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they divided the sky 4 1. 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 5 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...
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