Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  We follow the Mauerweg back, ducking northwards after crossing the Glienicke Bridge. The trail takes us downwards, towards lake-level, and runs along the Havel. We run into the nearby forest and then back out again, along a beach where the sky is split with a crack between storm clouds and sun. It is one of the middling, unsure days of early spring; the sky can’t decide what it wants to do. The view over Jungfernsee, just on the horizon, is swathed in black. Towards Wannsee is blue and sun.

  We cycle onwards, down a track that has sprung to life in the rain, the smell of wild garlic hanging thickly in the air. I’ve been this way before, once, with Jacob, along the Havel past the Pfaueninsel – the eighteenth-century landscape garden on an island, famous for its peacocks, and for its design by Lenné – and towards Wannsee. It had been one of those days, the kind I remember in vivid detail, every moment worth an age. But now, with Anne, I feel freer. I could forget this day, though I know I won’t, and it wouldn’t make it any less valuable. The burden of memory is lighter. I breathe in the allium scent of the ground and suggest, impulsively, that we stop and swim again. The sun is out. Wannsee is blue as ever.

  I hadn’t intended to swim in Wannsee in part because of its ubiquity. I’d wanted to pursue lakes at a distance, lakes lesser known and lakes I’d not been to before. But the day, which had been so grey at Jungfernsee, is becoming so bright.

  Wannsee is, perhaps, Berlin’s most famous lake. Anne begins to sing ‘Pack Die Badehose Ein’. Connie Froboess’s 1951 song about Wannsee perhaps embodies its importance to West Berliners. The song will be stuck in my head for a week. A bight of the Havel, its northern banks are taken up with the yellow-bricked 1920s Strandbad. It sits authoritatively on the opposite side from us, the sanctioned swimming place, sprawling and serious. We stand instead at the edge of a forest clearing, where a dock extends into the water. Pfaueninsel sits to the west. On the northern horizon, I can just make out the white-domed top of Teufelsberg, no longer listening to the city below. The forest around us is oak and pine.

  I strip out of my clothes and walk naked on to the dock. It’s warm in the sunlight, and the water here is so clear I can see straight to the bottom. A No Diving sign marks the end of the dock, but the lake is clear and there is no one around. I spring, knees flexing, and hit the water smoothly, a pointed, shallow dive into the blue cold. When I surface, two men passing on a nearby boat are applauding. I hadn’t seen them watching.

  Anne follows me out into the water, swimming out into the distance where the water runs so deep it feels bottomless. It’s the cleanest sensation of wetness, sharper than Jungfernsee, though their waters flow together from the Havel. Wannsee feels different, more like the fine and bevelled edge of a glass held to the light. On my back, my breasts and toes floating just above the lake’s surface, I feel the border between the sun and the water, a golden warmth and evaporating blue cold running together. I bask there a while, hands gliding at my sides and then resting on my tummy, otter-like, still. I turn to Anne and see that she’s been watching me swim.

  ‘The adoration of the sun,’ she says smiling.

  ‘Exactly.’

  The winter is a memory already, the spring now fully formed, verdant and vital. Out in Wannsee, we linger longer than ever before, the cold turning to comfort. We breathe in the sunlight and prepare for summer. The bluesoaked warmth of it, the softened blanket of the water on our bodies.

  slope

  Anne is crouched reading the names on the doorbells when I leave my house, a five-storey stucco block in Prenzlauer Berg. My name is written all in capitals, three short black letters next to a silver button. Anne is running her finger over the names above and below: Kandinsky, Richter, Picasso.

  ‘Artists’ house,’ she says.

  ‘They’re all rentals,’ I tell her. I’ve moved again, this time into my own one-room apartment in the inner courtyard of a quiet building. It has rough wooden floors and a small terrace off the kitchen. The neighbours are all holiday-makers, changing by the week. My name is on the door. I imagine this means I’ll stay.

  It’s clouding over a bit as we cycle away. I’ve not swum in ten days – focusing thoroughly on work in the final push for my dissertation, which I’ve completed at last. It feels like the last moment of an exhalation, small and sputtering, and anti-climactic. Anne and I have been saving this journey for a good day, as if to celebrate, so I hope it clears.

