And that is what I mean.

As you know, my mother left us right after releasing me into the world. In those days cancer still often went undiagnosed, and, as a fervent Catholic, Mama thought the Devil was living inside her and taking a piece of her liver every day. For as long as she could still speak, she cursed the doctors, refused to take her medicine, and instead consigned her soul to the wooden Jesus on the wall of her sickroom. I think she was a very unsophisticated woman.

Legend has it that, at the age of four, I said: I’m going to be mayor, and there’s nothing you can do about it! I’ve no idea whether I was really able to grasp the meaning of my words; in any case, it seems I stamped my feet one after the other on the living-­room floorboards. I was a stubborn little mule; I probably thought that, as mayor, you’d always have enough grown-­up women around you, and also that nothing bad could happen to you ever again. The first part of this assumption is correct, the second is not.

Cancer got me, too.

Do you know Friedrich Sertürner? Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner would have liked to become an architect, but he became a pharmacist instead. And that was a stroke of luck for me. Because in the year 1804 (when the population of Paulstadt still consisted of just four farming families, all related but all sworn enemies, their farms centred on a marshy pool more or less where Kobielski’s car dump is today), Sertürner got hold of a few spoonfuls of pure opium from somewhere and distilled it to make a poppy alkaloid. He named it morphium, after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, son of Hypnos, shapeshifter, messenger between the worlds, and the god of peaceful death into the bargain, which definitely makes him a congenial figure in my view.

You can sort of understand Mama: cancer is a devilish business. You can carry it around with you for years and not notice a thing, then all of a sudden it kicks off. It’s early morning, you’re sitting on the toilet with the local newspaper, about to look at the readers’ letters, and suddenly you feel this pain. It’s as if a dog has sunk its teeth into your kidneys and is tearing them out of your body piece by piece. Not just any old dog; one with bloodshot eyes, hulking, stupid and mean. You press both fists to your belly, fall sideways off the toilet and writhe on the tiles. Someone calls your name, hammers on the door, breaks it down: screams, paramedic, blue light, hospital, etc.

With the first injection you already feel better, and later, when you’re hooked up to a drip and the pain gradually fades to a vague memory as you contemplate the infinite beauty of the ceiling light over your bed, you feel as if everything will be all right again.

It won’t, of course. Your body starts to decay and crumble like an old wooden barrel. But in the end it was quick, and relatively pleasant. Morpheus cradled me into death.