Ten minutes into the dark green, looking back occasionally, I find the lake – marshy and brown and uninviting. It’s a nature sanctuary, and in the quietude nature has run its course, reclaiming the swampy borders of the lake with rotting wood and reed grass. I won’t swim. Tiny blue dragonflies skim the water’s surface, and I remember reading that there are Drosera here – sundews – carnivorous flowers tipped with sticky, pink dew. I don’t see them, but the thought of them unsettles me. I feel compelled to back-track, on to the drier part of the trail and away from the lake. The forest track alternates sand and pine needle, its sloping side falling into marsh. A mile or so along, I reach the forest’s end.
Checking the town’s notice board and map, I see that I’ve made it to Pätz, a small town south of Königs Wusterhausen. I know I’m not far from the train. But I’ve only swum once, so I stop quickly at the town’s strip of park, edging Pätzer Vordersee. It’s windswept and dull, but as I undress an elderly couple emerge from across the road, bare-footed and bath-robed, carrying towels. They leave their robes on the children’s playground and step out into the lake ahead of me. Flatly, they launch into the waves, silent the whole time. They don’t take any notice of me, so I swim out a few yards away from them, floating on my back, before returning to shore and gathering my things, exhausted. I’m angry with myself. Too ambitious, too disorganised. I don’t know what I’m doing.
The signpost in town tells me I’m ten kilometres from the train station, so I set off on the paved shoulder, defeated, finding my bike rhythm again. I’m a few minutes in, trance-like and longing for home, when a plate of turquoise, glassy water flashes from the roadside. I brake, shuddering into the gravel. And here is the thing I’d wanted all day – clear and glassy, blue and cool, a clay pit reclaimed as a lake. It is quiet and small, without a breath of wind, appearing out of nowhere. I thrust my bike against a tree and am in, tank-top soaked through, swimming to its centre. Redemption.
marking time
At twenty-eight, I feel a shimmering glimpse of excitement when I call my dad on the phone. It’s something I didn’t do for so long that now, when I feel excited to call and let him talk at me about home renovations or cycling or rugby, I think it’s a small gift I received by accident. I never planned to be the woman who called her dad on the phone every week any more than I planned to be the woman who didn’t call, and who moved incredibly far away on purpose, who got married at twenty-three despite her family’s disapproval and then had to work out how to get a divorce without hearing the words I told you so. But having been both, I now find a small thrill in wanting to call home.
Dad’s at the cottage when he answers, and for a moment I’m struck by how much he’s beginning to answer the phone like my grandfather did. A booming, swinging ‘Hello’ that makes me imagine he is scooping up a very heavy receiver attached to a rubbery coil, but then there’s his tinny FaceTime voice on the end of the line. I quickly search for a reason to have called, dropping in something about visiting home, and then the conversation continues as usual, with him updating me on his cottage chores like it’s stock-market ticker-tape, essential news. I didn’t call for any reason in particular, other than that I’ve been living with this amorphous ball in my stomach, some unidentifiable and unspecific longing for familiarity. Homesickness, maybe, but I’m no longer quite sure what it is that I miss or where home is. His updates momentarily fill that space. I’m silent on the line, adding only the occasional Mhmm.
The rest of the time, I fill my days at work or on my bike, hot summer rushing into my lungs. I’ve been making lists of full-day lake trips to take before summer is out, and today is another. I’ve promised Terresina, who is just passing through Berlin for the summer, a day of lake swimming.
We follow the busy road from Erkner towards the east to a string of skinny lakes connected by small canals, a chain of lakes designed for boats. We ride to the end of the chain, Möllensee, and lock our bikes in the woods before continuing on foot past forest benches and quiet campsites. At the far end of the snaking coil of lake, we stop and swim. It’s green – the water dense with clouds of algae and leaf – but as we swim out, it becomes clearer. Terresina tells me she’s never really swum much in lakes, and we bob and roll on the water’s surface, commiserating about our fear of deep water as small boats chug by. Underwater, I see her tattooed legs blur and shift in the moving water and I think, momentarily, that it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen. I won’t see this again.
