Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  A cold wind rushes across the open country, heavy rain lashing my cheeks. I pull the hood of my jacket tighter and then pedal faster in hopes of finding a more sheltered road ahead. I’m on my way to Hellsee, a large lake ten kilometres north of Bernau, following a road that cuts across flat farmland before narrowing to one lane. It’s freshly tarmacked and slick in the rain, and I feel increasingly precarious on my bike as cars speed past in the narrow space. Rain runs in heavy streams off my hood, and my hands are beginning to ache with damp cold. I’m not nearly halfway there.

  The road passes an animal kennel – on the site of a former East German army bunker – and reaches a residential stretch, then forks off, up towards a thick patch of pine forest. At the trees’ edge, the asphalt abruptly ends and becomes sand track. When I’d biked this stretch in summer, the rain had fallen so heavily that I’d had to dismount and wait out the storm with another woman under a bus shelter. I’d been given a new lake that day: Mechesee, a small, enclosed lake in the middle of the village of Lobetal. Now, reaching the edge of the forest, I slip off my bike and make a mental note of where I am: to my right, a small lake ripples under the falling rain. I know it instantly, without the map and without having ever been here before. It’s Mechesee.

  I think about the woman under the bus shelter – about her flowered dress and the small gift of a lake she’d given me that day in the rain. I wonder, momentarily, if the lake, like Bernau, exists only in the rain. I don’t stop, though. I push my bike on to the sand track: I cycled this far to go to Hellsee.

  The trail leads further north, past a water-treatment plant and on towards a thicker forest. The thick dampness of the air gives way to the smell of pine, and it briefly seems as though the weather might lift. But I walk further in, a kilometre into the woods, until I am overwhelmed by the thick odour of manure. I look around: there are only hunting blinds in this part of the woods, but the smell permeates everything. I take a turn around a treed corner, and there stand two hunters, clad in fatigues and armed, occupying the middle of the trail. I stop, vulnerability washing quickly across my mind, and then greet them. They pass me indifferently, saying nothing.

  I glance at my map and see that I’m still four kilometres away from Hellsee. I think about Mechesee, back there in the village, enclosed by trees and patterned with rain. It looked sheltered, safe. I’d come across it today for a reason, I think, and for once, I relent. I turn back through the woods and am back in the village, rounding the western side of the lake. Hellsee can wait.

  The middle of Mechesee is burnished flat – a shallow sand-bank at the lake’s centre disrupting the rippled grey of the rain – and its edges are lined with reeds. I follow the path around the lake’s tip, making for a small beach opposite. Late winter is dragging over the day, cladding the forest in an exhausted, damp mist. Between the trees, what look like small stumps appear, and then I realise they are graves – soldiers’ graves – forgotten, spectral and sparsely lined through the forest. For a moment I walk towards them, and then pause, thinking better of it, back-tracking towards the lake. Lobetal, I’ll learn later, has a number of army and naval bunkers, a town hiding so much underground, folded into the forests. One of the bunkers sits just beyond where I’d met the hunters in the woods. I glance out at the spot where the lake is glazed and still, the sand-bank underneath, hidden but ever present.

  I find a small beach on the northern tip of the lake and undress near a large oak tree. I neatly pile my clothes on my bike seat, covering them from the rain with my jacket, and then step towards the lake. It’s not too cold – I’ve been out long enough that the cut of the cold has deadened – and the water is thin and opaque. I swim out, counting my strokes, and turn back to shore, thinking about the gift of the lake on a grim day. I step sodden and numb on to the sand. Just then, a woman with a large German shepherd appears on the path.

  ‘Waren Sie baden?’ she asks. I’ve come to expect this question. She looks horrified and amused all at once, so I begin to explain that the water’s really quite fine. She eyes me suspiciously, chin raised, and then laughs and wanders off.

  —

  After that visit to Jacob, I went back to London and threw myself wholly into work. My doctorate became more consuming than ever before. I could work five days a week on research and weekends at my part-time job. The moments at work were a salvation: hours spent in archives, leafing through decaying legal files and land surveys. They held entire worlds in which to lose myself, to vacate my own feelings. Twice I found myself ushered out of archives at closing time, having worked eight hours straight without looking up, without food, water or a toilet break. My body deadened. The skin on my fingers cracked like the parchments I was reading.

