Once in Europa

by John Berger

  Late in the month of May, the grass grows before your eyes. One day it is like a carpet, the next it is halfway up your knees. Get it scythed, Albertine would say, or it’ll be tickling the cunt.

  The cows in Félix’s stable could smell the new grass. They followed with their insolently patient eyes the two swallows who were building a nest on the cross beam above the horse’s stall, empty since the purchase of the tractor. They stared at the squares of sunlight on the north wall which had been in shadow all winter long. They became restless. They lowed for Félix before it was milking time. They wouldn’t eat their croquettes quietly whilst being milked. When they licked each other with their large tongues, they did so with a kind of frenzy, as if the salt they were tasting had to be a substitute for all the green grass outside.

  They want to be out, don’t they? They don’t need a calendar to tell them, and they don’t give a fuck what year it is. Tomorrow we’ll put ’em out, tomorrow when the grass is dry.

  Late the following morning Félix undid each cow’s chain and opened the large door of the stable.

  Myrtille turned towards the sudden light and felt her neck free. Then she tottered, like a convalescent, to the door. Once outside, she raised her head, bellowed and trotted in the direction of the green grass she could see in the meadow. With each step she found her strength again.

  Hold her back, Mick!

  The dog bounded after the cow and barked at her forelegs so that she stopped, her neck stretched out taut and straight, her ears up like a second pair of horns, and her imperturbable eyes staring through the sunshine at the meadow. Immobile, her muzzle, her neck, her haunches and her tail in one straight line, she was like the first statue ever made of a cow. The other cows were pushing through the stable door three at a time.

  Calm, for Christ’s sake! There’s enough for you all. Get back, Princesse!

  They trundled their way down the slope towards Myrtille. Mick saw the whole herd charging at him. His mouth open without a bark, without a whine, he slunk to the side of the road as they thundered past and triumphantly swept Myrtille into the field. As soon as they felt their feet in the grass, their stampede ended. Some threw their hind legs up into the air. One pair locked their horns and shoved against each other with all their weight. Some turned slowly in circles, listening. The streams from the mountains above the village, white with froth because so much ice had melted, were babbling like madmen. The cuckoo was singing. Entire fields were suddenly changing their colour from green to butter-yellow, because the dandelions, shut at night, were opening their petals.

  Princesse mounted Mireille—when a cow is in heat, she often plays the bull.

  Get her off her!

  Mireille, with Princesse on her back, stood gazing at the mountains. The sunshine penetrated to the very marrow of their bones. When the dog approached, Princesse slid gently off Mireille’s back, and the wind from the northwest, from beyond the mountains, ruffled the hair between both their horns.

  Félix arranged the wire across the opening to the field, switched on the current, and, plucking a stalk of hemlock, held it against the live wire. After a second his hand shot up like a startled bird. He returned slowly to the house, stopping twice to look back at the happiness of the cows.

  He phoned the Inseminator to ask him to pass by for Princesse and gave him the code number of her previous insemination.

  In making hay there’s always a wager. The quicker the hay is in, the better it is. Yet the hay must be dry, otherwise it ferments. At the worst, tradition had it, damp hay could eventually set a house on fire. If you don’t take any risks you’ll never get your hay in early. At the best, you’ll be left with hay like straw. So, impatient, you bet on the sun lasting and the storm holding off. It’s not us making hay, repeated Albertine every year, it’s sun that makes the hay.

  This lottery made haymaking something of a fête. Each time they won they had cheated the sky. Sometimes they won by minutes, the first drops of rain falling as the horse pulled into the barn the last cart of the hay cut two days before. The hurry, the women and children in the fields, the sweat washed away with spring water, the thirst quenched with coffee and cider, being able to jump from a height of fifteen feet in the barn to land deliciously unharmed in the hay, the hay which he knew how to untangle and comb, the barn as tall as a church slowly filling up until, on top of the hay, his head was touching the roof, the supper in the crowded kitchen afterwards, this had all made haymaking a fête during the first half of his life.

