by Beat Sterchi
—That’s just it. Rötlisberger leaned across the desk. Bössiger shrank back. Put an idiot on your idiot-proof machines, not me! And important, respected, well-paid work. Herr Bössiger? Who respects it? Who pays it? Have those men in the office got any idea of the kind of stuff that’s come my way in the tripery? I’m not that cow-stupid. Don’t imagine you can pay us for the things that swill around our feet, and get hosed down the drain. You think you can stuff all that in the pathetic pay envelopes you give us? Ha! Right!
Rötlisberger stomped off. Bössiger reached for the telephone, and Frau Spreussiger once more for her mirror: she was snow-white.
*
Eight fifteen.
Whetting.
The turning stone rips sharpness into the blades.
The emptiness inside me. How quickly it returned. Suddenly the wheels grip, the drive belt hums, and I feel my guts being crushed, sliced, corroded.
The stone turns unevenly, and water splashes out from under the shield.
Eight hours to go.
I could put my medium blade away, lift my right arm, my hand could open and turn, and I could stop the electricity, cut out the motor, dead.
The stone would go on turning for a while, slower and slower. Then it would stop.
I test the blade with the tip of my thumb. I slice it across my thumbnail. The tiny fibres of metal tickle.
Can silence kill?
The way that cow got up on its forelegs to bellow.
When sand clogs the drain under the stone, the water used in the whetting collects and dissolves the soft stone.
At this hour, men in grey coats are going to offices.
We’re back in the arena.
We’re always there, and always surprised to find ourselves there.
The heavy side of the lopsided stone comes up, and as it falls away, the rotation speeds up, and a splash of water lands on my forearms and apron.
The men in grey coats are standing in bus queues and raising their hats in greeting. Each time they bow almost imperceptibly from the waist. Many carry umbrellas over their arms.
Remember that you’re a slave in Egypt.
Something should have bellowed and raged in me. Of its own accord. Independent of me. I would have liked to watch. A spectator of my own self.
And satchels are flying through heated classrooms. I hear them clattering onto desks.
What is it drives us out into the cold rainy morning three hours before sunrise? What lures them away from their warm wives? They tiptoe into the kitchen, down the stairs on hushed soles, out into the night.
I press the point of the blade against the fine-grained whetstone.
And the gentlemen in hats and coats say goodbye on doorsteps to wives in brightly coloured dressing gowns.
I watched with Ambrosio as Gilgen whetted an axe during the lunch break. At the end of work, he shaved himself with it in the locker room. He didn’t say what he wanted it for.
Will he come back?
Will Ambrosio?
I just have to make sure that Kilchenmann pushes the iron wire down into the marrow of every cow.
The men walk through the streets very uprightly. They carry briefcases and most of them are acquainted.
It is the oil between stone and steel that makes the sound of whetting bearable.
In a story there was a boy who stood all alone in front of a house at night, sharpening his slate pencil against the soft stone surround of a pump.
Only a single thread off the blade is ground on the whetstone: a barely visible wisp of steel. The individual fibres are picked off the stone by hand. Bössiger said: If anyone forgets to drain off all the water, he’ll be paying for the next stone!
He had been held up on the way there, said Überländer. By the time he rattled up on his JAVA, the farmer had lost patience and done the shooting himself. At point-blank range, with a double-barrelled gun, he had aimed first at one eye, then the other. Why the eyes? The devil only knew. At any rate, the shots had ripped away half the cow’s cranium like a hat, but she hadn’t lost consciousness. Wasn’t even lamed. While the farmer reloaded and the farmer’s wife chased the children away, the cow had pulled herself up again. Without turning off his JAVA engine, and still in his coat, he had stuck the cow right away.
And Krummen: seventeen times the two apprentices had hit the calf on the head, back in the days when a wooden hammer was still used to stun lightweight sausage-calves.
But then he had told those two guys the kind of butchers they were.
Without interrupting his chewing, Überländer said he had kept on telling the farmers he butchered for, for God’s sake not to shoot until he got there, you needed a proper gun and the necessary expertise. After all, it wasn’t a wild boar hunt.
