Hello, Stranger

My recent post about interfering with the Australian family’s bus trip one sodden August afternoon has led me to think, naturally, about my impulse to put myself forward to strangers I meet when I’m out and about. I’ve written here previously about an abortive conversation at a bus stop not long after we moved to Salzburg. There was another awkward encounter shortly after I first arrived in Ireland. I’ve also noticed my impulse to make eye contact, or the need to resist doing so, on the streets or in shops.

In fact, much of this is culturally as well as temperamentally determined. Preparing to move to Austria, I read that the custom here is not to make eye contact or greet people on the street, at least in the normal course of things. And I’ve found this to be true, in general, though occasionally, passing someone in the quiet streets around Katzenstraße, one may exchange a quiet Grüß Gott. Or not. (However, we’ve found when climbing mountain paths, the impulse to exchange greetings, even using the familiar pronoun euch, kicks in. It has to do, we suppose, with the fellowship of outdoors adventures.)

It’s taken some time for me to come to terms with this. It may seem familiar, even rude, to those I meet in shops or on the streets here, but I have trouble not looking into others’ faces, even making eye contact, which, it seems to me, then demands a nod, an acknowledgment, a simple greeting. So I discipline myself.

Bicycling, for example, I approach an oncoming cyclist and I feel my head nearly irresistibly swivel in her direction. My eyes want to slither sideways in their sockets. 'Just a peek!', my instincts cry. I fight the urge, keep my face forward, eyes focussed ahead, and we pass, ignoring one another. Why? It seems a matter of privacy.

As I said, in large part, it’s cultural. In Irish country towns, not only do people greet or acknowledge others on the streets, drivers along country roads lift from the steering wheel, with a certain studied nonchalance, the fingers of one hand in acknowledgment of passing cars. Walkers along the roads stare openly at those in cars that pass. Himself teases me because in our time in the house in Tipperary, I developed the habit of rushing to the window to watch each car that went by. One can’t help but greet others in these circumstances, especially when one is likely to know—even to be related to—most of those one meets.

In America, of course, depending on the city or region, there’s even more openness to strangers. In Ireland, though one may acknowledge others met on the streets, there remains a certain reserve—you could even call it caginess—about how much one reveals in these encounters. Not so in America: There it is common for people thrown into proximity with strangers to share a great deal of information about one’s life, one’s history, or one’s circumstances. Looking back, I’m now astonished at my own past revelations to strangers or near-strangers.

There are historical and cultural reasons for this, certainly. The vastness of unexplored land, the need for strangers to work together to build lives in frontier territories, isolation and loneliness, or perhaps idealism growing out of the American experiment, all combined to turn frankness, sharing of information and trust of others into American virtues. And American are appreciated, I think, for their open friendliness, informality and willingness to make human connections when they travel.

All the same, with some time and distance between America and my current life, I see the American propensity for expedited intimacy and the very desire to form those connections through a different lens. Like looking in the mirror and seeing a self not quite as remembered, I wonder some days just who I am. 

A Question of Settling

I suppose the logical question is what did we do for the Fourth of July yesterday.

Nothing.

I worked, trying to finish a rambling, disjointed post (see above) before moving on to my German lessons. Himself was at the office, playing mediator between his European team and the expectations of their American counterparts who, of course, were all out of the office. We roasted potatoes and a sea trout for dinner and afterwards took a walk in the fading light, walking first under the trees along the pale green-blue River Saalach as it tumbled northward toward its convergence with the River Salzach, then turning back along the Salzach to home.

There were no fireworks. There will be a splendid display during Salzburg’s Rupertikirtag festival in September. We’ll wait for those. Nor I did not pull out the U.S. Marine Corps Band CD. No Stars and Stripes Forever for me, not this year. It was day like many others, a day on which we were grateful for dry weather, a comfortable place to live and loving companionship.

All this seems to answer another question, one that was put to me all the time while we lived in Ireland: ‘Are you settled yet?’

An unsettling question, that. A question that’s nearly impossible for me to answer. I suppose I’m a kind of unsettled individual, at best. I’m a drifting sort of person, unsure and aimless at the best of times, a girl who is still waiting to grow up, fighting all the same growing old.

An American acquaintance in Ireland, someone I knew causally over the two and a half years we were there, told me as we were preparing to leave that it was just as well. ‘You’ve never settled here,’ she said.