On shore again, I tear a pretzel in half and we eat, digging our toes into the sand. And then, as quickly as we came, we’re on our bikes again, heading to the other end of the lake chain, Werlsee. Here, we swim farther out, even more boats moving nearby, and then retreat to the hut by the beach for soft ice cream, sitting crossed-legged and curling our mouths over the tight whip of chocolate and vanilla. She’ll be gone in a few weeks. These friends in Berlin come and go.
Leaving Terresina, I’m reminded of a day last year. It was October, and Jacob was looking at me suspiciously.
‘You’re only here for a few months,’ he said before turning back to his cup of coffee. We’d been swimming for nearly a month, meeting on the corner by the church and biking to Weißer See in the early morning. Afterwards, over coffee, we’d talk or argue or sit in quiet company with one another. Today was an argument.
‘I may come back.’
He looked unconvinced. ‘Everyone says that.’
A few weeks earlier, we’d walked around Mitte in Berlin’s centre, tracing a lingering route down Linienstraße and down along the Spree, and he’d described the orphan sensibility of young Berliners and the city’s many temporary residents. Everyone leaves, he had told me, so you try not to get attached. I’d laughed, then, but now, when he was using it to push me away, it seemed a barbed and prophetic remark. I wondered if our days together were just marking time.
—
If you’ve ever counted the rings on a tree stump, you have a sense of the way the landscape holds its own history; the way time recedes beneath the surface of the ground. Sand, gravel and rock layered year by year. Ice is layered just the same – glaciers hold their ages in their cores.
Tree rings, pollen samples and the ground strata have all helped to shape the story of glaciation in Brandenburg. In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists began using radiocarbon dating to determine the age of geological formations. The middle of the twentieth century – 1950 – was established as the stable scientific marker of the present. The landscape of Brandenburg was most profoundly transformed in the Weichselian glaciation, beginning over a hundred thousand years before 1950.
In the middle and later periods of the Weichselian glaciation, ice advanced southward from Scandinavia, pushing past the Baltic and over the north of Germany. When a glacier moves across a landscape, it picks up ground strata along the way, moving rocks from their places, carving up the land beneath the ice. The ice sheets of the Weichselian extended hundreds of kilometres inland from the Baltic, reaching the southern edge of Brandenburg, the edge of the North German Plain. As a result, glacial spillways and plateaus undulate across the landscape, shaped by the movement of the glaciers, moraines scattered by the ice. Eleven thousand years ago, as the world warmed again and the ice retreated, the lakes were left behind.
The time of glaciers seems obscure, too long or too slow to comprehend. It is drastically different from the transformations happening now. Over the past fifty years, lake water has warmed. As distant ice melts at the poles of the world, so too does lake ice disappear. The lakes left behind by glacial retreat tell us something of our warming planet, changes happening faster than ever before, glaciers outpaced. They are markers in time, emergency flares in an advancing crisis. In lakes, the present history of our world contracts and intensifies, urgent and shrinking like the ice.
—
I take my parents’ divorce to be a marker, a line drawn between childhood and adulthood. I doubt this is uncommon. N
ot that divorce is a bad thing; it was certainly the right thing for my parents and many others, and I don’t begrudge them that. For a girl on the cusp of teenhood, there was never going to be a good time.
On either side of the marker, I see things differently, as if before everything changed, things were less my fault, less my responsibility. Afterwards, I am fully formed, adult and responsible. I wasn’t even thirteen. But I acquired the hard habit of seeing myself this way, as if in the moment my father explained what was happening, I’d decided to grow up. I lived in their house, but I was on my own.
When my parents decided to divorce – a fact which I absorbed silently before asking if I could go eat my grilled–cheese sandwich – my sister and I ended up living with my dad, remaining in our childhood home. My mother moved to an apartment nearby, and then another, and another. I hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t imagined divorce to be a possibility, even in the times my sister and I sat on the stairs, listening to their arguments. I’d never met anyone who was divorced. I didn’t know what it meant.
