Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  On my back, I trace loops with my legs as I kick out into the centre, pale blue sky gliding above me. Ears underwater, I hear nothing. It isn’t a terrifying, muffled nothingness, but a quiet solitude. Stillness, and I float. The nagging November memory leaves me for a moment. I’ve never been here. This lake is entirely mine. Alone and suspended.

  The peace is temporary. Eyes closed, I don’t see the grey edging in from the north. But I hear it, a slow rumble, and I know I have to get out. Not for fear of the lake or of the lightning, but because of the rain – I am miles from the nearest train station. I’m at least fifty kilometres into the day and I can’t make it all the way home. I need a train and I need to get there before the storm.

  Stillness interrupted, I scramble to shore and get dressed into clean clothes: cotton cycling shorts and an old Team GB vest. I’m on my bike within seconds, shunting between parked cars to get back to the main road. I look behind me and see only the slow-motion churn of slate grey. I need to outrun it.

  I pass the road sign marking eighteen kilometres to Bernau, where I can catch a train home. But the road is narrow and sloping, a rolling line cut through an enormous tranche of reforested pine. I pedal harder and keep my eyes on the road.

  Cars begin to overtake me, and turning over my shoulder my eye is caught by the slightest flash of purple, recognisable to me even at a distance. Heather. I have it tattooed on my side, a single inflorescence etched into my ribcage. I mouth the shape of the word and say it out loud to help me remember. I keep pedalling. Moss is scattered on the hillside.

  More cars speed past, and to my right I see only the whisking line of the forest: heather, birch, pine, fern. I repeat them in my head, then with my mouth, cycling in rhythm, and I feel the wind shift. To my right, a field opens and above it looms the dark, inky grey. A line cuts through it like water through pigment, a wet crease to remind me of rain.

  I need to bike faster but I come to what I think may be the only hill in Brandenburg. Willing myself up it, I see a crowd of lycra-clad cyclists ahead, giving up and heading for shelter. I follow the road, passing them on the gravel shoulder. In the sudden darkness of another stretch of pines, cars turn their lights on and begin to pass. It’s only four o’clock, I think, and then realise that the road has darkened to night as the storm rolls overhead. Wind rushes in, and suddenly the air is a mess of pine needles. Warm, fat drops of rain begin to land on my arms. I relent. I need to slow down.

  I stop on the roadside to put on my bike lights. Rain now falls heavily in sharp pins and needles, turning the world to a fluid and moving grey. I pedal on as lightning rips into the small crack of sky above the trees.

  I’m soaked through, dodging overflowing potholes, when I see it: tucked on to the roadside, a lonesome bus shelter, glass-topped and dry. A black bicycle is lobbed on the road’s shoulder, and in the shelter I glimpse the unmissable, cheerful greeting of a flowered summer dress. The woman in it is soaked through too, and she smiles as I dismount and run under the glass roof, laughing uncontrollably.

  In the dry of the shelter, we watch sheets of water fall from the sky. The smell of rain washes away the citrus green of pine; everything becomes grey. I check my map and see that I’m still six kilometres from the train in Bernau. Resigning myself to the brief respite, to waiting out the storm, I turn to the woman, who is clutching a blue towel, and ask, ‘Hast du geschwommen?’ I have no idea if this is the right verb or conjugation, so I trail off, mumbling. Have you swum?

  She laughs and says, yes, before the storm.

  In German, I ask her where she has been and she begins to tell me about a nearby lake, just a small one, in the forest. She pulls out a folded paper map, points to a blue spot at its centre, and I look closely. Mechesee.

  I’ve never seen this lake before. Perhaps it isn’t on my map, I think momentarily, before regaining good sense and deciding, instead, that some lakes only show themselves when they’re ready to. In this moment with a total stranger under a bus shelter in the middle of a forest, in one of the sharpest and briefest storms of summer, I am given a new lake.

  south

  By September, the heat has lifted. Grey begins to cloud the sky, and sun creeps out only momentarily. Summer leaves as quickly as it arrived. The days pass swiftly as my work grows frantic. Amidst the deadlines, I’ve taken on part-time work as a nanny. I spend entire days proofreading, linking one sentence to another without coming up for air, and then rush off to meet the kids. I’ve set out a strict schedule for my work and feel pressure to stick to it. The first chapters of my dissertation are due in a week. But I’m excited. The coming of autumn means cold, and having grown used to the warmth of summer, I’m looking forward to something more. Something bright, and sharp, and different. It starts in the sky. The warmth of the sun disappears first, but soon it’ll leave the ground, and then water too.

