Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  From his childhood home, Hans and I drove to his “caravan,” as he called it, which was parked in Gaming, another absurdly picturesque Austrian town. Back in the blue van, the shepherd's sticks poking me in the back, the smell of the sheep calling up memories of my lamb-herding days, I asked Hans to once again try to explain why he hadn't immediately left Longo Maï. “Couldn't you see how crazy it was?” I asked.

  “Maybe a little,” Hans said, his face filled with the same sadness I had first noticed at his concert in New York. “But the world outside of the group seemed crazy to me too.”

  Hans looked at me just long enough to make me fear he was going to crash the van. “And it was not only bad things there,” he continued. “Not everybody was like Remi. There were some very peaceful people who were not part of this system. It was mixed with a lot of mess, but we were not foolish in all respects. And what I'm doing today—these ideas come from the group. Now I'm always looking for people to sing with, but there I just had to start to sing and some people would join with me. And I don't regret that I was there. It was important time for me because I learned that you can invent new things based on old traditions, like being shepherd.”

  I had almost forgotten. If there had been no Longo Maï, there would have been no introduction into the world of shepherding. Hans had told me that although he had sheared the sheep at Longo Maï, he had never been allowed to be a shepherd. The sheep held a special status in the community as a symbol of the group's return to a more peaceful way of life, and Hans was simply not high enough in the Longo Maï hierarchy to have the honor of leading the flock. Mostly Hans worked at office jobs, which he hated, or in the wood shop making tables, which he loved. But he remembers standing and watching the shepherds from a distance and wanting badly to join them.

  Hans, I realized, had lived in perhaps the only place in the world where being a shepherd was the ultimate status symbol, where would-be shepherds were denied the privilege of carrying the stick. Hans never put it this way, but it seems that by becoming a shepherd, he was, at least in part, making a statement to the residents of Longo Maï.

  The caravan where Hans, Kati, and their three sons had lived for a good portion of the last decade was parked for the moment on the property of a one-handed hunter named Wolfgang Pikl (pronounced Pickle). Hans pays only a token sum in rent, but he also gives Wolfgang Pikl lamb meat from time to time. I remembered that Hans had given lamb meat to Manfred as well, and it occurred to me that he was trading with a currency that had probably been out of use for a good 2,000 years.

  Set in the shade of a small patch of woods, the brown caravan was the size of a modest mobile home and had a thick metal hitch on the front so that Hans could pull it with the van—which he does several times a year, depending on the location of the flock.

  I stepped inside the caravan. To my right was the kitchen: a freestanding woodstove, a counter, and a breakfast table, above which a poster of smiling South American children was taped. To my left was a tiny bedroom, where three sets of bunk beds lined the three walls. Hans had placed a board across the two parallel bottom bunks, so that they functioned as what looked like an extremely uncomfortable queen bed. It was parents on bottom, kids on top.

  And that was it. Maybe six steps of clear walking space in the whole home.

  “It's hard to imagine five people living in there,” I said to Hans as we stepped back outside.

  “Yes, and sometimes guests too,” Hans said. “But we are outside with sheep most times, and this was like luxury compared to old caravan.” Hans pointed to a white trailer parked about twenty yards away that was about half the size of the caravan I had just been in. Hans told me that Andi now lived in the small caravan by himself and that he had his own TV and PlayStation in there.

  By then I knew the important question to ask: “How did you and Kati manage to have sex with the kids sleeping in bunk beds on top of you?”

  “It was okay,” Hans said. “When Andi and Günter were younger, they would hear a little bit and they made up name for it: ‘wackypoki.’ It was funny for them. They would write little comics and things like this.”

  “What about a bathroom?”

  Hans led me around the back of the caravan and pointed to a bucket. “When you are done, you cover it with some ashes and there is no smell,” he said seeming genuinely proud. “This is old custom I learned from the Roma.”

