing though: as individuals we are just as
unheroic as our unheroic times.”

“And Martin?” she asked.
“Martin is young. Everyone bangs their head into the wall at some

point. Besides, they’ve already taken him out of circulation. Next
time, he’ll think twice about what he does.”

“And if he doesn’t? If justice means more to him than anything

else?”

“Then he’s not a hero, he’s an idiot,” Manfred said brusquely.
“So what do you want?”
He said, “Peace and quiet is what I want. I don’t want to be bothered

anymore.”

No, Rita thought. This isn’t you. Didn’t I watch you working with

Martin? I haven’t seen you so animated since.

He no longer expected help from her. Worst of all were the

incredulous, touching glances he sometimes cast her way. She was not
deceived by his need to be near her, his fierce embraces, his insatiable

they divided the sky

154

tenderness. Sometimes, when they found each other again—in their
room, in the green glow of the radio—they would look past each
other. God, don’t let him lose his way! Don’t let this drive us apart.

One evening—one of the very rare humid, luxuriant evenings in
that month of May—Rita came out of the college after an exam. She
looked around in vain for Manfred, who was going to pick her up.
Slowly she started down the street along which she expected to meet
him if he was still coming.

At the corner of a quiet side street a car suddenly braked beside

her. Ernst Wendland got out.

“You’ve come just right for me!” she said, impulsively.
“I have?” he asked. “I’ve come just right for you? Do you realize

what you’re saying?” But he quickly returned to the casual tone that
was usual between them. He invited her to have supper with him,
somewhere outside the city. Rita liked the idea, but she hesitated. He
said, “Can’t you imagine that a lonely man would sometimes like to
have an hour of company?”

Rita thought, why didn’t Manfred come for me? She got into

Wendland’s car.

They must have driven right by the street corner where Manfred

had spent the last hour waiting for Rita. He’d watched it all: the car
stopping, Wendland, his invitation, her hesitation, her agreement.

The two people in the car were silent. Rita understood why she’d

gotten into the car: for her sake, not his. To take a rest, not have to
think or be responsible. Am I usually responsible? she asked herself
in surprise. Yes, of course she was. You know that!

Wendland watched her. He said, “It seems you didn’t even know

that it’s spring.”

She nodded.
“You’re tired,” he said.
She told him about her exams. He stopped and bought her

flowers, narcissus with birch leaves, and then wanted to hear about
everything, every single exam in every subject and why she’d done

Christa Wolf

155

better in one than the other. Suddenly she broke off. Why does he
want to know all this? “Are you really interested in all my stuff?” she
asked suspiciously.

He turned a shade paler, like someone who has received an

undeserved insult. She felt uncomfortable again. What am I doing
here? she asked herself. Where is this going?

They had already driven past the chemical plant, and were on the

straight road south, caught in the traffic of trucks with extra-wide
loads, oil tankers and the hordes of cyclists heading home. Then as
a belated response to her question, he said, “Do you know where I
should be right now? At a meeting where my name is on the list of
speakers.”

Why is he telling me this? Why didn’t he just go to his meeting …

But still, it was a nice feeling that this responsible person was doing
something foolish because of her. “What kind of excuse will you come
up with tomorrow?” she asked.

“I’m going to say that I absolutely had to see if what they’re saying

on the radio is true: the trees are in bloom, the birds are singing
and somewhere in the world there are happy people. And I’ll say I
discovered that it’s true. Now let’s hold some more meetings.” Then
he added, “By the way, this is my first getaway, ever.”

“Mine too,” she said quickly. They laughed.
He took her to a small village inn with a walnut grove and a view

over the hillsides in bloom on the other side of a small river. “Not
many people know about this place,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine
such a beautiful spot so close to the city.”

He ordered for them both without asking what she wanted, and

sat quietly across from her. He’d grown thinner (but it suits him, she
thought) and had small weary creases at his eyes. “You’re probably
not sleeping enough,” she said.

Yes, Wendland said. He was used to it. “It’s boom or bust right

now, especially at the plant.”

He began to tell her about it. She thought those were the same

problems as a year ago! But he said no. The problems had grown

they divided the sky

156

bigger because they’d gotten bigger. Rita asked about Meternagel,
whom she hadn’t seen for a long time because of her exams. Wendland
laughed. “He’s doing his own booming and busting! At the moment
he’s busting his foreman.” I’d like to be there, Rita thought. Let’s hope
he doesn’t take on too much.

“I’m coming back to work in the plant over the holidays,” she said

suddenly, surprising herself.

“Really?” Wendland sounded pleased. “Are you serious?”
Her decision was a relief. That was a solid prospect, something she

could head for. Wendland looked at her. “It’s not always easy for you,
is it?” he said quietly, concerned that the thin thread of understanding
and trust between them might break. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t
reject him either. I am exploiting her shyness, he thought. Someone
should have told me earlier!

Rita began to talk about Manfred. After the first few sentences she

wished she hadn’t—wasn’t she betraying him to the other man?—but
it was too late. Wendland kept smoking quietly, and said nothing until
he had himself under control. The way this girl talked about that man!
How her eyes glowed when she thought about him!

He let her tell him everything: the conditions in Manfred’s institute,

his friendship and collaboration with Martin Jung, the new machine,
and the unsuccessful struggle at the factory. At the end, he said, “You
should have told me about this earlier. I know a few people who will
be interested.”

Rita exclaimed, “Don’t tell anyone! You can’t imagine how angry

he would be with me!”

“If his machine were tested after all?”
“You’d see to that?”
“Why not?” he said. He looked down. The sudden joy and the trust

in her eyes seared his skin. “If he won’t do it himself … ”

“You think he shouldn’t give up either?” Rita asked.
Wendland shrugged. Hard to say. Many have run their heads into

the wall for nothing.

“But how else do you maintain your self-respect?” Rita asked. The

Christa Wolf

157

question had been tormenting her ever since she’d been watching the
change in Manfred.

We’re too much alike, Wendland thought. I can’t help but bore

her.

They were already back in the car when he said, without any

particular emphasis, “You know some people can be sucked into
melancholic despair. I think he may be one of them. It’s a freezing
cold place, where nothing matters anymore.”

Rita thought, yes. But how do you know about it?
The closer they got to the city the guiltier Rita felt. She tried to

talk herself out of it, but she could hardly stop herself from asking
Wendland to let her out at the street corner rather than in front of the
house. She imagined Manfred hearing the car slow down and stop,
the doors opening and closing, them saying goodbye …

Wendland gave her a curious sideways glance. And what kind of

excuses will you come up with? he thought.

She bristled. No, she was not going to take back this afternoon, this

experience of sitting across from someone she could look at calmly,
without feeling afraid that he might blow up or that another face
might appear from under his everyday countenance, or that he might
not even be who he really was.

“Thank you very much,” she said. Then she ran up the stairs as if

her life depended on it.

The room was empty.

Manfred came home after midnight. He ignored her, spent a long time
at the washbasin, and towelled himself dry. Rita didn’t take her eyes
off him.

“If I’d had my way,” he said coldly, “I would have stayed somewhere

else tonight. But nobody would have me.”

Rita stood in front of him. He could see her eyes grow dark with

pain and anger. He could see how her anger washed everything
away: the sympathy she felt for him, her habit of taking care of
him. She grasped him by the shoulders and shook him as hard as
she could.

they divided the sky

158

“What are you saying! What are you saying!”
She cried out against her own feelings of guilt. Against the fear

that had accumulated in the long hours she’d spent waiting. Against
the peace she’d felt with Wendland. Against the danger Manfred was
in.

She was glad that she frightened him. He’s never seen me like

this—ever. Finally, I am letting go. And I’m not going to stop now. I
want him to be afraid of losing me, I want him to feel what that’s like.
I don’t know what else to do …

Manfred didn’t notice how quickly her anger subsided. She could

feel it clearly, but she kept on shaking him until he grabbed her hands.
So that’s what it’s like when you stop feeling and just keep going in
order to make a point. She could see him standing there with her, she
could see what a poor actor she was, but he didn’t notice. And she got
what she wanted, she got him to show remorse, and cuddle her.

She freed herself, sat down on a chair and cried. Let him think he

has hurt me so badly. But what he has said, or worse, what he could
still say, is nothing compared with what I know: I am powerless.
There is nothing I can do to help him. We may come to a sorry end.

What was he saying? Please stop, for God’s sake, please, just stop.

What do you want me to do so you’ll stop? Come on, stop …

Rita calmed down.
He still thought he had to defend himself. He had no idea why she

was crying.

“I saw you get in his car. I was at the corner you always come by.

I’d bought one of those funny little bouquets of lilies of the valley …
How was the exam anyway? Good? I gave the flowers away to a little
girl out in the suburbs. Remember that weird little cinema where we
went once? They’ve opened a new gas station next door. I stood there
for a while and watched them wash cars. It’s very clever. I liked it, I
felt jealous. I went over and asked: is this where you can wash cars?
The one guy looked me up and down and said, when do you want to
bring in your car, young man?”

And then?

Christa Wolf

159

“Then I kept wandering around. Don’t even know exactly where.

And yes, I really did meet a girl from before. She didn’t want me …”

He pushed these hours aside, and said, “I couldn’t stand losing you.

You know that. I will try to control myself. I’ll stop running around
like a nut. I will stop being jealous.”

She smiled. You will keep on running around the world like that.

You will keep on being jealous.

And?
And we will keep on loving each other.
But Rita knew now: we’re not safe from anything. We’re just as

exposed to all the dangers as anyone else. Anything that happens to
others can happen to us, too.

She forgot this after a while. But she noticed that not a day went by

without her expecting a disaster.

25.

She had another two or three weeks. No matter how hard she tries
to remember, those weeks have been deleted from her memory. The
days must have gone by, they must have talked to each other, they
must have lived—she doesn’t remember a thing. Manfred left, just
for a few days, to attend a chemistry conference in Berlin; she doesn’t
even remember if she missed him or had a sense of foreboding.

She remembers only one thing: Frau Herrfurth met her at the door

one evening (I wonder what she’s so happy about today, Rita thought,
with an unpleasant premonition) and held out a letter from Manfred.
Rita still didn’t know. She opened the letter, she read it, but she didn’t
understand a word. She didn’t understand until his mother said, “He’s
finally seen reason. He’s staying there.” She was content. She’d done
her work.

Rita read, “I’ll let you know when to come. I live only for the day

you’re with me again. Don’t ever forget.”

Only someone in our immediate surroundings can touch us this

way, someone who knows our most vulnerable spot, who can take his

they divided the sky

160

time to aim and strike because he knows: you’re not expecting this.
Can someone who causes so much pain actually be gone?

Frau Herrfurth said, “Of course, you will continue to live here.”