  There’s a patch of forest south of Müggelsee, just south of Berlin: young oak and elderberry in alternation, with pine and rowan trees clumped like bristles on the edges. I’ve arrived here by bus and a short walk through residential streets. Along the way there’s been no one, not even a car. I stop at the forest’s edge, unsure, and then follow the dirt track until the late summer sun thins, the thin skeletons of pine growing thicker the farther I walk. Yellow starlets of bird’s-foot trefoil break the moss’s green, tiny interjections in a silent wood. The wood smoke on the air – a sure sign of summer waning – reminds me that I’m not far out, just at the edge of the suburbs, though I’m alone amidst the trees. A kilometre into the woods, I find an errant patch of mint, grown thick in the absence of anyone else, and I wonder how it got here.

  Then there’s the lake, Krumme Lake, so close in name to my first Berlin lake, Krumme Lanke. I’ll find these Slavic-named ‘crooked lakes’ across Brandenburg, like a connect-the-dots puzzle that’s secret and special only to me. Between here and the thin rivulet veins of the Müggelspree lies a bog, newly restored and thick with grass and sphagnum.

  Luca, the brazen Italian I’ve been renting my studio space from, had told me about this lake, a crooked, lily–capped stretch of water at the end of the watershed. He’d promised to come. But it’s September now, and he’s declared swimming season over. Weeks earlier, his incredulity at the idea of swimming through winter felt like a challenge, and now, on my own, I have something to prove.

  I’ve come alone, and though I’m grateful for the peace of the forest, when I reach the lake I feel a ripple of fear. It hasn’t been strong this summer but the changing season seems to sharpen my fear. The rising heat of panic as I step near the water’s edge. I’ve been walking for an hour alone and I realise, stepping in to the water, how far I am from anyone else. Why hadn’t there been anyone else on the path? I’d wanted the solitude, I tell myself, inching knee-deep into the lake. But something isn’t right: it’s too beautiful, too quiet. It can’t be safe. My legs ache to get out. My pulse moves to my eardrums, and I retreat to shore.

  I can’t not swim. I’m immediately ashamed, swearing quietly into the silence. A patch of sunlight moves across the rippled lake surface and I decide to take the opportunity, ploughing back into the water, waist-deep, the roar of water breaking the air. I’m in and swimming, still panicking but afloat, and I begin to count my strokes. The winter swimmer’s negotiation: stroke-counting, the thing to get you in the water and the thing that keeps you safe. I count to forty-five and I’m out again, still angry with myself. Forty-five is what I’ll swim in winter, when there’s ice. Here there’s a slice of warm sun and a lake full of blossom, and it’s September. I have to get back in, and I do, but it’s a stubborn dance, forcing my legs into the water when something small, old, and unused at the very bottom of my skull is saying to get out. This can’t happen now.

  —

  After the houseboating trip to Lake Temagami when I was eight, I didn’t go near another lake for years. It didn’t matter much: I didn’t feel especially Canadian at that point. My parents were busy wrangling with
their newfound success in business, the new worlds opened to them and their kids through their good fortune and hard work. We didn’t spend our holidays by the lakes, unlike many other Canadians, and if I wanted to swim there was always the safety of the swimming pool. After their divorce, I kept up swimming at the YMCA. I’d joined the school swim team, and between training and lessons, I was swimming four times a week. My hair smelled of chlorine, and I grew to love it. The fact of my being a strong, regular swimmer seemed only to underscore the absurdity of lakes, of stepping into deep water when perfectly good pools lay in wait. Pools were safe, sterile, domesticated. In lakes, there seemed to be a wildness and danger I couldn’t comprehend.

