by Sam Apple
Bashy sees it in my eyes that I am serious. “Let Ulf go with you,” she says.
“I don't want to go with Ulf,” I say.
“Fine, so I'll go,” Bashy says.
I go downtown with Ulf. I look at the spires of the cathedrals and the legs of the women. I almost buy a torte. Ulf takes me to an upscale bar. He buys me drinks and squeezes my biceps.
“Ulf, I'm not gay,” I say.
“Ja, I never said your were,” Ulf says.
I apologize, but Ulf is not having it. He stands up and leaves the bar.
I walk through downtown alone, and when I make it back to the hostel, Ulf and Bashy are waiting in the lobby. Bashy doesn't have her false teeth in. Her lips are folded into her face.
“Where were you?” Bashy asks.
“Just walking,” I say.
“You could have been killed,” Bashy says.
“It's not dangerous,” I say. “Tell her, Ulf.”
Ulf looks at me in disgust. “You have muscles like girl,” he says.
Four
Meet the Sheep
The sheep were still two weeks shy of their summer pasture in southwestern Styria. Styria, one of Austria's nine Laen-der, or provinces, begins in the southeast tip of Austria and cuts a large swath through the center of the country. According to Styria's official website, “Green colors the self-image of the province, in which cheerful optimism is more often the case than resignation.” Although Hans's route changes every year depending on the weather and where he can find the best grass, since 1992 he has been making the same broad loop with the sheep, spending summers in Styria and winters in Lower Austria.
Hans and I were meeting the flock just north of Knit-telfeld, a small town set amid the soft green slopes of Styria's Mur valley. Our long drive was almost over. Hans turned off the freeway and followed a winding road for about ten minutes until we came to the foot of a long meadow, lined by a small paved path on one side and woods on the other. The stretch of grass directly in front of me was vacant, but when I looked up, there they were, spread out over 100 yards like 625 woolly players nibbling on a football field.
The expanse of sheep left me breathless for a moment. Their coats were every shade from dark brown to off-white. Their legs were mostly still, but their mouths were in constant motion, a flurry of gums and grass. Some had well-kept short wool. Others looked like they were in desperate need of a good shearing, their thick “sheep-fro's” sprouting in every direction.
But what really struck me were the faces, long and pointy and much more horselike than I had remembered from childhood visits to petting zoos. At the tip of a sheep's head is a shiny black nose with nostrils that arc upward like butterfly wings and a mouth that, when closed, looks like it might have a tennis ball lodged inside. But the eyes are arguably the strangest part of the sheep countenance. They are set so far to the sides of the head that you can never really look a sheep straight on. It gives the sheep an almost sinister air. In contrast to the lamb as a metaphor for peacefulness, these eyes made me think that I would not want to run into a sheep in a dark alley late at night.
And then there are their lovely ears, which flap freely up and down whenever the sheep move. At rest, the ears neither stick up nor hang down, but point outward at almost ninety-degree angles from the head, so that if you were to draw a line from the mouth to the tips of the ears, you'd have an isosceles triangle. Some of the ears were encircled by wool at the base (I found these more distinguished); others were shorn to give the ears a bit more breathing room.
Still, intrigued as I was by the sheep, I can't say I found them sexually exciting. Before I left for Austria, a surprising number of my friends had made jokes about me copulating with a ewe. I laughed along but kept wondering why people have the idea that men like having sex with sheep. What is it about sheep, as opposed to the much more available dogs or cats? Why not turkeys for that matter? Or moose? Or baboons? I asked Hans about this sheep sex phenomenon several days later, and he said he had never heard of it until he traveled to North America.
