strangeness in the lake
Cardinal water: strange tides, lovers, deep waters
Sarah Hall’s ‘Vuotjärvi’ is a story about a liminal space. The plot is simple: new lovers are on holiday at an isolated but idyllic lake house. One of them swims out too far, and the other takes action too late.
The power of the story is that the central disaster is not clearly demarcated, in either time or space. The moments between the narrator registering the danger her lover is in, and realising it’s too late to do anything, are murky. Her motivations are unclear, apparently even to herself. This is a story written as a liminal space, but this intensifies, rather than diminishes the terror.
The story begins with her watching her lover swim to an island in the lake. Already, the liminality is setting in. His features become blank, and the distance between them is emphasised.
She stood on the pontoon and watched him swim out. His head above the lake surface grew smaller and more distant. After a while he turned and looked to the shore. His face was white and featureless.
The space itself appears to thwart her ability to act. It has an almost sentient power over her, causing a lassitude that delays her further.
She could no longer see him in the water so she kept her eyes on the spot where she thought he would probably get out. The foliage mossed together the more she looked. Birds circled over the lake.
By the time she decides to row out in a leaky boat, she is no closer to rescuing the man, but she is now in danger too.
Suddenly she knew how it would all play out. The boat would continue to take in water and would lug down as she tried to row back, its debilitation unstoppable, and then it would submerse. She would make it back to the shore because she could swim well enough but it would be ugly and ungraceful, it would involve swallowing water and choking because of the desperation. The rescue would be aborted.
We aren’t given the resolution to the story. It’s not clear whether these dire imaginings come to pass. The unsettling effect of this story is that it leaves us there, in liminal space, where time is suspended. Perhaps both of them survive, perhaps neither of them do. Perhaps the lake is a threshold to another world, and that is why the man has disappeared. You can almost feel the seductive pull of the water, and the strangeness of the lake.