Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  I was relieved when we pulled up at our new lodgings, a beautiful two-story farmhouse set against a steep slope of tall grasses. It was getting dark, but it was still light enough for me to see the large white barn next to the house and the huge toolshed off to the side.

  “You know,” Hans said, sitting down on the back bumper of the van and yanking off his mud-covered boots, “this farmer who lives here is the best at cutting the grass.”

  “Cutting the grass?” I was digging through my backpack for a dry shirt.

  “Yes, you know, with the sharp tool that they use.”

  “Lawn mower?”

  “No, no, with the stick and the knife.”

  “Scythe?”

  “Yes, yes. What is the word?”

  “Scythe.”

  “Yes. Sye. This man is best in world with sye.”

  “What do you mean, ‘best in world’?”

  “He is the fastest. Faster than even tractor.”

  I was intrigued. “How do you know he's the fastest?”

  “He won first place in the championships.” Hans took off his pants and pulled on a new pair.

  “Championships?”

  “Yes, this is very big activity in countryside. People come from all over. I don't remember exactly, but I think he did more than one square meter a second.”

  I don't know if scything more than a square meter a second would have meant much to me out of context, but now I was a genuinely excited. I was about to meet the world's greatest scyther.

  Hans knocked on the door of the house, but no one answered.

  “This is not a problem,” Hans said. “I have Schlafsäcke [sleeping bags] in the van, and we can go up to the little room there.” Hans pointed to the toolshed. The door was open, and I could see at least a dozen scythes hanging from the walls. This sleeping arrangement didn't sound particularly pleasant, but I was hungry and tired, and so I went up to the little room in the attic of the shed and helped Andi clear away the nail-studded two-by-fours on the floor. Once we had changed out of our wet clothes and put down our sleeping bags, I thought the day was done. Then Hans announced that we would now go to the train station to pick up his girlfriend.

  As we drove to the train station in the nearest town, Wolfi, who spoke almost no English, tried his hand at a little rapping. Again and again he barked out, “Come, my lady, come come, my lady, you're my sugarfly sweetheart baby”— lines from a song we had heard on the radio earlier in the day. I liked listening to his German-accented rapping, but Hans and Andi seemed less amused.

  Christine was waiting for us under a lamppost at the train station. She had long, straight red hair and large red-rimmed glasses. Her face was full and radiant, and before she spoke a word, I sensed her kindness. She and Hans embraced. Hans made a brief introduction, and then we were off to dinner. As Hans and Christine and Wolfi chatted in the front seat, Andi and I played chess in the back. I lost badly, but after serious consideration I've decided not to add this defeat, nor the ones to come later that evening, to my list of emasculations.

  Hans pulled up in front of a small Turkish kebab restaurant in a nearby town called Egal. The drab restaurant was covered mostly with unframed posters that looked like they came from Turkey's national tourism office. There were also several posters of scantily clad women on motorcycles. Christine's presence lifted everyone's mood, and the tension between Hans and Andi evaporated. We sat down in the empty restaurant and ordered our kebabs, or “kebaps,” as they were called in this establishment. After we discussed the appropriate spelling of “kebab” for some time (even the guy behind the counter wasn't sure), Hans told me that Turkish kebab shops are common in the countryside, run by Turkish immigrants who are not so well liked in these areas.

  As I finished my specially made meatless kebab, we laughed for a bit about my performance on the mountain, and Christine shared some of her own low points as a novice lamb herder. I learned over that dinner that Austrians know little, if anything, about The Sound of Music. Christine had heard of it, but there seemed to be no understanding of why Americans are so taken with the Von Trapps, and I wasn't able to offer any insight on the subject.

  After dinner we headed over to an establishment that seemed to be part bar, part arcade. Teenage girls in tight shirts laughed and danced with one another by the bar. Seedy-looking men with mustaches and unbuttoned collars sat smoking at the tables. We headed to the foosball table, where Andi and I played on a team against Hans and Christine. Andi was unbelievably good at making miniature plastic men connected to metal poles play soccer, and our strategy quickly became for me to leave my players with their feet in the air so that I wouldn't accidentally block Andi's shots. Foosball, I would later find out, is an important part of the Breuer family story. Kati and the boys are passionate about the game, and it has directly impacted their love lives: Kati got to know the dentist over the foosball table, and Günter is currently involved with one of the top female foosball players in Austria.

