Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In this gripping new novel, Christa Wolf explodes the myth, offering modern readers a highly relevant portrayal of a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle. Medea, driven by conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded an outsider. When she discovers the appalling secret behind the King of Corinth's claim to power, Medea is unwilling to ignore this horrifying truth and becomes a threat to the King and his ruthless advisers. Then, abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and murderess. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, MEDEA is a stunningly perceptive and honest work of fiction.

'Wolf is in a league of her own with her handling of myth and history, and her ability to interweave the personal and the political' Scotland on Sunday

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One Even dead gods reign. Even the hapless fear for their happiness. The language of dreams. The language of the past. Help me up, up out of this shaft, away from this clanging in my head, why do I hear the clash of weapons, does that mean they're fighting, who's fighting, Mother, my Colchians, am I hearing their war games in our inner courtyard, or where am I, because the clashing keeps getting louder. Thirsty. I must wake up. I must open my eyes. The pitcher next to the bed. Cool water doesn't just quench my thirst, it stills the noise in my brain too. But I know about that. You sat there next to me, Mother, and if I turned my head like this I could see out the window, as I can here, where am I? There wasn't any fig tree there, that's where my favorite walnut tree was. Did you know that one could yearn for a tree, Mother? I was a child, nearly a child, I'd bled for the first time, but I wasn't sick on that account, and it wasn't on that account that you sat by me and made the time pass, changing the herb poultices on my chest and forehead, holding my hands up in front of my eyes and showing me the lines in my palms, first the left one, then the right, how different from one another. You taught me to read them. I've often tried to ignore their messages; I've clenched my hands into fists, wrung them, laid them on wounds, raised them to the goddess, carried water from the spring, woven linen with our patterns; I've buried my hands in the warm hair of children. Once, Mother, in another time, I took your head in my hands as I bade you farewell, its shape is still impressed on my palms--hands can remember too. These hands have palpated every part of Jason's body, as recently as last night, but now it's morning, and what a day.     Easy. Take it easy, one step at a time. Concentrate. Where are you? I'm in Corinth. The fig tree in front of the window opening in this clay hut was a solace to me when they expelled me from King Creon's palace. Why? That comes later. Is the banquet over, or must I still attend it? After all, I promised Jason. You can't let me down now, Medea, a lot depends on this banquet. Not for me, I told him, as you well know; still and all, if that's what you want, I'll come, I said, but this is the last time. Long ago you traced that tiny line in my left palm with your fingernail and told me what it would mean if it should ever cross the life line, you knew me very well, Mother, are you still alive?     Look here. See, that tiny line is deeper now, and it crosses the other one. Beware, you told me, arrogance will turn your insides cold. Maybe so, but pain, Mother, pain leaves an awful trail behind too. I don't have to tell you that. It was pitch-dark when we boarded the Argo, but I still saw your eyes, I couldn't forget them, and their gaze burned into my brain a word I'd never known before: guilt.     Now I hear that clashing again, it must be the fever, yet it seems to me I was sitting at that table, not exactly by Jason's side, was that yesterday? Stay here, Mother, why am I so tired? I just want to sleep a little while longer, I'll get up soon, I'll put on that white dress I wove and sewed myself, just the way you taught me, and then we'll walk together again through the corridors of our palace, and I'll be happy, as when I was a child and you took me by the hand and led me to the fountain in the courtyard--you know, I've never come across a lovelier fountain anywhere--and one of the women draws up the wooden bucket for us, and I ladle out the spring water and drink and drink and grow healthy again.     So this is how it is: either I'm out of my mind, or their city is founded on a crime. No, believe me, I'm quite clear on this point, what I say or think about it is quite clear to me, for I've found the proof, yes, I've touched it with my own hands. Oh, it's not arrogance that threatens to undo me now. The woman--I simply followed her. Perhaps I just wanted to teach Jason a lesson, since he'd stood by and let them seat me at the end of the table among the servants, that's it, I didn't dream that, that was yesterday. At least they're the highest-ranking servants, he said pathetically, don't cause a scandal, Medea, please, not today, you know what's at stake, the King can't lose face in front of all his foreign guests. Ah, Jason, save your breath. He still hasn't understood that King Creon can't grieve me anymore, but that's not what I'm talking about, I have to clear my head. I have to promise myself never to speak about my discovery to a living soul. The best thing would be to do what Chalciope and I