Brief lull in the fighting

The brief lull in the fighting is a precarious interval in the grey zone: it gives Sergeyich room to deliver letters and imagine his displaced neighbours returning, but it does not end the war or restore the village’s postal service. Its quiet is local, temporary, and easily mistaken for safety. The contrast between a silent yard, distant shelling, and the later demand that Sergeyich revise his account of who is fighting makes the lull both a practical opening for civilian life and a measure of how much that life remains subject to forces beyond the village.

Silence and the sense of a ceasefire

On a March day crowded with important tasks, Sergeyich begins to think that time is dragging because a ceasefire has settled over the village. He tests that impression by listening repeatedly to the yard. Even the crows are silent. The quiet is not presented as a formal declaration or an established peace; it is something he infers from what he can hear close to home. That distinction makes the lull intimate and uncertain: its evidence is the absence of sound, not any assurance that the fighting has ended.

The silence changes the pace of the day. Sorting and carrying letters take Sergeyich more energy than time, yet their ordinary demands acquire unusual weight against the stillness. His work occupies the interval without making it safe. The lull is therefore less a resolution than a pause in which he can act on behalf of neighbours who are away and on behalf of a village whose routines have been broken.

Postal work inside the pause

Sergeyich sorts letters addressed to residents of old Lenin Street, correcting the street name to Shevchenko with a purple pen. The practical purpose is to tell recipients that the address has changed and to help them pass the new address to friends and relatives. He arranges the envelopes in descending house-number order, imagining how a real postman would sort a bag from a regional or district office. In a village with no functioning postal service, these small administrative gestures turn him into a substitute for an absent institution.

He takes the letters to the street and distributes them through letterboxes and under doors, first carrying the packet up to house number 40. At house number 36, he slips five letters under the door, then returns to his own house, number 37, for a ten-minute rest before going out again with another packet. As he delivers them, he imagines greeting neighbours whose faces and voices he can picture, while recognizing that he knows practically nothing about where they have gone or how they are faring. The letters reverse the usual expectation: instead of residents waiting for mail, their letters will be waiting for them.

That imagined reunion gives his work a guarded hope. Sergeyich tells himself that the villagers will be eager to return when the war is over and tries to regard Little Starhorodivka as one of the lucky places. He acknowledges that the church has been bombed and that shells have fallen, but minimizes the damage as he reassures himself that almost the whole village is intact. The appeal to residents to come back and resume their lives is therefore inseparable from an effort to make the village seem survivable, even while his own account records the damage and absence that make its future uncertain.

A postal ceasefire without a postal service

The lull cannot solve the practical isolation of the village. Sergeyich’s congratulatory card for Vitalina remains on his table, signed and sealed but unstamped. The Ukrposhta van has gone to Svitle and never returned, leaving the village without a postal service and its route effectively one-way through the grey zone. Sergeyich understands that the driver and companion might have carried the envelope if he had asked and paid, but he had not thought of sending greetings at the time. Vitalina’s three postcards are what bring the possibility back to mind.

The word “mainland” comes to him through an old film about Soviet polar explorers. It is geographically close yet divided from the village by the armed horizons on either side of the grey zone. Sergeyich reasons that neither side is firing at the grey zone itself; both are shooting through it at each other. The image of a place defined by what passes over it sharpens the contradiction in calling it a lull: the village may be quiet because the opposing forces are aiming beyond it, not because they have withdrawn.

With no postal route to rely on, Sergeyich considers asking Petro to mail the card. He finds Petro’s mobile number and sends the single-word message “Come,” then worries that Petro will make the muddy journey expecting an emergency, only to discover that he has been summoned to post a March 8 greeting. The sounds of shelling continue in the distance beyond Svitle, while Sergeyich describes the local pause as a postal ceasefire without a postal service. Around midnight, Petro arrives and asks how things are. The private errand brings a personal connection into the gap left by an absent public service, but it does not make the village less exposed.

The pause breaks, and its story is contested

The house later trembles so forcefully that Sergeyich puts out a leg to keep his balance. This return of physical disturbance punctures any sense that the earlier quiet promised lasting security. The change is stark: a day when even the crows seemed silent gives way to renewed upheaval, making the calm seem like an interval within continuing danger rather than an end to it.

The same contest over what the lull means appears in the border interview. Asked why he has come from Donbas, Sergeyich explains that he and his bees are from the grey zone and that people are shooting, naming Ukrainians on one side and Russians on the other. A young man interrupts and tells him to repeat the account without the word “Russians,” challenging how he has described the opposing side. Sergeyich then says Ukrainians on one side and, on the other, separatists from Karuselino. His firsthand description is thus edited while he is speaking, not simply recorded as he gives it.

The interviewer asks about his damaged car. Sergeyich says that one shell-shocked man attacked it after getting drunk at a wake for a soldier killed by the Russians. The young man again stops the interview, ruling out a live broadcast and directing the crew instead to film the bees buzzing and take a close-up of the axe mark on a damaged hive. The shift from Sergeyich’s account to selected footage shows how a personal encounter with wartime violence can be reduced to images chosen by someone else. Set beside the silent yard and the improvised delivery route, the interview makes the lull’s limits clear: ordinary work can resume briefly, but neither the conflict nor the struggle to describe it has stopped.