  The evening wore on. We played more foosball, laughing the whole time. Then Hans and Christine retreated to a table. I spotted them kissing as I played table hockey against Wolfi and began to have the strange and warm sensation that we were one happy, if dysfunctional, family: the shepherd, his mistress, the young lamb herders, and the journalist—all of us wandering together.

  Seven

  The Sheep Were Jews

  When we arrived back at the home of the world's greatest scyther late that evening, I was delighted to discover that the scyther and his family had returned and left the front door open. This meant that I would not be sleeping in a Schlaf-säcke. in a loft above a dozen scythes, one of which, I would later learn, happens to be the biggest scythe in the world, made especially for our host. The prospect of sleeping so close to the scythes was an unwelcome reminder of the pins and thumbtacks on my old Ziggy bulletin board. One night when I was six or seven, it occurred to me that were an intruder to enter my room while I slept, I had more or less laid out an entire arsenal of weapons for him to use against me. From that night on, my Ziggy bulletin board remained pin-less. I'm happy to say that I no longer worry about pins and thumbtacks in my bedroom, but scythes aren't exactly pins. They're sticks attached to boomerang-shaped swords that seem designed for efficient decapitation. And it's impossible to look at one without thinking of the grim reaper.

  Later, when I mentioned my association of the scythe with death, Hans seemed genuinely offended. “In countryside we do not think like this,” he said. “This is very valuable tool.”

  Death, I thought. Everywhere I turned there was death. The scythes, the dog attacking the sheep, my hypochondria, and, of course, the real death, the Holocaust. I felt especially ashamed that my obsession with the murder of Europe's Jews could coincide with my hypochondria. The seriousness of my thoughts about the Holocaust should have overwhelmed my neuroses, should have shocked me into a state of gratitude for my health and relatively comfortable life. But then, my neuroses are not easily overwhelmed. If there is one thing in this world I would not bet against, it's the ability of my deepest fears to withstand an onslaught of perspective.

  Inside the house, the lights were off. Hans guided me up three flights of varnished wooden stairs to the attic, where I would be bunking with Wolfi. In addition to two twin beds, our room had a strange bedlike contraption with straps and bars along the sides. It was either a medical instrument or a medieval torture device.

  Death, I thought, and crawled onto my sheetless bed.

  “Som, you muust to breakfast now!” Wolfi called out the next morning. On my way downstairs, I noticed a wooden engraving of a man holding a scythe by its two handles, the thick blade pointing to the scyther's own ankle. Farther along the wall was a group portrait of about twenty smiling men all wearing lederhosen that strapped across the chest, feathered, green hunting hats, and kneesocks.

  In the white-tiled kitchen, bathed in morning light, the world's greatest scyther sat drinking orange juice. He had short
brown hair and massive shoulders. He had blue eyes and a veined tree stump for a neck. His forearms were thick and meaty enough to leave a cannibal salivating. When he stood up, I saw that he was at least six foot four and thick all around. He was, I realized, the Austrian Shaquille O'Neal, the “Shaq Daddy” of the Alps. Hans, who looked like a child next to the scyther, introduced me.

  His name was Gottfried. I shook his enormous right hand, and then he was gone, off to the barn to tend to the cattle. Christine was getting ready, and Andi and Wolfi were playing Nintendo with another boy in the family. This left me, Hans, the scyther's tall blond wife, and one of the family's two young sons in the kitchen. Hans noted that the little boy, who was five years old, had one prosthetic foot. I didn't think much of it then, but later, when I saw scything in action, the blade sweeping across the earth, I couldn't help but wonder about that foot.

  The tall blond wife brought me coffee with Alpine milk. In the background I could hear the ding of metal against metal.