used to do with secrets when we were children, do you know what that was, Mother? We'd wrap our secret up tight in a leaf and eat it up while staring into one another's eyes. Our childhood--or rather everything in Colchis--was full of dark secrets, and when I arrived here, a refugee in King Creon's gleaming city-state of Corinth, I had an envious thought: these people have no secrets. And that's what they think too, that's what makes them so convincing; with every look, with every one of their measured movements, they're drumming it into you: Here's one place in the world where a person can be happy. It was only later that I realized how much they hold it against you if you express doubts about their happiness. But that's not what I'm talking about either, what's the matter with my head? It's buzzing with a whole swarm of thoughts, why is it so hard for me to reach into the swarm and snatch out the one thought I need?     I had the good fortune to be seated at the King's table between my friend Leukon, Creon's Second Astronomer, and Telamon. You know him too, Mother, he was the Argonaut who came to the palace with Jason after they landed on the Colchian coast. So I knew I wouldn't be bored at the banquet. Leukon's a clever man, I love to talk with him, there's a sympathy between us; and Telamon, though perhaps a bit uncouth, has been devoted to me since that first afternoon in Colchis, so many years ago that I can hardly count them. In my presence he always tries to be especially witty, also especially obscene, we all had to laugh. Resolved to punish the King from my lowly place, I acted the part of a princess--which is, after all, what I am, right, Mother? A great Queen's daughter. It wasn't hard for me to attract notice and demand respect, even from the foreign emissaries, the Libyans and the Mediterranean islanders. Telamon played along; we had poor Jason in a tight spot, torn between jealousy and his eagerness to please a King we're all, of course, dependent on. He lifted a surreptitious glass to me, cautioning me with stern looks not to let my exuberance go too far, but whenever the King launched into one of his tirades Jason had to hang on his lips. We were having a merry time at our end of the table, now everything's coming back to me again. How the two men at my sides began to quarrel over me, how Leukon, tall, thin, a bit awkward, with his oval-shaped skull that understands jokes but can't make any, started to extol my abilities as a healer to Telamon, a giant with curly blond hair, and how thereupon Telamon went into loud raptures over my physical attributes, my brown skin, he said, for example, my woolly hair that all we Colchians have, that's what conquered Jason right away, and him besides, but what was he compared to Jason, and then he became sentimental, strong men do that so easily, my burning eyes, he said. Yes, you do know him, Mother, whenever I see him I remember how you put your hand to your mouth as though in fright and yelled out Aiee! when he appeared in our doorway. It was a cry of appreciation, if I'm not mistaken, and I remember how your eyes sparkled, and how I noticed that you were by no means an old woman yet, and then against my will my sour-faced, suspicious father crossed my mind. Ah, Mother. I'm not a young woman anymore, but according to the Corinthians I'm still wild, as far as they're concerned a woman is wild if she has a mind of her own. The Corinthian women seem like thoroughly tamed house pets to me, they stare at me as though I'm some strange apparition, and we three merrymakers at the end of the table drew all eyes upon us, all the courtiers' envious, indignant eyes, and also poor Jason's pleading ones--well, yes.     Why did I follow that woman, the Queen, when I'd barely caught a glimpse of her during all my years in Corinth? Wrapped up in a thick cocoon of bloodcurdling rumors, securely hidden behind her unapproachability, she passes her days and her nights in the remotest, oldest wing of the palace, inside thick-walled rooms said to resemble dimly lit caves, fitter for a prisoner than a sovereign, served and guarded by two peculiarly rugged females who, however, are supposed to be quite devoted to her in their way. I don't believe she knows my name, and I had never wasted a thought on the unhappy Queen of a country that has always seemed alien to me and will stay that way forever. How my head aches, Mother, something inside me balks at climbing down into those caves again, into the Underworld, into Hades--where for ages people have died and been born again, where living beings are baked fresh from the humus of the dead--and so back to the mothers, back to the goddess of death. But what can forward and back mean there? My fever's mounting--I had to do it. The first time I saw this woman at Creon's side, Mother, it was with that second sight that you recognized in me. I struggled with all my might against becoming the pupil of that young priest, I preferred getting sick. Now I remember; it was during that same sickness that you showed me the lines in my palms, and later that priest committed some dreadful crimes, he wasn't a normal person, and that's when you said, the child has second sight. I've almost lost it here, sometimes I think the Corinthians' morbid fear of what they call my magical powers has robbed me of my gift. And so I was shocked when I saw Queen Merope. She was sitting beside King Creon without a word, she seemed to hate him and he seemed to fear