1/6

The train stopped between two fields. First they announced the stop would last ten minutes. Then they said there was no information yet. Then the conductor’s playful voice apologized for the inconvenience, and from her intonation Tim understood they weren’t going any further. They were unloaded onto a platform without a building; the name on the sign meant nothing to him. A conductor ran along the platform repeating the same phrase about buses to Dortmund arriving in an hour. An elderly man in a vest full of pockets leaned his bicycle against a post and explained to everyone in detail that it was the switch, that the switch had been replaced in spring, that a contractor had done the work, and that the contractor was surely from Thuringia. A woman with a child asked how long. The man said if it’s a switch, it’ll be a while. Though how would he know, he doesn’t work for Deutsche Bahn. Then again, Deutsche Bahn employees mostly don’t know either.

Tim walked to the end of the platform where the signal was slightly better and called Alyona.

— We’re stuck in some village, — he said. — I can’t pronounce the name.

— Where even are you?

— I don’t know. There’s a pharmacy and a hair salon. In the window a photo of a women’s haircut from ninety-three.

— It’s like that everywhere here. Welcome to our arse-end of nowhere.

— And I bet there’s some contemporary art museum here, or a Kunsthalle, built by one of those top-tier world-class starchitects.

Alyona laughed.

— A hundred percent. We’ve got one of those in Siegen too, actually.

He sat down on the curb and plugged his phone in. There was a sticker on the power bank with the logo of some random bar. Every time he saw it, he meant to peel it off.

2/6

In Dortmund he transferred to a red regional train that drifted eastward without hurrying, stopping wherever there was anything at all. Across from him sat a guy in dirty work clothes talking into his earbuds in Arabic the whole way. Sometimes hills came into view outside the window, wooded, black, a gas station, and hills again.

Alyona had said that from the station he needed to go down, then up the stairs. Wide stone steps descended along the water, and at ten in the evening two teenagers sat on them speaking Russian, holding cans of energy drinks. Up above, a lit golden crown glowed on a church tower.

For a couple of minutes he stood on the bridge and studied two cast-iron figures of some men in aprons.

3/6

The stairwell smelled of something spicy. Alyona opened the door and hugged him before he had time to take off his backpack, so they hugged sideways. She was in wool socks and a huge T-shirt belonging to her German husband.

— You’re freezing.

— I’ve been outside for six hours.

Fabian, Alyona’s husband, came out of the kitchen with a towel over his shoulder.

— Schön, dass du da bist, — he said, smiling stiffly.

In the living room a single lamp burned under a shade, and everything from it was yellow. The wallpaper was botanical — ferns, thin stems, a repeating pattern.

— Did you pick this?

— I did. Fabian wanted gray.

— Gray would’ve eaten all the light in here.

— That’s what I told him.

The couch where he was to sleep was low, green, sunken on the left. In the corner of the window a wasp scrabbled, driven there by the cold of the autumn evening. On the windowsill stood six pots, and in each a plastic tag with a name written by hand.

Fabian called from the kitchen that everything was ready. He’d baked a vegan goulash with potatoes and carrots especially for his beloved wife’s friend from Novosibirsk. Alyona had moved in 2019 on a spouse visa and didn’t know the horrors his generation of immigrants had gone through — the sky-high ticket prices, the blocked cards, all that nonsense. Not many people came to visit her in Siegen from her past life, that life full of drunken parties, songs with a guitar, dead homeless men found by chance at night on the outskirts of town.

— What can I tell you about Siegen? We have a river they covered up with a concrete slab in the sixties and made a parking lot on top.

— Almost like Russia — only there they would’ve built a shopping mall, — Tim laughed.

The balcony was a meter by a meter and a half. There were two plastic chairs on it and a plant stand, and on the stand a jar that used to hold olives, full of cigarette butts. Tim lit up and realized he’d been waiting for this cigarette since noon.

4/6

• •

Alyona, seven years into a happy marriage and missing her wild young life, was very curious how her bachelor friends were living, and besides, she hadn’t gossiped with anyone in Russian in a thousand years. Giggling, she suggested Tim had an active sex life in Berlin, at which he merely smirked and told her how recently he’d had the good fortune to meet a guy who, to his surprise, turned out to have a brain, and how it had happened not just anywhere but in a library, where Tim often came to work. Technically they’d met on Grindr, but what mattered was where they’d been at the time.

In libraries, the faces of everyone sitting with a laptop look the same, whether you’re job-hunting, watching porn, writing code, or reading a PDF downloaded on the free JSTOR tier. Almost the first thing Arman said was that he’d done philosophy, as if he knew this would make an impression on Tim. Tim hadn’t felt anything like what he felt with Arman for several years, so he didn’t fully understand what was happening to him.

• •

He was Armenian, so said both he himself and the three-striped flag he had in place of a Grindr username. He also said he’d written his master’s thesis on this — on his identity, torn away from physical space and community. His family had left Artsakh in the nineties, first for Poland, then for a small town in Hesse — he told this in one quick stream that Tim, with his dusty German, couldn’t quite catch. Here and there he’d catch individual words, sometimes whole sentences. Arman didn’t speak Russian.

