Cow Page 12

  The Golden Ox inn had a tiled roof like the farmhouses, and on the side facing the village square it had a round arch that reached almost up to the gables. There were blossoming lime trees in front of it, and some garden chairs and tables under a dark oak, in a little area bordered by laurels. The gravel crunched under Ambrosio’s sandals. At the top of the stairs leading to the door, he saw a mighty threshold: in this village one had to be careful when entering unfamiliar territory. In the frontage above him window stood by window, all of them brilliantly polished, and all of them adorned with geraniums, green shutters and white curtains. On the wall above the entrance was a gilded wrought-iron ox the size of a small calf. Its silhouette was squat, with a neck bowed as under a yoke, and head hanging low. On one side of the passage it said DINING ROOM above the door, and there were various official announcements on the wall. Over another door was an enamel sign GUESTS. Here Ambrosio heard people talking, and he went in.

  A few Innerwalders who had been sitting on corner benches, backs to the wall, immediately fell silent and turned towards the door. ‘Buenos días,’ said Ambrosio. He took his cap off. The room was as low and dark as the furthest corner of Knuchel’s cowshed, but still Ambrosio recognized all the faces, the co-op manager, the cheeser, the farmers. They were the same faces that stared at him in the village, they were the same men who pointed at him, who made jokes he couldn’t understand, who plucked at his clothes when he came into their midst in front of the cheese dairy, morning and evening, with Farmer Knuchel’s milk.

  A chair was pushed back, and the waitress came up to the bar. Luigi stood up somewhere at the back. Ambrosio made his way to him between the tables. On a green velvet cloth were four pink scrubbed hands, making a star. At first they were immobile, but now they were moving again, fumbling for the cards while the four players were still busy looking at the little Spaniard. Then a murmur of greeting, undirected and unenthusiastic. The necks lengthened again, brows unfurrowed themselves, mouths snapped shut, a match flared up and lips closed round a spittle-wet stub of tobacco.

  Opposite Luigi was the field-mouser, old Field-mouser Fritz, suspected by the whole village of sectarian machinations and worse. He was the binoculars, the ratman, the eargrubber, the mumper and the nightwalker of the highlands. It was: Mind you don’t touch his rags! Out of his way, boys! and the farmers’ wives would send their children into the house when they saw him coming up the farm road with his long stick.

  Ambrosio said some more ‘buenos días’, Luigi was happy, and called the waitress over, and the field-mouser, seeing Ambrosio was looking, slowly opened up his left hand, which was lying on the table like a clay prosthesis. Luigi laughed and said, ‘You muser, always you blaying!’ But Ambrosio stared at the black fingers spreading out and disclosing a palm that was ploughed with scars, cracks, callouses and gashes. Bits of sand and earth had become embedded in the brown-black crust of skin. The face of the field-mouser was as the hand: the nose a shapeless swelling the size of a potato, the skin seemed to breathe through the enlarged pores, and it put forth stubble and brows, and knotty blisters, warts and carbuncles, as fallow land grows weeds. Steel-blue eyes, dimmed by alcohol, studied Ambrosio, and while the hand slowly closed again and turned onto its palm, the field-mouser said: ‘Upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life!’

  Ambrosio turned round. The voices behind him were growing louder once more. ‘Have you seen Knuchel’s Spaniard? He’s wearing those Holy Land sandals of his again,’ said one Innerwalder. ‘Yes, Knuchel’s cut-price milker,’ said another. Luigi waved his hand, indicating to Ambrosio not to pay any attention to the talk behind him, and that he should order something to drink, the waitress was already asking a second time. Ambrosio was still astonished by the breadth of that earthy hand, when the smell of a young woman reached his nostrils. She stood very close to him, so that he could feel the warmth from her body. He gestured cluelessly at the cups and glasses all around, and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Kaffee fertig,’ said the field-mouser. ‘Yes, a kaffee fertig! A spoon in a glass, then coffee till you can’t see the spoon no more, and then schnapps till you see the spoon again!’

  Ambrosio nodded, and the waitress said, ‘One kaffee fertig, thank you,’ and was gone.

