Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  I wasn’t born into that wild place. I was born into a tangle of identical suburbs, of safe streets and shopping malls containing miniature golf courses. Kerbsides filled with browning December slush that stayed there until March. I remember being in cars – pinned to the seat by a seat belt stretched over my pink snow-suit or legs stuck to the leather in summer – and at gas stations, parking lots and traffic lights. The Canada on the back of our coins – loons and moose and trees and waste – wasn’t here. It was out there: beyond the traffic on the 401 and impenetrable. We believed it was there, a wilderness into which we were all born, safely kept behind the strip malls and drive-through doughnut shops. It was a half-truth we grew up with. You come to Canada and become Canadian – as if the wild is pumped intravenously into the newly arrived. We never talked about what was really there: poverty and bad water and the lives of entire places erased. That was the invisible, impenetrable wild beyond the city. Once in a while, I’d be shuttled along the highways to lake-fronts that showed the Canada on our coins. What was in between, I never got to know.

  I was thirteen, and my dad and stepmother had taken us along the highway to the cottage near Georgian Bay, a great swathe of cold water north of Lake Huron. It was set on to a rocky ledge backed by forest, and we could only get there by motorboat. After spending summers in Florida, the Canadian tradition of long weekends in Cottage Country was new to me, and I didn’t like it a bit. There were mosquitos and spiders and probably bears. There was an enormous black lake, but there was nowhere I was brave enough to swim.

  I hated everything at thirteen; with a combination of perfectly timed angst and bookishness, I had predictably decided to spend the weekend reading Aldous Huxley in the corner. My older sister and my new step-siblings went swimming in the lake. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  We were being introduced to my stepmother’s parents – our step-grandparents – who welcomed us into their family with the matter-of-factness available only to Europeans who have lived through a war. There was no fuss made there; you prayed before dinner and you ate what was cooked for you. In the early evening, you went fishing. Nick, ‘Grandpa’, was probably the nicest, most straightforwardly kind man I’ve ever met, but there was a lump in my throat and I had nothing to say. I had barely seen my own mother in months, and now I was meant to be making nice with my new family. Nick was inviting me fishing, inviting me swimming, and looked genuinely heartbroken when I turned him down.

  Nearly two decades later, this devastates me. There is little to be done for the anger of a thirteen-year-old girl whose parents have just divorced, but for this incredibly kind man who wanted only to show me this place by the lake that mattered so much to him, I still feel a persistent kernel of guilt. That same year he would take us fishing for our dinner, and in my steely stubbornness I would insist that he put the poor fish back. The gap in understanding between us seemed impassable; I wouldn’t let anyone cross it.

  —

  Now, the sun is waning in the sky at Straussee, and I’ve dried off fully on the dock. There’s a snack hut nearby, so I pack up my bag and wander over, closing the rusty gate behind me. Inside, I find a kindly middle-aged man standing behind an ageing chip-board counter-top, fiddling with a radio. I haven’t talked to anyone all afternoon, but when he greets me and asks how my day has been, the words rush out like water.

  I order french fries and, at his insistence, an Eisschokolade, which he delivers to me ceremoniously, its powdery chocolate milk crowned with whipped cream and a pirouline biscuit. He presents it with a smile that speaks of such pride in his work that something in my solitude shifts. We stand, chatting a while in broken German.

  The forest at Strausberg is protected land, cut through with paths for hikers and scattered with the occasional hunting blind. There isn’t much else here after the old town ends and the lake begins. In the forest, I remember only pines. But this man with greying hair and a starched apron is telling me about this place: about the boat he crosses the lake with every day to get to work, and about his cabin in the woods, across the water. Until the nineteenth century there were wolves in this forest, and this man – who is watching me eat this Eisschokolade with delight – lives there now.