The years after were scattered with legal battles, times apart from one another, calls by my sister and me to crisis helplines as my mother stood locked behind the bathroom door, pill bottles in hand. My parents grew tense and busy with their divorce. My sister and I learned to take care of one another, each coping in our own ways. Mine was retreat.
Everything came unmoored. Mom receded into a world of work and worry, eating thirty-cent ramen noodles instead of the full meals she had raised us on. Her face became haunted, pained. When I was fourteen, she was sent away for a time, and I didn’t see her at all. When Mom came home again, she was the mother I’d always known: she cooked again and gave love so fully. But by then I knew what was possible, how it could change.
I resolved not to be like that. That I would be stronger, as if strength were the crux of the problem.
The last summer with both my parents, Mom and I had been collecting plants: orchids and Tillandsias, which we’d lashed to the tree trunks in the Florida garden. One afternoon, we had driven to the Selby Botanical Garden and I’d brought home a new clay pot with five openings. I filled each soilless hole with a thin green plant, and placed it proudly at the front door.
A few years after that last summer, I noticed the pot taken over by one of the plants, Tillandsia aeranthos, long since being tended, a grey-green spray of leaves with cotton-candy-hued inflorescences. It had been my favourite, and now it had taken over, grown too full for its home. The orchids on the trees had grown thick roots, clutching tightly to the palms, duller than ever, as if they missed being cared for, missed my mother. I was fifteen; I had better things to do.
Instead of swimming and instead of gardening, I had begun staking out the public beach; looking for guys, for new friends – because I wasn’t holding on to people for very long at this point – and for some way to pass the afternoons. They charged twenty-five cents for a Styrofoam cup of ice water at the beach, so I scrabbled away my spare change for those afternoons. There was a pastor’s son, and the older guys who worked at the surf shop, and a boy from Michigan whose name I had forgotten by the time September arrived. When you’re afraid, relationships are a good way to pass the time.
Crushes came and went. With each of them, whether or not they were reciprocated, the space that had opened up around me would be filled. Momentarily, at least, I wouldn’t be alone. But all I sought were stop-gap solutions, friends I would keep for a few months, crushes that would dissipate as quickly as they had formed. And in this flippancy, I found that the thing I thought I was most afraid of – being alone and unstable – was the thing I kept choosing.
I didn’t care about family. That required consistency. I didn’t trust them. But I needed not to be alone, so by the time I was seventeen, I’d come to believe that the thing I needed most was love. Not family. Not friends. I could choose someone to love, and let them love me, and then everything would be okay.
Love was a lot like fear. It swallowed you whole, like water.
an offering
The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word ‘lake’ doesn’t refer to lakes as we know them. Instead, ‘lake’, from Old English, means ‘an offering, sacrifice; also a gift’. This origin of the word has nothing to do with water, but I find myself thinking about it sometimes, about the ways lakes hold themselves open to the world. Broad plates beneath the sky, they welcome a swimmer fully. Perhaps they swallow a swimmer whole. But there’s a kind of offering in the generosity of water holding you afloat. In the way water holds feeling, how the body is most alive submerged and enveloped, there is the fullness of grace given freely.
I think of this partly because my time in the lakes has been both gift and sacrifice. The lakes have been centres of both love and loss not solely for me – living in this place, things past and much more significant than me are always present – and they hold those moments stoically, water smoothed to satin. Lakes that have held joy, in time, came to signify incredible sadness, and learning to swim through that, like swimming through feeling, is a part of reinhabiting these places for myself. Much as I’ve longed for the quietude of places without a past, living here, as much as in Canada or England or anywhere else, it is impossible. There isn’t some untrammelled wilderness I can chart. Mühlenbecker See, perhaps more than any other lake, holds feeling in its depths.
I first went there with Jacob, during those early months in Berlin. It was the first days of November, and an unseasonable warmth had spread across the weekend, kaleidoscope trees glowing in a golden sky. Friends had come to dinner and I’d spent the evening cooking curry, furiously and unsparingly, laying out a table for ten. And then, somewhere near the end of the evening, amidst the raucous noise of a card game, Jacob caught my eye and said simply, ‘Lake tomorrow?’
