Cow

by Beat Sterchi

  ‘Ho! Ho!’ and, ‘Gum sessy!’ Ambrosio called out to them as he opened the gate. Blösch was the first to start moving. The others followed, with their milk-weighted udders they hesitated a little with every step.

  Knuchel entered the cowshed in a freshly washed tunic, and he held out another one to Ambrosio. ‘Here, get into this! We’re slaughtering today!’ he said. There were sticking-plasters on his chin and throat, he had shaved first thing.

  The farmer was extremely liberal with the formula feed, and was keen to get on to milking after only the bare minimum of cleaning.

  ‘Does a cowshed always have to look like a parlour? Come on, Ambrosio, let’s get started!’ And he reached for the milking-fat tin.

  Even before breakfast a large trestle and a wooden trough as big as a bathtub had been taken through to the threshing floor. The potato steamer was filled brimful with water. ‘For scalding,’ said Knuchel.

  When Ruedi returned from the cheese dairy after breakfast, and untethered Prince from the milk-cart, he asked: ‘Does the sow get another meal?’

  ‘No, no! Just one more bucket of milk and apples, so she doesn’t scream like a stuck pig before we’ve even begun,’ replied Knuchel, emerging from the cellar with a couple of bottles of white wine under his arm.

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts! Unload the swill! Then go and ask your mother for some knives. I don’t know what she thinks she’s waiting for. No towels or aprons in there either. Not even any basins.’

  ‘Well, it’s still a nonsense,’ said Ruedi under his breath as he went to pick up the churns from the dog-cart. ‘The Boden farmer’s cutting his rowan, and what are we doing? Slaughtering! In the middle of summer!’

  ‘You can stop your muttering!’ Knuchel told him. ‘Just do as you’re told. Fritz Überländer will be here any minute, and we won’t be ready.’

  ‘Well, he’s not here yet, your butcher,’ the farmer’s wife reported from the kitchen door. ‘And when he is, then you’ll have your towels. Don’t worry about that! And as for knives, I hope your dear Herr Überländer will have remembered to bring some himself.’

  Grandma, climbing the outside staircase up to the veranda, concurred with a wag of her head: ‘Whatever next! Providing knives for the butcher!’

  ‘What on earth’s the matter with you all?’ Knuchel irritably picked up the hosepipe to wash the pig down first. ‘All that talk about just one little sow!’

  By the time Grandma called down from the balcony: ‘He’s coming! He’s coming,’ and Custom-butcher Überländer rattled into the Knuchel farmyard, the labels had long ago come off the bottles that had been put out to cool in the well.

  ‘About time too,’ muttered the farmer, and his wife said, ‘Has he got a noisy motorbike?’

  ‘It’s a JAVA,’ said Ruedi.

  No sooner was Fritz Überländer standing on Knuchel soil by the side of his bike, unbuttoning his heavy leather coat with one hand, than he asked: ‘Well, have you got the sow ready? Can we start?’

  ‘Yes, Fritz, we’re ready.’ The farmer took some liqueur glasses off the kitchen windowsill, filled them with kirsch, handed them round and said: ‘Here’s to the sow!’ They drank together. ‘The sow!’

  ‘Do you want this in the kitchen? Or where do you want us to make the sausages?’ asked Fritz Überländer, who, as well as his box of equipment, was taking a sausage-filling kit off the back of his motorbike.

  ‘Yes, I thought we’d slaughter outside, sausages inside,’ said Knuchel.

  ‘Right then!’ Fritz Überländer hauled the box onto the threshing floor, unlocked it, laid a gun across the trestles, slipped into a butcher’s smock, tied on his apron and said: ‘There. Now we can start as far as I’m concerned. What about you? Shall we take her?’

  The light went on. The door of the shed squeaked. The bolt on the pigsty slid back. From the far corner, there was sniffing at shoes, aprons, then a grunting, there were hands pushing, a noose, there was delay, hesitation, some words of doubt from the door of the shed, short legs were dug in on the concrete yard, and there was squealing, pulling and kicking for dear life.

  ‘Ooh, you bugger! Not much wool and a lot of noise!’ Butcher Überländer exerted himself. The rope tightened round foot and snout, and cut into the pig’s flesh. Prince slipped out of his kennel and crept down towards the farmyard. Grandma took herself off to her hens. The children silently peeled away from the wall, stepped a little nearer. The pig’s throat rattled as it was pressed to the ground, and after the shot, Thérèse asked: ‘Is she dead now?’