When I told him, Himself was indignant on my behalf. After all, we had our house, which we had designed and furnished with care. We lived among a network of a large extended family. We attended weddings, christenings, First Communions and, particularly, funerals. We voted. We had gym memberships and were greeted on the streets and when we went into shops. Who was to say I had not settled?

Yet, in a way, she was right. Such intimacy as we developed with others remained within the family. In some ways, we were waiting for life to begin. And then, almost suddenly, we uprooted and moved to Salzburg.

Have I settled in Salzburg, then? Can I even define what that would be?

Skirting the question yet again, I think back to when we moved to our house, our first house, in Thousand Oaks. Himself envied me, he said, because I seemed to take to our new neighbourhood at once, in a way he never did. It was the archetypal California ranch-style neighbourhood of irregular blocks punctuated by cul-de-sacs, neat sidewalks bordered by grassy ‘parking strips’, a neighbourhood very much like the Sunnyvale, California, neighbourhood I grew up in. It was so like our childhood home that my sister said on seeing it for the first time, wonder in her voice, ‘You live in Beverly Cleary’s house.’

That suburban community with it tidy, mid-century stucco houses surrounded by rectangular lawns and patios was far from the dwellings in the small Irish towns where Himself spent much of his youth. It was further still the rolling farmland where he spent the rest of it, the same countryside where I, apparently, failed to settle during our time there.

And now we live in a flat at the edge of a central European city, in a neighbourhood that cannot be termed urban, rural or suburban, having elements of all three. When we arrived, we had few reference points, architectural, social, cultural or familial. My circle of acquaintances is small; it is through good luck or magnanimous fortune that we have wonderful neighbours who speak fluent English, else I would have been cut off nearly completely.

And, yet, oddly, I have settled, if by ‘settling’ one means a sense of feeling grounded in my surroundings. More and more, when I look out the window of the flat or of the bus, or take in the landscape as I cycle to the market, I feel at peace with the scene around me.

I struggle, naturally, with learning German. Even though I make my way around the city comfortably, being unable to speak fluently affects me at odd times. When the phone rings – which it does rarely – I answer wondering whether I will be able to understand the purpose of the call. If it is Himself on the other end, my tension immediately relaxes. I put off making appointments, wanting to avoid those awkward exchanges in stumbling German with the receptionists who answer the phone. (Once one woman, frustrated with my incomprehension, hung up on me. I took a deep breath and called back to begin again.) I worry about what could happen if I found myself in a real emergency.

Sunday I participated in a 5K Frauenlauf – a fun-run – as part of a team from The English Center, an English bookshop and language school. Standing in line before the start of the race, I asked the woman in front of me, in German, the time. Disconcertingly, she answered in German, and I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t understand what she said. I am used to hearing German over loudspeakers, but I long for the day when rather than sounding merely interesting, it will be also comprehensible.

But still, simply participating in the race, albeit as part of a team of English speakers, created another tie between me and the community. All along the route, Salzburgers stood and cheered as we passed.

‘Bravo, bravo’, an old man shouted as I turned the corner on which he stood. That I certainly understood.

I’m not suggesting that by doing the Frauenlauf I am now settled. It was a single morning; afterwards I came home and slept, nursing the hip I’d thrown out along the way. I rose the next morning – the morning of the Fourth of July – and went about my business. Alone, as usual, for most of the day, I limped, my hip still sore, and wondered how I will manage the medical system here to have it adjusted. In America, in Ireland, I would know how to find a chiropractor and how to make an appointment. It’s not so simple here. It’s an example, however small, of how I have not ‘settled’.

All the same, that the Fourth of July, a date that should have resonated and made me homesick, passed without much more than a ripple in my awareness suggests an important, if subtle, shift in my consciousness. Being settled, like being happy, is a fluid state. I can’t define or describe it; I’m not sure I even know it.

All I can do is refer to the lightness in my being when I see the sun brighten behind the green wood outside the window. Feel the rightness in the sight of the corner of a familiar door reflected in the wardrobe mirror. Or know comfort in hanging heavy clean towels on the line. Sometimes, this simple peace is enough. 

