Schlepping Through the Alps

by Sam Apple

  I wanted to say good-bye to the sheep, but I couldn't figure out an appropriate way to do so. Also, they seemed busy with their eating, and I hated to interrupt. I waved at them through the window of the van and then briefly felt like an idiot.

  On the drive to the home of the Turkish family, Hans and I got into a long argument over whether there was anything unusual about our tour guide hanging around in the nude. Hans maintained that I was taken aback by the nudity only because I was an American unaccustomed to European ways. “Fine,” I said, “but you can't tell me it's typical, even in Europe, for someone to give naked museum tours.”

  “Yes, yes, it izzz,” Hans said, entirely serious.

  Laughing, I gave up and told Hans that I was surprised he delivered his lambs across the country rather than just selling them to a butcher.

  “I am very proud that we sell directly to the consumer,” he said. “This is very important point for me. All our economic system is working in the other direction, and this makes alienation. I want that my clients are getting to be my friends so that we can exchange ideas and eat and perhaps sing some songs together. I do not want to sell my meat to fascists.”

  We dropped off the lamb to a grateful Turkish man, then returned to Vienna. At an intersection in the city, Hans pointed to a large apartment building. “That was where the hotel was where they tortured my mother and grandfather,” he said.

  I was flying to Israel the next morning. I'd see Hans again when I came back for my one-night stopover, but Irene would be out of town the day I was scheduled to be back.

  I went over to her apartment to say good-bye and spend one last night with her. We both intuited that it would better not to talk about the fact that there was a good chance we'd never see each other again. Irene took out an undecorated lighter and a bucket filled with silicon tubes and asked me what my favorite colors were.

  While my lighter dried, Irene showed me a pair of underpants her friend had made. The friend was an artist, and after discovering that her grandfather had been a big-time Nazi, she had begun to make and sell brown underpants with his photo and Nazi ID number on them. On top of the photo she had written Opi (an affectionate term for “grandfather”) and dotted the i with a heart.

  Thirty-one

  A Flock of His Own

  The two women who had visited Hans at Finkhof returned to Krems and brought the idea of Hans leading sheep along overgrown riverbanks in the area before the city council. The city officials were intrigued, since previously they had had to go to the trouble of burning off most of the growth that the sheep would now be dining on. Hans was given permission to bring a flock of sheep over for one year. No money would be exchanged.

  And so Hans had a pasture. The next step was to find some sheep. He approached a sheep farmer his mother knew and made him an offer. For fifty schillings per month per sheep, he would take care of the farmer's flock and supply it with all the food it needed. The farmer happily agreed. Hans bought a beat-up old Ford van and began to build portable wooden fences. A friend from Germany arrived to help him start out. Hans still had no home, not even a caravan. Some nights he slept in the van. Other nights he drove back to Vienna and stayed with friends.

  Not long after he started the flock, Hans took a bold step. After hearing about another farmer who was interested in having Hans care for his sheep, he briefly tried to care for two flocks at once, driving back and forth from one set of sheep to the other. Everyone told Hans it was crazy, and Hans knew they were right, but it turned out to be an important career move. The first farmer who let Hans care for his sheep changed his mind and took his animals back, worried that the sheep would lose weight in the winter. Without the second flock, Hans would have been a shepherd with no sheep.

  But the second flock came with its own problem: The owner of the flock had no money. Hans agreed to be paid in sheep, and after six months he had earned six ewes. A year later the farmer went bankrupt and offered to sell Hans the entire flock for 70,000 schillings before the bank took over his property. Hans had no money. He borrowed from friends and took out a loan. He was in debt and had nowhere to sleep, but with a flock of his own, he felt rich.

  Thirty-two

  Clinging

  In 1893, Henry Meige, a French doctor, published a short monograph arguing that the legend of the Wandering Jew had its origins in an actual nervous condition that afflicts Jews. These Jews are wandering, Meige concludes, because they are always in search of the new medical treatments for their imagined illnesses. Meige includes a number of case studies in his monograph (complete with photographs). “Almost all of these Israelites are chronic neurotics,” Meige observes, “enumerating their pains and dwelling obsessively on the reading of notes about sensations which they have carefully analyzed and recorded: tenacious headaches, digestive problems, persistent insomnia, erratic aches of the limbs or back, etc.”

  Later that night, after Irene and I had snuggled and fallen asleep in each other's arms, I awakened convinced that I had AIDS. It made no sense—Irene and I had always been safe—but I was sure of it, just as I had been the time the homeless guy on the subway with the cut on his hand had given me an unsolicited high five or the time I had taken a mud bath and then found out, to my horror, that they don't change the mud between bathers.

  And so the trip was ending where it had begun, with me fearing for my life, with me making a mockery of all the very real life-and-death stories I had come to write about. I lay in bed and looked at the white ceiling and hated myself.

  But maybe, I thought, there was one redeeming aspect of my hypochondria. Maybe in an odd way, it was itself a testament to the profound evil of the Nazis. After all, hypochondria at its core is a desperate clinging to life, and how better to understand the horror of murder than through the burning longing to be alive—not to be happy or successful or in love, but just to go on for one more day. This is what the Nazis did, I realized. They took all that clinging to life and they gassed it.

