Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  I learned that I couldn’t fix someone else. I just had to decide how long I was willing to wait. That little flat near the Heath housed both our marriage and the small piece of adulthood that I plastered over the years we spent together, falling apart.

  I’d attempted to make a new life. I’d moved far from family, and bound myself to my decision as if it couldn’t be undone. I felt too ashamed to undo it.

  My father visited and laughed scornfully at the terraced houses – dark down the middle with only windows on the ends, he said – and I knew it was because he’d grown up in one, across the borderland, land of my father. The tidal inflow of the Severn had kept him from England. When the new bridge from Wales was finally finished in 1966, he’d cycled its length the morning before the opening ceremony, staking claim, marking territory before the cars would rush over it, fuller than the tide. It was a tiny betrayal, my boarding a plane and ending up in England, unceremoniously. I didn’t take it seriously at the time.

  waiting

  I’m biking east from Königs Wusterhausen when I hit the sand track. It runs into the forest as far as I can see, forming a thin, white margin between a scattering of pine stands and farm fields. I look at my map, frustrated, but it’s the best way through. I apologise to my bicycle and push on.

  The track runs for seven kilometres from the small village of Senzig down towards Frauensee – ‘Women’s Lake’ – where I want to swim. It takes forever, and at every mound of thick sand I hop off my bike and walk for a bit, gazing up at the sky’s patch of sun and cloud. I set out late today and hope the daylight lasts long enough for a swim.

  It’s December. Winter is arriving in patches: cold winds and grey skies, dark evenings swaddling the city streets. The brightness of this weekend is an anomaly, and I want to take it in, to take the light and the air into my lungs and hold them there until spring. Winter will bring its own pleasures – the ice especially – but sunshine is rarely one of them.

  When I reach the lake, I follow a footpath eastwards, searching for the best spot to swim. It’s lined with reeds, and the far end of the lake peters out into sloping, scrubby banks and then rows of pine. On this side of the water, however, it’s sparse. Light reaches the ground in pale shafts through the gaps in the trees, mostly oaks. Sound carries over the lake too, voices chattering away. Ahead of me, there’s a group of elderly walkers clad in puffy winter jackets. One of them wears a Santa hat. They’re all carrying mistletoe out of the woods, approaching the campsite and youth centre nearby. A holiday fair is in full force, and the sounds of music are echoing through the trees. Christmas is coming soon.

  I duck off the path behind them, watching them disappear towards the campsite, and carry on looking for a place to swim. Ahead of me I see a beach, so I rest my bicycle on its side and approach the water’s edge. It’s clear and sandy, and an unused dock stretches out along the edge of the reeds. Stripping down and stepping in, I find the water brisk but not too cold; some lakes seem to hold the heat better than others. Frauensee feels exactly right. I swim out on my back, but the sun is beginning to sink below the treeline and shadow creeps over the beach. The scent of wood smoke carries across the air, out on to the water, curling in towards evening. Dry warmth calling me back to shore.

  —

  The years I spent married had the opposite of their intended effect: a relationship designed to bring two people together instead taught me to be on my own, incrementally. I felt as though I’d spent those years holding my breath, swept under by some current that would grab hold again whenever I neared the surface. Intimacy had disappeared, touch and affection dissolved, and with them any willingness to try.

  I carried on as if we’d been married much longer than we had: I worked and shopped and cooked in routine. We went to a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant in Tufnell Park every Thursday night, when we were both home early from work, and the woman in the restaurant came to know us by the enormous bottle of water we ordered. We chatted to her, and she watched us quietly eating in the empty restaurant. I sometimes think she was one of the only witnesses to our marriage. When it ended, many of my friends said they were never convinced he’d existed. We’d spent those years as if in hiding.

  I spent my time approximating some half-formed idea of daily life. While he worked gruelling contracts in social care, falling apart within himself and disappearing into drink, I worked most days at my job for an educational charity and three evenings a week pulling pints for bankers in a city pub. The recession had taken hold, so there were a lot of pints to pour.