her--anyone with eyes in his head could have seen that. I mean something else. I mean that suddenly it became completely quiet. That I had that flickering in front of my eyes that comes before second sight. That in the vast banquet hall this woman and I were alone. I saw her there, her aura almost completely darkened by inconsolable grief, so much so that I was horror-stricken and I had to follow her when she stood up stiffly in her gold-embroidered formal dress as soon as the meal was over and left the room without a word of explanation, without so much as a good night for the foreign merchants and emissaries, thus forcing the King to cover up her impertinence by talking fast and laughing loudly. His defeat rejoiced my heart. He must have forced this woman to present her ravaged face to all those vain, prying people just as Jason had brought me to the point of performing a little comedy for them. Now I'd had enough. Both of us left for the same reason: pride. You once told me, and I've never forgotten it, that anyone who wanted to kill me would have to deal more blows to my pride than to anything else. Nothing has changed in that regard, nor will it, and it would be a good thing for my poor Jason to grasp this fact before too long.     I followed the woman. That passage, the one that leads to the banquet hall--how often have I walked along it at Jason's side, the respected wife of the royal nephew and guest-friend, in times that seemed happy to me. How could I have deceived myself so thoroughly? But nothing is so deceptive as happiness, and there's no place that clouds clarity of perception so much as a place in the retinue of a King. It looked as though the earth had swallowed up Merope, there had to be some sort of hatch or opening somewhere, I searched around and found it hidden behind a pile of pelts. I took one of the burning torches from its holder and slipped into the passageway, which soon became so low that I had to walk stooped over, or did I dream that, the gloomy, vaulted cellarage, the King's bright glorious palace as its own counterimage in the depths of the earth, built into the darkness. The stone stairs, down one flight after another, I must have dreamed that; but the cold, surely that was no dream, I'm still shivering, nor the sharp-edged stones that tore my skin, why else would my arms be so covered with crusted scratches? And then at the bottom, at the deepest level, in that cellar where even in this dry country there were pools of water, the entrance to a labyrinth of caves, two steps and then down on my belly, crawling forward, protecting the torch that was only flickering now, not thinking anymore about Merope, who might or might not be ahead of me, not thinking about anything or anyone anymore, just knowing I must go on, on and on; when the passage finally broadened into a cave, it was familiar to me from my dreams--if not, how did I know that the way forked there, how did I know that I had to keep to my left and that soon my torch would go out? It went out. At that point the passage was so narrow that I would have had to crawl backward to get out, therefore I had to keep going, knowing full well it could mean my undoing--one's always hearing about someone who got lost while exploring underground caves and died inside them. Do I want to die, the question crossed my mind, I set my teeth and kept on crawling, then I licked some moisture seeping from the walls, tasteless dampness, then I sensed that the composition of the air was changing, and then my hair stood up even before I heard the sound. Then I heard the sound. It lasted longer than a person has breath, a barely audible but penetrating whining. It could just as well have been an animal, but it was no animal.     It was the woman. It was Merope. I wanted to go back, all the way back, and I pushed myself forward inch by inch. All at once, the sound stopped; the hammer in my chest drowned out any other noise, it hasn't stopped, it's hammering all the way up to my temples. Then, when my eyes had glimpsed the right direction in the darkness, I saw the Queen, sitting in the dim light of her little oil lamp, braced straight and still against the rocky cave wall, her eyes unwaveringly fixed on a point across from her. In this icy cold I was drenched with sweat, I stank of horror, such a thing had never happened to me. Something stirred in me that I had kept locked up and almost forgotten, something came alive in that corpses' crypt. This wasn't a game anymore. That whole production at the King's table, how vain that had been, how vain and affected my own behavior. But I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it. I wasn't going in for that sort of thing very much anymore, it's true, yet I must admit that I let a trace of coquetry spur me on at the King's banquet, instead of Merope's total, uncompromising refusal, and now she'd led me here, to the bottom of the Underworld, where my horror was suddenly replaced by panic, because there was something uncannily silent creeping in there, something I must hide from, but there weren't any cracks or fissures in the rock. Whatever was slithering this way had learned to move soundlessly, without causing so much as a current of air, even better than I can do it. For you taught me how to move like that at a very early age, Mother, showed me movement made up of tiny non-movements, and I learned how to melt into walls too--I'd need that in my father's palace, you said, before I understood why--as well as the breathing that holds back every breath that would otherwise escape from a person's body; all I'd learned was still there, it took over the commands and stopped me from shivering out loud at the sight of the creature, the shadow of a shadow, that propelled itself to the woman's side, whispered a word to her, and took the dimming lamp out of her hand. Whereupon the Queen allowed herself to be led away by this female, as I now perceived her to be, and as the cave narrowed they both had to go down on their knees, a movement that I involuntarily imitated. I knelt down, either out of weakness or out of gratitude to a god who had extricated me from yet another predicament. Or out of mortal fear.     