Sergeyich and Akhtem Mustafayev’s friendship

Sergeyich and Akhtem Mustafayev’s friendship connects two beekeepers across the distance between the Donbas and Crimea, and gives Sergeyich’s wartime longing for the peninsula a human face. They meet at a beekeeping convention and part with the easy intimacy of companions who have shared a small room, a picnic, and conversation. Later, when Sergeyich tries to call Akhtem, the number no longer works. The friendship persists in memory and in a notebook, but war makes contact uncertain.

A friendship formed among beekeepers

At the convention in Sviatohirsk, Sergeyich shares a small boarding-house room with Akhtem, a Crimean Tatar beekeeper from near Bakhchysarai, and Grisha from Bila Tserkva. The room is small, but Sergeyich remembers that it did not feel cramped. Their time together extends beyond the convention’s practical purpose: they enjoy a farewell picnic by the river and a bonfire in the evening. The albums preserve this fellowship as a scene of Sergeyich among his peers, an image of professional and personal belonging that he returns to when war has isolated him in the grey zone.

Akhtem’s company also left Sergeyich with a sharply individual memory of his friend’s manner. Akhtem does not drink the honey vodka, explaining that Islam forbids it, yet sits with the group and eats sausages. When Grisha needles him by suggesting that the sausages contain pork, Akhtem jokes that they are made of starch and Dutch food colouring. The joke turns the teasing back on Grisha, who loses his appetite while Akhtem continues eating. Sergeyich remembers this exchange not as a conflict but as evidence of Akhtem’s ease and good humor.

Contact remembered and attempted

Before the war, Akhtem had invited Sergeyich to visit him in Crimea. Sergeyich had never been there and still imagined the trip in simple terms: swimming in the sea, lying on the beach, and returning sun-tanned. He could not make the journey then, so the invitation remained open. When a young soldier tells him he had hoped to move to Crimea and build a small hotel, Sergeyich responds by mentioning his own Crimean friend and Akhtem’s repeated invitations. The exchange makes plain that the peninsula is not merely a destination in Sergeyich’s imagination; it is also where a friend is waiting, or once waited, to receive him.

Sergeyich keeps Akhtem’s address and telephone number in his notebook. On a winter evening, after considering whether to call his wife or Pashka, he recalls Akhtem instead. Their convention memories return in detail, and Sergeyich decides to try the number. The attempt fails: a recorded female voice says there is no such number. He dials again and gets the same response, then stops listening before the message finishes. The failed call converts a stored address into a sign of how difficult it has become to reach someone across the wartime division.

War’s interruption and unresolved distance

Sergeyich concludes that the Russians must have changed the Tatars’ telephone numbers when they took the peninsula. This is his inference, not confirmed information about Akhtem or the fate of his number. He also recalls hearing that people still go to the beach and reasons that there is probably no shooting there. His thoughts combine reassurance with uncertainty: he cannot establish whether Akhtem is safe or reachable, and the failed call gives him no answer.

The friendship stands against Sergeyich’s increasingly unstable sense of place. In his beekeepers’ album, he wonders whether the regional society still exists and whether he belongs to it, since he is neither in the self-proclaimed republic nor in Ukraine but in the grey zone, which has no capital. Akhtem’s surviving contact details offer a different kind of connection—one grounded in shared work and remembered hospitality rather than political affiliation. Yet even that link is vulnerable to the war’s severing of ordinary communication.

The friendship carried into displacement

When Sergeyich prepares to leave, bees, honey, and the practical demands of transport occupy his attention. He plans to close the hive entrances, load each hive onto the trailer, cover them against the rain, secure them, and take jars of honey as a form of portable value. That departure does not resolve his connection to Akhtem: the available evidence does not say that Sergeyich reaches him, visits Crimea, or learns what happened to him. Instead, the earlier invitation and the unanswered call remain suspended together, making the friendship a measure of both Sergeyich’s hope of belonging elsewhere and the distance the war has imposed.

The relationship is also built through the ordinary objects that survive separation: a convention album, a notebook with an address and number, and memories of a shared meal. The novel does not need a reunion to make the bond consequential. Sergeyich’s decision to call Akhtem, after hesitating over whom he might contact, shows that the remembered beekeeper remains a trusted possibility in his social world—even as the failed number leaves that possibility unresolved.