Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  I take small, silent steps on the lake. Fifty feet out, there’s an old couple. The man’s breath clouds beneath a dark grey moustache, and the woman wears a woollen scarf one might more rightly call a blanket. They’re huddled close to one another, walking. I’ve grown so accustomed to the cold. Stopping, they ask me how thick I think the ice is and, in my halting German, I surmise that it is probably ten centimetres thick. Not thick enough, I say, and they nod, glancing at the skaters. We all keep walking anyway.

  I make my way back to shore and retrieve my bike, its bell frozen over with a thin frost. The entire road is frozen too, but I cycle back along it, minding the slickest patches, until I’m near the top of the lake. I step off to look at the lake here, and as I wheel my bike towards it I lose my footing and slide, bike and all, eight feet down a small hill. I land sideways atop my bicycle, hot breath knocked out of me, my knee hurting fiercely, momentarily. But I get up and continue, brushing the snow off me – it is cold, I can’t feel much of anything anyway.

  The sun is beginning to dip low in the sky, time to cycle back. Without the light, the temperature is dropping. In German, they say arschkalt. Arse cold. It sounds sharper, more cutting in German. I say it aloud and then repeat other swear words to cut the sting of the cold. I say ‘fuck’, and realise I’ve said it in a German accent, as if it were spelled ‘fack’. My hands and toes have begun to thrum with numb pain from being out too long. I can’t stop thinking that if I’d swum, I’d be warmer.

  I bike slowly, so it takes me an hour to reach the train. Once on board, warmth rushes over me again. I take off my gloves and move my bony fingers, straining new life into their joints. And then, looking down, I see that my leg is covered in a deep and spreading red. Blood from the fall. It must have been frozen while I was outside, and now, in the warmth of the S-Bahn, is pooling into my clothes. I swing my foot on to the seat next to me, rolling up my leggings to reveal a cut as deep as my kneecap, warm and red, streaming across my leg. I stare at it blankly. A woman sitting across from me winces.

  It’s been a failure. That’s what my mind calls the whole day, almost automatically. I packed my bag the way I always do: towel, underwear, extra socks, plastic bag, hammer, hot water, lunch, thermos, bike-repair kit, firstaid kit. I dressed warmly. But I didn’t swim. Something in the day – the ice, the skaters, the fall – frustrates me. There is something I’ve been prevented from feeling, an urge unanswered. I look at my kneecap again – the wound yellow under the skin – and the thought arrives that in all of this swimming, I’m not completely sure what I’m doing. Like I’ve been trying to force some feeling out, to shock it from my system in the ice. Like I’ve been picking at a wound, preventing it from scabbing over.

  —

  I spent the weeks after the Oxford Street accident in a sling, holding my separated shoulder in place, taking trips to London hospitals I’d never seen before, seeing doctors, and getting X-rays. I grew sick from painkillers, so the doctor prescribed stomach medication. Amy helped me into and out of my clothes, styled my hair, and reached for things in the kitchen cupboard. I guarded my shoulder beneath my winter coat, terrified of being bumped into on the Tube.

  I hadn’t expected to resist the city, but those weeks were shrouded in my own shame at needing help, at being injured. Friends and doctors told me I was making progress, that a slump in mood was perfectly ordinary after physical trauma. But I couldn’t ride my bike or swim or do normal things for myself, and resentment welled in the creases of my days. I had begun to sink into something uncontrolled, unwanted.

  London had changed in my years away. I didn’t remember it being so expensive, or needing to work quite so hard to get by. Places that had seemed alive and interesting some years earlier had begun to feel sterile and empty, despite the crowds. Restaurants that had been popular in 2008 had franchised and rolled out across the city. Friends had moved to the outskirts, looking for spare bedrooms and reasonable rents. The hospitals I visited were stark, the A&Es at risk of closure. I’d left before the cuts had hit deeply and returned to find things different than I remembered.

