Cow Page 9

  I open your throat, following the strands of neck muscle, cut you open as far as the gristly white of your windpipe I sever muscle from muscle, vessel from vessel.

  I cut, part, split, divide, cleave.

  The trachea is free. I rest my knife on it, then push its curved point through it and into the cow. I hit the artery. The bright red blood bubbles up over my hands, washes over the blade and handle of my knife.

  The last flood tide before your long ebb. I catch your life as it pours out, direct it into a basin I hold under your throat. You, mingled with the solution that keeps your blood from clotting.

  Twenty seconds of quiet.

  Time for me to draw two or three breaths.

  In Africa, there are supposed to be tribes that bleed their cows instead of milking them. Every few days, a cow’s throat is broached like a barrel, and after the bloodletting it’s bunged shut again with grass and earth.

  Rötlisberger said there were lots of ways of dying a slow death, and standing around in the sun on a reserved grassland in the middle of Africa stuffing yourself, and donating a bit of blood now and again wasn’t the worst of them.

  I protect my daydreaming by going to whet my knife.

  Work may be interrupted for the purpose of sharpening one’s knives.

  How your blood rushes away.

  It pours out of you, like an underground stream.

  And me, the hangman’s assistant, the slave on the red front, brandishing my sabre over your throat. It’s me! Is it me? I turn you to good account, I fleece you.

  Krummen stands over.

  Don’t dig it in so deep. I don’t want the stuff to flow into the guts, I want it flowing out, into the basin, the centrifuge, and then as a binding agent in sausages.

  When Krummen talks, he never knows what to do with his hands.

  Oi, what about you? This isn’t a fucking holiday camp. Get those cowheads out of here! Give the trainee a hand with the sticking. We’re running late. Where’s Hügli? Goddamn it, where’s Hügli got to?

  What do I care where Hügli is?

  Let Krummen yell, he yelled all yesterday as well. Only not at the end, and he who yells last yells longest. As everyone knows.

  I twist a short knife under the cow’s scalp.

  I’m picking your brains now.

  Your ideas exposed to ridicule.

  I turn you onto your horns.

  The skin is tight over the lower jaw and larynx, it’s easy to slit through it as far as the bloodbath of your throat.

  You leer at me nakedly.

  Your skull is riddled with little red-and-white veins. I cut through all the neck fibres, to the bottom vertebra.

  It’s easy for the blade to slip on the lubricated bones here, or else to get trapped in an articulated joint and snap off.

  Done.

  Off with your head.

  I stand up and stretch.

  You’ve been put to the sword.

  My back aches.

  Now get the tongue out of the pharynx. I wash it under the tap. It’s difficult to get a firm grip on the eyes, so that I can sever optic nerve and sinew. The orbs keep slipping from my grasp. I dig deep into the sockets for a better grip.

  You’ve seen enough.

  Hungry, the shimmering nerve and the oiled membranes in the empty craters.

  Who’ll play?

  What?

  Blinde Kuh!*

  As if it was all over.

  Before I move on to the next throat, I slash open your udder, right through the warm tanks. The dam of calf and steer and ox must be drained. The milk must be emptied away. I stab four times. I turn away. My eyes are burning.

  I can’t bear to see the white streams at the back, and the red ones at the front any more.

  Get away from the fringe of skin round the throat on the floor.

  You’re still bleeding.

  * Literally ‘blind cow’; blind man’s bluff.

  3

  PUFFING AND PANTING. The path was steep as far as the wood. Ruedi and Prince were pulling the milk-cart while Ambrosio pushed. The rope secured four churns, each of them full to the brim. And Knuchel hadn’t stinted his calves either, or reduced his supply to the household. In fact, the farmer’s wife had even had to fight him off. ‘What am I going to do with all that milk?’ she had asked.

  The fresh feeding was coming through. Knuchel clover grew on richly fertilized soil, and when it was forked into the cribs, fat and juicy and with dewy dandelion leaves in amongst it, the cows didn’t need a second invitation. They ate with relish, squirting and squelching and smacking. Every last blade was tongued up, and while there was any left in front of them, none of them would chew cud. They were good working cattle, converting it all into milk and meat.