  Hans pointed to a clump of trees. “Over there was where we once had the foosball table,” he said, explaining how he and Kati had bought the table for the boys to reward their hard work with the sheep.

  With that, Hans climbed up a rusty ladder attached to the back of the caravan and began to sweep the leaves off the roof. I walked over to the smaller caravan to take a look. It was only slightly larger than a van. There was hardly space for one person to move, but Hans and Kati had lived there for years with two sons: the parents on one bed, Günter on the other, and Andi sleeping on the floor with his legs tucked under Günter's bed.

  Standing erect, my head nearly grazed the ceiling, so I lay down and thought about Hans's life from this new perspective. There was no longer room for romanticizing. The guy was living in worse conditions than most third-world refugees.

  I fell asleep and awoke to the sight of Hans grinning at me through the caravan's window. When I stepped outside, Hans announced that he had had many passionate moments in the bed I was sleeping in.

  Before leaving, Hans wanted to show me how the family bathed when they stayed on the Pikl property. He led me to a carved-out log about twenty yards away from the caravan that was filled with water that didn't look particularly clean.

  “Touch it,” Hans said.

  The water was ice-cold.

  Hans stripped naked and jumped into the log.

  I looked nervously at the son of Wolfgang Pikl kicking a soccer ball nearby. Hans stepped out of the log and got dressed. It was time to go.

  Twenty-five

  Caravan of Dreams

  Icome back into the caravan all wet. Irene is sitting at the table. She is mad.

  “Did you just bathe in the log again?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “I just bathed in the log again.”

  “That water is filthy,” Irene says.

  “I know,” I say.

  Irene stands up and steps into the bedroom. “I cant live here anymore,” she says.

  “Live where?” I ask.

  “Here,” she says. “In Wolfgang Pikls backyard.”

  “But this was your idea,” I say. “Remember? We would smoke and be in love and nothing else would matter.…”

  “Yes, but that was before you started with the Jew-ish thing.”

  Irene is referring to my recently developed habit of pointing to my chest and repeatedly blurting out the word “Jewish”—not “I am Jewish,” not “I'm a Jew,” just the two vowelly syllables: “Jew-ish.” Last night it had happened during dinner. Irene asked me to pass the salt, and out of nowhere I hit her with three straight: “Jew-ish, Jew-ish, Jew-ish.”

  “I would stop if I could,” I say.

  “So just stop,” she says.

  “I said I would if I could,” I say.

  Irene opens the door. I ask her where she's going.

  “Where do you think?” she says.

  “To play foosball with that Russian shoeshine guy,” I say.

  “Right,” she says.

  “Mr. ‘There are more Nazis in America than here,’ ” I say.

  “He's a nice guy,” Irene says.

  “He's a bastard,” I say. “He's probably not even Jewish. The Russians used to pretend to be Jewish to get out of the country.”

  “Whatever,” Irene says. She steps out.

  “Do you want to have sex in the woods?” I call.

  Irene closes the door behind her. I am alone. I knock on Wolfgang Pikls door but no one answers, and so I just start walking. I walk for hours. The sky goes from blue to orange to red to gray. I am tired, but I don't sto
p until I come upon a tall man standing in a yellow field. The man is holding a giant scythe.

  “Hallo,” I say.

  “Hallo,” he says.

  “I'm Sam,” I say.

  “I'm Death,” he says.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?” I say.

  “Bitte,” Death says.

  “Is it my turn?” I ask. I am strangely calm.

  “Nope,” Death says.

  “Could you tell me when?” I ask. “It would, ya know, save me a lot of worrying time.”

  “No can do,” Death says.

  “Do I have rabies?” I ask.

  “How the hell should I know?” Death says. “Why do you worry so much?”

  “Jew-ish,” I say, my thumb aimed at my chest.

  Death looks at me like I'm crazy.

  “Jew-ish Jew-ish,” I say.

