Cow Page 3

  As Blösch happened to be heavily pregnant, and would possibly calve that very night, her domination seemed more unassailable than ever.

  The farmer himself had gone straight to her after entering the shed with Ruedi. ‘She’s the best cow on the mountain,’ said the father.

  ‘So long as she doesn’t have another bull calf,’ added the son.

  Blösch mooed.

  The other eleven cows were also excited; they knew that on Sundays the farmer was particularly pleased with them, that on every seventh day he would be more talkative, would give them more strokes. Then, the milking and mucking out would be continually interrupted. Even before Knuchel had greased his hands with two layers of milking fat, and grasped the swollen teats with his leathery callouses, all the straight backs had to be admired, steadily increasing growth praised, lame haunches stroked, and only slowly cicatrizing grazes or pitchfork wounds dried and powdered. Dr Knuchel held his surgery on Sundays. One cow had a foot salved, another had some potato brandy from a dusty green bottle applied to a wasp sting near the eye. If there was a still-growing ox in the byre, or a bob calf or fattening vealer, then navels would be disinfected, horn clamps adjusted, and fastgrowing animals would have their muzzles and harnesses loosened by a notch or two. There was time also to frot those in calf behind the ears, and Knuchel never omitted to promise those in heat the affectionate attentions of Gotthelf, the capable bull of the village’s breeding syndicate.

  These ministrations could not be met with equanimity by the animals. All twelve of them stretched and tautened their red- and-white patchwork hides, presented their udders, and swished about with their tails in such a way as to gladden old Knuchel’s heart, so that he had to go and give each cow an extra pitchforkful of fresh straw to lie on.

  After that Knuchel and son had washed the udders of their best cows with lukewarm water – behind closed doors, as they were sensitive to the draught – had prepared their teats with a few tweaks, and then milked their way right through the shed.

  The yield was generous. One of the cows, young Flora, had even been in record-breaking form: counting morning and evening together, Knuchel worked out that for the first time he had pumped more than 25 litres from her milk tanks.

  Flora’s udder wasn’t a gigantic one dangling uselessly down to the ground so that you couldn’t jam a pail under it; it was small and firm, with flawless teats that Knuchel had milked first crosswise, then for a surprisingly long time at the front, rhythmically, until his finger joints were sore. The young cow had fought off the moment of drying up with every last dispensable bit of juice in her. She had arched her back, and instead of chewing at some of the feed concentrate that Knuchel had provided, illegally, but still in good faith to keep her quiet during milking, she had simply breathed deeply and stertorously.

  When Knuchel was at last finished with her, he had just sat there, benumbed. Still halfway underneath her belly, and no longer quite steady on the one-legged milking stool strapped to his behind, he had stared at the brimming pail between his knees. He had pushed back his cap, wiped the mixture of sweat and dust from the cow’s flanks off his brow with his forearm, and growled: ‘God knows we need another milker. If only that Spaniard would come soon.’

  These were worrying times for him. He had already had to have his wrists seen to on several occasions. He had sought out the healing baths on the mountain, and on the other side of it at Schwarzenburg, up the Gurnigel as far as Weißenburg. There was nothing he hated more than standing around in his cow byre, with his tendons thickly smeared with ointment, and having to listen to the milk hissing into the pails, without his participation. He had been reluctant to take his wife out of the kitchen into the byre, thinking privately that a woman had no business underneath a cow. During these grim days, his one comfort had been the fact that the spring-balance by the window bench had indicated yields far below his own averages, which were a closely guarded secret. However, he would then try to dismiss the lower figures, and when he’d been put down for rather less milk money than usual at the end of the month, he would plead excessively thirsty vealers, sickly pigs that he’d been trying to pep up with milk, and even cats, far too many and far too bold, whom he’d plied, so he said, with milk by the basinful, pouring it into their noses and ears and their greedy snouts.