  On Friday afternoons I did the shopping. On Saturdays I went to the farmers’ market, and on Sundays I cooked a proper dinner. When he stopped eating what I’d cooked, I continued anyway, as if I thought that my own steadiness, my own stillness might catalyse a change. Or at least, it wouldn’t get worse. My denial was as complete as his retreat from me. The uneaten meals stacked up next to the kitchen sink.

  After two years I’d grown tired, and having spent most of that time living with a shadow of a relationship, a shadow of a partner, I no longer feared being alone. I realised that I’d been doing it all along.

  I took to running. The summer our marriage ended I ran hard and fast across Hampstead Heath, damp clay soaking my ankles. I ran up Swain’s Lane past Highgate Cemetery, up the brick-lined hill and back down again. I ran to the Ladies’ Pond on the Heath. I hadn’t been swimming much in those years.

  That pond ought to have scared me; it would have, some years earlier. With a concrete dock and two ladders dipping straight down into the deep, there was no halfway point. No beach, no shallows. Just depth.

  We had once taken a holiday in Santorini – when we still believed things were fixable – and had swum off the back of a boat in the middle of the Caldera. I’d hung off the edge of the ladder, hesitating, terrified, but he had treaded water next to me. He stayed with me, watching as I dipped down slowly into the clear sea, panicking as I swam. He never left my side that day.

  The Ladies’ Pond wasn’t like that. I began to swim there alone, surrounded by women who seemed stronger than me. I wanted to be like them: sturdy, no-nonsense, unsentimental. The pond was opaque and slipped around my body thickly, the water a felted brown. It was cold and open: a bright circle of relief in the middle of the trees. I swam out into its centre again and again, out towards the willow and then back towards the dock. I swam to the lane rope at its farthest edge, watching the cormorants glide through the deep. The movement was an anaesthetic.

  Leaving my marriage meant leaving my home: the flat near the Heath, the routine, the city. I’d been offered a scholarship to do a doctorate in Toronto. A way out, a plan. It came at exactly the right time, and though I didn’t want to leave, and didn’t want to return to Canada, I knew I had to take it. I was only twenty-four, and it was an opportunity to repair my life, to learn to stand steadily and alone.

  I remember the taxi ride to the airport on the day I left. I remember looking around our empty rooms, the marble fireplace bare, my suitcases at the door. I remember locking my keys inside the flat, and then watching the terraced houses slip away as the taxi drove. We never drove past the Heath, so I didn’t get to watch it slip away.

  —

  The day after Frauensee is even brighter, so I decide to take another swim – this time in Butzersee. I’m out on my bike early, before the park fills with families taking in the December sun. I’d woken up from a fitful sleep, a handful of hours scrabbled together late in the night. Another dissertation deadline is approaching, and for the most part, sleep has been eluding me for weeks. Instead, I’ve taken to walking in one of Berlin’s nineteenth-century municipal parks, Volkspark Friedrichshain, at night. Most nights, there’s clear darkness but occasionally a fine mist gathers around the tree trunks, tiny droplets of water suspended in the air. The border between dry land and the world of water is a porous one. Each night I trace the same route through the park, chain-smoking cigarettes, and then go home and sit on my bedroom
floor working, like I did when I was at university. I worry I’m slipping back into old habits. When I’m not biking or swimming, only walking and work keep my nervous energy at bay.

  I feel awake in the bright sunlight, though, and as I draw my bike down Karl Marx Allee I’m smiling. I have the road to myself; Berlin is quietest on Sundays. Stores stay shut. There isn’t much to do. This early, I can slip out of the city unnoticed, swim, and be back before breakfast.

  I cycle on towards the lake, one of the three lakes out near Kaulsdorf, where I swam in the summer. I’ve been longing for this lake, waiting for exactly the right day. It’s incredibly clear and open, laid across a field south-east of the city, dug from a former quarry. When I arrive, the flat emptiness of the lake is a mirror, the sun doubled in the sky and water, too bright to look at. I pull my hat down over my ears – despite the sun, it’s still winter – and put on my sunglasses.

