Turning Read online

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  Published in Hamish Hamilton paperback by Penguin Canada, 2017

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Virago Press

  Copyright © 2017 by Jessica J. Lee

  Maps copyright © 2017 by Jessica J. Lee

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Lee, Jessica J., author

  Turning / Jessica J. Lee.

  ISBN 9780735233263 (softcover)

  ISBN 9780735233270 (electronic)

  1. Lee, Jessica J. 2. Canadians–Germany–Berlin–Biography. 3. Swimmers–Germany–Berlin–Biography. 4. Swimmers–Canada–Biography. 5. Swimming–Psychological aspects. I. Title.

  GV838.L43A3 2017 797.2’1092 C2016-907177-4

  Cover design by CS Richardson

  v4.1

  a

  ‘Around us the illusion of infinite space or of no space, ourselves and the obscure shore which it seems we could touch, the water between an absence.’

  Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

  contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  the lakes

  maps

  prologue

  summer

  under water

  the swimmer’s view

  a short spell

  landing

  baptismal

  marking time

  an offering

  silk and glass

  north

  south

  autumn

  a pool of light

  a congregation

  small intimacies

  schatz

  grey

  waiting

  winter

  under ice

  errare

  firn

  out of air

  echo

  unfolded

  borderland

  swell

  spring

  spring

  ember

  bridge

  slope

  gift

  afterglow

  bibliography

  acknowledgements

  the lakes

  1. Krumme Lanke

  2. Templiner See

  3. Habermannsee

  4. Liepnitzsee

  5. Flughafensee

  6. Straussee

  7. Orankesee

  8. Motzener See

  9. Pätzer Vordersee

  10. Pätzer Tonsee

  11. Möllensee

  12. Werlsee

  13. Mühlenbecker See

  14. Teufelsee

  15. Nymphensee

  16. Wandlitzer See

  17. Kleiner Lottschesee

  18. Bernsteinsee

  19. Kiessee

  20. Krumme Lake

  21. Karpfenteich

  22. Sacrower See

  23. Stechlinsee

  24. Klein Köriser See

  25. Bogensee

  26. Großer Tonteich

  27. Lubowsee

  28. Rangsdorfer See

  29. Heiligensee

  30. Frauensee

  31. Butzersee

  32. Plötzensee

  33. Schlachtensee

  34. Bötzsee

  35. Stolzenhagener See

  36. Neuer See

  37. Zeesener See

  38. Güterfelder Haussee

  39. Mechesee

  40. Schwielowsee

  41. Groß Glienicker See

  42. Großer Müggelsee

  43. Neuendorfer See

  44. Springsee

  45. Helenesee

  46. Jungfernsee

  47. Wannsee

  48. Schermützelsee

  49. Großer Däbersee

  50. Tornower See

  51. Teupitzer See

  52. Hellsee

  prologue

  It slips over me like cool silk. The intimacy of touch uninhibited, rising around my legs, over my waist, my breasts, up to my collarbone. When I throw back my head and relax, the lake runs into my ears. The sound of it is a muffled roar, the vibration of the body amplified by water, every sound felt as if in slow motion.

  Above water, it is entirely light. The sun pours over the tips of the forest, washing the surface of the lake in warmth. I feel it on my face, warm in the air, as I lie afloat. Eyes open, there is only blue, no clouds. The edge of my vision is framed with pine, its golden pollen thick in the air.

  Soon I will roll on to my front and submerge the rest of my body. I’ll pull broad, arcing breast-strokes underwater, coming up between them for breaths. I’ll feel the slight pressure on my palms as my arms sweep outwards, the gentle thrust of my legs as they spread and join again, the movement elliptical, repeated. Limbs stretched wide and then tight to my body again, my stroke as concise as a water strider dancing at the lake’s surface.

  But for a moment I stay on my back, moving at the border between air and water.

  summer

  Stratification: As the lake warms, the water separates into three layers. The coldest, the hypolimnion, sinks to the bottom. The warmest, the epilimnion, sits at the top of the lake. Between them is a zone of instability, the thermocline.

  under water

  A swimmer can sense the turning of the lake. There’s a moment in the season when the water changes. It isn’t something you can see, it’s something you can feel. In spring, the winter ice melts, and the warm and cold of the lake intermingle, flowing together. In summer, as the lake grows warm, a green froth of algae caps the surface of the water, and when it cools again in autumn, the green disappears. The air thins. The leaves flash red and gold. And the water ‘turns’.

  You come to know the consistent cool of spring and the stagnant warmth at the top of a summer lake. When the water clears in the autumn, you can feel it: the lake feels cleaner on your arms, less like velvet and more like cut glass. And then winter comes, sharper than ever. Swimming year-round means greeting the lake’s changes.

  There is an English expression for the lake’s changes: the ‘breaking of the meres’. It describes the point in late summer when shallow lakes – meres – turn a turbid blue-green, algae breaking atop the surface like yeast froths on beer. The Germans also have a word for the green of summer: umkippen. It describes the point when the water has turned to slick green, fizzling with iridescent algae.

