Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  ‘Nein,’ Anne and I reply in unison. We explain that it’s summer to us, the water almost too warm. The man shakes his head, amused.

  ‘Badenixen!’ he calls to us as he walks off, laughing. I look to Anne in confusion. Badenixen, she explains, are bathing beauties, the pin-ups in swimsuits sprawled on the beach. I laugh, thinking of Esther Williams, of Bettie Page. Most of the year, I’ve swum in a clumsy, ill-fitting one-piece suit, my head capped in a woolly toque.

  ‘We aren’t Badenixen,’ I reply.

  But Anne goes on to tell me that Nixe means mermaid or siren, and I like this better. I think of the sirens and the water sprites: their song, their place amidst the flowers, amidst the rocks and the water. One interpretation of the German myth of Lorelei – whom Heinrich Heine’s poem Die Lorelei depicted as a beautiful, distracting siren – speaks of a woman sitting by the water, drawing sailors to their deaths. The myths of sirens and mermaids take these sides: the woman in waiting, the temptress on the rocks. A choice between an enclosed life of waiting and the wilderness is no choice at all. I think of the goddess Hertha, either bathing in her lake or drowning her suitors. I think of the sirens, who Ulysses so fiercely sought to evade.

  Far better to be a siren than tied to the mast of a ship. Better to be at home in the water, the depth of the lake my wine-dark sea.

  gift

  Sixty kilometres south of Berlin, there is a landscape known as the Schenkenländchen. Stretching from Groß Köris in the north, Teupitz in the west, Briesen in the south, and Münchehofe in the east, the district is unified by its history: from 1330 until 1770, the land was acquired by and residence to the Schenk von Landsberg, one of Brandenburg’s most powerful families. The name Schenkenländchen is derived from the family’s name, Schenk, a title denoting nobility. Ländchen means ‘little country’ or ‘little land’, the diminutive -chen belying the vast moorlands of this stretch of Brandenburg.

  Schenken traverses multiple meanings: from the Old High German scanca, for ‘pipe’, the word is linked to the pouring of wine, the funnelling of wine from a barrel. This connects to the family Schenk von Landsberg in as much as the title comes from Mundschenk, meaning ‘cupbearer’. The family was responsible for wine and beer provisions in the region. Auschenk means ‘to pour out’, and distantly, but not unrelatedly, Geschenk, which draws from the same root, means ‘gift’. So I like to think that the Schenkenländchen is a generous gift of a landscape, wide and diverse, scattered with forests and sandy moorland, a wealth of lake water poured out over the Brandenburg sand.

  Fontane arrived in the Schenkenländchen just before sunrise in 1862. The town – named for a Slavic word for either ‘dull’ or ‘oak’ – had been undersold to Fontane. Teupitz, he wrote, was beautiful – more so than the reports of an impoverished small town had led him to believe – and its lake was the source of the village’s bounty. He found it simple, a sandy stretch scattered with pine and moss, the town of Teupitz slowly waking to the day. The region south of the village is a heathland.

  I step off the train just south of there, in Halbe, the next stop down from Groß Köris. It is the first stop on a journey which will lead me to Teupitz, like Fontane. The station at Halbe is a concrete platform on a side street next to a factory. I don’t expect much when I disembark, but as I wind my way through the town I find it quaint, with everything a small village might need. There is a travel agency, an insurance broker, a scattering of shops, and a bakery. I stop in and buy a Quarkkrüstchen, a small sweetened cake filled with quark cheese. It’s a warm day, the sugar dissolves in my hands. I eat it greedily as I walk along Lindenstraße, my fingers coated in sweetness.

  The town seems to have no central point of gravity. Every few hundred metres, a signpost details the history of refugees fleeing westward at the end of the Second World War. In the final days of the War, hundreds of thousands of Germans passed through Halbe. The confrontation between German and Soviet forces here – the Battle of Halbe – now goes mostly forgotten next to the Battle in Berlin.

