Rivers

It rained for most of May, so we were particularly pleased that the Monday of the Pfingsten – Pentecost – holiday was sunny and warm. After a lazy morning, we decided about midday we packed a lunch of cold cuts and took our bikes out for a ride along the river.

We followed the River Salzach along its northward course away from the city. The bright holiday afternoon had brought many Salzburgers out. Spandex-suited cyclists on light racing bikes competed with middle-aged women walking with determination. Young couples pushed strollers. Light flashed bright, shade, bright, as we entered the shadows of the trees and emerged again. To our right, the wide pale green river flowed, the irregular facets of its surface catching the light from different angles so it glinted light and dark. Occasionally it frothed white as it tumbled over rapids.

About two kilometres along, the path turned inland slightly as we crossed a wooden bridge over a small tributary. Now woods lined both sides of the path, but we could hear the Salzach beyond, still on our right. A kilometre or less more, and the path opened out into the sun once more as we approached a spear-shaped spit of land, known locally as the Spitz. Here, two rivers join: The Salzach to our right and, to our left, the Saalach. Converging at the Spitz they flow together northwest, forming the border between Austria and Germany.

On the sunny spit, children played in the sand. A couple of teenagers sat talking, water lapping their feet, looking toward the opposite shore of the Salzach. We walked to the tip of the sand, the strand rapidly narrowing as we reached the slender point, the very tip of the arrow. There we found two pairs of black shoes, empty toes pointing northward, toward the water, as though two friends had simply walked out of them and kept going, away across the water.

‘Looks like the Rapture’, said himself, as the light sparkled on the water.

Sitting on a miniscule grass-covered promontory above the strand, we watched the rivers’ flow. The mingling of the waters of the Salzach met the water of the Saalach was marked by slow swirls, the underwater tension evident in a sinuous ruffled edge, one side pale blue-green, the other a deeper yellow-green. Moving side by side, the two waters began to dissolve one into the other. Gradually the distinction blurred, the curlicue edges dissipated, and the two waters were one.

We ate our sandwiches and drank our wine at a shaded picnic table at the V-shaped edge of the wood, where the path turned back on itself, running southwest along side the Saalach, away from the confluence of the waters. Walkers, joggers and cyclists passed us on one side, turned at the sharp bend and continued in the opposite direction on the others side of us. After a while, we put the remainder of our wine in the back of the bike and joined them, following our noses and, taking the path away from the Salzach, cycled on, with the Saalach – and Germany – to our right.

It was good to feel the warmth of the afternoon as we pedalled along, muscles working, under the overhanging greens between shadow and light, light and shadow, passing other cyclists and walkers. A young girl sat astride a tiny brown and white pony, which a man and woman led by its bridle; an older couple walked beside a young woman pushing an infant in a stroller. We felt relaxed and free, at home in the countryside of a new place that is becoming familiar.

On the opposite side of the river we could see the footpath on German side. At one point, water tumbled over the bank and into the river. In the stillness, shaded by trees and viewed from across the expanse of water, the foaming waterfall looked like a painting from the Barbizon School. The path, temporarily deserted at this point, seemed otherworldly, remote and isolated. Soon, though, we began to pass houses, and we could see ahead the bridge where the thoroughfare that links Salzburg and German crosses the river. We rode up the Radweg – the bike path – to the pedestrian bridge and discovered to one side of it an hydroelectric plant. There, arrested by concrete, the river swelled and surged, its surface opaque and taut with pressure, before slipping over the spillway and, freed, speeding northward.

We continued west along the road, heading for Freilassing, the town just over the border. I was curious to know whether I can bicycle there to shop, if necessary. And we discovered it can be done with relative ease.

At last we turned back, cycling back to the Spitz, where we sat in the late afternoon sun, drinking the last of the wine and watching children play on the strand. Beyond the children, beyond the arrowed-tipped stand, the waters of the two rivers mingled and poured away northward, where they will meet first the waters of the Inn, then the Danube and, eventually, flow into the Black Sea.

May Day

Today is Saturday, the day we do our main grocery shopping for the week. It is also May Day, an Austrian holiday. We learned only late yesterday afternoon that all shops, all grocery markets, hardware stores, laundries – everything – are closed today. At least, so we were told.

So to prevent a grocery crisis, Himself left work early enough to pick me up to do the shopping. We were even able to squeeze in a trip to the new Bauhaus, the enormous DIY centre covering several acres, so it seemed, in the style of those in the U.S. You know you’re a resident of a place when your pressing needs include a strimmer for the garden.

