War, it almost goes without saying but it likely still needs to be said given the plethora of present horrific conflicts around the world, is a horrifically terrible thing to live through.
But what is it like to live war-adjacent?
This disorientingly strange limbo of normal is affectingly explored in Andrey Kurkov’s emotionally rich novel, pre-2022-set Grey Bees, which has at its centre a man known as Sergey-Sergeyich, a retired safety inspector and now fulltime beekeeper who is one of only two people left in Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets that sits squarely within what is termed the Grey Zone, a buffer of land that sits awkwardly in eastern Ukraine between warring Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-backed separatists.
The only other resident of the village with a bombed-out church is Pashka Khmelenko, Sergey’s enemy from schooldays with whom he has had as little to do as possible until, of course, circumstances forced them together in an act of unwilling mutual dependence.
While all the other villagers have fled, these two men, for a host of different reasons have fled, caught in a region of Ukraine known as the Donbas where life continues somewhat as normal but not even remotely normally at all.
This is the first searing insight Kurkov – that is after his a foreword and a preface, one written in 2022 and the other in 2020 where he gives firsthand account of what Russian aggression has meant for his country and for him personally – shares with readers who come to appreciate how messily ill-defined war can be.
He locked the door and snuffed out two of the three candles. The unexpected encounter with a military man had improved his mood – and this surprised him. It was as if he had just watched something interesting on television.
Nice guy, he thought, looking at the grenade. I should have asked him more questions.
The thing is, that while it may be ill-defined, that doesn’t stop it from exacting a terrible toll on those caught directly in it, or those like Sergey, who are caught on the margins.
The telling part is that these margins are no safer really than the frontlines, with Sergey and Pashka, and countless others living always under threat of bombardment; in many ways though life as they knew it has finished anyway, reduced to a struggle for survival so basic that it’s not unusual for Sergey to walk kilometres to the relatively unaffected and somewhat normal village fo Svitle where he can procure eggs and other food items simply not available to him in a village that is really only hanging onto existence by its frayed fingertips.
The only solace Sergey has is his bees who, in their six beautifully maintained hives, are the one constancy in a world long shorn of them, and a reason for him to get up in the morning and engage with the world in some sort of meaningful fashion.
He does have an increasing number of visits from Pashka, who graduates to frenemy status by novel’s end, and from Petro, a kindly younger Ukrainian soldier who checks in on Sergey from time to time and who extends him many kindnesses, both practical (supplying food, charging his phone; there’s no electricity in the village anymore) and moral (his company is warm, kind and thoughtfully engaged).
But by and large Sergey, long abandoned by his younger wife who took their daughter back to a larger city more her style, is alone with his bees until one day he decides to drive away in his Lada, his trailer loaded with his six hives, so his charges can fly around and collect pollen in a peace that simply isn’t possible in a place where going to the wrong field might be a death sentence.
Leaving at the start of summer, Sergey journeys through a number of towns and villages, in Ukraine and down to illegally-annexed Crimea where the usually taciturn, neutralist man, who prefers the Ukrainian iteration of his name but is stuck with the Russian one on his passport, where is forced to confront the barbaric, genocidal treatment of the Tartars, a Muslim people long mistreated by the Russians who continue to treat this culturally rich people like a pest to be exterminated.
In his long and winding journey where he meets loyalists and separatists, and Russian occupation forces who almost use inadvertently use the gentle, morally-centred man as a crass weapon of twisted propaganda, Sergey comes scarily close to losing everything on a number of occasions.
But he is also able to meet people who enrich the paucity of his spartan life, gifting him food, emotional sustenance and sometimes more, and it’s these relationships, where he becomes more invested than he expects, that come to define his summer away from strangeness of his war-pockmarked life.
Then he recorded Aisylu and her children; some people were worse than bees, and some were as good as bees. But better? Unlikely. He decided he would bring Aisylu some candles. Who knew when the power would come back? Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week …
As an insight into the impossible situation in Ukraine, Grey Bees is stunningly invaluable, adding a very human face to the countless stories of war, all the more heightened since Russia’s renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
But more than that, if that’s not powerful enough, it takes us into the very heart and soul of one beautifully caring and lonely man who always does what is right, even after he makes a mistake, because his conscience is so persistent that it will not allow to rest until he makes it right.
In a world full of moral equivalence and outright cruelty, he is a man apart, and through him, we are able to witness how truly awful many of the sins visited on Ukraine actually are; Sergey is the prism through which we experience not so much the war directly but its ever-widening effects, the way even people and places far from the frontline find old certainties being trashed and life as they know it as cratered shadow of its former bounteous self.
Grey Bees, translated by Boris Dralyuk, is a thoughtfully nuanced, emotionally rich story that tells its tale slowly but with great empathetic power, giving us privileged insight into Ukraine at war – it has been this way since 2014 with 2022’s actions simply the latest theatre in a long-running campaign of attrition against their western neighbour – and helping us to appreciate how great the cost of any military aggression, not just on those right on the frontlines of the conflict but on those caught on its margins who find their lives turned upside down and who must fight, like Sergey innocently does, to hang onto something of value (in his case, his precious bees) and to use this talisman to remain to life in whatever form they can manage.