From the Life of Sheep

Translated by Leo Shtutin; Published in Lunaris Review and Chewers by Masticadores

Why do I bother with this barber? He always cuts my hair unevenly, failing to do away with stray wisps. Seldom have I escaped his clutches unscratched and ungrazed. I did, on one occasion, venture to voice my discontent. There followed a hysterical hissy fit: he stormed out of the barbershop and, wiping away tears, swore for all the world to hear that he’d never touch my hair again. I was forced to apologise profusely, and pleaded with him not to leave the other side of my head uncut. Insulted to his very core, he completed the job with chin proudly upraised. It didn’t take him long, either—a few snips of the scissors and my coif was ready. For a week afterwards I avoided mirrors: the bewildered looks shot my way by strangers were reflection enough. For the sake of fairness I should note that my visits to my barber are infrequent: I don’t suppose I go more than four times a year. Each time I do, though, he declares with a sage air, “Can’t do without a cut ahead of summer,” or “Winter calls for a shorter crop”. Why winter calls for “a shorter crop” I daren’t ask, worried I might offend him with my lack of faith. In his book, our snowbound winters evidently necessitate short hair. That said, he makes no exceptions for autumn or spring either. Funnily enough, the barber himself shaves his head bald, so if a new punter were to turn up, he wouldn’t be able to quip, on seeing him for the first time, that “the cobbler has no shoes”.  Why do I bother with this barber? But of course he’s the only one in town. Though our settlement does indeed bear that proud epithet, it’s home to so few people it feels as good as abandoned. Everyone wanting to leave “town” has already done so, leaving us diehard patriots behind. That’s the yarn we spin to ourselves, anyway. More likely is that we just don’t have anywhere to go. Perhaps, as a former writer of ours melodramatically put it, this is the last safe haven for worn-out vessels. There’s just a handful of us left now. The postman, for instance—a lanky, wonky man with a tailless dog. He’s hardly overburdened by his job: I don’t recall when any of us last received a letter. So he has bags of time on his hands, and he uses it to regale us with the same heroic story. The story’s about his mutt, which, so he claims, once rescued a batch of mail from a trio of wolves, mauling them to pieces but getting its tail bitten off in the scrimmage. The sight of this shaggy-mop poochlet sparks scepticism from most. Also resident in our town are a couple of elderly fakirs (God knows how they ended up in our neck of the woods). To keep their profession alive, these oldsters do the odd spot of fire swallowing. They lost their swords on the way here from far-off Bhutan, and now, more out of habit than enthusiasm, they’re on the lookout for other swallowables. Across from me lives the bald-skulled, big-bearded ex-writer. The house diagonally opposite his is home to a family of Trinidadian navvies (eleven bawling sprogs). The house next to theirs, meanwhile, is the residence of a world-weary former socialite and her companion, an aging Tahitian woman who used to try and pass herself off, though without particular success, as a Russian princess. Add to these denizens a smattering of others and you have the entire population of our town. Oh—almost forgot to mention Ernestino, a tenor who claims to’ve sung at La Scala, lost his voice and gone mad as a result. Nor, of course, can I fail to say a few words about the man who proudly proclaims himself the finest chef in the Foothills. The reality may well be otherwise, but who among us can say for sure? Sequestered in a box of a kitchen complete with a red-hot stove, he cooks a single signature dish whose name none of us knows. Detractors suspect he cobbles it together from whatever ingredients he has to hand, small mammals included. The ex-writer whispered to me of his belief that yesterday’s serving featured hind leg of ferret. But no one, needless to say, is much inclined to apprise the chef of their misgivings. Even an innocuous request to go easy on the crushed ants sends him into a frenzy of rage. He leaps out of his kitchenette, cast-iron ladle in hand, and, furiously brandishing it about, screams that never, never will he modify a recipe for the sake of underwits ill-conversant with Michelin-level cuisine. No one dares to object—not lease because Michelin-level cuisine is indeed a closed book to us. Which is precisely why the chef’s signature dish is in high demand. Across from his kitchenette is the pharmacist’s booth. Our town’s so small no one ever thought to dispatch a doctor here. The pharmacist serves as a stand-in physician. But he does offer an all-important remedy for all manner of unfortunate ailments—a jab in the buttocks. He is convinced that buttock jabs activate the body’s defence mechanisms, inspiriting it to join battle against any malady. Depressingly enough, our town doesn’t even have a name. Imagine that! Folk just refer to it as “that place in the Foothills”. At one point there were even plans to strip