By the time we brought the groceries up the stairs, it was late and we were hungry, so we thought we’d see if the nearby gasthaus serves food. Just a ten-minute walk from our flat, it’s a small place, a timber-framed building of about the size of a two-room house, surrounded by the fields that stretch between us and the local shopping district. Passing on my bike on sunny afternoons, I’ve often noticed people drinking beer under wide umbrellas at its outdoor tables.

It was nearly nine, and Himself was doubtful, but when we approached, we could see a group of about eight men, shadowy in the dim light, eating at one of the tables. Chances were that we could get a meal.

‘Drinnen?’, the proprietor asked. No, we said. We would prefer to sit outside in the dusk, though the grey clouds overhead were turning darker.

He put a table cloth on the small table and, before he brought us our beers, put a candle-illuminated lamp on it. Then he recited the short menu. The conversation between my husband and him had been entirely in German, however basic, but at this point Himself said, in German, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’ the proprietor asked, also in German. Then he translated, a little halting but certainly clearly, the last item he had recited. A beef roulade with spaetzl. That would do just fine.

And it was delicious. We had found, perhaps, what I hoped we would, a place within walking distance with decent food where we could go of an evening or on a hot afternoon for a beer or two.

After serving us, Wolfgang, as it turns out the proprietor is called, unfurled and raised the umbrella next to our table. Was it going to rain, my husband asked. Wolfgang shrugged and commented that in any case, the clouds were getting blacker.

Next to us a solitary man sipped at his beer and smoked. Wolfgang stood by the man’s table and, with a gesture and word of thanks, took a cigarette from the pack that lay there. He stared off into the sky as he smoked, then went to check on the group around the large table. Occasionally, a car passed on the dark road, its approach signalled by the rumble of the narrow wooden bridge over the stream that winds through the field. We sat in the peace of the evening, pleased with ourselves.

‘Look,’ said my husband. In the darkness away to the west, over Germany, the horizon briefly paled. The sky darkened again, then came another faint light that quickly faded.

‘Let’s see how long before we hear the thunder.’

Something rumbled in the darkness, but it was only a car crossing the bridge. Soon, though, the sky brightened again, then again, and again. The flashes were brighter and coming more frequently. A woman who had joined the man at the table next to us got up to roll her bicycle into the shelter of the gasthaus. Wolfgang paused by our table. ‘Donner und blitzen?’ my husband asked him. Wolfgang couldn’t be sure, but it looked like it. We paid our bill, shook hands with Wolfgang and said good night.

Our brief drive was in the direction of the approaching storm. My husband drove slowly, pausing occasionally as lightening lit the horizon and silhouetted the trees surrounding the lake beyond our flat. Rapidly, the flares grew more brilliant. At home we opened the door from the bedroom and stepped onto the flat roof of the garage, giving us a view into the storm. Now we heard the crash of thunder as the storm moved ever closer. In the bursts of bright light we could see jagged bolts cutting the sky. With each flash, the clamour of the ducks on the lake rose.

Keeping in under the deep eaves, mindful of the danger of being struck, we stood transfixed by the drama. Illuminating the sky nearly continuously, the storm moved toward us. Rain splatted, slanting silver in against the lit sky. We settled into deck chairs, sheltered and content, remembering other storms. Himself recalled seeing a storm rolling over the landscape in Germany, where he lived many years ago. Similarly, I have the vivid recollection of a storm moving across the Salt Lake Valley as I watched from the University of Utah high on the east bench of the Wasatch Mountains. Himself remarked that storms don’t seem to move so dramatically over the Irish countryside. I tried and failed to recall seeing from our house in Southern California the similar onward march of a lightening storm.

At last, the storm moved past us, as it did lighting the sky behind the pilgrimage church of Maria Plain, silhouetting its twin towers high on a hill to our east. Then it began to fade in the distance. Other than the steady beat of rain as it fell, illuminated by the streetlamp across the way, there was little left to see from the roof.

Inside, I sat in the living room, trying to read my book on the history of Europe. But the intensity of the rain drumming in the darkness was hypnotic, pulling my attention from the text. I turned off the light and sat in the dark, half listening, half dreaming, until I was lulled into sleep.

Connected

It’s a bright, sunny and warming (to 11 C) morning, in contrast with the rain and cold of yesterday afternoon. May it continue. I intend take the bike and ride down the bike path to the Altstadt, perhaps to see something of the commemoration of the day in the platz in front of the Dom.

Just a few minutes after my husband left this morning, the doorbell rang for the first time since we’ve been in the flat. I had just started to sort the laundry to use in the new washing machine and, in fact, was still in my dressing gown and more disheveled than usual.

I was confused when I opened the door to an unfamiliar young woman, not older than 25, I’d say, wearing a jacket with a logo and three lime green boxes under her arm. Odd. I wasn't expecting any packages.

