Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  Before I had the chance to ask another question, Hans's cell phone rang, and he strapped on a headset. During the two-hour drive from the airport to the sheep, Hans received at least a half dozen calls. I thought of the old AT&T cell phone commercials in which a shepherd walks through the countryside with a phone in one hand and his stick in the other. Presumably, AT&T wanted us to find humor in this juxtaposition of ancient and modern, but I can now say with authority that there is nothing funny about a wandering shepherd's reliance upon the cell phone, or “handy,” as they call it in Austria. Hans says that his handy has changed his life by allowing him to stay in touch with friends and search for places to stay as he moves with the sheep.

  While Hans chatted and repeatedly said “ja, ja” into the mouthpiece of his handy's headset, I worried about how to tell him that I was a vegetarian. It was only a matter of time before the subject came up, and I thought my refusal to eat meat might offend him—after all, he makes his living by selling lambs for food.

  “Please don't feel you have to make any special arrangements for me,” I said when Hans put down his phone, “but just so you know, I don't eat meat.”

  Hans smiled. “You are vegetarian,” he said. “I suspected this.”

  What did that mean? Was my fear that Hans thought of me as a wimpy American city slicker proving true?

  “This is not problem,” Hans continued. “You will eat cheese and eggs, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. I don't particularly like cheese, but I had decided in advance that it would be better to eat things I don't like than to carry fifteen boxes of soy burgers with me, as I had done for years at the all-boys sports camp I attended as an adolescent. In those days I still ate meat, but the camp was not Jewish and didn't offer any kosher selections. On the first day, while the other boys dragged their duffel bags to the bunks, I would hurry to the kitchen with my bright red cooler to make sure my veggie patties made it to the freezer before thawing.

  We drove in silence for some time, then Hans began to sing a mournful Yiddish ditty under his breath. I asked him what the song meant. “It is a song about a tailor who is waiting for the holidays so he can put away his needle and go to synagogue,” Hans said.

  Even without the slides of the sheep in the background, I couldn't help but find it funny that Hans, who I knew had had a Communist upbringing and who I suspected had never uttered a prayer in his life, was singing centuries-old songs about a longing for synagogue. But amused or not, I liked listening to Hans sing. And I loved the way a simple mention of Yiddish could fill his voice with tenderness. Although I hadn't fully grasped this at the time, Hans's attachment to Yiddish borders on obsession. When I left Austria, I flew to Israel, and before going to the airport I asked Hans if he would like anything from the Jewish state. I was thinking of a menorah or perhaps a framed photograph of the Western Wall. Hans asked if I might walk around with my tape recorder and ask the old people I encountered in the streets if they knew any old Yiddish songs.

  After singing for a bit, Hans announced he had a story he wanted to share. Several days before I met him for the first time in New York, Hans had been in Canada for the annual KlezKanada klezmer festival. During a break from the festival, Hans spent an afternoon touring a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal. As he strolled the residential streets, three separate elderly women stopped to talk to him. The conversations were insignificant. But something about these old women, Hans said, was “heymish.” Heymish is the Yiddish word for “deeply familiar” or “homey.” Hans had never had a feeling quite like it. And what struck Hans most of all about these women were their hands. Unlike the coarse, thick hands of the Austrians, they were delicate and bony, the hands of intellectuals. They were, in Hans's eyes, typically Jewish, heymish hands that reminded him of the hands of his father.

  After telling me this story, Hans was quick to add that if he were to use the expression “typical Jewish hands” in Austria, he would be attacked by his leftist friends. In fact, when he had tried to explain the hands to a Jewish friend, she had told him he was being ridiculous. I tended to agree, but I was intrigued by Hans's anxiousness to manufacture a Jewish connection to the old women. The more he spoke about Yiddish or Judaism, the more of a mystery he seemed.

  “Did your father teach you anything at all about Judaism?” I asked. In the distance, snowcapped peaks cut through an increasingly cloudy sky.

