I tired of eating pieces of cheese and I dozed off, sitting in the cinema seat. The strange thing was that all the seats were still facing in the right direction except for the seat I was sitting on, which had its back to the screen and faced the projection room high up at the back.
The same thing happened again the next morning. The cow appeared and looked at me through the rectangular hole in the projection room, then it went on its way. I must admit that I was curious about the cow. What would a cow be doing in the projection room, I wondered. It occurred to me that the army had let it loose to spy on the people staying in the cinema. I didn’t know anything about cow behaviour. But I found I wanted to follow it, because it was the first cow I had ever seen in real life.
The teddy bear was lighter now, because I had eaten several of the wedges of cheese in its tummy. I quickly unwrapped three more wedges and stuffed them into my mouth one after another. They tasted different now – less tasty than before. The cheese was sticky and upset my stomach. Now they tickled the roof of my mouth and I felt I was going to be sick, but I swallowed them like medicine. I tried to get up from the seat and only managed it with a great effort, in order to follow the cow. I left the auditorium and walked behind it. The cow wasn’t in any great hurry; it was walking at a very leisurely pace, picking its way with difficulty because of the debris scattered everywhere. Despite that, it seemed completely at ease, as if it knew where it was going. I was struck by how clean it was, as if it were a house cat rather than a cow. But every now and then it would stop, bend its head and eat something that had just fallen from up above. I couldn’t see what the cow was eating, but I could tell that it was hungry. The teddy was in my hands – I thought I had left it on the cinema seat – and once again it was full of wedges of cheese, as it had been ever since the cinema had been shelled. I took out a piece and threw it as hard as I could towards the hungry cow, in case it wanted to eat it. I hadn’t unwrapped it and I wasn’t sure that the cow would be able to unwrap it with its teeth, but I threw it anyway. Although the wedge of cheese was small, it didn’t go very far. It landed one or two paces away from me. The cow paid it no attention at all. I took out another piece, unwrapped it this time, and threw it. It also landed only a metre or two away from me. It was as if I’d thrown a heavy sack.
I don’t know why the wedges of cheese wouldn’t go any further. I zipped up the teddy bear and followed the cow. It was walking slowly, because of the debris, and also because the street was too narrow for it. The cow was really fat, but it kept on walking. As it moved its fat body brushed against the walls of the buildings on either side. Sometimes a plant would fall down and get trampled on the ground and the cow would stop, lower its head and eat it. There were other plants that had been trampled and buried under the rubble but the cow didn’t notice those ones. It only ate the plants that fell as a result of its body rubbing along the walls of the buildings.
I wanted to follow the cow to find out where it would go, but I was worried about losing track of the cinema, so I retraced my steps. Along the way I tried to get some of the plants out from under the rubble but the stones were heavy and I could shift them only a fraction of an inch. I really wanted to feed the dead plants to the cow, because I thought the cow might be frightened. Perhaps she only ate the plants that fell because it was easier and it meant she didn’t have to stop for long.
But this cow wasn’t like those cows that fall off trucks or escape from their farm the night before they are due to be slaughtered and hide in a school classroom with tears in their black eyes and their hearts beating rapidly. It was very different from any cow anyone might ever have heard of. It had belonged to a soldier and he kept looking for her. On the way to the cinema he stopped me and asked me if I had seen a cow in the area. I knew from his uniform that he was one of the soldiers who were the reason we had taken shelter in the cinema. So when he started talking to me, I was frightened and I almost started crying. But he said he wouldn’t harm me if I showed him where the cow was. I told him I hadn’t seen a cow in the area. I felt I was telling the truth, the whole truth, and that I really hadn’t seen a cow anywhere. He also asked me about the teddy bear and I told him it was for food and had wedges of cheese in it. But he wasn’t interested. He didn’t ask me to unzip the teddy to make sure. There was a pistol on his hip.
The soldier told me he had brought the cow from his home far away and that when they enlisted him he couldn’t possibly part with his cow, so he had brought her along with him. He loved her very much. He said the cow sat with him in the tank. He got it into the tank without the officers knowing. But he had lost it a few days earlier. His tank had been ambushed and his arm was wounded and he lost consciousness. When he came round, he asked about the cow and they thought he was hallucinating. They gave him an injection to make him sleep. He said he spent a week being injected with tranquillizers, whether he asked about the cow or not. Then they sent him back to the army. But how the cow managed to clamber out of the tank, he didn’t know. He was talking and I was listening. He said he had been going up to the flats where people were living. He would knock on a door and when the people opened it, he would ask them, ‘Are there any terrorists here?’ But he wasn’t interested in ‘terrorists’, only in his cow. He didn’t go into the flats, but from the doorway he would take a peek inside to see if she was there or not. He knew the sound of her voice well and could tell it apart from other cows’. His cow couldn’t stand strangers, so she would definitely moo as soon as she saw her soldier friend.
When the soldier finished speaking, I left. I said, ‘I haven’t seen your cow,’ and walked away. He walked off in another direction, resuming his search for the cow. Before I got back to the cinema, I decided I would kill the cow when I next saw her; if I couldn’t kill her, I would have to hurt her, so that he couldn’t possibly put her back in the tank. I was certain for some reason that she would come through the projection room the next morning, and that’s exactly what happened.
And I ended up walking after her again.
The cow followed the same path. This time I was determined to get to the buildings before her. I ran as fast as I could, holding the teddy bear in my hand. It started swinging in the air slowly because its stomach was stuffed with wedges of cheese. I overtook the cow and stopped at the first building. I took out a piece of cheese and filled the cracks in the wall of the building with it. I did the same thing with every building I came to. When the cow’s body rubbed against the buildings, no plants now fell off, and so the cow would die of hunger. I kept up with the cow for three days, reaching the buildings first and filling the cracks with cheese. The cow often changed course and went to other buildings, but I would get there first and I would never give her a chance to rub any plants off the walls. The cow didn’t eat anything for three days straight and then it collapsed on the ground from hunger. Because it was a cow and not a cat, it wouldn’t lick the cheese off the walls as a cat might do.
The cow was half-dead and I was exhausted too. With a sense of relief I stopped to look at her. I even kicked her. But the kick didn’t hurt her at all. Over the previous few days I’d done a lot – I’d spent most of the time filling the cracks with cheese and I hadn’t eaten a single piece. I hadn’t eaten anything all the days I’d been working, because I needed to use all the wedges. My only rest was when I slept on the cinema seat facing the projection room. I didn’t sit in any other chair, because it was the only seat facing the projection room and from it I could see the cow passing in the morning.