Sergeyich

Sergeyich is a beekeeper whose work, home, and sense of purpose are bound to his bees. War displaces him from Little Starhorodivka, but his departure is not simply an escape: he takes the hives because they must be able to continue their natural work, and he carries with him the habits and relationships of the village he leaves behind. Through his care for the bees, his exchanges of honey for food, and his encounters with separation and return, the novel measures the war’s disruption against the persistent labor of living creatures.

Identity and the beekeeper’s work

Sergeyich understands the bees as living beings with needs of their own, not merely as a source of honey. In winter, he explains that a hive remains warm at thirty-seven degrees because the bees keep it that way themselves; they cannot sleep through the cold without freezing. His comparison with a person tending a stove makes their work familiar, but also underscores its relentlessness: they have to stay awake to survive. When spring comes, he intends to put the hives in an orchard and let the bees fly wherever they choose for pollen, rather than directing them toward one side or another.

His own work consists in guarding the conditions under which the colony can thrive. He monitors the bees’ health, deals with wasps that attempt to enter their hives, uncaps combs to extract honey, and gathers wax and bee pollen. The colonies’ internal arrangements belong to them, he thinks; he intervenes when a queen is lost or the bees’ health is in danger, not to direct their ordinary life. Their wing-ringing confirms both their presence and his own. He describes himself as a representative of their legitimate interests, while recognizing that the bees’ interest is simple: gathering nectar and pollen. Most of the work, he knows, is theirs.

His close observation includes moments that are not sentimental. He watches guard bees drive weakened drones out of a hive before cold weather, interpreting the expulsion as a way of avoiding the waste of honey and syrup. He sees a natural order that seems legible to him and compares it with human life, usually to the latter’s disadvantage. Yet this is his interpretation of what he observes, not a claim that the bees’ society and human society are identical. The colonies have their own life, which he respects even as he reads them through his experience of people.

Home, war, and departure

For Sergeyich, home is not just a place he has maintained. As he prepares to leave, he looks at the walls, trees, fences, gates, doors, and windows that have surrounded his life and realizes that he had mistaken which of them was protecting whom. He had thought he was safeguarding his land and home; only at the moment of departure does he understand that this small world has also shielded him, like a fortress or protective vest. Rain begins as he readies the green Lada and the flatbed trailer, and the possibility of never finding his home as he left it makes the practical preparations carry the weight of a farewell.

The departure requires more than packing. He plans to close the hive entrances, load the hives one by one, cover and secure them against the weather, and bring jars of honey as well. He knows that jolting roads can agitate bees and raise the temperature inside their hives, where excessive heat can kill them. Cool, rainy conditions make the journey safer. Honey, meanwhile, is not only the product of his work but a reserve of exchangeable value: he considers it steadier than sausages or clothing, comparing its lasting worth to the dollar. The same attention to the bees’ physical needs shapes the route, the weather he welcomes, and the cargo he carries.

Once past the checkpoints and the bombardment, Sergeyich feels a sudden, youthful excitement at the open road, though he recognizes that the reassurance it gives him is not fully justified. He calls himself a resident of war rather than a participant in it: he had simply found himself living where it was happening. The distinction does not free him from the consequences. He says that, without the bees, he would have stayed out of pity for Pashka, whom he would otherwise have left alone. But the colonies cannot move between peace and war as people can. They must be taken somewhere quiet, where flowering herbs and trees will provide pollen. Their needs turn displacement into an obligation he cannot set aside.

Work and exchange in the new place

In his new surroundings, Sergeyich’s trade in honey gives him a practical foothold. At the village shop called Nadya’s, he exchanges honey for bread and sausage and learns that he has a credit of 560 hryvnias to spend on groceries. The arrangement restores a small but significant sense of stability: rather than merely obtaining food for the day, he has a claim on supplies he can use later. After sitting beside the hives for half an hour, watching the bees inspect their surroundings after the difficult journey, he hears their buzzing settle into a quieter rhythm. His relief is tied to theirs; the colonies appear to be adjusting, and his own life begins to feel less precarious.

Galya helps turn his honey into a livelihood. Her claim that it is anti-alcoholic proves commercially successful, and customers from neighboring villages buy it. At first he receives credit for groceries; later, Galya pays cash in advance. Money collects in the glove compartment of his Lada, which functions as a lockable wallet. The trade changes from an improvised exchange into a more dependable supply arrangement, but it does not become merely commercial. Their relationship remains warm and friendly, and they find a degree of independence that suits Sergeyich, who thinks of the tent and the land around his hives as his own home for the time being.

