Orthodox 40-day mourning period

The Orthodox 40-day mourning period is described in the novel’s explanatory note as a forty-day span after death, marked by memorial services on the third, ninth, and fortieth days. Its significance in the story emerges through contrast: Sergey Sergeyich encounters a roadside ceremony for a fallen soldier and the funeral of his friend Akhtem, while the stated Orthodox timetable offers a point of reference for mourning amid different religious customs and wartime loss.

Definition and observances

The note specifies both the duration and the recurring dates of observance: mourning lasts forty days, and memorial services are held on the third, ninth, and fortieth days after death. The text supplies no further account of the services themselves, so the custom appears as a concise calendar of remembrance rather than a fully described Orthodox ritual.

Mourning in public and at the graveside

At a roadside welcome for a dead soldier, people gradually kneel as the vehicle approaches. Sergey Sergeyich remains standing at first, unsettled by the gesture and by his memories of kneeling as a child and in church; after Galya kneels beside him, he joins the others. His bodily participation does not feel like uncomplicated belonging: he experiences the act as a loss of strength and pride, then recalls a slogan asserting that no one could bring Donbas to its knees. Akhtem’s funeral presents a different ritual setting. The men gather around his body, wrapped in a green pall embroidered with Arabic script, and the imam leads prayers that Sergey Sergeyich cannot understand. He follows the procession and watches the burial from a position between intimacy and observation, describing his experience as that of a bee in an unfamiliar hive. The scene makes his presence at the funeral an act of friendship, but not evidence that he shares the community’s religious knowledge or place within it.

Household observance and religious boundaries

After the funeral, a candle burns in the house. When the imam explains something to the family, Aisha blows out its flame, and he responds with approval. The episode marks a boundary around the household’s religious practice without elaborating the imam’s explanation; it should not be mistaken for a description of Orthodox observance. Set beside the note about the Orthodox forty-day period, it underscores that the novel places distinct practices of mourning near one another without treating them as interchangeable.

Loss, uncertainty, and remembrance

Akhtem’s death reaches his family only after a prolonged disappearance. His wife tells Sergey Sergeyich that he was taken twenty months earlier; later, an official refers to her as a widow, then retracts the implication by saying the case remains open. Akhtem is eventually found buried in the woods, and Sergey Sergeyich learns that his trip to Simferopol helped secure the return of the body. The interval of uncertainty gives mourning a political and personal context that the forty-day calendar alone cannot contain. The novel also associates remembrance with ordinary domestic objects and recollection. In a separate scene, Sergey Sergeyich finds Vitalina’s dress among empty hangers and recognizes it as a sign connected to her departure. Later, he opens old family albums over tea, looking through photographs that span his father’s postwar years and his own life before the current war. These scenes do not define the Orthodox custom, but they extend the book’s attention to how absence is carried through objects, family memory, and acts of looking back.