Finding the Dead Man in the Garden is Joachim’s first encounter with death, remembered as both a startling childhood discovery and the beginning of a lifelong entanglement between memory and invention. The seven-year-old does not flee from the body or immediately seek help: he studies it, carries the news to school with exultation, and then enlarges the story for eager listeners. Much later, a detail he has made up—a ring—returns to him as an actual memory, turning the episode into a revelation about how telling can recover what recollection has lost.

The Find on the Way to School

A week after turning seven, Joachim had finally been allowed to walk to school alone. The new freedom changed the route into a field of discoveries: without his mother or brothers beside him, he could stop and go as he pleased. His birthday watch, which he had not asked for, was the condition of that independence. But the allotment gardens proved larger and more confusing than he expected. He tried to find his way by keeping right at each fork, while the school bell and the time on his watch made the wandering increasingly urgent.

After biting into an unripe apple and spitting it through a fence, Joachim continued through the gardens until he recognized a gate. It was locked, though he could see his familiar school route beyond it. He climbed the close-set ironwork by pressing his shoes flat against it when his toes kept slipping. Just as he was about to swing his second leg over and jump down, he saw a man lying in a flower bed below. Joachim immediately understood that the man was dead.

The body lay partly on the grass and partly among the flowers, face down, with grey hair in disarray and stems broken or torn around his upper body. The man was dressed entirely in beige, in a neat shirt and light trousers; one light-brown shoe had slipped off, leaving a sock visible. Joachim noticed a woven summer belt like one his father sometimes wore. The flowers were vivid, though he did not know what kind they were. These ordinary particulars give the discovery its peculiar clarity: the dead man is not an abstract figure, but a clothed stranger embedded in a garden that remains vividly alive around him.

Joachim later wonders why he felt no fear, why he did not consider calling for help, and why the body seemed meant for him, almost his possession. At the gate he remained suspended between the garden and the street, between the dead man and the living world of cars, passersby, and a school day already underway. The thought of having found a dead person grew into an announcement he repeated to himself, with mounting excitement. He then jumped down on the street side and ran to school.

The Announcement and Its Reception

Joachim burst into his classroom and proclaimed his discovery loudly enough to startle the teacher and the other pupils. Their lack of immediate understanding seemed to him like a failure to grasp the magnitude of the news, so he repeated it, spelling out that a man lay dead among the flowers and that he had found him. His excitement was not the reaction the teacher expected; she rebuked him for barging in and told him to sit down. To Joachim, however, the classroom itself seemed altered by the discovery. The desk felt low and small, while he felt he had made a decisive leap forward by becoming the possessor of such an extraordinary experience.

The school director, Waldmann, asked whether Joachim had really seen the dead man. Joachim insisted that he had. At 8:01, he said, he had found him. Waldmann reported the discovery by telephone and then sent the boy back to class, telling him that the police would find the place if the body was there. Joachim had hoped to accompany the police and show them where the man lay, but the school bell rang and the bustle of the pupils carried him back into the ordinary school day.

His classmates gathered around him with questions. At first, he told the story accurately, including that he had not seen the man’s face. Repeated questions about what he might have seen gradually drew him into adding details. The children’s curiosity invited him to imagine the body more fully, and he did not want to disappoint them. As the day went on, his account acquired opened eyes, a pale tongue, and finally the prospect of a shiny black beetle crawling into the dead man’s mouth. These additions were inventions, not observations from the garden. The changing story shows how quickly the listeners’ desire for a more vivid corpse began to shape what Joachim told them.

A Story That Acquires a Life of Its Own

For weeks, Joachim retold the discovery at school, at the swimming club, to his brothers, relatives, and his parents’ friends. He learned to adapt the account to his audience. His brothers and classmates wanted to be frightened, so he used the word for decomposition and described the dead man’s eyes staring at the sky. Adult men could be impressed by the boy’s supposed decisiveness: he claimed to have memorized the time, place, and position of the body before reporting it to the director. For female listeners, he grew more unabashedly dramatic, imagining wind carrying rose petals across the rigid body and catching some in the man’s grey hair.

Joachim knew that he was lying. Yet he felt that the story had begun to live independently and that he had become responsible for making himself worthy of it. Finding a dead man was so exceptional that he wanted the event to remain with him; he adorned it with flourishes rather than let it slip away. The embellishments are therefore not simply a later confusion about what happened. In Joachim’s account, he recognizes them as deliberate inventions, made under the pressure of an experience he wants to keep and of an audience that wants more than the first, spare facts.

The Ring and the Return of Memory

The decisive turn came when Joachim told the story to a friend of his eldest brother. As he embellished the familiar sequence, he added a ring: he said the man had worn a valuable one and that he had briefly considered climbing down to take it, before the school bell sent him running away. While speaking, Joachim felt a hot shiver and suddenly saw the ring clearly. It was not an invention after all. The dead man had worn a gold wedding ring on his lifeless left hand.

Joachim immediately insisted that the ring was true, though his brother and the friend did not understand what he meant. The invented detail had brought back something he had actually seen but could no longer retrieve through straightforward recollection. In his later understanding, the lie worked like an archaeological instrument, dislodging a buried particular from the depths of memory. His conclusion, that inventing means remembering, gives the episode its lasting significance: the story does not merely embellish the event but unexpectedly opens a way back into it.

Significance

The discovery begins with an unusually composed child’s attention to a body: the slipped shoe, the beige clothes, the crushed stems, the flower bed. It then shifts from observation to performance, as Joachim’s classmates’ questions encourage him to turn a real death into an increasingly graphic tale. Finally, the ring reverses the apparent direction of that process. Invention, first recognized as a departure from fact, restores a fact that had disappeared from conscious memory.

The episode also stands at the beginning of the book’s wider reckoning with mortality. Joachim identifies the retired man as the first dead person he found, before later losses in his family made death an intimate and recurring presence. The garden encounter matters not because the child understands death fully, but because he discovers that an experience can exceed what he can initially remember—and that telling it, even inaccurately, may bring part of it back.