  In truth, part of me was switching off. Eight weeks after the accident the doctor diagnosed me with depression, pointing out that it was completely to be expected. Hormones react to shock, to impact. The concurrence of the accident with losing Jacob felt something of an inevitability, like I should have known it would happen, but still, I was surprised. I thought about the haunted look on my mother’s face when I was a teenager and felt the weight of an unwanted inheritance settling upon me. I thought it was something I could work to avoid, like diabetes or heart disease, as if my own strength of will could keep the night from coming. I called Mom and asked how it had felt, and her words gave shape to my own vacancy of feeling. If I’d been capable of feeling fear, devastation, I would have.

  I felt as though I’d been hung and dried on a precarious line – brittle, delicate, hollow. As a child, my grandmother had kept a vase of dried cat-tails in her living room. I touched one once, when I was six, and it scattered into nothing, leaving itself dissected in clouds on the carpet.

  I cried only on the Tube platform – and only for the seconds it took for the train to rush in at Shepherd’s Bush Market. The rest of the time I stood safely back from myself, pressing work into the vacated space that had once held feeling. When the doctor handed me a pamphlet and a prescription for Sertraline, I looked at the infographics and thought, distantly, that I’d never been more productive. I went home and threw the prescription away.

  I could feel only one pleasure through it all. I was undertaking fieldwork for my doctorate, swimming with and interviewing the winter swimmers on the Heath, a kind of mandated cold-water therapy. I’d returned to the Ladies’ Pond and found some sense of relief, as I had some years earlier. So as I curled inwards into bursts of work and catatonic sleep, the Heath opened itself up to me again. I swam in the cold three times a week and lost myself in the stories of the women there: their decades swimming through winter, free of men, free of intrusion. I found small moments of solace in those swims, moments of cut-glass clarity and feeling that I couldn’t seem to summon at any other time, as if warmth was only to be found in the cold of the water.

  I watched spring unfold on the Heath, blossom erupting, the catkins coming in, and the grip of the thing lightened. But I still worked with a sort of exhausted determination, wanting to finish the essential core of my research. I sensed – having never quite made the decision explicitly – that I wouldn’t stay in London this time. As hard as I was working, my bank balance dwindled to zero every month. My scholarship was paid in Canadian dollars, and as the dollar dropped against the pound, I realised I was trying to force something into shape, to fit myself into a life I thought I ought to have, contorted and unhappy. The hold that Berlin had held on me months earlier hadn’t waned.

  The months at the Ladies’ Pond felt like a kind of reclamation, the water a kind of reminder that I’d once found solace in swimming, that it wasn’t simply something held between Jacob and me. It had once been mine – in the black of night at Chocolate Lake, in those early days at Krumme Lanke – and I could find that again, if I swam enough. If I returned to Berlin, I could write myself on to the landscape, on to my own memories of the place. I could layer new meaning on to the lakes. I could outrun depression. So I took the decision, left the life I tho
ught I’d wanted in London, moved into the stark rented room in Prenzlauer Berg, and set out to the lakes.

  —

  The train station at Potsdam outlets on to a disorienting web of roads: concrete and traffic lights in multiple directions, no landmarks, no invitation. I’ve been here many times before, but each time have taken the wrong exit from the station, ended up wheeling my bike through the unnavigable crowds queuing for baguettes or train tickets. Anne and I take the wrong exit, then turn back up the stairs with our bikes hooked over our shoulders. She is eating a banana with one hand, her bike clutched in the other, swerving through the Saturday morning crowd, refusing to let me carry her bag.

