I glance at the pond again and the feeling passes. This crooked wash of brown and blue, once maintained by prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, will turn to red and gold come autumn. I’ve seen it; I know this place. But in the moments I get too close, I find it barbed. Himmler was here, and the Stasi. The glimmer of fear I felt passing the fishermen turns to guilt, as though I ought never to have found beauty here, or love.
—
We swam as long as we could, cold tightening my skin, and then emerged, wet and shivering. On the shore, Jacob wrapped himself in clothes and then watched me dress, five feet away, staring, unmoving. And then, jacket zipped to the neck, he turned and set off back into the forest. Through the brightness of autumn, past the castle and the pond, and into the pine. Two hundred yards in, the rows of pine broke and a path – straight and long and lined with moss – drew us downward. Midway along, a shaft of sunlight lit the ground and we stopped. A single tree had gathered around it a blanket of carpet moss, deep green and aglow, and a glossy brown bolete had curved out of it, so stout I had to lie on my stomach to look at it properly. Jacob sat down next to me, unpacking lunch.
For weeks, I’d cooked or we’d eaten in restaurants, quietly biding our time together, never really acknowledging the feeling growing up between us. But here, on the moss, he spread a chequered towel, cheeses, bread and fruit. He held an avocado in the air, deftly slicing it in half. We ate for a while, warm sun streaming over us, and then folded the picnic away. The sun was still high, mid-way through the afternoon sky, so I shuffled my back towards the pine trunk, legs outstretched. Exhausted, Jacob draped himself over them, head in my lap, and closed his eyes. I moved my fingers through his thick curls, tucking them behind his small left ear with the hesitancy of new touch.
We sat silent, holding, until the sun began to dip. He turned his head half towards me and asked if this was okay. But my heart was already in my throat, in my mouth, out in the air, exceeding me. Feeling had grown down, unfurling its mycelium weave across me as we sat, hooking down under my skin and muscle and limbs. It had climbed down inside me, I’d breathed it in and welcomed it, and held it. I’d held my love out in front of me like an offering, quietly and securely. I knew now, in the broken silence, that whatever I said was just a tiny piece of it, sweet and fleshy on the surface, the feeling already anchored deep inside me. So I said something about patience, and then we climbed up out of the forest floor and rode out, pedalling in time, back to Berlin.
—
We reach the lake, summer sun blanketing it entirely. Katrin and Lily want lunch, so we spread our picnic out by the shore, legs outstretched in the light. And as they eat, I swim out into the centre, noticing for the first time Mühlenbecker See’s almost molten warmth, the thickness of the water. When I submerge my hands, I can’t see them any more, just the colour of the water, gold and bright but never blue. Perhaps it has changed. It’s summer and the warmth of the lake tells me how shallow it is.
I roll on to my back and float, sadness rushing off my chest with the water, and then turn to shore. Katrin and Lily wave, smiling, and I smile too, relieved. I make for shore, and there, lunch unpacked, we sit hip to hip, our toes edging the shore. Even now, I can feel the warmth of the summer in my feet.
silk and glass
The lake is so warm I stand there a while, sinking into the ground. Turning my back on the sun, I scan the horizon from the water. From the top of the hill, the Teufelsberg listening station, Epcot-like and crumbling, stares back. I can’t see the city, but I know that if I were to climb out and clamber up the winding hillside path, I’d find it off in the distance, still and grey.
The hill suits its name. Teufelsberg means ‘devil’s mountain’. It was built atop war rubble from the city below. Somewhere beneath the spy station sit the remains of a Nazi technical college. The top of the hill is capped with the station’s white domes, covers for the British and American antennae that once searched for signals here. Now, though, the station sits empty, wasting, fenced in. Weeds have grown up everywhere, and the place is a mess of concrete and colour from spray cans. In Teufelsee, though, everything’s green – ground and water and forest – so I sink down low, dipping my nose beneath the lake’s surface.
