I wheel my bike up a cobbled lane and back to the main road, cycling down towards Helenesee. It takes me forty minutes, keeping to the bike lane on a busy road, until I reach the quiet trail and turn off, following the track between dormant fields. The thick stench of garbage permeates the air along the lane, and I soon pass a dump, piles of waste stacked and rotting. I push past it, launching myself into the forest ahead and into the pine air.
The forest opens on to a paved road, the fence of a campsite running parallel into the distance. I cycle down around the fence, finding the gates closed, and then follow the road westward, around the curve of Helenesee. I can’t see the lake – the road is set far back – but I know it’s there. There’s a spot of clear sky in the centre of the tree-line, the open space of the water.
Around the western side of the lake, a gap between the fences opens and I find my way into a row of neatly managed pines. A short way in, the trees break and I see the vast, glittering surface of Helenesee open beneath me, sunken beneath the hillside. It takes up the entirety of the horizon, stretching far into the distance and from side to side. It seems strange, now, that the trees had hidden it so well. The lake is enormous.
I’m surprised momentarily by two walkers on the path. Two older men clad in hiking gear are admiring the scope of the view as well, and they greet me politely before following a trail southward around the lake. I stay where I am near the trees. It’s too steep to take my bike, so I leave it at the top of the hill and slip down the steep banks towards the lake-shore.
The banks here are so steep in part because they aren’t natural. Helenesee, like many of the clear-watered lakes in Brandenburg left by quarries and mines, was created in the middle of the twentieth century. The steep banks originally marked the edges of Grube Helene, one of the many lignite mines in the region.
Lignite deposits, or brown coal, in eastern Germany, especially Brandenburg’s south-east, are among the most plentiful in the world. Lignite is found where peat bogs developed fifteen to twenty million years ago and came under pressure from glaciers. So like many of Brandenburg’s lakes, the story of lignite is traced back to ice.
The deposits were discovered in the eighteenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, as Germany rapidly industrialised, lignite became a key source of energy. Opencast mines were established across the south-east of Brandenburg, and by the end of the 1940s, coal deposits were one of East Germany’s richest natural resources. In the 1970s, when oil prices rose, it became more crucial than ever to the economy of the East. Coal was burned in domestic ovens across the country. Combined with the oily blue fumes emitted by the Trabis (the popular East German cars), the air quality of the East declined drastically. Acid rain damaged forests across the east of Europe, depleting the already poor tree stocks of Brandenburg, but still, in discussion with the Swedish prime minister, East German leader Erich Honecker famously declared that there was no acid rain in the GDR. Lignite was essential.
As the region around Frankfurt Oder industrialised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lignite was required to fuel the new and busy factories for jam and glass production. After a series of earlier mines were created, Grube Helene was opened in 1943, adjacent to the earlier opencast mine Grube Katja. It was mined until 1958, at which point the open pit was filled with ground-water and began the slow process of becoming Helenesee, the lake as it is today. By 1970, it was complete.
I’ve glanced over old photos of men stood underground, carts of coal next to them. My grandfather was a coal miner in Wales and my great uncle a coal deliveryman. My father told me stories of Uncle Ronnie turning up to the house covered in coal dust, brown-black creased into his skin. The pictures of miners at Grube Helene remind me of them. The residue of coal emanates from the photographs, reminds me of family, but they both seem distant when I’m stood on the shores of Helensee, bright as it is. There is nothing of coal remaining.
The shore of the lake is sparse and sandy, lined occasionally with scrim – grasses and reeds that are beginning to take root along the shore – but the impression is stark, bright, beautiful. I step out into the water, and it has the same kind of sharp clarity that I’d found at Müggelsee. The men out for a hike have disappeared into the forest, and I’m completely alone at the base of this hill, in the face of this enormous swathe of reflective blue. Sun drifts overhead and then disappears behind a thin gauze of cloud.
I swim out, the cold rising over my shoulders with a crisp shock. It’s freezing despite the sun, a product of the water’s intense clarity. The lake is poor in plankton, has little algae and doesn’t hold heat all that well. It has very few plants – Elodea and water milfoil have taken root in nearby Katja See, but not here. Instead, I watch the empty sand pass at a distance beneath me.