  “My father was not interested in Judaism,” Hans said, then made a face that was something between a wince and a smirk. “When I was a child, I could not even pronounce the word ‘Jew.’ In German it isjud or Jude. It took me twenty years to learn to speak out this word, and still I cannot do it without contradictory emotions.”

  I reached behind me and moved a shepherd's stick that was pushing into the back of my seat.

  “You mean your father wouldn't allow you to even talk about Jews?”

  “No, it is not like this. You must understand how this word was used in this country,” Hans said. “I grew up before ’68, and it was establishment everywhere. In that world, if you would say the word Jud, it would be like you say ‘whore’ or ‘son of whore’ or ‘motherfucker’ or something like this. This word was the word the Nazis put on Jewish stores and on their drawings of Jews. It was so loaded and there was such bad national consciousness surrounding it that even to pronounce this word was not possible. Only fascists or uninformed people who really think that Jews are the evil of the world could use it in this old sense. The first time I remember hearing it, I was in elementary school. The children teased small girl with almond eyes. I made defense of her, and they turned to me and shouted, ‘Jud. Jud.’ I went home and asked my parents what this word means.”

  Hans had said “son of whore” and “motherfucker,” but the better parallel in the United States, I thought, was “nigger.” Calling someone a Jew in postwar Austria was like calling someone a nigger in the United States.

  “So what word did you use to talk about Jews?”

  Hans turned to me with a halfhearted smile. “In this country you did not talk about Jews for many years.”

  Didn't talk about Jews? For my family that would have been like not breathing. But as strange as this sounded to me, the next thing Hans said surprised me even more. “You must understand that I was also German speaking and part of the German-speaking people. I was child of victims, of a leftist and a Jew, but I also felt part of it. I had a bad consciousness for years just because I was speaking German. When I went to Poland for the first time, all I could think of was how many people had been killed there and how many Polish children had been robbed by the Germans.”

  Hans's handy rang, cutting off the lesson like the bell in a classroom. It was Kati, wondering where we were. As Hans spoke into his headset, I tried to process what he had just told me. How could Hans of all people feel responsible for German crimes? Was it possible that his turn to Yiddish was not so much a search for his roots as a search for atonement?

  When Hans took off his headset, I wanted to resume our conversation, but after talking to Kati, Hans looked as though someone had just punched him in the stomach. The whole structure of his face sunk, and he let out a defeatist puff of air.

  “When we get to the sheep, you will meet Kati. You must understand there is great tension between us.”

  “What kind of tension?” I asked.

  Hans looked at me. “I am hot, and she is cold. You know what I mean by this?”

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  “When I was younger,” Hans said, “you could put warm bowl of soup on my lap and I would get erection.”

  “Uh-huh,” I mumbled, somewhat nervously. I had no idea how we had gotten here. Hans's life seemed strange enough to me without this new tidbit.

  “With Kati, I would want to have sex every day, but she is not like this,” Hans said. “Sometimes she did not want sex.”

  I nodded and squeezed my backpack between my knees. Why was this man telling me about his sex life?


  “For a long time I had very bad complex,” Hans continued. “I thought there was something wrong with me. Now I understand that it is not wrong to want sex very often. People are different. Some want more than others.”

  “So does Kati know about your girlfriend?”

  “Yes, yes,” Hans said. “She knows. She also has boyfriend. A dentist in Styria. It is very complicated because we spend so much time together with the sheep and are sleeping sometimes very near each other so that over the winter we grew a little bit close again. But now this dentist tells her she cannot go near me anymore.” You could hear the spite in Hans's voice when he said the word “dentist.”

  “So why do the two of you work with the sheep together?”

  “Because this is our way of life,” Hans said, sounding slightly defensive. “We both are shepherds, and we both like very much to work with the sheep.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  If any other man had told me his powerful libido had ruined his relationship, I would have written it off as machismo. But Hans hardly seemed worried about appearing manly. When I first interviewed him in Brooklyn, Hans told me that Yiddish appealed to him because it was “the language of the heart.” Besides, machismo is the mask of masculinity. Hans, it was becoming increasingly clear, wore no masks at all. Call it artifice, call it civility, but whatever it is, Hans didn't seem to have it. I had never met anyone like him. He was painfully honest and, in his honesty, painfully vulnerable.