When I’ve finished swimming I dry off on the lawn, hanging my towel over my bike seat to dry. This small pocket of flat land on the hillside catches the sun. The height of the hill above it seems to keep everything else out; my phone lost signal an hour ago. I stay quietly in this green glade.
—
The weeks after that November day at Mühlenbecker See, Jacob and I sat in a soft, companionable kindness with one another. We ate bibimbap in Korean restaurants and stayed up late watching action movies from the nineties, close and at ease but never touching. In the mornings, we would meet for coffee and plan bike trips, swims, or days on the sofa. He translated the city for me, guided me to unknown lakes, pushed me to venture farther than I might have on my own. With him, I uncovered a kind of vitality that I hadn’t known was mine. A liveliness and courage that never factored into the life of books I’d sheltered in. I began to feel bold. I wasn’t afraid to swim. In those months, Berlin quickly became home, a steady ground from which I felt less afraid. But the solitude I’d held so securely when I’d first arrived had dissipated; I worried that too much of my feeling of security centred on him.
At the turn of December, we packed our bags and took the train north to the island of Rügen. Tom came with us. We’d planned for a weekend on the Baltic, grey and windswept, and arrived to find it exactly as we’d hoped. East German holiday towns empty in winter as the cold moves in from the north and the waves swell and pound the shingle beaches. I hadn’t wanted warmth or sun, but rather the sharp, aspirating air, something to break the monotony of winter.
Sassnitz, at the north-eastern tip of the island, was quiet. Paint peeled off the abandoned city centre, a thick putty-colour plastered over everything. At the waterfront, though, we found our rented apartment, two yellow rooms with a view over the sea, the sound of waves perpetually thrumming on the sea-wall. We stayed inside, where it was warm.
We spent the evening playing improvised games: the boys decided on a form of charades using phrases from the book I was reading and began acting out random words and sentences. It was my turn, and as I sat splayed on the floor – hopelessly acting out Gustave Courbet’s painting, L’origine du monde – they erupted in laughter. Outside, there was only the black of night and the sea.
In the morning we walked westward, out into Jasmund National Park, the peninsula of land at the edge of Rügen, leaning out over the Baltic. The coast-line here was made most famous, perhaps, by Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, the cliffs and a view of the sea carefully rendered. These eroding chalk cliffs at the edge of the park slip year by year into the sea. Like the lakes in Brandenburg, the cliffs here were carved out by glaciers.
Fontane wrote of Jasmund in his most famous novel, Effi Briest. In the novel, the eponymous protagonist – likened to a German Anna Karenina, but younger, more vulnerable – visits the forest at Jasmund with her husband. She is plagued by memories of her own infidelity, and on approaching Hertha See – a round, black lake in the woods – she is overcome by guilt, begs to leave. Hertha See, I learned, was home to the Slavic goddess Hertha – a kind of mother earth figure – who was said to run through this forest, to bathe in the lake. In some accounts, she was an incarnation of the devil, drowning unsuspecting suitors in the depths of the water. Hertha could only ever be a goddess or a siren. As if the only options for a woman were safety or danger.
Like Effi, we found our way into the forest. Atop the cliffs, there was a spare, winter beech-wood where we walked for hours. Sunlight came down in long, cold shafts, and when we neared the edges of the chalk cliffs, the wind was so strong we had to shout. I sat on the edge, wrapped up but still cold, watching the waves break a hundred metres below.
We walked to Königsstuhl, the ‘King’s Chair�
��, the highest cliff, and then clambered down the stairs along the white chalk face, towards the sea. Jacob and I wanted to swim. Tom stumbled behind us, cursing the cold, calling us crazy. Standing on the sidelines, he watched us. His face was shocked, dismayed, worried and amused all at once.
On the beach, we tucked into a small cove and undressed. The wind cut like ice. Stepping into the sea, it felt warm; we’d been swimming in lakes much colder than this and I felt powerful. The waves were fierce, though, and as we picked our way over the stones and out into the deep, we had to brace ourselves against them. Great lumbering waves that hit me at my knees, full-force. After five minutes in the water, the feeling left my body. It was too much work, the seabed too rocky, the cold cutting like glass. We stumbled to shore. Back on the beach, looking down, we saw that our feet were covered in blood.