Summer Skies

While it would be gross fabrication to say I miss the U.S., it would be mere exaggeration to say I am homesick for Ireland. We followed the Queen’s recent visit with uncanny fascination, surprised at the waves of emotion that overcame us at the reconciliation and mutual respect that arose from the ceremonies. I regretted that I could not stand near the motorway running between Cashel and Cork to see her motorcade pass – until I realised they made the journey by helicopter. Still, in my mind’s eye, I stood at our sitting room window in Tipperary and saw – across the pastures of Tincurry – her Range Rover glide through the landscape, past the gaze of Galtymore.

Likewise, we would have liked to have been there to see the crowds welcoming Obama, though, as it happened, we were in Italy during his visit. As well, when Tipperary recently beat Cork, its long-standing nemesis, in the first test of the summer-long hurling national championship, we wished we could have been watching the match from the comfort of the Garryroan sitting room.

Those are public occasions, of course. The twinges of nostalgia, those passing moments of longing, more often come in the odd, private moment. Weeding the garden in the stillness of an overcast afternoon, the breeze soft and pregnant with rain, the clear trill of blackbirds the loudest sound I hear, I am put in mind the long, overgrown garden at the back of my mother-in-law’s house. Looking up, I notice the swell of currents and ripening raspberries on the bush, and I wish, once more, that she could have seen our garden here.

I recall also the low rolling hills of Ireland, green fields cross hatched by deeper green hedgerows and grey clouds swelling on the horizon. Perhaps the memory is triggered by a photo; perhaps it comes suddenly to my imagination. The Austrian landscape is beautiful, its wide open meadows spreading against the soaring Alps breathtaking. The ancient onion-domed steeples and charming villages, dignified in these vast spaces, still astonish me. But my response to the Irish landscape, whether imagined or seen, is instinctual, as if primordial. It’s the quickening recognition that draws one toward a long-missed loved one.

It’s not just the landscape I miss, of course. I think of languorous warm Sunday afternoons, when, dinner dishes done, we wander aimlessly. Waiting, perhaps, for the Sunday match to begin, we sit in the glassed-in porch of my mother-in-law’s house, where, overheated by the welcome sun, acrid dust rising from the elderly brown cushions competes with the sharp scent of geraniums. Or we drift to the long tunnel of the polythene house, where the interior temperature rises a good 10 degrees higher than the cool afternoon. Flying insects ping against its taut surface; the air is rank with humus and sweet with ripe peaches and apricots. Rusted tools, rough twine, unspooled in irregular loops, faded boxes and broken crockery litter the tottering timber table. A drumming flutter beats against the plastic in the corner as a thrush, frantic, finds her way out the opening at the far end.

Later, in the long evening, we sit outside, if we’re lucky, to watch the colour drain from the light over the tips of the towering hedges. We try to distinguish the music of the thrush from the melody of the blackbird. Overhead, swallows and swifts dance their soaring song, filling the sky with swooping arabesques, their high chattering cries hanging in the air. They fill me with contentment.

We see no swallows from our veranda in Salzburg. I spotted, last summer, a few over the Salzach as I cycled along it in the evening. They flitted over the river, dancing from current to current just above the water, their cries muffled by the roar of the water. But they do not dance over our garden.

So it was with exhilaration I listened to the high shrill twittering of a sky full of swallows above the basilica in Padua. They soared too over the campos and canals of Venice, filling the heaven with their shrieks, weaving an elegant ballet against the fading blue light, blue reflected and intensified by the mirror-like waters below. In the heat of an Italian evening, I saw the swallows and thought of Ireland and home.

View of the Galtee Mountains from Garryroan, South Tipperary, Ireland
Photo by Lorraine Seal

Irish Harvest

I wrote recently about fall in Southern California, but it was only this morning, a glorious day, the sky above Salzburg deep blue and cloudless, that I realised that today is just two days from the autumnal equinox, the point in the year after which darkness overtakes daylight, creeping slowly, day by day, each night’s length exceeding the previous day’s hours of daylight.

The realisation brought to mind Ireland, where I spent the last three autumns. I recalled the bronzing of the beech leaves there and the reddening of the rose hips in the hedgerows. And I remembered the harvest.