  But the breaking of the meres and umkippen capture only that single moment of algal rupture, the death of the lake from too much algae and too little oxygen. We tend to notice the obvious thing – the emerging sheen of an algal bloom – and reduce a word’s meaning to that tiny moment, that fleck of green on the surface.

  The lake’s turning – ‘lake stratification’ and ‘overturn’ – runs deeper, taking in an entire year’s worth of changes in the water. Turning is perpetual. It points to the wider transformations in the water, as layers below billow and rearrange themselves beneath the surface. Even in winter, the lake is alive beneath the ice.

  I long for the ice. The sharp cut of freezing water on my feet. The immeasurable black of the lake at its coldest. Swimming then means cold, and pain, and elation.

  —

  When I
was twenty-eight, almost as if by accident, I was sent to Berlin on a five-month research placement. I moved into a second-floor Altbau flat, one of the crumbling, enormous apartments that looks straight out of a Stasi spy drama. And from this old place with an old cellar that had once been used for escape tunnels, I set out into a world of pine and silken water, of craggy cobbles and peeling paint.

  Berlin resembled the other places I’ve called home – Canada, Britain – but only in glimpses: in the way the skeletal pines would edge the lake, in how the old stones would grow thick with moss. Pain, brightness, loss and renewal were layered in the landscape: in the lush shade of Tiergarten, which in my grandfather’s days was barren, razed and desperately carved up for allotments, and in the crooked edges of concrete that had slowly been dismantled as kids my age grew up. I was three when the Berlin Wall came down. I don’t remember it, but I came to know it in my own way.

  The footprint of the Wall was turned into a hiking trail. Pavements stopped you in your tracks, Stolpersteine, brass stumbling stones marking the lost. Roads radiated out like a dial, a stretched palm pressed on to the city. I thought the roads here had to be so wide, if only to hold the ghosts.

  Half a year later, as I was retreating from the deep end of depression, I surfaced with the bizarre notion that the solution to my problems lay in swimming. I felt furious that I had succumbed to the dark vacancy of my moods, as though it were my fault. My heart was broken. Above all, I thought that swimming might help me find some new place in the world in a year in which I’d changed address five times. A place in a city that wasn’t mine, and that held layered in its streets a century of change and grief, ghosts in the landscape. Naively, perhaps, I believed that if I could find that place in the middle of the lake where every feeling slipped away, I might undo the hurt.

  I’d moved again – this time into a stark white room with ceilings thrice my height – but spent only a few moments unpacking and settling in before turning my eyes to the map. The city at its centre, cut through by a fan of broad avenues and the rivers, the sudden countryside at its edges. Hundreds of spots of blue multiplied exponentially as the city lines crept into the surrounding land. These lakes and rivers – their intricate weave of water laid on to the flat North German Plain by retreating glaciers in the last ice age – had worked a tiny hook into my heart, and I could do nothing for it but swim.

  Perhaps it was a drastic response. In depression, I had become someone I hadn’t wanted to be, emptied and hardened. I felt that I had to respond to it in kind, as if lake water might blast away my sadness and fear. So I decided to swim for a year, in the hope of finding some reserve of joy and courage in myself. It was a means of greeting the ghosts – mine and others – as they appeared around unknown corners. I knew there was no untouched landscape here: there is hurt that cannot be undone. I wanted to find a way to negotiate it, to live with it.

  Of all the lakes near to the city, I planned to swim in fifty-two, a whole year’s worth, stretching my swims out through each season. Prone to rules, I kept the parameters simple: no cars, no wetsuits. I could take friends from time to time. My daily life would continue as normal. I was in the final year of my doctorate, finalising and refining a dissertation in environmental history. I was living an ocean away from family and home. There was pressure to hold things together. Swimming would be a way of staying with my fears, a way of staying in place. Above all, I sought to find some balance in it.

  The summer in Berlin began coolly and then arrived fully formed, hot. Bright swathes of sunlight stretched over the cobbles, and the sky painted itself cornflower blue. The temperature rose and the air thickened only slightly as a hot, dry June settled on the city.

  I looked at the map, traced my fingers over the lakes I knew – Krumme Lanke, Weißer See, Liepnitzsee, Bötzsee, Mühlenbecker See – and decided, as if by habit, to start at the beginning. Krumme Lanke, my first German lake.

  the swimmer’s view

  There is a bay in central Ontario, two hours north of Toronto, in the heart of Canada’s ‘Cottage Country’. It is a place of rock, water and vast expanse. I swim there whenever I’m back in Canada, but for most of my childhood I wouldn’t swim in it at all. The depth and the darkness of the water kept me on the shore, terrified. The tangle of water milfoil in the shallows, to my mind, was a danger: grasping hands of water weed, clutching at my legs. It wasn’t a place for swimming.

  But it was the land my parents chose. Both immigrants to Canada, they set about approximating the ideal life. My father arrived in the early 1970s, carrying twenty dollars in his pocket. He’d left school in Wales at sixteen, set off across Europe doing odd jobs until he boarded his first Boeing 747. He arrived to a tangle of Canadian suburban houses in need of renovation, so he became a travelling salesman, replacing ageing clapboard and glass up and down the province. Within a decade, he was running his own business, hiring other salesmen like him.

