Cow Read online

  —Qué frío, someone said.

  Luigi was shivering ostentatiously. As though he was playing in an old silent film set in the North Pole. Piccolo rolled the sleeves of his butcher’s shirt back down again. He swore. The GAB A tablets he was trying to shake out of a little blue tin into his open palm were all stuck together.

  —Here we go then. Pretty Boy Hügli went off with Ambrosio and the trainee into the cattle slaughter room. Rötlisberger trudged off towards the tripery and Buri down to the salting cellar. The rest of them tied on rubber aprons, got their cutting tools together, put up their shirt collars, and set off for the chilling-room.

  Half carcasses to be sold as fresh meat hung in neat rows from wall to wall. Frayed necks hanging down, they were suspended from two hoists on the overhead rail on hooks through their Achilles tendons. On the floor, the last drops of blood, congealed and black. Everything looked pale in the dim light, there were no colours, only the cold and the smell of slightly rancid fat. And the hanging of meat and the ripening of apples in cellars are processes that depend on controlled fermentation. There were two dozen cows not meant for storage. They had been pushed in here the day before, still steaming, muscles still quivering, to cool down. Before the men could start on the day’s slaughtering in the cattle room, these stiff forms had to be quartered and made ready for transport.

  Clean hands took clean knives out of clean sheaths. Clean aprons rubbed against animal fat that had congealed into a protective layer. With horizontal incisions, the loins were cut away from the legs, the meat was peeled from the bones of less valuable parts to go into making sausages, ribs and coccyx were sawn through, and backs were split in two with well-aimed cleaver blows, those of steers at the thirteenth vertebra, cows’ at the eleventh.

  Bones cracked, a bent sawblade shrieked, fibres tore, meat smacked onto the floor, the chains of an old pulley rattled, and the new bleeding rail hummed smoothly. The fat and marrow and bonemeal from sawing collected on knives and aprons and hands. Work had begun. Huber pointed out to Hofer that his sawing was inaccurate. Hofer replied that he didn’t give a damn. Porco Dio. Luigi shivered. He was working with Fernando, who kept looking away. Down the side walls behind the rows of half carcasses of beef, half their size and with paler flesh, was a row of slaughtered calves. Hanging on spreaders which were fashioned, according to the regulations, from smooth, rust-free or rust-proofed material, and were fitted with sharp hooks. The calves were slit up the front, with their loins splayed open, and were hooked up below the knee. They hung from the chilling-room wall as though crucified upside down. Fernando stared at their pierced hocks. Madonna! Ma qué fai tu!

  No one liked working with Hugentobler. The tough Überländer was easygoing by nature, but even he was bothered by the man’s sight: no one would trust the cut of his knife, no one was willing to hold down meat and bones for Hugentobler to saw. Überländer was worried for his fingers. He’ll do an Ambrosio on me. Überländer shouted at Hugentobler. Either he should bloody well look where he was cutting, or else cut where he was looking. What the heck!

  Hugentobler just grinned. He had the hearing of an artillery man, with a thick thatch of fur on his head to go with it.

  The ventilation system was efficient, and cold air cut through the men’s socks and trousers like iced water. Cold as a whore’s shit. They responded by working still harder, by eager sawing and chopping. Let’s get out of here as soon as we can, was the watchword. They worked faster and faster, with a dangerous lack of concern for their sharp knives.

  Amid the growing rush, only Hugentobler kept to his own rhythm. He went on quietly, as though he was somewhere pleasant and temperate. Once again, it was a minor triumph for him. Because he was used to the cold as a refrigerator man, and was also the only one suitably dressed in several warm layers of swaddling wool. Hugentobler spent his days in the cooler department. And many hours in the still lower temperatures of the freezing-room. Look at those southerners, snivelling like wet poodles in the snow. Those Eyeties and dagos, they don’t know what cold is. Instead of dressing properly for it. No wonder they shiver and shake in their little vests under their shirts. That’s shut them up.

