Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  Groß Köris sits fifty kilometres south of the city, and from here we’re walking north-east, along cobbled village streets and on to a thinly forested trail. Fontane travelled here in the final volume of his Rambles, travelling by boat and coach around the region between the Oberspreewald, in Brandenburg’s south-east, and the Dahme River. It was sparser, then, but remains much the same. Fontane recounts visits to quiet villages lined with orchard trees and expanses of heath and woodland. It is Brandenburg as I’ve come to know it.

  Today, the trail we are walking is lined with fly agaric, some insect-eaten and drying in the cool sun. We crouch down low and press at them with sticks, tracing their crooked lines for yards along the trail. Standing up, we find ourselves at an abandoned, crumbling cabin. The roof has fallen inwards, and as we pick our way through the rubble we see that the living room is still furnished. Water-stained 1970s floral wallpaper still lines the walls. Behind the cabin, we find a blue bicycle, intact but for a missing wheel, its frame bent slightly out of shape, rusting into the ground. Everything is here, an entire life caved in on itself and open to the elements. It’s been here a while and leaves me suddenly, fleetingly sad.

  We make our way back on to the trail and keep walking. We’re planning to loop Klein Köriser See today, following the fourteen-kilometre Rundweg that leads us around the lake. The trail isn’t isolated, but it’s well enough into autumn that the lake is quiet. A quarter of the way around, we stop for lunch and a swim.

  Coco hasn’t swum since summer, so my assurance that the water isn’t all that cold doesn’t get her far. She steps in and gasps, immediately retreating to shore, while I swim out into the lake’s sunny centre. The lake is strewn with leaves, and as I dry off back on shore I realise that the truest cold will be coming soon.

  After swimming, we stroll slowly through the woods, eventually rounding the lake’s southern shore near the village of Klein Köris. Along the village road, there stands an oak tree elaborately carved into a three-headed dragon. It catches our attention because there’s little else nearby: some boat rentals, houses and a busy road. The Drachenbaum, ‘Dragon Tree’, stands at the edge of the road, watching the traffic.

  The tree’s nearness to the road contributed to its demise: when it began to rot in the late 1990s, local officials deemed the tree unsafe for traffic, but to fell it would have been devastating. In 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the people of Klein Köris had planted the oak as one of two ‘peace trees’ in the town. The tree’s story is displayed on a placard, and reads like a eulogy to village life.

  The reason for two peace trees was down to local conflict: no one could agree on where to plant the tree, so two trees were planted, and this particular oak by the lake happened to thrive. The threat of felling emerged over a century later. The decision to save the oak’s trunk by carving it into a dragon – an effort led by local dragon boaters – spoke of small-town solidarity about a hundred years late.

  Coco and I peer at the tree and the story on the placard, but the afternoon warmth is growing thin and we need to get back. The train is due soon, and we have plans back in the city. As we walk on, though, I turn to glance at the tree, which stands bulkily and clumsily by the road, and I think about the small intimacies of Brandenburg, and how I’ll never get to know them all.

  —

  At eighteen, I’d devised my escape plan. I’d grown studious and serious the previous year, knowing it would provide a way out of the complications of family life and the small city I’d grown up in. I had the naive idea that a change of surroundings would enable a total transformation: that I might distance myself from the anger I felt at home, and from the fear that I too would slip into emotional precariousness. I could shroud myself in education, could outsmart depression and instability. If I could be intelligent, then I would be good, and then everything would be okay. I’d been accepted into university two thousand kilometres from home. I wanted nothing more than to leave.

  There was a city on the east coast that could be mine. A quadrangle of college buildings filled with books I could read, and all of this would be my salvation. Naturally, I had a boyfriend there, waiting for me to move to Halifax to join him.

  I had grown up with so many privileges, but the world of books and culture and ideas wasn’t among them. I overcompensated: I studied too hard, typed up my hand-written notes every day at the end of class, sat in the front row, answered every question. I did well, academically speaking.

