Sergeyich asks Peter to mail a greeting card

With Little Starhorodivka’s postal service gone, Sergeyich asks Petro to carry a greeting card to his wife and daughter, Vitalina and Angelica. The card is made from a wedding photograph, its message addressed to both women; entrusted to a soldier who may soon be sent elsewhere, it gives Sergeyich a way to reach toward family life from which war and distance have separated him.

The photograph becomes a card

The idea takes shape as Sergeyich looks at the postcards Vitalina has sent him, propping them against a candle jar so that their messages, not their pictures, face outward. The approaching occasion is March 8, International Women’s Day. He wants to congratulate Vitalina and, just as importantly, let her know he has not disappeared and is still alive. He searches his papers for a blank card but finds none. Looking through a photograph album instead, he turns its pages back toward the beginning of his life, to his wedding. There he finds a small photograph of himself and Vitalina, both beaming at the camera. He removes it from the album and realizes that he can write on its reverse. Since he has not written by hand in a long time, he gets out his pen and the notebook he uses to record electricity-meter readings, and practices before putting the message on the photograph. The image that once recorded the start of their life together becomes the surface for a new communication.

Addressing a family split in two

The greeting is meant for more than Vitalina alone. Sergeyich considers how to address the card and rejects a form that would make it seem as if he thought of the family as three separate parts. His understanding is that the family divided into two: he and the household from which he is apart. He holds to the hope that those two parts will someday be joined again. The solution comes when he rereads Vitalina’s New Year card and notices the two names at the end. He writes, “My Dear Vitalina and Angelica,” adding “My” after a pause. The brief salutation makes the absent daughter part of the message rather than an afterthought. He copies his short congratulation onto the photograph in large letters, then signs the envelope and supplies his new address, 37 Shevchenko Street. The card carries both a practical return address and an intimate family address: his effort to be locatable accompanies his attempt to speak to both women as one family.

A message stranded by the grey zone

The finished envelope lies signed and sealed on the table until evening. It has no stamp, but the obstacle is larger than postage: Little Starhorodivka has no functioning postal service. The Ukrposhta van had left for Svitle and never returned, its route having entered the grey zone and come out the other side without bringing the village back into the postal network. Sergeyich imagines the working post offices beyond the fighting as the “mainland,” a place close enough to be visible in its direction yet separated from him by armed horizons and the nearly deserted grey zone. The card’s delay makes the conflict tangible in an ordinary object. Sergeyich is not trying to cross the front himself; he is trying to send one photograph through a landscape where even routine connections have been cut. He realizes that Petro could mail it. When the soldier visits, Sergeyich asks whether there is postal service where he is and pushes the envelope toward him, asking him to buy a stamp and post it. Petro agrees, glances at the address, and puts it inside his jacket.

Trust, uncertainty, and the attempted connection

Sergeyich tells Petro that the card is for his wife and daughter, then asks whether it is quiet where the soldier is. Petro answers that if it were loud, Sergeyich would hear it. His rotation is coming soon, and the two may not see each other again; Petro may be sent somewhere else. The card is therefore entrusted to someone whose own position is temporary. The scene does not establish whether the envelope reaches its recipients, leaving the act of sending distinct from any confirmed reunion. The episode belongs to a wider pattern in which Sergeyich’s care takes material form: he offers Petro honey, and other people’s practical generosity sustains him in turn. Here, however, the exchange is not honey or food but a request to carry a message across a broken civilian route. The handmade card, its wedding photograph, and its carefully chosen plural address preserve a claim on family belonging even when war has made ordinary communication uncertain. Its significance lies not in a recorded reply, but in Sergeyich’s decision to make himself present to Vitalina and Angelica—and in his willingness to entrust that effort to another person.