As I took in the sheep from the side of the road, Hans ran ahead to talk to Kati, who was standing at the front of the flock in the distance. I was alone, and the moment I'd been anticipating had finally arrived: I opened the van's sliding side door and grabbed a shepherd's stick. Despite all my anxieties (I was still checking my dog bite every few minutes for signs of rabies), I've never been able to entirely rid my imagination of scenes of personal triumph. In the shepherd fantasy I entertained before my trip, I'm standing in front of the flock, my stick raised high in the air. I don't have to say a word. The sheep know to follow. Hans is nowhere to be found. It's just me and the sheep, and when the sun goes down, I walk into a conveniently placed cave and build a fire. Then, as luck would have it, I encounter a beautiful mountain woman. She asks if she can stay the night in my cave. I tell her she's making a terrible mistake. “I am a wandering shepherd,” I say. “No matter what happens tonight, I will wake up in the morning and move on.” “I don't care,” she says. “I want to make love to you all night.” “Great,” I say, then I ask her if she's been tested for HIV and if she, perhaps, has some paperwork to prove it.
Hans and Kati walked over to me, and Hans made the introductions. Kati's skinny arms dangled out of her tank top. She had blue eyes, a dark tan, and straight brown hair down to her shoulders. Despite her sun-worn skin, her beauty was unmistakable. After saying hello, Kati walked to the front of the flock, and Hans and I were alone for a moment. He sat down on the bumper of the van and looked up at me. “Kati just now tells me that if I should try to touch her one more time, she is leaving the flock forever,” Hans said. He had that same punched-in-the-stomach look I had seen in the van.
I didn't know what to say. I felt sorry for Hans. I know the sting of rejection as well as the next guy, the pit in the stomach, the dry mouth, the absolute belief that happiness is an illusion. In fact, I had one additional reason for traveling to Austria. I was escaping the fallout of my own romantic disasters.
Until my early twenties, women took little interest in me. It may just have been that they weren't attracted to me, but it may also have had something to do with my approach to courting. Only in college did it really sink in that to meet a woman I would first have to speak to a woman. I was so quiet in high school that a group of girls began to refer to me behind my back as “Sad Sam.” I wanted to tell them that I wasn't especially sad, just shy, but I was too shy even to explain the distinction. What those girls couldn't know was that I wanted nothing more than to befriend them. I would sometimes fantasize about sitting at their lunch table and making funny asides. Sam, I had no idea you could be so lively, Amy would say, a strip of Fruit Roll-Up disappearing behind her full red lips. I love you, I would respond.
My loneliness won out over my shyness in the end, and I found myself in a solid relationship during my senior year of college. But when my girlfriend and I moved to different cities after graduation, I began to date periodically, and I wasn't very good at it. Things might start well, but eventually it would become clear that I was not joking, that I really wasn't going to eat the lettuce at the salad bar because it was right next to the little cubes of ham (“For God's sake, there's no ham in the lettuce, Sam!”), and that I really was afraid to sleep under framed posters (apparently, I'm the only person in the world who finds the prospect of being awakened one night by a plate of glass shattering on one's face unappealing).
Then, in the year before my trip, something strange and wholly unexpected began to happen. Either because of a shortage of eligible men in New York City or because I had discovered that a touch of gel could bring a semblance of order to the anarchy on my head, a number of women seemed interested in having a relationship with me. This should have been spectacular news, should have been reason to sprint up and down Broadway pumping my fists in the air while humming the theme music to Rocky. But there was a problem: I was more than happy to be the boyfriend of these women, but because the
y didn't like my favorite books, or because they liked my least favorite books, or because they believed in vaguely defined spiritual forces, or because they used words like “insidious” without irony, or because they said “you're so funny” in a way that revealed they didn't think I was so funny, I didn't particularly want to marry any of them. At the time this struck me as a serious moral dilemma, and I concluded that the only defensible option was to mention, on the very first date, that I didn't want to get married.
The woman's response would always be, “Don't worry about it, I don't want to marry you either,” to which I'd say, “Fine, then there's no problem.” And things would progress. We'd go out to dinner and pretend to talk like pirates. We'd read short stories aloud to each other until our voices grew hoarse. We'd have sex. A month or so later I would offer a casual reminder that I didn't think the relationship had “long-term potential,” at which point I would be called a bastard and asked to leave the apartment.
It was after a particularly nasty breakup that the answer to my dilemma came to me: traveling. Only when you're traveling can you date someone you don't intend to spend the rest of your life with and not feel guilty. The escape is built into the arrangement. Ending things doesn't mean you're a bad person. You just have to go home. I was so taken with this insight that I never stopped to think that I myself might be the one to get attached. Even stranger, I never stopped to think that there might be a contradiction between my search for anti-Semites and my search for an Austrian woman.
