by Sam Apple
In most ways it was striking how different Hans's childhood had been from mine. At an age when Hans was planning protests with his father, I still wasn't allowed to leave Bashy's side in the women's department at JCPenney. And yet I felt as though I could relate to what Hans had just told me—not to the historical drama or to the anger or to the way Hans had acted out, but to the burden on his soul, to the profound sense, even from a very young age, that nothing was stable or secure. And like Hans, I trace my feeling back to what happened to my mother.
I spent so much time with Bashy during my childhood because my mother wasn't around. She was diagnosed with an unusually progressive case of multiple sclerosis when I was three, and I have only a few isolated memories of her before she lost her ability to walk and talk and think clearly. She died the morning after my fourteenth birthday.
Despite the devastating loss, I was a mostly happy kid, too young to fully absorb the tragedy. Even moments that I now realize others must have found heartbreaking—the times my maternal grandmother, still struggling to accept what had happened to her daughter, would have me sit on my mother's lap and tell her stories about my life I knew she couldn't comprehend, or the times my grandparents took us fishing and made me hold a pole in my mom's useless hands as she sat in a lawn chair gazing blankly out over the lake—seemed entirely ordinary to me.
Then I hit adolescence, and the veil of childhood slipped off. The lesson of my mother's illness finally hit me: There were no guarantees. My father could be taken away just like my mother had been. Almost overnight the central question in my life switched from Where's the next basketball game? to Is my father alive and safe?
If my father went out in the evening, I would stay awake until he came home, peering out the window every time a car passed in the hopes that it would be our 1980 beige Honda Accord. Each car that didn't turn in to our driveway was a new blow. One night when I was twelve and we were in New York, my father went out at 10:00 P.M. to make copies. He said he would be back in fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes later he still hadn't returned, and I could already feel the change in my breathing. After an hour I was nauseous. I sat by the window picturing a cab barreling into my father's legs, a mugger's knife slicing through his side. By midnight I couldn't take it anymore. I went out into the streets to look for him. My father found me, walking along Broadway, my face ghost white. He took me to a therapist, but what could she say? My logic was tight. Without my father, in the center was a big broken thing.
Six
Punschkrapferl in My Pants
I awoke at 9:30 to find myself alone in Manfred and Lore's guest bedroom. I was still overwhelmed by my new surroundings and still a little jet-lagged. I stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen. Hans and Andi were eating brown bread and thick hunks of cheese at the wooden breakfast table. Lore pointed me to the table with a “bitte.”
“You slept good?” Hans asked. He was still groggy. His hair stuck out in every direction.
“Yes,” I said.
“So you are ready for the mountain?” Andi asked with a giggle. Now that he was no longer shouting at the sheep, I noticed his voice was changing.
“I guess,” I said. I liked that Andi was warming up to me, but I didn't see why it was so ridiculous for an American city kid to be doing a little hiking. What exactly did these people take me for? I got my answer a moment later when I sat down at the table and cut myself a very uneven slice of bread from the round loaf. Andi laughed.
“You don't eat bread like this in America,” he said. I wasn't sure if it was a question or a pronouncement.
“Sure, we eat all kinds of bread,” I said.
“I mean with cuts,” Andi said. “You don't have to make the cuts in your bread.”
“Oh,” I said, happy to have an excuse for my lack of coordination. “Yes, in America it is usually already cut.” My life in Manhattan was seemingly as strange to Andi as his life as a lamb herder was to me.
I poured milk into the mug of coffee Lore had placed in front of me and spread an unidentified red jam over my misshapen slice of bread. Hans informed me that the mountain we would cross that day is the biggest mountain he faces throughout his annual trek. He did not mention that it would be covered with snow at the top, or that we would be subjected to several hours of freezing rain and wind, or that no one intended to bring a bottle of water.
A few minutes into the breakfast Manfred showed up in jeans and mud-caked galoshes, which he removed and left by the door. In the morning light I noticed the distinguished wrinkles on his square face. Manfred spoke to Hans in German, and Hans translated. “Manfred would like to know about New York,” he said. “Do you like it there?”