  Then there was the fact that Blösch was completely restored. She had at last got over the loss of her calf, and seemed also to have forgotten the farmer’s coolness towards her. For a few more days she had stood, pining and withdrawn in her corner. Slime had dribbled from her nostrils, and the splashing in her insides had continued. The farmer had guessed a lung infection. However, the vet was unable to confirm that in his diagnosis. He wasn’t sure what was ailing the cow, he had said. Some internal infection? No, that was out of the question. A shot of penicillin wouldn’t hurt in any case, he had added, with the syringe already in his hand. The next morning, at watering time, Blösch was once again the first one out, and with all the usual carry-on too. She stopped in the doorway, half in the cowshed, half out. She controlled the narrow pass to the watering trough. The rest of the herd mooed at her, making no secret of their impatience, but none of the bevy of possible successors would try a butt. Blösch was their lead cow, as she always had been.

  But Check was another one who had played a part in the further rise in Knuchel’s production. She had finally freshened, ten days late by the calendar. The farmer had gone and stood in the passage behind her every couple of hours. Her udder had become so swollen that she could no longer stand without treading on her own teats, and it hurt her to lie down in the straw. Knuchel had had to make up a corset for her, out of canvas and a couple of leather straps that he fastened across her back. Thereupon the chequered cow – her hide was covered with five patches the shape of fried eggs – had not only dropped her overdue calf, as white as snow, she had also begun her lactation, setting immediate new records of her own.

  And what had flowed from the milk-mad Knuchel cows now stood on the milk-cart: heavy and plentiful. Ambrosio dug his toes into the gravel to push.

  The path levelled out near the end of the little wood. Nettles and thorn bushes fringed a little patch of grass. Ruedi stopped and sat down. The silence was broken by the cry of a child floating up from Knuchel’s farm, by an isolated outburst of pig squealing and rattling milking gear. The farm itself could not be seen from there.

  ‘Why he won’t take his tractor up to the cheese dairy!’ said Ruedi. He was out of breath. ‘Even Kneubühler takes his piddling 50 litres in his LANDROVER. We must be off our heads.’ He rested his back against a root and gazed up at the sky.

  Ambrosio took out a cigarette. Virginia tobacco, a PARISIENNE. ‘Es de aquí,’ he said, broke it in two, and passed one half of it to Ruedi. He put the pack back in his trouser pocket and looked for his lighter. It consisted of some tinder rope rolled into a ball and a simple flint. He flicked the tiny iron wheel with his thumb. The wheel rubbed against the flint, a spark caught on the tinder, Ambrosio blew on the little ember, and lit his half cigarette.

  Prince stood panting by the cart, ready to go.

  ‘Wonder if there’ll be more of that stupid talk there again today?’ asked Ruedi, coughing.

  ‘Tranquilo, tranquilo. No te gusta fumar?’ asked Ambrosio.

  ‘If they could hear themselves... look, here comes the field-mouser, Fritz Mäder.’ Ruedi raised one arm, and pointed up at a ridge.

  Like a deer, the field-mouser pushed his way through the bushes at the edge of the wood. He leaned fo
rward and passed through them, untroubled by the undergrowth. The foliage bowed, branches and twigs slid along his body, brushing his grey cape and his face. The field-mouser made no effort to avoid them. The branches closed up again in his wake. He had a stick which he didn’t use. On his back he carried a wooden box. He stopped and straightened up. He was a tall man.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Ruedi.

  ‘Vamos,’ said Ambrosio.

