Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  But here’s what I was afraid of: sometimes, on a quiet night, I would see the only other swimmers moving towards the pool’s edge and I’d realise they were getting out. If they got out, I would be the only person in the water. I would feel my heart bounce into my throat and start swimming as fast as I could, grabbing the wall and heaving my tanned little legs on to the tile. It was not okay to be the only person in the pool.

  The year before, when I was seven, I stayed up late watching YTV, when they turned the channel over to the children’s horror shows, duplicated in terrifying paperback books at the Scholastic Book Fair. Tucked into the far end of the beige sofa, pyjamaed and clutching my orange blanket, I watched as suburban teenagers were drowned in their high-school swimming pool, pulled underwater by some unseen, wrathful ghost. The pool, I learned, had been built atop an ancient burial ground, and they had neglected to remove one of the bodies.

  At eight I could hardly remember the foam duck but the whole haunted pool thing was too much for me. So while I swam laps during swimming lessons and found myself really enjoying swimming and was even quite good at it, I kept an eye out for the telltale signs of being the last one left in the water. Never swim alone, the pool rules said, and I took them very, very seriously.

  —

  An early summer heatwave hangs over Berlin, and by the weekend we’re all desperate for relief. I’m at no loss for swimming partners in this heat. I haven’t seen Tom and Natasha together for months, but we’re all here now. It’s summer and we’re excited.

  We take the train east to Kaulsdorf and then loop our way down the suburban streets to find the sun-drenched stretch of grass that borders the Kaulsdorfer Seen. I trace my fingers atop my phone’s map, and see three small, blue shapes in a field of green. I see the blue dot telling me we’re standing right there, but I can’t actually see the lakes yet. I see only fields. Tom takes the lead and trudges forward into the grass and scrub, the brambles high as our shoulders. We’re cutting a line through blades of grass that I imagine hold tiny, patient ticks, waiting for blood. I see a swathe of nettles ahead and dig my heels into the ground.

  ‘We can’t go that way. I can’t go that way.’ I’m allergic to nettles, and I don’t like ticks, who apparently, I read, can live up to eighteen years awaiting a meal. This fact has refused to leave my brain, and my paranoid legs are beginning to sting in the grass. ‘We need to go around the field.’

  But Tom isn’t listening. He’s twenty feet ahead, parting the scrub with his fingers and taking us into a copse of trees. Sighing, I run forward, and Natasha follows me close behind until we’re hunched down, avoiding branches spread atop the dank ground. There are voices on the other side of the wood. The red and orange of someone’s T-shirt flash past, and I can see it now: a path running along the opposite end of the trees. I can hear the water now too, splashing and laughter streaming in from somewhere just out of sight. I step out in front and forge a path through the branches, emerging dazed and temporarily blinded on to a well-trodden field path. There’s a lake at its end.

  Glancing at my map again, I see that this is Butzersee, not the lake we’re headed for but part of the same nature reserve reclaimed after sand and gravel quarries left the area in the 1930s. Many of the lakes in Brandenburg were formed by glaciers, but a good number are the remains of sand pits, clay pits, gravel quarries and lignite mines. These anthropogenic lakes are among the clearest: sand-bottomed and silken. Clear to the bottom, even from a distance, the bright emerald lakes in Kaulsdorf are fed with ground water, and the nature reserve here serves to protect that. The local community gets its water here, and as we round the end of Butzersee and make for Habermannsee, where we plan to swim, the sense that this is a local lake becomes even more prevalent.

  A field of tall grass scattered with sorrel and buttercup stands between the lakes, and between the blades of grass stand half a dozen naked, sun-browned men, hands on hips, penises like cockles sewn beneath their bellies. We pass them by as we approach the white sand that edges Habermannsee, and as we arrive at the lake we find it equally well-populated by naked families, all speaking German, and clusters of teenagers huddling around stereos blasting techno. Litter overflows from bin bags lashed to trees around the site. I feel as if we have stumbled into a scene, scripted and staged, that shouldn’t include us. There are now so few places in Berlin where English-speakers don’t belong that I am momentarily surprised, but we press on, self-consciously, quietly.