  My ankles sense the cold first, the kind of clear pain that hits your bones but not your skin. Within seconds, though, the feeling abates and I can walk out into the lake, plunging to my neck. I swim out towards the sun, squinting behind my sunglasses, and tread water in the middle of the lake. The water in winter is stratified, clear as in the early summer, and as I circle my legs in the cold I can see my toes and the receding depth beneath them. It’s still December, though, so I can’t stay in too long. I pull myself back to the shore, long strokes in the sun, and scrabble back on to the sand.

  By the time I’m dressed, the cold of the swim has gone. I sit in the sun eating my breakfast as dog walkers appear on the path. One woman stops, looks at me.

  ‘Waren Sie baden?’ she asks. Were you swimming? She sounds incredulous. It’s a question I’ll hear again and again, every time I meet a passerby during the winter. I tell her yes, and she looks horrified, then walks on, shaking her head.

  —

  ‘Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.’ I was sitting in the library, racing to the bottom of a stack of books, facing a deadline. But these words stopped me. I paused, traced my way back to the beginning of the sentence, and began again. ‘Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape’ – I mouthed the words, running my fingertip over the page. Maybe this was it. Each time I had moved somewhere new, to a new country or a new city, I soon found only the past in the present. There was a choice: keep moving or learn to live with ghosts. Freedom, it said. This seemed a promising thought.

  The words appeared in the middle of a study on mushrooms by Anna Tsing, an anthropologist I’ve come to admire very much. That this academic study might provide the words my heart so needed seemed improbable, but they were there on the page, and then in my fingers as I diligently typed them up. I needed to take them with me.

  After my marriage, I launched myself into work. I spent the next five years in archives and in the field, at work on my doctorate, as if returning to the scene might somehow repair it. As a historian, I spent those years chasing down ghosts in the landscape: those of my past and the pasts of others unknown to me, but everything I found seemed to recede just out of reach. I would find some fragment of the past, some story to tell, and it would somehow exceed itself. Words I wrote couldn’t capture them; they evaporated like mist from the morning hillside, still there, but diffuse, in the air, no longer solid. Ghosts are like that: with you always, but not entirely yours and impossible to capture in your hands or in a story. I tried to get them into words anyway.

  I hadn’t wanted to leave the Heath, and my doctorate became a way of trying very hard to stay. The months I’ve spent finding my way across the flat plains of Brandenburg feels much the same. The unwinding of tension as I work my way from lake to lake. Getting to grips with ghosts.

  —

  The warmth is short-lived. The middle of December hangs damply in the weeks before Christmas. It’s the worst kind of cold – almost English cold, wet and pervasive. I’d almost always prefer the snow.

  I wake up angry. I’ve been working constantly, still not sleeping, and bristle at every comment from friends about my habits, about my moods. I worry that I’m growing isolated, difficult to be around. With work pressure closing in, I’ve grown uneasy, unkind. When I’m not writing or swimming, I lie swaddled in my duvet, watching Netflix, eating takeaway Thai food. I’m hoping it will pass, that it’s just winter settling on me.

  My choice of lake doesn’t help. I hate Plötzensee. Many Berliners love it. In summer the beach here is packed, riotous on a weekend. But all I see is the stretch of industrial waste on the way to the lake. I feel only the furious wind as I push my bike along the canal. Then the lake appears and I remember that it’s fenced off on this side, that I need to slip under the chain-link and scrabble down to its frowning shore.

  I can’t quite place what I find so grim about Plötzensee. Anne suggests that it might be the history: the Plötzensee prison is nearby, where political prisoners were held, sentenced to hard labour and executed under the Nazi regime. North of the lake is a cemetery. This corner of the city feels crowded despite its starkness. There is a kind of sunken quality to the place – indeed, local legend says that a village here was once swallowed by the rising lake of Plötzensee. But it may also just be my mood, the darkening grey of the winter.

