Schlepping Through the Alps
Page 22
“This is the Aim,” Hans said as I stumbled out of the van, dizzy and nauseous. It was windy and freezing and raining. There was a hunting lodge with green metal shutters and a REININGHAUS BIER sign nailed to the side, and a dilapidated woodshed with a PEPSI-COLA sign nailed to the side.
Mohrle gnawed on a lamb carcass next to the door of the woodshed. Christine, Wolfi, a young Turkish couple, and an Israeli woman with her half-Israeli, half-African toddler were waiting for us inside the lodge. (Andi was in Vienna staying in an apartment Hans had rented across the hall from his parents and preparing for the first full school year of his life.) There wasn't much heat in the lodge, and to go to the bathroom, you had to dump a bucket of water in the toilet. Jennifer and I slept on the floor huddled together to stay warm.
During the day, while Hans sang and led the sheep around the mountain, the rest of us worked like Siberian prisoners, hauling heavy stones through the whipping wind and rain to place at the bottom of the fences. At night we were not allowed to leave the lodge because the hunter who owned the property was convinced that even opening a door after 6:30 would scare away his prized chamois. (Apparently, the hunter was monitoring our actions from the base of the mountain with binoculars.)
The Breuers had hauled a foosball table up the mountain, and in the evenings Jennifer and I competed against Wolfi while Hans forced the Turkish man, who played a traditional flute, to learn Yiddish songs with him. The half-Israeli, half-African toddler turned out to be a shockingly precocious cook, and he spent most of his time chopping vegetables in the nude with a large kitchen knife. Sometimes the whole group got together to play a card game called Rage.
I was pleased to discover that Hans, if not completely over Kati, was thinking and worrying about her much less often. “I am not happy about what happened with Kati, and I will never be happy about this,” he told me, “but I am in less tension with myself now.” Kati was still working with the flock, but her schedule had been arranged so that she overlapped with Hans much less often.
Christine told me that after a weekend of working with the sheep together with Hans, Kati, and the dentist, she had decided that she could no longer put up with it and now refused to visit Hans when Kati was around. She had started her own psychoanalysis practice and was shuffling back and forth between her patients and the sheep. Hans told me that they had discussed bringing some of her patients to walk with the flock as therapy.
When I last spoke with Andrea, she told me that the anti-Semite no longer calls her a Jew and that she is no longer in love with him.
One afternoon, after Hans had returned with the sheep and led them into the fenced pasture, he announced with a look of real worry that a lamb was missing—he knew because the mother was anxiously calling for her offspring with no response. Hans and I set out in search of the lamb. It was extremely foggy, and I could see only a few paces ahead of me. Hans said that our best chance to find it was to call out so that it might hear us and call back.
We walked together through the clouds, baaahing and foeee/iing. Hans found the lamb stuck in a small hole. He wrapped it behind his neck like a wool scarf, and we headed back to the flock together.
“I've never been in fog like this before,” I said.
“Sometimes when you have fog like this and you are with the sheep alone, it is like you are in separate universe,” Hans said. “It makes incredible impression, so that you cannot imagine how the world continues behind the fog.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent Jennifer Lyons for making this book possible and for being so supportive, and to Elisabeth Dysse-gaard for her invaluable edits and guidance. In addition to the sources I mention in the book, I'm indebted to Professor Anton Pelinka, Heimo Kosjek, Ellen Nickelsberg, Ulf Kint-zel, and Michael Schiestl for helping me make sense of my research on both Austria and shepherding. Thank you to Nancy Hernandez, Peter Kanning, Judy Weiss, and Benjamin Sadock for their assistance with translations. A special thank-you to Gerrit Jackson, whose diligent translations of important source material were indispensable. This book would be much worse without the careful reads of Jessica Apple, Talya Fishman, Rebecca Rose Jacobs, Rebecca Phillips, Olivia Gentile, Cuttino Mobley, and David Kaplan. Without the thoughtfulness of Aviva Sufian, who first e-mailed me about Hans, this book would not have happened. Thank you to the students and professors at Columbia University's School of the Arts, especially Lis Harris, for guiding me through the early stages of this process. I'm grateful to Rufus Griscom for his support and for allowing me to maintain a flexible work schedule while I wrote this book, and to Binnie Kirshenbaum and Patty O'Toole for their inspiration. Most of all I'd like to thank my wife, Jennifer Fried, who worked tirelessly to get my manuscript into shape even before we had exchanged our vows.
I'd also like to cite the works that were extremely important to the writing of this book: Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe, by Ruth Ellen Gruber; Hitler's Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era 1938-1945, by Evan Burr Bukey; The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, by Stephen Budiansky; A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, by Paul Berman; “The Passion of Joschka Fischer” by Paul Berman; Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past, by Anton Pelinka; Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider, by Hella Pick; From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism, by Bruce F Pauley; “Herding Dogs Past and Present,” by Ann Garner; “Herding Style Is Not a Fashion Statement,” by Ann Garner; Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong, by Ruth Rubin; The Legend of the Wandering Jew, by George K. Anderson; The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, edited by Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes; The Haider Phenomenon in Austria, edited by Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka; “The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945” by Eleonore Lappin; “War Crimes Trials in Austria” by Win-fried R. Garscha and Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider; and Les Héritiers Contestés: Longo Mai et les Média d'Europe, by Gilbert-François Caty.
SAM APPLE, who grew up in Houston, is a graduate of the creative nonfiction MFA program at Columbia University. Apple's writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York, Times, The Forward, and The Jerusalem Report. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jennifer and is a contributing book editor at Nerve. Visit the author's website at www.samapple.com.
About the type
This book was set in Cheltenham, a typeface created by a distinguished American architect, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in 1896 and produced by Ingalls Kimball of the Cheltenham Press in New York in 1902, who suggested that the face be called Cheltenham. It was designed with long ascenders and short descenders as a result of legibility studies indicating that the eye identifies letters by scanning their tops. The Mergenthaler Linotype Company put the typeface on machine in 1906, and Cheltenham has maintained its popularity for almost a century.
Copyright © 2005 by Sam Apple
All rights reserved.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-49052-0
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