Cow

by Beat Sterchi

  They’re shouting again.

  Orders.

  Everyone wants to give orders.

  Go on then.

  Cows two and three have been stuck and headed. We grab their legs and turn them onto their backs.

  As we turn them over, Überländer pushes an iron support underneath their bodies to help balance them.

  Heavy bitch, says Luigi.

  Huber and Hofer are whirling about, bickering. Just to show Bössiger how indispensable they are. It’s always the same.

  Bössiger doesn’t pay any attention.

  Piccolo slits the cows’ bellies open, pulls out the guts and makes a bit of room inside. Then he saws through aitchbone and sternum.

  Io niente pressiere.

  Piccolo smiles.

  With powerful cuts, Huber and Hofer take off the hooves, the ankles and the shins.

  And there’s Buri too, bending over a carcass, fumbling with his gutting knife. Enormous Buri, wobbly and stiff on his pins. He protests. He’s always made to do other people’s work as well as his own. His gutting knife looks tiny. No one ever helps me when I get behind. Buri’s waiting for the intestines of the first cow to be ready.

  Now the fourth is lying on the ground, twitching. I recognize her. She’s the one that had Ambrosio yelling out on the ramp.

  Where’s Ambrosio?

  I bend down.

  What a thin animal. Skin and bone. A sagging back. Long, pointed bones poking out all over the place. As though they were trying to puncture the skin. Bones. Bones. No fat, no padding. Nerves, sinews and bones.

  The cow moves, arches her back.

  But she was quite tame before the shot, quite calm.

  She slides about on the floor.

  Straw-red all over.

  A blushing Blösch hide.

  Just on her withers, the base of her tail and her head, a few splashes of white.

  She picks her head up off the floor.

  The horns are long and even. Marked by many births. You can’t make out the individual rings any more.

  I press my knee down on the scrawny throat.

  The red hairs are grey at the root. The hide quivers nervously, uselessly. A shudder, up and down.

  I can only just get through the skin. So tough she might have been tanned alive.

  The cow thrashes around. She’s still obstinate, still fighting, in spite of the hole in her head. The cow rolls over.

  I fight for my balance.

  For the Lord is the shadow over your right hand.

  My confirmation text.

  I feel the strength underneath me.

  The neck tries to beat up and down, like the tailfin of a dying fish.

  I put my rubber boot down.

  Concentrate!

  I stick.

  I miss the throat artery the first two times, and hit it at the third attempt. The red blood jets up, the heart pumps it out into the light in violent spurts. She can’t have that much... it’s not possible.

  The throat underneath me trembles harder.

  A groan, a rattle trembling through the windpipe, a quiver, a shudder: I get up.

  Go.

  The cow lifts her head. All wobbles and trembles: she pulls her weight onto her front feet. She’s trying to get up.

  With nostrils dripping red, she trumpets through the slaughterhouse. She sits there and rolls her head round to the right, the left, the right again.

  I retreat.

  The cow bleeds from the wound in her throat.

  The proud horns. Cow’s antlers.

  I’m glued to the wall, the knife in my outstretched hand.

  There! The cow collapses, gone, her nervous strength exhausted, she lies in her blood.

  Piccolo stares at me.

  All right. The ghosts have been exorcized.

  No one has stopped working.

  Kilchenmann just forgot to push the arm’s length of wire through the bullet hole down into the spinal marrow.

  Too much had remained undestroyed.

  A bloodless feeling in my head.

  I close my eyes, with my back to the wall, I slip down into a crouch, and try not to think any more.