  There’s a small island ahead, reached only by slipping off our shoes and walking knee-deep across the lake, and here we settle on a small beach. The beach is lined with fast-growing bamboo, and young birch trees stand in reminder that this isn’t an old place. The foliage is stark, sun-drenched and uncharacteristic for Brandenburg. I strip off and move out into the lake, tiny carp darting around its shallows, and I swim underwater to the lake’s middle. I want to swim to the bottom, as if I might find something of magic. I think of the German fairy tale of Rübezahl, who hid gemstones at the bottom of a clear fountain to capture his lover. I’ve never seen water this clear – I can just about see the lake floor – like some tropical sea had been dropped into the middle of suburban Germany. We stay a long while, until the sun dips low at the tree-tops, and I think at the time that it is the best day of summer.

  —

  ‘There are, for the lover of nature, days which are worth whole months.’ William Wordsworth wrote this in his guide to the Lake District, and though I’ve more often taken to reading his sister, Dorothy, I have had these days, and they have stretched and contracted in my memory of that time.

  My earliest days in Berlin were wet, with heaving downpours on hot afternoons, quick and unexpected. And they were bright – pink and alight with sunsets fiercer than I’d seen before. The late summer came with clarity, the air refined, the skies more vivid. Occasionally I think this is the fanciful work of memory, but I have photographs, and they are all affected with this quality.

  Of course, there has always been something in swimming – in water – of ritual. Water blessed and scattered on the forehead, water to cleanse, and water to convey the ashes in death – the medium on which we are carried and given to the world. So in beginning to swim in Weißer See every week, it seemed natural that Jacob and I under-took it as if it were sacrament. We never missed a swim, though there was no solemnity in it. For months, we swam with a joy found only in the weightlessness of water.

  We began on the frayed edge of summer, in that uneasy period in September when it is warmer in the water than the air, the sun still falling in golden swathes of light, the last gleam of an ember. The fountain – which for the past hundred years has remained a palmate jut of white water – wasn’t flowing, a sure sign that swimming season was meant to be over. The park attendants watched, unamused but unconcerned. The contrariness of our swimming was half the appeal, I think. Punk in reverse, a friend once called it.

  It was the first of those swims, and we were in the middle of the lake and swimming towards the fountain. The fountain wasn’t doing anything in particular, just floating on an anchored raft a hundred yards from shore. An island on the horizon to fix our gaze upon, the fountain gave us something to do. We breast-stroked towards it, half-racing and half-transfixed in conversation. Once we were upon it, we paused.

  All morning, our words had arrived freely and been thick with meaning. But when we pushed off from the fountain and made for shore, Jacob caught my eye for only an instant, and in that impetuous glint of blue light, there was no sound. For a moment, I was breathless. My words couldn’t meet it, so I submerged myself instead, breaking his gaze with the water that held us afloat. Lakes carry us into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.

  That instant and the concentric waves I left on the surface dissolved, written only in water. We never spoke of it. But in that moment, the centre of gravity in my life changed. Jacob broke through the surface of my steady solitude, settling into that uneasy, turbulent space between friend
ship and love. From then on I wanted nothing more than the time we spent together. And I remember each of our swims together with the clarity and elasticity that only belongs to those particular kinds of days, the days worth ages.

  —

  I’ve made a mistake, I think, in putting the best lakes at the beginning. I’ve been plucking my favourites from the Excel spreadsheet of lakes I’ve catalogued with notes on how to get to them, when I should go, and what each lake is like. The list has grown to eighty-six lakes, far more than I can manage. I’ve naturally settled on familiar lakes to begin with.

  It’s only just the end of June and we’re on our way to Liepnitzsee, and I worry the rest of summer, not to mention the coming winter, will be dire. My moods – momentarily alive and then bleak again – are growing tiresome, swaying unpredictably by the day. But I want to share this doughnut-shaped lake, left by glacial retreat, with my Canadian friends before they leave town. Berlin is a city of comings and goings, and you learn to make the most of the time you have. We’ve brought doughnuts, thinking we were being funny.