  All the same, the bugbear of the milking-machine salesman had come up every time. He was like a ghost, robbing him of peace of mind in the daytime, and sleep at night. His wife and son no longer dared to bring the matter up any more, but Grandma would still give him, along with the morning mail by his coffee cup, those prospectuses, true experience accounts from enthusiastic farmers, and friendly, casual invitations to exhibitions and in situ demonstrations. The very thought of this chugging, mechanically sucking machine hurt him. He distrusted the gleam of the chrome vats, the flexibility of the transparent plastic tubing; he just couldn’t conceive of his cows being fed into a network of pipes and valves and pumps. He wanted to see his milk, to feel it and to hear it, not entrust it to a system that he could no longer control, and where there was no knowing where it might lead.

  So Knuchel wished even more fervently for the Spaniard to arrive before his next onset of tendinitis. Because that next relapse surely wouldn’t be long in coming, what with Ruedi having to go back to school, and the whole shed lactating prodigiously on account of their fresh fodder. Not just Flora, but Mirror and Tiger, Stine, Patch and Baby, they were all trying to outdo themselves. All of them had been smoothly productive, and kept still in the best cow manner: once more, in concerted unity, they had been able to prove to the defencelessly dry Blösch, unmistakably, what greathearted Simmental flecked cattle they were. First to last, they all clocked up above-average performances. Knuchel and son had carried some 200 litres out of the byre, and their pride had even found a further object in Prince the dog, who, with lolling tongue, had hauled the milk-cart with three brimful aluminium cans up the slope to the village even more joyfully than usual.

  ‘Wonder whether anyone’ll bring in any more?’ Knuchel had asked.

  ‘That cheeser won’t believe his eyes,’ replied his wife, who had stepped outside.

  *

  Ambrosio buried the end of his cigarette in the dirt with his toe, struck gravel, and then, come what may, stars or no stars, he set a course for the Knuchel farm.

  Caramba, ya estamos aquí, he thought, and stumbling a little with his suitcase as he went down the slope, he felt his senses becoming more and more acute, as a wave of impressions engulfed him. There wasn’t a single detail he could avoid taking in. Here too, fermenting away, there was a towering dungheap, under siege from swarms of flies and midges. Not only the smell of it, but everything, the scale and proportions of barns and outbuildings silhouetted in the night, trees and bushes, the contours of the land and the hush up above, everything etched itself into his mind, in colours and forms he barely noticed for themselves, in melodies and shadings. Months later, he could still remember exactly how the first, the second, the third apple tree by the track had smelled, of resinous buds, and the exact blue-grey glint of the fenceposts. The grunting of pigs from one outbuilding sounded fat and overfed, they were castrates ready for slaughter, squabbling over the most comfortable sleeping places. Ambrosio smelled the broody hens, busy in their laying places behind the whitewashed walls of the henhouse. That was a smell of steamed potatoes and the cooked earth on their skins; a smell of cats, and of freshly split cedarwood. Ambrosio could also hear the snorting and groaning of some larger animal, the rattling of chains in a shed, the deep, drawn-out mooing of a heavily pregnant creature. He was just thinking, they don’t seem to have a dog, when he was overrun by a rampaging bundle of fur. ‘Caramba!’ He had hardly set foot in the farmyard when he was lying on his back in the dirt, with an Alpine dog on top of him trying to lick the moustache off his face with its rough flannel of a tongue. ‘Caramba! Un perro grande como una vaca. Caramba!’ Ambrosio struggled desperately, but it was only a sharp �
�Prince, hey!’ that brought the dog under control. Farmer Knuchel was standing in front of the kitchen door.

  Ambrosio got to his feet, brushed the dirt from his shirt and trousers, pushed his things back into the little wooden suitcase that had come open, and once more started going through his pockets for his papers.

  There was a hearty welcome for Ambrosio in the kitchen. The three younger Knuchel children stared shyly at the Spaniard who was given a place opposite them at the already cleared table; their mother set an extra bowl of Knuchel milk under their gawping mouths. ‘This is Ambrosio,’ she said. ‘And this is our Stini, this is Hans, and this is Thérèse.’

