Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  As those villages persisted and adapted to their newly liminal identities – despite fences, land mines, trip wires, patrol roads, watch towers and curfews – so too did nature take its course. Satellite imagery of the Finnish-Russian border in the seventies captured deep-green strips of old-growth forest, the first indication that within the untraversed stretch of the Cold War borderlands, the natural world had begun to thrive. By the 1980s, rare birds had appeared in the intra-German border, and today, preserved as a cross-cultural natural monument, the border remains a haven for moss, bats and other wildlife.

  The borders within Berlin have been somewhat different. In the much narrower Todesstreifen, ‘the death strip’, efforts to make use of the land – once raked over with sand and gravel to reveal the footprints of escapees – have been less coherent. The Berliner Mauerweg, the trail established in the early 2000s, marks the route of the Wall – and the fences that formed the outer city border – encircling the former West Berlin. In the years since, efforts to make use of the now dormant space left by the death strip have flickered, proposals for landscaped gardens and recreational areas leading to little. Within the inner city, memorials have been erected and new construction advances into these empty stretches of land, but there are entire sections of the border that remain unmarked, forgotten. Berlin is like this – redevelopment faltering in the sand of memory – but it is changing. Condo blocks have sprung up where buildings have been laid waste. Glass boxes overlook the death strip.

  I didn’t know the location of the border the first time I came to Groß Glienicker See. I hadn’t looked closely enough at the map of the GDR – West Berlin just a blank spot, an absence – and seen that the border cut the lake exactly in half. The lake ended in a sea of white paper. I hadn’t known that instead of a wall, instead of a fence, there had been a floating border here: a net, a line of buoys, patrols by boat. On the West Berlin shore, on the beach I’m standing on now, there had stood a sign: Achtung: In 170m endet West-Berlin. The beach was the shore of a walled island.

  That day I’d been unable to swim here, when the lake had been too frozen, is still weighing on me. I’ve not stopped thinking about the lake since, wanting to feel what was beneath the ice. It’s the beginning of March, and while winter has gone for the most part, the weather remains cold and damp. The same grey wash that spread itself over the late autumn hangs over late winter, awaiting sun and warmth. They haven’t arrived yet. I step towards the water, eyes to the sky, watching a cloud roll in. The ceiling is low today, a thick, looming grey, and as soon as I begin to undress, a light patter of rain rolls out over the lake. I’m alone here but for a group of divers packing up nearby, escaping the rain. They load their gear into a cluster of white vans and then stand, watching the weather.

  I pile my clothes under my raincoat and step on to the wet sand. It’s cold and sinks under the weight of my feet as I move across it, leaving tracks. The lake itself is a sheet, broken only by the pock marks of the rain, a grey extension of the sky above it. The far shore – which would have been the East – remains silent, no leaves on the trees, a putty-coloured stroke on the horizon. At Christmas in 1989, the border was opened between the villages of Groß Glienicke in the GDR and Kladow in West Berlin, allowing locals to go to church together for the first time since the Wall was erected. The day turned into such a celebration that the Taggespiegel reported that locals in the East decorated the gateway with Soviet military hats and brought a Trabant – one of the GDR’s state-issued cars – to provide a bit of local colour. This fetish for the East has been rendered in German as Ostalgie, a portmanteau of ‘east’ and ‘nostalgia’, a material recognition that a way of life isn’t easily dismantled and such a dismantling isn’t universally desired. Artefacts remain, among other less tangible things.

  Despite reunification, however, this lake still marks an invisible border. On the beach, I stand in Berlin. The other side of the lake is Brandenburg, the city-country border running through the water, now only a dotted line on a map. Negotiation is a constant.

  The day I’d been here in winter – with the hockey players and the haunting yowling of their skates – I’d been transfixed by the place, despite the cold, despite the ice. Now, in the rain, the feeling hasn’t dissipated: there is something about the lake, the clarity of the water, the way it sits silently, unassumingly, on the edge of the city, that has convinced me that I love it. I scan the horizon, looking for reasons or signs, but see only the thick reeds at the lake’s edge – golden highlights on a dull brown background – and the grey of the water. There is nothing exceptional about the day or the place, but it holds itself stoically, a silent shore, and I have a kind of respect for it.