  But my personal life was a mess. Despite the physical distance from home, the inconstancy of my previous life seemed to trail behind me, and there was no space between myself and my overblown reactions. I had never witnessed another option and clung desperately to what I believed were solutions. Work, love. The emotions and reactions most people would have relegated to their diaries, I enacted out loud, in public. My boyfriend and I broke up and reconciled weekly. I sat on the stairs of my dormitory crying, begging for acquaintances to console me. Afterwards, I would throw myself all the harder into work, believing it would change me. I got a part-time job as a nanny, then another in a café. I joined the campus newspaper. I swore and raged and threw furniture at home. I grew busier and tenser than ever, swinging violently between two options. Work or fall apart.

  I carried on this way for two years. By the summer after the second year, the detritus of overwork, exhaustion, my rages and my desperate need for succour were beginning to swallow me. My boyfriend – to this day, one of the kindest men I’ve known – broke up with me at last. I don’t blame him. I had it coming. Afterwards, I fell apart.

  The Nova Scotian summer was turbulent. The weather swelled from damp winter to an almost blue warmth, and then it rained and rained. The grey spread over everything – fog clouded the morning and rain soaked the night. The air had the petrichor scent of salt and worms, the smells of the harbour and dirt after the rain.

  I started walking at night, headphones on, listening to a song called ‘The Hypnotist’s Son’ on repeat. I thought the song felt like the hollow in the middle of my chest, the churning pit of my stomach. The song talked about being swallowed by love, about being swept out to sea by it. I had only ever felt love as this gravitational pull, this force that left me unmoored. I had never learned to anchor myself, and all the schoolwork and part-time jobs in the world wouldn’t solve it. The nights would pour with warm rain, and I would walk and cry and listen to the song, tracing rectangles through the streets between campus and my apartment.

  At home in my apartment, I drank beer and coffee in alternation. My roommate had left a bottle of amaretto on the kitchen counter, and I drank that too. I rolled and smoked joints in bed and left them half-crumpled in an ashtray on my window-sill. I sought the vacancy of drink or drug, but retreated terrified from its edge. I turned to sex, to passing comfort.

  One night, I sat in the dark smoking after a doleful one-night stand with a friend of a friend. He awoke and asked me what was wrong, and all I did was shrug. I wanted the feeling of this other person’s body off my skin. The next day I slept with my ex-boyfriend, one last time, as if it might fix how I felt.

  Two weeks later, when my period didn’t arrive, I took the tests, went to the doctor, stopped drinking and smoking. I kept crying. My ex-boyfriend came with me to the hospital, navigated the maze of locked doors, internal stairways and elevators that led to the windowless clinic. He held my hand in the pink waiting room, where re-runs of Saved By The Bell played on repeat.

  The gel felt cold on my stomach. I watched the ultra-sound pulsing on the screen. And then I scheduled an abortion.

  I think about that screen sometimes, about the bean-shaped glow at its centre, and calculate the years that have passed. What would my life have looked like?

  I kept up my night walking. I resumed drinking and smoking, heartbroken by what sex had brought, and began wandering tipsy past the Armdale Rotary towards Chocolate Lake. It sat just on the edge of the city, so named because a chocolate factory had once
sat on the site. A quarry had been dug and left behind this barren, sterile lake. I’d never truly swum in a lake, but there, it no longer scared me.

  I stripped out of my clothes in the dark. There weren’t street lights, just the big mouth of the moon agape in the sky. I started to swim. Out into the cold, into the dark, into the lake.

  —

  It’s late October, and there is frost on the air. I’ve been nursing a cold and feel warm with fever, but am restless as ever. I decide that I need a swim. Just walking to the end of my street fills my legs with heavy exhaustion, but a cracked-open, cavernous feeling has been washing over my chest as I’ve stayed home, and I don’t want to feel it. I text Sam and ask if he’ll join me.

  I lug my bike up the stairs at Karow Bahnhof, ten minutes before the train arrives. I feel faint. Once Sam arrives, though, I immediately feel better: other people do that to me, their presence like an anaesthetic. Sweat stops beading on my forehead, and I regain command of legs.

