John Berger - Once in Europa

So you’re going to sweep their chimneys? asked the ticket collector.

I’ll eat their shit, said Marius the boy, if they pay me more for it.

He achieved what he swore he would. He worked in a tannery in Aubervilliers, a little to the north of the Arc de Triomphe. By the time he was thirty he had paid off the family debts. By the time he was fifty he had the largest herd in the village.

They are calm today, Danielle, he went on, calm and agreeable, and they stay together. Not like yesterday — yesterday they could feel the storm, and there were flying ants. They ran with their tails straight out. They were as disagreeable as you can imagine yesterday. And today they are honey-sweet. As sweet as honey, Danielle.

It was the beginning of the summer and the grass was full of flowers, vanilla orchids, arnica, red campion, globeflowers, and blue centaurea that people say are the souls of poets.

Danielle was twenty-three. Her mother was dead and she lived with her elderly father, who had five cows and some goats. She had a job in the warehouse of a furniture factory. But in the spring of ’82 the factory went bankrupt, and so she proposed to take her father’s animals to the mountains — to the chalet where she had spent several summers as a child with her mother.

How does she have the courage to stay up there alone? people in the village asked. Yet the truth was she didn’t need courage. It suited her — the silence, the sun, the slow daily routine. Like many people who are sure of themselves, Danielle was a little intimidating. At village dances the boys didn’t fall over themselves to partner her — though she danced well and had wide hips and tiny feet. They weren’t sure she would laugh at their jokes. So they called her slow . In reality, this so-called slowness of hers was a kind of imperturbability. She had a wide face — a little like that of a Red Indian squaw — with dark eyes, large shoulders, small wrists and plump capable hands. It was easy to imagine Danielle as the mother of several children — except that she seemed to be in no hurry to find a man to be their father.

Grandad! she teased Marius, when she paid him a second visit a few days later. You dye it, don’t you?

Dye what?

Seventy and not a single white hair!

It’s in the breeding.

Danielle looked away as if she had suddenly forgotten her joke. The few white clouds above the peaks were the only sign that the world was still going on.

My father had the same head of hair, Marius continued, thick and black as a lamb when they nailed him in his coffin. Go fetch Lorraine, Johnny! he called to the dog, Find Lorraine!

The dog bounded away to fetch a cow who was straying along the slope to the west. Over the seasons the cows at Peniel have made, with their own feet, narrow paths like terraces along the slopes. You can wander along one of those paths without really noticing that on one side the drop below is getting steeper and steeper.

Go fetch Lorraine!

Marius had his own way of calling. His calls sounded like an order and an appeal at the same time. Everyone discovers how to make their voice carry in the mountains, and everyone knows that animals respond to sounds which are like songs. Yet his shouts were not musical, they were a kind of convulsive cry and each phrase ended with the sound OVER! Johnny bring over! Take over! Over there Johnny over! Somebody suddenly awaking from sleep might cry out like Marius calling to his dog.

Fetch Lorraine over!

Dangerous, he said. Lilac fell there two years ago and broke a leg. To save the meat I had to hack the carcass with an axe and take the quarters back to the chalet on a sledge. Alone. No one to help and no one to see.

The next time Danielle paid him a visit was in the evening. It had been very hot all day, the goats were as languid as she was. When she had finished milking, she climbed up to the pass. There she could hear the bells of Marius’s herd, and at the same time, behind her and much louder, the bells of her own five. She had an electric torch with her in case she needed it for the walk back.

Marius was sitting on a stool in his stable, empty except for one cow. He looked up from under his hat, his black eyes fixed intently upon Danielle.

I was doing my best to make you come, he growled, may need your help when it comes to pulling. I know my Comtesse.

Comtesse, the cow before them, had her tail in the air and glistening loops of mucus trailed from her distended vulva. Danielle approached her head and felt the temperature of her horns.

What she needs, she said, is some dew on her nose.

She wanted to joke because she saw that Marius’s hands were trembling. How many calves had he delivered during his lifetime? And now he owned not one but thirty cows. Why should he be nervous? The last sunlight was shining between the slats of the west wall. When Comtesse moved her head the bell around her neck tolled like an animal in pain. It was stifling as though all the wood of the floor and walls and roof, all the wood of the stable, were feverish; Danielle knew why he was nervous. To be nervous like that he had to be a man and he had to be old: it wasn’t the danger of losing the calf or the cow which worried him, it was a question of pride. As if he were being put to a test, as if he were on trial. No woman, young or old, would suffer like that.

The head’s twisted, muttered Marius, pushing his hat further back on his head, that’s why the bugger doesn’t come.

For the third or fourth time he rolled back his sleeve to the shoulder and plunged his right arm into the cow. The Comtesse was now so weak she was swaying like a drunk.

For Christ’s sake hold her up, he shouted, do you want to break my arm? Hold her up! God almighty, it’s not possible! Hold her up, do you hear me? Your father may be my worst enemy but you keep her on her feet, do you hear me?

Whilst he was shouting at Danielle he was quietly, systematically, searching with his open hand, fingers separated like probes, to find the calf’s shoulders and then its haunches and then with a single hand to turn them so that the calf could engage the passage. He was sweating profusely, so were Danielle and the Comtesse. Mucus, wood impregnated with a century’s smell of cows, sweat, and somewhere the iodine tang of birth.

It’s done, he grunted. He withdrew his arm and almost immediately two front hooves appeared, forlorn-looking as drowned kittens. Danielle was fingering the rope, impatient to slip it round the hooves and pull, and so finish with a labour that had already gone on too long, yet she hesitated because Marius was standing there, his face a few inches from the cow’s cunt, his eyes screwed up as if he were praying.

He’s coming to us! He’s coming. The calf slipped out limply, wearily, into Marius’s arms. He poured eau-de-vie over his fingers and forced them into the calf’s mouth so that it could suck. It looked more dead than alive. He carried it to the Comtesse, who licked its face and lowed. The sound she made was high and penetrating — a mad sound, thought Danielle. The calf stirred. She went to fetch some straw.

When all was arranged, Marius sat there on his stool, his right hand, with which he had turned the calf, still held open and extended, still making in the air of the stable the same gestures it had made in the womb. The difference was that it was no longer trembling.

You certainly know what you’re doing, Grandad!

Not always, not always.

A sweet breeze was blowing through the open door. The light was fading in the stable.

I couldn’t have done it without you, he said.

I did nothing.

He laughed and began to turn down the sleeves of his shirt. You were there! he cried, you were there! You kept her on her feet.

On her way home she was glad to have the torch, because the pass crosses from north to south, and with the moon still low in the east, the way between the crags was in dark shadow. She stopped to look up at the stars, which from there, where it was dark, seemed ten times brighter.