  This is what I struggle to make sense of now: I was a great swimmer. I’d been in lessons for years, earning embroidered badge after badge, until, by sixteen, I was diving to the bottom of the deep, retractable-bottomed pool to retrieve weighted bricks. Even that pool stopped scaring me.

  But in front of a lake, I fell apart. There was no amount of skill and training that could intervene, no sensible way to reason with it. In front of a lake, I felt fear clearly, purely. It wasn’t negotiable.

  This is how it would go. Someone, usually my father, would tell me to get in the water. I’d just stand there, staring. The hollow, dark feeling would spread across my chest, and I’d keep staring at the water. The longer I stared, the worse it got. The feeling would spread downwards, into my legs, and then upwards across my shoulders, into my skull. There would be sound: that electric, hazy humming that comes when you’ve stood up too quickly or smacked your head hard against something. It would surround everything, until I could no longer hear my father encouraging me into the water. And then, in a sheet of dark red, vision would go.

  By that point, it was too late. There was no getting into the water. My only chance was in that small moment between sensing, thinking, and feeling. Before I could register what was happening. This wasn’t about over-coming fear, but about getting there first, beating it to the punch. Wedging something into that tiny space between the lake and my terror. I was never fast enough.

  —

  I haven’t seen Sam since New Year’s Day, when we’d broken through the ice in Krumme Lanke. The winter swimmers I know in Berlin can be counted on one hand, but he’s one of them. I hope he’ll be an ally in the coming weeks, someone to keep me company. With someone else around, my fear feels less solid. It turns to vapour, and I can swim through it. By now, the summer has dissolved into autumn, and in the mornings a damp mist rises from the ground.

  The broad avenue of plane trees that cuts through the middle of Treptower Park is one of my favourite sights in autumn, but I know it is thinner now than it was just a few years ago. These trees and many others are being lost to Massaria fungus, changing this sheltered stretch of road dramatically. Even so, they are bright in the autumn sky, green turning to orange in the cool air.

  This is one of the few swims I’ll take within the borders of Berlin. Within the city history arrives more thickly than in the country, the stories more present. Stone and concrete hold the past in this way, I think. Open and abrupt. In the countryside, it grows over with green and settles into the landscape. The city stone is a monument. The park is a record, one of Berlin’s earliest municipal parks. In the final days of the Second World War, it became hard-fought-for territory between the Soviets and Germans.

  The Soviet War Memorial occupies the centre of Treptower Park, enormous but stark, a graveyard for fallen soldiers. We cycle around it, racing our bikes towards Karpfenteich – ‘Carp Pond’ – the hooked stretch of water in the middle of the park. Excavated in the 1880s, the pond sits amidst orderly paths, a swathe of reflective, autumn colour amidst the nineteenth-century park ideal. Swimming here is like swimming in a painting, bright and still.

  Leaning our bikes against the trees, we undress and step into the water. The mildewy smell of leaves rises up as our feet sink into the muck, but the water is clear enough, so we swim out into the cold. It’s blue in the sky and brown in the water. We swim towards the horizon: a riot of colour in the turning trees. The water will turn soon too.

  autumn

  Overturn: The top of the lake cools and sinks to the bottom. As the season changes, wind mixes the lake until it settles.

  a pool of light

  It’s the end of September, but a day so bright arrives that I have to swim. I want a journey. A day of solitude to make sense of my own feelings at the shift of the seasons and the completion of an enormous part of my work. The summer had been so bright and so busy that I’d become caught up with deadlines and hooked into the trace of adrenaline that comes with long days out on the bike and at the lakes. Reaching the lakes had become a task, and the rhythm I’d found worked especially well in the warm weather, when I could be out for hours with the summer light stretching before me. But the reality of my decision, by autumn, is beginning to settle on me.