  Today he was alone, alone to decide the risks, to cut the hay, to ted it, to turn it, to windrow it, to load it, to transport it, to unload it, to pack it, to level it, to quench his thirst, to prepare his own supper. With the new machines he did not have to work harder than in the first half of his life; the difference now was that he was finally alone.

  He had cut half the grass in what his father always called Grandma’s Field. It was on the slope above the linden tree. The hay had been turned but still needed a good hour’s sunshine. It was hot and heavy, the weather for horseflies. He studied the sky as if it were a clock to tell him how many hours away the storm might be. Then he bent down to pick up another handful of hay, assessing its dryness with his fingers. There were four trailer-loads to bring in. He decided to give it half an hour before windrowing. He switched off the tractor engine and walked over to the edge of the field where there was a strip of shade from a little ash grove. There he lay down and pulled the cap over his eyes. He tried to remember the cold of winter but couldn’t. He thought he heard thunder in the distance and jumped to his feet.

  Get it in now, Felo.

  He walked back towards the tractor along the edge of the un-mown half of the field where the grass was green and the flowers still coloured. The compagnon rouge, pink like lipstick. The tiny vetch scattered like stars of creamy milk. The bellflower, mauve, head bowed. The deep blue mountain cornflower, which cures conjunctivitis, its calyx crisscrossed with black lace like the stockings of dancers. As he noticed them he picked them. Herb bennett, yellow like a scarf. Crepide fausse blathaire, vigorous cropped blond. Fragrant orchid, red like a pig’s penis. He began to pick quickly and indiscriminately in order to make a bouquet, the first since he left school.

  Get it in now, Felo.

  He drove the tractor back to the house, unhooked the tedder and attached the windrower. The flowers he stuck into a jam jar which he filled with water from the kitchen tap.

  The storm broke as he was bringing the last load in.

  Saved by the skin of our teeth, Mick!

  In the barn he was stripped to the waist. His stomach and back, so rarely exposed to the air, were as pale as a baby’s. When you looked at him you thought of a father as seen by his child. Perhaps this was because his own flesh looked both manly and childish.

  When he had unloaded the trailer it was time to begin the milking. He walked out into the rain. He could feel it cooling his blood. It ran down his back into the inside of his trousers. Then he put on his vest and his tartan shirt, threw the blue cap onto his wet hair, switched on the motor for the milking machine and went into the stable. He left the door open, for there was little light inside and his eyes still smarted from the hay dust.

  The milking finished, he entered the kitchen. He had closed the shutters as Albertine had always insisted upon doing in the summer to keep the room cool. Light from the sunset filtered between their slats. On the window sill was the bunch of flowers he had picked. On seeing them he stopped in midstride. He stared at them as if they were a ghost. In the stable a cow pissed; in the kitchen the stillness and silence were total.

  He pulled a chair from under the table, he sat down and he wept. As he wept his head slowly fell forward until his forehead touched the oilcloth. Odd how sounds of distress are recognised by animals. The dog approached the man’s back and, getting up on its hind legs, rested its front paws on his shoulder blades.

  He wept for all that would no longer happen. He wept for his m
other making potato fritters. He wept for her pruning the roses in the garden. He wept for his father shouting. He wept for the bobsled he had as a boy. He wept for the triangle of hair between the legs of Suzanne the schoolmistress. He wept for the smell of a woman ironing sheets. He wept for jam bubbling in a saucepan on the stove. He wept for never being able to leave the farm for a single day. He wept for the farm where there were no children. He wept for the sound of rain on the rhubarb leaves and his father roaring: Listen to that! That’s what you miss when you go away to work for months, and when you come back in the spring and hear that sound you say, Thank God in Heaven I’m home! He wept for the hay, still to be brought in. He wept for the forty-two years that had gone by, and he wept for himself.