  I lock my bike to the fence and slide under, my back-pack snagging on the fence’s coiled edges. The shore-line is ragged, litter working its way into the ground, and the water moves in slate grey waves. Thin rain begins to fall.

  I’m going to make this quick – in and out, a final swim before I slip off to see family in Canada for the holidays. The promise of a break from work is the one steady thing on my horizon. My best friend Rachel is turning thirty and we’ve planned a weekend away with friends before we all shuttle off for family Christmases. The past weeks in Berlin have felt leaden as I’ve waited to go back. I’ve missed my close friends more than ever these past months.

  I slip into the water and it’s exactly as I expect: bracing cold, the metallic feeling of its grey sliding over me. I swim out into the centre, counting my strokes, longing to be out and dry again. I count to sixty and then turn back. Better things await me in the days ahead: warmth, light and respite from the grey of the city. When I come back, I hope it will have turned to white.

  winter

  Stratification: As the water cools below four degrees, the coldest layer floats to the top, eventually forming ice. The water directly beneath the ice remains at four degrees. The ice shields the lake from wind, so the layers remain stratified.

  under ice

  The air is algid. January brought full winter with it: the snow and then the ice. Anne and I tread carefully as we descend the frozen stairwell between the S-Bahn station and Schlachtensee. A sticky white snow coats the ground. The lake ahead is glassy and white.

  I’ve packed a hammer, and as I walk it clinks against the side of my thermos, a promise of warmth. Anne tells me about her Christmas holidays as we walk, our words forming thin clouds of water vapour in the air ahead of us. She had been swimming back home on the western edge of Germany, before the ice arrived. I’d been in the Great Lakes. My sister had swum with me in Lake Erie. My father had driven me to Lake Huron and watched from the shore, calling me crazy, a trace of admiration in his voice. It had been nice to be back home, but I longed also for Berlin. I’ve become divided, stretched across places.

  Now, back in Berlin, we tuck ourselves into a small clearing on the lake’s southern edge. There’s a patch of liquid water twenty feet out, and I think the ice here is thin enough to carve through. Anne looks sceptical – it’s her first winter – but I’m determined. I strip off my clothes and step towards the ice, wielding my small household hammer.

  There’s a sound made by ice when you hammer into it. First, a chipping, as you hit the hard surface and it breaks away like glass. Then the dry, bristling sound of the surface nearby crackling as the force of
the hammer ripples through it. The ice sheet begins to move and break up. The twinkling sound of the lake emerging from its icy cap is like a far-off rustling, someone standing at a distance crumpling a piece of cellophane.

  I chip a hole large enough to stand in, and from there I step barefooted into the cold – the water at one degree Celsius – and begin to hammer my way out towards the lake’s centre. It’s a numbing cold, pain gleaming into my bones and then retreating, and within a few seconds I’m comfortable, able to stand for the few minutes it takes me to unpick a seam in the ice sheet. Tiny fragments of ice gather around my legs, thin as flakes of glass, and I push them aside, under the water, under the frozen cap of the lake. I know that later, when I dry off, these thin flakes will have left tiny cuts all over me, as deft as paper, minuscule slices in my skin. It’s a small price.

  I’m waist-deep, and the ice is growing thinner as the lake deepens. Fifteen feet out, the sheet ahead of me relents and breaks apart, and a clear path opens between the shore and the open water. I turn and call for Anne to swim out.

  She hasn’t swum with ice before, and when she steps in a deep exhalation of voice and breath leaves her. It’s painful the first time, but I’m out in the deep now, enveloped in the black cold of the lake. The sharp paroxysms of pain have ceased in me, but I watch them work their way over Anne as she swims out. Between pain and numbness there’s a brightness, a crisp, heightened sensation in the cold: that’s the place to swim through. When it ends, when numbness arrives, it’s time to get out.