I waited until the women were out of earshot, and then I began to feel my way along the walls of the cave. I had to know this Queen's secret. In complete darkness my fingertips found what I suppose they were looking for: scratches in the stone not put there by nature, surfaces scraped with tools familiar to me from Colchis, lines that I could follow until they formed signs and figures which, as I knew, people here in Corinth carved in the cave graves of the eminent dead. This jibed with the suspicion I wouldn't yet have been able to express. At the spot where Merope had sat, I went down on all fours and crawled across to the wall the Queen had stared at, felt with reluctant fingers for the deep niche carved into the rock, found what I had feared to find, and uttered a cry that echoed in the maze of caves. Then I retraced my steps. I had learned what I wanted to know, I promised myself to forget it as soon as possible, and since then I can think of nothing but that meager, childish skull, those fine-boned shoulder blades, that brittle spinal column. Ah me.     The city is founded on a monstrous deed.     Whoever gives away this secret is lost. I needed the shock to make my way back. Not back to the King's table and the disdainful scowls of the company, surely not. But where to go? Not even you would be able to advise me this time, Mother, I can consult the lines in my palms as much as I want, and very distinct lines they are, but what does that mean here and now? However wretched it makes me feel, this illness means to give me a breathing space. I can fathom the hidden significance of illness, but I know how to use it better for healing others than for healing myself. Half intentionally, I abandon myself to the fever that's rising in me, washing me away on a fiery wave, and bringing me images, shreds of images, faces.     Jason. Did I betray myself to him? No. There was a moment, a fleeting, seductive moment, but I kept quiet. Yes I did, I kept quiet. Jason was waiting for me, I hadn't reckoned on that, I still don't know him completely, I've avoided knowing him completely because it wasn't important to me anymore--a convenient but dangerous omission. Instead of sparing no effort to anticipate his every impulse, I afforded myself the luxury of indifference; otherwise I would have realized that the mixture of triumph and humiliation he'd experienced at the King's banquet table would arouse his desire to such a point that only I could satisfy it, not any of the palace girls, ready and willing though they are.     Exhausted and dirty, I dragged myself home, home to the clay hovel stuck on the palace wall like a bird's nest and vaulted over by the fig tree whose bright leaves I can see from my bed. Lyssa's look warned me, the way her lips moved was a hint as to who was waiting for me behind the curtained doorway of the next room. I had just time enough to rinse my face and hands and throw on a clean nightgown in place of my torn and filthy dress before Jason called for me. The best way to deceive people is to make a show of perfectly ordinary behavior, so as usual I had to shove Jason's things, which he as usual had simply let fall, out of the way, and in so doing stretch out my foot from under the long, loose gown with that graceful, conscious movement, aware that Jason likes women's feet and that no woman has feet more beautiful than mine. He said so again, and to gain time I asked him if he remembered when he'd taken my feet in his hands for the first time, and he answered, with great assurance, Stupid question. Come here. That's the way the man speaks to me now, and it doesn't even matter to me anymore that he mixes me up with his other women. I told him he had to answer me first. There are certain things that a man just doesn't forget, he said, and immediately gave me an example of his capacity for forgetting.     It was in Colchis, he said, we were sitting by that stockade that fences off the inner palace courtyard from the other ones, it was night and a full moon, I remember that quite clearly. You were wearing a gown like this one, he said, I'd never seen such a weave, on the other side of the fence the watchmen were bawling out those horrible songs of yours that put trouble in a man's soul. When he said this I remembered how those long-drawn-out, melancholy songs our young soldiers sing used to seize my heart too, not for the same reasons. You promised, Jason said, to help me get that goddamned Fleece, the sole purpose of our long journey, and I--well yes, if you must know--I took your foot in my hands. Now come.     