us of our autonomy, but residents kicked up a fuss and we were left alone, albeit after having been forced to elect a mayor. We did so at the double, choosing for this office our chubster of a fireman, who, so the pharmacist suspects, is stricken with some strange malady. He spends the majority of his time asleep, his snoring so loud the neighbours are compelled to shut their windows. We still don’t know, by the way, if he’s even aware of his having been elected. I can’t remember when it all began. Perhaps some virus worked its way down to us from the basalt mountains. These mountains surround a volcano that is now dormant, but every so often we hear a dull rumble, as if the lava congealed within is ready to surge into life and gush in the direction of our little town, incinerating everything in its path. Living with the prospect of the volcano’s reawakening is far from easy. Hence, perhaps, the outflow of so many people from these parts. But what were we stayers-put to do? Dwell in everlasting dread and pray for the blasted volcano not to wake? Sooner or later the tensions of our existence could not but spill over. The virus, I suppose, must have played its own part here. It manifested itself in rather peculiar fashion. The first thing we noticed was our ever-intensifying irritability. Mere trifles sufficed to provoke us. Take the chef, for instance. Vexed at having failed to hear the Trinidadian navvy’s third “thank you”, he slammed his cast-iron ladle into his pot with such force that its contents splattered all eleven Trinidadian sprogs from head to toe. Thereupon the usually restrained navvy thumped him over the his balding pate with a shovel. The pharmacist, brought to the scene by their screams, resolved to administer first aid, but couldn’t make heads or tails of the kerfuffle, and stuck his needle into the bulbous rump of the navvy. All eleven sprogs promptly hurled themselves at the pharmacist, intent on jostling him into the oven. Shirt shredded, the pharmacist manoeuvred to evade their clutches, and began pounding on the door of a nearby house. The door swung open, and out leapt the elderly socialite and the Russian princess, both of them stark naked. Aroused no end by the sight of flesh peeking through the tears in the pharmacist’s shirt, they were ready to pounce on him there and then, but were beaten to it by the sprogs, who hauled him to the floor and started rolling him around like a log. Aggrieved at this misfortune and struggling to contain their newfound arousal, the two ladies vaulted a fence and ravished our slumbering fireman. Word is, he awoke and was forced to beg for mercy. But no one came to his assistance. Quite the contrary, in fact: our barber emitted a spiteful guffaw, snatched up his garden shears, and, darting over to the ex-writer, who’d come running at the commotion, lopped off half his beard. And now the postman unleashed his mutt, and now the mutt sank its teeth into the barber’s leg. Perturbed by this tableau, the fakirs began devouring fire, fantastic volumes of it, while mad Ernestino suddenly found his voice and launched into a sonorous, off-key rendition of the “Toreador” aria from Carmen. The following day found everyone indignant at what had come to pass. In due course it was decided that the guilty parties would be put on trial. Choosing a judge, a defence attorney and a prosecutor proved a real struggle, so in the end the formalities were skipped in favour of the inquest proper. First in the dock were the two elderly women. The socialite pronounced a whole speech in defence of their actions, which, for all its length, boiled down to a single argument: the fireman, she insisted, had in any case slept through what happened. Next to be summoned was the fireman himself, but nothing could be elicited from him save his usual snoring. The Tahitian princess, for her part, declared it impossible to live with a woman for so long without partaking of men who come pounding at your door. The battered pharmacist now took the stand, but laid the blame squarely on the sprogs. As minors, the sprogs were let off; not so, however, their navvy father, or indeed the chef. The barber, too, was targeted for apprehension, what with his beard-lopping antics, but he’d vanished into thin air. It was then decided that even the mutt must be made to face the music, but the mutt could say nothing in its own defence, and we were not prepared to engage in unjust proceedings. Eventually it dawned on us that everyone ought to be tried, which rendered the exercise meaningless. We dispersed, weary, to our homes, but, come morning, the whole town was awash with fresh screams, threats and complaints. The blasted virus continued to tighten its grip on the town’s inhabitants. Getting the better of it was proving impossible. Trivialities would rouse us to fury, and we were powerless to rein it in. To no avail would some of us supress our rage, even if only for a moment, and urge our townsmen to come to their senses, and ponder the joys of living, and reflect on the conciliatory spirit that dwelt in all of us. These were lone voices in the wilderness. No one wanted to pay them any