Granta 165, page 10
They didn’t hit any traffic during the short journey along the A66. The Tesla’s grey-and-white interior smelled the way new cars always used to. Tanja connected her phone to the stereo via Bluetooth, and played her Spotify playlist of the week, which, as so often, Jerome liked more than he thought he would. ‘Good song,’ he said of one melancholy number. ‘That’s Bladee.’ Tanja checked. ‘Yes. The track’s called “Numb/Beverly Hills”.’
In the passenger seat, Tanja was now reading the Wikipedia entry on Bladee and looking at pictures of him. ‘Swedish, born 1994. Most of the photos of him are well staged, and a few really aren’t. Seems like a nice guy.’ Jerome had mentioned to Tanja before that music by younger artists generally did more for him than stuff by people who were his own age or older. ‘I’m glad it’s staying light so much later again now,’ said Tanja. Jerome knew that she didn’t say this kind of thing just to fill a gap in conversation, but because she was genuinely relieved. Her readiness to share the most ordinary thoughts was something that Jerome really liked about her.
Strangers sometimes assumed that she was under some kind of psychological strain, probably because she didn’t smile very much. But Jerome knew that Tanja was usually able to find something to be happy about. He couldn’t believe there were many people with a more positive outlook than Tanja. Her younger sister Sarah, by contrast, who was studying screenwriting in Potsdam, suffered from depression. Tanja had once told him that people born in 1988 were particularly susceptible to mental illnesses; apparently no cohort from any other year in the eighties and nineties was prescribed antidepressants more frequently. But in the Arnheim family it was Tanja, born in 1988, who was usually fine, while Sarah, born in 1992, would be at acute risk of suicide if she stopped taking her medication. Tanja once described this as a statistical curiosity, and at first Jerome didn’t know what to say. Later, he said: ‘You can’t help the fact that Sarah is sad.’
A lot of the buildings in Maintal looked like they had been designed by primary-school children: symmetrical triangles sitting on top of rendered facades, with married couples inside bringing up children. Most of the little town’s houses, even those with weathered, brownish roof tiles, must have been built in the last four to six decades – this was a new world. All the same, nothing about it felt new and Jerome found this oppressive and charming at the same time. Maintal was not about emergence or regeneration; it seemed mostly to be about being left in peace, and this was a desire Jerome could understand, even if it wasn’t right at the top of his list.
He parked the hire car in the driveway of his parents’ house, a bungalow with a basement floor built in 1978, an unusual style in Maintal. The anthracite-coloured walls and the flat roof stood out from the crowd. From the age of twenty-nine, Jerome had begun to feel a kind of kinship with this building on the edge of the Hartig nature reserve. It suited him now. The fact that he still thought of it as his parents’ house he attributed above all to his essential modesty, though shame certainly also played a part in it. In purely formal terms, the bungalow was now his, though he had neither designed nor paid for it. Jerome’s father had moved back to Frankfurt, to a small flat with a view of the Iron Bridge, and his mother, who had been born and grew up in Cambridge, had spent the past three years living in Lisbon, where Jerome had been to visit her five times. Originally, both parents had planned to sell the bungalow they had bought together, and which they now regarded as a sort of midlife misunderstanding. When Jerome’s father asked him if he might like to move into it himself, it had been a kind of rhetorical question, but on Christmas Day 2016, Jerome had suddenly said: ‘Actually, why not?’
Tanja and Jerome liked to talk about the night they first met. Both thought it rather unusual to begin a relationship with a one-night stand, which is what the drunken episode at Flemings Hotel on Eschenheimer Tor had felt like at first. The first screening of the online series of NovoPanopticon, filmed on a Samsung Galaxy S7, had taken place in Frankfurt, in Bar AMP, opposite the big Euro symbol on Willy-Brandt-Platz. There were more men than women in the audience, and in late-summer 2017 a few of those men were still sporting meticulously groomed full beards and wearing dark clothes. Jerome, who had never had a beard, was sitting in the back row, and took an immediate liking to Tanja, though he didn’t raise his hand during the Q&A. It was only after the screening, when Tanja was standing by the DJ booth drinking a mineral water with the evening’s moderator – a lecturer at HfG Offenbach whom Jerome knew through friends – that he went and spoke to her. He said he’d liked the presentation of the four-part miniseries, without being too effusive.