  We bike to Lichtenberg, Anne racing ahead on her bicycle, which she has nicknamed ‘Bonnie Tyler’. Last week, on our way back from dinner, I’d cycled behind her singing ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, racing to keep up. Today is no different. We dart through the traffic along Danziger Straße as we work our ways towards Frankfurter Tor. We cut southwards, dodging pedestrians lingering in the bike lane. We reach the train station early, giving us time to wait on the platform ahead of our train east.

  The carriage is full, bikes lined into the aisles as day trippers make their way towards the city’s edge. The S-Bahn along this route is closed today, so the regional trains are packed. Everyone jostles for space, bikes clinking against one another as they’re rammed up close alongside the carriage sides. We find a small corner to stand with our bikes and wait for the crowds to clear. It doesn’t take long. Near Strausberg, the train empties and we have the carriage to ourselves for the journey towards Müncheberg, halfway to the Polish border.

  We’re headed to Schermützelsee, a crook-shaped lake in the Märkische Schweiz, one of the lakes Fontane most loved. When I’d read the Rambles, I had lingered over his descriptions of the lakes there: the blue crescent of the Schermützelsee, the slope of the tree-lined hills plummeting down towards the water. That had been enough to convince me.

  Anne, like me, has done her research. The lake is in Buckow – we’ll bike to the town from Müncheberg station, about ten kilometres – and as we ride the train Anne lingers over the etymology of the town’s name.

  ‘Buckow,’ she says. ‘The -ow. I’ve been telling you about these endings, the Slavic ones.’ I nod. Indeed, as we’ve unravelled the etymology of lake and town names over the recent months, the -ow suffix has come up before. The suffix, Anne explains, is just an indication for ‘settlement’. Buckow, from the German ‘Buche’ translates to ‘beech settlement’: the village with many beeches. Anne is sliding through pages on her iPad as the train rolls towards Müncheberg.

  ‘The -ow, though, it’s like the German -aue.’ She is immersed, piecing together word parts the way I piece together the landscape from scraps of moss, bits of flower. She laughs at me when I crouch to the ground to look at plants, but I think that this moment with the iPad is her version of it. She has a doctorate in literature and a penchant for the mundanities of German etymology. Last week over dinner she had taught me the word for ‘saucer’, Untertasse, ‘under-cup’, glowing at its simplicity, its functionality, lifting the tea-cup in the crook of her finger as if to emphasise her point. She keeps reading.

  ‘The -aue, it’s often used for things that are near water. Not the water and not the field, but a meadow or pasture close to water.’

  ‘A marsh?’ I offer.

  ‘No.’

  Later, she’ll send me the transcript of a Deutschlandradio Kultur show with an expert on Brandenburg place names. Etymologically, the Slavic and German suffixes -ow and -aue are completely different. The -aue, I’ll read, was for centuries imposed on places with Slavic names, one of the many historical means of Germanising the landscape. German rule spread to Brandenburg in the twelfth century, and the complexity of place names still reflects this. -aue, linked to the Latin aqua, indicates water, a wet meadow. Now, the region is awash with these muddled place names. I think of the more recent wave of name changes, the story of Gütergotz. I think of my own name, written in English, written in Chinese.

  We pull into Müncheberg and wheel our bikes on to the cobbled road by the station. The lane leads north, through a hedge-lined patchwork of fields, rising up and sloping downwards in way
s unlike the rest of Brandenburg. It is not without reason that the region is called the Märkische Schweiz: it is the ‘Switzerland’ of Brandenburg. The hills are Brandenburg’s Alpine analogue.

  Fontane’s second volume of the Rambles took him to Buckow. His is a world of rising hills, larch, fir and blackberry lining the landscape. Fontane’s Buckow is a ‘rural beauty’ bathing in the lake barefooted, hair braided beneath a willow tree. The red-tiled roofs of the village sit nestled into the hillside next to the silent stillness of Schermützelsee. It is a landscape of impenetrable quiet, of beauty and of memory. For Fontane, stories unfold in the landscape, time is compressed. Memory is layered like leaves, like pages.