  In July the evenings seem endless. When Félix, his boots full of hayseed and his face tear-stained, took his two churns of milk to the dairy, he could see for miles across the valley towards the mountains. Most of the fields were mown. Because he was alone, he would always be the last to finish his hay. The heat gone, the shaved ground lay there in a kind of trance waiting for hares or lovers. He drove faster than usual, cutting the corners. His tyres screeched as he braked. There were already five other cars there. He kicked open the door as if he wanted to break it down. The cheesemaker and the other peasants who had delivered their milk looked at him quizzically. He poured his churn into the tub on the scales without glancing at the reading. And when he emptied the tub into the vat he did so with a ferocity that wiped the smile off the others’ faces. The milk splashed the wooden ceiling. His second churn he emptied the same way.

  Everything all right at home, Félix?

  Nothing, nobody to complain about.

  Have a glass of rouge? Albert, the old man, lifted a bottle off a shelf above the sink. Félix declined and left.

  For God’s sake! muttered one of them shaking his head.

  In a year or two, said Albert, he’ll start drinking. Men aren’t made to live alone. Women are stronger, they merge with the weather, I don’t know how.

  Find him a wife!

  He’ll never marry.

  Why do you say that?

  Too late.

  It’s never too late.

  To set up house with a woman, yes, it’s too late.

  He’d make a good husband.

  It’s a question of trust, insisted Albert.

  Whose trust?

  After forty a man doesn’t trust a woman enough.

  Depends on the woman.

  Any woman.

  In God’s name!

  Suppose he finds an old maid—he’ll say to himself: there must be something the matter with her, nobody else wanted her. Suppose he finds a woman who’s divorced—he’ll say: she did wrong by one man, she may do the same to me. Suppose he finds a widow—he’ll say: she’s been a wife once, it’s my farm she’s after! With age we all become a little meaner.

  And what if he finds a young woman who’s unmarried?

  Ah! my poor Hervé, said Albert, you say that because you’re still young yourself. If Félix finds a virgin—

  Virgin!

  No matter! Suppose he finds a young woman, he’ll say to himself—and who knows? he might be right—he’ll say to himself: in a year or so she’s going to cuckold me as sure as day follows night …

  The men laughed, Albert handed out a glass of wine, and they watched, idly, the white liquid heating in the copper vat, the white liquid that only starts flowing after a birth. Outside the sky was darkening faintly and the first stars were like sleep in its eyes.

  Félix, already back in the kitchen, was reading the Communist Party paper for peasants and agricultural workers.

  Do you know where the biggest bell in the world is, Maman?

  Not round the neck of one of our cows!

  It’s called the Tsar Kolokol, it weighs 196 tons and was cast in Moscow in 1735.

  That’s a bell I’ll never hear, she said.

  Suddenly he got up from the table and walked across the bare floorboards into the Middle Room. From under the large bed he pulled out the accordion case and came back with the instrument in his arms. There was no longer enough light to read by, yet he did not switch on the light. Instead, he opened the door to the stable and entered its darkness. He felt with his foot for the milking stool that he kept by the water tap and he sat down on it. Myrtille eyed him, another cow mooed. And in the stable, a yard from the gutter full of the cows’ greenish shit, he began to play. The air, hot with the heat of the animals who had spent the day in the sun, smelt strongly of garlic, for wild garlic grows in the field by the old road to St. Denis where they had been grazing. The instrument breathed in this air and its two voices smelt of it. He played a gavotte in quadruple time. Gavotte, which comes from gavot, meaning mountain dweller, meaning goitre, meaning throat, meaning cry.

  Most of the cows were bedded down. At first they turned their heads to where the music was coming from and the ears of those who were nearest went up, querying, yet very soon they discovered that the music represented nothing more than itself, and their ears relaxed and they put their heads again on their own flanks or on a neighbour’s shoulder. One of the swallows flew around like a bat, less easily reassured than the cows. As he played, Félix looked towards the small window beside the door. The stars were no longer like sleep in the corner of its eye, but like rivets. His head was rigid, only his body moved with the music.