The two of them had stayed in AMP until the bar closed, and then went on to Terminus Klause, where they started kissing, and after two large glasses of Apfelwein with sparkling water, they decided not to avoid this awkward first night, but to see it through with a degree of coolness. They hailed a taxi and went to Tanja’s hotel. The sex in the incredibly stuffy room was not particularly good, but there was a sense that it might become good eventually; it had promise, Jerome thought, and so ultimately it was good sex.
Tanja washed her hair the following morning after just four hours’ sleep, in a glass shower cubicle that (true to the Flemings’ quirky style) was situated in the middle of the room and printed with a translucent Flemings logo. Jerome stayed sitting respectfully on the edge of the bed with his back to her the whole time, looking at his phone. That evening she texted him from Munich: Seems like there’s no one in the whole of Bavaria to get wasted with. And Jerome wrote that dinner with his father had been surprisingly harmonious. His lack of sleep had ensured that he was more patient than usual. Jerome didn’t have to think too hard about what he was writing to Tanja; it felt normal to send her several messages one after another, and yet it was still exciting, which made him suspect that this was the start of something new.
The last time Tanja visited Maintal, they had slept together the minute they got back to the house. As darkness fell, they’d driven to Tegut, and then fried some soy steaks. Secretly, Tanja might have been assuming that this sequence of events would be repeated and become a kind of tradition, but this time Jerome had already done the shopping. ‘Espresso or something alcoholic?’ he asked, and then they had an espresso followed by several glasses of the second-cheapest sparkling wine on offer in Tegut. They sat arm in arm on Jerome’s anthracite-coloured sofa in south Hesse.
At no point did Jerome feel that this image was very ‘them’, and nor did he feel like he was sitting on his own sofa in his own house, but he still felt good. ‘It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,’ Tanja said, looking at her phone. She sounded surprised. Jerome, too, had automatically assumed that they were expecting an unusually warm and sunny Good Friday. Generally speaking, the weather was bombastically fine when he spent time with Tanja. She asked if they could do a bit of work on her website at some point during the day. The second time they met – a date that began outside the Wurst-Basar concession in Hamburg’s main station and continued in a pub at the station’s southern entrance, where they both subsequently missed their last train home – they had agreed that Jerome would build her a website (tanja-arnheim.space) and that from now on they would officially be a couple. Tanja’s home page, designed and built by Jerome Daimler, had inevitably become a symbol of commitment. ‘Maybe instead of working on the page tomorrow, we could go to the Schirn gallery and then to the cinema,’ Jerome suggested. Tanja agreed at once. ‘Yes, that’s a better idea.’ Jerome knew that she was secretly scared of her website. Which colours, shapes and flourishes could express who she was in spring 2018 – these basic questions made her feel quite stressed. Jerome had therefore long since decided to build the website on his own and present Tanja with the finished design on 30 April, the day of her thirtieth birthday. A labour of love, as in ages past, he thought: a first home page of her own. Jerome was working flat out on it.
‘Are any of the characters from NovoPanopticon going to feature in your new book? Have you posed a question for it to answer? Is there something like a central theme?’ When the first bottle of cava was empty, Jerome felt a little like he was interviewing his girlfriend and he suspected that she liked it: his interest was genuine, he was asking both as a partner and a fan. As he went into the kitchen and took some clean glasses out of the cupboard, which he filled with ice cubes, cranberry juice and Skyy vodka, he could hear Tanja saying: ‘I don’t think you should ever define your theme too precisely.’ And after a little pause: ‘The characters are similar, but they’re still new. They seem more religious to me.’