  When the alarm clock went off at 7:00, I kissed Irene on the forehead and said, “I have to leave. Go back to sleep.” My hypochondria was instantly displaced by the misery of separation. I cant go, I thought. This is too hard. Then I climbed down from the loft and got ready to go.

  Irene accompanied me to the Westbanhof train station, where I could catch a bus to the airport. At the station we took photos together in a booth that produced twenty mini-stickers of our faces.

  I said, “I know this has all been sort of sudden, but you mean a lot to me.”

  She said, “You'll forget about me soon,” and poked me on the chest.

  Thirty-three

  This Pain!

  Back at Christine's apartment a week later, I apologized to Hans for having been unable to find any elderly Yiddish speakers to sing into my tape recorder. I had found something else for Hans: a limited-edition book of songs of his favorite Yiddish musician, Mordecai Gebirtig. Hans was thrilled with the book and immediately sat down on Christine's bed to look through it.

  Mordecai Gebirtig, killed by the Nazis in 1942, is one of the most popular Yiddish poets and songwriters, and there is no one Hans admires more. If Gebirtig's story weren't true, Hans would have had to have made it up: Gebirtig lived in Kraków, Poland, where he worked as a carpenter. In his spare time he would write Yiddish songs into the notebooks used by Polish schoolchildren and sing them for his three daughters. He had no formal musical training but had taught himself to play the shepherd's flute. The tender songs he wrote about Jewish life, about the working poor, and later about the destruction of European Jewry he was witnessing spread to Yiddish-speaking communities across the world, but Gebirtig remained a poor carpenter.

  As Gebirtig was being evacuated from Kraków's Jewish ghetto along with the other Jews, he was shot in the head by a Nazi guard. It remains a mystery why Gebirtig was shot during the solemn march to the train station while the others were taken away to the Belzec death camp. According to one account from a survivor, Gebirtig was sin
gled out for immediate death because he had suddenly begun to dance and sing in Yiddish at the top of his lungs, as if he had gone mad.

  Hans began flipping through the book until he had found “Avreml der Marvicher” (“Avreml the Swindler”), a song about a Jewish street hustler from a broken home. Hans loves the song because it reminds him of the reformatory runaways he tried to help when he was in Spartakus. He particularly likes a line about the poor showing more generosity to Avreml than the rich. “This is one of the crossroads of my shepherding and singing,” Hans said. “Often when I am with my sheep, it is only the poor farmers who will help me and give me good food to eat.”

  Hans then broke into “Avreml,” which ends with these stanzas:

  I am Avreml, they call me the swindler,

  In wheeling and dealing I'm always the winner,

  When yet a young lad, to prison I was sent.

  I came out a menace with a rare talent, oy, oy,

  I don't hang out in the market with the fellow,

  No, I lie in wait, the filthy rich to collar.

  I love gentle people, kind glance and all that,

  I am Avreml, quite a winning guy.

  Not for long can my story go on,

  Broken, ailing, from years in prison,

  Just one little hope I still have in my heart—

  When death comes and I'm no more driven,

  Upon my tombstone let there be written,

  With the biggest letters made from gold:

  Here lies Avreml, they call him the swindler,

  A man of renown, always a winner,

  A very fine man, with heart, with feelings,

  A pure-souled man, a lone wolf against his will, oy, oy,

  Who never did know a mother's love and caring,

  Who never did choose the street for his upbringing,

  Who never a child nor a father did have,

  Here lies Avreml, that winning guy.

  Hans ended with a Hasidic melody of da da da dies. Christine and I clapped.

  “Some sing this as happy song on stage, but I never make this a joke,” Hans said, sounding as though he might break into tears at any moment. “Gebirtig did not mean it as a joke. He saw this poor guy in the streets of Poland.”

  Hans then sang “Motele,” a song about a thirteen-year-old boy who defends his own wildness in the face of his father's criticism, just as Hans himself at that age had argued with his father about his radical politics. I liked it both because Motele, the diminutive of Motel, is my father's Yiddish name and because Hans sang the boy's dialogue in a comically high voice to convey his youthfulness.

  The last song Hans sang was “S'tut Vey” (“This Pain”):

  This pain!

  This terrible pain!

  Not because of hatred

  In the enemy's breast

  Nor even the beatings

  At the enemy's hands,

  Not the Star of David

  On our armbands.

  The shame!

  On all the land The shame!

  On them for all time.

  This pain!

  This terrible pain!

  When it's not the invaders,

  Not they!

  But Poland's sons and daughters,

  Whose own land will rebuke

  And turn from dismay.

  Gleeful, they poke fun, with laughter

  At what they see—

  Jews, harried and mocked

  By our common enemy.

  When Hans finished the song, he read the words aloud in English. And then the tears came, zigzagging silently down his cheeks as he sat atop Christine's bed.