As always – it happens afresh with each encounter – I was disconcerted when she addressed me in German. Isolated as I am in the flat all day, moving in my narrowly defined world, continuing to relate to it in English through books and magazines, the internet and in conversations with Himself, it is disorienting to be confronted again with the reality of a German-speaking world just beyond our door.

In the stream of German I caught at last our surname and the penny dropped. She was from Telekom Austria and the boxes contained our new landline phone and broadband modem. At last, after only a week, we would be connected. We had been told it would be two weeks. (When we moved to Ireland, we waited three months for a landline; broadband took many months more.)

The young woman, with very short breached-blonde hair and capable working hands, was disconcerted as well, her English being not particularly fluent. And we needed to have a conversation. Where were the phone outlets? Did we want the phone and the internet connected in the same room? And more.

I found my mobile and dialed my husband’s Blackberry. When I held it out to her, she reeled back just slightly, her look saying, ‘Don’t do this to me!’ However, she took the phone. The first thing she said into the phone was, ‘Do you speak German?’ and it turns out that Rosetta Stone is paying off. Soon they were conversing auf Deutsch, and we were on our way. (He tells me now that he handed his phone over to the German-speaker he was meeting with, so it was a three-way conversation.)

As she worked away, I got dressed and continued with the laundry in the nearly child-like state I inhabit these day. Unable to communicate beyond a few stammered words and sign language, I feel at times a kind of lightness, the lack of responsibility that accompanies my inability to understand or be understood.

That doesn’t compensate for the frustrations though. We bought new washing machine last week, and it was delivered complete with instructions and manual, auf Deutsch, of course. Downstairs I stared at the control panel. I recognise for word for ‘cotton’ and the word for wool, but what is Koch-/Buntwäsche? I came upstairs and typed it into the Google translator. Something cooking?

The young woman had just come into the room. I showed her the manual. ‘Ah, so,’ she said. ‘Neu?’

I pointed to the phrase. What does this mean?

Ah. ‘Not black. Not white. Coloured.’

A mixed load. That would work.

Downstairs I turned the knob to Buntwäsche Eco and set the temperature to 40. Pressing the button labelled Tür, I felt a bit reckless. At least it was all socks, underwear and assorted towels – nothing that required special care. I’d just have to see if it works.

This is me, the obsessive worrier about instructions and procedures. Who keeps a file of every manual for every appliance I’ve ever owned. Including watches and pocket calculators. Who wants to know How Things Work. Who figures if the engineers designed the machine to work a particular way, that’s the way it should be done.

I walked away.

Upstairs the young woman had the line working. ‘Your husband said you had a' – gesturing, she fumbled unsuccessfully for the words  – 'from Ireland?' Ah, yes, the phone itself.

She continued. ‘He didn’t know if it would work here.’

We were in the shared office, which is still piled with cartons to be unpacked. The handset had been in my office in Ireland, so it must be in one of these. I started pulling things out of one box and pointed to another, indicating she should root through it. And we were lucky; eventually we pulled out the base and then one, then another, of the handsets.

We tested it and it worked. We were set to go. After she had explained to me, seeming more confident in her English, where the cables needed to connect to the wiring, how to install the software for the modem and what light – she called it a lamp – on the modem had to be steady, I complimented her on her English.

She was pleased but dismissive. ‘Everyone learns it in school. But school is long time ago now.’

‘I must learn German,’ I told her.

‘I think German is very hard to learn. Very hard. Even I, I have problems writing it. So many rules. For writing. And they change every week.’

I doubted that was true, but we were nearing the limit of mutual comprehension.

‘I’m a writer,’ I tried to explain. ‘And it’s hard not being able to speak to people. Not being able to use words.’

I didn’t think she got me. I tried a different way.

‘My work is writing. Words are my work.’

‘Yes,’ she said, as though she understood. ‘Words are work.’

We shook hands on the landing. I was sorry to see her go.

An Encounter

Spring – in its commonly understood sense, not its astronomical one – is late this year in Tipperary. A week ago, the day before the movers arrived to pack, I walked from the corner where our road, the ancient Dublin road, meets the even narrower road to Ballylooby, seat of the local parish. It is at this corner that the old house, built by my mother-in-law’s grandfather, stands. As far as I know, it was last occupied sometime after the birth of my husband’s oldest sister – who is now retired – when my father-in-law, the penultimate child of a family of ten, moved his young family from the cottage to a town on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland in pursuit of his career. The roofline is showing cracks, slates are slipping, windows are shattered. Still, remnants of furniture and crockery lie cluttered under its low ceilings. Ash from recent fires fill its wide open-hearth fireplace. As a teenager, when visitors from Boston arrived for summer visits, my husband and his brothers spent nights there, in upper rooms reached by stairs now so sagging I lack the courage to explore them.