The next day, we went to Prora, to an unfinished monolith of Nazi architecture on the seafront. The concrete buildings ran along the beach for miles, flat-faced, enormous and grim. Intended to be a holiday camp for twenty thousand workers, the buildings were abandoned, bathrooms half-finished, walls half-plastered, windows broken. Cold wind rushed through the openings, into the halls. There were no doors inside. Nearby, developers were remodelling one of the blocks for condos.
Tom needed to sketch the inside of the building as part of a project he’d been at work on, so Jacob and I climbed out through a broken window and went on to the beach. A thin line of pine sat between the buildings and the shore. It was sandy here, but just as windy as the day before.
Alone for the first time in days, we began to talk. Small, quiet words in the wind, so we had to stand close. In that enclosed space – close to one another and in the roar of the sea air – I understood. I was going to leave Berlin soon. It wasn’t the right time. I began to cry.
A concrete jetty stood ahead of us, and I clambered out on to it. The wind nearly knocked me backwards, but I walked forward, head ducked against the force of it. I slipped my legs over the edge of the concrete, out over the waves, and sat alone. The water was white, breaking far out from the beach. Waves take their shape from the ocean floor, from what sits beneath them, and they fall only when the balance that sustains their arc-like movement is thrown off, when they reach their breaking point. The energy of the wave is always there, in the water, but it only shows itself when it approaches dry land. These waves – spilling breakers – the kind of waves that result from a slow roll on to land, form far from shore. They roll in slowly, limply, breaking over themselves in a pool of white. They are gradual, steady, undramatic.
Fifty yards out from the jetty, the Baltic broke itself up into white water, and I watched it break. I sat with the grey sea and sky surrounding me, wind draining the moment of sound, crying, wanting the sea to wash all feeling away.
—
The water at Nymphensee is silk. August has arrived, thick and hot, like July. Summer isn’t abating.
I had stepped into the lake and sunken deep into its wet sand, the slippery feeling of quicksand beneath my feet, but now that I’m swimming out to the lake’s centre, it is light and soft. I’m not alone – Anne is here, swimming too, and chatting all the while. She’s new to me, a fellow writer who has asked to join me for a swim. As we swim out into the lake’s middle, talking about the books of Jacob von Uexküll and John von Düffel, I’m convinced she’ll be a friend. For now, she swims a few yards away, her blond curls suspended above the water in the periphery of my vision, a bright point at the edge of my sight-line.
Nymphensee is a new lake, man-made, and sits at the edge of Brieselang, a small town west of Berlin. In his Rambles, Fontane lamented the changes wrought on the landscape, the turning of marsh into dry land, and being here today, I have a sense of it. There is a dusty dryness; Nymphensee the only patch of water amidst cars and concrete. But the lake itself is sheltered from the roads.
Out of the lake, we settle on the sand amidst the reeds, drinking tea. The forest on this side of the lake is all birch, newly grown after the quarry was closed. The sand around Berlin is light and fine, and where there is sand, the water seems to share the quality of lightness. In the middle of it, our talk is quiet, gentle.
That’s how I remember it. Months later, Anne told me that on the way back we passed a group of neo-Nazis, tattooed and posturing, but naively, I only remember the feeling of the swim, the lightness of the day, the newness of it. Freedom.
—
Water feels different in each place. The water I grew up with was hard, cutting, and when I go back to visit it now, I feel it in my ears when I dive in. Something different, more like rock. The lake a whetted blade.
The water in Berlin has a softness to it. Maybe it’s the sand, buffing the edges off the water like splinters from a beam. It slips over you like a blanket.
There’s a safety in this feeling. In the lakes here, there is a feeling of enclosure and security that Canada can’t replicate. And it shouldn’t – the pelagic vastness there is entirely its own, and I’ve learned to love that too.
Here, in the middle of the lake, the fear of slipping away dissipates. I’m right in place. I won’t slide off the map. I’m at home in the water, and I’m not scared to be alone here.