  I think about the places I’ve lived: the tiny apartments in Nova Scotia, London, Toronto, Berlin, and about this man’s cabin in the most beautiful forest I know, and leave the snack hut with the most incredible gratitude for this man, and for my paltry German.

  baptismal

  July hangs heavily in the air, and work days are spent inside pressed near the window, longing for full sun. A weary combination of discipline and deadlines keeps me inside, aglow by the laptop light, writing about metropolitan enclosures in nineteenth-century London, so far away from the German city outside my studio’s plate-glass window. I spend the entire day writing about the history of Hampstead Heath for my doctorate, but at lunch-time I step briefly into the sun and wander in a stunned haze over Tempelhofer Feld. Its dormant airfields are carpeted with rough meadow grass and sorrel, and I stand watching the kites amassed like airlift parachutes in the sky. There is sadness here, but brightness too. In a few weeks’ time, the airport will be converted into ramshackle, makeshift refugee accommodation.

  By evening, away from my desk again and on my green bicycle, I race home to Prenzlauer Berg, sneaking a glimpse of the Fernsehturm glinting on the horizon north of the Oberbaum Bridge. Somehow, Toronto seems closer, and London too, within sight of a tower stretching high. The tiniest parcels of homesickness for places I’ve left dissipate beneath the Fernsehturm. A city becomes home by these markers; every city has a tower.

  The days are all like this, a rhythm of work and travel broken only by my swims. At times, I feel that the work is all I have, but I’m annoyed by the melodrama of that thought. Besides, the lakes are there, calling.

  It’s Tuesday. Biking on, I pass my turning home and race past Prenzlauer Berg, up into Weißensee, the evening sun at my back. The market stalls at Antonplatz are beginning to pack up, and I remember those occasional mornings when Jacob and I stopped here for eggs or bread for breakfast. I remember the morning after a swim, when we came for vegetables, and the fruit-stall lady forced me to try a quince. I hesitantly but politely brought its milky sweetness to my mouth, and Jacob laughed, discreetly taking it from me, eating it himself. He was forever saving me from wasting fruit, taking my half-eaten apples when I’d grown tired of eating them, trading me half-full thermos cups of coffee to share. But today, I bike past the market and past Weißer See itself, thoughts of those days rising and falling lightly as breath. The evening is hot and smells of warm grass, and I want to swim.

  A mile on, a gravel road opens on to Orankesee, an unknown patch of clear water so near to home. That I’ve never swum here seems absurd, its figure-eight of tree-lined lake just fifteen minutes from my flat, so much brighter than Weißer See. Swimming in Weißer See had become a habit, and coming here now on my own is part of the process of breaking it. I lock my bike to a rusting street sign and follow the path to the lake’s edge, across the grassy shore and away from the crowds of splashing children. There is a group of grey-haired swimmers tracing lengths near the wooded shore, so I step into the water there. It’s clean sand all the way out, not a single rock or bottle cap or sink-hole of muck. For months, I’d come so close to here; Orankesee feels like starting anew.

  —

  My parents were used to my stubbornness and my fear. When I gave up eating fish at six – proclaiming that I’d be a marine biologist and save all fish everywhere – they eye-rolled and left me to it, joking that I would have to get in the water first. It was neither the first nor the last of such moral stands, the kind only the very young and the very stubborn have the will to see through. My rigid refusal to step into the lake or into the ocean may have frustrated them, but it was never a surprise.

  Their divorce some years later would change so much, and I would spend the decade after it unearthing its debris. Anger and d
espair and silence. But I know now there were glimmers of love amidst the grey: their panicked figures at the YMCA pool window, moments spent singing ‘Summer Holiday’ in the car on road trips, before they would fight and before the police would pull us over for speeding. These were the shining gemstones at the bottom of the lake.

  A summer week in 1995, when I was eight, we drove north towards Temagami, a town with one clapboarded Chinese-Canadian restaurant and a wharf of two-storey house boats with blue water slides curling down their backs. My sister Nika was doing a summer exchange with a girl from Wiesbaden, Germany, and her exchange partner Nadja was with us. She brought Germany into our lives; I didn’t realise then how important that would be.

  In the town, my mother, Nika, Nadja, and I stopped for fried rice and chicken – Mom quietly criticised the food, but I loved its sticky sweetness – while Dad handled the boat rental. It was a small boat – a hideous box suspended on water, seats that turned into beds for us kids, a room in the back for my parents. The roof was a sun-deck, plastic chairs scattered across it and a small bucket fastened to a string at the top of the blue slide.

