52 pages • 1-hour read
The Painted Bird
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Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
The head of a village places the boy with a farmer named Makar, his son Anton, or “the Quail,” and his daughter, Ewka. The family lives outside the village and is disliked by the peasants. Rumors circulate that Makar and his children, ages twenty and nineteen, engage in an incestuous relationship. Makar and the Quail often lock themselves in the stable with the goats. Ewka sometimes refuses to leave the house lest Makar and the Quail take her to the stable with them.
Ewka takes the boy into a sexual relationship and “tried to make [him] become a man”; the boy “followed all her wishes” and “felt secure and happy” (146), forgetting that he’s “a Gypsy mute designed for fire” (147). His dreams take on a sexual tone, sometimes becoming nightmares.
Makar pays special attention to his rabbits. He appears especially interested in a large white female rabbit, which he sometimes takes to the house, only to return her to her cage with animal ill and bleeding. One day he tells the boy to kill her, shocking the boy, who hits her on the head until he believes she’s dead. He’s in the process of skinning her when she awakens. The boy releases her, and she runs off frantically, causing mayhem among the animals. Makar kills her, then kicks the boy forcefully in the stomach. The boy takes weeks to recover. He’s visited daily by the Quail or Ewka, who bring him food. He misses Ewka’s touch but is in too much pain even to stand.
One night, the boy watches as the Quail leads the he-goat to Makar’s bedroom, where Ewka embraces it “as though it were a man” (151); the family members also lie with each other. Devastated, he experiences a moment of clarity in which he understands that “the powers of Evil […] lurked near every person,” ready to offer help “on the condition that it would be used for selfish purposes and only to the detriment of others” (152). This realization seems to explain the unstoppable Germans, who not only wield enormous power but also possess “splendid abilities and talents” (153). Deciding he will now open himself to the forces of Evil, the boy goes to the hut of Anulka, the village healer, stabs her with a stick, steals a comet, and flees to the forest.
Chapter 13 Summary
The boy has made ice skates, anticipating he’d one day have to leave the village. He ties them to his boots and takes to the frozen marshland with a canvas sail on his head, feeling “free and alone like a starling soaring in the air, tossed by every flurry, following a stream, unconscious of its speed, drawn into an abandoned dance” (157). When he grows cold and tired, he stops for a rest, only to find that his comet has blown out. Panicking, he looks about, unable to find a farm or village.
He hears the wind whipping about him and believes the winds to be the whisperings of Evil Ones who, “[t]o train [the boy] in hatred” (158), had taken him from his parents, Marta, and Olga; stolen his speech and Ewka; and now have left him to freeze in the marshes, in order to secure him in their power. He continues painfully on until he spots a village far ahead. Before it, a group of boys approach on skates. The boy attempts to flee, but he’s cold and exhausted, and they surround him.
The boys call him “a Gypsy bastard” and beat him. They begin to remove his pants to sexually assault him. The boy manages to injure two boys by kicking them with his skates, and several of their friends drag them, bleeding, toward the village. The boys who remain behind bring the protagonist to a hole in the ice and shove him into the freezing water, holding him down with a pole. Eventually noticing they’d let go of the pole, the boy struggles to the surface and pops his head out, waiting some time to emerge until he’s sure they’ve gone far enough away.
When he climbs from the water, his clothes and body are frozen. He moves as best he can toward the forest, where he imagines it’s summer; he sees fields of wheat and feels Ewka’s touch. With visions of delicious food in his mind, he stumbles into the woods, where he feels himself sinking into a warm bed. He hears a woman speaking, and “[e]verything dissolved into a sultry summer night, full of intoxicating, moist, fragrant mists” (161).
Chapter 14 Summary
The woman who saves the boy is named Labina, and he feels “safe and contented” (162) with her. Unlike other peasants, when she smiles, she doesn’t cover her mouth, unconcerned that he will count her teeth. When other peasants tell her she should turn him over to the Germans, she responds “that all were equal before God” (163).