That independence has its limits and its emotional pressure. Galya comes to the campsite when she has not seen him for more than three days, though he usually visits the village several times a week to fill his water canister, eat at her home, and buy provisions. She understands that he does not want to stray too far from the bees or settle into a second home. Still, her wish is clear: for him to move into her house and bring the bees to her orchard. Sergeyich accepts their existing arrangement, while recognizing that she would welcome a more lasting shared life.

When the combs are ready but he lacks a honey extractor, Sergeyich asks Galya to introduce him to a local beekeeper. The man brings an extractor to the campsite on a flatbed trailer and helps him collect almost a hundred kilograms of honey. Sergeyich offers to pay in cash, but the beekeeper takes only fifty hryvnias for petrol and gives him a warm handshake without asking for the story of his displacement. The gesture shows how the work of beekeeping creates a connection between people who are otherwise strangers: Galya has evidently told the man enough, and the shared practical knowledge of the hives makes explanation unnecessary.

Bonds across distance

Sergeyich’s ties to the village persist while he is away. Earlier, during a winter of church candles and no electricity, a mention of lard from Pashka awakens a longing for a food Sergeyich had not been thinking about. His household’s shortages seem almost endless, while what he can reliably name among his possessions includes honey, vodka, tinctures, bee-pollen remedies, and a bottle of Crimean brandy whose hiding place he cannot recall. He misses the ordinary pleasures that wartime scarcity makes conspicuous. His account of Pashka also changes: though they were childhood enemies and still squabble, Sergeyich feels increasingly close to him, almost like a brother.

That affection survives the separation. Before leaving, Sergeyich gives Pashka the key to his front door. Pashka urges him to stay for tea and a drink, then persuades him to drive to the end of his street so he can see him off. The departure therefore leaves Sergeyich with an unresolved concern for the neighbor who remains behind. On the road, the bees’ needs explain why he must go, but they do not make leaving Pashka easy.

Sergeyich also continues to be startled by the return of people he feared lost. After a mobile call interrupts a quiet moment, he expects Galya, then sees that the caller is Petro and is overwhelmed with happiness: Petro is alive and back home after hospitalization, though he is limping. The news converts anxiety into relief and confirms that the friendship has outlasted their separation. The grenade Petro had earlier given Sergeyich returns in a different way: much later, Sergeyich finds it among the combs of a hive, bees crawling over it. The object links his earlier life with Petro to the danger carried unnoticed inside the bees’ shelter.

At the station, Sergeyich releases Aisha as her train departs for Lviv. Once the carriages disappear, he is left alone on the platform, shaken by the separation and regretting, for a moment, that he did not get on the train himself. The journey home compounds his exhaustion: after little sleep, waiting at the Russian border, and rushing between buses and the railway station at Novooleksiyivka, he is worn down by the drive. He then notices that Aisha has left without eating and remembers the food in the car. His attention turns immediately to what she might need, even after she is out of sight.

Return, danger, and narrative significance

The possibility of homecoming is complicated by the bees and by the war’s residue. On a return journey, Sergeyich barters honey for more than a thousand hryvnias’ worth of buckwheat, barley, millet, and other groceries. He also buys eggs, carefully packed in a tray under corrugated cardboard. The full car gives him the satisfaction of returning with provisions, a role he associates with being a provider. But he drives at about thirty kilometres an hour, partly because he is hauling fragile bee cargo and partly because checkpoints may interrupt the route. There is no one waiting for him in the village except Pashka, and even that expectation does not make him hurry.

The returning hives make the threat within the ordinary work of beekeeping literal. When a strange sound comes from inside a hive, Sergeyich removes the roof and draws out a comb. In the narrow space behind it he finds a green grenade, the one Petro gave him the previous winter, with bees crawling over it. The discovery connects the soldier’s presence in his life to an explosive object hidden in the hive, a place he has treated as a living home. He puts the grenade away in the glove compartment, but the danger remains close at hand.

Dreams later seem to Sergeyich to offer guidance. Remembering figures that had appeared in the dark woods, he decides that dreams are not accidental and that God tells people what to do through them. He then climbs onto the trailer, loosens the straps, and pulls the grey-bee hive toward him. It shifts more easily than he expected, as if his strength has returned. His renewed resolve leads him to take the hive off the trailer, an action that precedes his use of Petro’s grenade against it.

The explosion ends the life of the third hive. Sergeyich throws the grenade toward the grey bees and falls to the ground; afterward, the hive is gone, replaced by a crater, pieces of wood, and a fragment of comb. A bee flies past. The destruction is not simply a reversal of his labor as a beekeeper: it is a grim collision between his effort to protect living colonies and the violence that has entered their world. Throughout the novel, he has understood himself as the bees’ caretaker and advocate, responsible for maintaining the conditions in which they can gather pollen. His wartime journey tests that role, while the bees remain more than a symbol: they require heat, safe transport, food, and an environment in which their work can continue.