Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  out of air

  When I had just about healed from the taxi accident, I took a train to Scotland for a few days of research in a private archive in Dundee. It was February by then, and the winter had laid itself thickly over England. As I rode the night train north it quickly became apparent that the train’s heating was broken. The carriage filled with frozen air, and as I pressed my face up against the glass, I saw snow beginning to fall in the dark. The train felt cold, metallic, like a flashlight cutting through a black night.

  I was travelling alone, hoping to immerse myself in work at the archives. But I spent the journey with Jacob at the other end of the internet, messaging all the while. Wind rushed through from the doors of the adjoining carriage, so I tucked myself into my coat, clutching my phone to me. Sleep came only in glimpses, snatches of quiet solitude in the cold until we reached Edinburgh and they repaired the heating. Then it was just a couple more hours until Dundee, and I slept fully.

  In the morning, I pressed my head against the window and peered through the dark: the middling slate-blue of morning was beginning to stretch its breath across the landscape. We crossed the Tay and crawled into the city, still street-lit and silent. From there I took a bus. The archive wouldn’t be open until nine, so I had decided to swim. It was one of my first swims since the accident. The bus led me north, along the coast, until the stone buildings of the city crept ever lower, and I found myself in a quiet stretch of a former fishing village, Broughty Ferry.

  I had read that the local outdoor swimming club – Ye Amphibious Ancient Bathing Association – swam here, but I had been too shy to reach out. My shoulder was only just beginning to move again, and I was dipping into water only tentatively. I hadn’t swum properly in over a month.

  I followed a quiet waterfront path around Broughty Castle and along the beach on the Firth of Tay. Light was beginning to touch the horizon, pink and gold on the water. I undressed on the beach and piled my clothes neatly near the waterline. The sand was cool, cream-soft beneath my feet. The cold night on the train had gone from my limbs, but I wanted the water as much to wake me up as to free me from the journey.

  I stepped out up to my waist and then swam, delicately, paddling one-armed, watching the sun lift itself into my sight-line. I’d never been to Scotland before and I’d never swum in the North Sea. I stayed in the shallows, floated in that interstitial space between river and sea, tucked safely at the edge of the landscape.

  The sun was reaching above the horizon, so I clambered back to shore and dressed slowly in the last dregs of the darkness, watching as the sky burned red and orange. There was no wind. I was alone. In the stillness of the morning, I wanted Jacob there with me.

  Impetuously, impulsively, I booked a ticket to Berlin. I hoped that seeing him might give form to this amorphous feeling I’d been holding. I’d hoped to catalyse a change between us. By the end of the week I was stepping carefully down a creaking aircraft stairwell. Jacob met me at Arrivals, held me close a moment, inspected my bad shoulder, and then turned and led me to the train. Not home, but south: so we could swim.

  Zeesener See sat a few kilometres south of Königs Wusterhausen, at the end of a marshy wetland. It was a long, thin lake, marine blue and capped with ice. Clear white snow lined the ground and coated the ice, the fingertips of wind touching the blue of the water. Midway along the lake we found a dock and decided to swim.

  It was cold – winter was still holding fast on to February. We undressed quickly, stripping down to our skin in the tight cold, looking properly at one another for the first time. The furtiveness of the previous autumn was gone. A small ladder dipped down into the lake, and he watched me climb down into the blue. He followed me down, the glacial rush of water swelling between our legs, over our chests, and around our necks. The sensation of cold didn’t surprise me, but it stopped my breath momentarily, powerfully, with the rolling force of an ocean rushing on to shore. It was our last new lake together.

  When we’d first met, there had been a glint of recognition: a feeling of sameness, of understanding. I felt that he could push me to grow in ways that I couldn’t quite grasp. In the months we spent together, swimming, I became someone else. Someone stronger and braver. I didn’t know if I could be that person without him. I’d longed to give shape to our love, but it was impossible. He was present and then absent again, retreating as he had months before. Immediately, I regretted the visit, felt that I’d somehow catalysed an ending. On the last day, I stood in his doorway, ready to go, heartbroken.