She could afford to be sympathetic now. Things would remain the
same, right? She would just clear a few things out of the room—his
clothes and his laundry, his books, a bookcase.

One evening, Cleopatra the turtle, who had woken from hibernation,

wandered back and forth, back and forth, across the bare floorboards
in the last strip of sunlight. Rita watched her until her eyes hurt.

She got up and put the animal in its box. Suddenly it was disgusting

to touch her. The dull, sad gaze of her ancient eyes seemed sinister.
Rita went to bed. She lay with her arms folded under her head,
staring at the ceiling. Completely still. She felt a deadly rigidity creep
up inside her. That was all right, she didn’t mind. He’s gone away.
Like some passing acquaintance, he left the house and shut the door
behind him. He’s gone away and will never return.

We smile indulgently about old books that tell of frightening chasms

and terrifying but irresistible temptations. They do not lie.

Rita spoke to no one during this time. She gathered up the last
remnants of her strength and protected herself with silence. She let
Sigrid, eager, grateful Sigrid, tow her along through the feverish exam
period. She did what she was told.

Sometimes she felt a little perplexed: how was it possible to drift

off like this, die off bit by bit, among all the others, and have nobody
notice … But she didn’t complain. She hardly suffered. She was just
the outer shell of herself. She was wandering through stage sets like a
shadow, unsurprised that real things—walls and houses and streets—
silently moved aside for her. It hurt to touch people. She avoided
them. In the Herrfurths’ apartment, which Rita never set foot in again
(“living coffin, dining coffin, sleeping coffin”), a bitter struggle had
broken out. A struggle for life or death, as it later turned out. Frau
Herrfurth could only interpret her son’s flight as a signal that she

Christa Wolf

161

herself should go. She demanded that her husband immediately burn
all his bridges. I’ve prepared everything, we can flee in two hours!

“Flee?” said Herr Herrfurth. “Why? And where to?”
Good God! He doesn’t know why! Into freedom, of course—

finally! And if only because parents belong with their child.

“Who knows whether that child wants anything to do with his

parents,” said Herr Herrfurth. Herr Herrfurth was tired. His wife
had spent a good part of her life making him tired and subordinating
him. Now, this one time where it really counted, the subordination
wasn’t working; only the tiredness remained. No matter what kinds
of levers and screws Frau Herrfurth applied to extract agreement,
disagreement or decisions from him, he consisted only of fatigue.

He could see how upset she was. How the terror and guilt at her

own involvement rose up in her eyes, how her lips turned blue and
how she had to keep reaching more and more often for the little
brown flask with the tincture. He could see this was no game as both
her hands suddenly reached for her heart. But what more could he
possibly do for this woman, now, at the end of his life, which he had
enjoyed to the best of his abilities (without her, true, since that was
how things had turned out).

And so, one night, he ended up sitting in Rita’s small, bare room. It

was late June. For most people, the nights already smelled of sea and
summer. Manfred had been six weeks gone. Herr Herrfurth had just
called an ambulance. People he didn’t know, with indifferent, serious
faces, had carried his wife, gasping for breath through blue lips, out
of the house on a stretcher.

Herr Herrfurth, not used to suffering in silence, had gone upstairs

to the girl’s room, to the only person left to him, and had asked her,
“What more can I do for her?”

He was huddled in the chair, cramped and tense, looking around

the room in surprise. During the time his hate-filled son had lived in
it, he hadn’t visited it once. He leaned his head on both hands and said
dully, “And the dreams every night!”

they divided the sky

162

Rita was sitting upright in bed, looking at him. His despair did

not touch her; she did not contradict his self-accusations. She wasn’t
having dreams, she told him.

Why had he come?
He raised his head and let it sway back and forth on his long,

withered neck: Oh, poor girl, what have they turned you into?

Wrong, Herr Herrfurth. Your target is not responding. This girl,

whose head is still pounding from a powerful and carefully aimed
blow, is not sensitive to the blows raining down on others.

Herr Herrfurth just kept talking to himself. “What could I possibly

gain ‘over there?’” he asked out loud. “Who is going to take on over-
aged personnel ‘over there?’ And here? They’ll just leave me alone
now. She … she always loved the boy more than me.”

When he realized he was speaking about his wife as though she

were already dead, he fell silent and stared ahead drearily.

Rita dozed off, and woke up again; he was still sitting there in the

grey early morning light, mumbling incomprehensibly. She suddenly
felt that this night and this man were the most horrific of all the horrific
events of the past weeks. “Please go away!” she said emphatically.
Obedient, he got up and left.

Rita lay awake until it was day and the bells of the many churches

began their insistent ringing and wouldn’t stop. Whitsun, she thought,
and held her ears shut.

Herr Herrfurth came once more. About a week later. He was

wearing a black tie and told her in a tear-choked voice that his dear
wife had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away overnight and that
she would be buried in three days’ time. The well-worn role of the
bereaved husband offered him some support.

Few mourners followed the swaying coffin from the doors of the

morgue through the streets and down the paths in the old cemetery.
Ernst Wendland, who had greeted Rita with only a look, walked at
her side.

Luckily, none of what was happening really concerned her. It

concerned the others. Only one idea kept returning: all this, I’ve been

Christa Wolf

163

through all this before, and in the same way. Maybe not this smell
of decay, but the long street and Ernst Wendland at my side, where
Manfred ought to be …

Finally, she recalled the dream. She felt relieved. So she must be

dreaming now too. It was as though everything were real—that was
it. It’s just a little hard to figure it out. But now you know it’s a dream,
it’s really very funny: the energetic Frau Herrfurth, so greedy for life,
is being carried to her grave and her son isn’t there; instead, someone
else is walking at the side of her daughter-in-law … Later on, when I
wake up, I’ll be able to have a good laugh at it all.

Then there was a mound of dirt, resounding words, some thin,

embarrassed singing, followed by manoeuvres performed by practised
men, and a light coffin that slipped into the pit. Earth to earth, ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.

Rita, still smiling in her dream, looked up. Beyond the tops of the

trees she could see the small steeple of the cemetery chapel, with a
swallow perched on it. When the little bell began to ring again, she
saw the swallow lift off and fly through the sky in a large circle, then
draw another circle over the grave. She followed its flight, and above
the soft tinkle of the bell she could hear the swallow’s shrill, free call,
see the bird pierce some skin-thin resistance and shoot straight as an
arrow toward a distant cloud, calling again, and carrying the entire
blue vault of the sky on its slender, narrow wings.

But she stayed behind, alone. Pierced by the call of the bird and

its flight, her numb impassivity lifted, and she burst into desperate
tears.

Someone took her arm—Ernst Wendland, who hadn’t taken his

eyes off her—and led her silently along the many winding paths
toward the cemetery gate. He asked his driver, waiting in the car, to
take Herr Herrfurth home. Then he walked Rita down the long street
lined with chestnut trees until she was calm enough to speak.

Wendland knew of Manfred’s flight, not from Rita but from the

careful Herr Herrfurth, who had wanted to “distance himself” from
the event.

they divided the sky

164

They didn’t talk about him. Rita did not have to worry that a small

spark of misplaced hope might light up Wendland’s eyes when the
other man’s name came up. As always she could look into this reliable
face for a long time. No other face could help her in this situation the
way his could. And she told him that. He understood her so clearly
that even that didn’t light a spark of hope in his eyes.

26.

That July the sun shone equally on the just and the unjust. When it
shone. It was a rainy summer.

August started well: hot and dry, with high open skies, though

people hardly noticed, except when they looked up at the planes,
more numerous than usual, that were flying over the country. “Let
August be over,” people said, “and a bit of September. Nobody starts
a war late in the year.”

Rita thought: you can’t even talk about summer or winter without

that

coming up. Later we will wonder how we ever put up with this.

There is no getting used to it. You never get used to this kind of
pressure.

It is the first Sunday of August. Early morning, and Rita is on the

fast train to Berlin. Since yesterday she has had a letter on her that
says: “This is the moment. I expect you any day. Don’t ever forget
… ”

Nobody knows where she is going—that is the advantage of living

alone and not having to render accounts. And nobody, not even she
herself, can predict whether she will return. Though her suitcase is
light. She is going to him without any luggage. As though to test out
this option, she lets her farewell gaze slip over the chimneys that slide
along the horizon, over villages, woods, a single tree, groups of people
who are harvesting grain in the fields. A week earlier she was working
here, in this very region, with Hänschen and some of the others from
the train carriage plant. She knows the harvest will be poor, and that
it is difficult to bring in even what little there is. But are those still her

Christa Wolf

165

worries? Everywhere in the world there are trees and chimneys and
grain fields …

It would be a hot day. Rita took off her jacket. Unbidden, another

passenger reached out to help her. She thanked him, and studied him
more carefully. A tall, slender fellow with a pale, long face, glasses,
brown hair. Nothing special. His gaze was a little intrusive, or was
she imagining that? He averted his eyes when she looked at him.
Still, his presence felt oppressive. She got up and went to stand at
an open window in the passage. She liked the way one image after
another appeared inside the strict frame of the window, colourful and
diverse.

Only the sky remained the same for a long time: pale morning blue,

lit by the low angle of the sun, a few light grey clouds that dispersed
as the day progressed.

So, what else do you want? Hadn’t he written in a way that allayed

all her doubts? He’s waiting for you the way you wait for freedom
after a long period of imprisonment, or for food and drink after a long
period of hunger and thirst. So, take your little suitcase—it doesn’t
matter if it’s light or heavy—and go to him. A two hour train ride;
it’s laughably short. And it’s the most natural, most real thing in the
world. So what’s the matter? This aching feeling that just won’t go
away? You can’t go by that. That’s not a measure.

“Are you happy, my child?” Oh, mother, that’s not the issue

anymore. And besides, isn’t that exactly the question, a question
you think still makes sense to ask, that separates us from you, the
constant worriers, the well-meaning oldies, the ones who understand
absolutely nothing.

All of a sudden she knew what had bothered her about the

letter. The same words that had always worked to smooth out
a misunderstanding or a shadow between them were no longer
sufficient. She wished she’d seen it more clearly: he knows exactly
what he’s asking of me, but he has no choice. The casual way he’d
abandoned her, though (“they offered me opportunities here that I
couldn’t let slip by”), his dependence on brand-new acquaintances

they divided the sky

166

that were suddenly classified as friends … That’s not how you do
the things you need to do. That’s just drifting along, when you’ve lost
control of the steering and nothing matters.

And can he even fathom what these eleven weeks have done to

me? It would be good if he doesn’t think everything has been decided
when I arrive. He needs to let me ponder this, together with him.
Once I recover the consciousness he took with him when he left. I just
hope I don’t lose it again when he puts his hand on my arm, and these
past days and nights run together as though they never happened.