At the disused entrance to the yard, horse chestnut branches dangled over the gate, bulbous purple tips oozing. I had been searching for signs of spring, wanting some hint of it before leaving. There were a few, but they were slight – reddening of bare dogwood branches on road sides, a scattering of deep gold and vivid purple crocuses at the base of the Big Tree, and the hint of arrow tipped leaves where I had planted tulips bulbs last fall. Still, the spreading branches of beeches across the fields showed no hint of pale green haze. Hedges were dull green and brown, showing jagged spears of pale torn ash branches where they had been recently cut. I would not see the daffodils bloom before going away.

I was on my way to our neighbours, the Murphys. From our kitchen window, you can see the rounded roof of the Murphy hay shed half hidden by the trees, a line marking the near horizon below the further horizon of the Knockmealdowns. When I first came to Tipperary, Anne Murphy was particularly kind to me. Offering red wine during late afternoon visits, she gave me also advice and lent cookbooks as I tried to learn to cook using different measures and ingredients, vegetables new to me and unfamiliar cuts of meat (or names of cuts of meat). Soon, though, changing work schedules, illness, the birth of her grandchild – life – had limited our visits. It had been too long since we sat together with a glass of red wine, and now I was going away.

Anne, her husband Michael, and I sat by the fire in their sitting room that looks west over the rolling fields, the low sun bright in our eyes. Michael and Anne told me what they could tell about the big tree, how it was part of the hedge at the entrance of the avenue leading to Millgrove, how it came to be burned, and how our neighbours stood circling it, protesting over two days, refusing to let the council cut it down. This was not long ago, perhaps 15 years back, within the time I had been coming to the neighbourhood, but I had never heard the story. They promised to try to recall more details of the tree’s history and send them to me.

We agreed that the hard frosts of winter were lasting too long. Usually by Patrick’s Day the road sides and gardens would be filled with daffodils. Now, a week before the 17th, there were just the tips of leaves and bare swelling buds, cresting the earth only this week. I worried aloud about the birds I had been feeding. How would they survive when I left? Michael didn’t agree with feeding birds; it makes them lazy, he said. But the winter has been so cold, exclaimed Anne and I. They would have starved! Maybe, he conceded, more out of kindness than conviction, I thought.

Anne told me about visiting Salzburg with their daughter, who has worked in one after another European capital for years now. It’s a beautiful city, they said, a nice drive from Munich, convenient to Italy, even Paris. I would learn German, she was sure, though her daughter prefers French. German, we agreed, is easier to pronounce than French, which I studied for years in secondary school and university without gaining verbal fluency. I’d get by, she told me. In the cities of Europe, if not in the country, so many people speak English. It’s true, I said. Dependent on tourism, Salzburg is a welcoming city, and most people I met there speak English.

I drained the last of my glass of wine and stood, saying goodbye to Michael, urging him to take care of himself. He was born on the morning of my mother-in-law’s 18th birthday, and his health has been poor recently. Anne and I embraced at the door, then she stepped outside with me. Under a small tree near the door, she picked a bright gold crocus and handed it to me. ‘Put this in a book,’ she said.

In the field next to their long drive, sheep congregated at the rail fence, bawling loudly. Were they hungry, I wondered. No, said Anne, it’s just they hear our voices. We said goodbye again, and she went into the house, waving as she went. I clutched the crocus and crossed to the fence, drawn by the sheep. Those closest to the fence put their heads over it, while more approached from behind them, bawling louder. Heavy with thick dirty wool, they watched me as the noise of their bawling swelled. Though they must be ewes, I thought, the heavy bass of their baaing was masculine in its intensity. It rumbled up from the depth, Robeson-deep, shuddering the air. I watched them; they watched me with equal intensity. Strange, I thought, how I’d never stood and contemplated sheep in the time I’d been there. Well, there was the solitary ram we sometimes passed in a small pen on our bike rides. I had dismounted and stood watching him. But never had I seen sheep come up to the fence, observing me while bawling at volume. I tried to take in their faces, black and dull white-grey, their thick coats, the shape of their hooves, their eyes and ears.

Those at the fence stood watching me watching them while stragglers behind them drew closer. I longed to reach out to stroke one. What would happen? I tentatively put a hand out; the ewe drew back. Still, we stood.

At length, I tried the trick Himself had showed me as we stood next to a field of young calves, also watching us. I drew myself up and, while looking intently, suddenly jumped side to side: right foot, left foot.

Unlike the calves, they did not all immediately scatter, but it startled them. They drew back, and briefly the bawling quieted. Then it rose again, loud and deep; it followed me as I walked away in the growing dusk, still holding between two fingers my golden crocus.