I’ve spent most of my life living in towns or cities, so the three autumns I lived in the Irish countryside were a revelation to me. In those three years, I found myself watching the skies each fall almost as anxiously as the farmers, looking for weather fine enough to bring in the harvest. Last year’s pleasant warm and dry early fall seemed a reward for enduring a miserably wet summer. I revelled in the sound of the combines droning in the fields surrounding us. I delighted in the shorn stubble shining pale gold in the sun, field after field of it, abutting in the distance green pastures. It was lovely to see, and surprisingly reassuring considering I have only an indirect stake in it. There was something peaceful about knowing the corn is safe in.

One golden day about this time last year, on a Sunday afternoon in Co Tipperary, I stood at the edge of a field watching a neighbour harvest the wheat. In the day’s heat and under the intense sun, I looked over my shoulder at what my husband’s family call the Old House – the now-deserted stone cottage built by my mother-in-law’s grandfather –  just across the road from where I stood. The sun glinting off its black slates suddenly seemed to solidify them. I saw as if for the first time the broken tiles and blotched greying walls. The golden light that bright September afternoon made me see it as a painter would. Its crumbling walls and chipped slates seemed more real, more weighty, than they had been a moment before.

That afternoon, it occurred to me that in three years, I’d never watched a combine at work harvesting the grain. So I stood at the entrance to Pat Murphy’s field, leaning over the gate and watching as Pat, working with his cousin and neighbour Johnny Donnell, manoeuvred the combine and tractor into position. This took longer than I expected, with Pat periodically jumping down from the cab and climbing back into it. Thick grey exhaust billowed from the combine. After 20 minutes or so, the combine, with Johnny driving it, rumbled off up the field, and Pat manoeuvred the tractor out the gate and onto the road.

The combine crossed and recrossed the rich ripe field, there at the foot of the Galtee Mountains, the din of its engine rising and falling as it approached and retreated. At last it pulled up to the large blue trailer placed at the edge of the field and aimed its towering cylindrical spout over the container. Down poured the golden stream, heavy, full, dusty. The door of the combine opened and Johnny jumped out. He stood by me and talked of the goodness of the harvest. He said, 'It is dry and the wheat is dry and falls nicely.' He spoke of its fall into the trailer as a thing, a noun, not a verb, an entity that was lovely, even, smooth. He talked about the price being dependent on the corn’s being dry. For each point of moisture above about 18%, the price drops because the corn buyers have to dry it, he said.

Standing in the heat and feeling the freshness of the fields, the trees and hedges, I felt exhilarated and connected to the countryside. Even the noise didn’t bother me. It seemed necessary, productive, reassuring. I remembered how the previous year, the combine had been brought to that very field and the next day the rain poured from the heavens, for days on end. The very fact that the corn could be cut filled me with joy.

The combine rumbled back and forth all afternoon and into the evening. Later that night, I walked over in the dark and stood watching it work. Its lights illuminated the field as it worked the hidden sea of wheat. I watched the light move across the field at the foot of the mountains to the north, which stood silhouetted against the horizon. The road and the hedges were black as I walked the short distance to our house, following the light I had left on. In the warm darkness, alone, far from crowds, I was comforted by the humming of the combine and the late song of birds.

They were at it until past midnight, Pat told me the next day, when it got too damp to work. The morning was overcast, so they waited for the sun to emerge and dry out the field to continue harvesting. When it’s damp, the straw doesn’t cut well and it clogs the header, Pat said as we stood in the mud at the edge of the field. Halfway across it, the uncut wheat swayed gently above the rough stubble with its litter of straw. At home not long afterwards, I listened to the rumble of the combine as work began again.

Later, just as evening set in, I walked up the road to see if Pat had finished harvesting the wheat. The light was gentle, the edge of pale grey, and the air as soft as a sigh. The hedgerow enclosing the field was luxuriant, its bracken still bright green, but I could feel in the air the coming chill. In the near-complete silence, I heard the deep lowing of a single beast, cow or bullock, from a nearby pasture.

I entered the field through the gap in the hedge and crossed the uneven muddy ground. The combine’s tracks seen from the distance appeared even and neat, like ridges of corduroy. But seen up close they were choppy, carpeted with chafe, ragged stubble and torn straw fallen every which way. I thought at first the ground was littered with the gold of wasted wheat. But then I picked up fingerfuls of the stuff and could see it was hollow chafe, as weightless as the pale light trickling through the shadows.