  ‘You, muser, show him what you got in your pogget,’ Luigi nudged the field-mouser, but he pretended not to understand. At Luigi’s second prompting, he still managed to ignore the attention being paid to him with an unconvincing show of modesty, thrusting his chin out and looking round the bar, but the third time he stretched out as far as he could, wedged in between his bench and the edge of the table, and dug around in his clothes with a dirt-encrusted paw until finally he produced a bundle of something resembling rubber bands tied together. The field-mouser waved it about, giggled, and trailed it through the air under the noses of Luigi and Ambrosio. They were grey-yellow mouse tails that had been chopped off, and they disappeared again immediately. ‘Water voles. Just caught them on the Boden farm. Terrible this year.’

  To Ambrosio’s surprise the waitress returned to the table with her tray full of crockery. He had just ordered a coffee. Luigi smiled knowingly and said, ‘Eh! Che cosa vuoi!’

  A wide-brimmed coffee glass stood in a saucer on some tissue paper. In one little dish, brown outside, white inside, were two sachets of the same sugar that Luigi had produced from his suitcase. Another little dish bore a miniature silver jug full of cream, with a miniature spoon next to it, ornamented, and marked with a stamp to show it had been produced in the prosperous land, and underneath it all a napkin embroidered with trotting oxen.

  ‘Two twenty-five please, if I can take it now please,’ said the waitress, and Ambrosio was captivated by her hand underneath her frilly white apron, scrabbling about in a leather bag full of jingling coins over her belly. That was where they kept their money!

  In the meantime, the field-mouser had cleared his throat, and with his tuberous nose sniffed the air like a dog. He slithered about this way and that on the bench, pushed against the table, and got to his feet without standing fully upright. ‘Upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life,’ he said loudly, and after teetering between bench and table edge, let himself drop back again. As he fell back, his head slumped so far that his face disappeared from view beneath the brim of his hat.

  There was derision from the other tables, comments, to the general effect that he’d had too much to drink, but still none of the other guests were concentrating fully on the field-mouser. What interested them, indirectly and covertly, were the two foreigners.

  After their conversation of the morning, Luigi would have liked to intoxicate himself with talk, and he was eager to get going again in their Mediterranean mixture. Ambrosio would have been only too happy to oblige him, particularly as he had some new questions of his own, such as who the woman was with the powerful thighs who was such a gifted cyclist that she caused havoc on the field roads of Innerwald, and uphill at that, and where this rocky man came from, and what he used those hands for, and what the waitress’s name was, and why the mouse tails, only his own speech sounded foreign to him here, and he felt he couldn’t talk properly in this room. Fleshy-faced farmers were looking at them, swollen necks stretched out, the laughter grew louder. The sound of foreign syllables, Luigi’s exuberance and Ambrosio’s reticence, everything incurred the displeasure of the other customers.

  ‘Well, well, so the Spaniard will be left in charge of Knuchel’s farm when the farmer himself is off doing his military service,’ someone said. But was Hans down for this year, came the question back. ‘Yes,’ came the reply, his unit was with the 18th regiment, light infantry, and they were off exercising in a fortnight. ‘Hans Knuchel’s unit’s been called up?’ queried the co-op manager. The first he’d heard, he said, and forgetting that for once it wasn’t his pencil in his hand, he whitened the back of his neck with the piece of chalk he was using to keep the score. ‘You can
see for yourself,’ said the cheeser. ‘All the schedules are up on the board outside, the refresher courses and inspection days.’ And when the co-op manager put his cards down, pushed his chair back, went outside and started reading one of the small-printed official communications, the cheeser called to him through the open door: ‘Here, you’re looking at the calendar of market days!’ and the other two players could hardly suppress their mirth.

  There was more laughter and grinning when the field-mouser tried once more to get up. Several times he flopped back onto his seat, then he raised his arm threateningly and hissed, ‘Upon your belly you shall eat and go dust all the days of your life.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said the co-op manager, returning to the table. ‘There’ll be all kinds of goings on on Knuchel’s farm while Hans is away.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to be cheesing, and I’ve yet to see a doctor’s report, when it says so in the regulations,’ said the cheeser.