  Hugentobler was an angular type. Everything about him was angular, head, nose, hands, feet, shoulders, everything. And his walk. All his various pullovers and cardigans and long johns stemmed the flow of his movements. Also, when younger, he’d been a victim of Bang’s disease. The heaviness that had flowed into his limbs like molten lead during his violent fevers still affected him. His legs were never completely free from tiredness. He walked with a stoop, and for a split second his foot would hover in mid-air before coming down on the floor. It was not least on account of the fact that he was called Frankenstein, though he rarely heard it and never understood what was meant. He didn’t talk much, ate several bars of chocolate a day, bought lottery tickets regularly, and was always pleased when the cutting up was finished and the slaughterers could begin outside. He liked being left on his own.

  Überländer shouted at him again:

  —Mind my thumb!

  Piccolo put his knife away. Huber and Hofer piled the sausage-meat onto the trolleys. Let’s get out of here. The tools were tidied away, and meat must always have been hung for at least two days so that oxygen can penetrate the fibres and loosen them. Meat fibres thus tenderized can be ground up between finger and thumb, as is not the case with meat that is freshly slaughtered, and only the short, thick-fleshed stumps of the loins were left hanging from the hoists. Überländer punched at the severed muscles from below. Pretty arses! The hindquarters consist of rump, loin and round and when Überländer was the last man to hurry out of the chilling-room, Hugentobler got a broom, and swept up all the meat scraps, bone shards and fat particles that had fallen on the floor.

  *

  Six o’clock.

  We’ve punched the clock.

  We fetch knives, bone-saws, cleaving-axes out of the storeroom.

  We get the cattle room ready for slaughtering.

  We smoke.

  A basin under every tap, and a bucket of hot water for washing hands at every man’s post.

  I feel sluggish, and don’t fight it.

  In our trouser pockets under our aprons we’ve smuggled out the last of the warmth of the changing room.

  Cold water goes in that canister. And powder from a packet. I give it a stir with a stick of wood. On the packet it says: ‘To prevent blood clotting with pigs and cows. Contents of one packet sufficient for 15 litres of blood. This corresponds approximately to the blood of one cow or four pigs.’

  Our faces and forearms are still unencrusted with slime, grease, bile, shit and blood. Our boots are still clean. The dry rubber gear is quite comfortable.

  We smoke and breathe, quietly and deliberately. They’ll be here soon enough, the gases and exudations from the cows’ bodies.

  Pretty Boy Hügli is there.

  Ambrosio is there.

  The others are still in the chilling-room.

  We’re ready.

  We could stick the first animals, start the slaughter, get the disassembly line moving.

  Supervisor Kilchenmann and Dr Wyss the vet are waiting too.

  Kilchenmann is responsible for shooting. Dr Wyss for the inspection of the meat.

  No reason to be impatient.

  Pretty Boy Hügli whistles the same tune once more and performs his regular stunt: buckling and unbuckling his sheath, lightning quick, buckling and unbuckling, on and off.

  The tune he’s whistling seems familiar to me.

  Only the cows aren’t there yet to be slaughtered.

  Let’s go out onto the ramp!

  The stockyards and pens are empty. No bleating animal anywhere. Not a pig or calf or sheep jamming itself against the fenceposts in the waiting enclosure. No chain rattle, no snorting, no mooing, no screaming. On the railway tracks behind the yards, the red rear light of a shunting locomotive disappears into the fog.

  Here they come th
en, the cows, forced by butter mountains and excess milk production into state-subsidized slaughtering programmes.

  Cheap sausage-cows, the lot of them.

  Why did they have to yield so much milk!

  Their will to work is the death of them. In avalanches of milk fat.

  For days now, we’ve started off every morning by slaughtering two or three dozen of these rubbish cows.

  Over-production-conscious livestock experts discard them and sell them for scrap.

  They get the cows’ mouths open, and look at their teeth. The ground-down crowns and the gaps between the incisors in the lower jaw betray their age.

  There’s a goods wagon standing next to Krähenbühl’s weighing hut.

  The loading-apron.

  It’s cold.