  It was one of the only summers we spent in Canada – I’d been at YMCA day camp in the weeks beforehand, swimming in a concrete-lined outdoor pool in a cartoonish leopard-print bathing suit, and spent the rest of the summer mucking out horse stalls and chasing the cats at the local stable. Now we were up north, a place we came to so rarely, meeting our family friends for a week on the lake, two house boats rented, two dads in sailors’ hats trained briefly to captain them. It was a rare moment when our family felt so fully Canadian – play-acting at woodsmanship, singing camp-fire songs in rounds.

  The week passed languidly. Our friends had five kids, and they and Nika and Nadja leapt into and out of the water, slight streaks of blond hair careening down the slides and clambering back to the flat roofs of the boats. I stood by the railing, staring at the lake. I had never seen something so dark – a thick, slate-coloured darkness, broken only by the black silhouettes of sunken pine logs. Shadows underwater, they moved with the light at the lake’s surface, great hulking figures in the depths. How and why anyone would want to swim near them – these dark bodies that sheltered beasts at the bottom of the lake – baffled me. I stood in the summer sun, watching the others slide and scream and splash.

  My parents didn’t worry about me. They told me to swim every so often, mocked my stubbornness, reminded me that I was missing out, but experience had taught them there was no forcing me. The cavernous gap between the other kids and me – their willingness to let go and swim, and my complete terror that they should do so – rested there for the week, closed only in the evenings when we would anchor near some remote island, gathering around the camp-fire singing ‘The Great Big Moose’ and roasting marshmallows to sandwich with chocolate and biscuits for s’mores. Our parents carried on whatever semblance of grown-up conversation was possible with eight children in tow, batting off the mosquitos that joined us at dusk. I fiddled absent-mindedly with the sugared end of my marshmallow-roasting stick, the glowing tip of which kept falling off in the flame.

  It was late in the week, the northern summer at its hottest, when it happened. That small glimmer I keep closed in hand, when my father’s love was most real and fierce and unequivocal, and when he terrified us the most. Seven kids are in the lake and on the boat, leaping off its sides and looping from ladder to slide. I’m at the railing, watching them go, and Dad is standing next to me, quietly coaxing me into the water. I’m thinking about getting in, dipping a toe and slipping into the black, terrifying deep.

  Then, from the sky, from the boat deck above me, the lake is pouring down. Cold and wet, I’m screaming. And to the boat’s bow, my father is storming. Someone had dumped a bucket of water on my head.

  ‘Which one of you goddamned kids did this?’

  It is silent. No one wants to step forward. The empty bucket, secured with twine, swings from the upper railing. The summer heat freezes over.

  And then, in disbelief and discomfit, my father’s friend – the other dad on the trip – steps forward, admitting that he meant it as a joke. He thought it might help me get in the water. My father is raging, swearing, arms waving. I hear only snippets, How dare yous, reproaches, and apologies.

  We’ve all seen this rage before, but now, in this one glowing moment, it’s about me. My dad is defending me, turning on his friend for me. And I know instantly that somewhere in this anger is love – so much of it – and I’ll continue to hold it close, a talisman of a memory, saying, Take your time, it’ll be okay, whenever I go near a lake again.

  —

  By the end of July I’ve worked up some nerve. Swimming for six weeks has taken its effect: a strengthening of patience, a willingness to spend long days alone. If Orankesee had righted me, a long swim might give me momentum.

  I spend the train ride in memory – grasping at amorphous memories of a train ride in winter – holding my bike upright amidst the Sunday crowds. I heave it off at Königs Wusterhausen, checking my map before bouncing along a cobbled road towards the west. I have a plan: there are three lakes on my list. A dull, rain-grey patch of clouds is clearing ahead of me.

  The landscape south of Berlin is an unrolling flatness. Parallel rows of green are stitched together with wooded seams, with occasional pines interrupting their agricultural weave. The air smells of manure and pine resin and hay, and sometimes there’s a distant, peaty whiff of marsh. Here more than anywhere Berlin’s dampness shows itself: the swamp, flat and wet and so shallow the city has to run water pipes above ground from construction sites. It is cobbled and invisible in town, but out here it feels as though gravity has drawn the wetness downwards, like the map had been stood upright and the lakes had fallen south. It’s a land of fields that speak of water, even when you can’t see it.