  Half the year, Berlin is a dark place. Not the permanent night of the north, but a slowly settling grey. By mid-autumn, when the time changes, the sun will be down by four, and in mid-winter, by three-thirty. Sunken low into the ground, so much of the city seems dark even in daylight. In the past weeks I’ve found myself mostly alone and often tired. As if when the heat lifted and the cool settled, something settled in me, too, and it is taking all of me to wrestle it back into the world. It isn’t depression – I know that too, and this isn’t it – but sadness. The kind of mourning that accompanies the change in the seasons, and the realisation that time is passing and I’m still here, doing this thing. Homesickness – for friends, for familiar places – comes in thick waves, turning solitude to isolation. With summer I’d found a rhythm in carrying out my swims, in visiting these places, but the core of it was something I’d been avoiding. It appeared that day at Krumme Lake, when I’d been scared to swim. This small fragment of loneliness and fear. In autumn, I know, I’ll have to make peace with it.

  I take the train to Spandau, just west of the old 1930s Olympic Stadium, and bike the rest of the way to Sacrower See. The ride is easy, down a suburban road that at one point could be anywhere in my childhood. An Esso station at one corner, a KFC on the other. It’s as if we already know these places, wherever they appear. Comfort and heartbreak wrestled into commercial premises.

  Beyond the sprawl, fields and trees emerge, punctuated only by the occasional village. Eventually the quiet road turns into a gravel path, and then into forest. The quiet comes slowly too, and by the time I reach the forest my mental chatter has slowed to a silent halt. I’ve been working all hours this week, writing towards a deadline, and desperately need this swim to set me right. I’ve come here searching.

  This forest, the lake and the quiet roads that run through here sit uneasily at the city’s edge, indifferently tucked alongside the Havel River. I wheel my bike into the woods and along the road to where signs mark the border that used to be here, and as I’m wandering the trees I realise that this trail is part of the Berliner Mauerweg, the path marking the Cold War border. The trail was established between 2002 and 2006, one of the ways the city and local campaigners have sought to make use of remnant land in the footprint of the Wall. Birch wood creeps on to the roads, reclaiming the ground. It is hushed and sheathed in the most distant kind of sadness – like so much of the city – but breaks in the trees are interrupted by the brightest of blues. The water sits in the distance.

  As I push my bicycle along the sandy trail a father and son bike past, stopping briefly to ask me about my bike. I chat to the father for a while, and then realise I’m speaking about my bike as I would speak of a friend. She is fantastic, I say, so reliable. Wishing me a good day, they bike off ahead, enjoying their Sunday. There is something in the simplicity of their manner, quietly biking side by side, that moves me. I hold my bicycle close to my side, the dark green frame aglow with the pine, and as they disappear around a bend I duck off the trail to find a place to swim.

  There’s an alder tree
shading a tiny, sandy cove on the lake, so I settle and step into the diaphanous wet. The water has a cut-glass clarity, the kind that regular swimmers say is noticeable just as the water begins to turn with the season. You only notice it if you swim often enough to know the water, to recognise the moment when the suspended residue of summer settles and the clearest water is left at the surface. It doesn’t stay this way, but for a few magical moments in autumn the water is crystalline, like swimming through a gemstone.

  The dregs of summer warmth have quickly disappeared and the water is cool at the surface, so I swim out into the sun and paddle backstroke in circles until I’m tired. There’s no one here, and for the first time in a while I feel completely at ease, without a glint of fear. My breath stops short as I think that this place has always been here, at this border place. Sacrower See was in the East, right near the Wall. Who swam here then?

  I swim to shore and dry off, then walk farther along the forest path that brushes the eastern edge of the lake. A short way in, I find another clearing with a much larger, sunnier beach, and there sit the father and son, now reading comics to one another in the afternoon warmth. I smile and set my bike against a tree, getting ready to swim again. Something about this end of the lake feels different, more open and warmer, so I paddle out and lie in the sun a while, until cloud creeps in and I begin to feel cold. It’s almost October.

  Warmly dressed again, I bid the father and son goodbye and set off out of the forest. There’s a short-cut out of the woods so I won’t have to loop back. I wheel my bike towards the trail’s end, nodding at the passing Sunday strollers who meet me along the way. It’s a busy afternoon on the trail, but something in the swim shifted me and I’m grateful for my own solitude.