“I love it. We have every type of person you can imagine,” I said, then wondered why I'd chosen to mention New York's diversity at that moment. Hans translated. We made small talk for several more minutes until a white van pulled into the driveway.
Manfred mumbled something to Hans. “This is sweets truck,” Hans said. “Manfred says you should pick out whatever you like. He will buy for you.”
My first thought: This beautiful home in the Alps already seems like paradise, and now, to top it off, they have doughnut trucks that drive right up to the door. My second thought: Is Manfred being so kind to me because he suspects I'm a Jew? Maybe he was just an extremely nice guy, I thought. But maybe I was the only Jew he'd ever met other than Hans, and the warmth I was feeling from him was really just the awkward manifestation of his guilt. For that matter, maybe Lore, who was now busy doing my laundry, didn't give everybody the constant bitte treatment.
I picked out a small squarish pastry with red frosting over a chocolaty middle and brought it back to the table. Hans told me that there is an old joke that this dessert, Punsch-krapferl, is like the Social-Democratic Party of Austria: red, as in socialist, on the outside; brown, as in fascist, on the inside—a reference to the Party's quiet incorporation of thousands of former Nazis into its ranks after the war. I put the Punschkrapferl down and had my first genuinely crazy moment of the trip (unless you count the semen-on-the-backpack incident): I found myself not wanting to eat a dessert with Nazi fillings. I looked at Manfred, then back down at the Punschkrapferl. The only plan I could think of was to stuff the Punschkrapferl into my pants when no one was looking and then pronounce it delicious. But then I didn't particularly want a Nazi dessert in my pants either.
I glanced at Manfred again, and he smiled. I ate the Punschkrapferl.
After climbing into my overalls all by myself and packing a small lunch of bread, cheese, and cherry tomatoes, I joined Hans and Andi for the drive out to the mountain, where Kati and Wolfi had already begun the day's trek with the sheep. We parked the van at the base of the mountain, took out our sticks, and began the upward march. Andi bounded ahead, leaving Hans and me alone. The sheep were nowhere in sight.
It looked like it might rain again. I wore a blue raincoat tied around my waist and Wolfi's small, multicolored child's backpack, which said ADVANCE SYSTEM in big letters on the pocket. Hans wore his red and beige rain suit with navy patches on the shoulders and knees. The sportiness of the rain suit seemed an odd contrast to Hans's hat, and I pointed this out.
Hans laughed. “Yes, but this is special hat,” he said, removing the hat from his head so I could get a better look. “The wool is not knitted or weaved. It has no structure, just one piece—like if you work clay.” Hans shot me a self-satisfied look. “This hat holds for three generations,” he said.
I glanced at Hans, and his eyes gave me permission to feel the hat. To make this hat, Hans continued, there is an old wooden machine. It has a long string on a stick. The stick is fixed in the upper part of the room, and the craftsman makes bong bong bong. He never touches the wool with his fingers, so it will all be the same structure.” I imagined someone playing a harp, wool magically appearing in the air with each pluck. Hans handed me the hat. It weighed a good three to four pounds. A thin cord, used to carry the hat around the neck when it
's not needed on the head, now dangled from opposite sides of the slightly upturned brim. Hans usually keeps the cord tucked into the hat. “There's only one person in all of Austria who makes these hats,” Hans added. “He lives in East Tirol, and he learned this job in Hungary.”
Austria's last wandering shepherd was apparently walking around in the hat of Austria's last gigantic hatmaker.
“So you met this man?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” Hans said. “But he did not let me look at his old wooden machine. It is family secret.”
Now I was really impressed. A hat made by a mystery machine that goes bong bong bong. “So what do you call this kind of hat?” I asked.
Hans thought for a moment. “Felt,” he said.
Hats like Hans's may be hard to come by these days, but they are believed to be the first brimmed hats ever invented and have been worn by travelers and shepherds for thousands of years. Known to the ancient Greeks as the petasos, the hat protects not only from the elements, but also from pesky bugs that circle around the brim, a safe distance from the wearer's face. I have yet to get to the bottom of the wooden machine that goes bong bong bong, but it is true that old felt makers like to keep the tools of their trade a secret.
