New Year

New Year is a recurring occasion through which Sergeyich encounters the distance between himself and his family: delayed greetings arrive months after the holiday, making the celebration feel less like a shared moment than a message reaching him across time. Their arrival recalls his lonely New Year’s Eve and helps prompt him to send a greeting of his own.

A holiday discovered after the fact

After returning from his unexpected postal duties, Sergeyich finds the letters he had earlier retrieved from Pashka. He lights two church candles to join the one already burning in a jar and reads the first card: “Happy New Year, dear Sergey! We wish you wisdom, health, and peace – may it come soon! Yours, Vitalina and Angelica.” He rereads its neat handwriting, then studies the postmark: Vinnytsia, December 16, 2015.

The date makes the greeting belated in more than a practical sense. Sergeyich remembers that two months earlier, on New Year’s Eve, he had sat alone waiting for midnight, drunk a glass of honey vodka, and gone to bed. The card’s wishes for peace arrive in a life where the holiday has already passed without family company; reading them brings that earlier evening back rather than restoring it.

More greetings, and an unanswered invitation

The other envelopes extend the pattern. One bears a February 12, 2016 postmark from Vinnytsia; another is also from the previous year, with a December date. Inside are a Defender of the Fatherland Day card and another New Year’s greeting from Vitalina and Angelica: “Happy New Year! Be healthy and happy! If anything happens, come to us!” The invitation gives the seasonal message a practical possibility: Sergeyich could go to them if he needed help. Yet he asks himself what “anything” means and cannot find an answer.

The cards therefore convey care without resolving the distance they expose. Their arrival is delayed, and the welcome they offer remains difficult for Sergeyich to translate into action. The blankness that follows his heavy sigh contrasts with the warmth of the messages: contact has reached him, but the next step is still uncertain.

From receiving to writing

The greetings also lead Sergeyich to consider answering. As he eats, he props the postcards against the candle jar with their messages facing outward, returning his glance to the words rather than the pictures. He decides to write to Vitalina for March 8, International Women’s Day, and to make clear that he has not disappeared and is still alive.

That decision gives New Year a continuing place in a larger exchange: a delayed holiday card first makes the family connection tangible, and the coming calendar occasion offers Sergeyich a chance to send something back. The scene moves from the solitude of the past New Year’s Eve toward an intended act of contact, without yet suggesting that the estrangement has been overcome.