Roadside kneeling ritual for welcoming the fallen

The Roadside kneeling ritual for welcoming the fallen is a communal act of mourning in which villagers line a road and kneel as a dead soldier is brought home. In Sergeyich’s experience, the ceremony both honours the dead and tests who belongs among the living: he joins the villagers only after hesitation, and the act unsettles his sense of dignity even as he recognizes their grief.

Occasion and Preparation

One rainy morning, Galya arrives at Sergeyich’s tent with news that Vitya Samoylenko has been killed in Donbas. She says they must be there by nine to greet him. Sergeyich initially questions the idea of greeting someone who has died; Galya explains that Western Ukrainians line the road on their knees to receive their dead, and asks whether their village is any worse. She adds that the whole village is coming. Sergeyich agrees to go with her.

They reach the highway turnoff at about half past eight and wait beneath an apricot tree to avoid getting soaked again. As they approach the gathering, Sergeyich sees hundreds of people who know one another and the dead man. Their shared history leaves him feeling like an outsider: after three years of near-isolation in an abandoned village with Pashka, he is unused to large gatherings and doubts that he has any place among these mourners. Galya, by contrast, is part of the village’s response; she urges him forward when the crowd begins to move.

The Kneeling Welcome

As the vehicles carrying Vitya approach, the people gathered along the road fold their umbrellas and move out from under the trees. The kneeling begins gradually. Sergeyich and Galya stop at the roadside, about fifty metres from the village turn. Galya kneels; a boy of about fifteen and the boy’s young parents kneel nearby. Sergeyich remains standing.

A dark-green minivan, followed by several military vehicles, crawls toward the turn. Galya urges Sergeyich to kneel, but he resists. He associates kneeling with childhood punishment and with prayer in church, where he accepts that people are weak before God. Outside that religious context, he has long taken kneeling to signify weakness. His hesitation therefore makes the ceremony more than a gesture of respect: it confronts a conviction about humiliation and strength.

When Galya calls to him again, Sergeyich finally lowers himself beside her. The people opposite him look at him with hostility; the boy beside him also watches him askance. As the minivan arrives, the crowd lowers its heads toward the road, and Sergeyich does the same. He feels his strength and pride give way, as though he has become nobody. The narration connects this bodily submission to a slogan he remembers from a bus stop in Karuselino: “No-one can bring Donbas to its knees!” He reacts to the contradiction with fear, then reminds himself that the people are grieving.

Collective Grief and Its Aftermath

The minivan continues toward the village while the people remain on their knees, still and bowed. The narration widens from Sergeyich’s immediate discomfort to the long line of men, women, and children kneeling along the road as the vehicle carrying Vitya passes. The ceremony’s force lies partly in this collective scale: grief is not confined to the family or to a graveside but is made public along the route home.

After the vehicle has passed, people gradually stand, gather their bicycles, scooters, and mopeds, or return to their cars. Sergeyich helps Galya up. She looks at him with compassion but says nothing. On the way back to the scooter, he offers her an overripe apricot; she declines, and he eats it himself. The quiet exchange follows his participation without resolving his discomfort, while showing Galya’s concern for him.

Memory and Meaning

Later, Sergeyich recalls kneeling beside Galya and the long rows of people, and wonders why the ceremony was necessary for a soldier who was not a hero or a cosmonaut. The question leads into a memory of a funeral from the time of the War in Afghanistan. That village had also gathered when a fellow villager’s body came home, but the mourners remained standing. Only the dead man’s mother tried to throw herself onto the fresh grave; others held her upright and led her away, while soldiers fired into the sky and wreaths covered the grave.

In Sergeyich’s thoughts, the soldier from that earlier war and Vitya merge: he considers both under the care of the Lord. The contrast between the two funerals makes the roadside kneeling ritual distinct without turning it into a universal custom. It is the village’s particular response to a wartime death, encountered by Sergeyich as both an expression of shared mourning and a demand to enter a community whose grief he does not entirely feel as his own. His eventual kneeling marks participation, but the remembered slogan and his sense of lost pride keep that participation unsettled.