As Hans spent several more minutes describing how he waterproofs his hat annually with lanolin (the grease from sheep's wool), I felt a jolt of jealousy. I was allowed to carry a stick, but only one person got to wear the big floppy hat.
Hans eventually put the hat back on his head, then bent over and picked a bright red flower from a small green shrub. “This is Almrausch,” he said, explaining that the flower has become a symbol for the Alps.
After having been tucked into bed the previous evening, I hadn't thought there was room on my trip for further emasculation. Then Hans stuck the Almrausch into a small airhole at the top of my hat.
“Thanks,” I said. At the time I thought that I at least had a special Alpine treasure in my hat, but I now know that Almrausch is slang for Alpenrose—also known as a rhododendron.
We continued along slowly. As I walked, I tried to keep my head down so I wouldn't stumble over the pumpkin-sized boulders. Unlike the green pastures of the day before, the mountain had only scattered patches of vegetation. The sky was all clouds.
Hans can talk, uninterrupted, for a solid hour, and the morning's lecture was on the wonders of life in the Alps. Hans's obsession with the Alps and old Alpine culture is second only to his obsession with Yiddish. He talks about the superiority of Alpine cheese and milk as though he were running his own dairy up in the mountains. He talks about Alpine plants and trees as though he were describing the vegetation in the Garden of Eden. I was beginning to suspect that Hans became a “wandering” shepherd not because he feared a dry summer, but because he needed an excuse to get to the Alps.
I was enjoying Hans's enthusiasm, but I also remembered that in our first interview in Brooklyn, he had told me that he associates the Austrian countryside with fascism and anti-Semitism and that when he meets people in the mountains, they often look at him with cold eyes, aware that he is not one of them.
I pointed out the contradiction, and Hans quickly agreed. “You must understand, one reason I sing in Yiddish is that I cannot sing the old folk songs in German,” he said. “This is real tension for me. Our national culture was destroyed by the Nazis. Not just in mountains, but all over. Only very conservative people would sing these old songs. But even as child, I had a strong emotional link to this old culture of the Alm [Alpine summer pasture]. Most Austri-ans—and not just Austrians, but also southern Germans and all the nations or ethnicities that are living around these mountains—are looking to them with lots of positive emotion. There is a very big sympathy for this old culture of moving with the animals to the mountains in summer and collecting berries and making firewood and coming down to the valley again in the autumn.”
At the heart of Hans's attachment to the Alps is the Alm. Generally high in the mountains, above the timber-lines, the Alm is a treeless green expanse (think Heidi) that is a bit like an oasis in the desert for grazing animals in search of fresh summer grass. Shepherds have been leading their flocks up the mountains to the Alms for thousands of years, and Hans loves the idea that he is a living part of this dying tradition. It's the one sense in which his love of both Yiddish and old Alpine culture doesn't seem a contradiction at all. Yiddish and shepherding are relics of another time. And as I observed the great pride Hans took in both, I couldn't help but think that he sees himself, if only half-consciously, as a hero for keeping alive what others have left to die.
About halfway up the mountain we entered a thick fog. Hans, whom I could now barely see, said the sheep were nearby. I wasn't sure if he had arranged for Kati to leave the flock at a certain spot or if he had some way of sensing the sheep's presence. Then I spotted Andi lying on his back on top of a large rock.
There were no animals in sight. “What happened to the sheep?” I asked.
“They are over there eating.” Hans pointed, but I couldn't see anything through the fog. “It is okay,” Hans said. “The dog watches them.”
Hans sat down and rested for a moment. I was extremely thirsty, but, to my amazement, no one had brought along water. I didn't want to sound wimpy, but I was beginning to feel slightly faint, and I wanted nothing less than to end the afternoon on my hands and knees vomiting.
