Labina

Labina is a poor village woman who gives The boy shelter and food when others argue that he should be delivered to German soldiers. Her hut becomes a rare refuge, but that refuge is not insulated from village cruelty: Labina has endured humiliation and suspicion, and her death leaves The boy with the necktie of her dead husband, Handsome Laba, as he sets out again.

First Encounter and Shelter

The boy reaches Labina after stumbling through the woods over frozen ground. When he wakes, he is on a low bed covered with sheepskins in a hot hut: a candle lights its dirt floor, whitewashed walls, and thatched roof, with a cross above the fireplace. Labina sits by the flames. She is barefoot, dressed in a coarse linen skirt and a hole-riddled rabbit-pelt jerkin. Her watery blue eyes and uneven yellow teeth make her presence vivid to the newly awakened child, who has no reason yet to know whether he is safe.

Labina approaches, lifts his chin, and studies him. Speaking a local dialect he cannot fully understand, she calls him her poor Gypsy and little Jewish foundling. At first she does not accept that he is mute: she looks into his mouth, taps his throat, and tries to startle a response from him. When he remains silent, she stops testing him. The scene places her initial uncertainty beside a practical kindness; she does not require speech from him before attending to his needs.

She feeds him hot, thick borscht and carefully examines his frozen ears, hands, and feet. She tells him her name, and he feels safe and content with her, liking her very much. In a life marked by displacement, that sense of safety is a consequential change: Labina is not merely the woman who finds him, but someone with whom he can briefly settle.

Work, Protection, and Life in the Hut

By day, Labina works as a domestic for richer peasants, especially households with sick wives or too many children. She often takes The boy with her so he can get a decent meal. This care puts her directly against village opinion. People say the child ought to be handed over to German soldiers; Labina answers with curses, insisting that all are equal before God and that she will not sell him like Judas for silver. Her protection is expressed not through power or wealth, but through the repeated decision to keep him with her despite the danger of the accusation and the pressure around her.

In the evenings, men who manage to get away from their own houses visit her hut, bringing vodka and baskets of food. The single enormous bed can hold three people; between it and the wall Labina makes a sleeping place for The boy out of sacks, old rags, and sheepskins. He usually goes to sleep before the guests arrive, but their singing and loud toasts wake him. He pretends to remain asleep, watching with nearly closed eyes because he fears the beating Labina halfheartedly says he deserves. The hut therefore offers protection without erasing the child’s vigilance: even in a place where he is cared for, he calculates how to avoid harm.

The brief loves of Labina and her guests are set against the boy’s earlier attachment to Ewka, which had lasted longer before being extinguished. That contrast belongs to the child’s observing perspective; it does not turn Labina’s hospitality into a simple idyll. Her hut holds food and a place to sleep, but also adult intimacy, noise, and a danger the boy manages by feigning sleep.

Marriage to Handsome Laba

On rainy afternoons Labina grows melancholic and talks about her husband, Handsome Laba, who has died. She had once been beautiful and had been courted by the richest peasants in the village. Against their advice, she fell in love with and married Laba, the poorest farmhand. The difference between her former suitors’ wealth and her husband’s poverty defines the marriage’s social circumstances from the outset.

Laba’s beauty was conspicuous: he was tall, nimble, and admired by women, and he knew the effect he had on them. He paraded in the woods and bathed naked in the pond, aware that young women and married women watched him. His desirability did not protect him. The rich peasants who hired him knew their wives and daughters desired him and humiliated him for it. They also harassed Labina, knowing that her penniless husband depended on them and could only look on helplessly. Their marriage is thus remembered through both love and unequal power: the couple’s poverty leaves them exposed to the people who control Laba’s work.

Laba’s death is bound in Labina’s story to the necktie he wore before hanging himself. The account also recalls an emptied chest and treasures whose origin he never explained; Labina never learned where he had been or how he acquired them. Neither the thief nor the stolen objects is ever found. The missing property becomes a wound that the village keeps reopening rather than a mystery the narrative resolves.

Accusation, Death, and Departure

Rumors assign the theft to a cuckolded husband or fiancé, or to a desperately jealous woman, and many villagers suspect Labina herself. When she hears the accusation, her face grows livid and her hands shake. She lunges at the accusers, her fingers clawing, until onlookers have to separate the fighters. The suspicion does not remain a matter of gossip: it repeatedly drives her into confrontation, after which she goes home, drinks herself into a stupor, and holds The boy against her breast while weeping.

During one of these fights, Labina’s heart bursts. The boy sees men carrying her dead body to the hut and understands that he must flee. He puts smoldering embers into his Comet and takes the precious necktie Labina had hidden under the bed—the tie on which Handsome Laba had hanged himself. In the village, a suicide’s rope is believed to bring good luck, and The boy hopes he will never lose the tie. His departure carries forward both a material remnant of Labina’s household and the village superstition attached to it; the object is at once a keepsake and a talisman for a child who has lost his shelter.

Narrative Role

Labina’s role is defined by a sharp contrast between the care she gives The boy and the community’s readiness to expose him. She feeds him, takes him along to secure meals, and refuses to surrender him, while the villagers treat his presence as a reason for accusation and exclusion. Her defense rests on a claim of equality before God, yet her own life is constrained by poverty and by the rich peasants who exploit Laba’s dependence on their work.

The narrative also gives Labina a history beyond her brief function as the child’s rescuer. Her marriage, her husband’s unexplained absence and death, the missing treasures, and the villagers’ suspicions show how private grief becomes public conflict. Her final embrace of The boy, described amid drunkenness and sobbing, precedes his flight after her death. The necktie then links her household to the next stage of his wandering, preserving the memory of the shelter even as he leaves it.