Valik

Valik is a young, traumatized combat veteran whose hostility toward Sergey Sergeyich turns a tense encounter into an attack on the beekeeper’s car and apiary. His own injuries and growing blindness deepen his instability; after a bee stings his already impaired eye, he loses his sight, and later kills himself with a grenade. His death changes the danger facing Sergeyich: Galya, who had warned him not to return, subsequently tells him that no one will bother him now.

Identity and Background

Valik is introduced at night with Mikhalych, an older companion who tries to prevent him from starting a fight. Drunk and staggering, Valik attempts to strike Sergeyich. He is a veteran of the trenches and says he experienced shelling and suffered a concussion, while Mikhalych had instead been occupied telling children stories at school. Valik’s speech presents his wartime experience as a grievance that separates him from those he believes have not endured the front.

His accusation against Sergeyich is rooted in the death of Sashka: Valik blames the beekeeper for it, though Sergeyich answers that he was at home and had never fired a shot at anyone. The two men understand their place in the conflict differently. Sergeyich describes himself as being from the grey zone rather than Donetsk, while Valik insists that the whole of Donbas is a grey zone. He also challenges Sergeyich for not attending the funeral or drinking at the wake. Sergeyich explains that, as a stranger, he did not feel it was right to attend, though he had commemorated the dead and paid his respects.

Attack on Sergeyich

The confrontation escalates beyond the attempted punch. After the men leave, Sergeyich finds that Valik has smashed every window of his Lada with an axe. The windscreen is broken inward, the driver-side window is gone, and the rear window is webbed with cracks. The car is left badly damaged, but the nearby hives have suffered little: Sergeyich finds only a single axe mark on the nearest hive. He is relieved that the bees appear to have survived, even as the attack leaves his means of travel ruined.

Valik’s violence is not limited to Sergeyich. Galya reports that a week earlier he had thrown a grenade into the yard of the village council’s bookkeeper. It failed to explode. Valik was deeply in debt to the council for water, yet, when drinking, he yelled that other people owed him. The report gives the attack on the beekeeper a wider context: Valik is a continuing threat to people in the village, not simply a man acting out a private grievance.

Blindness and Death

Later, while Sergeyich is in Crimea, Galya calls with news that Valik has gone blind. One eye had already been impaired because of his concussion; Galya identifies him as the man whose eye Sergeyich’s bee stung, and who smashed the Lada. She urges Sergeyich not to return. In her account, the bee sting and the earlier concussion are distinct parts of Valik’s worsening condition, though the evidence does not specify precisely how the sting affected his sight.

Galya later reports that Valik has killed himself with a grenade. His blindness had made ordinary movement difficult: he kept bumping into lamp posts and people, and after colliding with someone he would pick a fight. The village heard a blast that morning and gathered at his yard; Galya had left her shop open when she ran out with the others. His death ends the immediate threat that had made Sergeyich’s return seem unsafe.

Relationships and Consequences

Valik’s encounter with Sergeyich is shaped by an accusation rather than an established personal history: he assigns the beekeeper blame for Sashka’s death, while Sergeyich denies having taken part in the fighting. Their exchange over the funeral likewise exposes competing expectations about who belongs and how the dead should be commemorated. Valik treats Sergeyich’s absence as evidence against him; Sergeyich’s explanation is that he was a stranger and had paid his respects in another way.

Mikhalych acts as a brake on Valik’s aggression, pulling him back and telling him to calm down, but cannot prevent the later destruction of Sergeyich’s car. Galya, by contrast, becomes the messenger through whom Valik’s decline alters Sergeyich’s prospects. First she warns him away because of Valik; after the suicide, she says he can come back and that things will be better with him there. Valik’s final consequence is therefore both personal and communal: his death ends a dangerous presence in the village and reopens the possibility of Sergeyich’s return.