29 March 2024, Friday, 10:54
Support
the website
Sim Sim,
Charter 97!
Categories

Why Do You Need Money, Kisa? You’re Old

40
Why Do You Need Money, Kisa? You’re Old
Iryna Khalip

A bunker is almost a grave.

I have this question of Ostap Bender in my mind for days. Or even for years. But now, when I see Putin waging war from the bunker, it sounds particularly relevant.

Why should one start a war, bombing maternity hospitals and kindergartens, taking civilians who are sitting without water and heat under siege? Why do you need all this killing if you are sitting in a bunker and will be there for the rest of your life? Why do you need these meaningless bloody billions that you will never use? All sorts of "trustees" of numbered accounts will gradually steal them away. Or maybe they already have. One can't tell from the bunker.

Once upon a time Putin had, they say, a taste for life. He spent money with pleasure. He chased pretty women, wore nice suits. He organised banquets, flew with Siberian white cranes, dived, stepped out on the tatami, drove a boat, and posed with a builded torso. Rich and authoritative Russians in a friendly manner wore a watch on their right hand instead of their left. Putin does it. He is not only the head of state, but also a trendsetter. They lined up to order a half-million-dollar watch. Lange&Söhne Tourbograph Perpetual "Pour le Mérite". There are only a few dozen such watches in the world, so one has to turn inside out to get one.

The botoxed face replaced the builded torso; a bunker somewhere deep underground replaced the interiors of the Konstantinovsky Palace, where the G8 leaders met; a mystical fear of all that exists in the world replaced the arrogant self-confidence in his might. Putin has no Internet - he has confessed. He does not realise that this is not an oddity or an amusing habit he shares, but that he is voicing a diagnosis. He thinks one can cast a spell over the Internet, inflict a serious illness, or infect him with a coronavirus. Or some Kashpirovsky could break into his bunker through a screen and give him the wrong message. No, he'd rather sit in a sterile cell underground. Actually, a bunker is almost a grave.

What was the point in robbing his people, distributing subsoil to their friends in the Ozero co-operative, waging war of invasion, murdering journalists, imprisoning politicians and businessmen? If it all meant yachts, women and cocktails at sunset - the motive would be clear. But why all this, if the loot cannot even be used, is a question without an answer. Even Alina Kabaeva must now appear in front of Putin in a plague suit and sit in the opposite corner of the bunker, as recently Macron did. He is certainly not enjoying these meetings. Nor does he take pleasure in the billions he has stashed away. "What are you going to buy, Kisa? You're going to die soon, you old man." Ostap Ibragimych has mentioned everything. There is nothing left to add.

Meanwhile, we have our bunker seven hundred kilometres from that underground grave, on the outskirts of the town of Ostroshitsky. And that's where Kisa sits too. He is almost the same, only without Botox (though who knows - there is no one who wants to look at him closely). Our Belarusian bunker was built in the USSR and used to decorate (or rather fortify) Marshal Timoshenko's dacha. According to technical characteristics, the bunker must withstand a nuclear explosion. When Lukashenka has decided to settle down there, this marshal's dacha together with the bunker was surrounded by a three-meter fence and guard towers along its perimeter. He feels more comfortable and relaxed there. Should one wonder that he has chosen the dacha with the bunker in Ostroshitsky for his permanent residence? ("Only losers live in Drozdy now," explain the former officials, who have managed to move from Drozdy to the seashores and thermal resorts.) The nuclear bunker is the only place in the country where no gamma particles, Tsoi's songs or even the loud Long Live Belarus can reach.

He has been racketeering, stealing, killing, taking away the people's earnings for more than a quarter of a century. Banker's millions or greasy money in a pensioner's wallet heartens more when they are forcibly taken away to the bottomless pit-pocket. To end up in a bunker, be afraid of your own shadow, the phone call, the guard, your sons, the girls walking around town. To greedily buy senselessly expensive brand clothes, which one cannot even wear to show off outdoors, because the street tear you to pieces. Was it worth it?

However, it was their choice. It makes no sense to ask rhetorical questions now, when the choice has long been made and the path has been passed. Only one question arises why do you need money in the bunker, Kisa?

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

Write your comment 40

Follow Charter97.org social media accounts