  I swim out into the lake – tracing broad loops in the shallows – and watch the opposite shore. Near the northwestern tip of the lake, there had been a guard station, a watch tower overlooking the border. The city’s memorial website has a photo gallery of that stretch of the border. A slider moves between a still shot of the death strip and the growing young forest in its place, strips of bare sand and a sandy trail through the woods. At first the present-day view looks inviting, silent about its past. But the young trees – skinny birch, aspen, and ash trees – are a record, pioneer trees reclaiming bare ground. At Sacrower See, just south of here, I had seen rows of birch at the edge of the pathway – trunks peeling bright white – quietly colonising the ground of the death strip. Berlin and Brandenburg hold a lot of new forest.

  My shoulders stiffen as I work my way out into the lake. Cold, bright drops of rain soak through my hat and into my hair, the late winter washing over me from every direction. I turn back towards the beach, treading water a moment, and feel the depth of the lake beneath me. Berliners swam here, despite the buoys, even then. An out-of-date internet forum maintained by GDR historybuffs details local memories of the lake: swimming in summer, the orange buoys, the mesh net, the unfortunate border-crossers who were picked up in the middle of the lake. They link to old photographs, to news articles and to old maps. Beyond these fragments, little remains of the aqueous border, the lake’s memories held in hypertext.

  The scuba-divers on the beach are lingering, and as I emerge back on the sand one of them walks over. He is tall, lumbering towards the shore, his brown hair matted by rain. He doesn’t say anything, just gives me a puzzled look and then turns back to the lake, standing ten feet away, as if he wants to talk.

  I open: ‘Waren Sie tauchen?’ Were you diving?

  He looks at me confused, as if he is surprised I’d noticed, and then explains that the weather today isn’t great for diving. The water is normally very clear here – fantastic for spotting stocky, grey-finned tench, carp, perch and water plants on the lake’s bottom – but today there is too much sediment. I look back out at the water, patterned with rain drops, and think about the depth of it beneath me when I’d been twenty metres out. I hadn’t been able to see my feet.

  I turn back to the man, but he’s talking about diving in detail now, and my German can’t keep up. I look at him confused and explain that I’m struggling to follow, but his explanations don’t seem to help. We struggle, line for line, until we both smile and call it even. I wish him a good day, but I’m mortified, wishing my German was better. I am frustrated with myself for opening the conversation and then being unable to finish it. I run through the phrases I understood – about the clarity of the water, about the fish and the plants – and then begin to dress and pack up.

  The day is dreary – the rain hasn’t ceased – so I don’t bother to eat my lunch. I pour out a steaming capful of coffee from my thermos, knock it back as I wheel my bike back towards the road. I think about the lake here in summer – the reeds turned to green, the water clear in the sun – and know I’ll come back, always, the place already precious to me.

  swell

  There’s a lake at the southern edge of the city – a wide, shallow pan, the biggest in Berlin. Shaped by glaciation and fed by the Spree River, Großer Mü
ggelsee sits like a mouth agape, a culmination of flows, a testament to the city’s long relationship with water. As early as the thirteenth century, Müggelsee’s levels were shaped by use, mostly by the Mühlendamm weir, which dissected the course of the Spree through the city, channelling trade through the early villages in the region, and more recently by nearby waterworks which draw from the lake. It is at the edge of the city, resting at the borderline of human and natural worlds.

  The Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology has a lab on the shore of Müggelsee. When I’d met with one of their scientists in the autumn – who had told me about Stechlinsee – he’d told me that Müggelsee is so shallow that researchers at the Institute place bets on who can swim in the cold the longest, and when the lake will freeze. In the nineteenth century, when boating nearby, Fontane reported a story of a sailor tangled in the weeds and drowning in the waters here. The placid lake can be deceptive.

