Valik's attack on Sergeyich's car and apiary

Valik’s attack on Sergeyich’s car and apiary is the violent reversal that ends the beekeeper’s fragile refuge: an axe destroys the windows of his Lada, while the hives survive almost untouched. The damage is both material and intimate, and it propels Sergeyich and Galya into a hurried nighttime evacuation of the bees and his belongings.## The confrontation at the tentThe assault begins in the evening, when someone grabs Sergeyich’s hand and yanks him as he is coming out of his tent. He nearly falls, then frees himself with a sharp movement and turns toward two figures silhouetted against the dark-blue sky. Asked what they want, one answers in a drunken, youthful voice and staggers forward with a fist aimed at Sergeyich’s face. The other man, apparently older, pulls him back before he can start a fight.The confrontation turns from a threat of immediate violence into an accusation: the older man blames Sergeyich for Sashka’s death. The scene places the beekeeper in the path of anger shaped by wartime loss, without making that accusation the explanation for what follows. In the darkness, the attackers are at first figures and voices; their grievance precedes the full revelation of the damage.## The car is wreckedMikhalych, the history teacher, is with Sergeyich when a strained cry and then a loud bang break into the night. The blows make a sound like a stick hitting thick cardboard, or a crowbar striking sheet metal. Sergeyich rises to go outside, but Mikhalych blocks him and insists that he stay out of harm’s way. Before the teacher can explain, Sergeyich realizes that the so-called counterterrorist is wrecking his car. Mikhalych holds him down, pleading that the shell-shocked man is out of control and cannot now be stopped.The noise ends with car doors slamming and an engine roaring away. Only after the attacker has left does Sergeyich emerge. Under the stars and the thin horn of the moon, he finds the familiar Lada nearly unrecognizable. Valik has smashed every window with an axe: the windscreen remains only in fragments, bent inward at its upper and lower edges; the driver-side window is gone, and the window behind it is webbed with cracks. The slow inspection gives the attack its full weight. This is not simply a damaged vehicle but the destruction of the thing Sergeyich depends on to move himself and his bees through a dangerous landscape.## The hives and the cost of escapeSergeyich walks around the car with stabbing pain in his heart, then looks toward the hives and listens for the bees’ familiar buzzing. On the edge of the nearest hive he finds just one faint axe mark. Valik appears to have spent his strength destroying the car rather than continuing against the apiary, and Sergeyich’s relief is immediate: he thanks God that the hives have been spared. The contrast defines the attack’s uneven result. The Lada is left exposed and unusable as it was; the bees, though threatened, remain alive and present.The attack nevertheless makes staying untenable. At Galya’s home, she comes into the street with tears running down her cheeks and asks how he will manage with a car in that condition. Sergeyich does not answer the practical question directly. Instead, he tells her that Valik tried to smash the hives too, but lacked the strength. The battered car is an injury that can be seen; the narrow escape of the bees is the fact that makes relocation possible.## Evacuation and departureUnder the street lamp, the car’s broken windows bring Sergeyich shame and pain, and he fears the looks of other drivers, traffic police, and passers-by. He calculates that he has three hours before dawn and that the roads will be quiet in the early morning. Galya follows him on her scooter as he returns to the hives. Together they lower the trailer onto its wheels, close all six entrances, load the hives wall to wall, and secure them with straps. He puts the rest of his belongings in the Lada’s boot, making the wrecked vehicle part of the escape rather than abandoning it at once.Sergeyich asks Galya to look around later and keep safe anything he may have missed, adding that he will return. She assures him that he will. Before he leaves, she asks him to call when he finds somewhere to stay and offers to bring food if the place is not too far away. They embrace; he registers her as the closest and dearest person in his life, then lets her go. He waves goodbye from behind the wheel and drives off. The farewell makes the attack’s consequence more than a change of location: it separates him from the person who has helped him leave, even as both speak as though the separation may be temporary.## The road toward CrimeaThe empty road calms Sergeyich, but he does not want to sleep. At a fork, Donetsk lies straight ahead and Melitopol to the right. He has passed junctions where he could have stopped, pitched the tent, and set up the hives in a secluded place, but the road’s desertedness seems to urge him onward, as if farther must mean safer. Then his headlights catch a large sign bearing the word SIMFEROPOL above the arrow for the main road. He realizes with a jolt that he is almost in Crimea, and the shock feels happy. The attack has begun as an accusation and ended with a departure whose destination emerges almost by chance: the bees survive, but their survival now depends on carrying them away from the place where Valik found them.