In NovoPanopticon the all-male characters were emotionally unstable, their behaviour was occasionally obsessive and there were few hints about their parents. The change of focus from psychology to religion seemed like a sensible move to Jerome. It struck him as somehow freer. Because while people often seemed entirely at the mercy of their own psyche, religiousness was something you might be able to design. Jerome had chosen not to participate in confirmation classes at the age of thirteen, but to this day he still paid his Church taxes. On Christmas Eve 2017, when his mother came to visit him in Maintal, the two of them had gone to the Christmas service. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to attend, simply because it was something Jerome and his mother had never done before at Christmas. When they walked into the church, the only seats left were up on the balcony, on the left-hand side. From there they could look out over the packed nave. Jerome sent Tanja a short video, and Tanja, who was at her parents’ in Kiel, replied immediately: ‘Pretty church.’ Jerome was surprised by how relaxed the congregation seemed at this service – the reason being that, until then, he had only ever set foot in a church for funerals. Five of them in total: his two grandmothers, Greta and Mary; the father of his friend Mark from primary school; Judith, a fellow student in Düsseldorf; and his godfather, Falk. After attending three of these five funerals, Jerome had decided to leave the Church: the Christian ritual hadn’t comforted him, but made him feel alienated every time. Ultimately, it must have been his father’s comment that the Church also did a lot for society more generally that stopped him from actually leaving.
And now, with a cranberry-coloured glass in his hand, Jerome said: ‘During the service, a young girl did a flute solo, and she played one wrong note after another. It was laughable, really. But instead of laughing, the entire congregation was embarrassed for her. Everyone was sympathetic. I think that was when I understood the Protestant religion: listening attentively to a mediocre piece of flute music, hoping no one messes up, and then being sympathetic when the schoolgirl hasn’t practised enough, because you suspect the failure will stay with her a long time. That’s Protestantism.’
Tanja grinned. ‘You’ve been taking aim at your own background a lot recently.’ She was just making a statement, but all the same Jerome felt attacked.
‘Yes, sorry . . . you’re right. I talk about it too much.’
‘Jerome, baby.’ Tanja reached for the loose sleeve of his shirt. ‘I didn’t mean it as a criticism. It’s cute when you tell me things more than once.’
When Jerome closed his eyes to kiss Tanja, he felt dizzy. ‘Are you feeling dizzy too?’ he asked.
‘Totally,’ Tanja laughed.
‘What about nauseous?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
After that they had rather solemn sex on the sofa, spurred on by the conviction that they were now doing something unquestionably good for their bodies and souls. At one moment Jerome even believed that their act was helping to improve the energy of the whole planet. He moved with unusual awkwardness, and Tanja pushed herself against him in a rhythm that seemed new. Once he had come and then, shortly afterwards, she had, his thoughts about energy made him laugh. Jerome’s first impulse was to tell Tanja about his energy theory straight away, but then he thought that you didn’t have to talk everything to death immediately. He would simply continue to observe their sex and planet Earth. Tanja kissed his left temple, then she laughed, too. They got up from the sofa together and, seven paces away, lay down feeling slightly dazed on Jerome’s 140 cm wide mattress. They slept back to back.
2
The week after Easter was warm and sunny. It was Tuesday evening when Tanja got back to her two-room apartment, from the balcony of which she could look out at the Hasenheide park. If she’d had the same depressive tendencies as her sister Sarah, Tanja might have found the mood on the street oppressive. In big cities, the first warm days of the year had such potential for social anxiety; in Berlin, it was all about having a good time in the most performative way possible. Tanja thought that, even when they’d been in the city for years, a lot of people who’d moved here found it hard to accept that, despite the warmth of the sun, they would rather be working in the shade than sitting outside a corner shop drinking Sekt, which seemed to be the new thing. Tanja, too, had taken a while to recognise that in the long term, it wasn’t enough for her to hang around outside and be liked. What she really wanted was to produce work that even the harshest audience would enjoy. The fact that this work was writing wasn’t so important; it might just as well have been fashion or video art, Tanja sometimes thought. But in truth, all she had ever done was write, it came easily to her, and it went better when she was doing it regularly.