The train made the only stop of the journey. Half of the trip was

over. She had to quickly think through the most important points. But
when you have something specific and important to consider and want
to keep it clear in your head, it rushes by, rendered unrecognizable
by its speed, and instead, all kinds of tranquil images that you don’t
really need crop up at the edges of your consciousness.

Rita returned to her compartment to get rid of those useless

thoughts. She accepted a cigarette from the other traveller. She saw
the magazine he offered her.

Maybe she should have spoken to Wendland after all, she thought.

Yesterday would have been a good moment. It’s almost arrogant to
rely only on yourself …

Last evening, an hour before midnight, she’d been the last person

on the late shift to leave the assembly hall. As always, she looked back
one more time and counted the cars the early shift would be finishing.
She’d found it hard to leave the heavy, dull grey blocks. She’d had
Manfred’s letter on her since midday, and knew all the details of her
journey to him.

When she finally left the plant, she saw Wendland standing on the

top step of the entrance to the administrative building, right under
the light, less than twenty meters away. He didn’t see her because she
kept to the shadows. He lit a cigarette and slowly walked toward the
factory gate.

She followed, keeping a slight distance. They met no one along the

way. There must be some reason why he, the director, was walking

Christa Wolf

167

through his plant that evening. He walked slowly, heavily almost, but
was attentively looking ahead and at the buildings on both sides.

The silence in the place seemed unnatural and sad. Light and

dark were differently arranged than in daytime. The darker spots
that sunlight never touched were illuminated by floodlights at night.
Even the narrow passage between the forge and the shop where the
turntables were built, which Wendland now turned into, was lit up.
The place he was just walking past was where someone had said to
her: Do I have to be the one who destroys what I like best about
you?

Rita walked more quickly even though Wendland might discover

her. The sharp flames made by the welders hissed out of the shop, and
their blue tremors marked her path.

As Wendland passed by the gateman, Rita called his name. He

stopped short and walked back toward her. “Rita!” he said, and
repeated what she had once said to him, “You’ve come at just the
right moment!”

He didn’t notice that he’d addressed her informally. He’d been

doing so in his thoughts for a long time. He told her that this time he
had undergone a kind of exam. His knees were still soft. And contrary
to her, he hadn’t held up very well.

Rita recalled that many unfamiliar cars had been on the grounds

that day, a big conference of factory directors. Had they criticized
him?

Yes, some, Wendland replied. “I don’t take criticism easily, you

know. I can see for myself that we haven’t been making much progress
in the past weeks. But the way these things go, my critics only had
half the story, half the bad and half the good. I didn’t really deserve
the praise either, so that was no comfort. Later on, they brought out
the heavy guns, and I forgot the rest.”

Rita started when he said abruptly, “We’re not building the new

car!” What? That was impossible. For weeks they’d been talking of
nothing else in the plant: Never mind, just wait till we start building
the new car … “No,” Wendland said. “There are certain metals we

they divided the sky

168

need, which we’ve been buying in the West. Now, they won’t sell
them to us anymore. They keep finding ways to get at us!”

But we’re not giving up, he continued. We have to re-think. We

need time.

“What about Meternagel?” Rita asked. “Will you tell him

yourself?”

Wendland nodded. He had two nights and a day to get ready for

Monday morning’s meeting in the plant offices where he would quietly
say: we’ll be building the new car later. Here are the new measures
we have to develop in order to no longer depend on the metals they’re
trying to pressure us with.

It was midnight when they turned into Rita’s street.
Wendland fell silent. All the disappointment that would flood back

tomorrow (or maybe even in a few minutes) had lifted. Here he was,
walking next to this girl, finally talking to her as a friend, here they
were at her door, and what was he talking about the whole time?
“Remember,” he said, “this is where I saw you for the first time? We
ran into each other in the doorway. I had just been made director.”

They both thought: God, that was a long time ago …
“Yes,” Rita said. “But it wasn’t the first time. I was with the Ermisch

people in the bar.”

“Right!” he said. “Did you notice me then?”
She laughed. “Couldn’t miss you! You spoiled everybody’s good

mood.”

That would have been the moment to talk about the letter that was

in my pocket and that I couldn’t forget for even a second. He will
never understand why I didn’t tell him.

They were still standing there. As the silence grew too long,

Wendland said brightly, “That’s often what happens to me, I don’t
say enough. I would be sorry in your case. I hope you know you can
count on me.”

Neither one of them said what they really wanted to say—at least

not in the right tone. They didn’t know how to start over—he, for one,
didn’t know this might be the last opportunity to speak, and she did.

Christa Wolf

169

A few more undecided seconds, then Wendland said goodnight and
Rita went upstairs. She packed her small suitcase quickly; then she
stepped to the window and for the first time in a long time, watched
the stars. It’ll be a clear day, she thought. She set the alarm and went
to bed.

“Well,” said the man seated across from her on the fast train to

Berlin, “I didn’t expect you to take such an interest in my modest
magazine.”

Rita blushed. She finally looked at the page at which the magazine

had lain open for God knows how long. Three black letters: OAS.
Below them, the mutilated corpse of a woman. She turned the page:
the beaming face of a child. And more black letters: USSR.

“The Medusa of our times,” said her fellow traveller. “Everybody

has their own problems: some have plastic bombs, others toothpaste
grins. If you can believe what you read in the magazines.”

What does he want exactly? “Pretty different problems, don’t you

think?” Rita asked in surprise.

“Indeed,” he replied politely. “As you say. So, are you travelling to

Berlin for a visit?”

“My fiancé,” she said coolly and with a note of triumph. Strange, it

didn’t seem to bother him. A beautiful day to visit your fiancé, he said.
An exceptionally beautiful day.

What did he mean? It was impossible to tell. It would be best to just

dislike him. On the other hand, he was an amusing storyteller. Oh, so
he’s a teacher! He’s not surprised to find a future colleague in her.

“What do you mean? It’s hardly something you can see from the

outside.”

He laughed winsomely. It was her improving-the-world-look. The

typical look of the German teacher, who wore it to make up for the
meagre salary they earned … She didn’t really feel angry at him, even
if in some unpleasant way she felt he’d caught her out. And she didn’t
know what to make of his polite insinuations.

Was he also going to visit relatives?
He laughed, as though she’d again been excessively naïve. Of

they divided the sky

170

course, he said. You could call it that.

Rita became tired of the complicated conversation, which he

respected. He dug a book out of his pocket and leaned back into the
corner.

Rita doesn’t remember when the city began or when she first started
to feel the icy strength she would need to get through whatever
happened.

This was not her first trip to Berlin, but this time she realized that

she didn’t know the city at all. They travelled past garden plots, parks,
then the first factories. Not a pretty place, she thought. But her face
didn’t show it.

Her travel companion looked up. “I hope your fiancé lives in

Pankow or Schöneweide?” he said in a friendly tone.

“Why?” Rita asked, trembling.
“You could be asked.”
“Oh,” she said quickly. “Yes, in Pankow. He lives in Pankow.”
“That’s good then.”
Does he want to find out where I’m going? Or warn me? And what

do I say if they ask for the street? I’m really not prepared for this …
Who’s going to believe that I actually have to do this?

There was no time left to think. The train stopped. Police came

in and demanded to see identity papers. (If they ask me, I won’t lie.
I’ll tell everything, from beginning to end, to the first one who asks.)
They leafed through her papers and handed them back. Her hands
shook as she put them back in her purse. Not very effective, these
controls, she thought, almost disappointed.

The man across from her wiped his forehead with a snow-white

handkerchief that had been ironed and folded in sharp creases. “Hot,”
he said.

They spoke nothing more. Rita saw him again at the gate, with

a woman who’d arrived on the same train and whom he seemed to
know very well.

Then she forgot about him. She had her own worries. In the adjacent

Christa Wolf

171

hall she located a big city map. She stood in front of it for some time
memorizing the names of streets and stations she didn’t know. It was
clear to her that she would have to manage the day’s events all alone.

She stepped up to the ticket window. For the first time she had to

say what she was doing.

“To the Zoological Garden,” she said.
A small piece of yellow cardboard was slipped indifferently toward

her. “Twenty,” said the woman behind the glass.

“And if you … want to come back?” Rita asked gingerly.
“Forty, then,” the woman said. She took the ticket back and

pushed a different one through the wicket. This was what made the
city different from all other cities in the world: for the price of forty
pfennigs, it offered you two different lives.

Rita looked at the ticket and carefully put it away. I have to keep

my head clear for other things.

She was already feeling tired as she let people who were out on their

Sunday excursions push her along the tunnel and up the stairs onto
the platform. The day was just beginning here. Pretty dresses, crowds,
the chatter of children. A normal Sunday in summer. Rita stood by
the wide doors that opened and closed silently at every new station.
For the first time in her life she wished she were someone else—one
of those harmless folks on a Sunday outing—just not herself. This
wish was the only sign that she was getting into a situation that went
against her grain.

Now there were no more clouds in the sky at all, if you took the

trouble to look up from the moving train. Rita couldn’t shake the
distressing feeling that with every moment she was missing something
important. She kept repeating the names of the stations and streets
that lay along her way. She had no idea what there might be to the left
or the right, and she didn’t want to know. A thin, fine line had been
sketched out for her through this immense and awesome city. She had
to stick to it. Otherwise there would be complications whose end she
could not imagine.

In the end, she missed nothing, and arrived. She got off the train

they divided the sky

172

punctually, carefully and without haste. She forced herself to take the
time to look in a few kiosk windows on the platform (so those are the
oranges and chocolates, the cigarettes and the cheap books … ), and
discovered that she had pictured them just like that.

She was among the last to reach the barrier. There she encountered

a small group of people who were blocking her way, completely
engrossed in their own affairs, and expressing effusive joy or profound
pain—it was hard to tell. Maybe both. Suddenly, Rita noticed that her
fellow traveller from the fast train was at the centre of this group. The
woman with whom he’d passed through the barrier was now hanging
from his arm, crying openly along with a few other women who had
probably come to meet the couple.

Rita stopped short. At the same moment, the man spotted her and

recognized her. He raised his arm in a greeting—he couldn’t get out
of the circle of women—and gave her a knowing smile.

Rita quickly ran down the steps. It could not have been a worse

start, she thought. Why did that person have to cross her path? Am I
as marked as he is by a guilty conscience?

27.

She shut her eyes for a moment to have the whole picture in front of
her, the way she’d seen it on the big city map, neat and clear.

Turn right first. Cross the wide street, where (and the map does not

show this) you have to wait for minutes before the impeccably trained
policeman executes the elegant arm movements that stop the stream
of cars in both directions and let people cross. Turn into the famous
shopping street (that has become the source of legends, reputed to
be so beautiful, so rich, so brilliant that it hasn’t been able to keep up
with its own mythology). Follow this street to the fifth cross street
and turn right. Rita entered a quieter area now, still following the thin
line she’d drawn on the map and which she saw more clearly than
the actual streets. Without once having asked for directions, she was
suddenly standing in front of the house where Manfred lived.

