This was the oldest part of the Paulstadt cemetery, which many people simply called ‘the field’. This area had once been uncultivated land owned by a cattle farmer named Ferdinand Jonas. It was a useless patch of ground, littered with stones and poisonous buttercups, and the farmer had been happy to get rid of it at the first opportunity by selling it to the parish. It wasn’t any use for grazing cattle, but it was good enough for the dead.

Hardly anyone came here any more. The last burial had taken place months earlier; the man had forgotten whose. He remembered another burial more clearly, many years ago, when the florist Gregorina Stavac was laid to rest on a rainy late summer’s day. Gregorina had lain undiscovered in the storeroom of her flower shop for more than two weeks, dust collecting on the cut flowers as they withered on the shop floor. The man had stood at the grave with a handful of other mourners, listening first to the words of the priest, then only to the hissing of the rain. He had never exchanged more than a few words with the florist, but on one occasion, as he was paying, their hands had touched. After that, he had felt strangely connected to this unassuming woman, and as the cemetery gardeners started shovelling in the earth, his cheeks were wet with tears.

Almost every day he sat under the birch tree and allowed his mind to wander. He thought about the dead. Many who lay here were people he had known personally, or had encountered at least once in his life. Most were ordinary citizens of Paulstadt: craftsmen, businessmen, workers in one of the shops on Marktstrasse or its little side streets. He tried to recall their faces, piecing his memories together to create images. He knew that these images did not conform to reality, that they might bear no resemblance at all to what these people were in life. But that didn’t matter to him. It gave him pleasure to see the faces appear and disappear in his mind’s eye, and sometimes he would laugh quietly to himself, leaning forwards, hands folded over his stomach, chin sunk on his chest. If anyone had been watching him from a distance at such a moment – one of the gardeners, perhaps, or a visitor to the graveyard, wandering down the wrong path – they might have had the impression that he was praying.

The truth is, he was convinced that he could hear the dead talking. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he perceived their voices just as clearly as the twittering of the birds and the humming of the insects all around him. Sometimes he even fancied he could pick out individual words or scraps of sentences from the swarm of voices, but however hard he listened, he never managed to piece the fragments together so that they made sense.

He imagined what it would be like if each voice were to have the chance to be heard once more. They would talk about life, of course. He thought that perhaps a person could only really pass judgement on their life once they had gone through death.