In retrospect, Tanja thought it was good that she and Jerome had argued late on Good Friday about Call Me by Your Name. The argument showed that they were both still developing their own thoughts and perspectives and didn’t depend on each other for their opinions. They had sat in a couple’s seat, the ones without a central armrest, at the Metropolis cinema on Eschenheimer Tor, sometimes arm in arm, and yet they had seen very different things in Call Me by Your Name. Jerome had let himself get caught up in the obvious beauty of the on-screen world – like most of the other people who had told Tanja about the film, which told the story of a homoerotic summer romance between a teenager and a doctoral student in 1980s Italy. But Tanja felt repelled by it. She found Call Me by Your Name horribly vain. The chemistry between the two main characters hadn’t left her completely cold, but the film’s implicit message seemed to be that you could only build happiness, tolerance and humanity on a foundation of wealth and elite education – and that bothered her. On the way back in the Tesla, Jerome said that perhaps it was all just too painfully close to home for her, as the pretty daughter of well-to-do academic parents, and that she at least had to acknowledge the film’s stylistic perfection, and Tanja raised her voice. Please could Jerome just accept that the film hadn’t really done anything for her. And when Jerome started to respond, Tanja said: ‘Shut up now, Jerome.’ They didn’t speak again the rest of the way home.
Tanja could be sharp-tongued on occasion. Her mother and sister knew that best of all. But apart from her ex-boyfriend Max, very few people outside her family would have imagined she had a choleric side. Tanja Arnheim was sometimes regarded as other-worldly, lethargic or arrogant, but never aggressive.
Not bearing grudges was an important part of Jerome’s self-image and so they made up quickly. As Jerome was unlocking the door to the bungalow, Tanja broke the silence – ‘Jerome, I’m sorry’ – and he paused for a moment, looked her in the eye, and then submitted himself to a fierce hug.
On 5 April, it almost smelled like summer. After eight and a half hours’ sleep, Tanja was sitting in the Hasenheide drinking a sugar-free Red Bull, not far from the still-unfinished Hindu temple, which had been covered in scaffolding for months. The spire was the only part of the temple that had so far been painted in bright colours. Tanja liked the idea that her neighbourhood might one day contain buildings that stood for all the different religions. Everything she knew about Hinduism she had learned in the ninth grade of her selective school in Kiel: that from reincarnation to reincarnation you could rise and fall through the various castes and life forms, and that a lot of gods were represented as human–animal hybrids. It seemed like quite a nice religion. Maybe one day Hinduism would become an option, not necessarily for Tanja, who didn’t even like yoga, but possibly for someone she knew.
Amelie had texted to say that she was hungover and wanted to go for food at City Chicken on Sonnenallee, but Tanja had only just had breakfast at home. There was no question of just offering to go with her: Amelie, who was over 180 cm tall and not exactly skeletal, wouldn’t countenance eating in the presence of another person if that person wasn’t also eating. Over time, Tanja and Amelie had learned even to like each other’s more annoying qualities. There was always the possibility of friction between them, but it never escalated. Amelie frequently used the term therapied out when she was talking about herself: in the space of eight years, three different therapists had attested that she’d made progress. Tanja knew that Amelie was still under some psychological strain, but at least she now seemed to know what was causing the strain, and maybe that in itself was a big thing. Tanja and Amelie met up every two or three weeks at around one o’clock on a Sunday, drank negronis and then went to a daytime disco. When they went out, they talked a lot, and their attention was fully focused on each other, so other clubbers hardly ever approached them. A kind of protective space formed around them and in this space Tanja and Amelie often had a really good time.
