First there was Mum. She smelled of milk, hay and warmth. She smelled like Mum.
I don’t know whether warmth really has a smell, but back then it did. When I tucked my head beneath her belly, everything was all right.
Straw under my feet, her breath above me, and that beloved rough tongue she used to lick me.
Sometimes I closed my eyes, and then it felt even better.
I thought that was what life looked like. Mum was always there, there was milk, then sleep, then Mum again. And so on forever.
I didn’t know yet that “forever” is a very short word…
One morning a man came. I knew him. Every day he brought food, opened the doors, looked after us, and sometimes scratched Mum’s neck. He spoke gently to me:
“Little one.”
I liked it when he called me that. Mum wasn’t afraid of him either. He was one of ours, after all. A friend. Back then I thought all people were good.
But that day he didn’t stroke Mum. He put something around my neck and pulled. I didn’t know why. Maybe he wanted to take me somewhere for a little while. I didn’t want to go, so I braced my legs, but my legs were still weak and his hands were big.
Mum came up to the metal partition and began to cry out. People say “bellow,” as if it were only a loud sound.
I knew it wasn’t just a sound.
Mum was calling me.
I called back. I turned my head and cried as loudly as I could. The man must not have understood, because he kept pulling.
Then another man came and helped him. They talked calmly as they did it. One said it would probably rain in the afternoon.
The other said that was good because it had been dry.
That calmed me a little. If they were talking about rain, maybe nothing bad was happening.
Mum followed me on the other side of the barrier for as long as she could. For a moment we were almost side by side.
Only the railing was between us. I looked at her and she looked at me. Then the passage ended.
Mum stayed behind, crying out. I answered her.
I could hear her for a long time.
“He’ll get over it,” one of the men said.
After a while I no longer had the strength to call.
But I didn’t get over it.
They took me to another place. It was bright, clean and quiet. I was given milk from a rubber teat. It was warm.
I drank because I was hungry, but I kept turning my head. I looked for Mum by the teat, then beside the wall, then between the bars.
The milk smelled like milk.
It did not smell like Mum.
At first I thought she might come any moment. Maybe the man had simply forgotten to bring her. Then I thought she would come in the evening. Later, perhaps the next morning.
At first I truly believed she was somewhere nearby.
After a few days I knew.
Behind the partition lived someone like me. Small too. Sometimes he pushed his head between the pipes and we touched cold noses. It felt good. For a moment you could feel that you weren’t alone.
Sometimes he would stare into the distance for a long time.
I didn’t know whether he remembered his mum too. I think he did.
You don’t need words to know things like that.
People came in the morning, at noon and in the evening. They had rubber boots, buckets, gloves and phones. They were always hurrying somewhere.
Sometimes one of them stopped beside me.
“Nice one.”
Another looked me over more carefully.
“Good weight gain.”
Someone else asked:
“How much is he now?”
I thought they were asking how many days old I was. Maybe they wanted to know whether I was still very young.
Later I understood they were asking about kilograms.
That surprised me a little. I didn’t know you could count all of me in kilograms. I still had a nose with which I searched for Mum.
I had ears, and I liked it when someone scratched behind them. I had eyes. I had my favourite place by the wall, where a little morning sun came in.
But here the most important thing was the number of kilograms.
Then I was given another number. They fastened it to my ear.
NUMBER.
From then on, that was what people looked at. They came over, took hold of my ear, read the digits and wrote something down.
If the number matched, they were pleased.
I was pleased too.
If they were pleased, I must have been doing everything right.
I felt useful to someone.
Mum didn’t need a number. She never checked anything. She knew me by my voice, by my smell, perhaps even by the way I came up to her.
People have it harder. That’s why they invented numbers.
They say people used to have numbers tattooed on them too. I don’t know why. Other people did it to them. They haven’t done that for more than eighty years. Now they number themselves differently.
I grew, though I don’t think anyone expected me to grow very much. More and more often I heard a new word.
Veal.
I didn’t know what it meant.
They said it was good. Pale. Tender.
I liked “tender” best. It was a pretty word. It sounded a little like “little one,” the words the man had once used for me.
I was happy.
They were talking about me, after all.
I mattered to someone.
One morning a large truck arrived. They opened the back and lowered a metal ramp. They began leading us inside.
None of us wanted to go in.
I didn’t know why. I had never ridden in a truck before. Maybe we were going to a pasture. Maybe there would be lots of grass. Maybe Mum would even be there.
I wanted to think that.
But my body thought differently.
It backed away.
Fear has a smell.
That was the first time I truly understood it. It is cold, sour, and passes very quickly from one animal to another.
The man by the ramp didn’t seem to smell it. He patted me on the back.
“Come on.”
The calf in front of me slipped and fell. The man swore, but a moment later bent down and helped him up.
That calmed me a little.
If he helped him, then surely he didn’t mean us any harm.
People are strange. First they push you, then they help you up. Sometimes it is hard to understand whether they are good or bad.
