Paul wasn’t bad, either. When he was drunk, he used to say he’d drained the marshes and in doing so had saved the town. I gave him a photo. It showed me as a child, in black and white, with plaits and a serious expression.

My first was seventeen, two years older than me. Everything about him smelled of ink. He wrote poems that didn’t rhyme and made no sense, either. They were word sculptures, he said. He ended up working at the town hall. He was in charge of the heating system, and sometimes sat in the porter’s lodge.

Lennie, Hagen, Wilfried, Werner I, Werner II, Helmut, Tom, Rudolph, Christian I, Christian II, Christian III, the gardener, the doctor, the short guy, the guy with the briefcase, the pudgy guy, the man that no one saw. It was astonishing: one would only just have left and the next would already be there. Yet I didn’t have much to offer. I wasn’t even that pretty. Basically, though, men don’t care what a woman looks like. They want to feel good about themselves, that’s all.

One of them saved me. I’ve forgotten his name. No matter what I do, his name simply will not come to mind. He saved me because he left.

Jonathan was religious. In the beginning he talked about God incessantly; then I told him my views on the matter and he stopped bothering me with it. Secretly, I envied him. He would go to church, and when he came back it was as if his face was still bathed in the light from the stained-­glass windows. When the priest burned it all down, Jonathan lay in my bed and didn’t move for three days. Then he got up, and our relationship was over.

Oswald had long, strong arms, but he didn’t know how to use them. They hung at his sides as if they were sewn onto his shoulders. But arms are important. They don’t necessarily have to be strong, but they must be able to hold you. You can lie in a man’s arms and still feel completely alone. He holds you tight, and he feels great, because inside he’s all toasty and warm. But none of this warmth reaches the outside, and everything about you contracts and curls up tighter and tighter, until you’ve shrunk to a cold, hard marble stuck in the crook of his arm. And then someone comes and puts his arm around you, and his touch is like a memory. It’s as warm as a summer’s day in the fields. Most men’s arms mean nothing to you. Some you would like to live in.

There was one who smelled of burnt wood. And one who twisted his knee proposing to me. And one who was always whistling ‘La Paloma’. And a fat one who could hardly get up the stairs and would still be panting long after he’d lain down on the carpet. And Edward. And Hannes. And four Martins. And Heiner. And Heiner’s father. And Gerhard. And Burkhart. And Fritz. And the man with the three-­legged dog. They hated each other. I think the man had cut off the dog’s leg when it was still a puppy. Later, the dog mauled his forearm to shreds. Apparently they lie side by side in the same grave. There were quite a lot of weirdos in my life; I must have attracted them somehow. My mother used to say: there are a few misshapen turnips in every field, but they all taste the same.