  “This is the father of Gottfried,” Hans said. “What you hear is the Dengeln.”

  I nodded, assuming Hans meant “dinging.”

  “You know this, Dengeln? He hits the ‘sye’ with small hammer to make sharp.”

  “Oh,” I said, sipping my coffee.

  “He does this always. He is best in the world.”

  I put down my coffee. “They have competitions for sharpening the scythes?”

  “Yes, yes,” Hans said, as though it was a silly question.

  After breakfast Hans escorted me to the entrance of the barn, where Gottfried's father, Fritz, sat on a wooden stump, a miniature hammer in his right hand, a two-foot scythe blade spread across his lap—not the sort of item I would have wanted near my genitals. The smell of cattle shit swept through the mountain air. Fritz wore an oversized bright blue baseball cap. He was red-faced and stout and fleshy, his belly just one more slope in the hilly landscape. Upon being introduced to me, Fritz laughed and broke into a raspy German.

  I tried to convey my lack of understanding with an awkward flailing of my arms, but Fritz kept on going. He was immensely likable, with a manic goofiness that brought to mind Curly of the Three Stooges.

  “He speaks very old dialect of German, more similar to Yiddish,” Hans said. “I like it very much. Perhaps later he and his son will sing for you.”

  Fritz was still smiling at me.

  “Now he will show you Dengeln,” Hans said. Fritz took a sharp whetstone out of an animal-horn-turned-water-holder attached to his right rubber boot and began to smooth over the spots he had just hammered. Then he carefully pounded the blade for another twenty seconds and repeated the smoothing.

  “How long have you been interested in Dengeln?” I asked, not entirely sure what I was talking about. (I now know that dengeln is the thinning of the Dengel, the eighth-of-an-inch-wide metal strip at the scythe's edge. It's a bit like jewelry making, more about skill than strength.)

  Hans translated for both of us: “I started to scythe at eight and to dengeln at twelve,” Fritz said, his eyes still focused on the blade. “My father was ill, and I had to do the scything when he could not.”

  “And you were the world champion?”

  “Yes.”

  Fritz took a few more whacks at the scythe with his hammer, then explained how a Dengeln competition works. Five men pound the Dengel for half an hour, then a judge examines the blade with a magnifying glass to see if the metal has chipped in any place. The judges also test the blades “in special ways” with their fingernails. The metal “should not have waves going up and down, but be spread evenly.”

  I could have happily spent the afternoon watching Fritz pounding and smoothing metal, but the sheep had a big day of walking and eating ahead of them, and it was time to get dressed. Manfred had been kind enough to lend me his boots, and with the rainstorms seemingly over, I was able to leave my overalls in the car. More significant, when Hans, Christine, Andi, Wolfi, one of the scyther's young sons, and I arrived at the sheep's evening lodgings to release them from the fence, Hans handed me a new hat, a leathery Panama Jack getup. Was this Hans's way of telling me I was no longer a novice lamb herder? Was this like getting a new belt in karate? The new hat wasn't exactly Hans's felt crown, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't pleased with this sudden reeval-uation of my headwear.

  The sheep were milling about near the edges of the netted orange fence, anxious to get going. Hans opened a section of the fence and began to lead them out with a long, echoing “Kooooooooomm, kooooooooomm.”

  If my outfit was a bit more glamorous that morning, the work was decidedly less so. Christine, Andi, and I were left with the job of pulling the fence posts up out of a muddy field, which in itself would not have been so bad had the sheep not left a minefield of shit in their wake. Andi went off by himself, while Christine and I worked as a team. I pulled the fence posts out of the ground and handed them to Christine for bundling and tying.

  After a few minutes of work, my pants were covered in mud and sheep droppings up to the knee. I looked down and then up at Christine. “This is real shit work,” I said.