First through the chilling-rooms, then down a side passage. Perhaps steal a look outside. A bit of sky. Anything but the direct way back.
It’s true too, Überländer had added after a while.
In his own way, that is, with the greatest reluctance, Buri had joined in. You might say that everything at SWIFT & CO. in Chicago went off at a hellish lick; sometimes an ox would still be waving his tail at one end, while at the other his tongue was already being pickled in vinegar.
Ice-cold air greets me outside the deep-freezing room. Ventilators like aircraft engines.
Hugentobler territory.
You know, Überländer had told the farmer, you could have killed an elephant at three hundred paces with one of those cannonballs you used.
Before the meat goes into the freezing-room, it is stacked here by Hugentobler, and instantly deep-frozen, amid fiendish din. Minus thirty-seven.
Outside the cattle slaughteringhall, the wooden chest and the smell of cattle fat at body temperature.
The warmth that rises from those opened cow bodies.
Back to work.
With sharpened knives.
*
Buri’s hands felt the intestines. Sensitive as a blind man’s, they plucked here, pinched a little there, stopped tentatively, and moved with a serpentine grace over the ruffle spread out over the wooden table. It was the sixth of the day, and by no means a bad one. Small and large intestines felt tough, thick enough for cervelat and tongue sausages. Buri swore. So far he had only been able to throw away Blösch’s lean and inflamed intestines. There was still more work for him to do here.
The final 75 centimetres of the large intestine go with the tripes. Buri measured and cut. Rectum and anus flopped into a basin, and then Buri got into position: one boot pushed forward, head and neck bent, and he began to reel off 40 metres of chitterling into a plastic bucket. Pulling evenly, he parted the long tube from the ruffle with his knife. After every finished move, he nodded his head. His eyebrows frowned. He concentrated on his knife. A moment’s inattention, and the whole intestine is ruined. Buri was sweating. He wiped his forearm across his brow. He finished. He put his gutter’s knife away, and went in with bare hands, into the fat-padded remnants of the insides of the sixth cow.
Buri no longer had the strength of a butcher. He wasn’t even properly healthy. His colour had taken on something of the gall-gut green that his hands had to burrow in every day. He could no longer keep his back straight either: his walk was stooped and broken, as though his bones had rubbed one another down as he dragged himself from one side to another in the halls and passages of the abattoir. Buri had a wooden leg.
But Buri was still a giant. A tired giant, but a giant all the same. However ponderous his movements might be, his chest was still as big as a barrel, his shoulders were broad, and his proportions massive. The more striking was the gentleness that flowed, smoothly, almost womanishly, but alive as quicksilver from his wrists and out through his fingertips as he worked. It was with positive tenderness that he treated each apparently indissoluble knot of delicate intestine, and quickly and effortlessly sorted it into a little pile of fat, a little pile of veins and tendons, and a few tubes, which he knotted at both ends, and, acco
rding to colour and calibre, dropped into one of his various buckets for further processing.
Cleanliness was Buri’s first commandment, his pride and his joy. There was never dirt on his apron, and it was rare for him to get besmirched. Buri had a low opinion of butchers who, after five minutes at the gutter’s table, looked as though they’d fallen into a cesspit. He himself wouldn’t touch an intestine, unless there was a bucket of hot water standing by, and if, for all his delicacy and expertise, an over-porous gut did happen to tear, he wouldn’t stop until the tiniest greenish stain, the least taint of stomach juices had been removed.
But Intestine-man Buri wasn’t the only one who had gone back to his proper post once the slaughtering had got underway. As the cow-demolition process had advanced, all the others too had gone to their individual places, like grenadiers leaving the vanguard. Together, as a team, they had got things moving, and now the wagon was rolling, it was that that was setting the pace. Each man had to fight alone, on his sector of the red front.
Krummen brought in the cows.
Kilchenmann shot.
The apprentice got the cows ready for sticking, he bled and headed them.
Fernando and Eusebio carved off the horns and shins. Together with Luigi, they turned the cows over onto their backs.