When scientists study the clarity of a body of water, one of the tools they use is a Secchi disc. The circular disc – invented by the Italian scientist Angelo Secchi in 1865 – is plunged into a shaded patch of water until it is no longer visible. The depth at which it disappears is used to calculate the water’s turbidity, how far light reaches in a lake and how well plants can survive. The greater the Secchi depth, the clearer the water. Temperature in a lake is shaped by a multitude of factors – shape, wind, sun, sediment – but one of those is turbidity. The less clear a lake, the more its many particles absorb heat and impact the lake’s life cycle. The turbid lakes freeze more readily come winter. In clear lakes, over time the temperature will warm up, the sunlight reaching deeper into its depths, leaving it ice-free for longer come winter. Bizarrely enough, at the end of cold season, a deep, clear lake can stay frozen for longer than a shallower, cloudier one, as its temperature changes more slowly.
I think about this as I swim out into the Helenesee. The water has an immaculate clarity to it, not sterile but immensely clean. Fifty-five metres at its deepest point, I feel as if I could always see straight to the bottom.
I linger a while, feeling small in the pit of the lake, the scooped-out, wide feeling of the horizon here, and then trace my way back to shore. I dress and scramble up the steep hillside where my bike awaits, and then I set out, beginning the eighty-kilometre journey back to town. It will take the rest of the day.
The road away from Helenesee is empty. I cycle as fast as I can, picking up speed on the slick asphalt, watching the light tick between trees as I pass them. I swerve, narrowly missing a toad that sits in the middle of the road, and then I begin to notice them. For a kilometre or so, toads have wandered on to the warmth of the country road and been flattened by cars. Some have been spared and linger by the road’s edges, but most are splattered, belly up and drying in the spring warmth.
Common toads follow the same yearly route to their ancestral breeding sites, whether or not the route takes them over the road. On this stretch, for the past few years conservationists have been installing plastic fences, low to the ground, punctuated by sunken buckets into which the toads will drop. A few times a day, workers come out and carry the buckets of toads safely across the road to their breeding grounds, an ingenious but not entirely convenient effort to spare the toads. Not all of them make it. I stop and examine a few who have made it to the roadside alive, getting on my knees to look at them from eye-level, and then cycle on, trying in vain to avoid the dead ones as they dot the ground.
The route back to Berlin takes me through Müllrose, a town that sits along the Oder-Spree canals, and then on along the bike route that follows Spree, through a forest of birch and sparse pine. I cross a ramshackle wooden bridge over the river, and then find myself on the cobbled streets of Fürstenwalde, a town at a ford of the Spree. I stop at a supermarket on the edge of town and buy cheese and pretzels, which I eat greedily outside in the car park. Passing shoppers stare as they wander in for their weekend shop. I don’t care, though. I pack an extra packet of cheese into my back-pack and retie my hair. I’ve another few hours ahead of me on the bike, so I refill my water bottle and set out again.
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The stretch towards Erkner, on the edge of Berlin, is a long one, and I occupy it by singing. I pick a record and sing it track by track until I’m through, and then pick another and sing that one. I’m breathless by the end of it, but it keeps my mind from overthinking, from spinning away in time with my bicycle. The past weeks have shifted something, the sting of anger gone and the hurt of the past lessened. The heat of my feelings has abated, cooled to a soft glow, a steady emanation, no flares, no fire. Cycling home to Berlin, there’s a calm in the distance, in the blankness of my mind as I cycle and sing, and I’m grateful for it at last.
bridge
It’s late in the morning when we meet at Nordbahnhof. We were out the night before, a Friday night dinner at one of the cosiest but loudest restaurants in Mitte. Anne and her friends had gathered at the restaurant long before me. This past month I’ve been so thick in work preparing to submit my dissertation, due in three weeks, I’ve been late for everything. I arrived at the restaurant flustered, my vision blurred from work and my mind still writing in English, and was launched immediately into a dinner-time conversation in German. I spent most of the meal catching up, trying and failing to follow, asking ‘Wie bitte?’, and swallowing my words. Frustrated, I turned my focus instead to the plate of Käsespätzle in front of me.