  Outside Halbe, the bodies of soldiers and civilians still lie unrecorded in the vast forests nearby, remnants of war just under the surface. Finding and laying them to rest is a continuing task. Halbe now has one of the largest German war-time cemeteries – some thirty thousand are buried here – and is growing due to efforts to identify remains found in mass graves or in the forest and to give them a proper burial. Staff from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge – the German War Graves Commission – work with metal detectors, diggers, and bomb disposal experts to scour the landscape. They find remains, soldiers’ boots, dog tags. In one old East German history book I find in the Staatsbibliothek, it is said that after the battle, thousands of civilians – supported by the Soviets – were enrolled in giving the dead shallow burials in the forests. Now, some of the woods around Brandenburg hold the dead as if in waiting. I think about my paternal grandfather – ‘Bampi’, as the Welsh say – in France, exhausted by the war. I think of my maternal grandfather – ‘Gung’, as we say in Mandarin – flying fighter jets over China. In the intervening years they both moved countries, their children moved countries, and their grandchildren yet again. So much has changed in seven decades. But in Halbe I’m reminded that the landscape remembers, even as it grows over.

  I follow the route of the 66-Seen-Wanderung towards Tornow in the west, just north of the cemetery. The pavement disappears and I find myself following the shoulder of a rural highway, the occasional gust of wind as a car blazes past. I check my map again, but it seems this is indeed the trail. A few kilometres west of here, it’ll duck southwards into the trees. First, though, there’s an overpass, the autobahn. I cross over it, the blazing sun casting its glare on the concrete, and then follow the shoulder of the road down on to a dirt track. I follow the trail markers south, past a house guarded by a Rottweiler and a Jack Russell terrier. And then I find the forest, quiet, alone. I move through the silence comfortably, carrying on in solitude as if it was something I’d always been able to do.

  The pines are well spaced. Beneath them, a thick mat of reindeer lichen has spread, a grey carpet in the forest shade. The ground is dry – indeed, the lichen gives everything a dusty, matte finish – and the sunlight only appears in spare, thin shafts through the trees. I stick to the trail. I don’t know this stretch of forest well.

  The trail curves and leads me southward, tracing a kilometre in the trees. And then I find myself in an open field, the lamp-lined seam of a suburban road ahead of me. Tornow, a small village south-west of Halbe, appears as if out of nowhere, as if I’d walked through the forest to find this other world. The village streets turn to cobbles, each of which radiates from a central square. A community noticeboard and a bus shelter occupy prime position.

  Tornower See sits at the end of one of these roads, a secluded and dark lake fringed by walking trails. A handful of private docks – Betreten verboten – line the edge of the lake. North of them, a small peninsula reaches into the water, a tiny, forested spit of land left open to the lake. I follow the trail down towards the shore, on my way passing a man at work with a shovel and a bag of mulch.

  ‘Ist es privat?’ I ask him. Is it private? I don’t hear his reply clearly. What I hear is a muffled sentence, beginning with ‘Nein,’ and ending with ‘leider’. I can’t hear what’s in between. I realise that he has either said, ‘No, that would be unfortunate’ or ‘No, unfortunately it’s not,’ but I can’t tell which. I nod awkwardly, unsure of what to say. I look at the man to determine whether he would rather I wasn’t here, whether he thinks I’m an interloper at this town’s quiet lake, but I can’t tell. I wish him a good day and he wanders off.

  At the bottom of the hill I find an enormous wooden dock, slanted and rusting into the lake. The water is dark, the kind of clear, refined blackness of deep lakes. I’m not sure what to expect. I don’t know much about this one.

  I undress and step out into the water, my feet disappearing beneath the soft sand. I
draw my feet out and step farther into the deep, and then suddenly the ground drops off beneath me. I almost fall forwards but manage to brace myself, making a kind of clumsy dip into the water. The lake is cooler than Schermützelsee was last week, the darkness holding the cold, but I’m grateful for it. The day has been warm.

  I bend my knees and swim out, not wanting to walk further and risk falling. It’s free and clear as I swim out, but I can’t see into its depths. My breath comes in heavy gasps. The water beneath me feels bottomless. I’m making panicked strokes. I am scared, I realise. It arrives unannounced. I haven’t felt it in months. The tight grip of panic, when my mind sinks beneath the water’s surface to whatever might be beneath. I lock my gaze above the water, trying to quiet my mind. The fear is real, but it isn’t total.