Hacking and sawing, Luigi opened up the bodies, took off the udders and tails, and attached the hindlegs to a lifting-hook.
Hügli sent the carcasses up into the air and eviscerated them, removing heart, lungs, kidneys and liver.
Piccolo took the stomachs into the tripery, and came back with the empty barrow.
Huber and Hofer worked the skinning gear, cutting and tugging the red-and-white hides off the cow skeletons.
Between trips to the pens, Krummen split the carcasses in two.
Überländer tidied and wiped and washed what was left to be weighed.
Swiftly and eerily the animals had their familiar form stripped away from them. No sooner were they dead, than they were hanging upside down on the overhead rail, naked and steaming, passing the keen gaze of the meat inspector. And the whole thing accelerated further, the din grew still more intense: the hydraulic knives whirred, the chain-lifts rattled, the electric saw chewed and shrieked and chattered its way down the spine of a slaughtered animal, the guillotine precision-crunched hooves and bones, and Kilchenmann’s shots flew, bang, bang, bang, through the hall. The noise accumulated and washed back over the men in a hundredfold echo, as the blue veins bulged on temples, on blood-smeared forearms, swelling under the mounting pressure of the slaughter as the pulse stopped in the breast of one cow after another. Red flowed from the throat wounds of the animals, red slopped from blood-catching basins into tanks, red dropped from the walls, from hooks and from aprons, from the faces of the men, from their knives, from their meat-chewing swords.
Blood dripped onto the scraps of skin and tendon on the floor, turning them into one slippery pudding. In a puddle of everything that dripped and dropped from sagging organs and limbs, Krummen’s rubber boots sought a foothold. Blösch had to be split.
Krummen took one more look round. Even with Gilgen and Ambrosio absent, he had kept forcing the pace. The resentful glances hadn’t escaped him. Didn’t escape him now.
—Are you proposing to milk those cripple cows, and put them up for the night? I want them out of here! Before the calves come, he shouted, while he held the electric bone-saw against Blösch’s croup.
Blösch’s hide lay spread out like a carpet on the floor behind Krummen in the middle passage of the slaughterhall. Meat side up. Huber and Hofer were standing over it, pointing out scrapes and scars, bruises on the flanks, a purulent eczema on the neck, and no fewer than seventeen places where bot-fly larvae had got through. Huber said: Sieve! Fucking rubbish!
—Wouldn’t even make shoelaces, said Hofer.
—What are you waiting for, then? Salt it and get rid of it! Krummen shouted at them.
Like a wet canvas tent, they folded Blösch’s hide into a parcel the size of a suitcase, tied a rope round it, and left it on the floor behind the slaughtering bay, next to the grey-blue uterus.
The bone-saw started up with a whine: the teeth wouldn’t bite, they only howled imploringly, protesting, idling at high velocity, and bones consist of 1. The compact substance (hard as a tube of concrete), and Krummen spat on the sawblade. The spittle hissed.
—Fuck! All right then. Krummen picked up the cleaver. He took it back over his head, and slammed it down. Nothing. He raised the metre-long blade higher, and swung it down even harder.
Suddenly there was silence in the hall. Pretty Boy Hügli gaped as he sidled closer. The apprentice raised his head, and sharpened his knife. Huber and Hofer switched off their skinning gear. At the intestine table by the wall, even Buri stopped work.
Krummen’s jaw trembled. He circled Blösch’s body like a dog circling a tree.
—Where’s the other cleaver? Did you hear me? I want the big cleaver! He shouted, without taking his eyes off the carcass. The big cleaver! That fucking fossil cow! I’ll show her! Jesus! She’s got it coming! And the bones form the body structure: the ‘backbone’ supports the trunk, and Fernando handed Krummen a monstrous cleaver. It was so outsized, so unmanageable, that no one used it any more, and it even had rust stains on it.
Krummen seized the wooden handle, pulled the heavy implement to him, and tested the sharpness of the blade. He spat on his hands. All eyes were on the bone that would not break.