  The great hunk of boiling beef was once again fished out of the pot, and Grandma served it to Ambrosio in slices as thick as his thumb, along with plate-sized slabs of bread. The farmer had got out the bottle with what was left of the Sunday wine, and drank to Ambrosio. At the same time, he was studying the southerner’s hands as they scuttled about nervously on the kitchen table.

  They were bony hands, with dry skin. Knuchel couldn’t deny that they looked practical. Those pincer fingers must have often gripped and held, unsparing of themselves, done hard work, and, without shame, dirty work too. Callouses and blisters, taut sinews, scabbed wounds, strong firmly rooted nails, were what these hands had. But did they know what milking was? That was the question! Did they understand the udder and its whims? Did their rough exterior conceal the inner tenderness essential for the milking of cows? What if these hands had just been fiddling about with tight-arsed goats, and hitherto plucked a measly pint or two of nanny goat’s milk for the home from between a pair of bony shanks and into some half-rusted baking dish? Knuchel’s cows were no bony small fry that had to go and graze in the churchyards to weed up seven withered blades of grass from the side of a tombstone. No one on Knuchel’s farm was under any illusion that milking was when some flying-fuck-born Saanen goat weed three times and thought she’d just performed a miracle. If he’d known how to, Farmer Knuchel would have loved to get Ambrosio away from the dinner table and out into the cowshed to let him have a shot at real milking.

  Ambrosio himself had long had the feeling of being besieged, so he scarcely dared to help himself the way his appetite demanded. He would have preferred to take a couple of slices of bread and disappear into the night, but he had to stay where he was and parrot out: ‘Sí sí! Ambrosio! Sí. Sí! España. Sí!’ The searching glances, the questions, the wine in front of him, the dog under the table, and the flypaper hanging over it, it all came to oppress him more and more, it closed around him like a vice, tighter and tighter. Everything squeezed the blood against the hot skin of his face.

  They were happy he’d come at last, said the farmer, only half interrupting his examination of the hands. They had almost been afraid something might have gone wrong. But now Ambrosio had got here, and that was good, because they really needed a third milker, with all the cows freely pouring out milk and on top of that, Blösch, the best cow in the byre, was about to freshen, by God, if it all went well it might be tonight, he would call him when the time came, he could be sure of that, then he could find out for himself what they were like, the cows on the highlands. And out on the fields too there was quite a bit to be done, he wasn’t to think they were behindhand, by no means, they had tractors and machines more than some he could name up in the village, only, in the cowshed, they had so far been able to stave off these ultra-new developments, but then there was always work to be done on any decent farm, especially with the pasture needing to be refenced again this year, and not with pine like last time, no, in the past winter he and his son had collected some hazel staves. Also, they’d begun with soilage feeding, not that they had any need to go over the floor of the hayloft with a toothbrush to get together another cribful of hay, not at all, but a batch of clover did just go straight into the milk, you could say what you liked, but then he, Ambrosio, would see that for himself soon anyway.

  *

  In all her girded-up physicality, her body corseted till it cut into the flesh, Farmer Knuchel’s wife scaled the stairs ahead of Ambrosio. The woman who was taking him along the veranda was like a tree. She was twice his weight, but neither coarse nor fat. What lay hidden beneath those skirts was well capable of work, a match for husband and farm, and, with her white apron, stately and beautiful. And she moved the way she looked, and spoke the way she moved.

  ‘Our attic is hardly the lap of luxury, but then there’s always the parlour, and our kitchen’s not so uncomfortable. No, there’s no need to go and hole up in there like a mouse. I wouldn’t have that!’

  Ambrosio hung on her movements, followed the tone and rhythm of her voice.

  ‘There, this is the room. We got it ready nearly a month ago. We hung up the pictures specially for our Spaniard. Well now, God bless.’

  When the steps of the farmer’s wife had gone back along the veranda, and down the outside stairs, Ambrosio looked around his attic room.

