Little Starhorodivka cemetery, the burial ground beside the village church, holds several layers of the story at once: Sergeyich’s crowded family past, the physical erasure wrought by shelling, and the rituals through which the living meet the dead. It is both a familiar local landscape and a place where war makes ordinary belonging uncertain.

Family Ground and Local Memory

In a dream that alters the past, Sergeyich leads Vitalina around the church rather than through its open gate and takes her among the cemetery’s silent crosses and gravestones. He shows her his parents’ graves; neither had lived to fifty. The family dead extend beyond them: his father’s sister and her husband, a cousin and the cousin’s two sons, all killed in a drunk-driving accident, and a niece buried at the cemetery’s edge above a ravine. The niece’s marginal grave carries a local grievance: her father had fallen out with the village council chairman, who took revenge by placing her there. The scene turns the cemetery into a record not only of death but of kinship and village power, where private histories remain legible in the arrangement of graves.

The dream is not a faithful replay. Sergeyich remembers that he and Vitalina really visited the cemetery on her second or third day in the village, but she wore black then, not the ant-pattern dress imagined in the dream. The shift from the living village promenade to the graves brings courtship into contact with mortality: the place where he introduces Vitalina to his buried relations is also a measure of how much family and history can accumulate beneath the ground.

Shelling and the Vanished Church

During the war, an explosion leads Pashka to speculate that the cemetery has been hit, though neither man knows who fired or what exactly was struck. The uncertainty is part of the scene: even the location of the damage is discussed without reliable knowledge, while the possibility of another attack intrudes into a request for tea.

The village’s first shell hits the church. The next morning, residents begin leaving Little Starhorodivka: fathers send wives and children to relatives in Russia, Odessa, and Mykolayiv, then depart themselves; older residents are taken away last, weeping and cursing. After cannon fire, Sergeyich walks Lenin Street and finds the village almost emptied, its doors boarded and some windows covered with plywood. The church, less than a kilometre from his home, anchors his cautious walk through the deserted streets.

Later, looking toward the church and cemetery, Sergeyich recognizes that the church is gone. In his recollection, it had once risen before him with heaven-blue wooden walls; now the building no longer stands. The cemetery remains a point in the landscape, but the familiar approach to it has been altered by the destruction of the church and the depopulation around it.

Mourning and the Limits of Belonging

The cemetery also becomes a setting for collective mourning. When a fallen soldier’s green minivan arrives, those gathered beside the highway gradually kneel. Sergeyich stands at first, held back by memories of being punished on his knees as a boy and by his dislike of kneeling even in church. Galya kneels beside him and pulls at his trouser leg; after tense looks from the mourners across the road, he lowers himself too. He feels his strength, pride, and even his name drain away, then recalls the slogan painted at a bus stop in Karuselino: “No-one can bring Donbas to its knees!” The ritual makes the words newly painful: the public declaration of defiance collides with a bodily act of grief and solidarity.

At Akhtem’s funeral, Sergeyich is again present but not fully at home in the ceremony. Akhtem’s body, wrapped in green cloth embroidered with golden Arabic script, is placed on a bench in the yard before the men carry it toward the cemetery. Sergeyich follows at the rear. There he stands neither as an outside observer nor as someone close to the deceased, hearing Tatar prayers whose language he does not understand even as their solemnity reaches him physically. He watches three men lower the body into a narrow grave. The cemetery gives his uncertain position a precise form: he is included in the act of farewell, yet remains a guest in another community’s rites.

A Place Between the Living and the Dead

The cemetery’s recurring presence joins private memory to wartime upheaval. It contains the graves Sergeyich uses to introduce his family to Vitalina, becomes the suspected target of an unexplained blast, and receives the body of his friend Akhtem. Meanwhile, the church beside it is destroyed, the streets empty, and the rituals of mourning demand gestures that test whether Sergeyich can stand with other people in their grief.

At Akhtem’s home after the burial, a candle burns while the imam explains something to the family; Aisha blows it out, and the imam looks at her approvingly. The scene extends the cemetery’s connection to mourning beyond the grave itself: remembrance continues in the household, shaped by religious practice and by the people who decide how it should be observed. Little Starhorodivka cemetery is therefore not simply a backdrop for death. It is where memory, community, and the costs of war become visible in the ground and in the living people gathered around it.