  Last December, I swam here through a thin fog as a light snow melted from the trees. Winter had barely touched the city, but the water breathed like dry ice into the atmosphere. My best friend Rachel, who had flown across the world to see me before Christmas, stood on the shore taking photos, supervising me with a quiet combination of worry and wonder. It was one of the best days I’d had in a long time. Now it’s summer, and the light is falling between the beech leaves and the forest is warm. I miss Rachel – struck by that feeling of wanting the only other person you’ve been somewhere with to be there always – but I know this group of friends will be moving on soon, and then I’ll likely be swimming alone.

  On a weekend Liepnitzsee is inundated, but it’s Thursday so we have it mostly to ourselves. I lead them to the small wooden dock midway across the lake, and as we arrive I see it is occupied by a sunbathing, corpulent and naked man, so we back-track and find the next opening in the trees. It’s shaded at the water’s edge, but ten feet out the sun cuts a line across the water, and the lake shines turquoise and clear. We swim a while, everyone marvelling at the lake’s clarity and the extraordinary contrast with the slate-coloured water of Canadian lakes, before retreating to shore and eating our modest picnic. I’ve promised the group a hike, so we pack up quickly and set off into the woods.

  A small hill rises over the lake-side, and we get one final glimpse of the water before turning north and into the trees. The stretch of Brandenburg north of the city is all forest in my mind; thick beech-wood and winding paths, which eventually outlet into pinewoods that, by all accounts, could only belong to the cultural imagination of this part of the world. The air is thick with sappy pine, and we’re confronted with a wall of branches, impenetrable as dark fairy-tale thorn.

  I know there’s a path here so I forge ahead towards it, but my friends remain frozen in place. They’ve never seen anything like it; every children’s story brought to life before their eyes. I’m dragging them into the pinewood, without a crumb trail to leave behind. The doughnuts are gone. But these dense pine forests appear only in patches, I promise them, most of the forest lopped for timber; these dense stands are but short stories in the landscape, and on the other side we’ll find our train back into town.

  landing

  The Canadians have left town now, as most people do, and I’m stood alone on the miry edge of Flughafensee – Airport Lake, another remnant of Berlin’s quarries – watching the planes take off. The water is repellent, sludge green and being policed by a family of swans. Resentment wells to the surface; I don’t want to swim here.

  I can see a pair of women training for something out in the middle of the lake. I know the water’s fine, but the reality of having committed myself to a ridiculous plan has finally materialised in the form of this disgusting bird swamp. For months, I’ve been reading homemade websites and local forums extolling the joys of Flughafensee. But here, a coil of soaked, filthy cotton rots on the beach; hooks that are the necks of waterbirds skim through the green. I walk a furious loop around the shore and back to the spot by the swans, who have begun harassing a teen-aged couple kissing on a nearby bench.

  I toss my bag on to the sand and undress, stepping into the shallow muck and swimming out. The water’s better farther out, but I’ve decided not to enjoy it. I hook my fingers into anger as if on to a cliff’s edge; there’s no saving today’s swim.

  —

  The pool rules said never to swim alone. Don’t swim immediately after eating. No running. There were rumours that the pool’s water would turn purple if you peed in it. At summer camp as a child, the sign said: ‘Welcome to our ool. Notice how there’s no P in it? We’d like to keep it that way.’ These rules were sacrosanct: at the neighbourhood pool I spent my childhood summers in, we knew that if we broke the rules we would be swiftly reprimanded by the local nosy parkers. So I spent most of my time counting laps, swimming the pool end to end underwater, practising something akin to a dolphin’s tail stroke. Missy, my new best friend from Missouri, raced me across the pool and spent the summer teaching me a gymnastic, underwater wheelbarrow, she upside down, clasping my ankles as I clasped hers. Entire days were spent on this one feat of aquatic brilliance, broken only at lunch-time when we would run home to eat Lunchables on the screen-porch. I was nine and Missy was ten, so she got to be in charge. I memorised her house rules for Uno and Monopoly, and began to pronounce the word ‘towel’ with a Midwestern accent. Taaal.