  Teetering half upright, the field-mouser began cursing to get the attention of the room, at first incoherently, then audibly enough to obtain silence, and when the last pink face was turned towards him, he leaned on Ambrosio’s shoulder and said he was the field-mouser, the field-mouser of the highlands, and he carried his money around in a moleskin, there was room for it, and if there was anyone present he owed money to, and wasn’t it the case that if you came down too hard on rats they’d start producing a nestful of little ones every month? With these words, he appeared to lose his balance completely, but he caught himself again on Luigi’s shoulder.

  Because he understood poison, he continued, yes he was a field-mouser, and a trap once set he’d never forgotten it, not in thirty-five years, and if someone brought him a handful of earth, he’d tell him the field it came from, never mind what had been growing on it, but then those Innerwald thickheads, what did they ever see? By St Ulrich he’d show them, and when a young farmer got up and made tracks towards the field-mouser, but then sat down again, he said: ‘For thou shalt not be ashamed of the dirt under thy fingernails!’ And after he’d asserted that while everyone knew which farmer produced the biggest calves, only he, the field-mouser could say where the mice did best for a living, he took is paws off the shoulders of Luigi and Ambrosio and roared: ‘You should all sacrifice a golden mouse for every farm in the village, because there’s a plague of them on you all!’ And collapsing back onto his bench, he whispered, rolling his eyes, ‘I’m the field-mouser, the field-mouser I am.’

  Thereupon upon he slumped forward across the table, knocking over a coffee glass in the process. A rough, snoring sigh was heard. The battered hat fell from the old man’s head, rolled across the table onto the floor. The young farmer who had just sat down again, now moved his chair, picked the hat up off the floor and said: ‘Right, that’s enough of that.’ A fist crashed down, a beer bottle burst open.

  ‘Damn it now!’ said the cheeser.

  A pink hand grabbed the field-mouser by the collar. ‘Leggo,’ said Luigi. The hand jerked the field-mouser to his feet, and Luigi lashed out. When another hand gripped Luigi, Ambrosio’s elbow swung into an Innerwald beer belly. A dozen hands grasped struggling limbs like steel tongs. Only the field-mouser didn’t put up a fight.

  ‘Seems you can’t even play a quiet game of cards on a Sunday any more,’ sighed the co-op manager.

  Luigi, Ambrosio and the field-mouser were thrown down the steps of the Ox. The young farmer knocked his hands together as though to remove clinging particles of dirt, and said: ‘That Spaniard struts about on our land as though it belonged to him, just like the field-mouser does.’ ‘And in green clothes and all,’ chipped in another Innerwalder. ‘They’ve come all the way here to open their flies and piss on our roads!’ said a third.

  4

  IN THE CATTLE room of the slaughterhouse at the edge of the beautiful city, the rush was on. The swearing had become audible, the men spat, waved their knives about, spat again. Fucking shit! Those stupid asshole cow-handlers! And the wops! Three men short already, and now Gilgen’s stayed away too.

  Krummen’s face was brick red. There was no rhythm to the work. They were already an hour behind.

  The first half dozen cows were slaughtered by all the men together. Only after that could each one settle to his task and go from one animal to the next concentrating on the same actions routinely and repetitively. For the moment, though, everyone was doing everything, and even more ponderously than usual.

  The most ponderous of them all was Ambrosio. He was standing there shaking. He was weak in the knees, pale-faced, and staring at the knife in his four-fingered fist, then at the cow’s shin in his left hand. He had skinned it, and sawn it off at the knee. The hoof wobbled about on the end of the slithery white bone; the tendon had been cut. Our slaughtermen have the material before their eyes, and are themselves in the best position to assess the value and size of a correctly cut hide, and the wastage and loss in one poorly cut. Ambrosio stepped away from the carcass, which now had only three legs pointing up in the air.