  I look to the shore and see no one. Tornow is quiet. Regaining control, I slip over on to my back, kicking my way towards the shore, fixating on the sky. The terror goes. I let the lake slip over my skin, and then I clamber back on to dry land. My skin tightens as I hit the air, goosebumps rolling over me. I watch the horizon, catching my breath.

  Dressed again, I decide not to linger. I’ll come back to this spot in summer – it is an incredibly secluded patch of shore-line – but for now, I want to walk. The swing of my own gait is a comfort. I want to move through the landscape, towards Teupitz, towards its lake. Fontane did it by coach, but I’ll do it by foot.

  The road out of Tornow takes me past a cluster of silent houses. Next to one, I find a book exchange box, a little wooden library at the side of the village road, marked with the words Zum Mitnehmen. ‘To take.’ I open it and find it full of books – most published in the GDR, pricemarked for the East – their pages yellowing in the dry warmth. There’s a Kipling, some Pushkin, and a more recent book of Georgia O’Keefe paintings. I wonder how long they’ve been here, if they’ve been in this village for decades. Brandenburg has a way of standing still. I close the lid gently, happily, the simple presence of these books a kind of comfort on my walk.

  The road leads to another strip of houses, simple bungalows with ageing carports. In one, an old Trabi is painted in rainbow colours, its white body a base for a kaleidoscopic blaze of paint. It’s a cheerful remnant, a relic not of mourning but of simple joy. I wonder when they got it – some people waited years. Perhaps they’re just collectors, Ostalgists. I smile – the books, the car, small pleasures – and walk onwards towards Teupitz.

  My walk through the Schenkenländchen is punctuated by information points. When I reach the end of the forest trail between Tornow and Teupitz, a noticeboard details ‘Fontane’s Teupitz’, the short pages of the Rambles that have drawn so many to this lake-side town. Signposts mark out the routes of ‘Fontane Walks’ – indeed, there had been those in Buckow too – as though he were the patron saint of Brandenburg, breathing life into forgotten places. A nineteenth-century history, I realise, is refreshing, a kind of ‘time before’. Across the road from one of the noticeboards, I find a small lane leading to the shore of Teupitzer See, the lake that Fontane described as the source of the village’s fortunes.

  When Fontane arrived in Teupitz, the lake was the central focus of his explorations. Without water, the village wouldn’t have thrived as it did, with barges journeying up to Berlin carrying fruits, vegetables, peat and wood. The lake was so rich in fish and eels that in winter fishermen pulled nets beneath the ice, ‘a feast for Teupitz’. But still the village retained a reputation as an ‘ideal of poverty’, a village untouched by the changing city nearby. After Fontane, of course, tourists came in droves.

  I follow the lane along the eastern edge of the lake, past rows of gated gardens leading down to the water. Reeds form a seam on the horizon, the lake fringed with lashes of golden grass. The iron gates are all padlocked, the shore-line off limits. I recall Fontane’s descriptions of boating here, from the tree-lined shallows to islands. It is different now, starker, the shore bursting with private docks. Farther down the lane, a small jetty reaches out into the lake – the water brown and clear – and I stop there, checking my map. Surely there is a place to swim. The jetty is concrete and lined with algae. There is no one around, I could manage a quick swim, but I’m sure this isn’t the right place.

  I back-track towards the information points. One of them had been a map. Tracing my fingers down the flattened image of the shore-line, I find the two parallel waved lines that denote a Badestelle, a ‘swimming place’. It’s farther down than I’d thought, a few hundred yards beyond the jetty. I retrace my route.

  A tree-lined patch of lawn reaches down towards the beach. It is covered with geese. The lawn is scattered with their green shit. I walk towards the shore and the birds saunter off, waddling awkwardly towards the lake. They reach the water and paddle away, gathering fifty yards out as if waiting for me to leave, gossiping at a distance. I hear their calls slink back over the surface.

  There’s a bench at the edge of the water. I drop my bag on it and undress, piling my clothes neatly atop my bag, careful to avoid the goose shit. The lawn near my feet is littered with feathers. The birds aren’t yet willing to cede territory to the summer swimmers.

  I step into the cold, sandy shallows. It smells fishy, a bit of stagnant marsh, but I wade out farther until the water feels cleaner, less slick. I swim out, bumping my knees along the muddy bottom. It’s shallow. A broad, flat kettle. Teupitzer See came from glaciers, but there are other kinds of lake nearby: lignite mines, clay pits, sand and gravel quarries. As monotonous as Brandenburg can be, its waters tell a scattered history.

