Valik smashes Sergeyich’s car

Valik smashes Sergeyich’s car after accusing him of being responsible for a soldier’s death and condemning him for having been on the other side of the front. The attack leaves the car’s windows shattered, but the nearby hives largely intact; its deeper consequence is to make Sergeyich abandon the apiary and set out with his bees. The scene converts wartime accusation into a personal rupture, and a damaged vehicle into the immediate cause of another displacement.

Background and Confrontation

The confrontation takes place at Sergeyich’s tent, where he is living among his bees. Two figures appear in the evening. One grabs his hand and pulls; Sergeyich nearly falls, then frees himself and asks what they want. The younger man, Valik, tries to reach his face with a fist, while the older man, Mikhalych, restrains him. The imbalance between the two visitors is clear: Mikhalych attempts to prevent a fight, but Valik is intent on confronting Sergeyich.

Valik’s grievance is bound to the war. He blames Sergeyich for the death of Sashka and insists that he himself had endured shelling and a concussion in the trenches while Sergeyich had been on the opposing side of the front. His accusation makes the attack more than a random act of damage: Valik treats Sergeyich’s location and perceived allegiance as grounds for punishment. The episode does not establish that Sergeyich caused Sashka’s death; it establishes that Valik believes or claims he did.

The Attack and Its Immediate Damage

A loud bang and further blows interrupt the confrontation. Mikhalych blocks Sergeyich from going outside and tells him to stay in the tent, out of harm’s way. After the visitors leave in their car, Sergeyich emerges and finds that Valik has smashed the windows of the green Lada with an axe. The windscreen is reduced to fragments, the driver-side window is gone, and the rear window is webbed with cracks.

The attack has reached the vehicle, but not, in any substantial way, the apiary. Sergeyich hears the familiar buzzing and notices only a faint axe mark on the nearest hive. He concludes that Valik had spent his strength destroying the car. That contrast matters practically: the Lada is badly damaged, yet the bees he depends on remain alive, so the immediate crisis is not the destruction of his work but whether he can continue to keep the bees and himself there.

Sergeyich begins mechanically removing loose glass from the car. He cuts his hand in the process and uses supplies from the vehicle to tend to it. His attention to the damaged car and his continued concern for the hives show how the assault interrupts ordinary maintenance without erasing his priorities: he tries to make the vehicle usable, but the bees’ safety remains the decisive concern.

Valik’s Wider Threat and the Decision to Leave

Galya explains that Valik has been causing trouble beyond this attack. A week earlier, he had thrown a grenade into the yard of the village council’s bookkeeper, though it did not explode. He is in debt to the council for water, yet when drinking he shouts that others owe him. This account places the smashing of the Lada within a pattern of volatility and makes the threat to Sergeyich’s apiary seem less isolated, even though the hives escaped serious damage this time.

Galya advises Sergeyich to leave for a while, suggesting that Valik might be arrested and that she will call if that happens. Sergeyich is ashamed of the windowless car and anticipates the attention it will draw from other drivers, police, and passers-by. With only a few hours before dawn and traffic expected to be light, he decides to hurry. The assault thus changes his immediate objective: instead of carrying on at the apiary, he must get himself and the bees away before the road becomes busier.

Departure and Consequences

Sergeyich and Galya prepare the bees for transport. They close all six hive entrances, load the hives side by side onto the trailer, and strap them down; his other belongings go into the car. The careful loading is a direct answer to the vulnerability exposed by Valik’s attack. The car may be damaged, but the hives can still be moved, and Sergeyich organizes the departure around keeping the bees together and secure.

Before leaving, Sergeyich asks Galya to look around later and keep safe anything he may have missed, adding that he expects to return. Galya asks him to call when he finds somewhere to stay and offers to bring food if it is not too far away. Their parting gives the flight a human cost as well as a practical one: Sergeyich leaves the person who has advised and helped him, while neither treats the separation as necessarily permanent. He gets into the car, waves to Galya, and drives away.

On the road, the damaged vehicle and the threat behind it propel Sergeyich farther than he initially intended. He passes possible places where he might have stopped and continued a quiet life with the bees, but keeps driving. At a fork, the road leads toward Donetsk or Melitopol; then a sign for Simferopol alerts him that he is nearly in Crimea. The attack therefore becomes a turning point in his wartime displacement: it drives him from the apiary, but does not destroy the bees or sever his hope of returning.## Narrative Significance The episode sets human conflict against the comparatively undisturbed life of the hives. Sergeyich has long understood his work as caring for bees whose needs are concrete: they must remain warm, and their hive temperature holds at thirty-seven degrees even in winter. In the attack’s aftermath, he checks the familiar buzzing before treating the car’s damage as the central problem. The difference is not that the bees escape every danger, but that Valik’s violence, directed at Sergeyich, nearly leaves them untouched.

That distinction makes the ruined Lada both a material loss and a forced change of course. Sergeyich’s livelihood depends on the bees and on his ability to move and care for them; Valik targets the vehicle that helps make that life possible. Sergeyich responds not by retaliating or abandoning the hives, but by using the remaining means at hand to transport them. The episode’s decisive outcome is therefore a departure under pressure, with the survival of the bees preserving the possibility of continuing his work elsewhere.