Makar

Makar is a secluded farmer whose household stands apart from village life, and whose guarded farm becomes a place of both shelter and threat for the unnamed boy narrator. His authority rests on control of the household and its animals, while his estrangement from the village is reinforced by rumor, intimidation, and the family’s own isolation.

Identity and Background

Makar lives with his son, Anton the Quail, and his daughter, Ewka, on a farmstead separated from the rest of the settlement. His wife had apparently died long ago, and he had arrived in the village only a few years earlier; villagers therefore treated him as a stranger. Rumors cast suspicion on the relationships within his family, and people muttered that the household should be driven out and its home burned. Makar ignored such threats, but the hostility around him formed a persistent boundary between the farm and the village.

After village boys caught the unnamed boy narrator in the forest, the village headman tried unsuccessfully to place him with other peasants and then handed him over to Makar. Makar suspected that the boy’s muteness was feigned to conceal his Gypsy speech. At night he sometimes went to the small attic where the boy slept and tried to provoke a cry of fear; the boy woke trembling but could make no sound. Makar watched these attempts closely, seemed disappointed by their result, and eventually stopped testing him.

Authority, Animals, and the Household

Makar’s authority at the farm extended to its people, livestock, and trade. He raised rabbits in rows of cages arranged through the outbuildings, with only wire netting between them, so he could survey the animals together. An expert breeder, he kept specimens so fine that even the wealthiest farmers could not afford them. The household also had five goats, cared for by Anton the Quail, who milked them and took them to pasture. Makar and his son sold rabbits and skins in neighboring villages, making animal husbandry both their livelihood and the organizing principle of the isolated farm.

The narrator’s work reflected that hierarchy. Makar normally killed the rabbits himself, while the boy skinned and dressed them and Ewka prepared them as food. When Makar ordered him to kill a valuable white female, the boy hesitated; Makar slapped him and repeated the command. The episode shows how the boy’s place in the household depended on obedience, even when the task disturbed him, and how Makar’s concern for valuable skins could coexist with his willingness to use force against the child entrusted to him.

The farm’s animals also marked the household’s boundary with the village. Makar kept a trained wolfhound, Ditko, in the yard, and Anton carried a hand grenade he had found on a dead partisan. Makar himself kept a long knife in his sleeve and was known for his accurate throwing. These weapons answered the villagers’ threats to drive the family out and burn its home: Makar ignored the threats, but the household was not defenseless. Its seclusion was thus maintained through a combination of economic independence, guarded property, and the capacity to intimidate anyone who approached.

One night, the boy secretly watched Makar arrange a sexual encounter between Ewka and the family’s buck goat. The scene revealed the abuse within the household and gave the narrator a disturbing explanation for the village’s suspicions about Makar’s family. What had seemed like hostile gossip was connected to conduct taking place behind the farm’s closed doors.

Wartime Economy and Rural Exchange

Makar’s rabbit and goat farm operated within a rural economy strained by wartime demands. In the village, German soldiers arrived three times a year to collect food and materials the peasants were obliged to provide; across the region, peasants also had to surrender much of their meager harvest to German troops and Partisans. Refusal could bring punitive raids that left villages in ruins. The evidence does not say how these levies affected Makar directly, but they show the pressures surrounding the livestock trade on which his household relied.

Exchange continued around the Red Army camp as well: peasants brought fruit and vegetables to trade for canned meat, shoes, or tent canvas. These transactions offer a contrasting measure of village survival under wartime scarcity—not evidence of Makar’s own dealings, but a wider setting in which food, materials, and livestock had practical value as well as market value.

Narrative Significance

The episode’s significance lies in how it converts village rumor into the boy’s newly confirmed understanding: what had seemed an abstract accusation now has a concrete, hidden counterpart inside Makar’s household. The narrator connects this discovery to a familiar local expression about success achieved through an alliance with evil. In that turn, prosperity no longer appears merely as the result of skill in animal husbandry; it acquires a disturbing moral shadow, and the boy’s inherited language of superstition becomes a way to interpret conduct he cannot otherwise make sense of.