  I swim on my back for a while, watching the clouds work their way across the flat disc of the sun. I lie still in the shallow plate of Teupitzer See. With sadness and gratitude, an uneasy mixture, like oil and water, the thought arrives that I’ve only one lake left.

  afterglow

  When Germany was reunified in 1990, I was just four years old. I had never been to Germany and didn’t know a word of German. Within a few years, however, through my sister’s exchange trip to Germany, the country entered my life. A handful of years later, I made a similar trip to the Black Forest. At the time, I didn’t learn to speak German much more than to say ‘danke’ or ‘tschüß’, thank you and goodbye. At the time, I had no sense of the world that had changed to the east. Even in living here now, when the seams are still visible – in the landscape, in the people, in the endless networks of bureaucracy – I can never truly understand what reunification has meant or continues to mean to the people of Berlin, Brandenburg and Germany more widely.

  Weeks on from finishing my doctorate on Hampstead Heath, I’ve turned my attention to the landscape of Brandenburg. I’ve been reading reports from local regional planners, scientists and cultural historians. I leaf through blank-faced local publications at the Staatsbibliothek. My browser windows have been filled and slowed by PDFs about rural governance, lake restoration and cultural identity. I translate and read them all in scraps, paragraph by paragraph, cross-checking my translations with a dictionary, with Google Translate. I’m learning to work at the edge of my own words, where every sentence is a precarious and hard-fought gift. I’m learning to join one word to another, to situate meaning in unified territory.

  In one of the reports, I read about the ways in which reunification transformed local governance. In 1952, East German administrative districts were drastically – and arbitrarily – redrawn. Bezirke – districts – included both urban and rural communities, often overwriting communities linked by unified history, culture or landscape. After reunification, borders were again redrawn, local governance and administration transformed once more. In the landscape, this has meant new forms of connection: regions united by tourist boards, by environmental preservation, by regional parks.

  North of Berlin, in the stretch of Brandenburg scattered with turquoise green lakes, one such district has come into existence. Barnim – a district created from the former GDR districts of Bernau and Eberswalde – stretches across the
north of Berlin, as far east as the Polish border. It rests atop the Barnim Plateau of clay and sand, across moraines formed by glaciation. So Barnim, before being an administrative district, was a place in the landscape. But during the GDR, Barnim did not exist on paper. In the ground, perhaps, and in historical identity, but as a collective identity and a collective memory, Barnim disappeared. Its re-emergence now – in local government, in the co-ordinated parks and landscape strategies that characterise this stretch of forests and lakes – is one of the ways in which identity has been reforged, one of the ways in which unification efforts have been laid over the land. Names – those reclaimed, those erased – are one of the ways in which die Wende, ‘the turn’ from two Germanys into one, shaped not just a people but also a landscape.

  Hellsee is a lake in Barnim. Ten kilometres north of Bernau, in a wide swathe of mixed forest, it sits winding, crooked and sloped amidst the trees. Like Liepnitzsee, to its west, it forms part of a glacial chain, a series of crenulated lakes formed in the Weichselian glaciation. Long and skinny, it is a lake that catches the light, unfurling as it does amidst the beech-wood and alders. It has a name that captures it: ‘Bright Lake’.

  —

  I wake up to the sound of a bumble bee. The cherry laurel shrubs in the courtyard have begun to bloom: conical, snow-coloured inflorescences speckling the dark-green leaves. The bees haven’t left for days. With my window open a crack, the sound of them rushes in. From my bed, the city is silent but for the bees.

  The gauze of the curtains does little; the room is filled with light. When I close my eyes, it remains bright, a sure sign of a sunny day. I linger a minute, watching the morning, and then throw off the duvet. It is bright. Appropriate, I think.

  The mornings of lake days have become routine: coffee, half poured into a cup and half poured into a thermos. Toast. I nibble at it haphazardly as I pack lunch. Bread, cheese, eggs. I’ve got chocolate today, so I pack that too. My bag fills: lunch, towel, a plastic bag. I’ve learned something about preparation over the year and also pack a change of clothes.