Christa Wolf

173

She’d been here in her thoughts every day, and now she actually saw

it. She suppressed her surprise that this place—an ordinary apartment
block in an ordinary city street—could be the object of someone’s
longing and their refuge. She stepped into the cool entrance and only
then noticed how hot it was outside. Slowly she made her way up
the worn but polished linoleum-covered stairs. The harder she felt
her heart beat, the more she knew: this is not some harmless venture
you’re engaged in. It is risky, and you should not have undertaken it
alone. But it’s too late to turn back now.

She was already at the door with the bright nameplate. The doorbell

was sounding, a brief, thin tone. Footsteps. The gaunt woman in black
who stood before her had to be Manfred’s aunt.

The entire building gave off a sour smell, redolent of poverty

struggling to appear elegant. It was teetering at the edge of the abyss;
workers’ housing started one street over. The sour smell and the shiny
linoleum in the stairwell had made their way into the dark entrance
of the apartment where Rita was now reluctantly ushered in. Bashful,
she stepped into a room and in the brighter light got a better view of
the woman, who plied her for information.

Yes, this was the sister of the deceased Frau Herrfurth. A sister

whom fate had discriminated against, at least as far as it was possible
to say that a dead person has some advantage over a living one. The
slightly triumphant look mixed with self-pity and pious grief on this
woman’s face could well have stemmed from the realization that,
finally, she had gained the upper hand over her dead sister.

“Go ahead,” said Frau Herrfurth’s sister. For the first time since her

nephew had been living with her, she was opening his door to a visitor.

All the tears Rita shed later were set off by what she saw in the few

seconds as she entered the room. Manfred was sitting at a table that
had been moved directly in front of the window, with his back to the
door. He was reading a book, his elbows planted on the table: the
narrow back of his head, the short hair that stood up at the cowlick,
his youthful curved shoulders. As the door opened and someone came
in (his aunt, he thought) he stayed where he was, motionless, but did

they divided the sky

174

not continue reading, stiffening in defence. When no one spoke, he
slowly turned his head.

His cold, dispassionate gaze told Rita more about his life in this

room than he could ever have expressed.

Then he saw her.
He closed his eyes, and opened them again with a completely

different expression: disbelief, consternation and foolish hope. He
came up to her, raised his arms as though he wanted to rest them on
her shoulders, and quietly said her name. The enormous relief on his
face pained her. But she smiled and gently stroked his hair.

She’d done the right thing in coming to him. But she already knew

every detail of what would come next. It pained her that they would
have to go through these steps, say the words, spend this day. He
knew too, and so it was easier to bear.

That moment didn’t last long, only as long as they looked at

each other. Then they forgot what they had known with such lucid
certainty. Once again, anything was possible.

“You’ve changed,” Manfred said as she sat on the only chair there

was, the one at the table, and he huddled at the head of the bed.

She just smiled. Once again, they knew exactly why they loved

each other. As she had foreseen: nights filled with great torments and
days of hard decisions were burned away in a single glance, in the
light, perhaps accidental, touch of his hand.

Rita looked around. The woman in the next room, his aunt, had

achieved what his mother had failed at for years: the room was
painfully tidy. A small, endlessly dreary rectangle. The few dust mites
that could survive here were dancing in the long narrow ray of sun
that came in for half an hour at this time of day. In a moment, it would
slide silently off the edge of the table, and onto Manfred’s motionless
hands, which would still not move.

How long can you sit there like that?
Rita got up, just as Manfred did too, as though at a sign. They

stepped into the aunt’s room, “ante-hell” as Manfred quickly told Rita
in a whisper. The woman was sitting at the window, in the light of

Christa Wolf

175

the same uncanny, silent sunbeam, knitting away at a black scarf for
winter. She had nothing else; only the grief for her deceased sister,
which would have to last a long time.

When she realized where the young lady was from, she was

suddenly willing to make coffee. A little light entered her pale eyes.
Who would miss the opportunity to host someone from the East, and
interrogate them?

With several polite words they escaped. Outside, as the door closed,

they looked at each other openly for a few moments. Is this what you
were looking for here? — How can you ask that? No, this isn’t it. —
What is?

Manfred looked down. He took her hand and pulled her down

the stairs behind him. He swung her around the bends. Then they
ran through the cool, echoing, stone entrance hall and were finally
outside: in the street noise, the heat and the glaring noon light.

“Right,” Manfred said with a grin, “now take a look around. The

free world is at your feet.”

All the church steeples rang out twelve o’clock.

28.

“Am I supposed to spend the whole winter here?” Rita asks the doctor
on his daily visit. October has passed and a dismal, cold November
is setting in.

“Not at all!” the doctor says, “You’re free to go. Wherever you

like.”

“Right away?” Rita asks.
“Let’s say tomorrow.”

On this last afternoon, Erwin Schwarzenbach comes to visit. The
heating has been turned on for the first time. Rita and her visitor
sit in the winter garden at the end of the corridor. The lush green
plants in the big glass windows stand before the great grey wall of
the sky.

they divided the sky

176

What does he want? Rita wonders. He knows I’m being released

soon.

Schwarzenbach doesn’t say much; he is thoughtful. He smokes and

has a good look around. Rita asks questions until she runs out of
them. He answers quietly until there’s nothing left to ask or answer.
All right, she thinks, we’ll just keep still. She leans back in the wicker
chair and listens to the gusts of rain on the window panes, the wind
in the trees of the park. Sometimes the wind and rain cut out, and
everything grows very quiet.

“Listen,” Schwarzenbach says. “Did you never consider following

him?”

Rita understands immediately.
“I did follow him,” she says without hesitating. Schwarzenbach is

not the sort of person who collects superfluous testimonies. He prefers
facts that come straight to the point, which he listens to calmly.

“And what happened?” he asks with interest.
Maybe it’s good to talk to him about this, Rita thinks. Especially

today, especially him. As of tomorrow she’ll be busy with the everyday
joys and sorrows she’s been longing for. The doctor was clever enough
to let this longing grow until it would be big enough to carry her over
the first few difficult days. But when will anyone else ever ask, why
did you do this or that? When will she have another chance to think
about an answer?

“I remember it was a really hot Sunday,” she says. “But I hardly

noticed it at the time.

“The streets must have stored up the heat. The few people who

weren’t seated at tables for lunch—wanderers like ourselves—kept
to the narrow shady strips along the house fronts, which would only
release the accumulated heat in the afternoon.

By the way, the buildings are no different. They’re built according

to the same pattern ‘over there’ as they are here. For the same people,
for the same joys and the same sorrows. I couldn’t understand why
they were supposed to be different from other houses in other places.
Of course, there was more glass and plastic in the shopping streets.

Christa Wolf

177

And goods I couldn’t even name. But I knew all about that beforehand.
I liked that. I could just imagine how much I’d enjoy shopping there.

“But in the end everything comes down to eating and drinking,

dressing and sleeping. Why do you eat? I wondered. What do you do
in these fantastically beautiful apartments? Where do you go in these
cars that are as wide as the street? And what do you think about in
this city as you fall asleep?”

“Don’t,” Schwarzenbach says. “Just tell the story as it happened.

What you just said is what you think today, isn’t it?”

“No,” Rita said. “It’s what I was thinking then. I remember

exactly.”

Why does he think I’m exaggerating? If they only knew how much

I used to puzzle over the question of our purpose here on earth. When
I was with Manfred, this question disappeared as though an answer
had been found. That Sunday, it was back. It stepped right out of me.
Absolutely everything I looked at raised that question.

They walked along side by side, in silence, and not touching. Once
his hand brushed her bare arm, and she glanced up to see if it was
deliberate. The hurt pride in his eyes as he returned her glance was
something she knew all too well. She had to smile.

“Do you know what jumpology is?” he asked brusquely. They were

standing in front of a showy poster.

“No,” Rita said.
“Well, I do. It’s a science. They make people jump up in the air, and

then assess their character by the kinds of jumps they make.”

He felt awkward. She shook her head lightly, and he accepted the

criticism. Things were easier without words.

“Let’s get something to eat first of all,” Manfred said. “We don’t have

to worry about money; I’m already earning.” He noticed immediately
that he’d said the wrong thing again. Slowly, a silent anger came up
in him. He began to explain the streets and buildings as they passed
by them.

“Don’t,” Rita said. “You never used to do that.”

they divided the sky

178

“Yes, I did,” he said, hurt. “You’ve just forgotten.”
His face next to mine in the river—that doesn’t compare.
“I haven’t forgotten,” she replied, quietly.

“Have you ever been over there?” Rita asked Erwin Schwarzenbach.

“Yes,” he said. “Years ago.”
“Then you know what it’s like. There are lots of very attractive

things, but you can’t enjoy them. You keep feeling that you’re hurting
yourself somehow. It’s worse than being abroad because you hear
your own language. It’s a terrible way to be abroad.”

That’s what she told Manfred too, when he asked her at lunch, “Do

you like it here?” He just meant the restaurant, which was lovely and
modern, but accepted her answer, which referred to much more. The
answer irritated him, but he controlled himself.

“Of course,” he said, “you’re still wearing those political glasses.

I know how hard it is to get rid of them. But things are different in
West Germany. Not as hysterical as in this crazy Berlin. I spent two
weeks over there. That’s where we’ll go. They’ve kept their word. I
have a job for the first of the month. It’s perfect.”

“I was there when … Mother died,” he said with difficulty, because

he saw there was no avoiding the topic. “When I got Father’s telegram,
she’d already been buried.”

But even so you wouldn’t have come, would you. There was a

wreath from you in the procession: To my mother, in farewell.

The swallow, Rita thought. He knows nothing about the swallow,

and he never will. There’s so much he doesn’t know.

“We’re having a hard time right now,” she said, apparently off

topic.

“Who, we?” Manfred asked.
“All of us,” she said. “The pressure is increasing. We’ve noticed it

especially in the factory: Meternagel, Hänschen, Ermisch … ” She
didn’t name Wendland, although for a moment she thought, why ever
not? “I’m working there again over the holidays.”

Manfred said, “The first time you worked there they were having a

Christa Wolf

179

hard time too. Remember?”

Rita felt like protesting: are you trying to say the hard times won’t

stop? There’s no point waiting for them to end?

“That’s all over for me now,” Manfred said evenly. “I don’t want

to think about it anymore. All those unnecessary problems. The
exaggerated self-flattery when some little thing works out. The self-
lacerating critiques. I’m getting a job now where others are paid to
deal with anything that might disrupt my work. It’s what I’ve always
wanted. Over there I’d never have that, at least not in my lifetime.
You’ll see how good it is.”