Maybe even they don’t know.
In the truck we stood very close together. At every turn we all leaned in the same direction.
There was nowhere to move away. I felt another body beside me, another breath, and the smell of fear.
The driver turned on the radio.
Someone was singing about love, longing, and how you cannot live without the person you love.
The song was beautiful.
I thought of Mum.
I always thought of Mum when I didn’t know what was happening to me.
After a while the truck stopped. The doors opened. I saw concrete, metal railings, a wet floor and people in aprons. It smelled of water, cleaning chemicals, animals and something else.
Something terrible.
Panic. And something even more terrible, something I had no name for.
I still didn’t know where it came from, but my body seemed to know. My legs refused to move again.
One man checked papers, another checked the numbers in our ears, a third examined us one by one. The third wore a white coat.
White made me think of Mum’s milk.
I calmed down a little.
He must be a good person.
He looked at my eyes, touched my leg and checked the number.
“All right,” he said.
I was happy.
I was all right!
I just didn’t know what that meant for me.
They led us into a narrow passage. There was no way to turn back. One calf stood in front of me. Another behind. We moved forward slowly.
The first disappeared through a door.
I waited for him to come back.
He didn’t.
Then the second disappeared.
He didn’t come back either.
I thought there must be a great deal of space behind that door, since everyone went in and no one came out.
Then it was my turn.
On the other side stood a man in a green apron. He didn’t look bad. He looked very, very tired. He adjusted his glove, hiccupped and prepared some kind of device.
He never once looked me in the eyes.
I wanted him to look.
Just once.
Maybe then he would see that I was little.
Maybe he would see that I was afraid.
Maybe he would ask where my mum was.
I didn’t know I could still be saved. I didn’t even know such a word. I only wanted him to see me, just for one second. To see that I was here.
That I was alive.
That I was looking at him.
That I was afraid.
Then there was a bang.
He was the one who let my soul out of my body.
Suddenly everything became strangely peaceful. I could no longer feel the floor or my own weight. I was very light.
After a moment I saw my body from above.
I recognised it at once.
That was me.
Or rather, no longer me.
Only a moment before I had walked on those legs. Only a moment before I had looked at the man in the green apron with those eyes.
Now the body belonged to people.
They worked quickly and efficiently. One did his part, then moved me on. Another took over the body and did the next thing. Someone sprayed water, someone adjusted an apron.
“Faster, we’re holding things up,” one of them said.
The other replied with something funny.
They laughed.
I didn’t hold it against them.
For me, EVERYTHING had just happened.
For them, it was eleven twenty.
There were still several hours left until the end of the shift.
I felt a little sorry for them.
I only had to be there once.
They had to come back tomorrow.
I watched as my body looked less and less like me. Things I knew disappeared, and things I had never seen before appeared. I hadn’t known I had so many different parts inside me. A heart, lungs, liver, muscles, intestines, bones.
I looked at the heart a little longer.
It was what beat when Mum licked me.
It was what beat fast in the truck.
It was what pounded hardest in front of the man in the green apron.
Now it was still.
Later my body was taken to a huge, cold room. Many others hung there. Some bigger, some smaller.
Not long before, each of us had been someone in our own right. Each had their own smell, eyes, voice, their own place to sleep. Each had probably once stood close to their mum.
Now we all looked the same.
A man with a notebook came. He checked the temperature, wrote something down and moved on. Another man inspected the meat and stamped it.
“Everything is in order,” he said.
I was happy again.
Strange.
Even when you’re no longer alive, it feels good to hear that everything is all right with you.
The next day other people came. They had knives, saws and thick aprons. They worked and talked. One told the others about a car that wouldn’t start that morning. Another talked about a match. A third complained about a co-worker who had failed to show up for his shift again.
While they talked, they cut me into pieces.
People have names for everything. They also have names for the pieces I can be divided into.
Leg, shank, loin, shoulder, brisket.
They sounded a little like names of places on a map.
Only the country was gone.
While I was alive, I was one.
Then it turned out I could travel to several places at once.
One part went somewhere else, another stayed, another was packed separately.
The piece I stayed with longest was placed on a white tray and covered with clear plastic.
It looked very clean.
Very tidy.
Then they put on a label. It had a date, a weight, a price and a name:
VEAL CUTLET
I stared at those two words for a long time.
Veal.
I suppose that meant mine.
Apparently that was what I was now.
Not all of me.
Just a piece.
Of all the things I learned about people, this was perhaps the strangest. They can take someone who once had eyes, legs and a mum, divide him into small pieces, give each piece a different name, and then no longer see what had been there before.
Maybe that’s why they invent so many names.
I was taken to a shop. It was bright and cool. Refrigerators hummed quietly, and dozens of packages lay around me. Each had a price, a weight and a use-by date.
Some looked like me.
I wondered whether I had known any of them from the truck.
There was no way to tell.
Without eyes and a nose it is hard to recognise one another.
