by Beat Sterchi
*
Ten thirty.
This way!
Where are you off to?
Santo Cristo!
You cripple dog!
Get them, kick them, smash them. Kick their legs!
As he unto me, so I unto you.
That’s the first six calves for the day.
Heavy sods.
Lifting them up!
Rest them on their own spines for shooting.
Luigi swears like crazy. So does Krummen. The animals kick and scream. Überländer shakes his arms loose afterwards, like a shot-putter. The dust off their hide irritates, but calves smell fresh and dry.
I’m to stick. No, I’m to stir blood.
Buri says in Chicago they didn’t have time to knock the calves unconscious first.
Or the pigs.
Oxen, yes. You’d never have been able to stick them otherwise. But the calves? A couple of guys with strong arms, and someone who wasn’t asleep on the job, that was sufficient in Chicago.
They’d pulled the calves up by machine.
Not like here, where you can fuck your back up on those overfed buggers of bull calves.
We must be nuts.
And in America, the butchers wore red gear. That way, you didn’t have to change every time you got a drop of blood on your clothes.
Kilchenmann keeps his blue uniform clean. He never stands too close to the animals when he shoots them.
And I stir blood.
The man from the veterinary hospital is here. Every time he puts on this show of not being amazed.
Pah, what’s in a slaughterhouse!
Yes, on the outside.
Sandstone walls, fences, hedges, wire surrounds, glass bricks, frosted-glass windows. Normal factory uniform. Now and again, a distant view of a quarter of beef hanging up outside the chilling-room, or loaded onto a lorry.
It’s just like in the movies.
But this.
When the blood flows, the stomachs turn and the guts void, then either they don’t look, or they pretend they’ve seen it hundreds of times before.
But ever been right up close, rubbed your nose in it?
Never.
It has to be done. And we do it. Actually, it would be possible...
You’d just have to...
Wanted for calf killing.
For the death of...
I stood side on to the mirror in the locker room, and squinted at my profile.
My wanted face.
Full face and profile.
And I’m stirring blood.
How red it is. Living red and dead.
At least I don’t have to be careful with my knife. I can stand and stir and think about what I like. Those calves never saw grass in their lives. Maybe a bit of green through a crack between the boards of the loading bridge. They grew up behind a muzzle. They’re not allowed to eat what they like. They’re to drink milk, and nothing that contains any iron. Lack of iron keeps them anaemic and white.
And white they have to be. Veal is innocent and healthy, for children, invalids and old people. But it’s not got any iron.
Even when they’re obstinate, there’s something gentle about calves.
Something stupid too.
What are you staring at me for?
It’s Krummen who’s got you by the dewlap. Luigi’s got you by the tail. Pretty Boy Hügli by the ears.
Not me.
Überländer sticks the creatures.
Calves’ blood is used for dyeing the outside of sausages red.
Calves don’t bleed, they drip to death.
I want to clear off.
Out.
I’ve got to stir until the blood’s no longer warm. Otherwise it congeals.
Yes, banging on the toilet walls and shouting, I’m good at that.
Or I try and wank.
Ex-press myself.
The hold between my legs.
That’s how I express myself.
Who’s the bigger fool? I try and steal my own energy from them. A bit of my own power for my own mill.
They want our best shot.
They want everything, from early till late.
The way we sometimes go home at night.
Collapsed, bowed, crippled, drained. A pack of beaten dogs.
Even without wanking.
Krummen’s destroying himself. Anything to give the impression that we’re not missing Gilgen.
He’d rather work himself to death.
When I stir, I think, and when I think, I want to leave.
Just go.
Go to Australia, New Zealand, America.
The sixth calf is bucking.
In the corner over there, there are three cardboard boxes. One’s shaking. They’re tied with string, and they’ve got airholes in the sides.
Rabbits.
Someone wanting to hang rabbits in his lunch hour.
Rötlisberger?
They can’t budge the calf.
I gave him a finger to suck.
It follows Hügli’s hand quite tamely and goes under the rack. Rope round its leg. Because it straddles its front legs, its rear end seems higher. Standing there, like on a chocolate ad.
In my lunch hour, I’m going to lie on my back. On the wooden slats on the floor of the locker room.
Huber and Hofer start skinning the calves.
My heel isn’t hurting.