  We take the train as far as Basdorf, a village twenty-five kilometres north of the city, and from here we cycle north, through Wandlitz and on towards Bogensee. After Wandlitz, the road is freshly tarmacked and cuts a narrow strip between symmetrical rows of pine. The monotony of pine is broken by the occasional grove of beech trees. Sam stops near one and touches the bark, talking about beech trees from his childhood back in England. I’m only half-listening. Instead I’m watching his hand on the smooth width of the tree, imagining the sensation of the bark. We cycle on.

  Just before the road curves south again, we duck off on to a forest road, winding through the pines and into a small valley of beeches. Past here, we churn our bikes up a small hill until we’ve reached Bogensee. An ageing, peeling placard shows the map and marks out where we are. It’s just an empty stretch of road.

  On one side of the road, there’s a forestry school; we can hear the distant hum of a chainsaw. Beyond the bushes on our left, there’s an enormous, crumbling complex of looming Soviet-era architecture, rows of windows revealing a decaying, lavish interior. It was once a high school for the Free German Youth (FDJ) in the East, a kind of scout or guide movement. The buildings now stand empty, with no hope of a buyer. It’s sprawling and enormous, grown over with bramble. Once in a while, the sound of an attendant’s weed-strimmer rips into the silence. The local government is hoping to keep it from total disrepair.

  We pass the buildings and round the corner, coming to a much smaller, more modest villa. Its roof slopes low to the ground, such that the whole house seems to be working its way into the soil, not so much rotting as sinking under its own weight. In its small courtyard stands a sculpture of a couple embracing. They are rigid, holding one another both close and far apart, their intimacy uncomfortable. I circle them, feeling their stony distance.

  Joseph Goebbels – the chief Nazi propagandist – lived here. It is said he brought women here for sex, hiding his affairs in the countryside. He wrote propaganda here. Brandenburg has been trying to sell the property for years; they’re careful about whom they sell it to, though, wary of neo-Nazis, and they have yet to find a buyer who passes muster. The house is beautiful, but discomfort seeps into the ground around it.

  Sam and I pick our way across the property, peering into the windows. It’s immaculate inside. The parquet looks warm in the autumn sunlight. Curtains line the window-frames. The doors are all locked; it’s well-kept, but desolate.

  This desolation is catching, so we lock our bikes and wander down into the forest, away from the house. The forest slopes down towards the lake – Bogensee – which is scattered with leaves. Beeches, oaks and strips of damp, fern-covered marsh surround the small lake.

  Autumn has fully turned and the lake glows with the colour of it. The water itself is brown, toffee-like and thick, and the air is thick too. Cold and damp, hanging heavily above the water. The creeping sadness of the house seems to have worked its way down here, as if the fear once manufactured in its rooms has penetrated the air of the place.

  I step into the water and sink into the muck. The lake is full of eels, but I block out the thought of them and swim twenty feet out, to where I’m suspended in its opaque cold. Sam swims closer to shore, and then we both pick our way back to land and dry off. My fever has gone, but I don’t quite feel well.

  —

  A few days later, fully recovered, I head out alone. I bike southwards, past Königs Wusterhausen, towards Großer Tonteich. It’s a clear patch of water at the end of a gravel road near some allotments. Birch trees line its north shore and a campsite sits on the south. It’s a thimble of a lake; Teich means pond. It feels safe, luminous, quiet.

  The feeling of desolation from Bogensee has lifted. It’s too easy to be sucked under by sadness in the autumn. The weather has been curling in towards winter, at one moment bright and at another grey and damp, but today is sunny. A single patch of thin cloud blows across the sky, and then the sky glows with the cold, white, late-October light. I swim out into it. The water temperature is exactly right for the air, bracing but not cold. The lake is clear and peaceful, so I linger a while, rolling on to my back, watching the leaves fall from the trees. I savour the lightness of it all, the watery feeling of suspension and the crisp glow of the sun.

  schatz

  A week into November, the pleasant weather has held over. These glimpses appear in autumn, bright patches of warmth spreading into the winter, a slight glow that convinces me it might never get cold. The darkness will come, though, and in a few months I won’t quite be able to remember how bright these days have been. There’s a rhythm to the light, and my moods move with it, a buoy on a rolling sea.