  Ambrosio could already call all Knuchel’s cows by name, and he knew their moods and preferences. He could steam the potatoes for the pigs by himself. He knew how the farmer’s wife wanted her vegetable patch watered: the lettuces more than the beans, and the tomato plants no more than three times a week. However, he hadn’t yet been able to discover the cause of the rhythmic banging that sometimes made the wooden walls of his attic shake in the evening, when he was lying on his bed smoking, but gradually, he was getting accustomed to life on the farm. On the other hand, he got little change out of the village. He would never be able to read those faces. All that loose flesh and muscle round those thick lips when they gawped at him from their farms. The probing of the eyes, uncertain behind a veneer of pride. And would he ever manage to scratch his head with the same hand with which he raised his milker’s cap? Never. Nor would he ever be able to give emphasis to something he’d said by thumping his right fist against his right hip in the local manner. He might practise for a hundred years, and still not be able to roll his sleeves up over his biceps with the exquisite precision he could observe on the village square. He would never learn how to keep one arm calmly concealed behind his back while making expansive gestures with the other in illustration of some evidently momentous words. No, he would never master the art of being an Innerwalder. The language was another barrier. For a long time he had suspected that the greater part of communication there was silent anyway. The words would follow after, but so incredibly slowly, it was as though they’d first had to be invented. Ambrosio was able to tell them apart, and already he tried to arrange syllables, or sometimes just to count them. But the words rarely seemed able to achieve much on their own. There were some faces that would look embarrassed as soon as the lips began moving. On others, the brow would furrow straightaway. It was only later, always later, that something might happen. The words would be spoken, then there would be a silence, and then, only then, would there be an answer or a reaction. How could he ever learn that silence?

  A lot of things would remain inaccessible, forever beyond him. He could feel it and see it. He saw it in expressions and gestures, he saw it in the farms, the fields and pastures. All the houses in the village had broad, powerfully framed doors that creaked and groaned on their hinges, and they had heavy granite treads like boundary stones in front of the worn oak thresholds. The fields covered every inch of available land, they had been ploughed and harrowed and rolled to the edge of the path and beyond. Small-checked, spread out according to some unfathomable design, they surrounded the village. Every day would bring something to astonish Ambrosio, and every day he would discover fresh instances of ornately executed fieldwork: how the tracks of machines and wheels would go meandering along, zigzagging, fitting the contours of the hills, tracks elegantly following the natural curves, tracks that graced the landscape like lacework. And he saw it in the pastures as they greened for the cattle waiting in their cowsheds. These pastures were on steep slopes that were less easy to cultivate. And yet, not only were they fenced in for the cows, they were reinforced, barricaded, protected to a height of 2 metres, with liberal use of barbed wire.

  Ambrosio would never understand it.

  They unloaded in front of the cheese dairy in the square.

  Securing ropes were untied. Long threads of spittle hung from the panting tongues of dogs. Horseshoes, gumboots and wooden clogs scraped the asphalt. Up on his platform, the cheeser puffed out his chest. Whey steamed. It smelt of cowsheds and salt and Friday night. Hands in trouser pockets, hands scratching, hands resting on steering wheels, hands raised in greeting, hands clasped round churns heavy with milk, hands pointing, hands talking. Sinews tautened and muscles bulged under green farmer’s cloth. Hey up! Milk was hoisted from carts, was carried off, weighed, admired, written down, milk flowed and hands wrote, cigarettes slipped out of yellow packs, tongues clicked, there was laughter, and in between pauses, talk: it was no longer news that Knuchel had his cows milked by a foreigner, but had they heard what this Spaniard was doing on the dungheap of an evening? Scratches, and some premature laughter. He was practising the pole-vault with a dungfork. And why was it that he no longer took his baths in the pigs’ feeding trough? It was too deep for him, and anyone who didn’t believe it could ask the man himself, because there he was, just arriving with the Knuchel milk.

  Hands laughed, hands stroked thick necks, hands pointed at Ambrosio. Ruedi grew red.

  And did they know why the Knuchels’ dog Prince had such an offended expression nowadays? It was because he was having to share his kennel with the foreigner. And why did the carpenter and the blacksmith go to Knuchel’s farm? The smith was putting an extra wheel on the dungbarrow, and the carpenter was building a bridge across the gutter. Glances dropped contentedly. Jaws wobbled and heads twisted with laughter. Ruedi and Ambrosio lugged four churns to be weighed. Yes, by God, he was a right little runt, someone said, but the farmer was singing his praises all the same. But then what else could he do, seeing as he’d got him, came the reply. Now how much would a fellow like that cost, came another question. Oh, they were cheap, dirt cheap, you couldn’t get a proper milker for wages like they got. Yes, cheap, said another, a real milker would cost you a lot more, and they weren’t easy to find either, but then at least you knew where you were. A foreigner in your cowshed! Next thing, you’d have the swallows flying under your cows. In fact, they weren’t all that cheap, came the objection, where they came from they hardly had enough to eat, and they were earning good money over here. Yes, exactly, otherwise they’d just have stayed at home, it was argued. And hands dug deeper in trouser pockets, and fingers poked in ears and noses.