We set off early, before the day had settled on the city, and cycled north along Prenzlauer Allee. He rushed ahead on his black bike, putting yards between us, and I pedalled faster, only just keeping up. Away from the city, when we found ourselves alone on one of the country roads lined with silent village houses, he slowed and cycled next to me, chatting about dogs. Australian shepherds. A goose farm appeared to our left, and he joked about Christmas coming soon. I felt only sadness for the birds.
Abruptly, the smooth of the tarmac ended and we were turned on to a sea of ageing cobbles working their way out of the ground as if they had better places to be. Our slender bike wheels slipped in the cracks, hulking and thumping along the quiet road towards the forest.
—
July is nearing its end, and I’ve worked up some nerve. It’s my favourite stretch of forest, despite my memories, and I want to go back. But I want to go back shrouded in safety, with the hands of friends clutched in mine. We’re waiting on the train platform at Karow, and Katrin and Lily are talking in a sideways, lost-in-translation way about cars or horses or both. I’ve lost track. I’m immensely relieved they like one another.
Lily is over from London for just a few days, but I’ve scrabbled together this encounter on the premise that they’re two of my favourites – wild-eyed creatures who belong in a far-away forest but have somehow ended up in these frowning, grey cities. But we all know it’s because I was afraid and wanted them to work through it with me. I’m shuffling on the train platform, lifting my heels and shuttling around while they talk.
The blue and white train takes us northward, leaving us at Schönwalde on a lonely, one-sided platform. The forest wraps around it, and as we walk up the mossy dirt track, the trees swallow us in a cathedral of orange and green.
—
Jacob had been here before. We hopped off our bikes and wheeled them through the uneven dirt track over beech roots and fallen logs. The sky above was veiled in colour, a painted ceiling of oranges from burnt to yellow, flickering like confetti in the warm air. On the ground, it was still.
We stopped at the small, sloping mouth of the lake, blue from the shore. Pausing in the silence, I brea
thed in the wide expanse of the lake, grassy and warm. The porcelain figures of two white swans slipped into a curve in the shore-line with silent grace. Behind me, Jacob began to undress, and when I turned around he was waiting, naked skin stretched over lithe muscles, unabashed.
‘Hurry up!’ he chirped and made for the water. I’d packed a swimsuit, but now, with his legs, buttocks, and the curve of his back turned towards me, I felt embarrassed, childish. Slipping out of my clothes, I hugged my breasts and stepped furtively towards the lake. He was in now, splashing and laughing and calling for me, and as I stepped in I sank unexpectedly into the deep. Cold water rising to my waist.
—
The smell of moss and pine washes over us, though it’s been a dry week. I’d hoped for rain, as if the sudden rush of water might bring the forest to life, but it’s here all the same, bright and full, but dry. The forest in summer is different from the forest in autumn. Then, the carpets of moss sprout mushrooms, peering through fallen pine needles, cheerful nodes of brown amidst the glowing green. In summer it is just moss, and dry moss at that, no lush floor but flashes of verdancy under fallen logs. Along the path, we come to Schloss Dammsmühle, a castle once commandeered by the Nazis, and then in the GDR by the Stasi. It is still and quiet, its history silent. The salmony paint falls in scales across its turret and the mildewed tile fountain is filled with dead leaf. At the curve of the pond, a tent sits camouflaged in green, three fishermen clad in fatigues, minding their lines. My feet remember the feeling of that pond and the patch of ground where their tents are pitched; I’d sat there last November, toes dipped into the cold, mirrored water. I lose myself momentarily in that thought. The men look up at us, beer cans pressed to their lips, and track us as we pass, three women in the woods. Katrin and Lily catch my eye, but I’m impetuous. I say hello, and then keep walking, the small thought in the back of my mind that I ought to be more afraid, that I ought to mind my body and my gait, but I don’t.
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