remote cards

From all over the provinces they rumbled in on their tractors, blocking the roads: Red plastic cows tied onto the back, homemade cardboard signs saying "Sorry folks, we're on our way to town."
Like dinosaurs, they shouldn't be here. Like things torn from the insides of bodies, of the fruitful farming body of the nation, worn down and weary and terrible with the power of fossilised giants, they have made their way to the capital. There they stand and wait. You sense that only a great evil, a desperate wrong could force this to happen, this ghost parade. This gives the air a crisp tautness.

The Ring Road is full of the damn things, police have cordoned it off and now it is more quiet than it should ever be. Just a long line of silent tractors, facing parliament.
Within minutes the tourists swarm out, snatching tiny cameras to their faces again and again in amateur concentration. They dart, like bees. Old men in thick sweaters wander among the machines, appreciative connoisseurs pointing at this one or that, engine names and years drop from their lips effortlessly like honey. At the end of the road, far away from the chants of the demonstrators, the air becomes joyful and tingling.
The old men whisper reverently: How impressive these machines are, how strong. How invincible the metal underneath the scratched paint, how rough and thick the tire profiles with their tan cakes of mud. How real they are! And oh how long since they have been seen here, since anything this real has been seen here.

And there am I among the tourists, darting back and forth until I trip and I am caught from behind. I feel the rough wool scratch of a pullover, and the wonderful smell of milk and cows. He is young, he wear a sign on his chest saying "fair milk". He has these sharp, ironic, distanced eyes they have, that still manage to smile, the ones that warn you not to take liberties. I say, "sorry!" And he says "no problem", and when he smiles it is maybe a smile and maybe it isn't. And he is strolling on with his buddies anyway, picking his way through the maze of sleeping tractors, talking to them perhaps with anger about these strange strange towns.

Labels: cows, farmers, parade, protest, vienna