  Twenty-six

  In the Army Tent

  Later that week Irene and I went to the annual outdoors festival held on Vienna's Danube canal. The air smelled of grilled animal flesh, and as soon as we arrived, I felt overwhelmed by the swarms of Viennese teenagers. They were dancing and typing messages into their cell phones and whipping one another with rolled-up T-shirts. Some of them wore lit-up devil horns.

  I immediately sought out a stand selling roasted corn on the cob, because I generally find these roasted-corn stands to be the only unambiguously redeeming thing about outdoor festivals.

  Irene bought a drink, and we sat down at a picnic table. I told her that I would have to leave Vienna in a few days and that it was going to be hard to say good-bye.

  She smiled but didn't say anything. It made me nervous. I picked a few kernels of corn from my teeth. We walked on until we came across a large canvas tent that was closed on all sides.

  “It's a tent of the army,” Irene said. “They're making exhibits at the festival during the day.”

  We looked at each other, then walked to the front of the tent, unzipped the flap, and went inside.

  It was pitch-dark and peaceful, the noise of the crowd now an even hum. Irene sat down and took out one of her lighters. Her face flickered in the light. I stretched out with my head in her lap and asked her to be careful not to burn my hair.

  “I've never met anyone who worries so much about things like this,” Irene said.

  “Okay, um, please just try not to burn my hair,” I said. Then I began to sing songs from the musical Hair.

  Irene impressed me by knowing most of the words. When we had done every Hair song we knew, Irene taught me a German protest song, and we sang it together softly:

  Hey ho, leistet Widerstand

  Gegen den Rassismus in dem Land

  Schliesst euch fest zusammmen,

  Schliesst euch fest zusammmen.

  Hey ho, resist

  The racism in this country

  Firmly join your forces,

  Firmly join your forces.

  “I think I'm really starting to like you,” Irene said, her fingers pressing on the sides of my neck.

  I felt nervous again. I was really starting to like her too. What I hadn't understood about the “travel relationship” before I left for Austria is that it makes things much harder rather than easier. Had Irene and I both lived in the same city, I probably would have been fixating on how different our personalities were. But the travel relationship allows you to put down your guard, to slip seamlessly into feelings you would otherwise keep at bay. And then, just like that, just when your heart is fully exposed, it's time to get on a plane and go.

  I tried to deflect the tension with a joke. “Oh, come on, you just have some sort of thing for Jewish guys,” I said, temporarily forgetting that I had already been scolded for this exact remark a few days earlier.

  Irene's voice lost its softness.

  “Trust me,” she said, “I don't have a special thing for Jewish guys.”

  Then she stood up and walked out of the tent.

  I followed her out. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I was just joking around.”

  “It's nothing,” Irene said. “I'm sorry.”

  We sat down and watched the teenagers sing karaoke. Two boys were doing “Summer Lovin’” from Grease as their friends cheered them on.

  I picked more kernels of corn from my teeth. Irene rolled a joint.

  “A Jewish guy tried to rape me when I was sixteen,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Holding hands, we left the festival and walked to a party a friend of Irene's was throwing. I felt sad for Irene and angry at myself for having raised the subject again. I couldn't help thinking about what was going through that rapist's head. Probably he was just cruel and demented in the way all rapists are cruel and demented, but maybe he had been caught up in his own psychosexual drama about Austria and the Jews. Maybe he had really been after Austria more than Irene.

  I felt sick.

  The party was in a large apartment full of computers and ashtrays and plastic cups that had been abandoned mid-drink. A dark-skinned man with long hair strummed a guitar in the corner.

  I sat on the living room couch between Irene and a girl whose short blond hair looked as though it hadn't been washed in a long time. I asked her what she did, and she said, “Nothing.” Then she said that she wanted to be a doctor but that she couldn't be one in Austria.

  Across from me a pregnant woman was taking a hit from a joint.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “You must not have heard about Dr. Gross,” she said.

