9.
Christa Wolf 39 9. “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 40 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 warmhearted 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...
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