Village of Red Men

The Village of Red Men is a small peat-selling settlement east of Hans Reiter’s home town. He reaches it by following a dirt road through the forest, and sees it as part of a landscape whose villages appear remote and almost uninhabited. Its brief appearance helps turn a local walk into a private map of separation, danger, and imagined histories.

Setting and Description

Hans walks east along a forest road to the Village of Red Men, where the inhabitants sell peat. The settlement is one stop in a longer route: farther east lie the Village of Blue Women, set in a lake that dries up in summer, and then the Town of the Fat. The Village of Red Men and its neighboring settlement seem to him like ghost towns, inhabited by the dead.

Hans Reiter’s Perspective

The place is presented through Hans’s solitary, exploratory movement rather than through a detached account of its people. He imagines that the villagers may have died at the hands of the inhabitants of the Town of the Fat, whom he pictures as relentless killers. The text does not establish this as fact: it is Hans’s conjecture, shaped by the stark differences he perceives between the settlements and by his sense that he does not belong to the world of the Town of the Fat.

Hans thinks of himself as a diver moving through a world that is not his own. That imagined identity makes the Village of Red Men a place he visits but does not enter into socially; he passes through it as an observer, carrying his own interpretation of its people and history.

Place in the Landscape

The Village of Red Men is part of a sequence of named communities that gives the countryside a fable-like structure. Its eastward route contrasts with Hans’s walks west, where he passes Egg Village, Pig Village, and the Town of Chattering Girls. These settlements are not developed as an ordinary regional map. Instead, their suggestive names and Hans’s impressions organize the landscape into distinct, self-contained worlds.

The Village of Red Men therefore matters less as a center of action than as one of the places through which Hans’s solitary childhood perspective takes shape. Its apparent emptiness, the peat trade, and his unverified suspicion about its past remain deliberately spare, leaving the settlement suspended between a real destination and a child’s imaginative geography.