  “No,” I said, and then she told me the story. Until the late 1990s, Dr. Gross had been one of Austria's leading neurologists, regularly giving expert testimony in court. During World War II he had worked in the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, which is now part of the Vienna State Psychiatric Hospital. Despite his denials, there is considerable evidence that while working at the clinic, Dr. Gross supervised cruel experiments on physically and mentally disabled children—both Jews and Gentiles—whom the Nazis called lebensunWertes Leben, or “life unworthy of life.” When the doctors were done with the children, they killed them with barbiturates and put their brains in jars that were kept in the basement of the clinic and used for research as recently as 1998.

  That almost 800 children were killed in the Am Spiegel-grund clinic was no secret. The director, Emst Illing, was hanged as a war criminal in 1945. Gross was tried and convicted on one count of manslaughter in 1950, but, as was typical of Austrian Nazi trials, his conviction was overturned on a technicality after only a few months. Dr. Gross went back to work and personally continued to experiment on the brains of the murdered children well into the mid-1960s. In 1975 the Austrian government presented him with a high state medal for his services to the country.

  A new attempt to prosecute Gross on nine counts of murder began again in 1999, after a researcher found medical notes Gross had taken in the summer of 1944 in a Berlin archive. It would have been Austria's first Nazi war crimes trial in a quarter of a century, but it was suspended after a court ruled that Dr. Gross suffered from dementia.

  The children's brains were finally buried in April of 2002.

  From the party we went back to the two-bedroom apartment Irene shared with her roommate, Dani. The apartment was full of what Irene referred to as her “inventions”: The remote control was attached to the futon mattress on the floor by an elastic cord; the bookcase doubled as a stairway up to her loft. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and Irene mentioned that she sometimes did dishes while she showered. In the bathroom Irene had posted cartoons and newspapers clippings. One of the banners read: ÖSTERREICH IST KEIN NAZI-LAND (“Austria is not a Nazi country”). I asked her why it was there, and she said that she thought it was funny that the newspaper had felt the need to run the statement as a headline.

  We undressed and climbed onto the loft in Irene's bedroom. I had a bunch of small stickers that came with my blank audiocassettes, and I put them on Irene's feet. Then I apologized again for my comment about her liking Jewish guy
s.

  “Forget about it,” she said.

  I tried, but I couldn't.

  Twenty-seven

  The Shepherd of Vienna

  Four days after leaving Longo Maï, Hans arrived at his parents’ apartment. He had no friends, no job skills, and no idea what to do next. He stayed in his parent's flat for three weeks until his father, Georg, came up with a plan. Georg had inherited a small estate outside of Vienna, where Hans's grandfather had run a vegetarian pension from 1930 to 1938. The property had been neglected for years, and Georg offered to pay Hans to clear some of the dead trees around the house. Hans, still struggling to readjust to life outside of Longo Maï, found the logging cathartic. He continued to clear trees through the winter of 1975. In the spring he began traveling around Austria, working odd jobs as a farmhand and falling in love with teenage girls. The next winter Hans cut down trees again. Then, on April 1, Rosa saw an ad in the newspaper: The city of Vienna was looking for a shepherd.

  “Everyone thought it was April joke,” Hans said.

  It was no joke. The city owned a lot of unused land, and someone in the bureaucracy came up with the idea of putting a flock of sheep on a few of the fields so that they would not go to waste. Rosa pushed hard for Hans to apply. As a city worker, he would receive a good wage, a cheap apartment, and a measure of job security. “My mother wanted I would be pragmaticized,” Hans said, unable to hold back his laughter.

  Hans got the job by exaggerating here and there about the extent of his experience working with sheep. “I had really not much idea of what it is to be shepherd,” he said, “but we say among the blind ones, the one-eyed is king.”

  As it turned out, Hans was not only “one-eyed,” but also one-legged, having recently broken his leg in two places after an ill-fated attempt at bareback horse riding. In those first months as the shepherd of Vienna, he would limp along with his stick, taking sixty sheep back and forth through a stretch of woods to a grazing patch without even a dog to help him.