  ‘Sshh! Otherwise you’ll hurt her even more!’ The travelling butcher drilled the sticking-knife into the sow’s throat.

  The farmer’s wife held a frying pan under the pale red fountain that flowed from the keeled-over pig. Ruedi and Ambrosio pumped the legs, and the farmer knelt on her belly. Fritz Überländer wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, and sharpened his dripping knife.

  ‘Who would have guessed the little pig would have so much blood in her?’ said the farmer’s wife as she carried the brimful pan back to the kitchen.

  ‘Right, now let’s scald her!’ The butcher put his knife away. Hot water by the bucketful was carried from the potato steamer to the threshing room to be poured over the pig’s bristles as it lay in the trough.

  ‘All right!’ said Knuchel. He scraped across the pig’s skin with a scalder. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. ‘All right!’ he said again.

  Scalding water splashed across the barn. Butcher Überländer gave instructions. Ruedi and Ambrosio scraped away at the hams. After the bristly skin had been scalded off, the pig’s body was laid on the trestles. It seemed to be getting whiter all the time.

  And when Fritz Überländer took up a long-handled razor to take off the last few hairs himself, he told of the local slaughterhouse: how on a single afternoon they slaughtered well over a hundred hogs, and how the whole thing went like clockwork. And they were just about to expand their capacity still further. A larger scalding tub and a new scraping machine would be added shortly.

  ‘Over a hundred pigs? In an afternoon?’ asked Ruedi.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Fritz Überländer, taking a step away from the trestle. Knuchel had brought in one of the bottles, poured out a couple of glasses and said another ‘All right!’

  ‘Whew! What about this weather! Pigging hot!’ said the butcher after the first taste.

  ‘Yes, but the scalding’s always the worst of it,’ said Knuchel.

  ‘And we’ve done that.’ In a single draught, Fritz Überländer emptied his glass.

  ‘Yes, we’ve done that,’ Knuchel repeated.

  ‘And your wife? What’s she doing?’ asked Fritz Überländer.

  ‘My wife?’ Knuchel refilled the glasses. ‘My wife can help make the sausages later. Butchering’s not women’s work.’

  ‘Oh? You don’t think so?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘Well, Fritz, butchering is men’s work. Just like milking is.’

  ‘You mean they turn the cows’ heads in the cowsheds, and then they cry into the milk later till it sours?’ said Fritz Überländer laughing.

  ‘Yes, the way they’d cut themselves if they were butchers,’ said Knuchel, laughing too.

  ‘Yes, that’s what my old man used to say,’ the butcher carried on laughingly. ‘It’s all right for a woman to bathe in it, that makes her beautiful, but actual milking’s something for a man to do.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Knuchel pursed his lips, put the empty bottle away, scratched his neck and said: ‘Well, shall we get back on the job?’

  The pig was hung up on the wall head down, and was slit open from top to bottom. The innards tumbled out, grey-brown-green. Überländer worked swiftly, and the men stood and watched open-mouthed as he pulled out intestines, womb, lungs, liver, heart and kidneys, and laid them all out in separate bowls and dishes.

  Ambrosio was sent to the well with the straight int
estine. That had to be washed first, so they could get started on the black pudding, said the butcher. ‘Lavare bene! Girare subito,’ he said to Ambrosio.

  ‘Black pudding! In the middle of summer!’ muttered Ruedi, who was blowing up the pig’s bladder with a bicycle pump, and Knuchel said thoughtfully: ‘So you know Spanish.’

  ‘No, just a few words of Italian,’ said Fritz Überländer, as he got ready for the first blow to the backbone of the gutted animal. The farmer stood behind him, watching attentively as one vertebra after another split, and he complained about the cheeser and the mayor, about how they were all kicking up a fuss over his Spaniard, and how he had been looking in vain for a solution to the problem.

  When the last vertebra had been split, Überländer straightened up again, felt the bacon on the two split pig halves, wrinkled his nose and said: ‘Hans, that’s just silly. Send us your Spaniard. Anyone’s allowed to work at the slaughterhouse. There’s no fuss there. He can start next week, if you like.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course. I’m telling you, aren’t I?’