  We were best friends every summer and every Christmas, when our families packed up and moved to Florida for the holidays. In Canada, people like us were called Snowbirds, flying south for the winter. But we spent our entire summers there too, so I grew used to being American for a few months, riding my bike up the numbered streets and buying blue raspberry slushies from the Circle K. I didn’t really know what the difference was between Americans and Canadians, but the other kids at the pool asked me about penguins and igloos. And they were really confused by my dad’s British accent and my Chinese mom; like I should have been able to articulate who I was simply, to melt it into one thing. Missy didn’t care, though, so we spurned the other kids and colonised the deep end of the pool, rating each other’s dives and seeing who could hold their breath underwater the longest. We lived in swimsuits and oversized T-shirts.

  Our summers stayed like this for what felt like many years. At twelve, though, my parents divorced, and I think Missy’s parents wondered if I would be a bad influence. The summers after that, they encouraged us to go to youth club at the Baptist Church down the road, and I went until eventually it felt as if the joy that held Missy and me together couldn’t be found again. It wasn’t about her, I knew, but about the fact that spending the afternoon practising our best underwater tricks no longer fixed things. Inside the pool gates, the rules could only keep us safe for a while.

  —

  Later in the week, I try again, deciding to leave Berlin and head into the woods alone. A long walk, I think, might fix my mood. And a long swim might even make me happy. I board the S-Bahn and take it east to the end of the line, then walk the suburban mile and a half to the forest in Strausberg. I know this forest reasonably well, having hiked it the previous Boxing Day, when a thick, sticky snow lined the pines and dripped on to the icy paths. Returning in summer, I find it profoundly changed, with resiny sweetness in the air and more oaks and beeches lining the lake’s edge. I’ve only ever seen it in winter.

  I decide to swim in Straussee, one of the three lakes in this forest, and follow the packed-dirt path around the lake’s eastern edge. A hundred yards in, three young boys are laughing in the shallows as they take turns on the rope swing looped around a tree’s branch. I pause and watch them swing for a while, tracing broad arcs in the blue sky before letting go of the rope and falling with graceless splashes into the lake. I never did this as a child, and now, in a way, I want to join them. But the longer I stand here watching, the more appa
rent it becomes that I’m staring, so I keep walking.

  Straussee is enormous: clearings in the trees make spaces for swimmers, but a hundred yards out sail-boats jostle on the light waves. A tiny ferry boat juts back and forth between the landings, dropping day trippers off in the Strausberger and Blumenthaler Wald, an enormous stretch of forest that sits between Berlin and Strausberg. It’s Sunday and it should be busy, but a cluster of stratocumulus clouds have taken up residence in half the sky, so everyone has packed up. I’m delighted.

  A thin, gauzy sadness had settled on me this week, but the journey here has already helped turn up the edges of loneliness. Instead, there’s solitude. Midway across the lake, I find a long wooden dock and spread my towel at its end, settling down with my legs dangling over towards the water. The conical lines of deep green trees break up the horizon, and I think it looks rather like the view at my parents’ cottage back in Canada. After lying stretched in the patchy sunlight, I dive off the dock’s edge into the amulet blue, feeling so wholly present in the water that I forget I’m alone, and climb out and jump off again and again until I’m exhausted.

  —

  In Ontario, a few hours from home, the landscape is scattered with lakes. It sits beyond the endless coils of concrete and brake lights, running far into the distance, webs that encircle the cities and ensnare those within them. You can only leave the cities if you can navigate past these highways, but beyond them lies this place of wood smoke and riotous colour. The grey of concrete turns to green trees and then grey again, slate and granite. It’s broken by blue – the deepest kind, almost black, which only shines if the sky is bright. Breaks in the trees and granite reveal them, dark and glassy and unassuming. On a dull day, it’s a place for flannel coats and seeing your breath on the air, but in summer you can dangle your legs into the water, cold against the heat.