I was astonished, but at myself. He can still hurt me, Mother, that has to stop. Besides, it should have been obvious to me that he, too, could think of only one reason why I helped him against my own father: I must have been helplessly in thrall to him, Jason. They all think that, all the Corinthians, in any case--as far as they're concerned, a woman's love for a man explains and excuses everything. But our Colchians, too, the ones who left with me, thought Jason and I were lovers from the beginning. The notion that I couldn't have slept in my father's house with a man who was deceiving him won't penetrate their thick skulls. Deceiving him with my help, Mother, yes, yes indeed, that's what was so cruel about the position I was in, that's what was tearing me apart, I couldn't make a move that wasn't false, I couldn't do anything that didn't betray something dear to me. I know what the Colchians must have called me after I fled, Father surely saw to that: Traitress. The word still stings me. It stung me that night on the Argo, one of the first nights after our flight, the Colchian fleet had broken off its pursuit, I was at the side of the ship, perched on a coil of rope, there was a new moon and an enormous, starry sky. Don't you remember, I could have asked Jason, the shooting stars were falling into the sea as though strewn by someone's hand, the waters were calm, the waves were washing quietly against the sides of the ship, the Argonauts on rowing duty were rowing along rhythmically, quietly, the ship was gently rocking, the night was mild. When you came, Jason, I could have told him, you were a dark shadow against the starry sky; you were at your best, you said the right thing in the right way, you soothed my grief, which you knew nothing of and which I considered beyond remedy. As if to warm them, you took my feet in your hands.     Nonsense, Jason would have said, so I kept quiet. He said, Let's not fight, Medea. Not tonight. Come. In his voice, once again, was the signal that something in me answers. Once again I abandoned myself to him, not just my foot but every part of my body, he responds to it like no other man. Used to respond to it is perhaps more accurate. Jason? Long silence. I'd seen him like this before. Now he'd have to find someone to blame. This happens, he said accusingly, because you're deceiving me. If not, where did you disappear to so soon after the banquet, who were you having fun with? I couldn't answer his questions, and that made him angry. In the past, he said, you wouldn't have acted like this. In the past, you gave me strength, all the strength I needed. What he said was true. I got up and rinsed my hands and face with the water I'd drawn from the spring in the morning. In the past, I said to Jason, in the past you believed in me. And in yourself.     You always have a clever answer, Jason said, you always know better, when will you admit that your time has passed? Now, I said, surprised as I was, now I admit it, but what good does it do you? Then he pressed his head between his hands and gave such a groan as I'd never heard from him before. Don't think, he said, just don't think it makes me feel better when you don't know what to do either. That was a confession I wouldn't have expected from him. I sat down next to him on the bed, tugged his hands away from his temples, stroked his forehead, his cheeks, his shoulders, the vulnerable hollow in his collarbone. Come, he said, pleading, and I lay down beside him, I know his body, know how to ignite his desire, behind his closed eyelids he abandoned himself to the fantasies he never let me share. Yes, yes, yes, Medea, that's the way. I wished him success, he succeeded, fell on me with all his weight, buried his face between my breasts, and wept for a long time. I had never seen him cry. Then he stood up, plunged his face into the water basin on the chest, shook his head like an ox that's just been struck between the eyes, and left without turning to me again.     I'll have to pay for that. In Corinth, if a woman sees a man's weakness, she always has to pay.     And at home? In Colchis? Am I fooling myself if I privately insist that things were different there? It's odd, lately, how I practice calling up the memory of Colchis and filling it with colors, as if I simply refused to watch Colchis fading in me. Or as if I needed it, I don't yet know why.     I went to Lyssa's room, she was still awake. Next door, through the curtain, I heard the children's breathing. I was hoping Lyssa would ask me where I'd been, but she never asks. Among all living things, she's the one from whom I've never been separated for a single day, she, who was born the same day I was, whose mother was my wet nurse, she, who was the wet nurse of my children. She, who's seen everything with me and probably understood everything--or was that an illusion too, when I considered it normal for her to empathize with all my feelings and expected her to perceive them, often before I did and even when I denied them to her face? Lyssa, whom I sometimes pull down next to me on the bed for an intimate chat, and whom I sometimes wish away at the edge of the world. But the edge of the world is Colchis. Our Colchis on the southern slopes of the wild Caucasus Mountains, whose stark outline is inscribed in every one of us--we know this about one another, but we never speak of it, speaking increases homesickness until it can't be borne. But I knew that, I knew I'd never stop pining for Colchis. Still, what can that mean, "knew"? This ache that never goes away, that's always gnawing, you can't know it in advance, we Colchians read it in one another's eyes when we gather to sing our songs and tell our young folk the tales of our gods and our forefathers--which many of them don't want to hear anymore, because they think it's important to act like real Corinthians. Sometimes I, too, avoid those gatherings, and it strikes me that they're inviting me less and less often. Ah, my beloved Colchians, they understand how to hurt me too. And lately Lyssa has learned the trick as well.     