  I worked a lot, throwing myself into the research I could do with just one hand. On weekends, I worked part-time as an events assistant, shuffling guests to their seats, checking on catering, minding my arm. At night, I spoke to Jacob. After the card and after the accident, his friendship became more vital than ever. I sent him pictures of me in my sling. He asked about my progress in healing. We talked about trips we could take together, camping trips in the West Country, bike rides across Northern Germany. We talked side by side on our pillows, on FaceTime, and new, pervasive intimacy grew up between us, in the distance between Berlin and London, in the time we spent apart. The distance of the screen made it possible.

  The months in Berlin had worked something into me, some idea or some longing, and the accident seemed to crystallise it. It was more than just him. I longed for Berlin. I began to dream of the cities overlaid on to one another, the Circle Line flowing into the Ringbahn, the creeping edges of London dissolving into Brandenburg countryside. I missed riding my bike across that flat landscape. I missed the forests and I missed the lakes.

  There’s a term glaciologists use for the rocks that are picked up and moved around by glaciers. ‘Glacial erratics’, they call them, from the Latin errare: to wander, to roam, to be mistaken, to go astray. Erratics carry their origins with them, telling the story of where a glacier has been and how the ice deposited the erratic in the landscape. An erratic is a rock that doesn’t belong to the geology in which it is planted; instead, it’s a record of another place. They appear wherever glaciers have been. They’re in Ontario, near my family’s cottage, and in Nova Scotia, shaping the coast-line. They’re in Brandenburg, a geological record of the ice, like the lakes. Fontane writes of erratics in the first pages of Der Stechlin; they are part of the geology of the place. Like an erratic, I was carrying past places with me. I felt mistaken.

  For the first time, I felt adrift in London, like I wasn’t where I was meant to be. This place I’d sought out, the home I thought I was coming back to had disappeared. I wasn’t sure if the accident had knocked it out of me or if it hadn’t been there all along.

  firn

  Stolzenhagener See is capped with mist. Thin ice greases its edges, slick with meltwater and grey. Damp has reached under my skin into my bones, so I’m walking ever faster to warm up. If I trace the western edge of the lake, I’ll find a spot to swim.

  On the train up, the heating had been on full and I’d had the illusion of summer: green grass out the window, deer grazing in field after field. But then snow had appeared in patches, stitching the edge of a field to a creek. A white crane stood by the creek, watching the water, hiding in plain sight.

  The path here is wet from melting snow and forms sticky brown ridges wherever I step. The entire forest seems to be melting – the slick shine of the lake like a glassy eye. A drier, colder day would have been better, I think; the damp is the worst. I wonder if the winter will be short, will peter out in a spell of rain.

  The trail is lined with holiday homes grown thick with lichen. They each have little gates that lead out towards the lake, rusting in the wet air. It’s a private lake, owned since the nineteenth century by one of Germany’s wealthiest families: Betreten verboten, the signs all read. I walk to the northern tip of the lake, finding nothing. Fences line the entirety of this side of the lake, so I’ll have to pick one of them to climb.

  I back-track a way, swinging around the side of a tall wrought-iron gate that floats atop a dock – no fencing attached to it, and to climb past it you have to dangle over the lake – and sit down on the wet wood, pulling off my boots. The lake water looks brown in the shallows, filled with leaf and mud, before slipping out into an icy cap of grey.

  I step out into the lake, the cold of it burning my feet, and launch myself forward. My breath comes heavily today – I’m anxious out here alone – and I count my strokes aloud. One to twenty-fi
ve, swimming out towards the ice, and then I turn back, counting the strokes of my return. I’m back at forty-six. A short swim, but it’s enough. I haven’t seen a single person today, and I’m cautious on my own in the ice.

  The quiet of the lake here isn’t peaceful: it feels vacated of tranquillity, a thick and melting isolation running off into the ground, and I find myself wanting company, even a stranger, a walker on the trail. But no one comes, just the hollow sound of a woodpecker working its way through the trees, so I slide out of the shallows and into my clothes again, making small jumps on the spot to warm myself up.