  The shallowness of Müggelsee is such that, during spring, summer and autumn, and as wind blows across the lake’s broad surface, the layers of the water often mix thoroughly, creating a uniform temperature. The lake is cut through by the flow of the River Spree, further mixing the water. Its only retreat into stillness is in the solidity of winter ice, which arrives early and lasts throughout the season. Lakes like Müggelsee are known as polymictic: they mix freely, often, as long as there is no ice. They don’t lie still, stratified, like deeper lakes.

  By the time I reach Müggelsee, the ice is long gone. March is streaming with sunshine, the midweek low awash with gold. I cycle down past Treptow, past Köpenick, until I reach the forest north-west of the lake. It’s both empty and full: the quiet of a Wednesday shrouded in light, Scots pine thick and heady in the air. The buds haven’t formed on the oaks yet, but the remnants of the previous year lie scattered, a thick carpet of mulch.

  I cycle round the lake, towards the west, until I reach a clearing in the reeds. Sand runs up to the pathway, the fine, golden sand that stretches across Brandenburg. There’s almost no wind today: the lake barely brushes the shore in small waves. I step out into them, swimming out in the clarity of the cold. I can see straight to the bottom, the water’s surface barely a border.

  —

  Limnology, the study of lakes, takes its name from the Greek word λίμνη, limnē, meaning ‘marsh, pool or lake’. It is a word that stands alone, without an especially telling etymological story.

  When I first learned about the field, I was certain that the root limnē was related to limen, the Latin for threshold or border, but they are false cognates. Saying the word aloud brings recollections to the tongue, the sensation of the word liminal arriving as a sister sound, a thought connected by sensation and idea, but not by etymology. Limen, however, arrived in English in response to a German word, Schwelle, a psychological term referring to the border of the sensible, but also meaning ‘threshold’ quite materially, like the wood of a door-frame. The German word Schwelle links also to water: it can mean an ‘accumulation of water’ or a ‘swell’. The Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm refers to a swimmer caught in the Schwelle, in the swells. This threshold is the space-in-between, the Zwischenraum. To me, it is the seam between water and air in a lake. As a swimmer, this is the border of sensation.

  That swimming takes place at the boundary between worlds – between lake and land, between nature and culture – stitches the two words together in my mind. Even as I work to learn German, I realise I’m a bad linguist, tangling my words at will. The German word for ‘lake’ – See – recalls the pelagic enormity of the sea. Limnology teaches me not just about lakes, but about borders, about thresholds. In this complicated landscape, it seems appropriate. Many of the lakes here have fluvial waters running through them, making it difficult to determine whether they ought to be considered lakes or wide stretches of river. In Müggelsee, the Spree and the lake intermingle, blurring into one another. The lake, it is said, may take its name from a Proto-Indo-European root: migh, for ‘fog’ or ‘cloud’. Vapour afloat.

  At the sharp edge of sensation, the cut of the ice, or in the silk of the warming lake, like moments before sleep, the lake is a threshold. Memories swell. Sensation floats at the surface like fog.

  —

  The water is a slippery kind of cold: I can sense my toes tightening as I tread it, the clarity of the lake accentuating the shock. There is no pain: it might be the perfect temperature, enough for a rush without the cut of the ice. I can linger at the surface and feel warmth from the sun. I don’t rush back to shore. There’s a languid possibility in a March swim. I follow the line of the reeds as they curve out along the shore, paddling out until I can’t quite see the spot from which I’d entered. It’s silent out – just the calls of great tits echoing from the wood, the lapping of the water on the shore-line – and I wonder if I ought to swim back. It’s still so shallow I can touch the bottom, just, and so I take my time, floating back to the sand with occasional strokes, sensing the water as it runs over my shoulders.

  On the shore again, I dry off as a couple walk by, hand in hand. They stop, watch me with my towel and talk quietly to one another. The sensation of being watched is stronger after having been out in the lake, the solitude of the water and the light a stark contrast with dry land, so I turn and wave. They wander off, spell broken, saying nothing.