  With a bundle of papers jammed under his arm, Weighmaster Krähenbühl opens the lead seal on the sliding door of the goods wagon. He rests one ear against the wood of the door as he talks to Krummen. Krummen is impatient. He can see us standing around idly, and he starts hustling.

  Come on, get on with it! Let’s get them weighed and under the knife! We haven’t got all day!

  Krähenbühl won’t be hustled.

  All the papers have to be checked through first.

  The morning breeze blows coolly over our forearms. It’s not summer yet. The last remnants of warmth from the changing room have been used up.

  In order to get warmed up, Ambrosio and I get out our knives and whet them in order, longest to shortest, on the whetting steel. With our thumbs we test the sharpness of the blades.

  We put up the collars of our butcher’s shirts. Ambrosio’s longest knife is longer than his forearm.

  He whets it clumsily.

  With every scrape and drag he pulls a face.

  He hates the sound of steel on steel.

  Me too.

  Now he tilts his head and blinks the cigarette smoke out of his eyes.

  The finger-wide gap on the handle of the knife in his hand.

  Only a couple of weeks have passed since the accident in which Ambrosio surrendered the middle finger of his right hand to the abattoir.

  The jokes he made about it.

  And the jokes the others made about him.

  He’s doing well. Very well. Grin and bear it.

  The goods wagon opens up at last, and Krummen starts shouting at the cows.

  Chains rattle. Hooves clatter on wooden planks.

  Get a move on, you stupid cow! No more guzzling Alpine roses and dumping in streams! Hurry up, you fucking dog!

  It’s a bad sign with Foreman Krummen, language like that.

  When he’s that talkative!

  *

  And out in the abattoir behind the high fence on the edge of the beautiful city, the first cow appeared in the doorway of the cattle-cart. She hesitated and mooed. The skin crinkled between the black orbs of her eyes that looked dully out into the grey morning. The cow barged back towards the darkness of the goods wagon. Her forelegs were stiff, she had spent the journey tethered on a short rope, and in today’s markets trade in quality slaughter animals was good, with supply short and demand up, occasionally brisk to lively. But in quiet, rather dull markets, Bologna cattle changed hands at little over contract prices, and Foreman Krummen pulled roughly at her halter and swore, while weigher Krähenbühl jabbed at the cow’s skinny belly with his wad of papers and said, ‘Yah, move, you stupid cow!’

  The city was still asleep. The other side of the tracks from the abattoir was a grey wall of fog and concrete. Neon letters glowed: MATRA big and red, MACHINES TRACTORS small and blue. Over the outlines of the factories and warehouses a chimney climbed to an incredible height, through the fog and into heaven itself. At the top of it flickered the name VON ROLL. Next to it, smaller and black, was the chimney of the abattoir’s own incinerator.

  A train hurried by, with brightly lit compartment windows.

  In front of the pens waited Pretty Boy Hugli, the trainee, and Ambrosio. The trainee shivered. Ambrosio was whetting one of his knives, suddenly stopped and let it fall to the ground.

  —Caramba! Esa vaca! Blösch! Yo la conozco! Blösch! and cattle are mammals, belonging to the order of artiodactyla, the sub-order of ruminants, and the family of cavicorni or bovidae, and lame in one leg Blösch miserably followed Krummen out of the cattle wagon, and along the platform.

  She looked like a pair of trestles, run down and emaciated, with her bones protruding, skin sagging and udder disfigured by machine milking. She smelled of disinfectant alcohol, urine and VASELINE, yards off. A pathetic skeleton that stopped one last time in front of the weighing cage and mooed long and deeply, shuddering from the base of her tail all down her spine.

  Get on with it, hissed Krummen, and Krähenbühl grabbed her ear to read what it said on the metal badge pinned to it.

  Blösch remained quiet.

  Even during the humiliating ritual of weighing, she kept her aura of ancient creaturely warmth, and domestic cattle belong to the species of European cattle. The original forms of other cattle species can still be found in the wild, but not that of domestic cattle. It was the aurochs which was still extant in Europe in the Middle Ages, and immune to scorn, Blösch declined to lower her head to butt, but made no use of the strength that still dwelt in her great body. Even given the justification of self-defence, she declined to use any kind of force. She was civilized inside and out, horn to udder, and even on the abattoir platform she remained submissive and meek. These principles had worldwide currency, and Blösch stayed true to them to the last.

