Literature and nursing: As long as it works, it still works

Jupiter is not doing well. He has been diagnosed with a progressive nerve disease and his body is increasingly failing. This means he can hardly go out the door anymore, and it also happens that he falls over and can’t get up. He is thinking about moving into a nursing home.

Juno is strictly against it. They are married, about the same age. As long as it still works, it still works, she tells herself, brushing aside any further thoughts about it. But only the thoughts – the feelings about them remain. And because it is Juno who has these feelings, they are strangely twisted and idiosyncratic without being wrong or even harmful.

Juno is surrounded by a tender loneliness, which she herself does not admit to lamenting; She has always been a part of her life, even during her childhood she was the strange outsider who had no friends, sewed her own clothes and started cutting her own hair at the age of ten. She doesn’t suffer from this peculiarity of hers, but she does feel a little emptiness. She can only truly come to herself on stage: she is a performance artist. Only in dance is she completely gone and completely there.

This need to grow beyond herself and to thrive in a role probably leads her to respond at night to the lovescammers who write to her via Instagram. For Juno, it’s just a game that passes the time for her, who can no longer sleep. She tells the scammers made-up stories about herself: that she owns three falcons, smokes banknotes, and has three dogs in Romania. Most scammers quickly notice what is being played and block them. But one person picks up the thread: Benu, who lives in a medium-sized city in Nigeria and smokes a lot of weed. What exactly drives him to get involved with Juno remains unclear: perhaps his own boredom, perhaps a genuine fascination, or, as Juno repeatedly suspects, that he may be looking for a long-term way to get money out of her.

Juno is also interesting because she is not a pure soul: the early death of two former schoolmates who once tormented her still fills her with a certain satisfaction today. During the exchange with Benu, she keeps thinking about perhaps turning the material into a play; knowing full well that she would exploit Benu. And then there is the betrayal of her husband: Juno doesn’t tell her Jupiter about Benu; it’s a kind of affair without sexual drive.

Benu is all hers. Through him, Juno not only opens up an entire world, but also the sky above. Juno is very interested in constellations and always looks at the night sky online, which Benu could look at if he were to look at the sky outside the door. Celestial bodies are her big hobby anyway, and they also play the main role in her favorite film: “Melancholia” by Lars von Trier is about the days before the collision of the vagabond planet of the same name with the Earth. “She lived on this planet,” it is said about Juno. “Not on the one that was hit, but on the other one.”

Beyond any personal – psychological or biographical – reasons for Juno’s lonely sadness, there is also a social aspect here. This is not spelled out in the novel itself, but it resonates in many scenes: she shares this loneliness with many of the approximately seven million caring relatives in Germany. It’s not Jupiter’s illness that banishes them to this other planet, but rather the looks the others give them on the tram; the letters that she absolutely has to post and sometimes forgets; the fear of traveling because Jupiter might fall; the broken, bureaucratic callousness of the health authorities.

When she buys him the speculoos that he loves so much in September, a young, hip woman comments disparagingly over her head about how one can only buy Christmas stuff in the summer: Then Juno collapses in the aisle of the supermarket and cries. Too much is too much: The unreasonable demands are not a planetary impact, but a rain of comets.

What holds Juno together, what holds her life (which she sees as neither good nor bad) together, is Jupiter. He is not the core of the story, he is more of a protective cloak. Once Juno says to her work colleagues: “Did you know that Jupiter uses its gravitational force to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts?” No wonder, she doesn’t want him in a home; No wonder she finds it difficult to think of any future. No wonder she hardly sleeps anymore.

Surprisingly little happens in this novel. There is a lot of tension, but none of it is resolved. Benu just disappears in the end, Jupiter has a boost from which he will recover a bit. Everything remains in limbo. The fact that this story still works is because Martina Hefter has worked through every single sentence of this novel to ensure its tempo and content. The stubborn dance quality that characterizes Juno is also reflected in her style.

Juno once wrote to Benu: “I live in a country where you can stare at the stucco ceiling for weeks and no one notices.” Here too, Hefter’s great talent for showing the big in the small is evident; That’s actually what this society is like for all those who need help.

Martina Hefter: Hey good morning, how are you? Velcro cotta, 224 p., br., 22 €.