  ‘Well, maybe there’s not such a great hurry as all that.’ Knuchel rubbed his right wrist, and first looked round the farm and then down at the meadow. ‘Let’s see, first there’s the rowan coming up, and the wheat we could use him for. Then it’s already nearly time for the potatoes, and all the fruit has to be boxed. And the beets. Who’s going to dig them? No, it’s not as urgent as all that. And milking goes on all the time of course.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Hans. When the time comes, send him to me. I’ll take him up to the office. They’ll find him a room too.’

  ‘A room too? Yes, in town, I suppose.’ Knuchel took the left half of the pig, slung it across his shoulder, and said: ‘Right, shall we, er, take this pig in and put it on the kitchen table then?’

  The farmer’s wife was standing outside the threshing room. She looked first at the empty bottle, and then, as though to ask him: ‘Well? Does he drink?’ at the farmer. But she actually asked: ‘Are you already finished with the butchering?’ Without waiting for an answer, she leaned forward, sucked in her stomach, looked down her front and said: ‘You know, that pig made a right mess of my apron.’

  ‘Well, you did go and wear a white one, didn’t you? It’s not Sunday,’ said Knuchel from under his half carcass.

  ‘You put on clean things too. And you shaved early.’

  ‘But that wasn’t on account of the sow, though,’ Knuchel replied and went on into the kitchen. The pig’s neck wobbled and smacked against his back.

  ‘Why else?’ asked the farmer’s wife quietly, and picking up a bit of gristle from the ground, tossed it in front of the kennel to which Prince had again retreated.

  *

  Ambrosio knew this road. He knew it well. It led along the hills across the highlands, a winding grey asphalt ribbon through woods and meadows, from village to village. When Ambrosio had driven into town, alone or with Luigi, he had sat on the post bus and looked out at the landscape, always a little sceptically. Those people, those villages, those hills and woods and mountains, were they all quite real?

  Ambrosio still had his doubts. He was sitting on the tractor, behind Livestock-dealer Schindler. They were going slowly; the engine was straining, it could only manage a crawl up the steeper slopes, but Schindler wasn’t impatient, he was towing a considerable prize: in the trailer at the back stood Pestalozzi.

  ‘Wh-hey, won’t those cattle-dealers be quaking in their boots when we roll up with that great bull-trailer and come out with him!’ Schindler chuckled and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Pestalozzi.

  The livestock-transporter that Schindler had hired was an open wooden box the size of a small house. It had three axles, as many hand-brakes, and a double floor. Since its centre of gravity was actually below the surface of the road, no raging bull could upset it. The side walls were reinforced with iron, and so high that Pestalozzi’s back only just cleared them. Chained by his nose-ring, his curly head held down by ropes tied round his horns, there wasn’t much an earth-bound spectator could see of the massive body of the ex-village bull of Innerwald.

  But from up on the tractor, Ambrosio could see the mighty curved back, and the froth at the bull’s nostrils, and he could also see the pink neck of the livestock-dealer, which seemed to be glowing with satisfaction over his purchase.

  Once more, Ambrosio saw the saturated green of the grass and the heavy dark brown of the earth in the ploughed fields either side of the road. The woods were bright, suspiciously bright, and suspiciously beautiful.

  Demonstratively slowly, men and women went about their labour in the fields with horses and machines. Low and broad, they stooped down over potatoes and beets. They moved as though they were doing it for their own enjoyment, like actors convinced of the importance of their gestures.

  Ambrosio took out a cigarette, lit it from his tinder lighter, which proved its worth in the breeze on the open tractor, and inhaled deeply. No, if everyone and everything here, the ploughing men and the flower-watering women, and the bright trees and tall fences and great-uddered cattle, if they were all props in a gigantic theatrical production put on for the sole purpose of misleading him, then the enterprise had failed. He, Ambrosio, wasn’t deceived.

  How those farms were bragging again, with their dungheaps on show by the roadside. But Ambrosio no longer respected this world, he had managed to find out a thing or two about it, he had helped spread the dung on the fields himself, and even the day before, his last full day on the Knuchel farm, he had seen past the geraniums into the rooms of the Innerwalders.