I will? Rita thought. I’m not even in the picture. Or am I supposed

to become a teacher “over there?” And why does that strike me as
impossible? Sometimes she herself had thought: Meternagel is
destroying himself for nothing. He’s taken on more than he can ever
handle. But that was exactly why she couldn’t abandon him. Not by
using words or expressing doubts.

“Imagine,” she said to Manfred (fully aware that she was now the

one talking about unsuitable things). “The other day two guys were
supposed to be kicked out of the brigade because they surpassed the
norm by two hundred per cent!”

“Ah,” he said. It was hard for him to even pretend to be interested.

Rita turns back to Schwarzenbach, who isn’t bothered by her long
silences. He doesn’t expect her to tell him everything. He doesn’t ask
any questions, he doesn’t interrupt. He seems to be waiting to hear
something specific.

“I told him the whole story,” Rita says, “without knowing how it

would end. I couldn’t even imagine how it would end.”

Meternagel and Ermisch had finally fallen out completely. For the

occasional observer it looked as though the argument were always the
same: Meternagel was fighting for the good of the factory and Ermisch
was trying to scrape together as many advantages as he could for
his brigade. It seemed very repetitive. A year earlier Meternagel had
demanded they build ten window frames a day instead of eight. Now
it was twelve instead of ten. “So, I suppose next year it’ll be fourteen,”

they divided the sky

180

was Ermisch’s sardonic comment. “Damn right!” Meternagel replied.
But anyone who looked at the conflict closely could see new aspects to
the ongoing fight: regardless of how insistent Meternagel was, he was
careful not to insult Ermisch; and regardless of how grimly Ermisch
warded him off, he was quieter than before. Was it even about two
window frames?

“I didn’t understand what was going on,” Rita told Schwarzenbach.

“I didn’t know when to say something or when to keep quiet. One
day I watched Horst Rudolf, the tallest and most handsome man in
the brigade, who earns the most money and has the most stories with
women. I watched him install a frame in fourteen minutes. It was
magic! The time normally allotted was ninety minutes. So what did
he do with the seventy-six minutes that were left over? I asked him.
‘Man!’ he said, ‘keep your mouth shut! Don’t say a word! Don’t tell
anybody what you saw.’ And I didn’t tell anybody.”

“Not even Meternagel?”
“I didn’t have to tell him. He knew. He knew all kinds of other

things too. But I felt uncomfortable after I saw that. You were the
one who used to say we need time. That’s all we need. Five or ten
years. Then they won’t be able to touch us … When I walked past
the workbenches, I used to wonder: how much of the precious time
that makes up our lives falls under the table here, every day, lost,
wasted?

“Only later I noticed that others had the same idea. When I was

sitting with Manfred, I didn’t say anything about this. I didn’t know
how it might end. But I’d watched everyone steer clear of Meternagel.
It made me feel terrible. I told Manfred about that.”

“Even the party secretary had a word with him,” she told Manfred.
“He said, ‘stop pushing!’ You’re going to drive people to the West.”

“Not so loud!” Manfred whispered.
“Oh, all right,” she said and looked at him closely. “You know

you’ve changed too.” Then she was quiet and ate her soup.

She heard all the sounds in the modest, friendly room resonating

Christa Wolf

181

clearly. She heard a mother at the next table scold her child, “You
don’t say ‘her’, Inga. You say ‘the lady’.”

“Oh, please don’t worry. Children are children!”
She heard the clatter of dishes in the kitchen and the quiet steps of

the waiter. The light came softly through light green drapes. If you
didn’t know, you wouldn’t think the city outside was boiling in the
sun.

Manfred couldn’t let the silence grow between them and asked,

“What are you thinking about?”

“Do you remember how we’d get upset about the habits of the

adults?” Rita asked. “And that we decided we would never get used
to all that? Sometimes, now, I’m afraid I could get used to the most
horrible things. And you too.”

“What kinds of things?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, “all kinds. Not saying what you think. Working less

than you can. That there are already more bombs around today than
you need to blow up the entire world. That a person you belong to
can be driven away forever. And all that’s left is a letter: Don’t ever
forget … ”

“Rita,” Manfred said. “My girl! Do you think it was easy for me?

Do you think there has been even one truly happy moment for me
since then? It was too much for you. You’re confusing everything:
your factory and the bombs and me. If you stay with me, I’ll make
it all better again. Maybe you don’t know what’s best for you right
now. Couldn’t you just trust me this time? As the song goes: ‘Ich will
dir folgen durch Wälder und Meer, durch Eis, durch Eisen, durch
feindliches Heer … ’”

He tried to make a joke of it. Rita was silent. What did they know

when they made up songs like that, she thought bitterly. Ice and iron
and hostile armies! What kind of a song might they think up for this
day, this city, and the two of them, who weren’t separated by long
distances or ice or iron, but were sitting together at this table, without
hope?

Rita ate a meal that was probably excellent, but later she couldn’t

they divided the sky

182

remember what she’d eaten. She preferred not to have wine just yet,
and Manfred agreed. The day was long.

They went back out into the heat. Rita noticed that the whole

situation was starting to overwhelm her. Was there no spot for them
in this entire shimmering place?

“Isn’t there a park here somewhere?” she asked.
“Not exactly a park. A green space.”
“Let’s go there.”
Later she thought, we should have stayed in the streets. A street is

a street, you know what to expect. But this place will never be a park.
The few trees and bushes—birch trees, linden, snowballs, lilacs—had
already seen their best time of the year. They were grey with dust
and their leaves curled up in the heat like thin wax paper, rustling
as they passed, though there wasn’t a breath of air. The only spots of
colour were provided by the brightly painted benches occupied by
older people and young mothers with baby carriages.

Where did lovers go?
Rita and Manfred sat in a line with the other tired, silent occupants

of a bench. They didn’t dare look at each other. They were ashamed.
It hurt to think about the simple joys of the last summer that were
forever lost.

“Where are all these people supposed to go?” Manfred finally

asked, irritated. “This city has no hinterland. It’s dreadful!”

“Are you saying it’s my fault?” Rita asked.
Manfred caught himself. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little crazy

myself already. You really do go crazy! But let’s not hold each other
responsible as though we were hostile politicians. That really is too
silly.” He was frightened. He could see where they might end up. The
fright made him honest.

But his honesty took away her last hope. She saw: he has given up.

Someone who no longer loves or hates anything can live anywhere

From Ännchen von Tharau, a folksong: “I will follow you through woods and

seas, through ice, and iron and hostile armies … .”

Christa Wolf

183

and nowhere. He was not leaving out of protest. He was killing
himself by leaving. It was not a new attempt; it was the last attempt of
all … what I do from now on doesn’t count anymore.

In the following weeks, she despaired at the thought: all that was

inside him when he was living next to me. And I wasn’t able to hold
on to him.

The losses that occur in the last hours of a war are particularly

bitter. And the most recent losses along our way are the most bitter
for us. Rita wondered, was it unusual for a girl to lose her lover? Was
it cause for despair? No, she told herself. If he left me for another
woman, I could resort to my pride. I’m sure it wouldn’t let me down.
But what do I do, what instinct can I rely on, what certainty is there
when he says: “I love you, and nobody else, forever. I know what I’m
saying. No other woman has ever heard that from me. Is it too much
to ask: come with me? I understand what you’re going through. But
just close your eyes. Just listen to a few names: the Black Forest, the
Rhine, Lake Constance. Don’t they say anything to you? Isn’t that
Germany too? Or is it only mythology or a page from your geography
book? Isn’t it unnatural to feel no longing for those places? No longing
at all? To extinguish all that in yourself?”

With every word he said, her life force ebbed out of her. She felt

weak as never before, and bitter. Oh, the longing for all those places
where he would be now, for all those unreachable landscapes and
faces that would leave their imprint on him, the longing for a whole,
full life together came upon her and almost destroyed her. Who in the
world had the right to confront someone—just one single person!—
with such a choice, a choice that regardless of the decision would
demand its piece of flesh?

She felt she now knew this city, this unfamiliar little part of the big

city, better than someone who had lived here for years. It was inhabited
by ordinary people, but was not an ordinary city. Its days and nights
were made of other stuff: the stuff of lives she could not know. As
though the millions of human efforts that were made every day to
ward off disorder and chaos had not been enough for this place. A city

they divided the sky

184

embraced by the moment, trembling before the inevitable outbreak
of reality. Goods that had been tested and rejected hundreds of times
were back on the market here as though they were worth something,
and the people subjected to this clearance sale didn’t realize that they
were just trotting along the same few pre-ordained paths.

“Where are you now?” Manfred asked, smiling at her. “Don’t turn

it into a drama. Nothing’s really happened. I was here, they made me
a good offer. I stayed. It’s normal.”

“It is everywhere else,” Rita said, “but not here, where we are. Do

you know that your mother bragged that she was the one who got the
two people to approach you? And do you know why she did that?
Because she was sick with despair about her wasted life? Because
she knew your contempt for her and wanted satisfaction. And do you
know what Wendland said: ‘I can forgive a lot of people, but not him!
He knew what he was doing.’”

“Oh, really! Wendland!” Martin exclaimed, full of hatred. The

silent agreement not to hurt each other unnecessarily had been lifted.
“Him! He should know what’s going on! He doesn’t have to rely on the
newspapers. He can look behind the scenes. And don’t you think I was
full of hope once, too? Or that I once thought that by eradicating the
root of all the evil we could eradicate evil in the world? But it’s got a
thousand roots. It cannot be eradicated. It may be a noble thing to keep
trying. But if you’re not convinced, a noble spirit becomes a grimace.

“Do you think it’s fun to know you are constantly being

undermined? You’re experiencing it for the first time; I’m not. That’s
the difference.

“Here, I know what I’m at. I’m ready for anything. Over there, it’s

going to take God knows how long for actual facts to emerge from
behind the lovely words. The fact is: humans are not made to be
socialists. If you force them, they go through grotesque contortions
until they’re back where they belong: at the biggest trough. I feel
sorry for your friend Wendland, I really do!”

“Why are you so angry at him?” Rita said quietly.
That question so enraged him he felt like hitting her. She’d never

Christa Wolf

185

seen him in such wild despair. It took a second for him to realize: the
life he’d left behind and that he was ranting about would never leave
him. It made him furious. What he needed to do now was transfer to
someone else the flaccid disappointment he felt for not being able to
withstand the pressures of the harder, stricter regimen.

If I went with him, Rita thought, I would not only hurt myself. I

would hurt him too, and most of all.

“It would be easy,” Rita said, “if they were all ‘cannibals’ over there,
or if they were dying of hunger, or the women’s eyes were red from
crying. But they’re comfortable. They feel sorry for us. They think: it
only takes one look for anyone to see who is richer and who is poorer
in this country. A year ago I would have gone anywhere Manfred
wanted me to. Today … ”

That’s what Schwarzenbach wants to know. “And today?” he

asks.