  Last week at Großer Tonteich felt like an affirmation, a silent confirmation that the strength I had been building in September hadn’t slipped away. I was beginning to find comfort not just in swimming alone, but in sharing it with others, and was learning how to switch between the two. I didn’t know such a thing was possible. Most of my life, when I was with other people, I could only ever imagine continuing to be with them. I felt a desperate longing to melt myself down into them, and when they would leave the shock of reconstituting myself as a whole individual seemed a terrifying task. But in the end it was never as bad as I imagined it would be.

  Walking helps. On my bicycle, I lose myself in speed, in the slick glide of the tyres on the road. My legs and the pedals become a single moving thing, spinning in time. Being back on my feet is different. At a walker’s pace, everything changes: expanding and contracting. Distance stretches. The minutiae of the trail present themselves.

  Swan’s-neck thyme-moss – Mnium hornum, one of the most common mosses – appears. Its sporophytes reach into the minuscule, unseen upper atmosphere of the ground. The geology of the landscape underfoot vibrates into my feet.

  It’s at this pace that my mind quiets, and with the swing of my gait that I do most of my best thinking and writing. It’s easy to retreat into my head on these walks. But I focus my attention: there’s much to see. Mostly, I look for mosses.

  I’ve become obsessed with mosses. The forests and the damp ground here are covered in them, thick blankets of green in every shade. Mosses are a steadying force: patient, sturdy, but soft. Mosses are masters of their tiny worlds, experts at making life in the boundary layer of their small environments. Without water, mosses simply curl into themselves, waiting. They can lose ninety-eight per cent of their moisture and still survive. This is why, if you’ve ever taken a cluster of moss home from a country walk, you can revive it months later. When water does come, the moss can make the best use of it. Being only one cell thick, every part of the moss is intimate with water.

  But still, they are neglected. Bryology, the branch of study devoted to bryophytes – mosses, lichens and liverworts – is a rare specialism. Botanists prefer angiosperms, the flowering, seed-bearing array of plants that includes trees and herbaceous flowers. Most plants you know are probably angiosperms. Roses. Tomatoes. Daisies. Most of what we eat comes fro
m angiosperms. They make up most of the plants I learned in my studies. Like many things, because they’re the thing we know the most about, they’re the thing people take the most interest in.

  Bryophytes, on the other hand, ask me to slow down. I crouch down low to the ground. I meet them at eye level, at the level of their micro-environment. Larger mosses grow underwater. Some species of Mnium, related to the swan’s-neck thyme-moss, grow in lakes. Evolutionarily somewhere between algae and land plants, mosses are the link between the water and the landscape.

  When moss appears in a landscape, it is one of the first stages on the way to woodland. They are among the first things to arrive on bare ground, along with grasses and wildflowers. These eventually give way to scrub, shrubby plants that darken the surface of the ground. When young and fast-growing trees like birch arrive, strong woodland is not far behind. All of this can take over a century. In Brandenburg, the names of forests give a hint to the story of succession. Here, Heide, which normally means ‘heath’, usually refers to forest: pine forest grown over the spare, sandy heathland of the region. Moss is at the centre of such stories.

  I’ve been writing about forest succession in my research, tracing the transformation of scrubby fields and hedgerows into full-blown woodland on Hampstead Heath. It’s all I can think about. Looking at the margin of this German path now is like seeing a fragment of the wider timescale of ecological change.

  Swan’s-neck thyme-moss carpets the edge of the path I’m walking. I’m looking for water, north of the city again, finding a trail that runs through Birkenwerder, a small town with a quaint, red-tile-roofed town centre. The trail appears at the end of a residential street and is part of the 66-Seen-Wanderung, the 66-Lakes Trail, a four-hundred-kilometre-long hiking route that forms a ring around the city. Its name belies fact: the trail passes more than seventy lakes, but sixty-six was thought to be a nicer sounding number.