Driving another person’s car without official permission

The rule against driving another person’s car without official permission is invoked against Aisha after she has used a car registered to her deceased father. Its decisive significance lies in how an apparently straightforward requirement of consent is enforced under Russian authority: the father’s death, which makes permission impossible, does not excuse the violation but becomes the circumstance around which the prosecution’s reasoning turns. Sergey Sergeyich challenges that logic, while the detective presents the rule as grounds for coercion rather than a matter of ordinary vehicle use.

The Rule and Its Application

The detective tells Sergey Sergeyich that Aisha has been driving someone else’s car for two years without official permission. He explains that the car is registered to her father and that the father never formally authorized his daughter to drive it. The case thus rests not on whether Aisha had access to the vehicle or whose family it belonged to, but on whether the required official permission had been given.

Sergeyich answers that the car belongs to Aisha’s father and that her father was killed. He makes the consequence of that fact explicit: a dead man cannot provide official permission. The detective acknowledges the registration but treats the missing authorization as decisive, insisting that Aisha has been breaking Russian law for two years. The exchange sets the rule’s documentary standard against the human circumstance that makes compliance impossible.

Enforcement and Consequences

The detective presents the alleged offense alongside other accusations, including that Aisha had spoken disrespectfully to the authorities. He tells Sergeyich that she has two options: prison or the army. In his account, military service would teach her to respect authority, or at least to fear it. The threatened outcomes make the driving rule part of a larger mechanism of state discipline, not an isolated administrative dispute.

Sergeyich asks what he should tell Aisha’s mother. The detective leaves him to decide what to say, but also reminds him that he is a foreigner and warns that he must leave Russia within eleven days or be brought back and held in a cell. The warning redirects the encounter toward Sergeyich himself: his effort to intervene for another person is met with a reminder that his own status is vulnerable to official control.

Legal Authority in a Divided Setting

The episode belongs to a wider setting in which people navigate competing lines of authority and uncertain jurisdiction. Elsewhere, soldiers question Sergeyich about entering through the territory described as the O.R.D.L.O. and check whether his home village, Little Starhorodivka, is in the D.P.R. At the Russian border, an official tells him that he will not receive asylum and may stay only ninety days. The vehicle-permission rule appears within this wider landscape of documents, territorial classifications, and threats governing movement.

Another brief exception to the violence around such rules is a one-day postal ceasefire, announced so accumulated mail can be delivered to villages in the grey zone. That temporary arrangement makes room for ordinary communication, while the car case shows how a rule can continue to operate without regard to the ordinary circumstances behind it. The novel’s contrast is not between law and a lawless void, but between different practical orders: negotiated pauses and personal assistance on one side, and official procedures wielded against a person whose father cannot authorize her on the other.

Sergeyich’s Intervention

Sergeyich does not accept the detective’s reasoning as morally sufficient. He interrupts to insist that the car is Aisha’s father’s and that her father was killed, then asks how a dead person could give permission. His argument does not undo the charge, but it exposes the gap between a formal requirement and the conditions in which it is enforced.

The encounter also changes what Sergeyich must carry back to Aisha’s family. On the drive back to Albat, he glances toward Aisha without speaking, while she remains quiet and does not ask what he has learned. When he later recounts the detective’s words to Aisylu, she struggles to hold back tears. The rule therefore reaches beyond the car: enforced through a threat of prison or military service, it makes Sergeyich the bearer of news that the family must absorb, while leaving him unable to secure Aisha’s release through his appeal.