  Literary critics have argued that Fontane’s Brandenburg is a unified landscape, its flat fields and waterways easily traversed, with no true obstacles. In the face of rapid industrial change and urban growth, his landscape is a place of intimacy, the landscape of the walker. The rivers and the lakes are markers of Brandenburg’s unity, stitches and seams that run across the land. Now, Anne and I are trundling across this landscape, across a stitched-together patchwork of lane, hedgerow and hillside. It is rolling and quaint, a place scaled for walkers, for bicycles. I think, for a moment, I am in England, but then we pass a man on the roadside, clad in a canvas apron, working in his garden. He looks up and greets us.

  ‘Guten Morgen!’ I am in Brandenburg. A thin stand of Scots pine opens up ahead of me, a constant reminder of this place, the species that covers three-quarters of the state’s forest. The hills plummet downwards – I’d mapped this route earlier, traced the elevation on Google Maps, remembered the drop – and we wind our way, curving with the lane, into the valley towards Buckow. The lane looses us on to a cobbled road in the village, with just the small Eisenbahn-Museum and the single-carriage, still dormant Kleinbahn railway waiting for summer. The barn doors to the museum are open on their slides, the workers inside painting and preparing for the coming season. It smells of turpentine. The burgundy and beige Kleinbahn lies static, appearing disused. In a week’s time, it will run the route between Buckow and Müncheberg, a connection between this otherworldly pocket of the Märkische Schweiz and the train lines to Berlin. It’s run this route since 1897, though today it mostly carries tourists.

  The cobbled road leads us further downhill, a steep and sloping curve. I hadn’t thought we could go lower. At the bottom sits the slate-blue plate of Schermützelsee, greying beneath the lightly clouded sky. In summer, this lake turns turquoise in the light, and as today’s clouds break and sun hits the surface, there are glints of colour. It’s still early.

  We follow the road around the northern side of the lake, down on to a dirt track scattered with holiday homes, their wooden docks extending out into the lake. Anne is enraptured. She points to the houses she would like, the gardens slipping down towards the water. Every piece of land here feels enclosed, cosy, unlike the stark and unravelled immensity of the rest of Brandenburg.

  We dodge off the trail and into the forest, the sloping sides of which Fontane lingered over, the branches of trees dipping down towards the water, all of which to him most embodied the rural quaintness of the Märkische Schweiz. The forest here is scattered with alder trees, their wide, paw-shaped leaves just unfolding. The ground is speckled with pink sprays of common toothwort, its parasitic inflorescences reaching just above the soil and rotting leaves. Ivy has spread over the forest in patches, and the spaces between trees reveal occasional signs of use: a bottle cap, a receipt. The forest is quiet but not unused.

  We find a clearing in the trees where the forest opens into the sparse lake floor. From the water’s edge, the red-tiled houses of Buckow are just visible, dotted amidst the trees. I imagine it as Fontane saw it. Anne points to the houses along the slopes.

  ‘Which is Brecht-Weigel Haus, do you think?’ Bertolt Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel had a summer house here. I scan over the white-walled houses and tile roofs, pointing to one with a steep roof and wide windows overlooking the lake.

  ‘That one,’ I guess. I’m wrong, in any case, but for now we are satisfied. We pile our clothes by an alder tree and step out into the lake, already warming in the spring air.

  I swim out a way, watching the sky for sun, but the clouds don’t break. The sun is dulled behind a blanket of cirrostratus, turning the lake a dull kind of blue. The farther I swim, though, the richer the colour becomes. Fifty feet out, the depth turns the lake to a deep emerald – the kind of colour I know from Liepnitzsee in the sun – and I’m transported to summer. Anne swims out too, taking broad, graceful strokes at the lake’s surface. She swims farther out than me, towards the clouded sun, while I return to shore. I watch her while I towel off and get dressed. She is in her own world, transported by the lake to somewhere distant. I call out to her.

  ‘Don’t swim too far!’ She turns towards me and makes a wide circle in the water. Her movement is steady.

  When she returns to shore, I wander along the trail for a few minutes, finding an enormous birch with a rope swing attached. The cries of past summers hang over the place. Soon, it won’t be so silent.