Of course she had stayed awake, as she always does when I may need her, but unlike the other times, she refused to give me her complicitous smile. I wouldn't beg for this favor, I pretended to notice nothing and began, there in the middle of the night, a discussion about whether the men in Colchis were different from the ones in Corinth. She joined in the game austerely; as far as she recalled, the men in Colchis gave vent to their feelings, she said, for example after her brother's accident her father had wept publicly and bitterly, had howled and moaned, while at a Corinthian funeral you never see a man weeping--the women must take care of that for the men. Then she grew silent. I knew what she was thinking about. I've never seen a man weep as that young Colchian did, the one Lyssa loved with such devotion, but whom she left behind to follow me onto the Argo for an uncertain journey. She gave birth to her daughter, Arinna, during the voyage, and thereafter there has been no man in Lyssa's life, and I can't help asking myself what price Lyssa has paid, and the other Colchians, and all of us, because I didn't want to live in Colchis anymore and they followed me, blinded by my good repute among them. That's the way I must look at it today.     Jason? Ah, Jason. I let them keep believing he was the man I'd follow to the ends of the earth, and I can't blame them for taking our separation as a serious personal offense. Worse: as proof that our flight was in vain. While I, I thought as I lay on Lyssa's bed, I touched that proof today with my own hands, a child's skeleton hidden away from all the world in a cave. Then Lyssa laid her hand on my neck. We still make the old gestures, but they no longer have the same meaning. We can soothe one another. We can't put anything right. That's not part of the arrangement, Mother, I'm beginning to understand.     What did I want to put right, or put back together, if the best course of action I could think of was to go with Jason? When I confided my intentions first to you, Mother, and then to Lyssa, both of you listened to me in silence, not even asking me my reasons, until finally Lyssa declared she'd come with me. It was only years later that I decided to ask her what was going on during those last days and nights in Colchis, for it was Lyssa who collected the little band of Colchians who were willing to join us. She couldn't afford a single miscalculation, every one of them had to be reliable, any thoughtless or treacherous word about our plan would have meant catastrophe. She understood our countrymen thoroughly--she'd observed them carefully for a long time--and she knew which of them found the situation at home as unbearable as I did. They didn't go along with us because of me, or not only because of me, Lyssa has often assured me of that, whenever my Colchians, disappointed by the lands to which I, a fugitive myself, have led them, begin to blame me for the loss of their homeland, which shines for them, belatedly, in all its pristine brilliance. How I understand them. How furious they often make me.     It wasn't long before differing and even contradictory stories began to circulate about the circumstances of our sailing from Colchis. What's certain is this: I went to Lyssa's bed and shook her awake--Come on, Lyssa, are you coming?--and she got up, grabbed the bundle she'd already packed, and slunk with me out of the palace and down to the shore, where the Argo lay waiting on a calm sea and in almost total darkness, and with it two other ships that belonged to the Colchian fleet, escape ships, to which men wading in the shallow waters were carrying the women and children who were coming with us. Early in the crossing some of these men began to exaggerate the depth of the water and, especially, to go on about how fraught with peril our departure had been, about swells and rough seas, and about their own courage and good judgment, by virtue of which all the women and children had made it safely on board. If our situation worsens, their legend-spinning will get completely out of hand, and objections based on facts will be futile. That is, if there still are such things as facts, after all these years. And if homesickness and humiliation and disappointment and poverty haven't worn them down to a thin, brittle shell that anyone who really wants to can destroy. Who will want to do that? Presbon?     Presbon, with his insatiable egoism--that could be. He was the only one of the emigrants whom Lyssa herself hadn't briefed, to this day she reproaches herself for having tolerated his coming. He seized the opportunity to turn his back on Colchis and offer his immense talent for self-display elsewhere, here in glittering Corinth, for example, where he's made himself indispensable to the production of the great temple festival plays. He knows how to set their complicated machinery in motion better than anyone, and his inspired performances of the great roles are such highlights that King Creon is moved to gratitude. No Colchian has been so highly honored as he, Presbon, the son of a maid and a palace guard officer in Colchis, who during our early days here in Corinth didn't consider himself too good to pick up rubbish from the grass after big holiday festivities. How much effort he had to make to get himself noticed. How he suffered from humiliation. How he hates everyone who saw him in his disgrace and mocked the contortions he put himself through in order to climb higher. How he hates me, because I wasn't capable of recognizing his true worth. Nothing fails to have consequences, Mother, you were right about that.     