Es ist immer nur eine Zahl!!!", she wrote on the card she sent me on my 75th birthday. If it's nothing more than a simple number, Bärbel, why then did you call it quits before your own 75th?
We were articled clerks in the same insurance company in the early 60s. I left for Australia in 1965, and we kept writing to each other until my brief return in 1967 when, for old times' sake, I went to her parents' house.
Her mother introduced me to the man beside her. "Meet Bärbel's fiancé", she said. Decency demanded that I should stop writing to her, and I did.
It was seventeen years later, in January 1984, when I flew back for my father's funeral, that I phoned her again. "Come over for a champagne breakfast", she suggested. Her husband was at work; her two teenage sons were at school; and we talked all morning about all those years ago.
"I'll asked my husband if we two can go out together this evening", she said, and rung later to meet her by the Staatstheater for a night out.
We had a meal at a Greek restaurant (where I impressed her with my knowledge of Greek food and the Greek language); we had drinks at several bars; and then we had a long walk through the by then quiet town which had been my home for most of my childhood and teenage years.
Two days later I was back at the desk in my office in Piraeus with the memories of my father's funeral and of what used to be home safely behind me, and of what might have been my girlfriend had I not been such a shy teenager more than twenty years ago. Then her first letter arrived and we wrote to each other until her untimely death thirty-eight years later.
I've had many "might-have-beens" in my life. Bärbel was one of them.
Rest in Peace, Bärbel.