  —No work? Fast asleep? Or is he looking for his middle finger again? Huber and Hofer hissed with twisted faces. Ambrosio didn’t hear them. He froze. Krummen pulled the fourth cow into the hall on a rope. Ambrosio dropped his knife a second time. The cow being pulled in was Blösch. Blösch, the lead cow from Knuchel’s shed. Ambrosio stepped back. It was seven years since he’d last seen that cow, but he recognized her at once, out on the ramp in front of the cattle-truck. She loomed out of the morning mist like a ghost, limped into the weighing cage, and weigher Krähenbühl, frowning sarcastically, noted down a pathetic animal live weight in his notebook. The onetime pride of the highlands, the mainstay of Innerwald breeding, was being led to the scaffold uncelebrated and unheralded. Nowhere a ceremonial bell, an organ intoning, a fanfare calling to attention. Where was Blösch’s cow bell? Where was the embroidered ribbon? Where was the village band?

  Blösch still showed no sign of resistance. Cowpeaceably, as though she had juicy Knuchel grass under her hooves, she stood beside Krummen and waited.

  She was worn to the bone, her straight back had turned into a jagged range of protruding vertebrae, the horns were spindle-thin and decalcified, on her left hindleg a poorly healed wound from a pitchfork was still suppurating, her hocks were swollen, and her skull drooped from an emaciated neck.

  Animals of the classes cattle, sheep, goats, swine and horses are – with exceptions in an emergency – to be stunned by a bolt or bullet to the brain. Krummen didn’t even look at the cow in his grasp. Kilchenmann! Shoot! Blösch lay long and lean on the floor.

  Ambrosio had already got as far as the first cow in the centre aisle of the abattoir. He was making his exit with equanimity. Abattoir-Marshal Bössiger showed up, but he didn’t get involved, he kept away from the front. The more livid were his lieutenants. And the full blood-basins! And the shanks! Can’t you ever be left to yourselves? Do you need someone to wipe your botties too? What about these heads? Get to it! Goddamn it! Ambrosio! Ambrosio! Where the hell are you off to?

  Ambrosio stared into space.

  Krummen hissed first at Piccolo, then at the trainee. He barked out orders, made one man stop the work he’d just embarked on, didn’t tell him what to do instead, trod on someone else’s toes, wanted to inspect the knives, got in the way of everyone. Huber and Hofer followed suit, scattered pointless commands, splashed Ambrosio with water, then with blood. When Krummen’s back was turned, they swore at each other, said it wasn’t the first time they’d been in a slaughterhouse, and that they knew quite well what to do. Several times they stole a glance at Bössiger, but he just kept quiet in his white overall, and pretended to check some entries in his black notebook, as if nothing was amiss.

  Ambrosio backed out of the hall. He was splashed with blood. His boots squelched with every step as though he were wading through a swamp. Where his trousers weren’t covered by his rubber apron, they stuck to his legs. For Thou hast made him Lord of all Thy creation: se
tting all beneath his feet: sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the field.

  Without touching it with his hands, Ambrosio opened the door of the washroom. Pretty Boy Hügli was standing in front of the mirror, combing his hair.

  Ambrosio didn’t go in.

  He carried on down the long central corridor of the slaughterhouse. His sheath and whetting steel clinked together on his hip, and bumped against his legs. The corridor was like an empty and endless tunnel, and Ambrosio trotted along down its length, on and on, with every step the clinking sheath tapped his thigh, and Ambrosio swung his head in time to his steps. Soon the slaughtering would break through the double door of the room and overflow into this passage, with machine noise, battle cries and gunshots preceding it. The victims would follow, by way of the weighing machines and control books of the handlers and weighers, past the meat-inspecting vets, judged and stamped, weighed and numbered, Blösch too would be pushed along here on a hoist, those parts that didn’t go straight on to offal or tripes, or the hide and lard stores, would come creeping out here, her head would be piled up in a mound on a trolley with the other eyeless and hornless cowheads. In wheeled basins, in steel containers, in a jumble of lungs, hearts, kidneys, spleens and livers, would be Blösch’s insides, gleaming wetly in luminescent colours, taking on new forms like those of the headless shapes at the bottom of the sea, but the corridor was as yet still untouched by the products of the slaughtering process.

  Only the chest stood there. The chest that for weeks had been shunted about from one side of the corridor to the other. The chest that was always in the way, and which now and again would be furiously kicked by someone.

  A chest of fir, some 2 metres high.

  Ambrosio didn’t notice it.

  *

  Seven fifteen.