  The temperature of January has fluctuated by the week, ice melting and re-forming, cloudier each time. I’ve watched it change from clear to grey as the weeks have passed. At the lake, the damp cold still hangs heavily, but by the time I’ve walked the four kilometres back to the train station in Wandlitz, the sun has come out.

  I have an hour’s wait for the train, so I slip into the bakery by the station and order a coffee with a slice of cake. The yellow Formica of the bakery counter reminds me of summer. I don’t think it has changed since reunification. I stop here often on my way to and from the lakes nearby, and each time it feels as if I’ve stepped into a prior decade, the synthetic decor of another time, this place a stark but small comfort. I sit perched on a plastic chair, stirring my coffee. Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ comes on the bakery’s fuzzy radio, and I feel warm again.

  —

  The cut on my knee has scabbed over and begun to form a deep, grey scar where I’ve picked at it. I’ve kept it bandaged when swimming, but run my fingertips over it each night, the grains of the wound sliding off into scar tissue. I can’t stop touching it, the same way I close my eyes and run my fingers over my tattoos to check if I can feel the lines of them in my skin. The scar and the lines of ink are a kind of record of time passing and I want them to remain. There’s a bump on my shoulder bone where there shouldn’t be.

  In my reading about ice, I learn about the snow that blankets temperate glaciers, old snow that melts and recrystallises until it has the texture of wet sugar. ‘Firn’, from the Middle High German virne – meaning ‘old, last year’s’ – compacts over time, over years, eventually becoming ice. Until that point, though, it reshapes itself with the seasons, the residue of past times reconstituting itself in the cold present.

  The melting and re-forming snow here in Berlin and Brandenburg will never do that; it only happens on glaciers in the mountains, or in the far north or the far south. But nonetheless as the winter carries on fluctuating I imagine it between my fingers, sticky and granular. The Encyclopedia Arctica says that when it reaches this stage, it doesn’t melt any longer but compacts, eventually becoming a part of the glacier.

  I think a lot about last winter, about the accident and about how I changed. About why I felt I had to start swimming alone. The anger with myself and the heartbreak have dissipated and turned into a dull, steady presence. My shoulder still aches when I wake up in the morning. It probably always will. In the past decade my mother’s knuckles have grown thick with arthritis – worse when she works in the garden – and I wonder if my joints will do the same. I’ve developed the habit of sliding my right shoulder back every time I move, rotating the joint in hopes it won’t ice over. There’s no visible scar except this habitual movement, this overcorrection.

  —

  I’m on the top deck of the bus, feeling faint. I’ve been in bed for two days with norovirus, clinging to a metal mixing bowl, fevered and forehead glistening. It’s my first day out again, having managed a slice of dry toast for breakfast, and I see that I’ve missed very little: the weather is still grey and damp. The snow has gone, but a thinning coat of ice still caps the lakes.

  The bus drives west from Spandau, crossing the line of the Mauerweg and the border of Brandenburg, dropping me at the side of a busy road. I duck off into the residential streets, eventually finding the worn track that leads to Neuer See.

  It’s a small suburban lake in the middle of a park. A tiny beach near one end is littered with the blown-out scraps of fireworks, a sure sign of Berlin winter revealed by the melted snow. In Germany, fireworks are only sold and allowed to be set off at New Year, so they are lit in abundance, a deluge of light in the dark winter. They linger afterwards, wasting with the days.

  A thin rain begins to fall as I follow the track around the southern edge of the lake, and by the time I reach the lake’s western tip, it’s falling heavily over the water and the trail. I pull my hood up tight and cross my arms for warmth. The rain is pooling on the remaining lake ice, giving everything a slick, oiled look. There’s a playground ahead, so I take temporary shelter under a wooden pirate ship.

  Once the heaviest rain passes, I half-heartedly begin to look for a spot to swim. The large, curling shape of Falkenhagener See hugs closely to Neuer See, the larger left by glaciers, the smaller by a sand pit. The lakes are two records in the landscape. A small path runs between them, and I follow it a while, looking for a clearing. The best one is occupied, a sou’westered fisherman perched on a stool, despite the drizzle. I don’t want to disturb him, so I carry on until I find another small opening in the trees, then slip myself through towards the water.