Nor’s my back.
I stretch, and think about the veins and tendons and bones under my skin.
I think about my blood.
*
Reporting for duty. Triper-grenadier Rötlisberger. Thirty-two years’ service on the red front. Uniform: burlap aprons and butcher’s shirt. Weapons: knife and boiling water. I’ll teach them! The layabouts! Pen-pushers! Trying to get me out of here, just like that! An old man I may be – but I’m not dead yet! I’m not just an empty sack with a couple of arms attached to it to scrape the shite out of cows’ bellies. I’ve got a union background. The only man in the abattoir with one, but by God I’ve got it!
The words came hissing out of the left corner of his mouth; the BRISSAGO was in the right one. He stamped on the floor in his wooden clogs, and sent the water splashing through the tripery. No question! This one’s going to backfire on Bössiger!” You can bet on it, they won’t get me. Of course that fool Buri thinks it’s a good deal. And then it’s always the foreigners to blame with him. Always the dagos. But I know the way the cat’s jumping.
Rötlisberger stood at his triper’s table. The four stomachs of a ruminant lay before him. He had cut them open. Rötlisberger’s arm circled, tireless and monotonous as a machine. His hand was a claw, incessantly plunging into the inside of the second stomach, and scraping the fermenting grass from its honeycomb walls.
A greasy dough of excrement, scraps of gut, weasand and skin clogged the drain on the floor. The dirty water was already ankle deep. Safety valves hissed, in six cauldrons innards were simmering, in two others swam calves’ heads and ox muzzles. A mixture of two parts rumen and honeycomb, and one part omasum, abomasum and straight gut produces first-class tripes. Scalded for two or three minutes at 69°C, then boiled for twelve to fourteen hours. Not in a pressure cooker, to let the odours escape. And the steam. On the walls and ceiling, thick enough to chew. It softened up the plaster and broke off plate-sized pieces, it crusted over the bare lightbulbs, and it rusted everything that wasn’t chrome steel. Swathes of steam headed for the door, ducked under the cowskull hanging over the lintel and got out into the open. The cowskull dripped. The spiders’ webs luxuriating from the nostrils and eye sockets, and garlanding the horns, gleamed in the damp like silver threads. Sucking noises were heard from the main drain. Waste water from abattoirs may only be allowed to flow into open water after it has passed through a purification plant or cesspit. Where the contents of rumens and fertilizer material are not continuously removed, dungyards are to be provided with impermeable foundations, to avoid detrimental effects on the abat
toir and its environs by pollution, bad smells and vermin.
Rötlisberger banged his fist down on the wooden table, then smashed it into the honeycomb. The bastards! The BRISSAGO in the right corner of his mouth danced up and down. The bastards! He whacked a section of calf’s gut. Yellow juice squirted out. The bastards! The yellow juice dribbled down the wall.
Head-gutter Buri had wheeled in the first calf’s intestines. The ruffle, he had said. Fritz, you’d better take these! They’re halfway to being cow’s bellies again. They’re no use to me. Put them with the tripes. What am I supposed to do with them? Stupid overfed bull calves!
—That’s the way it goes. Cow’s stomachs aren’t what they used to be either, by God, Rötlisberger had replied. There was one today, Christ it must have been ancient! Take a look at what was inside it!
Rötlisberger had picked up a bundle of ironmongery off the windowsill. Screws, cable, wire, barbed wire. She must have been grazing on a building site. Look, five 10-centimetre nails! And who knows how much of it’s already rusted away in her belly?
—Do they give them all one of these nowadays too? asked Buri. A magnet 1.25 centimetres thick was holding it all together.
—Yes, by God. Earlier, they just used to push probes down them. And by force. Now though. If you stand on a meadow with a compass. North is always where the cow is. See what else she had in there! That’ll be aluminium. Poison. Rötlisberger had the rusty hulk of a toy car in his hand.
—The things a cow will eat, eh? Buri had stared and when he lifted the calves’ stomachs out of the barrow, he had stepped up to Rötlisberger and nudged him with his elbow. The dagos! It’s the dagos’ doing! he had said.