  When I’d been on the train to Scotland, I had sent him a picture of the carriage and he’d said of the seat across from me, ‘That’s my seat.’ And it was. He had been there the whole ride, he always was, at the other end of the internet, at the other end of the phone. But now, standing directly in front of me, an arm’s distance away, he wasn’t here. He was capable of putting an ocean between us with a word, with a glance. A gap opened up wider than the distance between countries, between matter and text message words, and he raised his hand as if in salute, saying only, ‘Thanks for coming.’

  —

  It’s February, a year after Scotland and that visit to Berlin. I’m thirty-six lakes into my year of swimming. I’m up early. The sun sits just above the bare skeletons of the trees, which are coated in hoar-frost. A thin armour of white cold covers everything. The streets are silent but for the birds: the songs of blackbirds and great tits swell in the air, landing on the stillness of everything else. I don’t see a single person the entire way to the lake.

  I’ve come back to Zeesener See now, alone, as if to exorcise a ghost. I want to swim here again, to see if anything of what I remember is right, if it really was as blue as I had thought it had been. More than anything, I want to forget him. I want the cold of the lake to anaesthetise the remaining hurt and anger, to wash it off of me, if it can.

  The lake sits on the eastern side of the village of Zeesen, a small residential stretch outside Königs Wusterhausen. I’ve been here a number of times on my way to other lakes, and have come to know its streets. It’s the kind of quiet place where chickens stray from their yards, roaming the lanes confidently. Locals advertise household services like ironing and childcare from their front windows. Children ride their bikes up and down the roads. An enormous abandoned manor house sits crumbling near the village’s centre. To me, the house looks like sadness.

  I take Schulstraße towards the lake, following the intermittent paving stones along the road. It’s nine in the morning and Zeesen is silent: no dog walkers or cyclists. It feels, in a way, as if the town had frozen overnight with the weather, empty, in a suspended state. The sun edges higher in the clear sky, and still there’s only the sound of bird song. Ahead of me, I see a collared dove standing in a driveway. It sees me too and turns away. The birds have better things to do.

  I reach the lake through a small metal gate and make my way towards the dock. It’s exactly as I remember it: the bluest lake and the bluest sky, and the long wooden dock stretching out into the water. There are ducks and cormorants floating nearby in the only fluid patch of water. The rest is glazed with a thin, rippling ice that moves with the waves. It must have formed overnight as the rest of the town fell silent.

  I stand a while on the edge of the dock, watching the birds fly. They settle fifty yards northwards, near but not too close. They’re the only ones here with me. Ahead of me, the lake opens up, an undulating stretch of curves edging towards the horizon, white with morning sun. The distant end of Zeesener See is cast in air frost, rising in the light the way smoke rises from dry ice. I realise now how cold it is.

  The longer I stand here, the closer to the surface my thoughts rise, and I don’t want to hold them today. It’s so beautiful out and I want to linger in it, to feel the sun and the cold and the blue fully on my skin. I undress and place my clothes neatly atop my bag, stepping from my boots on to the wet wood of the dock. It is slick with bird shit.

  I step towards the ladder and lo
wer myself down rung by rung into the cold. There’s ice on the other side of the dock and as I settle into the deep water, waves roll under its surface, making the entire lake creak and roll rhythmically. It makes small cracking sounds in the silence. The intensity of that day here last year is gone: instead, I swim slowly, silently, watching the ice. My heart aches, but only distantly. I feel the lake on me, around me. The water feels thin, clean, and as I move through it I feel it ripple down my limbs and across my back. There is life in the cold.

  I climb back up the ladder and watch the entire lake move: fluidly, adaptably. The ice doesn’t break up, but creaks and settles with the water, dancing at the surface. I want to be like the ice, but it’s warm up here in the air. I’m not of the lake, not of the ice. The sun is warming the water from my skin, and soon I will be dry. I watch the droplets bead on my arms and then disappear into the dry cold of the day.