  We make it on to the road, finding our way from Friedrich-Engels-Straße to Leipziger Straße, towards Schwielowsee. The roads in Potsdam aren’t built for cyclists, and we jostle for space in the thin margin of the gravel near the road’s edge. Soon enough, though, the sparse concrete of the city ends and we are careening downhill into a forest-lined road alongside Templiner See. Winter has fallen away, the steady unfolding of early spring announced by a water-thin blue, cloudless sky. The trees are still bare, but new shoots of grass cluster in the lawns at the roads’ edges. The scrubby margins of the wood reveal flashes of light reflected from the water as we cycle past.

  The journey is quiet, so we bike side by side, laughing over stories of bad dates. Anne knows the route. She used to cycle it when she was married. Separation is one of the small threads that connects us. We are both in the process of rewriting memories. She watches for the road to Caputh, a small, cobble-streeted village on the edge of Schwielowsee. It’s a quiet place in February, sun shining in wide angles across the lanes. A sign points the direction to Einsteinhaus, the scientist’s holiday home – his only surviving residence in Germany – a rust-red house on the hill, overlooking the town and the lake. We follow the lane downhill, towards the water’s edge, where the wide windows of a waterfront restaurant – Fährhaus Caputh – overlook the ferry landing. Anne stops us here, setting our intention for the day.

  ‘This is where we’ll cycle back to.’ She points to a small, flat ferry boat shuttling a hundred yards between spits of land, joining the western shore with the eastern, through the confluence of Templiner See and Schwielowsee, the watery path of the Havel River. After that, she promises we’ll return to the restaurant to have Kaffee und Kuchen, coffee and cake, a sweet promise after a day’s cycling.

  She leads southward down the lane, winding up a small hill that takes us away from the lake, up a quiet road that guides us out of the village. The road narrows and is edged by old brick walls, and then slopes downhill again into a sparse wood. The pines here are notched with slashes, deep Vs cut into the bark to extract pine resin for turpentine. The cuts – called streaks or cat faces – form a pattern, giving the practice its name: ‘the Herringbone method’. Now widely discouraged, though it carries on, streaking the pines was until the mid-twentieth century a crucial part of the forest economy in a landscape dominated by pines. I step off my bike to look at the notches and as I begin to explain them, Anne stops me, gasping at the view. The hill opens up on to a steep slope, unfolding down towards Schwielowsee, which is pale blue in the light.

  We wheel our bikes downhill along a dirt trail, and then cycle further until we’ve reached the lawned gardens of Schlosspark Petzow. The landscaped gardens of the manor house were designed by Peter Joseph Lenné, Prussia’s most famous landscape designer. During his time as head gardener in Potsdam, he created the extensive gardens at Sanssouci, the palace in Potsdam, and at the Pfaueninsel, the ‘Peacock Island’, which sits in the Havel. Lenné refined the natural style in German gardening, introducing the informal and picturesque sight-lines that have more often come to characterise English gardens. But Petzow’s gardens are rather more modest, with just a few walks and a pond. As we wheel our bikes along the gravel path we pass a bride and groom posing for photographers against the early spring green.

  We follow the trail towards the water’s edge and find a small beach. Two women wrapped in fleece scarves and quilted coats sit on a blue bench overlooking the water, and as I undress down to a small bikini and step out into the lake, they remark to Anne that I could have just swum naked, they wouldn’t have minded. I swim out into the lake as Anne chats to them. I can hear them talking about me but the farther out I swim the more distant their voices become, the more I feel only the sensation of cold water on my skin, sun at my forehead, a bright glistening on the lake’s surface.

  I turn back as Anne steps into the water, and I watch her descend into the crystal clear of it. The women on the bench are packing up to leave, and as they wander away I cry ‘Tschüß’ from the water and they turn, waving at me, gesturing their encouragement. I swim back to shore, as if a part of me wants to go with them.

  Back on the sand, a bracing rush ripples over my skin. I dry quickly in the sun, but the clarity of the cold remains, and I can feel it in my bones. I stayed in too long, the warmth of the day deceiving me somewhat. I dress quickly now, fumbling for the clothes strewn atop my bicycle’s handlebars. Anne comes back to shore too and we move over to the bench. We sit for a while watching the water. I eat boiled eggs and drink coffee while Anne eats fondant egg sweets and drinks Earl Grey. There is an orange sticker on the bench, peeled from the cover of someone’s book. It reads only, Nobelpreis für Literatur 2014, and Anne begins listing authors, searching herself for the year’s winner. She grows frustrated, takes a picture of the sticker, and files the thought away for a later time. Later in the evening, I’ll receive a text reading only: Patrick Modiano!