  *

  And Ambrosio in the corridor of the slaughterhouse, past the chest, never saw it, knives dangling, the little Spaniard bloodboltered all over and the centrifuge in the machine room still neat and new, still quite unblöschbloodbespattered, but already it will be flowing together from jugular and carotid, citrate added to it as an anticoagulant, until Luigi arrives with the big funnel, sets it up on the centrifuge, and the blöschblood will run, separated out into blood sediment and oily plasma, and away with it in an aluminium canister, the blöschbloodplasma will finish up as protein supplement for sausage filling, first it will splash about on walls, on ceilings, blöschstains everywhere, the last traces of a cow on Luigi’s arms and legs and on the stone floor it will drip, oily, it will creep under Luigi’s bootsoles, he struggles to keep his balance, stretches his hands out in front of him as he carries the plasma-canister away, the chance of slipping dead certain and didn’t Ambrosio wind up on the floor once already, the seat of his pants drenched in blood and Ambrosio sees nothing, hears nothing, just out of this corridor, how alive I must be among so much liquid death, and he trots across the forecourt of the slaughterhouse, blindly onto the approach road, walking down the middle of the road, hey! Ambrosio! towards the horizon, sheath dangling, sheath bumping, get off the road, the porter’s shout, and beer in bottles and in others none not bock not stout not special brew in crates steadfast green soldiers by twelves by twenty-fours, secured with chains, each under other, above beside between, five layers high on the factory beer-transporter which changes down a gear, Ambrosio hears no emptybottlerattle only walks along down the centre line and a SAURUS comes hooting hotbrakeblocking, and Ambrosio carries on and the SAURUS following the FBT slaughterhousewards, through the gate in the fence, upskip thousand bottles fit to leap out of their crates and a humchoke round the entryway curve cowbodythudding against the animaltransporterdinoSAURUSplanking, four hooves gripless on the dungboards and a blow the rope halter tight to the ring, hornless the skull smashes and in the body greenferment comes up, squeezes flatulence unruminable as the gums press the beerbottles clatter foam under the patent tops down into the canteen cellar right at the back of the yard and on the ramp the SAURUS drops its tailbridge, rattle rattle fresh air nostrilbreaths latticegates shut weighed in the cage with nudgefinger pushing weights threehundredandeightyseven kilos of youngcow marked down for SAURUS-owner and animal-dealer Schindler with canteen landlady empty bottles hydraulically rearloaded on the factory beer-transporter shakerattleandroll and in the waiting pen, up the green from bellies all bole by bole waitingchews the youngcow.

  *

  Seven thirty.

  Krummen’s getting going.

  They’re all doing the same, pushing themselves.

  Nothing but ugh ugh ugh.

  In the hurry you forget the time – sometimes.

  Just don’t loosen your grip on the knife.

  My hand is clammy. I don’t feel well. That cow earlier did something to me. My nose is bleeding. It was as though she was on invisible puppet strings, the way she got up. The gurgling. The trembling.

  I chisel away wildly. The scraps of skin I pull at keep slipping from my grasp.

  And today of all days.

  When I wanted to be so strong.

  Krummen wants to catch up.

  In a mad rush he drags the cows in and turns them over.

  Kilchenmann puts the brake on: not too much haste! Easy, he says, easy does it.

  I can keep up. I’m not falling behind. You don’t leave me standing.

  Like Piccolo with the flies on the canteen walls, we flatten the cows on the slaughterhouse floor.

  Goddamn it, you fucking bastard!

  Krummen never used to swear at the animals.

  He even gets violent with them. Don’t you...?

  One arrives
with red streaks across her nostrils, another limps up with an open wound on one leg. She can’t grip the wet granite properly.

  The cows never used to bellow like this.

  Krummen drives them along at the double to a vacant slaughtering bay.

  One cow has no horns: disturbed, she crawls before Krummen on her knees.

  He’s got himself a whip.

  Kilchenmann says his firearm has to be cleaned. And he needs different shells. The amount of gunpowder used for each animal has to be calculated afresh according to the thickness of the skull and the density of hair. These ancient sausage-cows here were too thick-skinned and hard-nosed, bull-headed they were. And if one of them had marrow already shrivelled away or dried up, you could rattle the wire around in her spine for ever and not achieve anything, you just had to shoot more slowly and meticulously. He disappears into the weighing office.

  Krummen protests. Puffed up, he stands next to the cow.

  The cow tries to free her head. Krummen holds her tight in an armlock, squeezing the cowhead to himself. It takes more than cows to bother him. He looks at the carcasses on the ground. The first of them headless, without recognizable animal shape; the others still mooing for the last time, still full of warmth, life and blood.

  He’s perfect, the way he drops them.