  My mother arrived at twenty in 1974, speaking English only in fragments. Her credits from secretarial college in Taiwan weren’t recognised in Canada, so she was sent to complete grade twelve at her local high school. She spent the year out of place, longing for home. And then she married my father, an anchor in a foreign land.

  By the 1980s, our family was living in the Canadian suburbs, learning to be Canadian. My sister Nika and I were enrolled in primary school on weekdays, Chinese school on weekends, ice-skating lessons, summer camp, ballet. We moved from one suburb to a nicer one. My father designed the logo for his home renovations business, a maple leaf to dot the ‘i’. We were sent for swimming lessons at the YMCA, because swimming lessons seemed essential in a land full of water. Neither of my parents could swim.

  Like my mother, we spoke Mandarin at first, but in time the words disappeared. We spoke only English at home. In school, they taught us French.

  Now, halfway across the world, as I’ve learned to speak German, I think of this. Of the language I lost and those I’ve gained. Of the places that have reshaped who I am and where I find home.

  —

  I remember the sound of my mother walking through the door at the end of the day. , ‘Wǒ huíláile’ – one of the refrains in Mandarin that she repeated, as if speaking to no one. I’ve always thought this meant ‘I’m home’, but I’ve learned that it means only, ‘I’m back’, or ‘I’ve returned’. But , ‘return’, the small box tucked safely within another box, is a kind of comfort. The origin of the character is in a spiral, referring to a kind of regularity, the rotation of coming and going. Home as the place you return to.

  From time to time, the words take shape in my mouth when I walk through my apartment door in Berlin. A kind of routine, the same way the patch of shore-line from which I swim represents safety. Fragments of Chinese slipping out between English and German, as I press new words and places into place. Return. Home is as much in a language as it is in a landscape.

  The German word Landschaft implies a cultural landscape. It’s built into the very idea. To speak about landscape in Germany is to speak of a place shaped by people, and given the past century’s history, it hasn’t always been easy to speak about. But agricultural fields, the romanticised places of forest and hillside, the many-storied rivers that traverse the country: all of these are cultural, on some level, shaped by and shaping culture.

  The name Berlin, so the story goes, stems from an old Slavic word for ‘swamp’. Hardly an attractive beginning, but it is an accurate name nonetheless: Berlin is built on wet ground. The Spree and Havel Rivers slide across the city, damp cobbles edge the canals, ground-water rises from the sandy soil. A ring of water surrounds Berlin: a speckled landscape of lakes. Fresh water rushes into former sand quarries, moorland slopes into marshland, rivers slip and swell across the flat ground.

  Brandenburg surrounds Berlin. A countryside at odds with the city, it is the place I least expected to love. Berliners joke about Brandenburg: ‘its poverty’, ‘its backwardness’, ‘its bigotry’. They ask if I’ve be
en given a hard time by neo-Nazis. They warn me that I’ll have to improve my German skills if I’m to make it. All of this holds a grain of truth.

  But before any of that, I knew it for its water. To leave the city, to swim, you need to know Brandenburg. It’s a place of summer afternoons, holiday homes and forest trails. It’s a place where silviculture thrives, where people farm and people live. It’s a place that’s made me stronger.

  Picture an eagle with its wings outstretched. That’s Brandenburg. Berlin is at its heart. To know Berlin’s landscape means to know Brandenburg’s too.

  In 1862, Theodor Fontane, one of Germany’s most celebrated nineteenth-century realist writers, began to document his travels through the region. His five-volume Rambles Through the March of Brandenburg took twenty-seven years to complete and remains one of the most popular works of German travel writing. While the book has remained popular in Brandenburg, the relative inaccessibility of the landscape until 1989 has meant that the book has been somewhat overlooked amongst English-speakers. It remains, however, a detailed and personal portrait of Brandenburg before the turn of the twentieth century, mindful of its precariousness in the face of industrialisation. From the forested, sparsely populated north-west of the region to the marshland at its east, his accounts speak of a place grounded in water, a place that came to thrive through its aquatic prosperity.

  I began reading Fontane’s Rambles when I moved to Berlin, translating passages from German in fragments, searching the text for lakes and towns I knew. His was a landscape shaped by storytelling and by memory. His was a Brandenburg untouched by the twentieth century, layers beneath the place I’ve come to know.

  Like me, Fontane spent his early career in London, documenting his life in the city, and his travels in England and Scotland. The British are known for a love of landscape writing, an intimate love of historical minutiae written in the ground. Fontane brought that love to Brandenburg, attempting to discover his home landscape lest some foreigner do it on his behalf. A hundred and fifty years later, I can’t ignore the humour in this.

  The borders of Brandenburg then were somewhat different, and the fields are now more monotonous. In the centuries preceding and succeeding Fontane’s Rambles, it changed dramatically, but many of the places Fontane documented remain. The lakes, most of all.