attention. To say nothing of the fact that, after these brief instants of lucidity, individuals appealing to reason would once again be consumed by the vortex of general fury. Nothing remained for me but to retreat to the basement of my building; taking occasional peeks outside, I would look on as my neighbours, who only yesterday were all congeniality, waged war on one another. The chef roved about, cast-iron ladle in hand, and thwacked the heads of dashers-by. The fakirs spat fire, while the two elderly ladies, still in the buff, lurked in secluded spots like a pair of predators and pounced on their victims with lascivious cries. The postman set his mutt onto the eleven Trinidadian sprogs, their shovel-wielding father raced hither and thither, and the writer, concealing with his hand the embarrassment of his half-beard, hid from the barber and his clicking shears. What, I wondered, does the barber get up to when he’s not hunting writers or cutting hair? Word is, most folk give his shop a wide berth for fear of causing him offence… Perhaps he has a side-line in sheep shearing? It’s not like the beasts would have much to lambast him for. It struck me as eminently logical—a barber, after all, can’t just neglect his trade altogether. I got hold of a hefty directory and searched its pages for nearby pastures. No luck: turned out there were none hereabouts, not even a scrubby meadow (basalt mountains aplenty, though). Sheep, as the directory informed me, had never been present in these parts. How odd, I thought: we’ve a barber who’d come very much in handy for sheep shearing, but there isn’t a single animal in the vicinity. The thought gave me no peace. Availing myself of a moment of calm—the urge to rip each other’s heads off had tired my neighbours out—I borrowed a little money, set off for a town beyond the mountains, and purchased there a beautiful and shapely sheep. The creature’s noble nature was clear to see from the start. Its regal bearing; its proudly upraised head, seemingly chiselled from marble; its large, contemplative, to all appearances mascaraed eyes; its long, exceedingly beautiful ears—all this spoke rare elegance. Transporting it over to our town didn’t pose much difficulty. The barber was thrilled to receive such an unexpected gift. At long last he had found an occupation to his liking. He stopped hunting the writer, and, as a gesture of reconciliation, buried the shears in the public gardens. He took to shearing his sheep each and every morning; the sheep, for its part, took to bleating out its gratitude. This gentle, touching spectacle so moved the hearts of the town’s inhabitants that, putting on ice their plans for mutual extermination, they all—all went out and bought themselves a handsome, noble-natured sheep of their own. Our life has changed its course since then. Observing these splendid beasts, we took note of their tranquil, unflappable character. The waves of tempest and tribulation convulsing us broke against the majestic edifice of their serenity. Nothing could ruffle their placid demeanour. Their restrained, judicious temperament seemed ready to serve as a crutch, a foundation on which we might always rely during times of hardship. There was, we realised, another mode of existence, one hitherto unknown to us: we could lead lives of quietude and inner peace. Lord, how we came to crave it, that unclouded, beatific state! Here, we thought, could be the key to defeating the accursed virus. First to become a grazer was our chef. He gave us a whole lecture on the gustatory qualities of certain plants. As we were quick to note, he selected for consumption the youngest, most succulent grass-blades. Without pausing to think, the pharmacist wrenched up a fistful of blades. This species of grass, he informed us, by way of self-justification, could cure diseases of the stomach, and, if consumed in sufficiently large quantities, he added, mouth stuffed full, it even offered protection against angina pectoris. Following the pharmacist’s example, the Trinidadian sprogs hurtled screaming to the neighbouring lawn. Their father and mother followed on their heels. And now the postman’s bellicose mutt, spurning the bone proffered to him, devoured all the grass along the fence. There was nothing for it: the postman dug in beside his faithful friend. The elderly ladies ate a dandelion each, chewing dreamy-eyed and purring low. The ex-writer snacked on ribwort. Ernestino ate a basil bush in a paroxysm of delight. The fakirs stopped swallowing fire and sampled the sage growing by their house. Yes, our life has indeed changed. How pleasant it is to awake of a morning and hear the joyful bleating of the Trinidadian sprogs outside your window! The pharmacist murmurs something under his breath, the postman snorts. As for the barber, he has long ceased to shear his sheep; along with everyone else, he revels in the taste of succulent, health-giving mint, smacking his lips in sweet enjoyment. I graze on all fours alongside my townsmen. I lift my head, and a charming pastoral tableau reveals itself to my sight: looking out at us from almost every window are the big, sorrowful eyes of our sheep.