  I dress and settle for lunch, pour out a steaming cup of coffee, unbox my sandwich. The remnants of the season sit around me, browned oak leaves and crushed fragments of pine cones drying in the sun. Just west of me, the Müggelberge rise, a tree-covered line of hills that create a pocket of shade on the western side of the lake. I make a mental note to come back, to walk the trail up through the hills, to return for a swim.

  The bike ride back through the woods and into Köpenick rushes by, and it is midday by the time I reach the bridge over the Dahme River. I’ve been quick this morning, despite the time I took in swimming, and have some time before I need to get back to the studio to work on my dissertation. I want to enjoy the day, the brightness of late winter, before the season changes. I duck off the road at Alt-Köpenick, turning on to a shaded, cobbled street.

  The village sits where the Dahme meets the Spree, its neo-Gothic town hall overlooking the water, made famous in 1906 when a local shoemaker attempted to steal the town’s treasury by dressing up as a captain. When Fontane travelled through Brandenburg, he set off from here on a boat journey along the Dahme – known to Fontane as ‘the Wendische Spree’ – describing his childlike excitement at the trip, the scent of blossom on the air in Köpenick. Today, though, the town is quiet, no flair. It’s a Wednesday, and the only people I meet on the streets are older couples strolling slowly along the cobbles. Football flags hang from windows on the side streets. Sunlight cuts the lanes with angles of shadow.

  It’s beautiful here, but I don’t feel fully at ease. Outside the town hall, someone has chalked anti-government and anti-refugee slogans on to the pavement. I see flyers for a counter-protest outside a refugee centre nearby, Berlin’s anti-fascist campaigners asking for solidarity against ongoing racism. I skirt past the slogans on the ground, as if my walking away from it might make it disappear. I wonder momentarily when it might rain.

  When I was nine, a bank teller in Savannah, Georgia, refused to serve my mother, so my father went inside instead. They served him. I don’t know what was said. We waited in the car. I’m halfway between my parents – passing for both and neither – and don’t know what I would do. I live in that unsteady balance, a borderland marked on my body. It brings up a kind of uninterrogated discomfort now. I think of how beautiful that town had been too. I think of the new words I’m learning, of the shape my mouth takes when I speak German instead of English, instead of Chinese.

  This is the only time I’ve seen racist graffiti in Berlin – naiveté on my own part – having only ever come across the frequent refrain of Nazis raus, ‘Nazis Get Out’, scrawled across inner city walls. I remember the da
y Anne and I met, how I hadn’t noticed them there on the train platform. And then, as if by instinct, I push the thought back. It’s too heavy to hold, and I like this place.

  Away and already forgetting, I wheel my bike around to a side street and lock it to a lamp-post by the red-brick church in the centre of town. From here, I follow the line of the sunshine, avoiding the shaded pavement until I pass an inviting café overlooking a wide curve of the road. Sun gleams off the stucco of the building, bright and refracted in the angled, narrow lanes. I step into the coffee-scented air, Edith Piaf playing on a tinny sound system, and take a table by the window. The man behind the counter brings me a bowl of potato soup, which I eat greedily, hungry again despite my earlier lunch, until I feel relaxed, ready to cycle the hour’s journey home.

  Glancing up, I notice a chalkboard above the counter: Es fehlt allein der Blick aufs Meer, ‘All that’s missing is a view of the sea’. I smile at this, then send the quote to Anne. ‘Scheiß-Kitsch!’ she replies. ‘Shit kitsch’. I laugh, thinking that’s exactly the right term, and exactly why I like it. I pay the bill and make a note to remember this quiet, beautiful lane in Alt-Kopenick, and the sensation of the day.

  spring

  Overturn: The ice melts, and with the help of the wind the water at the surface mixes with the water at the lake’s bottom. The lake reaches a uniform temperature and circulates freely. The lake warms for summer, when it will stratify again.