  Christine liked this line, and we began to chat as we worked. I learned that she was a high school teacher in Vienna and had recently received a degree in psychoanalysis. She and Hans had met after a Yiddish concert Hans gave to a group of Austrian students at another high school. Christine liked Hans's singing, and just by staring at him, she could tell he was a good man, if a bit lost. She identified with the sadness in Hans's eyes. A day later Hans was moving some of his things into her flat. Two days later she met die Mama and den Papa Breuer.

  That was about four months earlier, and this was only Christine's third time working with the sheep. She said she liked to think of the work as meditation and to synchronize her breathing with her movement. Her English was smoother than Hans's, but, unlike Hans, who will happily make up usages when necessary, Christine grew flustered when she couldn't find a word, her face reddening, her eyes turning to the sky for help.

  “Your friends must think it's strange that you've become a shepherdess on the weekends?” I noted.

  “Ja,” Christine said, smiling, “but they are used to me doing crazy things.” I liked Christine right away. She seemed smart and sweet, and she had an explosive, body-shaking laugh. Almost every time I pulled a fence post cleanly from the earth, she would nod and give me a “Ja, ja, this is goot.”

  Walking to the van, each of us with two fence bundles in our arms, I asked Christine if it bothered her that Hans still worked with Kati all the time.

  “It is not easy for me,” Christine said as she tossed the fences onto the smaller trailer attached to the back of the van. “They were together many years. For now I prefer not to see Kati. She is a nice woman, but I know they are together when they go with the sheep from the Danube day and night, and sometimes they are growing emotionally and sexually close, and this hurts me very much.”

  I felt for her. Hans's decision to continue shepherding with Kati was crazy. It was making both Christine and him, and no doubt Kati and the dentist, miserable. I thought back to the women I had hurt in the months before my trip and felt a wave of shame and guilt. The real problem with love, I thought, is that it's got nothing to do with morality.

  Later Christine told me that during the war the Nazis had used the basement of her school as a prison. Part of the prison has now been turned into a small museum, and the school has been inviting former Jewish students who were exiled during the war to come and visit.

  “You must come and see,” Christine said. “Perhaps you will speak to my students?”

  I pictured myself standing in front of a group of rowdy Austrian teens, spitballs moistening on the tips of their tongues: Hi. I'm a Jew from New York. Any questions?

  “Um… I'll think about it,” I said.

  By the time the entire fence was bundled and stacked on the trailer, Hans was already far ahead with the sheep. I realized that the hat is only one o
f the perks of being the shepherd. You also get out of fence duty.

  For the rest of the morning Christine and I took turns driving the van and helping the boys with the lamb herding. At one point Wolfi and Gottfried's son joined me in the van, and the three of us inched along the road watching the sheep and listening to terrible rap songs on an Austrian radio station. Hans was leading the sheep through a small residential area, and I began to see some of the appeal of being the only wandering shepherd in a country. Packs of little children chased us down the streets. Mothers stood on their doorsteps to watch. One old woman handed us ice-cream bars as we made our way past her home. The flock might just as well have been Michael Jackson's limo driving by.

  Hans was too far ahead for me to see his face, but I already knew him well enough to know that he loved this attention. This was payback time for all those lonely hours in the wilderness, payback for the all the years of living in a cramped trailer. To the extent that Hans's shepherding was a romantic fantasy, the fantasy was coming true before my eyes.

  But Hans was also working extremely hard. Leading 625 sheep through a residential area is a lot trickier than leading them through the mountains. As soon as his sheep stroll into town, the wandering shepherd has to be extremely vigilant of cars. But he also faces an even greater dilemma: preventing a huge flock of sheep from snacking on people's lawns and flowers.

  The great sheep-snacking dilemma was first tackled in medieval Germany and England when Saxon farms and intensive agriculture arose in Europe. The Saxon estates were huge self-contained plots, complete with orchards, woods, and crop fields, and the farming system relied upon some patches of land remaining unplanted each season. These fallow fields, usually adjacent to crop fields, were an ideal food source for the sheep in the late summer and spring. But there was a catch. The only things missing from the self-contained Saxon estates were fences, meaning that if the sheep had been allowed to graze freely, the crop fields would have ended up as little more than a light morning brunch.