  Thirty-four

  To the Mountains

  During the winter of 1992, Hans had a vision. For reasons he can't explain, he predicted that it was going to be an especially dry summer, and he became obsessed with finding an area with good grass during the hottest months. If northern Austria dried up, Hans would have to buy hay, which he couldn't afford—the flock eats its own value in hay in three months, and Hans and Kati had always earned just enough to live on. Hans decided that the only hope was to head to the higher altitudes, where the mountain grass would be plentiful even if there was a drought below. He began to call friends, who in turn called other friends, until someone contacted Manfred, who agreed to let the sheep come for a summer stay on the Alpine pasture he had rented that year.

  Of course, it turned out to be an especially dry year, so that by June the grass began to turn yellow, then brown, then dark brown. It was catastrophic for the farmers in the area, but the Breuers and the sheep were already trekking to their hidden green treasure in the mountains.

  The change was about more than fresh grass. It was also a chance for Hans and Kati to break out of old patterns of fighting and frustration they had found themselves in. Hans met Kati in 1982, two years after starting work as a shepherd in Krems. Kati was seventeen and Hans was twenty-eight. Because he was much older, Hans was the dominant figure in the relationship in those early years. He taught Kati how to handle the flock until she became an expert herself, training the dogs and building fences as quickly as any shepherd Hans had ever seen.

  By 1987, Hans and Kati had two children, whom they would sometimes carry on their backs for entire days as they led the sheep and sometimes hang on trees in woolpacks. They worked as regional as opposed to wandering shepherds in the general vicinity of Krems. Hans fixed up an old abandoned house, and they moved in together. To make ends meet, Hans sheared sheep on the side, coming home in the evenings plastered in wool and hay.

  This should have been the point at which Hans's story turned happy. After a tumultuous youth, he had found the job of his dreams and settled down—in his own way—with a wife and children. But happiness has never come naturally to Hans. He loved his work and his sons, but his relationship with Kati was rarely stable. As Kati grew older and more independent, the differences in their personalities became increasingly hard to overcome. Hans wanted to work and intellectualize their problems all day and then have sex at night. Kati wanted to work equally hard but talk and have sex less. With Kati's rejections lingering over him, Hans would find himself once again searching for a sense of security he had never known and once again lashing out when he couldn't find it.

  The problems in the relationship only intensified when the shepherding became stressful. After spending years on the outskirts of Krems during the winter, Hans and Kati altered their winter route, taking the sheep through the region's sloping vineyards instead. The change was the result of a happy accident. One winter night the sheep had broken out of their fence and made their way onto a nearby vineyard. Hans was terrified that he was going to be bankrupt after reimbursing the farmers for their crops, but when he approached the flock, he saw that the sheep weren't interested in the grapeless vines but were instead eating the grasses and cereals that had been planted between the rows of crops. The cereals were an ideal protein-rich food for the sheep, and after proving to the farmers that the sheep wouldn't damage the crops in the winter, Hans and Kati were given permission to lead the flock across the vineyards. Hans thought he had struck gold in these barren, snow-covered fields, land that would have seemed useless to just about everyone else in the world during winter. But the vineyards were aligned, one next to the other, making it impossible to skip over a plot of land where the sheep weren't welcome. And while most of the farmers thought the flock's presence in winter was good for their crops, a handful didn't particularly like the sight of a man in a giant hat crisscrossing their property with his wife, sons, and 600 sheep. Sometimes the fights with these farmers got so bad that the police had to be called.

  When things got really bad and it felt like everyone— Kati, the farmers, sometimes his sons too—was against him, Hans would retreat into his music, singing to himself and the sheep in Yiddish. The tranquillity of the folk life depicted in the songs about shoemakers and tailors and weddings was eluding him. Hans had become a shepherd, but it hadn't solve
d his problems.

  But in the mid-1990s, as Hans and Kati grew into their new roles as wandering shepherd and shepherdess, the relationship began to improve. Walking with the sheep, the boys at the back of the flock, they would go over and over Hans's emotional problems, trying to understand the link between his outbursts of aggression and his insecurities. It didn't matter so much how they explained Hans's behavior. It mattered that for the first time in years they were talking and working peacefully with the sheep instead of arguing. Hans, who had spent years worrying that Kati would leave him, finally felt reassured.

  And then, at least in Hans's telling, Kati grew distant again a few years later. Hans's frustration multiplied as his sexual needs were being left unmet. Kati told him that if he needed sex so badly, he should go find other women to sleep with. Hans thought about it and took her up on the offer. Meanwhile, Kati began spending more and more time playing foosball with the dentist at a bar not far from where their caravan was parked. Hans was terrified, with good reason it turned out, that Kati was going to leave him. Before deciding to travel to North America, where I would meet him for the first time, Hans had begged Kati not to give up on their relationship while he was gone. He returned to Austria to find that his worst fears had come true. His own dentist!

  Thirty-five

  Very Rare and Special

  With only a half hour before I had to head back to the airport, I realized that I had failed to buy gifts for my friends. I ran to the store, and when I returned minutes later with five gum-filled watches, Christine said that someone named Daniela had called and left a number. I couldn't think of a Daniela in Austria that I knew and decided there wasn't enough time to call. But as I was putting the silicon-covered lighter Irene had given me into my bag, I realized that Daniela was Dani, Irene's roommate. I figured I must have left something at the apartment and that she was calling since Irene was in Italy.