  Now he was playing “Le Jeune Marchois,” a plaintive wedding march he’d learnt in the army from a friend who came from Limoges. Two fingers of his left hand, their nails broken, their knuckles engrained with dirt, the chapped tip of one cracked by the cold of winters, played a staccato beat which was as high and raucous as the cry of a corncrake. His right hand, raised level with his shoulder, was playing the melody which rose and fell like a chain of hills, a chain of gentle hills, of hillocks, of young breasts. His head was now nodding to the tune, his boot on the cobblestones tapping to the beat. The wedding procession approached and the undulating hills gave way to a hedgerow behind which appeared, disappeared and reappeared women with glistening stoles thrown over their shoulders. The calls of the corncrake too were transformed. No longer the cries of a bird, they were the whistle of air emitted from a leather bag punctured by the point of a knife. His two fingers hit the keys like rivet chargers. The procession had risen in the east by his right shoulder, now it was midday and was before his eyes. Each woman had removed her stole, and the white linen undulating in the wind caressed the bare shoulders of the woman behind her. The women could see the procession of men approaching. The whistles of air were gasps of breath. Appearing and disappearing behind the branches of the hedgerow, the women were undoing their hair. Yet already they were passing to the west. The gasps of breath became again the cry of a corncrake, more and more distant, disturbed, fleeting. The road behind the hedge was deserted. A mist covered the hills.

  A cow shat when he ceased playing. A pungent smell of wild garlic was wafted towards him. He remembered the waltz of “Rosalie de Bon Matin.” He played it as loud as he could.

  It was due to Louis, who can still argue a politician under the table, that Félix began to play regularly every week in the café at Lapraz. One evening the following winter Louis went to try to sell Félix a ticket for a lottery which was being organised to raise money to pay for the transport of the village children to the nearest swimming pool. Everyone born in the mountains should learn how to swim! was the motto of the campaign.

  There I was, explained Louis afterwards in the café, climbing up through the orchard to Felo’s house. It was already dark and I was glad I had a pocket lamp. At the top of the hill I thought I heard music. It must be the radio, I told myself. My hearing’s not as good as it used to be. From the big pear tree beside the yard a white owl flew up. There’s not many come up this way at night, I said. The music was clearer now, and it was an accordion. No radio sounds like that. The crafty boy, he’s got company, I said. Nearer the house, I couldn’t b
elieve my ears. The music was coming from the stable! There was a light in the window and the music was coming from the stable! Perhaps he’s dancing with the gypsies, perhaps he likes to dance with gypsies and is frightened to let them into the house, thieving good-for-nothings that they are. Who would have believed Felo would dance with gypsies if he wasn’t his father’s son? I peered through the filthy little window and inside I could make out the dancing figures. No use knocking here, Lulu, I said. So I tried the door. It was locked. To hell with the lottery ticket, I simply wanted to see what was going on. All the doors were locked and he was with the gypsies in the stable. Then I had an idea. Ten to one, Félix didn’t lock the barn door above the house. Up the ramp in five seconds and I was right, it was open. By each trap he’d prepared the hay to fork down to each cow in the morning. Not everyone does that, he’s farsighted, Félix. The music was coming up through the floorboards louder and wilder than ever—a mazurka. I lifted up one of the traps and, lying on my stomach on the little pile of hay, I peered through. There was the cow bedded down, and there was Félix seated on a stool, beneath the one dim electric light bulb, an accordion between his arms. For the rest I couldn’t believe my eyes. Lulu, you’re seeing things, I told myself. Félix was alone! Not another soul in the stable, playing to the fucking cows! He can play though, Félix can. You should get him to bring his music down here sometime.

  On the night of Philippe’s wedding, when the sky was already getting light from the dawn, long after Philippe had taken Yvonne to bed, and the parents and the parents-in-law had gone home, a few of us, including the dressmaker with dangling earrings who liked laughing and who worked in a factory that produced wooden handles for house painters’ brushes, a few of us were still dancing and Félix sat playing on his usual chair, his cap on the back of his bald head, his heavy working-boots tapping the floor as he played. We might have stopped dancing before, yet one tune had led to the next, and Félix had fitted them together like one pipe into another till the chimney was so high it was lost in the sky. A chimney of tunes, and the women’s feet so tired they had taken off their shoes to dance barefoot.