  Ruedi shook his head. ‘Blatherers!’ he said. Ambrosio was unperturbed. He joined in the laughter, grinning up at the sarcastic faces.

  ‘Ruedi, hombre! Vámonos!’

  *

  Ambrosio lay on his bed, smoking. He had the lid of a tin of milking fat for an ashtray. He played with his lighter. He had taken off his socks and draped them over the shafts of his boots. An open airmail letter had fallen onto the floor. Ambrosio felt the air on his toes. He drew on his cigarette. The lid lifted on his belly. He blew a smoke ring. It climbed towards the ceiling, and slowly dissolved. He blew another one, and a third.

  The sound of chains rattling came up through the wooden walls. Vacas no fuman, thought Ambrosio. What do cows do in the evening? What goes on in their heads? Those great heads on the end of those great bodies! Vacas grandes como elefantes. Yes, he would tell them that at home, how big, how unbelievably huge the cows were. And how greedy.

  During the feed before the evening milking, Ambrosio had noticed how Blösch wouldn’t even touch her own pile to begin with. She would ignore the portion in front of her, and go for her neighbour Mirror’s instead. Greedily she pushed herself against the bars of the manger, and stuck her neck across into her crib. With cowtypical gulps, Blösch plucked hay from Mirror’s ration. She collared one tuft after another. It was only when there was nothing left within reach to steal that Blösch started in on her own hay.

  Ambrosio listened to the cows shift from one foot to another, and then one after the other they lay down. He imagined the way their dewlaps would dangle into the straw as they ruminated.

  Caramba! De nuevo! The banging began again. Dull and rhythmic. Boom. Boom. Boom. The wood panelling shook. Ambrosio stubbed out his cigarette. It sounded as though heavy objects were being smashed against the wall downstairs. Ambrosio threw his lighter in the corner. He sat up on his bed. One of the pictures on the wall showed an old ma
n sitting on a bench in front of a farmhouse smoking a pipe. The farmhouse resembled Knuchel’s: wooden, with an overhanging roof. The old man had on a black woolly hat, and was surrounded by children who were listening to him, as quiet and attentive as Knuchel’s children at table.

  The banging would not stop. Boom. Boom. Boom. Ambrosio went over to the window. The floor felt cold to his bare feet.

  Ambrosio looked at the window. His fingers had passed over the glossy frame and the joins many times already. It was a window with two casements that fitted trimly and tightly into their frame. Ambrosio held the iron bolt by its brass knob. He rested his forehead on the back of his right hand. He loosened the catch, then pushed the bolt back. The window shut itself, wood pressing against wood. Ambrosio opened the small upper casement, shut it, opened it again, shut it again. He pressed his nose against the lower pane. Outside, the night was grey over the hills on the highlands. Car headlights flashed and disappeared. On the left, a lantern flickered in the pasture. Its yellow light moved this way and that, as though there was someone moving around down there. The old man with the stick and the box on his back? The wild mouse-trapper? Ambrosio lay down on his bed again. The banging had stopped. Still he could find no peace.

  *

  ‘Come on, Thérèse, don’t sleep at table! Give me your plate. Not that one, the other! You too, Ambrosio, there’s enough there, have some more, for God’s sake!’ Farmer Knuchel plied the serving fork to such effect that the gravy splashed right across the table. ‘Meat and sausages are the best vegetables,’ he said, and then the farmer’s wife remarked, with her mouth full, ‘That’s you all over isn’t it? A platter of tongue and pork, you’ve always gone for, but what’s the matter with your fingernail? Why’s it not getting any better? You sure you don’t want the doctor to see it?’ She looked at the bandage on the farmer’s hand.

  ‘I expect he’s applied some cow dung on it,’ said Grandma.