  When we’re finished, we pack our bags and cycle back to the path, finding our way northward around the western shore of the lake. It leads us past a sea-buckthorn plantation and up through a series of new waterside developments. Anne looks dismayed at the sight of them, boxes on the waterfront, closing ranks around the lake. I try to imagine them elsewhere and my mind lands in a suburban plot in south-east England, then a development in south-western Ontario. Their grey and white stucco cuts through the green, through the blue of the lake, like air-dropped containers. These houses are too anonymous for this place.

  We round the top of the lake where the land thins between Templiner See and Schwielowsee, approaching the ferry back to Caputh. Anne wants to swim once more, gesturing towards an open stretch beyond a campsite near the boats in Templiner See. I’m still cold and can’t bear the thought of stripping back down to bare skin, so I zip my jacket up to my chin as I watch her dip in to the water’s edge. She swims out steadily through a patch of shadow, stretching her arms out into the sunlight ahead of her. She swims with the kind of tenacity that belongs to winter swimmers, getting in the water when no one else would. I look at the lake, muddy and leaf-strewn here, and watch her with fascination, with respect. She’s stronger than I am.

  We cycle on to the ferry, a flat-iron boat with room for two cars and a few bikes, shuttling the short distance between the shores. The boatman collects our fare and launches us across, back to Fährhaus Caputh. It’s busy out now, crowds lining the waterfront in late afternoon, but we manage to find a small booth in the glassed-in sun terrace of the restaurant.

  Anne orders us a plum cake and cream so large we struggled to finish it between us. We sit watching the other diners, an old couple next to us eating potatoes and sausages. The old man chats to Anne in German for a while, talking about the spring-time, about the return of the sun, and about the size of our slice of cake. He turns to me occasionally and translates into an American-inflected English, which makes me smile, as he doesn’t realise I am following the conversation, albeit silently. His wife smiles quietly too, saying nothing.

  We bike back to Potsdam side by side, taking the quiet road out of Caputh. I turn to Anne to tell her how much I’ve loved the day, and she pauses in reply, searching for words.

  ‘I don’t know how to explain this,’ she begins, ‘but swimming like this has meant so much to me. It’s as
if it opened something in me, like a drawer or something folded, what’s the word, one of those files,’

  ‘An accordion file,’ I offer.

  ‘Yes, there’s more space inside than it originally seemed.’ I cycle on, thinking about this, about what her friendship has come to mean to me. I think about Anne’s second swim, the strength I’d seen in her pushing through the cold. Swimming seemed to give strength a form, to give materiality to reserves held inside.

  I’ve been so angry with myself for losing my equilibrium, for confusing swimming with love. I’ve been furious at myself for sinking, for being vulnerable to periods of depression that were prefigured inside me. But Anne is right. There is more space inside than I can imagine, more hope and possibility than I’d known. Feeling as clear as the day, as deep as the lake.

  borderland

  From the Barents Sea, north of Finland and Russia, to the Adriatic and Black Seas, running from the top of Europe to the south, there is a stretch of land that has remained relatively undisturbed since the middle of the twentieth century. During the Cold War, this was the border, the socalled Iron Curtain. Today, it makes up the conservation land known as the European Green Belt.

  Not a single wall or a narrow border, the stretch between the two Germanys was as wide as a kilometre in places, 1,393 kilometres of borderland that remained active until reunification. Entire communities existed within these spaces – villages that, whether through political bartering or pure chance, ended up in the Sperrgebiet, ‘prohibited area’, along the border. These communities existed in a kind of vacuum – deeply patrolled and regulated, yet removed from the maps and road signs, to prevent escapees from finding the border. There are stories of the Westfacing façades of village buildings being modernised and renovated, a Potemkin show put on for West Germans peering over the border with binoculars.