  Avoiding bottle caps and shards of glass, I step out into the sand. The water feels warmer today than it has in weeks – though I know it is still no warmer than three or four degrees – so I stand a while in the rain before swimming out into the lake’s centre, where the waves settle into a glassy stillness near the ice. I swim towards the ice. Now softened and pitted with the warmth of the rain, it has the texture of slush, and comes apart in my hands. It’s only slightly colder than the water; the sensation of it melts away as I touch it.

  —

  The following week, I go for lunch with Luca and Baptiste from the studio. We’re eating Italian food when Baptiste tells me a story of a man who couldn’t feel pain. The man was subjected to studies, he tells me, in which scientists would slam a hammer down next to his hand. He wouldn’t flinch. The sensations we all learn to avoid, the painful experiences we gather and begin to understand as harmful, didn’t make sense to the man.

  I’m midway through a lasagne when Baptiste begins speaking, and when he finishes, I realise I’ve been holding my fork aloft, rapt in attention. I don’t and could never understand the reality of such a condition, but something about this man sounds so familiar. Things that ought to have hurt didn’t register.

  When the body enters cold water – like any physical trauma – it responds. ‘Cold shock response’ is the body’s reaction to the drop in temperature, the pain of the water. Because water conducts heat better than the air, the shock of the cold is far greater in a freezing lake than simply being out on a cold day. The water draws the warmth out of the body faster.

  The initial response is a gasp, which can be the biggest risk in cold-water swimming. Gasping, you risk breathing in water and drowning. It’s why I won’t let first-time winter swimmers jump in to the water. Tachycardia sets in: the heart races. The body urges you out. The key is to keep moving. Entering the water slowly, step by step, it’s possible to steady the breath. It’s possible to feel the pain of the water strike and then dissipate. By mid-winter, once I’ve acclimatised, I hardly react at all.

  There’s a popular misunderstanding about hypothermia. People ask if I worry about freezing to death when I swim. I explain that it would take at least half an hour or more for hypothermia to set in, and by then I’m out and dry and rapturous. Two to three minutes in a frozen lake can suffice. I stay in long enough to move from pain to pleasure, counting my strokes.

  Water under eleven degrees is considered ‘cold’ by scientific standards: it’s enough to induce cold shock response, to drastically impair your muscle functions. Shivering is a common response at first. It sets in quickly at the beginning of the season. It’s the body’s effort to produce heat. But repeatedly exposing the body to the cold changes things: the water doesn’t seem s
o bad after a few weeks. You come to expect it. There’s no shock, but rather a stillness, an ability to observe the sensation of ice on the body. As the weeks pass and my body comes to expect the cold, the quaking takes longer to arrive. I don’t shiver until long after I’ve left the water. Instead, I’m attuned to the sensation. The more subtle variations between temperatures become apparent: the cold of the sea in winter is milder than the ice of the lakes. Some lakes – Weißer See, for example – hold the cold better than others, such that a five-degree swim at one lake is easily differentiated from a one-degree swim in another.

  The joy of it is the body’s response to pain. The cold triggers an endorphin release that diminishes the discomfort of swimming, blocking pain and producing euphoria. I’ve met opiate users who liken the sensation of cold-water swimming to using heroin. Perhaps they exaggerate, but I return to it again and again, looking for the high.

  Baptiste is still talking about the painless man. I’ve eaten my lunch, but the entire time I’ve been absent, thinking about the water, about the cold and the ice. A crack forms, like the small, white split that appears as I hammer into the ice. My thoughts turn to Jacob, and then to my husband, both present and then absent again, these inconsistent figures in my memory. The sorrow is scarred over but ever present.

  I think of what the lakes meant to me then and what they mean to me now. In the middle of the lake, I’m completely present. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I’ve conditioned myself to the lake, to the cold, to the pain of it. I can hold it. I’ve made it mine.