“You will go with the boys,” Hans said. “They will show you what to do.”
Hans walked some fifty yards ahead to the front of the flock, where Kati was already stationed, and started belting out “Hey, Tsigelech,” the song he opened with at his concert in New York. Once you understand Hans's relationship to Kati, the lyrics take on new meaning:
Hey, little goats, come here quickly
I will now sing you a pretty song:
It begins with a shepherd and a girl that bewitched him.
Hey, little goats, hear what happened:
The shepherd was once cheerful and lively,
Now he is sad, does not glance at the sheep,
but yearns for the girl who bewitched him.
Hey, little goats, listen to the end of the song:
Like orphans his poor flock wanders about.
The little shepherd lies deep in the lake
and the girl sits by the water and cries.
“Tsigelech” is an appropriate call to the animals because there are two goats in the flock—included for their leadership skills. Unlike the sheep, the goats always keep one eye on Hans, and when it's time to continue forward, they don't try to sneak in a few more nibbles. They move ahead and the sheep follow. I came to have great respect for these two goats, one bearded, the other horned. If Hans and Kati were king and queen of the flock, the goats were their ministers and the sheep the loyal subjects. The boys were the princes, I suppose, and the sheepdogs their knights. I'm not sure what that made me—perhaps the jester or the court Jew?
As Hans and Kati walked ahead, I made my way over to Andi and Wolfi, who were standing behind the sheep. Andi was shy and Wolfi didn't speak English, so there was no conversation, let alone instruction.
Wolfi, classically cute with short brown bangs and a toothy smile, held a shepherd's stick about a foot taller than he was. (All the shepherd's sticks tended to be a foot taller than their carriers, and Wolfi's had been shortened accordingly.) Andi had straight brown hair down to his shoulders and gentle brown eyes. He was hardly intimidating, but his angry hop hops made me jump.
Most of the sheep seemed to understand that a hop hop from Andi meant, Enough chewing, let's move on out. But every now and then one animal would ignore the call, and then Andi repeated the hops in an even angrier tone. If an unusually bold sheep still wouldn't budge, Andi would take his stick and throw it at the sheep like a javelin. He didn't usually hit them, but I was taken aback. Wolfi, meanwhile, was running around stabbing his stick into the ground and leaping forward as though practicing for a miniature pole vault competition. It began to feel like I was in the lamb-herding Olympics.
We passed from the field into the dense forest ahead, and I discovered that lamb herding can be an extremely difficult job. The sheep inevitably disappeared behind bushes and trees, and just when it seemed as though they were all accounted for, one last lamb would come racing from behind to catch up with the others. I was glad that I had brought my newly purchased disposable contacts, even if it did take twenty minutes to put them in every morning. Good vision is important for the lamb herder not only because he or she must scan for wayward sheep or because the lamb herder, unlike the shepherd, walks in the path of fresh shit, but also because the lamb herder must be able to see the signals from the shepherd far ahead. When Hans wanted us to move slowly, he lifted then lowered his hand; to speed us up, he moved his outstretched arm from side to side. If he wanted us to be extra careful not to leave a lamb behind, he placed his hand above his eyes, as though blocking out the sun.
I followed Hans's orders, but I hated bothering the flock while they were eating. I kept wondering what it would be like if I had to eat all of my meals with a shouting giant hovering over me with a stick. I felt especially bad hurrying the little lambs. Some of them were only a few weeks old and still had a little wobble in their stride. I knew I had to do my fair share of hop hoping if I was going to garner any respect from the boys or the sheep, but it's not the type of work I'm cut out for. I'm soft-spoken, with a deep crackly voice, so much so that people always assume they're waking me when I answer the phone. In addition, I'm physically incapable of screaming. At some point in junior high, word of my handicap got out, and my classmates found it fascinating. On the playground, groups of preteens would come up to me and ask me to make the loudest noise I could. All I ever managed was a sort of George of the Jungle “Ahhaahhh,” which would, of course, send everyone into fits of giggles.
