Lake Saint Anne

My grandmother used to say that Lake Saint Anne never stays in the same place twice.

Not because it moves. Water does not walk about on its own, and she knew that too. But she insisted that each person comes down from the crater with a different lake in mind. If you climb with a clear thought, you remember the water. If you climb with a bad thought, the lake keeps it and returns a memory you can no longer trust.

At twelve, I did not believe in her stories. I believed in encyclopaedias.

The encyclopaedia said that Saint Anne is Romania’s only volcanic lake, lying in the crater of the Ciomad massif. It was approximately six hundred and twenty metres long, four hundred and sixty metres across at its widest point, and a little over six metres at its deepest. The figures were precise. Figures did not change their story from one evening to the next.

My grandmother did not argue with figures.

“They measure the water,” she would say. “They do not measure what you take with you when you leave.”

I first went to the lake with my family when I was eight. I remembered the climb through the forest and the air turning suddenly cold before the crater. I remembered the water as round, green, and still. I remembered the birds falling silent at the shore and my father taking a photograph in which I refused to look at the camera.

Years later, I would discover that almost nothing in the photograph matched what I remembered.

My grandmother’s story began with a shepherd named Avram.

He had come from Sâncrăieni with the sheep one spring at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when a few monks lived beside the lake in a small hermitage. Avram had heard that an ancient treasure lay at the bottom of the water. Gold, weapons, and precious stones—things no one had seen, but whose value many could describe exactly.

At the evening meal, Avram asked the monks to help him search.

Ilarion, the oldest among them, asked what he would do if he found nothing.

“I will go back,” Avram replied.

“Not what you will do,” said the monk. “What will your thought do?”

Avram laughed. That night, he went down to the water alone with a rope and a rake tied to its end. He cast the tool into the lake and drew it slowly across the bottom, waiting for the touch of metal.

In the morning, the monks found him on the shore. The rope lay beside him, dry and carefully coiled, as though it had never been used.

Avram insisted that the water had pulled it from his hands.

Later that same day, he said he had never had a rope. After a week, he remembered finding the gold but leaving it there of his own will. After a month, he could no longer say on which side of the lake the hermitage stood. He drew it sometimes to the north, sometimes to the south, and sometimes in the middle of the water itself.

He took the flock down to the village and lived for many years. Whenever someone asked him about Saint Anne, he described a different road, a different shore, and a different night. Every memory seemed true while he told it. None resembled the one before.

One spring, he tried to return. He climbed almost as far as the crater and stopped at a crossroads the other shepherds said they could not see. Three paths began in the same place, and Avram recognised every one of them.

He could not choose.

He returned to the village and never tried again.

“Did the lake punish him?” I asked my grandmother.

“No,” she said. “It gave his thought back. Only the thought had changed while it was in the water.”

At twelve, Avram’s story seemed to me an elaborate explanation for the shame of a man who had found no treasure.

I decided to climb to the lake alone and prove my grandmother wrong.

That was my bad thought. I wanted no gold, and I meant no one harm. I wanted to return with a description so exact that all her stories would seem ridiculous. I took a notebook, a pencil, and the old encyclopaedia. On the first page, before leaving, I wrote: “A lake is the same lake, whoever looks at it.”

It was September. The summer visitors had gone, and the forest smelled of wet leaves and resin. I descended into the crater, counting the bends in the path. At the seventh, I saw the water between the trees.

The lake was there.

Not a false lake. Not an apparition. The same green surface surrounded by forested slopes, more oval than the perfect circle in my memory.

I sat on the shore and began to write. The colour of the water. The shape of the clouds. The roots beside me. The number of steps to the edge of the forest. I recorded everything that seemed impossible to dispute.

After a while, I noticed that the page was still blank.

The pencil was in my hand, but I did not remember writing anything. I turned the page. On the next one, I found a sentence:

“The water was black and the wind was blowing.”

It was my handwriting.

The water before me was green. The air did not move.

I tore out the page, crushed it, and put it in my pocket. Then I wrote again, pressing so hard that the pencil point scratched the paper.

This time, I watched every word until I had finished it.

When I looked up, I no longer knew what I had wanted to prove.

I had not forgotten where I was. I knew the lake’s name, the figures in the encyclopaedia, and the path by which I had come. But the thought that had brought me there was gone. In its place remained a silence without edges, like an empty space inside a sentence.

I became afraid and left.

On the way back, I counted twelve bends, although I was certain there had been seven on the way up.

My grandmother was waiting for me. She did not scold me or ask why I had gone alone. She took the notebook, opened it to the first page, and handed it back.

The sentence I had written before leaving was still there.

Beneath it, in the same pencil, a second line had appeared:

“But it does not remain the same in the mind.”

I did not remember writing it.

My grandmother closed the notebook.

“Now do you know why Avram could not find the road?”

I wanted to tell her that I did. Instead, I asked what the lake had looked like when she was there.

She did not answer.

My grandmother died three years later. Among the things she left me was the photograph my father had taken on our first visit.

In the picture, the lake was not round. It was long and slightly crooked, as I had seen it at twelve. I stood at the water’s edge, turned towards the forest.

I had always remembered the photograph being taken from the opposite side, with me looking at the lake.

On the back, in my grandmother’s small handwriting, was a single line:

“Water does not walk on its own. It needs someone to carry it.”

I have not climbed to Saint Anne since. I can point to the lake on a map. I can say how long, wide, and deep it is. I can explain the way there using information more reliable than my memory.

But whenever I try to draw the path to the water from memory, I arrive at a different number of bends.

Perhaps the lake has always remained in the same place.

Perhaps we are the ones who move it each time we remember it.