Out There & In Here

” No such thing as a black sheep,” he explained, as I pointed at one in the flock.

” Sheep are all the same. The black ones aren’t any different from the others, they’re just black”.

This was Zufar Suleman, a North Macedonian shepherd I met last week on a mountain plain not far from where I live.

As we talked, one or two of his sheep trotted mindlessly onto the road, hooves clacking on the asphalt, and Zufar thwacked his stick on the ground to get them back onto the grass.

” I never hit my sheep. You can see they’re not afraid of me. They wouldn’t stand so close if they were. ”

* * *

I like a new person to chat to, and Mr Zufar Suleman did too.

“They never get the spelling right in the post office. Suleman means ‘peace’, you know, not that we had much peace in Macedonia. Tito’s first wife was Serbian, of course, that’s where all the trouble all started.”

” But my parents were from Albania. We had Hoxha there, remember ? “( I did remember Hoxha, from my fleeting engagment with stamp collecting in childhood, and I remembered another dictator of Albanian origin, one of my bosses in Saudi Arabia ).

“The Italians were in Albania, twice, before the communists. When I first emigrated here to Italy, they tried to deport us back to Albania, offered us a bit of cash but I like it here and I like my work. I’m healthy and I’m outdoors. Never taken a pill in all my days, but I got the covid vaccination. My son Najden – he lives in Hamburg, wife’s from North Macedonia – forced me to”.

“I have a new boss now, a woman. I used to take sheep to other places but this summer I’m here. I don’t like it too much because there’s no shade, and the tourist camper vans upset the sheepdogs at weekends so I have to keep moving. I usually live in Foggia with my wife and we’ve got two daughters there. It’s 200 kilometres away, and that’s where the sheep spend most of the year.”

I was about to ask him if he walked all that way here with the sheep every summer, like they used to do, but he pre-empted my question, and gave me a this woman has no idea about anything look, though it was a gentle one.

“They get driven up here in lorries and I follow them in my van. That’s where I sleep when I’m looking after the sheep. I’ve been in Italy for 35 years now, pension coming up soon. But I’ll keep working. I’d miss the sheep…and maybe they’d miss me too.”