  Talk of his departure had gone on for weeks. The farmer had brought in Luigi as an interpreter, they had telephoned, and it seemed Fritz Überländer was right. The wages he might expect to earn in town were considerable. Ambrosio had agreed, and written home to say that he would soon be earning more as a ‘carnicero’. The mayor had returned his papers, and up on the Galgenhubel, they had toasted the new job. If Ambrosio liked it there, Luigi would pack his bags and follow him, for the moment he wasn’t quite sure. But for Fritz Mader, the field-mouser who had worked on the Knuchel farm for much of the harvest as a day-labourer, there was no doubt: ‘Go! Go to the city! Why lose your sweat on foreign soil!’ he had counselled.

  And yesterday after the evening milking, when the herd was already bedded down in the straw and contentedly ruminating on chopped beets, then Knuchel had rubbed his wrists in the alley behind Blösch and said: ‘Schindler’s coming tomorrow, you know. He’s collecting the tired bull up in the village. He could give you a lift into the city. You want? Then come on, if it’s got to be. Let’s go and sit in the parlour and do our sums!’

  ‘Como no,’ Ambrosio had replied, and followed the farmer out of the cowshed. But there it was again: Boom! boom! boom! Not muffled, the way it sounded up in his attic, but louder and harder. Ambrosio had paused in the kitchen doorway, but as he entered the parlour he had flinched. The Knuchel children! There on the sofa right in front of him, Stini on the left, Thérèse on the right, little Hans in the middle, and all three of them rocking backwards and forwards, beating the backs of their heads against the parlour wall. As hard as they could. Boom! boom! boom!

  ‘Those kids, eh?’ the farmer had said with a sidelong glance at Ambrosio. ‘They like doing that, it quietens them down they say. But look, here’s the money!’

  Absent-mindedly Ambrosio had picked up the notes the farmer paid out, and even when Knuchel had poured schnapps into a couple of glasses and said: ‘Cheers! It’s some of our own. I’ll give you a bottle to take with you when you go. Anyway, here’s to you!’ even then he was still feeling shaken by the rhythmic banging of the children’s heads against the wall.

  Knuchel had then explained that he was thinking of distilling some more schnapps in the autumn. Twelve bottles as usual, that was his entitlement, one bottle per head of cattle, that was the custom and the tradition, because you sometimes needed it to treat the
cows with. And Knuchel had had one more go at the village farmers: ‘They can go to hell as far as I’m concerned, and take their milking machines with them!’ But Ambrosio had already emptied his glass, and was backing away towards the door, twisting his beret in his hands. ‘Buenas noches,’ he had said.

  Then, pursued by the knocking, he had walked up and down the cowshed, listened to the Knuchel cows chewing, and recited their names to himself: Baby, Patch, Check, Snail, Bossy, May, Flora, Tiger, Stine, Gertrude, Mirror and Blösch, but still he hadn’t managed to escape the Boom! boom! boom! that resounded through the whole house.

  Later that evening, Ambrosio had packed his little wooden case, laid his suit across the back of the chair in readiness, and counted his money. It was more than he had expected. Farmer Knuchel had thrown in the whole of an extra month’s wages.

  Sitting on the tractor, Ambrosio felt for the money in his waistcoat pocket. He took his eyes off the fences and barns, the model farms, and looked at Schindler’s head. Those contours! That neck! There was meat there, and fat. But didn’t that skull look surprisingly flat at the back? Was the back of that head anything more than the vertical extension of the neck?

  Ambrosio’s thoughts were rudely interrupted. With all his strength, Schindler pressed both boots down on the brake pedal. ‘Now what does he want?’ he said.

  A highway policeman in a black uniform waved the vehicle over to the side of the road. With his hand on the brim of his cap he stepped up to the tractor: ‘What’s that you’re carrying in the back?’

  Schindler looked down into the trailer, as though he first had to check to be sure what it was himself, then he turned off the engine and said: ‘A bull.’

  ‘Will you unload him, please! Vehicle inspection!’

  Schindler went bright red. He slid about on his seat, gulped, turned the steering wheel and first said, very quietly: ‘You great fart!’ and then very loudly: ‘Oh, that’s Pestalozzi we’ve got in there, from the Breeders’ Syndicate in Innerwald. He’s the best-behaved bull for miles, I can’t just... anyone would think he had foot-and-mouth disease or something!’