  Eight kilometres in, I think I’m lost. I’ve followed the curving weft of the road and passed the sign marking Teltow-Fläming, which I know is the edge of today’s territory. Motzener See is somewhere nearby – I can smell it – but I can’t see anything but sorrel and poppies and ramshackle cabins ahead of me. I pull to the side of the road and give up, checking my phone.

  Somewhere in the past kilometre, I’ve taken a wrong turn, so I back-track a while. And then, round a bend there’s a tree-lined avenue marking the beginning of Kallinchen, a one-street town with a campsite and park running along the lake’s edge. I lock my bike at the park, and glancing upwards, notice that the rainclouds have hung around.

  I swim quickly, lolling briefly in the toffee-coloured water, before downing a hard-boiled egg and a piece of bread, packing up and moving on. Pätzer Hintersee is six kilometres away, and if I bike fast enough I might find shelter in the pinewoods surrounding it. The road opening ahead is swathed in gold – stormy sunlight filtered through thick cloud. It begins to spit warm rain.

  I round the bottom edge of Motzener See and head for the lane leading towards Pätz, but I find instead that the asphalt road turns briefly to sand and then to the rumbling slabs of concrete which form a logging road. The flatness of the land has broken, and ahead of me rises two kilometres of hill through dense stands of pine. It’s the fastest and only way through.

  I heave up through the growing rain, which makes the dry pined hilltops warm with sticky sweetness, the smell of burnt orange and green. Reaching the hill’s apex, I career downwards without pedalling, thumping over the gaps in the slick, chalky concrete of the makeshift road. Halfway down, I hear my bike chain drop.

  Furiously, I stop and repair it, black grease coating my fingers, and curse the goddamned map that took me this way. I apologise to my bicycle. There had to be a better way. I should have brought more than my phone. The road ahead turns to trail, and then sand, and then I have to walk.

  The white sand grows deeper as I follow the trail through the pines, and eventually the rain abates. But I’ve been out for hours and am nowhere near carrying out my plan. Three lakes. What was
I thinking? I check my phone, but its battery is dead.

  My bike squeals and shudders as I push it through the sand. The neat rows of Scots pine turn into clumps of young, scrabbly wood, which linger into scrub and tussocks of tall brown grass. I’m not lost, but neither am I convinced I’m going the right way.

  And then, ahead of me, I see three children amidst the grass. One, the oldest, is standing sentry at the path’s edge, while the other two, a boy and a girl who can’t be more than six years old, are crouched collecting wildflowers and leaves. I scan the horizon; there’s nothing but forest and field to be seen.

  ‘Wolltest du hierhin?’ the oldest one asks, eyeing me suspiciously. Did I mean to come here? What kind of question is that? I don’t see what she has to be suspicious about – from what I can tell, she knows this place, and I’ve just wandered in here and found a group of children alone in the middle of a field of wildflowers. I should be suspicious, I think, but I put on my best, most confident self.

  ‘Ja!’ I chirp. I tell them I’m going to Pätzer Hintersee, at the top of this sandy moor.

  ‘But you’re in Groß Köris,’ she replies dryly. Her pale brown hair is laced with blades of hay.

  I point to the trail ahead and nod enthusiastically, as if I’d known where I was all along. The other children have stopped gathering flowers now, and are stooped in the sand staring at me.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ she asks, stepping around me like an interrogator. The other kids have gathered around my bike now, clutching floral clusters in their dusty fingers.

  ‘Berlin,’ I say, and before I can continue she is smiling, nodding, saying that they too are from Berlin. But she doesn’t offer any explanation for their being here, alone in the middle of nowhere. I realise I’ve started walking, some distant childhood instinct not to talk to strangers kicking in, though I know full well I’m the adult here. But something about them – her forthrightness, the smallness of the younger boy crouched low to the ground, the fact that I haven’t seen another person or a house in miles – puts me off, and I make my excuses, knowing I’m running far behind in my plans. I take the path into the woods, leaving the children and the moor behind.