Labina hosts parties with much singing and drinking. After, a man would stay with her, joining her in bed as the boy listened. The boy is appalled by the animal-like qualities of these rushed sexual encounters; they strike, push, and beat each other until they fall to the bed “like slaughtered cattle” (165). The boy contrasts this love with the gentle, selfless love he gave to Ewka.
Labina tells the boy the story of her husband, Laba, or “the Handsome One.” Though she could have married someone rich, Labina chose to marry Laba, a poor farmhand. Laba knew he was handsome and liked to bathe naked in the pond as lustful women looked on. The rich peasants for whom he worked knew their wives were attracted to him and liked to humiliate and humble him.
Laba suddenly disappeared and did not return for a year. When he did, it was with a chest full of beautiful, stylish clothing. He wore shiny shoes, silk shirts, and black suits about the village, ostentatiously, showing off at church, funerals, and weddings; he was the constant center of attention and was more admired than ever. He was fawned over by women and courted by rich peasants, and he often traveled miles to attend receptions, leaving Labina at home.
One afternoon, Labina found him dead in the attic, where he’d kept his precious clothing. He was hanging by his floral necktie, beneath a hole in the ceiling, from which a thief had escaped with his treasures. Without the clothes that had brought him admiration, he had nothing to live for and had taken his life.
The thief was never discovered, and some believed Labina was responsible, making her furious and ultimately causing her heart to “burst” (170). As her body is brought back to her hut, the boy flees, on the way out collecting his comet and also the necktie with which Laba had hung himself, for “[i]t was common belief that the rope of a suicide brings good luck” (171).
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
The events in these chapters are transformative for the boy; they represent the beginning of a transition from innocence, both sexually and ideologically. Ewka awakens in him “something [he] had not known before” (147), and while on the surface this something appears to be love, his relationship with Ewka is the catalyst for a series of realizations about power that stay with himto the end of the novel.
In his dreams, the boy imagines he’s “a tall, handsome man, fair-skinned, blue-eyed” (147). With his “artful hands,” he inspires “wild passions in the village girls, turning them into wanton Ludmilas” (147). These self-aggrandizing fantasies feel typical of a young boy in the midst of his first sexual experiences. However, his imagining of himself as “a German officer in a tight, black uniform” (147), or as a bird catcher, suggests his excitement stems not just from sex but also from power; he is, for once, the catcher, and not the caught. His sexualizing of the SS officer only reinforces the connection between sex and violence.
This connection between power and sexual dominance is further demonstrated after his perceived sexual betrayal, when he resorts to “the powers of Evil” (152),thus following in the footsteps of peasants who turn violent to compensate for losing the sexual upper hand. He promises to “consciously promote evil” and use the “diabolical powers granted him by the Evil Ones in a manner calculated to cause as much misery and suffering around him as possible” (152). He longs to be like the “invincible” Germans, whose “eager[ness] to do harm” earns them “splendid abilities and talents” (153) from the Evil Ones. As if to prove his dedication to emulate them, he stabs Anulka the healer with a stick on his way out of the village.
It is when the boy has hope and is disappointed that he undergoes the most momentous shifts. When prayer proves fruitless, he loses his voice; when he’s disillusioned by love (“So that’s what love was,” he grumbles [165]), he abruptly turns to the Evil Ones. It’s worth noting that the peasants’ deviance, too, seems to originate from loss. Garbos, who beats the boy, demands to know why he lives “when his boys had died so young” (118). The widowed Labina finds no comfort in her love affairs, which “were like short spring thundershowers that wet the leaves and grass but never reached the roots” (165). Even “Stupid” Ludmila is affected by a traumatic past, having been raped by a gang of peasants and left with an “addled” mind (48). Nestled among scenes of violence, these details remind us of the fragility of the human heart.
The boy concludes that to love is to be passive and therefore vulnerable, that he who “succumbed to emotions of love, friendship, and compassion, would immediately become weaker and his own life would have to absorb the suffering and defeats that he spared others” (152). However,the boy’s passivity has eroded; he’d prayed and supplicated to God, with nothing to show for it but the loss of his speech. Now he must “build up a potential for hatred that would force [him] to action” (154).
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