Candles in mourning and interfaith goodwill

Candles in mourning and interfaith goodwill are embodied in Sergey Sergeyich’s decision to bring candles to Aisylu and her children during a power outage. A modest gift meant to ease an ordinary hardship becomes entangled with Akhtem’s death, Muslim mourning practice, and Bekir’s arrest. The candles offer no remedy for loss or political coercion, but their passage between households and faiths makes care tangible—and puts Sergey Sergeyich in a position to take responsibility when an act of kindness is misread as evidence of theft.

A gift made in darkness

Reflecting on life without electricity, Sergey Sergeyich recalls that the television’s dark screen had been more painful than the unplugged refrigerator, but that he eventually adapted: bees could manage without electricity, he reasoned, so perhaps people could too. His thought then turns from the general comparison to Aisylu and her children. Some people, he recognizes, are as good as bees; he decides to bring them candles because the power may return tomorrow or not for a week.

He carries a thick, weighty bundle of about fifty candles down to the village. Albat-Kuybyshevo’s first houses are dark, and the unlit street lamps, silent streets, and absence of barking dogs make the village seem withdrawn and fearful. Sergey Sergeyich reaches Aisylu’s yard but hesitates at her door: if he knocks, the family may invite him in, and their hospitality would turn a simple delivery into a visit. Instead, he puts the bag at his feet, knocks three times, and hurries back toward the gate. Hearing someone open the door and pick up the crackling plastic bag, he returns to the apiary feeling lighter—not because he is no longer carrying the candles, but because the good deed has given him joy and strength.

The flame in the house

On a later visit, Sergey Sergeyich sees that his gift has entered the household’s private mourning. A church candle burns on the dresser before a mirror draped with dark cloth; sunlight already fills the room, so the flame is not needed for illumination. Its place is memorial. When the imam points it out and explains something to the family, Aisha runs over and blows it out. After he leaves, Aisylu strikes a match, relights the candle, and returns to the table. The same small flame is thus subject to two gestures: it is extinguished in response to religious instruction, then restored by a bereaved mother who wishes to keep it burning.

Later, Sergey Sergeyich finds Aisylu’s street empty after the Berkut have gone. In the living room the mirror remains covered, but the candle in front of it is now a stearin one. Aisylu tells him that Bekir has been arrested: police searched the house, and a detective accused him of stealing candles from a church. Yet the candles had been left at the family’s door during the outage, and Bekir was away in Qarasuvbazar that day. The gift that had quietly relieved a household now figures in an accusation against one of its members.

A kindness becomes testimony

Sergey Sergeyich tells Aisylu that he brought the candles and that Bekir did not steal them. He explains that the candles are his: he took them from the church in his own village after it was bombed. Aisylu is struck by the disclosure that the anonymous donor was the visitor himself. The exchange turns his earlier, deliberately unobtrusive delivery into a consequential admission. Rather than let the candles’ provenance remain uncertain while Bekir is accused, Sergey Sergeyich claims responsibility for bringing them and identifies their origin.

The candles’ changing material also records the pressure on the family. On another visit, Sergey Sergeyich notices the covered mirror and a burning stearin candle, but this one is the cheapest kind, grey, and gives off an unfamiliar, unpleasant odor. He infers that the beeswax candles he brought have run out, or that the family is afraid to light them; he also suspects that police took the better candles found during the search. The scene does not establish what happened to each candle, but it makes the contrast legible: a small, cheap replacement burns where the household’s earlier candles had been, amid fear and the aftermath of the search.

Mourning across religious difference

Aisha explains that the family will light candles for forty days, counting from Akhtem’s funeral rather than the date of his death, which is unknown. The imam had scolded Aisylu because Muslims do not light candles for the dead; when he visits, Aisylu hides the candle. Her account clarifies the household’s divided position: the family observes a forty-day period of remembrance, yet its candle practice conflicts with the imam’s instruction. Aisylu’s decision to relight the flame after he leaves, and to hide it when he comes, shows that remembrance continues in a private form rather than through an open challenge to religious authority.

The scene gains force from Sergey Sergeyich’s position as both guest and outsider. At Akhtem’s funeral, he sees a green pall embroidered with Arabic script, men in fezzes, and mourners carrying the stretcher in turns; he cannot understand the Tatar prayers, although he feels their gravity. At Aisylu’s home he encounters another boundary, this time around candles. His own act of giving does not erase religious difference, nor does it make him an authority on how the family should mourn. Its meaning lies instead in the connection it makes possible: he notices their need, brings a practical gift without demanding entry or thanks, and later speaks up when that gift becomes bound to an accusation.

The afterlife of the candles

Before leaving Crimea, Sergey Sergeyich counts the five candles he has left. He has no reason to light them now and hopes to take them back with him; he will also save the one in the jar. His plan frames the candles as objects with a future beyond the immediate acts of mourning and hospitality. Having carried them into Aisylu’s darkened home and seen them burn in memory of Akhtem, he keeps the remainder for a return that remains uncertain.

Across these scenes, a candle changes function without losing its connection to care: it is a practical response to a blackout, a flame before a covered mirror, the subject of a dispute over religious practice, and evidence whose disputed origin helps lead Sergey Sergeyich to defend Bekir. The gift is not a solution to bereavement or repression. Its significance is smaller and more exact: in a setting where power, safety, and certainty are unreliable, material generosity establishes a bond, and accepting responsibility for that generosity becomes part of the bond’s cost.