Don't look up
Para is already home and I'm worried. In Kiev it was the other way round, where it is clear what can happen and what the response will be, I have seen it. A beautiful Tuesday morning, on the news, Israel has replaced Ukraine - the war is further away from us. The power of the media, when they are baking the news from their sofas, is staggering. I remember the article about the Kenosha railway station in Kalveli (or is that just me? It sounds strange?) scrolling through my mind, and images immediately spring to mind, with the details of the stories from Ukraine overlapping with those fresh from the kibbutzim on the Gaza border.
The same tactic is used again. The "green" men in slippers, the ordinary "Shakhtiors", deceived this time not the SBU or the GUR, but MOSSAD and CACHAL themselves.
The recipe for "success" is an infiltrated agency and fast vehicles, improvised missiles and drones. In Ukraine, this was the case in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, in Mariupol, Borodianka, Buche, or even Kherson (the list is long) last year, when cities fell not because of the invasion of heavy equipment, but because saboteurs "woke up". On 24 February last year, a group of men wearing red sneakers ran out of my friend's house in Buche, not to play sport but to kill.
...the past gets projected into the future, so it's hard to believe that we are in line. My brain searches for sedatives - I take a shovel, head for the border with Mordor. I want to dig trenches. Naive.
The road to the Medininkai border checkpoint is wide and smooth, with the usual traffic - lots of trucks and cars with Belarusian plates. The protests are long over and life goes on as it should, colluding with enemies who are nothing more than man-eating vulgaris. The road is so different from the one leading to the Belarusian border from Kiev and Bucha, with no fortifications, no trenches, no roadblocks. I did not see any police crews either, and until recently, some 10 years ago, they were working like mad on that route. Only the 'border area' sign reminds us where we are. It is like the sign on the neighbours' fence: an angry dog that looks like a dachshund and a cat.
Only 33 km from the centre of Vilnius - the border, and I drive up to it after listening to a few songs. The number of bicycles left at the barriers is surprising, and another one arrives as I film. This is how those in a hurry cross the border. This is how the Russians crossed the border in the north of Norway... a strange sight.
In the shack where the musician lives, there is silence, he has been in the city, giving way to his protest, which has been going on for the second or third year. It is only thanks to him that the gateway to Lithuania in that place has been decorated not only with the flag of the Gulgarian opposition, but also with the Ukrainian bicolour with our tricolour.
I get in my car and drive towards the gates of hell, turn around after hitting a stile and drive along the border towards Shumsk. It is a strange feeling when you know that just a kilometre away there is an abyss. From the hills you can see fields divided by a fence, ploughed fields in the distance, and there are probably roads for the machinery to drive along. I stop at a road that leads to the large village of Medininkai - a village of three and a half huts. The border is 500 metres away, and the surroundings are as if I were in the centre of Phoenix Park in Dublin, with a herd of roe deer on the run, never to escape from our freedom reserve. It's peaceful. No war and a 4G connection makes it great to talk to a friend in Ukraine.
I also turn calmly towards the closed Shumsk checkpoint, passing a car abandoned by mushroom pickers, the road covered with a thick layer of needles. A few more months and it will resemble a post-apocalyptic movie. The roadblock is met with a STOP sign and a dead end. It is empty and only the eyes of the cameras watch me. I drive calmly and slowly back to Vilnius.
Nobody cares what I'm doing there.
Kenya's Kalveli station greets you with a proudly standing electric car, its front showing whose it is - the red star from the abyss beyond the gates of hell.
The station has several trains in transit to the occupier's lands in East Prussia, our electric train with the Vytis on the first track, and the Ukrainian flag still missing from three masts. The members of the delegations, who are so fond of having their photographs taken there, do not care. Just as nobody is interested in the passengers on a stationary Russian train looking at billboards with photographs of people who have been murdered by their tribesmen. Those who asked for Russia to be invited did not think about it - it was not for them.
At the station, there is only security and one Border Guard car, and I have no one to complain to about the empty flagpole, so I drive home through a village where there is not a single Vytis or tricolour.
Vilnius 35km.
Don't look up. Don't look up.
