I hear you muttering about leaky ballot boxes. About voting slips that went missing and others that were counted two or three times. But, dear God, who asks the ram where he got his horns as long as he can lead the herd safely through the winter?

You say I overdid it with the women. To be honest, I don’t know how it’s possible to overdo it with women.

You talk about bribery. Bribery, you say, is a wicked thing. But I ask you, how could I have given without ever taking first? You can’t dig deep into empty pockets.

At this precise moment one of you, one of the braver ones, no doubt, one of those who always knew, or at least maintains that he did, might step forward and ask, in a firm voice: Could you at least be more serious in death than you were in life, Landmann? My answer: No.

You say that I ripped off old Karl Jonas when I conned him out of his fields? That I greased the palms of the geological surveyors and the surveying engineers, then held out both hands when the construction contract for our leisure centre was awarded, the centre you all wanted so badly? My dear friends, far be it from me to call you liars! Yes, I did slightly speed up the process. The future was rattling at the gates of our town – I just happened to be standing there, and pocketed the entrance fee.

Later on, things happened over which I no longer had any control. If I’d had any control over them, they wouldn’t have happened. You all remember the terrible day when three people lost their lives beneath the debris. Girders were wrongly placed, steel was hardened too early, concrete poured too late, the ground too soft, too deep, too undermined, I don’t know.

The deaths of these three people were a disaster for us all. Their graves are over there, plot seven, rows four and five.

Stephan Wichant. Friedbert Loheim. Martha Avenieu.

Do you know what was the most poignant moment of my life? Not my appointment as mayor, nor my first kiss from the girl who would later become my wife (you know how that ended). Not even the birth of my first child, which back then I still took for granted. No: it was the moment when we all gathered together in plot seven, rows four and five, to send three of our fellow citizens off on their final journey.

At that moment our hearts all beat together, as if we were a single organism. For that one, desperately sad moment we were what people call a community.

*

Family is the closest community of all. Who would contradict me on that? No one. So I’ll have to do it myself. Family is just a community of necessity. That can work out, but often doesn’t. We just don’t know what faces we’ll be looking at when we leave the familiar universe of the womb. A community like the one that came together that autumn Saturday afternoon is something else entirely. It arose out of the free will of each individual member.