Leaving the field I looked back. The fading sun, low and red-orange, lay tangled in the spikes of the tree tops. Dozens of pale-gold straw cylinders, each over a metre in diameter and perhaps two metres long, were all that remained of the harvest. In the days to come, these would be loaded onto a tractor-drawn trailer and stored in sheds for use over the winter. For now, though, they were scattered across the field, washed pale pink and burnished gold by the sun’s last rays, like so many spools tossed aside by an outsized toddler. For the moment, they looked magical.

Bird Song

Himself has been considering cycling to work, a fair distance from our flat on the northwest of Salzburg. So yesterday, a clear day after a stormy night, we decided to bike the route to check it out.

We cycled the now-familiar path along the River Salzach, reaching the Altstadt in about 20 minutes. As we rounded the final bends before reaching the city’s historic core, I looked up to see the Hohensalzburg rising on the Festung, from which it dominates the city. Clustered forest-like around its base were centuries-old domes and steeples. Beyond it stood the green-covered Alps, and I thought what a storybook picture it looked. Salzburg seemed to me in the moment a gem, a wonderful place to live.

We continued southward along the river, a route less familiar but still one I have travelled to reach my yoga class. We were cycling now past moderately sized buildings – municipal and private offices, university buildings and apartment houses – that line the quay south of the Mozartsteg.

The bike path was still crowded, filled with skaters, walkers and cyclists on this pleasant Sunday afternoon. In fact, I found myself manoeuvring carefully to overtake slower cyclists while avoiding oncoming ones. Along the path, people paused in walking their dogs to talk. A man leaned into a car, talking to the driver as he stopped in the street. Two middle-aged nuns stood talking to a man and a woman as they peered into the window of a bright red van. ‘Super!’ said one nun just as I passed her.

As I wondered what had excited her enthusiasm, I thought, ‘She’s just another woman, not much older than me. Why shouldn’t she be pleased by ordinary things on a beautiful spring day.’

About thirty-five minutes along we entered a wooded area, the river still to our left. By now I was getting tired, and neither of us was sure how much farther we needed to travel. We knew only that the campus of buildings was beyond where a tributary joins the Salzach. The trees in the wood we passed were green with the freshness of spring, the ground damp beneath then. As we rolled along I realised there was no litter, unlike in America or, even worse, in Ireland where rubbish is indiscriminately strewn along green lanes as well as  remote tracks. Is the corporation of Salzburg better at picking up rubbish, I wondered, or, more likely, is its population less apt to litter?

Another fifteen minutes along, we passed a beer garden or gasthaus on what seemed to be the shores of a small lake. People sat on the grass or at tables under the trees. Then the trail rose suddenly, and we were on top of a large dam crossing the river, water roiling dramatically in front of it and swelling more calmly beyond it. A few minutes along, we came at last to the convergence of waters, one river pouring into another.

By now, it was as though we had left the city behind us altogether The river here was wide and placid. Swans shone white on its surface. The water was pale, pale blue-green and nearly opaque, a smooth nearly unearthly colour after the clear bog brown of the rivers we knew in Ireland. Rising steeply just beyond, jagged, tree-covered Alps framed the scene.

We passed families playing on the sandy shore and fishermen stretched beside their poles. A pair of women walked behind shaggy Yorkies, one cream and one caramel. A woman in jeans rested her head on a man’s shoulder as they walked along, hands held tightly between them. Along the shore, a small clear stream revealed pale sand and brown pebbled in its shallow depths before it flowed into the opaque pale turquoise river.

We found at length what we had come for and turned to return to the city. Now late in the afternoon, grey clouds, warning of another storm, massed overhead. In the wood to our left, pale green of new beech leaves and broader leaves of white-flowered horse chestnuts filtered the light overhead. It was, briefly, so like Ireland, where the intensity of green seems at times to tint the very air. For the moment, the path was deserted; no cyclist or jogger or skater or dog walker passed us. Other than the murmur of the river and the whirl of my wheels, it was very still. Then I heard from the wood, very distinctly, what it took a moment to comprehend.

Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo.

Ahead, Himself wheeled around and raised his hand, pointing to the wood. Stopping and straddling my bike, I nodded. Yes, yes, I heard, I heard.

Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo.

