Later I wrote a novel, but no one wanted to read it to the end. I burned the pile of pages out in the middle of the fields. They were almost completely burnt when the wind blew on the ashes, and I stood there in a flurry of fluttering shadows as if in a swarm of dainty black butterflies.

I wasn’t like the other girls. I lacked their propensity for cheerfulness, and sometimes I despaired of my dreams. I felt all wrong in my body, with its thin arms and long neck, as wrong as I did in this town with its bumpy roads and the smell of mould that escaped from cellar windows in summer. At night, I lay in bed with the window open, hugging a pillow tight against my breast, yearning for freedom and light.

A few days before my nineteenth birthday I met Robert. He was sitting on a bench in the town hall square, and I thought he looked lost somehow. His jacket was buttoned up wrong, and when I saw his small hands resting in his lap I felt a warmth in me that I’d never known before. When our eyes met, we didn’t smile. Right from the start we were connected in some strange way. We were so different, our thoughts and feelings running in opposite directions, yet we belonged together. We were two diverging branches on the trunk of the same tree.

We married before we even turned twenty. Robert’s proposal was clumsy. He dropped the ring and had to crawl after it, right under the kitchen bench. His shirt rode up out of his trousers until I could see his boyish white back. I think we both laughed. Then I took the ring and said yes. It was a wonderful party. I danced all night and drank wine and enjoyed myself. Through my veil the wedding guests’ faces looked soft and beautiful, and for the first time in my life I felt like a woman.

Back then, the town was slowly starting to wake up. Hot tar steamed on every corner, whole rows of houses were being renovated, and Marktstrasse acquired wide pavements equipped with streetlamps. On the evening of my twenty-­first birthday I was standing under one of those streetlamps with Robert, talking to him urgently. Excited by my own determination and by the wine we’d been drinking, I stopped and seized his hands as we were walking home. ‘I want to make something of our life,’ I said. ‘I want to do something, to work and grow. I want to open a business. With you.’

I could see him trying to look composed, but I also saw that the veins at his temple were bulging like roots, and pulsating as if they might burst at any minute. ‘What sort of business do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I mean a shop, for shoes. An upmarket shoe shop. We don’t have anything like that yet in Paulstadt; people go off God knows where to buy shoes. I have a little money. Our parents can help. We’ll pool our savings. The coal merchant’s on the ground floor has been empty for years. Just think: the two of us, you and me, in our own little shoe shop! You’ll see – all we need is a little courage. Would you like that, Robert? Would you like to be courageous with me?’