A feeling of homesickness has been hanging over me – the same undefinable, amorphous feeling that I’d carried around in summer – and dinner in another language magnified it. Berlin has become home in so many ways, but I’ve been missing my old friends, missing London and Toronto. In substitute I’ve been living online, communicating in one-hundred-and-forty-letter fragments, talking through FaceTime windows. On Skype, a close friend said to me that this is not how humans are supposed to live, but to me the screen has become a familiar place, a hollow landscape in itself, flaring bright as the lakes. In that world, my German is auto-corrected.
Somewhat recovered from the shock of dinner, I sit on the S-Bahn platform at Nordbahnhof drinking coffee from my thermos. Anne is showing me her new vintage bicycle – a sleek pink and black relic with down-tube gear levers – which she has just bought to replace the rusting old one she’s been riding since she was a teenager. It’s bittersweet. The new one is a joy to ride, she tells me, but I understand her longing for familiarity. The old bicycle is unfixable; I suggest she keep it as a souvenir anyway, though I wonder where she’ll store it.
We board the train and take it to the end of the line. When we emerge at Wannsee, the station is crowded with tourists and families, but we wind our way through and cycle down towards the Glienicke Bridge. Its seafoam-hued steel hangs gracefully across the Havel: modest, low, sloping curves that obfuscate their own importance. We have to dismount and walk; the bridge is covered with tourists, darting across the road to snap pictures of themselves at the bridge’s centre. Anne rolls her eyes.
‘Tom Hanks fans,’ she mumbles, and I suppress a laugh. It’s more crowded than the station had been. A family of tourists have posed on one side of the bridge, one of their own having crossed over to snap the photo from a distance. We wander across, weaving between them, pausing now and then to avoid walking into the gaze of other people’s cameras.
Glienicke Bridge marks the present border between Berlin and Brandenburg. Until recently, it marked the border between east and west, was the bridge between worlds, the bridge constantly at the centre of negotiations. It is the famous bridge for trading spies between the Americans and the Soviets. It’s a tiny arc of iron, in reality.
On the other end, we follow the road along the water, sloping down towards Jungfernsee, and into Neuer Garten. Lenné, who designed the gardens at Petzow, where we’d been a few weeks back, redesigned the gardens here in 1816. As we cycle through, Anne remarks that the world is coming back to life in the spring air: everything is trimmed in the faintest green. Daffodils rise from the cropped lawns at the path’s edge. It’s April – they’re late. I’m thinking of St David’s Day, of my Welsh grandparents. I’d always brought them daffodils at the beginning of March.
We cycle on along the water, passing a small quay where a cluster of river freighters are tied together. The saline smell of the boats and the water wafts up between them. Rust peels from their sides. Anne stops, transfixed. Lobbing her bike on the lawn, she asks me to stop for a moment. She climbs aboard the nearest ship.
‘We’re going to get in trouble!’ I whisper, though there’s no one around. She turns and gives me the same look she gave the tourists, all eyes and pursed lips. She calls me a goody goody. Climbing fences is no matter to me, but the freighters make me nervous. I worry about slipping between their cracks, into the metal-edged darkness below. A part of me worries about being an interloper, being caught offside. Glancing around for onlookers, I follow her aboard, ducking under a thick railing rope.
She walks to the edge of the first boat and takes a broad step on to the next, working her way towards the water’s edge. I hang back, watching, standing by the ship’s wheel. Anne takes photographs, crouching down low on the iron floor, while I urge her to hurry up. A mechanical hum is drifting around the corner of the trees. Another small freighter approaches, looking to tie up next to us.
‘Come on!’ I call, and we slip back on to dry land and on to our bikes. We pedal out of sight just as the other boat slips alongside the freighters. We carry on quietly, searching for the right place to swim. A few hundred yards along, we find a bench and a clearing, a fallen willow leaning out over the lake, half in leaf. We stop here, locking our bikes to themselves and clambering down the small ledge overlooking the water. Jungfernsee is clear, just sand and mussels dotting the lake’s bottom. A short way out, fallen logs break the surface.