  Ten points every time.

  The victor.

  And who tends the vanquished?

  I brush the sawdust off their bodies.

  My nose is dripping too. My grimy face!

  I go from rope to rope, udder to udder, throat to throat, cowhead to cowhead.

  Just be careful with the knife.

  He’s standing over me, looking at my nose.

  I turn away.

  Have you got a nosebleed?

  What me? Where? Of course not.

  Even when bending down, I try to get my body weight behind the blade.

  You’re pale!

  I hear the cow snort and scrape against his apron. Knock him over, why don’t you. But he’ll break your neck first. He clasps her goggle-eyed head hard against his belly.

  I want to find that rhythm again, that feeling of concentration, absorption in work and forgetting everything else.

  Luigi pulled a full uterus out of the ghost cow’s body.

  Just don’t think about that damned cow.

  Don’t tighten up.

  My head isn’t muzzy.

  I don’t feel numb.

  Nothing hurts.

  My hand is steady.

  My nose isn’t bleeding.

  I have no abrasions on my hands, not a single cut the other blood can eat into.

  And the fourth vertebra in my back, that’s just the centre of the universe.

  Don’t pay any attention to the splashing blood! Just drive your blade under the scalp, don’t slow down, don’t think of anything. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t...

  I approach the next cow from behind. This one doesn’t try to stand up afterwards. Not all of them are possessed. I tie, I open, I stick, I bleed, I skin, I scalp, behead... I dig through skin, sinew, flesh, pain, crawl along, lash out with my knives, look for cover behind the pressure of work.

  Well hurried is well survived.

  As I empty the basin where the blood collects, I straighten up.

  I stretch my back, and feel my wrenched vertebrae with my hand. Gilgen can talk. Gilgen’s got a broad back. A healthy back. You need a strong back.

  The cow that wouldn’t die is spreadeagled and hoisted into the air.

  She’ll never walk again.

  Her uterus lies grey-blue on the green granite floor.

  Piccolo pushes a trolley for the intestines. He isn’t allowed to carry on into the inner chambers of the cow by himself. He just transports the stuff out to the tripery. He’s waiting for Hügli, who’s probably posing in front of his dressing-room mirror, rubbing VASELINE into his face.

  I’m already cutting my seventh throat.

  The loneliness of the headless bodies behind me, the hopeless gurgles ahead.

  The guts, still digesting, bloat the stomachs round as cannonballs. A thin whoosh of air, and I smell the pressure released through the relaxed sphincter.

  Bony beside every body, the appropriate peeled skull, with empty eye sockets.

  Each of them is hung from a spike that is stuck through the nostrils. All the parts of a cow have to be kept together until the vet has checked them.

  Meat-inspection rules!

  By the side of each spiked skull, the tongue of each. The rope halter.

  Behind it, the slowly filling blood-tank.

  All my work.

  My handiwork.

  Jesus fucking Christ!

  Krummen’s getting impatient.

  Kilchenmann! Damn it! Shoot!

  Easy, boss, replies the voice from the weighing office.

  The cow’s getting nervous, she flares her nostrils, whisks her tail. No one is better than Krummen at inspiring a cow to stoical-aristocratic behaviour just before the end. But no cow will stand quietly in a slaughterhall for more than five minutes.

  Just keep her away from me.

  I nick the artery in the throat under my knee.

  Nothing!

  Has my knife lost its point?

  I stab it in, hard. The blood spurts, bubbles out, pumped by the still-beating heart.

  In the slaughtering bay behind me, Kilchenmann finally applies his gun, pulls the trigger and the cow drops from Krummen’s arms like a stone. He doesn’t look, doesn’t watch her fall, crash and die.

  Just as long as he can play the boss.

  He goes from one carcass to the next, checking our work: once they’ve been skinned, there isn’t to be the merest trace of dirt from the hide; no blood in the meat; no gall in the fat; no slime on the tongue; no puncture in the guts.

  The slaughterer’s art.

  Krummen sees the fourth cow already hanging, and no one disembowelling her. He walks up and down a couple of times, his left hand sweeps in a wide arc round his whole bulk, he buries his fingers in the cloth across his bum, and he yells.