  *

  Five past seven.

  Danger! Shooting!

  A bang. The third. Then the impact, short and dull.

  The cow squeezes her eyes shut, as though she’s been dazzled.

  Now get stuck in!

  Krummen prowls round in a circle, pointing this way and that, doesn’t know what to do with himself in this rage. With Krähenbühl, he’s dragged twenty-one cows onto the weighing machine.

  Fucking shit! We’re a whole hour late starting. Just because some gentlemen in the city chose to stay in their beds.

  None of us feels implicated.

  Krummen stamps off, swearing. He gets the next cow out of the waiting pen. Another red-and-white flecked Simmental.

  Offal-man Buri is waiting for the first entrails.

  What a struggle! Fewer men every day, and more and more cattle!

  Pretty Boy Hügli has stopped whistling. He looks down contemptuously at the three shot cows.

  Another wagonload of rejects! Just like yesterday; nothing but dried sinews! Bone-hard cartilages! We’ll be back sharpening our knives by lunchtime!

  Just you be grateful you won’t have to skin them, says Huber, and Hofer nods in agreement.

  Andiamo, porco Dio, says Luigi.

  Sticking time.

  My privilege.

  Come on Ambrosio, put your fags away, let’s join the front.

  Those Simmental cows are going to bleed.

  Krummen’s got them neatly laid out on the killing floor: they’re lying on their right side, with their rumps bang underneath the electric lift. Once we’ve got them gutted and skinned we pull the bodies up with a steel hook on the hindlegs pushed through a slit between tendons and thighbones. Then we shove them on a hoist along the overhead rail for further processing.

  When it’s empty, the room has something in common with a church, big and white, with two wings and an aisle down the middle that leads up to the scales at one end. And the windows are a bit arched too, and made out of ornamented frosted glass.

  Ambrosio is unhappy. His mouth keeps moving, saying that cow’s name over and over again.

  Blösch. Blösch.

  Has he noticed that the animals are lying well? That way we won’t have to move those tonne-weights of collapsed milk machines across the floor into the right position in their totally uncooperative inertia.

  If a cow is to fall the right way, Krummen will have to
have forced her weight onto the correct leg. If she then sticks her head out calmly in front of her, Kilchenmann will push the pin back in his gun, put in a cartridge and aim for the part of the skull that’s easiest to penetrate.

  That’s at the intersection of two lines that Kilchenmann draws in his mind’s eye across the cow’s forehead. The first from the right ear to the left eye, the second from the left ear to the right eye.

  The painless stunning of animals for the slaughter.

  When Kilchenmann fires, the cow’s head jerks upward about a horn’s length, the neck arcs back, posture goes haywire and the cow collapses, first onto her horns, then her chest, then she finally comes to rest on her right flank. Suddenly she’s lying there, so brutally suddenly, without any dignity, smashed down and stretched out on the ground.

  I bend down over the first cow of the day.

  I’m working.

  The first one is the hardest. She’s shifting and stretching, pawing with her back legs, stiffening her tail.

  I feel for the rope down among the folds of hide behind the hump of the horns.

  The coat is warm and bristly.

  I touch the doomed animal just where I would stroke it.

  Would I stroke it?

  I look for the loop and the knot, try and undo it.

  I know that, once stretched out like this, you’ll never moo again. In a minute you’ll be tied again by this same rope. I can feel the sweat and slobber and urine on it; it smells of milk and straw and cowshed. I re-tie it round the hoof of your left foreleg. How waxy that feels. I walk around your body, pull the rope, pull your front side back and expose your throat, then attach the loop to your left hindleg and bend down over your throat.

  Then I stick you.

  I plunge my medium-length knife into the rolls of hide on the cow’s breast. I plunge my medium-length knife into the dying cells, cutting through skin and hair and muscle and sinew.