Was it Lyssa who told you what time we were to set sail? You guessed it yourself, more likely. No one studied as attentively as you did the events brought on by the appearance of those foreigners in Colchis.     Everything looked promising at first. Our Colchians weren't unsympathetic to them, to Jason with his panther skin and his rather unkempt band of Argonauts, who weren't so much brutish as awkward, ready to help when help was wanted, and curious. And it was actually flattering that the goal of their perilous sea voyage was none other than our Colchis, a land like others on the Black Sea coast. In any case, these mariners had dropped anchor in the mouth of our river Phasis, and there was no reason not to treat them with the courtesy due to guests. Besides, shortly after their arrival King Aeetes, my father, received Jason and Telamon and invited all fifty Argonauts to the palace the following evening for a banquet which cost a quantity of sheep their lives and ended in high spirits and oaths of friendship.     Naturally there were many who later claimed to have smelled disaster, but what could have been sinister about such a banquet, the palace resounded with the noise of feasting and the blare of ram's-horn trumpets, for the wine we grow on the southern slopes of the mountains found great favor with our guests.     No. I was the only one with a premonition of evil, because I knew how suspiciously Father regarded these guests. The only one except for you, Mother. You didn't need any new reasons for gloomy premonitions. You knew the King. I had to deal with the father inside of me: You shall not betray me, my daughter. I knew that Jason wanted the Fleece. I knew that the King didn't want to give it to him. I didn't ask why not. My duty was to help Father render this man harmless, no matter what the price. I saw how high he set the price--too high for us all. The only choice left me was to betray him.     Did I have no other choice? How the years have washed away the reasons I used to be so sure of. Again and again I call to mind the sequence of those events--I've kept it locked up in my memory as a protective wall against the doubts that now, so late, are flooding through my defenses. A single word opened the breach: futility. Ever since I touched that child's little bones, my hands remember those other little bones, the ones that I--loudly weeping, I still remember that--threw from my fleeing ship to the King, who was pursuing us. Then he broke off the chase. After that, the Argonauts were afraid of me. Even Jason, whom I looked upon with different eyes after I saw the way he commanded his ship. He had poked around Colchis like a blind man, understood nothing, and put himself completely in my hands; but when he stepped aboard his ship, with the Fleece laid across his shoulders, he became another man. He lost all trace of awkwardness, he stiffened his spine, there was nothing unmanly in his concern for the fate of his crew, the prudent way he handled the Colchians' embarkation impressed me. Then I heard, for the first time, the word "refugee." To the Argonauts, we were refugees; I felt a pain in my heart. I gave up certain sensitivities around that time.     But that's not the point now. I believe it's my weakness, Mother, my momentary weakness, that's putting me at the mercy of these thoughts today. When you were standing on the shore to bid me farewell, you led me to believe that you approved of what I was doing. I had no choice. There wasn't much to say. Don't become like me, you said, then you pulled me against you with a strength I hadn't felt in you for a long time, turned away, and went up the embankment toward the palace, where the farewell drink I'd mixed for the King and his servants before they responded to Jason's departing toast had left them sleeping sound and deep. Jason himself had to remain alert and sober in order to find his way back to the sacred grove of Ares, which I had shown him by daylight, then to creep past the guards, who were also, thanks to me, sound asleep, and finally to perform--with my help--that feat for which he had come all the way to Colchis, at the eastern edge of his world: to take down from the oak sacred to the war god the ram's fleece that his uncle Phrixos, fleeing for his life, had brought there many years ago, and that his relatives were now demanding back. A sort of test of courage, or so I considered it at the time, unfamiliar as I was with poor Jason's tangled family history. It was only later, when they had looked at the thing more closely, that the Argo's crewmen decided to call it the Golden Fleece, but what did the Fleece mean to me? Like the fleece of many a ram in Colchis, that ram's skin had been used for gathering gold, that is, one spring it was laid in the bed of one of the mountain torrents that rush down to the valley, and there it collected the gold dust that was being washed out of the mountain's innards. The Argonauts questioned me very closely about this method, which seemed quite ordinary to me but sent them into flurries of excitement. There was gold in Colchis! Real gold! Why hadn't I told them about this before? Think how much more profitable their enterprise might have been!     