  Where’s Hügli got to this time?

  Jesus Christ Almighty!

  And Ambrosio!

  Piccolo smiles quietly.

  I try to smile back, feel the crust on my face, haven’t got a hand free to scratch my chin.

  I peel the scalp right off.

  Change of knife.

  I slowly pass the medium blade across the whetting steel. The short knife needs sharpening too.

  With all the bloody hurry I slipped.

  I must have blunted the point on one of the iron rings concreted into the floor.

  In the middle of each killing bay is a heavy iron ring in the floor. Once they used to tether the animals to them before knocking them down with a poleaxe or a butcher’s hammer. Later on, they were still used for heavy steers. A rod with spring-hooks at either end was clicked in through the ring in the floor and the nose ring.

  Here’s Hügli.

  Like a guilty dog, he slinks in at the side entrance. He looks sharp. He doesn’t buckle on his sheath, he takes it down off the rack, and with practised elegance, rolls himself into his belt, moving his hips like a woman and tossing his head back.

  That’s good, Hügli. Your gun belt. Hear the music, can you? Film music.

  Now I know what tune he was whistling before.

  And my hands! I nearly broke off the tip of my knife.

  There must be a tendon somewhere in this neck cartilage.

  Wonder if that fourth cow carried a portent in her belly?

  Perhaps one day something amazing will come out of one of those bellies.

  Hügli gets ready to start disembowelling.

  There are still a few fibres holding the carcass together.

  Hügli severs them.

  As always: You hope for a sign, an answer, but nothing comes. Only the slobbery guts hanging down the front of the broken-open cow.

&
nbsp; It looks as though she’s puked them up.

  She doesn’t have any more secrets, she’s made a clean breast of things – there’s nothing out of the ordinary about her.

  The usual octopus of stomachs and intestines.

  No word from the cow oracle.

  Her insides are outermost. The workshop of her belly is empty. If she had an incubus it wasn’t incubating in there.

  Hügli waves his longest sword around in the air. Couldn’t Piccolo have waited for fuck’s sake? What if everyone just started tweaking at bits if they felt like it! This membrane here had to come out first of the lot. Preferably without getting the whole thing covered in shit.

  Hügli yells. It’s always him that gets the blame.

  Yell all you like. You can’t compete with the machine noise.

  Io? Non ho fatto niente io! Piccolo thrusts his hands in the air, as though Hügli had pulled a gun on him.

  Another victorious duel. And now he works exaggeratedly slowly. If the slaughterhouse was a Western. You do what you do.

  Piccolo wants to know what that membrane is for.

  Pot roast! Pot roast! shouts Hügli. So the juice doesn’t run out. Capito?

  You know what you know.

  Molto bene, for make a de roas!

  I nod to Piccolo.

  He smiles.

  *

  Ernest Gilgen was livid.

  Ernest Gilgen, the master-butcher of the abattoir, Ernest Gilgen, the Tyrolean giant, Ernest ‘Aschi’ Gilgen, Ambrosio’s friend, Ernest Gilgen, who didn’t slaughter cows so much as chop their roots, and fell them like trees, Ernest Gilgen, whose prodigious strength was famed far beyond the walls of the slaughterhouse, this Ernest Gilgen now clenched his pincer fingers into fists. His jaw twitched and jutted forward, and a thick vein swelled up in his throat from the collar of his shirt, to just below the stubble on his unshaven chin. He could have run away, like before, over fields and meadows, through a gorge, through a whole mountain valley up a scree to a glacier.

  He paced back and forth in front of the kiosk on the approach road to the slaughterhouse.

  In tin cans and gherkin jars were bluebells and irises stood in water. Gilgen drew his left foot back, and turned away, took aim again, pulled his foot back further – and at the last moment kicked the rubbish bin instead. Pieces of scrap paper and newspaper fluttered through the air; bottles rolled across the pavement onto the road.

  —Here, you! What’s up with you, Gilgen! As though she couldn’t breathe, Frau Kramer, the kiosk woman, banged her hands against her chest. Herr Gilgen! And so early in the morning!