  Roughly carpentered and in clear olfactory proximity to the hayloft and feed store, it was right at the top of the farmhouse, like a dovecote. In the middle of the room was the bed, as heavy as an altar, and covered with a thick red-and-white feather bed. Next to it was a wardrobe, in another corner a chair, and in a little flower-painted cabinet a chamber pot. Hanging on the walls were several reproductions that had appeared as magazine covers.

  Still holding his suitcase, Ambrosio stared at that mighty sleep altar. He dreaded the first morning of work; whoever slept on a bed like that would know all about physical exhaustion; whoever built a resting place like that for his limbs must know the joy of soft pillows after a long day’s back-breaking labour.

  He set his case down on the chair, got out the picture of his family, smiled at his wife and children, put the framed photograph on the cabinet and rolled himself a cigarette, which he did not smoke, however, as overwhelmed by fatigue, he climbed onto the bed and fell asleep.

  In his dreams, Ambrosio continued his journey into the interior of the prosperous land, but soon there were footsteps along the veranda, the darkness creaked, the attic door opened, and a moon-illuminated Knuchel said:

  ‘It’s on account of the lead cow, Blösch. Get your trousers on and come down. She’s probably pushing the hooves out by now.’

  Swearing softly to himself, Ambrosio followed the farmer down into the cowshed.

  All of Knuchel’s cows were on their feet. They were all lined up, back alongside back, staring into their closed feed cribs, not chewing. Only Blösch, in her pride of place by the door, was lying down in the straw. The chains had been taken off her, and with great heaves she was pushing out the head of a calf. Now and then she broke off her exertions for a breath of air, but immediately she resumed them again, with still more powerful heaves that ran like waves through her whole body, from her neck to her belly, down her flanks, squeezing the milk-swollen udder so forcefully between her taut legs that it yielded to the pressure, and sent out yellowish spurts into the air. Below her tail, which went out at an angle, the slime-wet head of the calf pushed further and further into the light. Muzzle, eyes, the bumps of the horns abruptly appeared, whereupon the head and forelegs together would disappear back into the cow, only to be pushed out still further into the drop – by the next surge.

  The head still showed no signs of life, the calf being born in the shed was at once limp and bulky. But suddenly it began to gurgle, clearing its respiratory tract of fluid, then, even before the rest of its body could follow, it started scrabbling about in the straw just its head and forelegs, first feeling blindly for a firm footing, turning to left and right, then suddenly there were dark eyes gleaming in the red-and-white-flecked head, squinting round in panic at the still unborn part of its body.

  And then came the navel.

  ‘Another bull calf. What the hell!’ said Farmer Knuchel to himself. And to Ambrosio:

  ‘The best cow anywhere on the highlands, but by God she’s got nothing but little bull’s hea
ds packed inside her! A back as strong as a roofbeam, an udder like a bottomless barrel, so much fat in her milk you’d think we fed her on OVALTINE twice a day, and I’d like to see a prettier Blösch skin. You won’t find one on the whole mountain! Same with the horns. The devil must have his eyes on her! Why else does she have to go and produce bull calves year after year?’

  He emptied his pipe against the bench and went out.

  Ambrosio went up to Blösch, who had turned to her now more animated half calf, and patted her on the neck. The heads of cow and calf came very close, smelling each other with flaring snot-dribbling nostrils, then, with a final mutual effort, the cord broke, and the back end of the fetus slipped out onto the straw, a bundle of calf, gurgling and groaning, swelling its breast: head and foot, rear and front halves had been joined into a single creature, a calf lying stiffly in the straw.

  Blösch showed few signs of exertion. She rested a moment, took a few breaths, then she got up, which was the sign for all Knuchel’s other cows to lie down, and she started drying her new-born infant. With her long-reaching tongue, she licked the blood and slime and scraps of womb off the calf’s skin, and pushed it, nudging haunches and neck, until the barely ten-minute-old creature was teetering on its knees and hindlegs. The legs were thin and spindly. The calf lost its balance repeatedly, but it kept picking itself up again, like a prize-fighter, no sooner down than up again, more and more confident on its shaky legs. It was trembling all over its body, and promptly fell back into the straw.