  It isn’t what I thought it would be. I don’t know what I had expected. But a stillness, a silence hangs over it all, asking me to acknowledge it. I’d come for an exorcism, to wash myself of pain and grief, but instead I find silence. I feel the ghost settle into my body, into my skin, and into the air. The ache in my heart doesn’t go. It stays with me, like the ice on the lake, as if to say, ‘I’m here, moving with you.’

  echo

  The wintry cold has dissipated and the ice has gone. The first weeks of February are bright, the air warming and the sun gleaming behind a pattern of white cloud. I’ve been working the past weeks with a kind of focused, microscopic attention, editing chapters of my dissertation that I’ve read again and again, nearing a final draft. But I’ve managed to save the weekends for swimming. Still, though, I’m late, cycling furiously through Mitte to reach the train in time. I dodge pedestrians as I take the corner at Friedrichstraße, pushing my way up towards the station. My phone is buzzing in my pocket; Anne is waiting.

  I heave my bike up the stairs and find her on the platform. The train is pulling in. She’s got the tickets already – Anne is as keen on plans and preparation as I am – and as I catch my breath, she is unflustered. We wheel our bikes into the carriage and then turn, at last, to greet one another good morning.

  The train cuts diagonally across the city, down towards Potsdam, stopping at Babelsberg. The district – famous for its film studio, the first major studio in the world – sits east of central Potsdam, and from here we cycle further east, towards Güterfelde. As we cycle, Anne tells me about her family. She carries a mint-green tote bag with two sausages on it, curving around the words Wurst Freund. I laugh at this – bending the words into their English sounds – because she is beginning to be my best friend here. But Anne explains that it is her family’s old business, a butcher’s shop. She loves the logo, she tells me, and only has two of these bags. She says this simply, unsentimentally, which, now that I know her, betrays its importance.

  Our plan is to swim in Güterfelder Haussee, a reedlined lake hidden quietly amidst the fields and motorways south of Berlin. It’s a lake outshone by the bigger, bluer lakes near Potsdam: few but the locals seem to know about it, and when we arrive, there are just a few dog walkers leaving the forest.

  I had texted Anne the day before with the route, and she’d written back asking if I had understood the significance of the lake’s name. I’d admitted that I hadn’t – I have yet to inhabit German in the way I do English, drawing lines between words and their associations, their hidden selves – so she explained. Güterfelde, she told me, was not the village’s original name. She sent me a link to a local news article: the village had celebrated its seven-hundred-and-fifty-year jubilee a few years before, and a local had taken up a campaign to change the name of the town back to its original name: Gütergotz. The name – of Slavic origin – was just one of many place names that had been Germanised under the Nazis in the late 1930s. Originally meaning ‘morning guest’ – or in some cases translated as ‘morning god’ – it was changed, removing the ‘gotz’ and replacing it with the more German-sounding ‘feld’, meaning ‘field’. It was one of the many ways in which German identity was manufactured, constructed and delimited. In Brandenburg, the tension between Slavic and German names is a constant; in most cases, the two origins overlap, and have grown together over time.

  The lake’s name, Güterfelder Haussee, Anne explained, was analogous to the common German term Hausberg, denoting a town’s mountain or hillside. In this flat landscape, not a hill or mountain in sight, Güterfelde has its lake. As the season carries on, Anne will point out these words from time to time: words that sound Slavic, words that sound German, words that carry histories within them. It is one of the ways she teaches me about landscape, about Germany.

  We follow the trail into the woods, dodging the dog walkers. Anne hates dogs and spends the walk looking for their tracks on the lake-shore, making sure we don’t inadvertently swim from a dog beach. I laugh at her and wander ahead through the woods. The winter has done its work: chickweed has spread thickly across the forest floor, a winter carpet for the trees. The wood is a mixture of beech and oak, and common ivy grows over all of it, a thick blanket of dark green in the brown, dark berries dangling from the choking clusters. Anne looks up at them, having forgotten about the dogs.

  ‘It’s like the trees are wearing dresses,’ she says. I nod in agreement, wondering why she isn’t always with me, teaching new words, sharing her thoughts. I’m suddenly so grateful for her presence, for someone so willing to plough into frozen water with me. For friendship rather than romance, the lack of complication in it.

