The Enduring Valentine

Yesterday afternoon, I fell asleep in the university library once again, and I dreamt that I was in the Berlin of 1972. I tried desperately to wake myself up from that dream, but with each attempt I found myself sinking yet deeper into the labyrinths of the narrow lanes of suburban Berlin. And then I saw Maria, now an old woman with grey hair, seated on a brown chair sipping coffee and reading the morning edition of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. We had first met under the stormy skies of Paris in May 1968, and felt that we were finishing off the job that the stormers of the Bastille had left undone in 1789. She had come from rural Catalonia of a family with pious Catholic backgrounds, but her father had rebelled against her grandparents and joined the anarchists in the great Civil War against the monstrous Franco. And then in '68 it was time for her to follow her father's footsteps. As for myself, my parents had named me Karl after the great German theologian Karl Barth, but they had perhaps forgotten that Karl was also the first name of someone else.

After the turmoil of '68, Maria had emigrated to Canada where she settled down as the wife of a rich industrialist in Toronto, and I had joined the University of Tuebingen and spent an entire life-time trying to recover from my loss of faith in the Revolution. Maria saw me approaching her and smiled at me : 'Oh, it is you, Karl! Shall it be black coffee, no milk, one sugar, like in the olden days?' As we were sipping coffee looking at the tired red sun going down in the distance, an old man came up to us and asked us, 'Do you have any spare change?'. I rummaged through my pockets and found that I had a thick wad of 500 Euro notes. Maria dug into her red leather bag and took out seven shining credit cards, each from a different company. We both replied instantaneously, 'Sorry, but I have no change'. The old man stared into my eyes softly, and there was something in them that reminded me of '68 : Was he a long-lost comrade of ours? Could we have fought under the same tormented skies? Could we have chanted the same slogans against the vile Fascists?

Later that evening, I came out of the library and rambled into the noisy market-square where I saw a young man and a young woman distributing Communist Party pamphlets. On the first page, there was the usual gobbledygook about capitalism, communism, and consumerism, and I rapidly skimmed through it. On the last page, however, there was something that reminded me again of '68. There was this poem :

How does it matter, dear friend

What flag you struggle under?

Only the farmer knows

At sunrise and at sunset

The true unmistakable colour

Of the sun's unredeemed suffering.