When I first came to Berlin and began swimming, every moment carried with it a feeling of freedom. It was the first fresh start I’d had in a while, and it was entirely mine. A few years earlier, when I was twenty-four, I’d left a marriage I couldn’t fix.
So Berlin held a kind of promise for me. I had mourned the loss of love, found my feet again, and was giving myself the gift of time that I’d not given myself in my early twenties. Back then, I had chosen the temporary safety of a relationship, of a marriage, and the magic of it could only last so long.
Berlin was the first place I had for myself as a woman – I didn’t have to be here for anyone but myself, and that was new to me. I felt independent for the first time. On my bike, out in the city, and out in the centre of Krumme Lanke on my own, it felt like the greatest kind of magic. I’d walked away from marriage, from love, and found something incredible in the landscape. In swimming, I’d found a place to be with myself.
And then I met Jacob. I found a kind of bravery swimming with him, a fearlessness I’d longed for. But it came to me in a flood of energy. I wondered if I could ever find that courage on my own. The brief moment of space that had opened up – that gift of time I’d given myself after my marriage – suddenly filled in, wrapped itself tightly around me again. I hadn’t learned to love since my husband. I was terrified. I didn’t want to give up the space I’d found.
But I did. And afterwards, I was angry.
north
Twenty days before I first moved to Berlin, I sat in the front of my husband’s 1998 Toyota Corolla and got a divorce. Actually, that’s not quite accurate: I signed the stack of documents – which for months I had referred to as ‘the paperwork’ – pressed up against the dashboard using a blue ballpoint pen. Five initials and three signatures. I passed them to my left, and he signed them too, an inky blue scrawl.
I had joked repeatedly some years earlier, perhaps at his expense, that he had the most forgeable signature I knew. An abstract squiggle, like two small mountains on a page – I used to forge it all the time. Forgery was the only way to get things done.
But that day, in the Toyota with Nova Scotia plates, I waited. It was hot and he asked me to roll down the window, or maybe it was cold and he asked me to roll it up. I can’t remember. It is remarkable to me that I can’t remember this small detail from what ought to be an important moment. I remember so much. I remember that there was an enormous, plastic bottle of water in the back seat, the kind you’d buy if you were stockpiling for the apocalypse. He’d always been afraid of tap water. There was an empty, used coffee cup on the floor.
The day before, we had met in the Halifax Public Gardens for coffee, on the benches where we’d spent our early summers swooning and staring into one another’s much younger e
yes. I was twenty then. Eight years had passed. I’d arrived there early enough to look comfortable, though I wasn’t, and had bought myself a cup of coffee on to the lid of which I’d pressed my red-lipsticked mouth while I waited and tried to keep calm. He’d stopped at the gazebo when he saw me, and I saw him, and we waved. When you don’t see your husband for three years, you don’t quite know what to expect: greyer hair, a moustache, a pot belly, or increasingly gaunt cheeks. Two out of four.
Coffee is a great mediator. We’d stood in line at the café and I’d watched him order a large dark roast, and held my tongue for the requisite ten seconds before noting, half-jokingly, that he still hadn’t managed to quit caffeine though it made him ill. It was a constant struggle, he’d replied. Years earlier, on a street corner in Brighton, a similar remark had resulted in an argument and us taking two separate trains home from our honeymoon.
I stuffed the signed and dated paperwork into a plastic envelope and opened the car door. We were stopped on the side of the road outside the family court, as if we were dropping off a parcel at the post office or popping into the corner shop for a packet of chewing gum. He’d never liked formality much, but I’d learned in the intervening years that a lack of ceremony didn’t make things feel any less important. Love, sadness and anger still did their quiet work.
The court was formal and bleak in the way that only buildings related to births, marriages and deaths can be, and a winding staircase tunnelled us down to the basement and the wicket designated for do-it-yourself divorces. Standing in the waiting room, three feet away from another couple retracting their vows, we stood quietly, pretending not to listen.
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