Rita thinks. “The Sunday after my visit to Manfred was the

thirteenth of August,” she says, not answering Schwarzenbach’s
question directly. “Early in the day, after I heard the first reports, I
went to the plant. When I saw I wasn’t the only one, I realized how
unusual it was for so many to come to the plant on a Sunday. Some
had been called, others hadn’t.”

Schwarzenbach knows what she is trying to say. It is not very

different from what he himself—what they all—experienced on that
Sunday.

“Didn’t you love him?” Erwin Schwarzenbach asked. “Isn’t that

what moves many girls? Why not you?”

“As though I didn’t try! I lay awake night after night and tried out

living ‘over there’ at his side. I tormented myself with that for days.
But the foreign place remained foreign to me, and my life here was
warm and close.”

“The pull of a great historical movement,” said Erwin Schwarzenbach,

nodding. This made Rita smile. Him, too. And who’s to say she didn’t
feel some of that, that day in the horrid park at Manfred’s side.

they divided the sky

186

They’d wandered up and down the few paths as though they’d lost
their way until they ended up in a little niche, protected by poorly cut
hedges. Tired to death, Rita was leaning against a tree, and Manfred
was facing her, his hands pressed into the tree on either side of her
face. They were looking at each other. They didn’t hear or see what
was happening around them. Nothing, nothing at all was going on at
that moment beyond the little square, made up of the tree and the two
arms that encapsulated the two of them.

“How’s Cleopatra?” he asked quietly.
“She’s not eating much.”
“Maybe you should try some little chunks of tomato?”
“You’re right. I will.”
They smiled. They’d already begun to separate from one another,

to take themselves back. But now they smiled. Yes, that’s still you,
the man who stood by that laughable wind-worn willow tree every
evening, with arms that are too long and a head like a bird’s. Right
away, I knew everything about you. I didn’t have a choice about
whether to go to you or not. If that happens only once in a lifetime—
and I think it does happen only once—then that experience is now
behind me. And you too, right?

They smiled. Manfred rested his face in her hair. He pressed her

hands. Rita began to tremble. She tipped her head back until she
could see the flat, faded afternoon sky through the skimpy branches
of the tree. It’s still all there. This is his hand. That’s the smell of his
skin. That’s his voice, and he’s quite unaware of it.

A silent green wall between us and the world. The world—does it

even exist? We do. Oh God, we exist …

Still, it was enough for one little voice, one thin, chirping little

child’s voice—a long time later that’s what she remembered—to
break through that wall. Heile heile Gänzchen, es wird schon wieder gut,
das Kätzchen hat ein Schwänzchen, es wird schon wieder gut. Heile, heile
Mausespeck, in hundert Jahrn is alles weg

… (in a hundred years it’ll all

be gone).

In a hundred years. It makes me want to laugh. That’s not a wall.

Christa Wolf

187

This is you and me and the thin little voice with that silly song. She
quickly walked off to the edge of that damned park and into the
nearest street, where he caught up with her.

They crossed over to the shady side and followed along side by side,

in silence. They must have gone up and down a few streets when they
spotted a small, clean garden café. They sat down at one of the dainty
round tables under a parasol that looked like an enormous fly agaric
mushroom. It had done its work for the day. The sun had already
dropped below the four-storey building on whose ground floor the
café was located.

They ate ice cream and watched the people coming and going,

concerned with only themselves. They were too exhausted to still be
concerned with themselves. They knew: right away, or tomorrow, or
the day after, the pain will return; it’ll lodge within you, it will shake
you through and through, it will twist and turn inside you. For the
moment, they felt numb from exhaustion, a short merciful moment.
Amiable, they returned a child’s ball that had rolled under their table;
polite, they listened to the mother’s apologies; smiling, they allowed a
busy man, who had arranged a big get-together of relatives from far
and wide in that very café that afternoon, to take the third unused
chair from their table and move it to the big family table.

They were so silent they began to be afraid they wouldn’t speak

again. They sat so still it seemed possible they would not move again.
They each knew their own path, but not the next step.

At the family table the noise increased. “Waiter!” the busy man

called indignantly. The sole waitress was overworked at this time
in the afternoon. Now she stepped up to the table of the impatient
customer. “We’ve made a special effort to bring our uncle over
from the Soviet zone,” he said. “We really don’t want him to have
poor service here, do we?” “From the zone?” the waitress asked
quickly, and gazed at the busy man’s uncle. He was from the
country, sweating in a dark blue suit. “From over there? Which
town?” “Hermannsdorf,” said the old man. The waitress coloured.
Impossible! She was from the very same area. She stepped behind

they divided the sky

188

her compatriot’s chair and gripped the back of it, a little too familiar.
But her joy was stronger than her recent training. No, he didn’t
know her village. But the man Schirrbach from her village, he’d
been in the military with him. Suddenly the waitress was interested
in Schirrbach, someone she hadn’t thought about since she’d left.
“And how are the crops? Good this year?” “Well, they could be
better.” “But you’re going back, aren’t you?” “Of course. Where
else would I go?” “Excuse me, miss,” said the busybody, “I can
understand what you must be feeling. The world really is a village.
Even the free world.” He laughed. “But your fellow countryman is
thirsty.” Oh all right, she was already on her way. To the older man
she said, “Men these days, they’re not worth a fig … ”

Rita leaned back in her chair. God, the moon was already up! On

this light green summer afternoon the moon was there, an almost
transparent, frayed half circle. The night that is yet to come will
contract around it.

While the moon, unnoticed, was growing visible, the air around

them must have changed. It was now easier to breathe, too easy to
breathe. You could hardly feel it in your lungs. You kept wanting
to breathe in more of it in order not to suffocate in the void. This air
isolated them, separated them, made them incapable of transferring
joy or pain from one to the other.

All of a sudden, the city felt deaf and dumb, as though submerged

in water. But it was still unaware. High above it was the moon, a
pallid lamp from the real world. No other sound, no light. The neon
tubes that began to flicker on here and there spelled out a mysterious
indecipherable code: Kauft Salamander—Neckermann macht’s möglich—
4711 Immer dabei

It was the gray hour of the day.

Christa Wolf

189

29.

In the glassed-in veranda, the silence and the rain are ticking on the
windowpanes. “It’s letting up,” Schwarzenbach says. “I can go now.”

But they both stay where they are. After a while, Rita says,

“Sometimes I wonder: can the world even be measured by our
standards? Good or bad? Isn’t it just there, and nothing more?”

She thinks: then it would be quite senseless for me not to have

stayed with him. Then every sacrifice would be meaningless. Just as
he said: it’s always the same game. The rules change. And the smiling
augurs look down on it all.

Schwarzenbach understands exactly what she means. But he

doesn’t give a direct answer.

“Do you know why I came to see you today?” he asks. “I wanted

to know: does it make sense to always tell the truth that you know,
under all circumstances?”

“You wanted an answer from me on that?”
“Yes,” Schwarzenbach says. “And I heard the answer from you.”
“What’s the matter?” Rita asks. “Why did you have any doubts?”
Schwarzenbach does not consider himself too good to give an

honest answer. “I wasn’t sure anymore,” he says. “You know how it is:
sometimes everything comes all at once.” He’d written an article about
dogmatism in class for the teachers’ journal, describing inappropriate
methods used by teachers, at the college as well. He’d written: some
people still try to dictate rather than convince. But we don’t need
citizens who just regurgitate what they’ve learned, we need socialists.

“Yes,” Rita says, “and where’s the uncertainty?”
Schwarzenbach smiles. He’s become almost cheerful. The article

and what came after don’t bother him anymore. Of course, he’d heard
comments from people who wanted to hide the fact that they felt
targeted; did you have to write that just now? Aren’t we in a special
situation that prevents us from saying everything?

Buy Salamander—Neckermann makes it happen—4711 always with you.

they divided the sky

190

Mangold had weighed in too. He thought his time had come.

Schwarzenbach had always displayed a weakness for political
romanticism, he said.

The people who are casting suspicion on him are more powerful

than he is, thinks Rita. And Schwarzenbach, as though reading her
mind, says, “Let them organize a few more meetings and grumble on
about me. I will keep in mind how greedy they are for sincerity. I will
say: Yes, indeed, we are in a special situation. For the first time we
are ready to look truth in the face. We can’t turn difficult into easy, or
dark into light. Can’t abuse trust. That’s the most precious thing we
have acquired. Tactics, yes. But only tactics that lead to truth.

“Socialism is not some magic formula. Sometimes we think we

change things just by using a different name. You confirmed for me
today that nothing but the bare naked truth is the key to humanity.
Why should we willingly hand over our decisive advantage?”

“Oh, no,” Rita says, frightened. “You’re reading too much into my

story.”

Schwarzenbach laughs. “It’s all right. I understood you.”
Now he’s gotten up from his seat. It’s getting dark outside. A nurse

comes down the hallway and flicks on the lights. She looks in on
them, nods and moves on. Now they can both hear the quiet of the
big house. Finally Schwarzenbach says, “Will you walk me to the bus
stop?”

Rita doesn’t answer. She hasn’t heard his question.

“Now we should have some wine, right?” Manfred said. Rita

nodded. She watched as he took the bottle from the harried waitress
and poured the wine himself. It was greenish yellow; its lightness and
aroma were located in the colour. Moon wine, she thought. Night
wine, memory wine …

“What shall we drink to?” he asked. When she didn’t answer,

he raised his glass. “To you. To your small mistakes and their huge
consequences.”

“I’m not drinking to anything,” she said. She no longer drank to

anything.

Christa Wolf

191

When the bottle was empty, they left the café that was still occupied

by the busybody’s family. They walked down the street to a large
circular place, far away from the traffic and almost empty at this time
of night. They stood on the edge of it as though wary of disrupting its
tranquility. A strange hue, made up of many different colours, lit the
big circle, and made them look up. Directly above them, and cutting
straight across the circle, was the line between the day sky and the
night sky. Veils of cloud moved from the night-grey section into
the light-day section, which was fading away in unearthly colours.
Above—or below?—it was glassgreen, and in the darkest spots it was
still blue. The small piece of earth on which they stood, a stone slab
that was a part of the sidewalk and no more than a meter square,
turned toward the night side.

In the past, lovers who had to separate would look for a star where

their gaze might meet in the evenings. What can we look for?

“At least they can’t divide the sky,” Manfred said in a mocking

tone.

The sky? This enormous vault of hope and yearning, love and

sorrow? “Yes, they can,” she said. “The sky is what divides first of
all.”

The station was close by. They walked down a narrow side street.