Buri had a way with words, he could hang a couple of empty words up in the air and leave them for half a minute, or a whole minute, and watch them with piercing eyes, and they somehow turned into a threat. Rötlisberger, however, hadn’t responded, not even after getting a second nudge in the ribs. Buri himself had had to say what he’d been hoping to hear. He had their measure, the dagos. But it was the way someone went about his work, the way he’d learned it, from the basics up, that wasn’t the least important part of it, he said. Christ, he could tell Rötlisberger a few things, he’d been involved with stooges in America for a long time, and you had to watch yourself with those bastards, they would crawl to you and be friendly to you to your face, and then the moment your back was turned, your job was gone. That was quite something, when anyone, not even knowing how to hold a tool properly, could just march in and strip the butcher’s shirt right off your back. For the moment it was his, Fridu’s, but who could tell when some dago might not get control of the whole of offal and casings, with salting and storage and everything. Here Buri faltered, short of breath. And even if he wasn’t saying anything at the moment, he, Fridu, would be ready when they came for him, and, hobbling rather more than usual, he left the tripery. Schnurri-Buri! Always the same Schnurri-Buri! Rötlisberger had said to himself.
The BOSSHARDT STEAM PRESSURE COOKER was hissing. Rötlisberger glanced at the thermostat. The pigs’ bellies from yesterday. A hand rapped on the frosted glass over the triping table.
Rötlisberger didn’t hear.
He could only hear the trains.
The trains thundered past on the tracks at the back of the tripery. Always punctual to the second. That was the Intercity. Rötlisberger knew them all, and took them all in. God, we’re running behind today. Those cows’ bellies should have been scalded long ago.
Earlier, much earlier, the young Rötlisberger had boiled tripes with the help of the railways. He hadn’t had a watch of his own, and the factory clock on the wall had been little use, if any. Either it was obscured by steam, or blind with condensation. It was years since Rötlisberger had last looked at it, and its protective glass was thickly coated with grease and powdered calcium. But he’d always had the trains to go by, leaving the city or approaching it, the few that stopped at the loading ramp outside the abattoir’s stock pens, a few others that stopped a little further along, outside the armaments factory.
But by now Rötlisberger had become his own timepiece. Tripes were tripes. They had to be emptied, scraped, rinsed and scalded, and you put those of the same age and thickness to cook for an equal length of time at an equal temperature. Changes to the pattern of work were extremely rare. For thirty-two years, Rötlisberger had been doing virtually the same things every day, and his heart had made good use of that time, in all those years out in the slaughterhouse behind the high fence at the edge of the beautiful city, it had learned to beat to the rhythm of the tripery. The pulse of the BOSSHARDT STEAM PRESSURE COOKER, the pulse of the ELRO BOILERS, the pulse of the whole tripery was his pulse too, and the energetic Rötlisberger had now internalized rinsing and boiling times for so long and so powerfully that he no longer knew them, but simply felt them with every fibre of his being. He had become a biological clock, a tripe alarm with built-in bell. He was set for life.
—And if that was my last cow belly, and if I never scrape another one so long as I live, I won’t have anything to do with that machine! Not me! Wild horses wouldn’t drag me into washing harigalds.
There was another knock on the frosted glass.
Rötlisberger didn’t hear. He sloshed around in his pool, jumped up, splashed down, hopped like a child in a puddle. His hands tugged at the braces of his burlap aprons, and suddenly he doubled up with laughter. No chance! No fucking chance! The red tip of the BRISSAGO danced up and down. Rötlisberger grabbed the scraped stomachs off the table, hoisted them to his shoulder, swivelled round like a shot-putter and sent them flying through the air. They hadn’t seen anything yet! The flabby green bundle splattered against the wall, stuck fast for a moment, and then, like an enormous wet rubber glove, flopped onto the lid of the BOSSHARDT STEAM PRESSURE COOKER. Do your own fucking crap! He skipped through the tripe kitchen, spitting venom from the left corner of his mouth. Anything in his path he swung a clog at. Glass smashed, a thermostat broke, a dent appeared in the side of one of the ELRO BOILERS, a cauldron rattled across the floor, a barrow started rolling. Rötlisberger didn’t mind any of them. He grabbed a ladle and started lashing out with that too. Do your own fucking crap! Do your own fucking crap! With each repetition, the words sounded more rhythmically. Do your own fucking crap! A hissed sing-along with tripe-percussion obbligato.