  We settle on a small reed-lined clearing and undress, stepping out into the cold. It’s colder here than I expected – the sun can be deceiving – and I reel with pain as I wade up to my waist. But I move steadily forward. Anne follows, and we both swim out, taking in the length of the lake. It’s sheltered and quiet, with a few cottages opposite us.

  I stumble back to shore and, as I dry off, I notice a light figure on the opposite shore.

  ‘He’s swimming!’ I say, and Anne turns, excitement rushing over both of us at the thought of a fellow swimmer. He’s climbing out by now, drying off on the beach, and we’re waving. He doesn’t notice us, though, two hundred metres away, across the water. I get it, in a way, the tunnel vision that comes over you in the winter. In summer I can languish at the water’s surface, taking in the world. In winter, my focus is acute, piercing. I feel only my hands, my feet.

  The man wanders off, but Anne and I are curious now: the beach on the other side of the lake looks even nicer, so we pack up our things and follow the trail around. By the time we reach it, the cloud has cleared and left the sky bright and blue. It feels momentarily like spring, so we venture out on to the small dock that edges the beach and settle for lunch.

  I unpack my sandwiches and boiled eggs – ‘honest food’, Anne calls it – and she takes out a packet of chocolate biscuits. We sit eating and drinking warm coffee, indulging in the sun, until I wonder if we ought to make the best of the weather and swim once more. Winter may be over soon, or this may just be a temporary lull. Anne agrees. We pack away our lunches and strip off our clothes again, this time taking turns, stepping down the ladder into the cold rung by rung, naked in the bright sun.

  The water feels warmer the second time around – deceptively so – and I swim out fifty feet, turning on my back and letting the warm light wash over me. Floating at the surface, the break between air and water is the coolest part. Underneath, my limbs feel fluid and at home, the lake sliding over my skin, naked and alive.

  —

  The next morning is equally as bright, a small window of sunshine after January’s weeks of grey. Anne and I have been so overjoyed after our visit to Güterfelder Haussee that we’ve decided to swim again. Nowhere new, but at Orankesee, where Anne has been swimming on Sundays with the local FKK swimming club, the Berliner Seehunde. The group has been swimming here since 1980, gathering weekly on the beach to swim nude during the winter months. I’ve n
ot been before, but Anne has been joining them – mostly swimmers much older than us both – and I’ve decided to tag along.

  The group has its benefits. They carve great swathes into the lake ice when it freezes over, making sure there’s always room for a dip. They gather for celebrations together, for food and for friendship by the water. It is one of the ways in which local community has carried on despite the changes wrought in the country more widely.

  Today, the sun gleams off the surface of Orankesee. The swimmers are gathered on the sand, wearing red jackets and bathrobes embroidered with the club’s name. The group’s jolly membership co-ordinator Dieter wanders over in his bathrobe and greets me, recognising a new face. He shakes my hand and welcomes me in German, and Anne explains that I’m also a winter swimmer. He looks at me knowingly, remarks that we’re both well-prepared for the cold then, and wishes us a good swim.

  With that, the group strips off and rushes into the lake. Anne and I undress and then swim out into the water twice, the clear cold sharper than the day before. I stay in until the feeling in my fingers goes, and then retreat to shore, dress in the sunshine, and open my thermos.

  Dieter comes back over to ask if I will join the group. It would be nice, I think, not to have to carry a hammer, to have the lake ready. The community would be a blessing, but I know that for now I want to carry on alone, as if I’m not quite finished proving my point. I hesitate, and then explain. But I tell him that I’ll join next season, and I mean it, the thought of a future here flickering across my mind, across the surface of the lake.

  unfolded

  It starts to rain as soon as I hit the cobbled streets in the centre of Bernau. I’ve been here before – during that thunder-storm in late summer – and as I cycle north, I make a mental check-list of the streets and buildings I recognise. The city’s defensive wall, built in the fifteenth century, forms a horseshoe around which the centre pivots, cobbled streets clustered within its enclosure. Timber-framed houses and Plattenbau – prefabricated housing rolled across the town’s centre during the 1970s in an effort to establish Bernau as the ideal communist town – peter out quickly, and as I pass the red brick of St Marien Kirche and cut across the park, drenched green, I find myself on the open road leading north.