Manfred stopped. “Your suitcase!” He could see that she wouldn’t go
back for it. “I’ll send it to you.” She had everything she needed in her
handbag.

They entered the heaviest evening crush. They were pushed and

shoved and separated. He had to hold onto her in order not to lose
her too soon. His hand lightly on her upper arm, he moved her along.
They didn’t see each other’s face until they stopped inside the train
station.

What they hadn’t decided yet, they couldn’t decide now. What they

hadn’t said yet, they would never be able to say. What they didn’t
know about each other yet, they would never discover. The only thing
left was this pale, weightless moment, no longer coloured by hope and
not yet discoloured by despair.

they divided the sky

192

Rita picked a thread off Manfred’s jacket. A man selling flowers,

who had studied exactly when best to approach lovers saying goodbye,
stepped up to them. “A little bouquet, perhaps?” Rita hastily shook
her head. The man sidled off. You never stop learning.

Manfred looked at his watch. Their time was limited. “Go now,”

he said. He walked her to the barrier. There they stopped again. On
the right, the stream of people flowed up to the platform; on the left
it flowed back into the city. They couldn’t hold out long on their little
island. “Go,” Manfred said.

She kept looking at him.
He smiled (he wanted her to see him smiling whenever she thought

of him). “Goodbye, little brown miss,” he said tenderly. Rita laid her
head against his chest for a moment. Weeks later he could still feel
that featherweight touch when he closed his eyes.

She must have made her way through the barrier and up the stairs.

She must have taken a train to the right station. She wasn’t surprised
that everything now worked smoothly and efficiently. Her train was
there, with few passengers. She got on, calmly, took her seat, and they
were off. That was how it was meant to be.

At that point, it would not have been in her power to overcome the

slightest obstacle, or make even the most unimportant decision.

She didn’t sleep, but she wasn’t fully conscious either. The first

thing she noticed after quite some time was a still, light pond out in
the dark countryside. It had attracted the little bit of light that was
still in the sky and was reflecting it back, enhanced.

Strange, Rita thought. So much light in so much dark.

30.

The day Rita returns to the sooty city is cool and indifferent. A typical
early November day, equidistant from the last heavyhearted days of
autumn and the translucent brightness of winter. Hardly changed by
her two-month absence, she returns, formally, to her old room, as
though to renew an old resolution or assert it forever.

Christa Wolf

193

She knows what lies behind her, and she knows what to expect;

in fact, that is the only change that has taken place in her, and it is
invaluable.

She is not unhappy to be walking through the streets alone,

knowing no one, unknown to all. It is the busy hour before noon,
just before the shops close. She is amazed by the tumult in the main
streets. She doesn’t feel courageous enough to join in. Her senses will
need time to adapt to the shrill sounds, colours and smells. Do people
put up with this noise and these crowds their entire lives? She laughs
at herself, at her village sensibilities. By tomorrow she might already
see the city with the eyes of one of its inhabitants. But she’s seen it this
way once before, in this same hard, sharp, bright light. A trace of that
perspective will always stay with her.

She’s been through hard times; that is no exaggeration. She is

healthy again. She doesn’t know—many of us don’t—how much
spiritual courage she needs to face this life again, day by day, without
fooling herself or letting herself be fooled. Maybe later people will
realize that during a long, difficult, threatening and hope-filled historic
moment it is the spiritual courage of countless ordinary people that
determines the fate of those who are born afterward.

And so Rita is back at her dormer window. With a practised

gesture she pushes aside the curtain, opens the window (ah, the
smell of autumn and smoke!), leans her arm against the upper part of
the window frame and her head against her arm: a series of familiar
movements along which she can pull ideas that were interrupted long
ago back into the light. She rediscovers something she’d noticed that
August day, not so long ago: years of wind have blown all the willows
lining the bank of the river in the same direction, to lean inward, and
she even thinks she can hear the shrill whistle of the locomotive that
once etched itself into her ear.

Today, it seems as though she had heard nothing but that whistle the

entire day. She remembers feeling that the terribly indifferent gaze of
some inescapable power was pursuing her. She’d been separated from
Manfred for only three weeks at that point, and already she knew: the

they divided the sky

194

great lovers that poets create do not seek death because of separation
but because of the dull return of daily life. Leaden reality lamed her,
cast a pall on her spirits, hollowed out her willpower. The circle of
her certainties, once immeasurably large, grew painfully narrow.
Carefully, she stepped along its edge, aware of ever more cave-ins.
Were there any certainties left?

The locomotive’s whistle had seized and carried off all the options

she’d had. Today, she’s no longer scared to admit that the time and
place of her collapse were no coincidence. She can still see the two
heavy green train cars rolling toward her, inexorable, silent, sure.
They’re coming right for me, is what she felt, but she also knew: she
herself was carrying out the attack. Unconsciously, she was giving
herself one last chance to flee, not for love but out of despair that love
is transient, like everything else.

That was why she’d cried when she returned to consciousness. She

knew she’d been saved, and that made her cry. Today, she doesn’t like
to think back to that sick, emotional state. In letting time do its work
she’s regained the immense power to give things their right name.

Rita steps away from the window and starts unpacking. She

removes the items from her suitcase one at a time, spreading them
around the room. Some things she suddenly doesn’t like anymore.
She has some money left from her work at the plant: tomorrow she’ll
buy a new skirt and a couple of blouses in the new design that’s
become fashionable. She’ll take Marion along so she won’t make
any mistakes.

She reaches for the hand mirror at the bottom of the suitcase. She

sits on the edge of her bed, angles the mirror into the light and looks
into it attentively. It’s been too long since I last looked in a mirror,
she thinks. It makes you ugly. It won’t happen again. She strokes
her eyebrows. Nothing much she can improve there. She checks
the corners of her eyes. The tears haven’t left a trace. She goes over
her face, centimetre by centimetre, the outlines of her cheeks, her
chin. Unwittingly, she smiles. The new expression in her eyes, that’s
something that will stay on. It’s where experience has retreated to.

Christa Wolf

195

She can see: she’s still young.
She hasn’t heard someone come up the stairs and carefully push

down on the door handle. Only as Herr Herrfurth stands in the
doorway does she look up. His first reaction is to withdraw—he
hadn’t expected to find her there already—but then he hastily holds
out a note, the way one extends an identity card, that he’d wanted to
put on the table for her. And he’s also brought back Cleopatra in her
cardboard box. The turtle has survived her owner’s absence.

The note is from Meternagel. It reads: “Come for a visit when

you’re back. I’m sick. At home in bed.”

“That man is finished,” says Herr Herrfurth. “They gave him his

promotion. So he got what he wanted. He could have relaxed. Instead,
he kept up his rampage. It went so far that they had to remove him
from the plant in an ambulance.”

If that’s the case, I’ll have to go see him right away.
Rita relieves Herr Herrfurth of the turtle, and sets her in her corner.

She takes the suitcase off the chair. “Please sit down,” she says.

Herr Herrfurth really doesn’t have time to stay but since she insists.

The way he sits there it seems that he hasn’t looked in a mirror for
a while either. If you had known him earlier, you would not miss the
little signs of neglect. Tears that have been suppressed over a lifetime
do leave a trace.

After a while, Rita says, “I’m going to pay rent for the room now.”
Herr Herrfurth starts up. That’s the absolute last! Never would he

… from a person who was virtually … Anyway, she shouldn’t insult
him.

But she would prefer that, Rita says. Herr Herrfurth collapses

again.

“Excuse my candid opinion, but you are … a strange person,” he

says. “My deceased wife also found a few things about you quite hard
to understand. Of course, she had her own idiosyncrasies … I took
you into my family in complete good faith, I can assure you of that.
Apparently I did not succeed in awakening the same sentiments in
you.”

they divided the sky

196

Rita realizes that, like many a weak person, Herr Herrfurth needs

someone to listen to his constantly changing versions of the truth.
Only once, in that night before his wife died, has she seen him honest,
honestly destroyed. That didn’t last long.

He’d thought, he says, that things between Manfred and her would

work out—that Sunday, when she went on her trip. He’d seen reason
for hope. After all, could anyone really feel what it is like for him,
losing both his wife and his son in one blow?

How long has your son not been your son? Rita thinks. But she

says nothing.

“To this day, I do not understand why you came back. You may call

me old-fashioned, but in my day, love was more romantic. And more
unconditional. That too.”

Rita thinks about this man’s wedding picture and again says

nothing. What else can you do but be silent?

Herr Herrfurth misinterprets her silence. “Please don’t think that

I would in any way abuse the fact that I know about your trip to
Berlin!” he says beseechingly.

Rita looks at him. No, she wouldn’t expect him to do that. Herr

Herrfurth can relax. But his anxiety cannot rest. It drives him to ask
another question.

“Why did my son hate me?” he wants to know.
Rita looks at him in surprise. Does he really want to know? No, he

doesn’t. He wants to complain about how unfair it is to be left alone
as an old man. This person is absolutely useless in dealing with the
truth.

Herr Herrfurth continues talking away his sorrows. “You know,”

he says, “everybody has the right to make mistakes. How can you
know beforehand that you’ve bet on the wrong horse? In hindsight
it’s easy to criticize older people for the mistakes they made! Dear
Miss Rita—I know what life’s about. The sons always repeat their
fathers’ mistakes. And then we all end up in the same place anyway,
in the grave.” Since his recently acquired disgust for life, he thinks he
knows life.

Christa Wolf

197

“He doesn’t hate you anymore,” Rita says. “Really, he doesn’t.”

Fathers like this have children; it’s something you can’t prohibit. I’m
going to protect the children from these fathers.

Herr Herrfurth feels it is time for him to be going. He gets up with a

light groan. Strokes of fate do affect a man. He’s been sorely tried, but
he’s risen above things. Resigned, he holds out his hand to this girl,
whose youthful obstinacy won’t let her understand him. Downstairs,
in that big empty apartment of his, he will be the picture of misery.
But for another moment he is still Herr Herrfurth, a man who knows
what he’s worth.

Before he goes he remembers something else. He recently ran into

Herr Schwabe—Herr Rudi Schwabe, she’ll know who that is—the
dean’s representative in the student council, one of his son’s old
friends whom he knows very well. Not a bad person. He’d apparently
had problems because of Manfred. Anyway, he said he would like
to take back some of his ruder remarks. (Rita recalls: “Your friend?
Unfortunately we’ll have to ex-matriculate him … ” What does
someone do when they realize it was wrong to say such things?) Herr
Herrfurth says, “See? Nowadays, a person’s fate can depend on such
chance moments—whether someone is in a good mood, or not.”

Rudi Schwabe. The man they harassed like a vagrant dog that night

at the professor’s house. Had he gotten any smarter in the meantime?
Or was he still marching along behind any slogan that came his way,
as willing as always?