People walked along the refrigerated cases. They picked us up, looked us over, read the labels and put us back.
The first woman who picked me up stared at the price for a long time.
“They’ve lost their minds. Too expensive,” she said, and put me back.
I felt something like pride.
All my life no one had ever told me how much I was worth.
Now I knew: a lot.
It feels good to be someone valuable.
Later another woman came with a little boy. He might have been five.
She chose the groceries while he peered at everything and asked questions about everything.
She picked me up.
“We’ll have veal. It’s tender.”
That word again.
Tender.
I had heard it before, when I still stood on my own legs.
Back then I thought it meant something nice.
The boy looked at the tray.
“Mum, what is veal?”
“Meat.”
“But from what?”
The woman hesitated for a moment.
“From a calf.”
“A little one?”
“Yes.”
The boy stared at the red pieces under the plastic for a long time.
I waited.
Maybe he would ask where that calf had lived?
Maybe he would ask whether it had a mum?
Maybe he would ask whether it missed her?
Maybe he would ask why a calf that had been little was here now?
He didn’t ask.
And his mother put me in the basket.
I landed next to a carton of milk.
Milk.
If I could still have laughed, I think I would have.
Of all the things in that enormous shop, they had put me beside milk.
I looked at the white carton and suddenly felt those first days again. Mum’s warm belly and her milk. Hay. Her rough tongue. The place beneath her belly where everything was all right.
For a moment I truly believed that if I remembered hard enough, I would go back.
The basket moved on.
At the checkout the woman put the groceries on the belt. First bread, then milk, then me.
The cashier passed everything over the scanner.
Bread – beep.
Milk – beep.
Me – beep.
I thought that was a very strange last sound of mine.
Once I had had a real voice of my own.
With it I had called Mum as loudly as I could.
Now the last sound I made among people was made by the till in my place.
The woman paid. The boy got a lollipop. The groceries went into a bag and we went to their home.
The kitchen was warm.
A little like it had been with Mum.
The woman put me in the refrigerator, later took me out and laid me on the counter. She was talking on the phone. She laughed. Someone on the other end must have said something funny too.
Meanwhile she cut open the plastic, threw away the tray and heated a frying pan.
She wasn’t doing it out of anger.
She wasn’t bad.
She was simply making dinner.
That was another thing I learned.
The worst things are not always done by bad people.
Sometimes good people do them while they are making dinner.
There was butter in the pan. Then salt and pepper. It sizzled. It smelled unlike anything I had ever known.
The boy came into the kitchen.
“Mum, Mum, when is dinner?”
“In a minute,” Mum answered.
Mum.
That word hurt me more than the pan.
They sat down at the table. On the boy’s plate there was a small piece of me, potatoes and something green. For a while the boy pushed the meat around with his fork.
“Eat, it’ll get cold,” his mother said.
He tasted it.
“Good?”
He nodded.
“Soft.”
The woman smiled.
“Because veal is tender.”
That word again.
Tender.
Yes.
I really was tender. I was only a little child, after all.
I liked milk. I liked warmth. In the mornings I liked standing where a strip of sunlight came through a crack. I liked it when someone scratched behind my ear. I was a little curious. Loud noises frightened me.
Most of all, I liked standing beside Mum.
That isn’t much for an entire life.
But my life wasn’t long either.
I’m not angry with the boy.
Truly.
How could he have known?
They told him it was veal.
They didn’t tell him that before that I had been a cheerful little calf. That I had a mum. That I had been happy beside her. That later I was given a number.
That I drank milk from a teat and kept turning my head because I thought Mum would come any moment. That in the truck I listened to a song about love. That I was afraid of the man in the green apron.
They didn’t tell him that once I had called for Mum until I had no strength left.
You don’t tell children things like that over dinner.
What amazes me most, though, is how many people had to do just one small thing each for me to end up on that plate.
There was the man who fed me. The one who helped take me away from Mum. Those who gave me milk from a teat. Those who led me to the truck. The driver who drove me. The man in the white coat who checked whether I was healthy. The tired man in the green apron who let my soul out. Those who divided my body.
Those who weighed it and packed it. Someone who stuck on the price. Someone who drove me to the shop. Someone who put me in the refrigerated case. The cashier who passed me over the scanner.
The woman put me in the frying pan.
The little boy ate me.
Everyone did only a little.
No one did everything.
Maybe that is why the whole thing was so easy to do?
Sometimes I still wonder what happened to Mum.
Did she call for me for a long time that morning? When my voice went quiet, did she keep answering? The next day, did she stand by the same metal railing and wait?
Maybe she thought I would come back.
For a while, I thought so too.
I wonder whether later she still went there looking for me. Did she sniff the place where I had slept? Did she turn her head whenever, far away, she saw or heard another little calf?
And when at last she stopped looking for me, was it because she had forgotten? Or because she understood?
I don’t know.
I only know that people needed a number to know who I was.
Mum never needed one.
Because mothers always know which child is missing.