Krummen wound himself up.
—Now, you bastard! he screamed, and dealt the Blösch cadaver a masterly blow on the rump-bone, but nothing split. No crack, nothing. He hit it again and again, raising the steel ever more furiously above his fire-red face, shouted and groaned and stamped and swore. All his blows were deflected like water off glass. Blösch’s rump-bone defied Krummen’s strength, as though it had turned to stone. Krummen rained down blows, but this backbone was indivisible.
His blows splashed on the glass bone with less and less precision. Buri turned away, shaking his head. Huber and Hofer shrugged their shoulders in bemusement, and switched on their skinning gear once more.
—Now, by God! I don’t believe it, said Überländer, and once more Krummen rolled his eyes, ripped the steel high above his head, and with the last of his strength sent it crashing down next to the rump-bone: the right pelvic bone broke and splintered. Überländer twitched, as though the blow had been meant for him. Hügli winced. Krummen was chopping his way through the loin. The vertebrae cracked. Smashing the right sirloin, he went on chopping parallel to the backbone, hacking through the hoops of the ribs, through the lateral bones of the thick neck vertebrae, making an ugly pulp of the steaming dark red flesh, blindly he smote at the last vertebra, the balancing atlas, until the two halves of Blösch’s carcass, more shredded than split, fell asunder, and the iron in Krummen’s hands, suddenly unresisted, bit into the granite floor.
*
Eight forty-five.
I try to hide my glee.
Wrestler-king forced to his knees by cow.
She gave me a fright, but she threw him.
Can cows really not hate?
That’s what comes to him for his condescension and maltreatment. He shouldn’t have dished out so many blows.
Usually words are enough for him.
Yes, he, most silent of word-misers, only nodding, pointing, indicating, at most growling or shouting, he, who with his professional pride and wrestler’s honour, doesn’t dare throw out more than three or four syllables at a time, words are usually enough for him.
But that old ghost cow avenged herself.
You’ve got all the blood running back into her guts!
Watch it! You’re through the other side!
Hügli can go and stew himself. Back to the locker-room mirror. Whistle your Ennio Morricone!
There’s just a thin trickle from the throat under my knee.
When Krummen gets to them, they all start going cr
azy.
Because she’s not dead. I defend myself.
Ha! Not dead! Hügli laughs.
Just pay attention and don’t wander. That’s right.
Because she’s still trembling.
Still glowing with warmth.
If that collapsed heap is still alive!
Once more I push my skinning knife up behind the tough skin of the forehead of a feebly bleeding cow.
Stop cutting her hair!
Shout all you like.
On the horns, that I’ve got the skull resting on, the rings are close together. Each one a calf, each ring the ring of a year. The fetus, splashing about in the uterus, indicates his pilfering of his mother’s calcium store with a ring-shaped stunting of his mother’s horns.
Dr Wyss is standing by the cow that frightened me, and that Krummen couldn’t split.
In his hand he holds a knife as sharp as a scalpel. A delicate, light metal sheath for it hangs from his doctor’s coat.
He points at the botched half carcasses.
He’s after something, and Überländer shrugs his shoulders.
The meat inspector nudges the uterus on the floor with his shoe.
The veins in Krummen’s forehead were that shade of blue.
If something doesn’t go according to plan, he can only shout and swear. He lost his rag. He, too, in an invisible cage.
I am not alone, with my own will supplanted by my will not to will.
Deep down, Krummen knows neither peace nor aloofness from his work. His wrestler’s gait: show! His laconic manner: show! The casual way he wields the tools: show! When something touches him, like that glass cow did just now, he suddenly changes colour, explodes, can only rant and hop and swear.
Would he take a step to freedom?
We could all get up, turn round and go.
Just go.
Like hens.
Given the choice: undernourishment and cold out of doors, or plentiful grub in a cage, hens would choose freedom.
I keep still.
Someone has to do it.
We all do what must be done.
Only in Utopia, said one of Lukas’s friends, only there was the slaughtering done by serfs, and outside the cities. These were medieval ideas, though.