  As we drove on, cars that all looked a little too small occasionally joined us on the open road. Hans asked me if I had boots for the mountains. “I think these will do,” I said, lifting my foot and showing him my designer Australian boots. I had bought the boots to impress a girl I was dating, and somewhat to my amazement, it had worked. She had thought I was cool (at least until she discovered that I had stopped resting my laptop computer on my lap for fear that it was irradiating my genitals). But there was no fooling Hans.

  “We will find you real boots to wear,” Hans said. I looked at Hans's feet. He was again wearing sandals over socks. Not so hot either, I thought. I also noticed for the first time that Hans's T-shirt said SHAQ on the front in white letters. Finally, a perfect vehicle for lighthearted chitchat.

  “So you're a basketball fan?” I asked.

  Hans looked at me.

  “Shaquille O'Neal,” I said. “The Shaq?”

  Hans looked at me again.

  “Your shirt.”

  Hans glanced down with a confused expression, then told me that he rarely buys clothes and that he didn't even know where this shirt had come from.

  I explained that Shaquille O'Neal is the most dominant basketball player in the world, that when he is near the basket, no one can stop him. Hans seemed interested. Later I would point out the mostly faded silk screen of Shaq's face on the back of his shirt. “It is funny,” Hans said. “All this time I did not know there was black man on my shirt.”

  Half an hour later Hans and I pulled up to a two-story white farmhouse with brown wood shutters. In front of the house was a pile of wood big enough to keep a fireplace going for about a decade. I was expecting to see the sheep grazing nearby, but it turned out to be only a pit stop. “This is the house of my friends,” Hans said. “We will eat here quickly, and I will find you boots.” We walked into a large kitchen with dark oak floors and wood-paneled walls. Hans introduced me to Manfred and Lore. Manfred was tall and ruggedly handsome, with a strong jaw and thick gray hair. With the addition of a cowboy hat, he might have passed for an Austrian Marlboro Man. Lore had reddish brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and small features that were shriveling with age. Neither of them spoke English, but Lore, like a number of elderly Austrian women I would meet, managed to communicate by saying the words ja and bitte constantly while gesturing with her hands. (Bitte is the German word for “please.” It can also be used for “you're welcome.”)

  Lore “bitted” me over to the table, and Manfred, who had just finished chopping wood, disappeared in search of boots and clothes for me. Hans told Lore that I would have only cheese on my sandwich. She looked concerned, let out a few bittes, and retreated to the kitchen.

  After lunch, during which Hans downed two large turkey sandwiches on thick slabs of brown country bread, it was time to dress me. “You must have good clothes,” Hans said. “It might rain today, and tomorrow we will go over the big mountain.”

  “Big mountain?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Hans said. “It is very big mountain. You will like it.”

  I wasn't so sure. I had last done serious hiking in the north of Israel with a friend. After a wonderful afternoon of traversing jagged rocks and leaping over streams, I had dropped to my hands and knees and vomited three times. I ended up hitchhiking to a hospital, and as we drove, I told the driver in my broken Hebrew to hurry because I had lost all feeling in my hands. I was given an IV for dehydration at the hospital and I quickly recovered, but ever since I've wondered if summer hikes are perhaps a bad idea for me. In addition to my proclivity for dehydration, I'm prone to heatstrokes. And although inhalers seem to have little effect, it's believed (granted, only by me) that I have exercise-induced asthma.

  Manfred returned to the kitchen smiling and holding up a pair of dark blue ski overalls. They looked small, but I climbed into them, lifting the straps up and over my shoulders. Unaccustomed to wearing overalls, I couldn't seem to make the outfit work, and the next thing I knew, Hans and Manfred were both pulling at various pieces of my clothing and laughing. I began to sense that the thought of me working as a shepherd was as absurd to them as it was to me.