I found a seat on a smooth rock and sucked the juice out of my cherry tomatoes. The sky was now dark gray, and a light drizzle had begun to fall. I rested and wondered if the thin air at high altitudes might kill brain cells, until Hans belted out “Hey, Tsigelech” in the distance. I looked up to see him leading the sheep back from their grazing patch, directly toward me. As the flock approached, Hans made a sharp turn before a large rock and headed upward, so that I had the chance to see the wet and matted sheep row by row as they made it over the small incline and then broke right. The fog created the illusion of sheep emerging from the sky, a heavenly entourage of snouty faces and matted wool. It was the stuff of dreams, or at least the stuff of our imagery of dreams. I sat mesmerized as Hans and Andi continued along, Hans moving up the mountain and Andi and the dog forcing the stragglers back into line.
From that point on, the climb went from vaguely to obscenely strenuous. The wind began to whip my face, and the drizzle turned into a hard rain. I hurried to catch up to Andi, but I soon found myself falling farther and farther behind, unable to keep up with even the infant lambs that were literally wobbling up the mountain.
As I inched my way to the summit, the wind grew stronger and we began to encounter large pockets of snow and increasingly steep inclines. I fell even farther behind, until I could hardly see Andi's stick in the distance. No one seemed to notice that I was no longer around. I imagined Hans and Andi sharing a beer years later and thinking back to the American journalist who disappeared on the mountain. He was a nice guy, Andi would say. But you should have seen the way he cut his bread.
When I finally made it to the top, there was hardly any pleasure in the triumph. I was exhausted, and the view was entirely obscured by the fog. I'm not sure what happened to Andi, but I ended up sitting next to Hans, crouched in a small stone structure that had apparently been set up by shepherds or cattle herders long ago for just this purpose. The stones were only about waist high and there was no roof, but by hunkering down, we were able to stay out of the wind. While I sucked on a few remaining tomatoes and wondered how the hell I had ended up in this situation, Hans broke out into another chorus of the Yiddish song about the tailor preparing for the holidays. The song concludes with the tailor wondering if there will be any good food left over when the holiday is over, and I found myself empathizing with his dietary concerns.
Even as the freezing rain pounded our hats, Hans spoke admiringly of this small stone structure. After all, it was a part of the great Alpine culture! Soon he was back on his Alpine kick, telling me how early music may have emerged out of the instruments used by
ancient herders to call their animals in the mountains. The Alpine history lesson ended with Hans standing up and running a few steps downhill with his stick dragging behind him. “This is origins of skiing,” he said, laughing loudly.
Cold and grumpy, I laughed in spite of myself. I put on Wolfi's multicolored backpack and began the descent. At the bottom of the mountain Kati and Wolfi were waiting on a rock. It was clear that she and Hans had a carefully arranged schedule, presumably designed by Kati to minimize her time with Hans; but from my perspective, Kati appeared to just pop in and out of our journey like a mischievous mountain sprite sent by the gods to play with Hans's mind.
It was decided that Hans and I would take the van to buy groceries, including more salt for the sheep, while Kati and the boys finished the day's shepherding duties. When we all met again at a field that had been chosen for the sheep's evening residence, Kati and Andi were visibly angry. They had been waiting for us for more than an hour. Kati and Hans had a brief argument, and then Kati drove off in her white Jeep.
“Kati tells me that Mohrle [the dog on duty] went a little bit crazy and attacked one of the sheep,” Hans said to me. He was as mad as I had ever heard him. “I always tell her she makes too much pressure on this dog to move the sheep quickly, but she does not want to hear this.”
The sheep was now missing and presumed dead. Back in the van Andi made the mistake of asking what had taken us so long. Hans's response to the question lasted a good half hour. Occasionally switching from German to English (for my benefit), Hans lectured Andi on money and responsibility. “This dentist of Kati's likes to take them out to dinner every night,” Hans said, turning to me in the backseat, “so now they don't understand why I have to buy groceries. They think everyone should be reech.” As Hans went on and on about the dentist spoiling his sons and filling their heads with “wrong ideas,” I began to feel embarrassed for all of us. Hans couldn't stop himself. It was a side of him I hadn't seen before. He didn't seem in full control, and I wondered if this was part of the reason Kati hadn't always been so eager to sleep with him over the years.