I didn't understand them until I came to Corinth. Corinth is obsessed with gold. Can you imagine, Mother, they don't just make cult objects and jewelry out of gold, but common things for everyday use, plates, bowls, vases, even sculptures, and they sell these things at exorbitant prices round about their Mediterranean Sea; and they're always more than ready to barter grain, cattle, horses, or weapons for unworked gold, for simple ingots. What we found most disconcerting was this: the worth of a Corinthian citizen is measured by the quantity of gold in his possession, and the contributions he must make to the palace are calculated accordingly. Entire armies of clerks are employed in making these calculations--Corinth is proud of her specialists in this field--and Akamas, the chief astronomer and the King's First Minister, to whom I once mentioned my astonishment over the multitude of these useless but arrogant scribes and reckoners, lectured me about their eminent usefulness in dividing the Corinthian people into different classes, which is the first means of making a country governable. But why gold, of all things, I asked. Surely you must know, he replied, that it's our wishes, our desires, that make one thing valuable and another one worthless. The father of our King Creon was a clever man. He made gold much sought-after in Corinth by means of a single prohibition: he proclaimed a law forbidding his subjects to wear gold jewelry unless their contributions to the palace reached a certain level. You, too, are a clever man, Akamas, I said to him. Your kind of cleverness didn't exist in Colchis. That's because it's not required in your country, he said, smiling again in the way that used to wound me in the early days. And he was probably right.     But where am I wandering off to? I must finally get up. If I'm seeing right, Mother, the rays of the sun are already falling onto the fig tree from directly overhead, can it be possible I've lain about dozing the entire morning, that's never happened before. It's because of the caves, I can't climb out of them, someone should help me, Lyssa should come, the children. There, someone's feeling my forehead, a voice says, You're sick, Medea.     Is that you, Lyssa. Copyright © 1998 John Cullen. All rights reserved.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

Wolf, a valorous German writer, has always used her essays and fiction as acid baths to burn away the lies and hypocrisy embedded in the politics of her homeland, but her quest for truth extends far beyond any geographic or cultural boundaries. Indeed, it even transcends the constructs of time. She revisited the classic story of Cassandra in an earlier novel and now explodes our notion of Medea as the ultimate villainess. In her ringing introduction, Margaret Atwood previews the startling reversals Wolf achieves, but the novel is even more riveting and significant than she suggests. Wolf's Medea is a woman of compassion, courage, and conviction, who loves her children and possesses wondrous healing powers; a woman, in short, strong enough to antagonize everyone around her, from her scheming father to her hero-turned-coward husband, Jason. Wolf envisions Medea as a woman envied, feared, and falsely accused of murder, a woman whose only crimes are a striving for understanding and a willingness to face the truth. Wolf's brilliant novel is a mirror reflecting all the hate and venality perpetuated by our ancestors and ourselves, a maddening yet cathartic revelation. (Reviewed April 15, 1998)0385490607Donna Seaman

Kirkus Book Review

German novelist Wolf's discursive retelling of the familiar Greek legend, a logical outgrowth from her earlier novel Cassandra (1984), isŽpace Margaret Atwood, who contributes an informative ``Introduction''Ža humorless and essentially predictable political allegory envisioning the reviled sorceress and murderer (of her children) as a victim of male arrogance and sexual insecurity. Medea's homeland Colchis is a ``darker'' counterpart to the kingdom of Corinth, a self-aggrandizing state that brutally distorts truth to justify its imperialistic crimes. Wolf offers a chorus of ``Voices'' hereŽthe eponymous heroine, her weak-willed adventurer husband Jason, and other players in the drama of Corinth's power struggleŽto chronicle the scapegoating of an insubordinate female goaded to become ``immoderate . . . a Fury, just what the Corinthians needed her to be.'' Overwrought, and markedly inferior to Wolf's better fiction.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Christa Wolf was born on March 18, 1929, in Landsberg, which is now Gorzow, Poland. Her father joined the Nazi Party and she became a member of the girls' version of the Hitler Youth. In 1949, she joined the Socialist Unity Party and studied German literature at universities in Jena and Leipzig. She wrote numerous novels during her lifetime including The Divided Heaven, The Quest for Christa T., A Model Childhood, and Cassandra. She won several awards including the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1963 and Thomas Mann Prize for literature in 2010. She died on December 1, 2011 at the age of 82.

(Bowker Author Biography)