Thank You for Visiting…

“If you come at four in the afternoon, I’ll begin to be happy by three.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

The signs at the edges of towns and villages in Australia vary in design, but all share the same basic sentiments. They thank you for visiting, remind you about where you were, a gateway to a mountain range, or the home of a vague historical figure, scene of some event. Sometimes the sign reminds you to drive safely and tells you how much it is anticipating the next time you choose to visit. Even if all you did was lower your speed to pass through on your road trip. Of course in Austria things are a little more formal and regimented.

The Teutonic sensibility is to denote the start of each village with identical blue bordered white signs. They are always placed at the same distance from the road, in the same height, and feature the village clearly printed in sans-serif type in the centre. On leaving the village it’s almost the same thing, except the there is a diagonal red line running through the sign now. You pass from village to ‘not village.’ Just like that.

The spaces between villages are often crammed with fields of crops, wheat, vineyards, tobacco and maize. The little roads dip and weave like a switchback following tracks and borders laid down in ancient times. Hares weave madly in the lucerne, a pheasant stalks in the cool shade of a stand of trees and there you see the little chapel, and pull over.

A little bench and table nestles deep in the shade of a stand of brutally green trees, presided over by an oak tree. The ground is grass and lime-gravel, and the lazy thrum of crickets and grasshoppers falls away to reveal the distant waterfall hiss of the autobahn a mile or two to the west. The tiny chapel is painted in pink and cream, and Jesus stares of from behind the iron gate, past the stubs of votive candles and the parchment remnants of the flowers woven into the gateway. He looks east, to the sun, the Father of the pagans who was brought to a trillion peasants as a new Christian God from a land many thousands of miles distant. The blood from the crown of thorns and his hands and feet is stained a dirty brown, like rust, and his blue eyes stare out past fields and powerlines, windmills and hazy hills.

You stand and think about saying something, a prayer, or a poem, and nothing seems to come naturally, so you walk to the spring cut into a stone, Heiligenbrunn – the holy well. AS you kneel the tendons at your knees crack like knots in a fire, and you lower your mouth to the stone and drink three long swallows of the healing water that was found here in the middle of these fields. The water is cold and sharp, like cutting your mouth with the acidity of the deep hills underground. This water travelled from the sky to a snowflake, to rest upon mountains distant, melted into brooks and sank deep into the earth to be drunk by you here and now. It has travelled all this way, and so have you, in the sight of the sun, the corn, the trees and the chapel.

Return to the car and take the empty water bottle and fill it from the stone, and feel it sit heavy and cold in the bottle, heavy and cold now in your belly too. From here you will take it to the hospital for the old man on your evening visit. But for now you walk to the bench, and sit and look out on the world. To the right lies the fields and flatlands that becomes the steppe as it progresses east. Ahead lies Vienna, and to the left the beginnings of mountains, the ends of mountains, sheathed in the haze of the day.

Through the shimmer deep blue cliffs and massif’s are faintly visible. Somewhere far distant swans are swimming on blue lakes, church bells are ringing. There is the hush of a young couple in love laying in a high meadow, their fingers intertwined, and the clatter of smooth river stones under the tread of a deer seeking water under the shade of the sycamore trees that line the banks to the east. Children run and shout and play, old men sit and watch the changed world race past them, old women in the village

cemetery clean and tidy the graves into a picture perfection, weeding and raking, talking and laughing from time to time about the friends’ and enemies buried here. Silent when they walk home and part ways, the same place they were born, lived, worked, and soon will die. Perhaps somewhere there will be tombstones thus marked, like a village sign, a name in plain black text, stricken with a cherry red diagonal, This is not Karl. This is no longer Hilde.

You return to the car, and soon you will be at the hospital, clutching the healing water, as though a miracle were possible, as though this elixir will shatter metastases, regrow lung tissue and legs, heal bypass scars and regrow the dendrites of veins lost and excised, one by one. You will find him sleeping, as he so often is, and go to fetch a plastic cup from the station for the water. The nurse will assure you that she will call you as soon as he wakes, and you go to your favourite place in the waiting room, looking west to the cupolas and spires of the buildings, the rise of the hills and the impossible shapes of the clouds as the haze lifts and the world ages again. Trains slide silently along their lines and you see the grey building where your aunt and uncle lived when you were here as a child, and you think about how everything is ending, even as it  seems to be beginning, everything is waiting to be crossed off with a red line, and become it’s antithesis. And all you would want to say here, or to the statue of Jesus, or to your dying father is “Thanks for visiting…”