  Next it was time to step into Manfred's boots. They were large brown work boots, which turned out to be as big on me as the overalls were small. Fortunately, Manfred also had several extra pairs of wool socks. Hans then produced a child-sized striped baseball cap and plopped it on my head. I looked like an overgrown toddler playing in a grown-up's shoes.

  Hans also had to change before we left, and I waited for him outside, where several dogs were running around. One, a mutt with a short black coat, was especially frisky. He brought me a stick in his mouth, and soon we were engaged in a heated round of tug-of-war. The dog put up a good fight, but he was no match for me. I yanked the stick away and threw it into the distance. The dog ran after it and brought it back. All right, I thought, one more. I reached down for the stick, pulled it away, and then, just to add a little drama, I waved the stick in front of the dog's face, at which point he bit my hand.

  The wound was small, causing only a drop or two of blood, and my breathing remained normal for a moment. Then I realized I might have rabies. I hurried inside to announce that I had been injured.

  “The dog,” I said, pointing to my hand.

  Manfred shook his head. He understood a little English. “This is stupid dog,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But maybe he has a disease?”

  “This is stupid dog,” Manfred said again. “He likes to play too much.”

  Yes, yes, I thought. Stupid, sure. All dogs are stupid. But did this stupid dog happen to have a disease that was going to cause me to start foaming at the mouth?

  “Rabies?” I said. “This dog maybe has rabies?”

  The message wasn't getting through. “Lore will help you,” Hans interjected, and the next thing I knew, I was biting my lips as a stern-faced Lore dabbed my wound with iodine and wrapped it in gauze.

  I gave up trying to communicate my fears and walked back outside. Hans emerged in a surprisingly sporty rain suit, and we were off. But nothing was the same from then on. There was a big mountain to look forward to, and dehydration and rabies, and this was all in addition to the slipped disk in my back, which was pressing on my sciatic nerve and occasionally causing a horrible shooting pain down my right leg.

  When we were just minutes from the flock, Hans told me that he had “only been half shepherd” thus far because he had been away from the sheep. Now he was “going to be full shepherd,” wh
ich meant that he might be too busy “speaking with the dogs” or moving the sheep out of the way of traffic to talk to me. I was given the choice of walking ahead of the flock—always making sure I never broke the cardinal rule of passing between the shepherd and his sheep—or walking behind the sheep as a lamb herder. I chose to be a lamb herder.

  Three

  Vienna Dreams

  Bashy and I are in Vienna. We are summer tourists, and we are staying in Vienna's only gay hostel. I made the reservations by mistake, but now that we are here, we are comfortable.

  Ulf, the man at the reservations desk, is all muscle. He wears tight V-necked T-shirts and speaks in a thick German accent. When I ask him if he goes to the gym a lot, he says, “Ja, ja.”

  Bashy and I are tourists in only the broadest sense. We do no touring.

  Sometimes I plead with Bashy to go downtown with me.

  “What's there to see?” Bashy says.

  “The museums,” I say. “The famous buildings, the people.”

  “Goyishce nachas,” Bashy says.

  In the lobby of the hostel is a restaurant where they sell Sachertortes and warm Apfelstrudel. I am not to eat at this restaurant. Bashy has brought cans of oily tuna and her own strudel wrapped in aluminum foil. We eat on paper plates at a small wooden table in our room. When the maids come to clean, Bashy shoos them out. “Prostitutes,” she calls them in Yiddish.

  Ulf is the only Austrian Bashy likes. When he brings us clean towels, Bashy forces him to take a piece of strudel. “He's a mensch,” Bashy says.

  “Your grandmother is so teeny,” Ulf says.

  One afternoon, while I am finishing my strudel, I make a stand. “Bashy,” I say, “I'm twenty-five years old. There's a world out there.”

  “Finish your strudel,” Bashy says.

  I finish my strudel, but I am still hungry. I tell Bashy that I'm going to go out and explore downtown Vienna.