Loz Harper's blog : With his country crumbling around him, President Moskalev seemed almost blasé.
The girl turns toward the door.Looks up the stairs to the ground floor.She takes the hand of the woman who spoke.Turns it palm upward.And the hand that holds the mattress flickers with a momentary silver light.They wait in the dark.They have to be certain they can do it all in one go, that no one will have time to reach for his gun.They pass the thing from hand to hand in the dark and marvel at it.In the dark, they were sent light.One of the overseers comes to unshackle the woman who thought she was going as a secretary to Berlin before she was thrown down on a concrete floor and shown, over and over again, what her job really was.He has the keys in his hand.They fall on him all at once, and he cannot make a sound and blood gushes from his eyes and ears.They unlock one another’s bonds with his bundle of keys.They kill every man in that house and they’re still not satisfied.There are a thousand little towns here with staging posts in basements and apartments in condemned buildings.They trade in men, too, and in children.The girl children grow day by day until the power comes to their hands and they can teach the grown women.Tunde files a series of reports and interviews from the Moldovan border towns where the fighting has been most acute.The women trust him because of his reports from Riyadh.He brings his other reports with him, shows them to whatever woman says she’s in charge of this town or that.They want their stories told.We killed them, but it wasn’t just them.The police knew what was happening and did nothing.The men in the town beat their wives if they tried to bring us more food.The Mayor knew what was happening, the landlords knew what was happening, postmen knew what was happening.She starts to cry, scrubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand.This means we will never stop watching, she says.This revolution will need its chronicler.It’s going to be him.Pulling out to see the shockwaves of the power slosh across the planet.Zooming in tight to focus on single moments, single stories.Sometimes he writes with such intensity that he forgets that he doesn’t have the power himself in his hands and the bones of his neck.De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.There’ll be an accompanying barrage of footage online.Reporting from inside the events as well as analysis and argument.Tunde interviews the President five days before the government falls.Viktor Moskalev is a small and sweaty man who has held this country together by making a series of alliances and by turning a blind eye to the vast organized crime syndicates that have been using his little, unassuming nation as a staging post for their unsavory business.He moves his hands nervously during the interview, brushing the few strands of hair left on his head out of his eyes constantly and dripping sweat across his bald head, even though the room is quite cool.President Moskalev, says Tunde, deliberately relaxing his voice, smiling, between you and me, what do you think is happening to your country?Viktor’s throat muscles clench.They’re sitting in the grand receiving room of his palace in Chisinau.Half the furniture is gilded.Tatiana strokes his knee and smiles.All countries, says Viktor slowly, have had to adapt to the new reality.
- Digital