  Anne is sitting on a bare log drinking tea and eating Halloren-Kugeln, from the oldest chocolate factory in Germany, opened in 1804. She hands me the packet and I draw the chocolate to my mouth, the thick cream sweetness of it slipping over my tongue. Halloren chocolates, she explains, were incredibly popular in the GDR, one of the few brands that withstood reunification. Anne is always turning up with chocolates I’ve never heard of, sweets I’ve never seen before. An interpreter, a guide. The sweets all have a story, a memory attached. I suppose I could do the same, given a Dairy Milk or box of maple creams. The past is at the tips of our tongues.

  We cycle back, retracing our route, and then turn off at the signs pointing towards Brecht-Weigel Haus. The house is at the base of a deep hillside, its red-tiled roof reaching down towards the ground. The façade is painted with white and green looping curls, and wooden shutters line the windows. The gate is locked. The museum won’t open for another hour. I ask Anne if she’d like to wait, but she shakes her head, takes a photograph through the gate.

  ‘We’ll come back!’ she sings, and then we return to our bikes, following the track towards Buckowsee. It is a small, glassy mirror at the base of the town, the church and the roofs doubled in a watery plate. Boardwalks lead along the Sophienfließe stream stemming from the small lake, and beyond the small lawn leading to the water stands a series of placards and rocks in a stylised curve. This is the Eiszeitgarten, a small display of glacial erratics set up to illustrate the movement of glaciers across the landscape of northern Europe. The rocks here are marked with labels, their ages identified, their variety named: granite, sandstone, chalk, porphyritic rock. Fontane too had been preoccupied with geology at Buckow, the situation of the lake and its valley in a glacial kettle. The rippling, crenulated shore of the Schermützelsee points to its origin as a dead-ice kettle. Kettle lakes formed when glaciers left ice behind in their retreat, the way plaster fills a mould, leaving their form behind as the land masses surrounding them settled. The rolling hills of the Märkische Schweiz were formed through a myriad of such retreats in the Weichselian glaciation, the last time ice covered northern Europe, between one hundred thousand and ten thousand years ago. I pick my way through the rocks in the garden, pressing my hand on each of them; enormous stones brought here to illustrate glacial advance and retreat in miniature. They come from as far away as the middle of Sweden, carved away by ice and blasted by sand. The stories of their travels are written on their surfaces. Erratics came from far away, but they helped shape this place.

  We cycle onwards, along the Sophienfließe and back through town, finding our way towards Großer Däbersee, Anne’s suggestion. The lake, also a glacial remnant, sits south of Buckow, along the quiet residential streets of Waldsieversdorf. It’s a secluded lake, lined on three sides by forest and reeds. A simple Strandbad with a dock sits on its northern shore, and it is
here that we lock our bikes. The nearest entry to the lake is through the beach, but it is ticketed in summer. We enquire at the café by the beach and the woman is so surprised we’re swimming – the season won’t officially begin for another week – that she encourages us in, waives the ticket fee. Satisfied, we make our way down to the dock and strip off, readying ourselves for the depth of the water. My swimsuit is wet from Schermützelsee, so I strip down to my underwear and walk to the edge of the dock, arms suspended for a dive. On the terrace by the café, two men sit drinking coffee, overlooking us by the lake. Inside, behind the glassy windows, a family sits eating their lunch.

  With a quick flick, I enter the water, no longer a cold shock. I surface and swim out towards the sun. It looks like home, like the cottage, lined by pines on all sides. I’ve no fear of the dock, the depth, the darkness. It slips over me as I slip down into it.

  Anne is more tentative. She climbs down the rusting ladder and into the opaque sheet of the lake. I remember this fear, these tentative steps into oblivion, but they seem so far away for me as I tread water in Großer Däbersee. The unknowable blackness of it lies beneath me. I love this lake, its hemmed-in feeling of familiarity, its crooked shore. The hook in my heart.

  Dressed again, we sit on the benches by the café drinking coffee. I crack the shell of a boiled egg and eat it as I watch the shore. The family sitting by the window gets up to leave, and as they shuffle out the door of the café the oldest man stops to remark on our swimming.

  ‘Es war kalt, oder?’