But she says something else. As though all along she’s been thinking

of only one thing, she asks, “And Rolf Meternagel? Did they finally
remove that unfortunate situation from his file, the one that cost him
his job?”

“Oh, please! I ask you!” Herr Herrfurth says pleasantly, his face

friendly. “Three thousand marks. A trifle!” Then he finally gets up
and goes.

Rita goes to see Rolf Meternagel, who’s had the wind knocked out

of him again, for the umpteenth time in his life. How many times
can someone get back up again? Someone who has never stood out

they divided the sky

198

of trouble’s way or held out his hand like a petty little shopkeeper:
I’ll have some please. Someone who has never hoarded his paltry
savings, who has always been generous with his creditors, who never
withheld the only thing he owned, his capacity to act, as though it
were an endless resource.

Rita remembers Herbert Kuhl, Meternagel’s old opponent,

watching him week after week. At that time, when no one knew
what effects his ongoing demands for greater production would
have on the brigade, and when everyone avoided him as though he
were carrying some deadly germ, Herbert Kuhl would taunt him
with sarcastic remarks. Sometimes it looked as though there would
be a fight. Kuhl had new tense lines in his face that had nothing to
do with his earlier coldness. He seemed to be trying to shake off
the tension that was gripping him, but he couldn’t. Until the day
he decided to get rid of it by force, whatever it might cost. The
morning after he and Kurt Hahn, a new guy, each built fourteen
window frames during their night shift, his face was colder and more
sarcastic looking than ever. He lay in wait for Meternagel; what was
going on around here? Was it about greater productivity, or was it
about one man’s success, Meternagel’s? Was there something special
about this man, or was he just running himself into the ground for
his own sake?

Meternagel said nothing for three days. For three nights, Kuhl and

Hahn built fourteen frames per shift. For three days, all the others
produced only ten frames each.

As it turned out Rolf Meternagel could stand more than Kuhl.

On the fourth morning—the brigade was just about to walk past the
two norm-breakers, and ignore them—Kuhl stopped right in front
of Meternagel. The others, who couldn’t get past the two men in the
narrow passageway between the train car and the wall, collected
behind them.

“So, what do you say?” Kuhl asked, aggressively.
“What should I be saying?” Meternagel responded, in a friendly

tone.

Christa Wolf

199

“Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow too, I’m going to build

fourteen frames in every shift,” Kuhl said.

“Bravo!” Meternagel responded.
“I guess you don’t like someone like me starting on this?” Herbert

Kuhl asked.

“You’re crazy,” Meternagel replied, still just as carefully friendly.

“But what I’d like to know is why you’re doing this?”

Kuhl looked as though he was about to attack Rolf. Things could

perhaps have got that far if Meternagel had looked away for just a
second. But he kept his quiet, friendly gaze on Kuhl. He held Herbert
Kuhl, whom they’d never seen in such a state before, in check with
his eyes.

“Just what I thought,” Kuhl said, dangerously quiet. “Anybody else

can do less and still be a hero. Only in my case you say, why are you
doing that? Why me? Because I was a lieutenant? Yes, I was. Body
and soul. I’ve never done anything halfway. Yes, sir, and let me tell
you, if they’d set people up in front of me and told me, Shoot! I would
have shot them. Without feeling guilty afterwards. The difference
between me and most of the others is that I say so. But you’d rather
keep quiet. Yes, sir, I’m willing to say you can turn anybody into a
killer. And so what? What are you all staring at?”

“Hey!” Meternagel said in his everyday voice. “Relax. You’re

contradicting yourself. You’ve spent the last sixteen years trying to
convince yourself what a bad guy you are, and now you’ve wrecked
your reputation.” He laughed quietly, to get the others to look at
him.

They all avoided looking Kuhl in the face. He was exhausted, as

though he’d just finished a job that demanded far more strength
than he had. The muscles in his cheeks were twitching. He couldn’t
yet forgive himself for this defeat. He didn’t say another word. Rita
wasn’t sure he even understood what was being said.

Horst Rudolf, the most handsome man in the brigade, whom Rita

had seen install a frame in fourteen minutes, and who was saving up
for a car, objected, “Everybody makes their money here,” he said.

they divided the sky

200

“And you know why? Because we stick together. I don’t work with
people who betray me. It’s me or them!”

“I’d hate to see that happen to you,” Meternagel said gently.
“There’s no going back,” Karßuweit said, dejected. “When you’ve

gone this far you can’t go back. You can take my word for it.” He held
on tightly to his experiences as the carpenter on a large estate.

They were silent, thinking, do we want to go back? Back to the

mathematical manipulations that Ermisch’s pencil performed?

Meternagel acted as though he didn’t even want such questions to

arise. “I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but it seems to me that
things are getting just a little hot around here. Something’s in store
for us. Could be that if we give up a few hours we can help put out
the fire. It’s not as absurd as it may sound. But what if they actually
demand it? Then we’ll say, Oh, leave us alone, everybody makes their
money here.” He looked Günter Ermisch in the eye, openly, directly.
Ermisch had been expecting this look for weeks, and turned bright
red.

“Who do you take us for?” he said, choking with emotion. “You

think that just because we cheated you once, we’ll always be cheaters?
Yes, just so you know, we scammed you for three thousand marks. Of
course I knew those processes I was billing for weren’t happening
anymore. Most of us knew that. So you lost your job. Okay. But does
that mean we’re crooks forever?”

Meternagel had gone so pale Rita was afraid for him. He was not

interested in dragging out the silence. He’d always dealt with the
important moments of his life on the side. He bent down to pick up
his worn briefcase. He said, “Meetings should never drag on.”

As they were dispersing, Ernst Wendland joined them. He

addressed Ermisch. “We’re short on carpenters,” he said. “Are we
going to be getting more frames from you, or not?”

“Maybe,” Ermisch replied. He’d had enough that day.
“Maybe belongs in a novel,” the director said.
“Don’t worry,” Meternagel said. He looked at Wendland evenly.

“You know how it is, when a virgin says maybe … ”

Christa Wolf

201

Wendland understood. He laughed and offered cigarettes all

around. “You’re a lucky guy,” he said to Ermisch. “It’s easier to
become a famous brigade leader than a famous factory director.”

“It’s just not so easy to hang on to the label,” Ermisch said.
They laughed and clapped him on the shoulder: no truer word.

Rita knocks on Meternagel’s door with a feeling of apprehension.
How much can a man change in eight weeks?

As always, his wife is there. Her face lights up as she recognizes

Rita. “He’s asleep,” she says, “but I’m happy to wake him for you.”
At the door to the bedroom, she turns round again. “Don’t let him see
that you’re shocked.”

The warning was unnecessary. Rita hides her fright under a smile.

“Hey!” she says, “who asked you to take over from me?”

He can tell she’s not prepared to meet a man who is seriously ill, but

he ignores that. He can only ever do one thing at a time: raise his head
or smile or speak. He does all of that little by little. His smile is the only
thing on his face that hasn’t changed. It makes him look even stranger.

“Take a seat, kid,” he says. Yes, it’s really got him this time: heart

and kidneys and circulation, and God knows what else. He’s going
away for treatment so they can patch him up again.

“And who’s replacing you as foreman?” Rita wants to know.
No, Rolf says. No point imagining things. He’s not going to be

foreman again. Ermisch will be his successor.

What more is there to say? They look at each other. Rita stops

trying to hide her feelings. They realize they’ve known each other
long enough to talk things through honestly. A year and a half. No
more than that since she first arrived at the plant, wet behind the ears,
and nervously followed this man through the place, with no greater
fear than being a failure in his eyes.

Rolf says, “If you always knew ahead of time what’s coming your

way … There were times when I thought: nothing more can happen
to you now. There’s nothing that can knock you over now.”

“Keep thinking that,” Rita said. “Nothing can knock you over.”

they divided the sky

202

They laugh. Frau Meternagel sticks her head in the door. She’s

pleased. She knew this visitor would be good for her husband. She
invites Rita to have a coffee with her in the living room.

The coffee is thin. Rita only knows the room with Meternagel

sitting in his chair at the window. Without him and the smoke from
his cigarette, the room is empty. Today she sees how threadbare the
sofa is and that there’s a rug missing.

Meternagel’s wife is happy to be able to talk through her worries

with someone else. She hasn’t mentioned them to her husband for a
long time. “He’s not like other people,” she says, discouraged. “I’ve been
watching him destroy himself. Others buy a television and a fridge, and
a washing machine for their wife. Do you know what he’s been doing
with his money since the girls have grown up and don’t need our help?
Saving it up. He thinks I don’t know why. But I do: he wants to repay
the three thousand marks he overspent years ago. He’s crazy, truly
crazy. Does a factory that size need three thousand marks? I do.”

Rita drinks the thin coffee. She has a few bites of bread with it.

He married this woman when she was a servant girl and he was
an apprentice. They’d known each other since they were children
growing up in the same courtyard. The building where they grew
up is still standing. Rita has had a look at it. “When things are this
clean there’s no poverty,” said the social worker, and left Meternagel’s
mother and her five children without support.

The girl who later became Rolf’s wife would come over and help

clear up when his mother went to do laundry. They were all boys;
Rolf was the oldest.

The woman has grown old beside the man. She must have been

pretty once. He always forced her to turn over every penny. Now
her face has gone limp and submissive. The dress she’s wearing was
fashionable five years ago.

He’s probably always supported this woman, though he’s never

said anything about it. How long can a person’s strength last?

“You cannot imagine how much your husband accomplishes,” Rita

says, unable to find the right words to console the woman. “And how

Christa Wolf

203

they all look up to him. We can’t manage without him.”

“I know,” she says quietly, “he has to be the way he is.”
When Rita goes back into Rolf Meternagel’s room, he’s fallen asleep

again. She’s afraid to look at his exhausted face. She pulls the door
shut after her.

This day, the first day of her new-found freedom, is almost over.
Twilight hangs low in the streets. People head home from work.
Squares of light come on in the dark walls of houses, and the private
and public ceremonies of the evening begin—thousands of actions are
carried out every night even if they only produce a bowl of soup, a
warm stove, a little song for the children. Sometimes a man’s eyes will
follow his wife as she leaves the room with the dishes, and she doesn’t
notice how surprised and grateful he looks. Sometimes a woman will
stroke a man’s shoulder. She hasn’t done that in a long time, but at the
right moment she can feel: this is what he needs.

Rita makes a long detour through the streets and looks into many

windows. She can see how every evening an endless amount of the
kindness that was used up during the day is newly produced. She
is not afraid that she might not get her share of it. She knows that
sometimes she will be tired, and sometimes angry and upset.

But she is not afraid.
That’s what balances things out: when we get used to sleeping

quietly. When we live life fully, as though there is too much of this
strange stuff called life.

As if it could never run out.

Document Outline