— Could you speak a bit more slowly?

— I’m not going to talk to anyone like they’re an idiot.

• •

A black curly mane on his head, a medium, almost sculptural beard, the build of shoulders where you can see the person doesn’t do any sports, and a black patch of hair peeking out from an unbuttoned blue shirt. Tim sat across from him and, for the first time in a very long while, arrived at the thought that something might now be starting that hadn’t started in years. The last time he’d felt anything like this was many years ago, in another life, when he lived in Petersburg and went on dates. Going on a date in Petersburg means always being ready both to be mocked and to mock.

• •

Tim couldn’t keep up and they switched to English. That’s when Tim began to pick up the sarcasm — it turned out there was a lot of sarcasm in what Arman was saying. In fact, everything he said was made of sarcasm. It turned out they’d both been reading Ocean Vuong at the same time. Or maybe that was mockery too.

• •

The Russians have shat all over Yerevan. Arrogant and rich, they arrive expecting to be spoken to in their own language, expecting Armenians to behave toward them like servants, and they sincerely don’t understand why this pisses anyone off. He said he’d been in some idiotic bar with an idiotic name, PYU, and hadn’t even understood at first what the name meant. The bar had been opened by the son of a Moscow oligarch, the owner of GUM — a big, luxurious store on Red Square. In Moscow, he and his friends had thrown fashionable parties in the carefree tens. Tim said he had no idea what he was talking about, that this was exactly why he hadn’t gone to any post-Soviet country — he didn’t want to feel remorse on behalf of all his compatriots at once.

• •

He gets taken for an Arab, for a Muslim, for a Turk, he gets exoticized, and Tim didn’t remember how their conversation had once again slid toward autism. Lately every conversation eventually comes around to either autism or ADHD. Arman, without changing his sarcastic tone, said neurodivergence had been invented by white people so they too could feel part of an oppressed community. Tim nodded, though he didn’t agree.

• •

It seemed to Tim it was perfectly clear Arman was bored with him, that he was looking for excuses to end the date and go home — and then Arman turned his laptop around and showed him a documentary that had been made about his large family. About the traditions of Armenian migrants. And in it they slaughter a ram. Whole, without any mercy, in close-up. Do you like watching animals being killed?

• •

He brought up Grindr himself, I didn’t ask. He explained that he writes "bottom" in his profile so other hungry bottoms don’t hit him up, but that he chooses his role in the moment, depending on whether he feels desire when he sees the person or not, and that anyone can be a bottom with anyone, it doesn’t require anything. And he laid this out as a system. The way people explain the settings on a washing machine and are a little proud they’ve figured it out.

• •

He left the library with the full sensation of intellectual rape, however ambiguous that might sound.

• •

But despite the fact that dozens of similar dates had ended in nothing for him, he wrote to him that evening saying he’d really enjoyed it, that he’d like to see him again — not because he didn’t believe in the universal inflation of love, not because, like any Russian, he was subconsciously seeking humiliation. Arman replied right away that he’d enjoyed it too. They rode the S-Bahn together. Arman said he’d signed up for Urban Sports Club for the first time and had a free trial slot at a gym somewhere on the outskirts of Lichtenberg.

• •

They met the next day at the same library. He said he had to buy vegetables before evening and was making a shopping list. And Tim said: I bet there’s beetroot on it. Arman straightened up and asked: how did you know I love eating beetroot?

• •

In moments like this you falsely think you were made for each other. When most of the time we just need sex.

• •

He suffered exactly one evening. To distract himself he took the bike and rode out to Tempelhof. Standing at a traffic light, he deleted every message he’d exchanged with Arman, but the contact stayed in his phone book, and that was a mistake. A week later he saw him on a tram at Alexanderplatz, couldn’t resist, and wrote on WhatsApp that he’d seen the back of his curly head. He replied with a single line: where was that. Not "sorry I didn’t come over," not anything else. Where was that.

• •

A week later he wrote first. Wrote that he’d seen Tim near Ostkreuz. Tim replied that he hadn’t been at Ostkreuz that week.

— Must have been some other Slav.

• •

Three months later his profile came up on Grindr again. I recognized him not by the photo — he hides his face — but by the Armenian flag. So characteristic, that the limits of his anonymity don’t extend as far as his ethnicity. He was on the hunt for a huge ass, hashtag dominant, hashtag deepthroat.

5/6

— I want a divorce, — Alyona said.

6/6

The duvet was heavy and too warm, like the polyester one he’d bought on sale at Jysk; he stuck one leg out and it was immediately met by the cold breath of autumn.

From the bedroom he could hear Fabian saying something quietly, Alyona answering quietly, and then they fell silent.

The lamp in the hallway had been left on so he could find the toilet. A yellow strip of light squeezed through the crack in the doorframe, enough to make out the outline of the ferns on the guest-room wallpaper. Tim turned toward the back of the couch and fell asleep almost at once — something that hadn’t happened to him in Berlin for a whole year.