With practice, I got my hop hops to a near shout, but the sheep never really responded to me the way they did to Andi. Usually they would give me these “You call that a hop hop?” looks and continue eating, leaving me feeling like the substitute teacher whose very presence signals the absence of authority. Later I became fixated on the question of whether there was anything integral to the noise hop hop that the sheep were responding to or if hap hap or heep heep would work just as well. When no one was around, I would test these new noises out, but I never did come to a satisfactory answer because the sheep tended to ignore me either way.
By contrast, I paid great attention to the sheep's bleating. They baaahed much more loudly and nasally than you'd expect. A few of the stronger bleaters, I thought, might have had second careers as foghorns. The baaahs—or beeehs, more precisely—would be intermittent until feeding time. Then, suddenly, dozens of ewes would cry out at once to their lambs in an ear-ringing chorus of animal need.
While I was busy listening to the baaahingand bossing around two-week-old lambs, Churka was doing the real work. Churka was one of Hans's and Kati's three Alt-deutsche Schäferhunde (Old German shepherd dogs). The Altdeutscher Schäferhund, so named because it has been the dog of choice of shepherds in Germany since medieval times, is the ancestor of the modern German shepherd dog. Now nearly extinct, the Altdeutscher Schäferhund was bred to a standard only in 1989 and can look like a wide array of different breeds, from poodles to schnauzers. Churka, medium-sized, with a shaggy gray and white coat, resembled a border collie.
As the sheep shuffled along, Churka would race back and forth along one side of the flock, tracing an imaginary border that the sheep were not to cross. If a sheep managed to stray so far that it didn't make it back inside the border before Churka arrived on the scene, Churka and the sheep would face off like a linebacker and a running back. The sheep, sometimes faking one way and going the other, would try to scurry back into the flock without Churka clutching a leg in her teeth. When I first witnessed one of
these standoffs, I was startled by Churka's ferocity and felt sorry for the sheep. But Hans explained that the dogs only “grip” the sheep in places where the wool is thick and that his animals are never injured. Hans trains his puppies to grip by draping a lamb in a raincoat with holes cut out to expose the appropriate targets. (Note: If you ever happen to be hiking the Alps and you see a man singing Yiddish songs as he watches a dog chasing a sheep in a raincoat, no need for concern.)
Every few minutes Churka would stop and look up at Hans, who would point his stick and bark out rapid-fire commands in an intensely nasal voice, always saying the dog's name before the command: “Churka, steh [stand]!” “Churka, draussen [outside]!” “Churka, bleib [stay]!” “Churka, ab [go]!” You could never tell when these commands were coming, so a typical conversation with Hans while he's with the sheep is a bit like talking to someone with Tourette's: “I'm remember when I was—Churka, bleib! Churka, ab! Churka, komrn rum (herum), und hopp! ab ins Feld!—little and I was talking with…”
Sounding a bit like Tolstoy, Hans once declared that “the only dogs that are happy are shepherd dogs. All other dogs are unhappy.” He based this statement on his belief that canine contentedness is dependent upon bending to wolfish instincts. To ensure that his dogs are in touch with their inner wolves, Hans always lets them go a little hungry when they work. As Hans put it, if you feed the sheepdog before work in the morning, “the dog will be seelly all the day and not understand you.” Still, the sheepdogs can't go too hungry, or else they really will kill the sheep.
We emerged from the thicket of trees and shrubs onto a mountain road with a small stream a few yards off to the right. It was only about 3:00 P.M., but the sky had turned gray, and it looked as though it would rain at any minute. I was beginning to develop a bit of a shepherding rhythm. The mountains draped in softly drooping evergreens and the urinelike trickle of the stream, where the bolder sheep would scamper off to drink, distracted me from the vision of an angry Austrian nurse administering multiple rabies shots to my stomach. We ascended the winding road slowly until we reached a spot near a farmhouse with enough space for the sheep to spread out and graze. By the time I arrived from the back, Hans was sitting on a log, eating an apple. I joined him.