Klara

Today will be short. For a change. Because “almost mom” Klara doesn’t have a long story of her life to tell. They’ve jammed her up. Short and succinct.

They cornered her in a field. In the woods. They docked her in the summer with tourists. She gave birth, and how! After the last birth, she lost sight in one eye. She limped around. She dragged her leg behind her. That’s how she reached the barn.

She didn’t even enter it anymore. The farmer, after 8 years, slammed the barn gates in her face, tied her to a tree in the yard and called for someone to take her away.

On that October afternoon – a car rolled in. Among the first autumn golden leaves, she went in silence. Powerful, powerless, almost blind. She went haggard in the cool wind, among the mud and under the dark clouds. She hit the gangway with her hooves. So that the world would hear.

But the world is deaf today. We live in such noise that who would hear the rumble of hooves there.

“The foal is, that and the price is high, if it doesn’t fit, get out,” chuckles a bearded man. Well, and you tell me that mothers do not beat. But they do beat them. No one from the ultrasound at the slaughterhouse gate is standing. Klara passes it in a second, before she knows it she will get wet in today’s rain.

You know, I know that horses get slaughtered. It’s an eternal debate whether man is carnivorous. Well, and what a horse is better at than a pig. I’m not writing to you to discuss evolution or anything.

But what drives me, personally, crazy is exploiting an animal for years and then looking at the sky, whistling and loading it for slaughter because it broke down, wore out got old. I try not to have aggression in myself towards anyone, but believe me, although I am a woman, today when I stand here alone, I would take the whip and …

Because there is a peddler standing in front of me, a friend of the landlord where Klara served for years. He stands and shoots her over the head with this whip. And she, half blind and terrified, hits her head against the railings, then against the wall. And then she glances at me pleadingly, resigned and at once full of some strange hope.

“Strange is this world…” as Czeslaw Niemen sang.
And I will repeat it after him today.

For Klara.
I beg.
To her.