Though I  had never before heard the cuckoo's call, there was no mistaking it, two clear notes repeated again and again. It was sweeter than I had imagined, soft but clear and sustained, like chimes, reverberating through the dense green wood.

Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo. Coo-Coo.

Then the notes stopped, and we were freed to continue, northward with the Salzach, toward home.

Perspective.

Checking Joy of Cooking last night for a pancake recipe, pancakes being the traditional Irish dinner the night before Ash Wednesday (traditional because the eggs, butter and sugar had to be consumed before the privations of Lent), I noticed a recipe for Austrian pancakes, Nockerln. The authors note: ‘In Salzburg, when we were last there. . . .’ In the 20 years I’ve owned the book, I doubt I'd ever noticed the recipe, awareness narrowly focussed always on the more familiar. In fact, until recently little about Austria had caught my attention. As European states go, for myriad reasons, it’s hard to overlook France or Germany, Spain or Italy, but Austria always sat on the edge of my consciousness, tucked away, the Alps perhaps too lofty to scale.

So, weeks ago, when we became aware of the possibility of moving to Austria, I started looking at history books and online maps, refreshing my knowledge of the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, trying to understand how Austria fit into European history and geography. I realised how little I had ever thought or knew about Central or Eastern Europe. What’s remarkable is how different the map looks with the Atlantic and Ireland repositioned on the far western edge of the page and Turkey and the Middle East framing the eastern edge. Europe suddenly expanded, unreeling on the other side of the Alps, rolling away down the great plains of Hungary, passing mountain ranges and boggy ground I couldn’t have located months ago, rushing headlong toward the vast steppes of Russia and the Black Sea.

This week, in Ireland, though, I’m working through the checklist of things to be organised before the move, mostly involving paperwork and following through with bureaucracies: US tax returns (2009), Irish tax refunds (2008), filing receipts for the reimbursement for medical bills, and more. My husband is receiving, signing, scanning, and resending contracts and other documents. There are emails and phone conversations about shipping, temporary housing as well as renting a place in Salzburg.

There is another checklist, though, an interior one, directing my attention to sensation. The black roof tiles frosted as white as the rime-covered rough grass in the morning’s first light. One rabbit chasing another in the dim early light, dark form after dark form bounding through uneven tangles of wild grass. The tiny bold robin, head cocked, waiting two feet away as I scatter the day’s seed.

My mother-in-law’s dog, Sally, arriving first thing from next door to race through the house, claws clattering, eager to make sure we’re both here, before tearing out the back door and up the field. The sharp shard of yellow light striking the wall by the kitchen as the sun finally mounts the tall hedge to the east. The stab of light through the skylight, cutting a tilted square of brightness on the pale hall wall, warming the chill. The stark bare skeleton of an ash, branches and truck stripped to the bone by crows, rising from the hedge opposite my window, its spear-like upper branches scraping the sky.

These and more go into the album of the mind.

Here Be Demons

Among the documents the Company sent over with my husband’s letter of understanding and the contract for his new job is one spelling out the flextime rules. It notes the standard work week in Austria (38.5 hours), the range of hours within which one can choose to be in the office each day, the core hours during which one is required to be in work, and many more arcane details regarding overtime, time credits and debts, and the recording of time worked.

Legally required, I imagine, in its specificity it’s a far cry from anything you’d get from an Irish employer. Moreover, it would have been unheard of in my American jobs, where the standard work week at the professional level could be defined by ‘How many hours does God send.’

I pointed this out to Himself. ‘It’s for the good,’ he said. ‘Everything is clear, understood.’

So. Things will be different when we move to Austria.

I’ve been anticipating this, to be sure. I’m told to expect order, the assumption that one adheres precisely to the rules and stated procedures, very different from the slapdash Irish approach to life, where cutting corners or taking one’s own time is routine. I don’t imagine I’ll find hastily scrawled ‘Back in 2 minutes’ signs on many shop doors in Salzburg.

Himself says this adherence to order will suit my temperament. ‘You like to have things spelled out so you know what to expect.’

He’s right, of course. I’m not by nature orderly in my habits, and my housekeeping is inconsistent, but it soothes my anxiety to know how things are done and when something will happen, and in what order, as if the world could be contained by checklist. It’s a fiction, of course, but it serves as notional boundary between the known world and the great white blank beyond the border, where demons dwell.