I throw my back-pack to the ground and wander towards the willow. It’s damp, its thin layers of moss still holding on to prior rain, so I slip off my shoes and step sock-footed on to the bark. Crouching low, I work my way out over the water, into the thickening branches of the tree. Once I’m halfway out, I pause to take a photograph, and then turn to see that Anne is photographing me from the shore. She crouches at the edge of the water, her camera held aloft, eyes focused. I stay still a moment and then turn to climb down, but find it steeper than I’d imagined and have to shimmy down, gripping the width of the tree for support. When I reach the ground, my socks are soaked through from the moss.
‘I love trees like this,’ I say as I reach the ground. ‘They always remind me of Bridge to Terabithia.’
‘What’s that?’ Anne asks me, and I’m momentarily surprised, but then remember that we grew up half a world apart, in completely different languages. I begin to explain the plot of the book, a waypoint in North American childhood, and then stop short. I say only that fallen trees, to me, always mean magic, friendship and escape. I speak about childhood and nostalgia. But I don’t speak about tragedy. I think of the timelessness of the tree over the water, the golden light cast by memory. When I finish, Anne tells me that Jungfernsee means ‘Virgin’s Lake’, and we laugh.
We pile our clothes by the waterside and step out, the cool of early spring rising to our chests. Small clusters of slick green hornwort dot the shallows. Left alone, they’ll grow up and choke the lake. I swim around them, dodging the sunken logs, and move towards the centre of the lake. Another small freighter is making its way down the corridor of Jungfernsee. It’s a narrow arm of the Havel and sits on a federal waterway, making it popular with tourist boats and freighters alike. I swim a while longer in the deep. A tourist boat passes, and I wave from the water.
Afterwards, dressed again, Anne and I regain warmth on the shore, eating our lunch and drinking from our thermos flasks. It’s grey, a slight drizzle drifting in over the lake, but we’re sheltered beneath trees. The bench at the shore is a concrete monolith, slowly growing over with lichen. I wrap myself cross-legged atop it and we chat, lingering for what feels like an hour.
At dinner the night before, the discussion had turned to old-fashioned names, the na
mes that none of us could take seriously on a date. Friends had offered suggestions: Fritz or Gudrun. But I struggled to hear the difference between old-fashioned German names and, say, Hannes or Eva. We turn back to the topic now, sitting by the lake, and I try to list names I think would be old-fashioned in English. All of them, I explain, are being used again. Anne and I run back and forth offering suggestions, laughing about how Fritz would sound during sex, which names sound trashy in America or Britain, and which sound posh. I complain about my name, but if I hadn’t been Jessica I would have been Michelle, and I don’t like that any better. I teach Anne to pronounce my Chinese name: the upwards rise of the Jie, the downwards fall of the Ke. It isn’t official, doesn’t appear on any documents, but it is mine, given to me by my mother, like so much in my life. I love it.
Names are haphazard, I realise. Every time I offer a name for discussion, Anne responds with surprise. She gives a German one and we both laugh.
We turn to talk of friends, of friends we’ve gained and friends we’ve lost, and I realise how new our friendship is. I realise how much it has come to mean to me, someone swimming through the cold alongside me, asking for nothing but my company. Offering hers. A steady presence.
I watch the coots fish in the shallows, point out a heron wading amidst the logs, and then we pack up, ready to cycle back.
It begins to rain again as we retrace our route through Neuer Garten. We take shelter briefly at the Meierei and then cycle on, out of the gardens, back towards the Glienicke Bridge. The whole day, we’ve been pointing to houses we like and suggesting we live in them. The area is awash with villas, enormous stone houses overlooking the water, and modernist cubes positioned for the view. We’ve been taking our pick. Just imagine swimming here every morning, Anne says. Outside Neuer Garten we spot another one – a sandstone villa overlooking the water – and it is for sale. I pull out my phone and check the agent’s website. Five million euros. It’s possible our freelancer budgets won’t stretch to that, I remark, and we cycle on, still laughing.
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