Angel Lisa

Iryna Khalip
15.03.2024, 19:15
34,744

There are no more safe places left on the world map.

Yesterday Lisa was buried in Warsaw. None of the Belarusians need her last name or profession, no one needs to explain who this girl is. It is enough to say the name, and everyone will understand: Lisa is the same Belarusian woman who was raped and killed in the center of Warsaw on Żurawia Street.

Żurawia (Crane) Street — what a beautiful name. I remember it very well. The very center of the city, crosses Marszałkowska. On this street, in one of the large office buildings on the sixth floor, there is a nice bookstore selling books in the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian languages. And on this street there is a district court, four ministries, a notary’s office, coffee shops and barbershops, cinemas and restaurants. In short, a bourgeois wealthy street in the very center of Warsaw. Now there will also be an unofficial memorial for Lisa.

I look at her photographs: Lisa was fantastically beautiful. Brown-eyed brunette, a Monica Bellucci lookalike. She fled from repression. Found a wonderful guy from Ukraine in Warsaw. Knitted funny bunny-eared hats. Dreamed of Paris. At 25, one’s supply of dreams is limitless, and life seems eternal. At 25, you don’t think about death — only about love and Paris. Perhaps Lisa would not even have returned to Belarus — she would have fulfilled her dream, settled in a bohemian Parisian area, recorded videos with French beauties for TikTok. Or she would have settled in Warsaw, become a typical local lady, and grown her roots. Or maybe she would return to a free Belarus. No point guessing now — Lisa will not return anywhere.

During this time, many wrote, spoke and shouted about the defenselessness of women, demanded changes in legislation, and spoke at a rally in memory of Lisa. This is all correct and necessary. I was just thinking about something completely different at that time.

Lisa was just walking home through the center of Warsaw. Along Żurawia Street — not along Wilcza (Wolf) or Krucza (Raven) Streets (there are streets with such ominous names nearby), but along Żurawia, not knowing that he was walking towards death. Exactly the same young beauties, looking like Monica Bellucci, danced carefreely in the open air at a music festival in Israel on the night of October 7 last year, not suspecting that in a few hours they would be raped and killed. And on February 12, 17-year-old Ukrainian basketball player Volodymyr Ermakov, who left for Germany because of the war and played for the Art Giants Dusseldorf club, was preparing for the next day’s game and did not know that he would never play again, because in broad daylight in the middle of the prosperous city of Oberhausen his two teenagers with knives would just kill.

And it doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman, a teenager or a pensioner. You are running away from war or repression and find yourself in a safe and prosperous country. You no longer flinch from bomb explosions or from the fact that your door could be broken down by GUBOPIK at dawn. You don’t delete messages in your phone before going outside and don’t look for the nearest bomb shelter just in case. You write freely on social media and successfully build a career in a new country. You're not scared anymore.

But one day, in the center of a European capital, a stoned local will attack you and kill you. Or terrorists will break into your house in an Israeli kibbutz. Or some crazy person will smuggle a bomb onto your vacation plane. Or your polite, smiling neighbor in the stairwell in a pretty European city will turn out to be a maniac and one day will catch you in the entrance with a knife. Or during the Christmas market, a killer truck will drive into the crowd where you are drinking mulled wine.

There are no more safe points on the world map. You can escape from GUBOPiK and Iranian drones with Russian missiles. But you can’t escape anywhere from stoned bastards, terrorists, maniacs. Perhaps to some archipelago of Tristan da Cunha, from where the nearest mainland is three thousand kilometers away, and the population is 238 people, not counting penguins and corncrakes. But they don't like strangers there. And it's too difficult to get there.

And Lisa was buried beautifully, of course. White clothes, white flowers, white coffin. Then those who came looked into the sky, because Lisa was there now and was probably an angel.

Angel Lisa

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