The Evil Ones

The Evil Ones are the demonic powers the unnamed boy narrator imagines as patrons of deliberate cruelty: they offer strength and assistance to people who make harming others their purpose. His theory gives supernatural form to a world already organized by violence, deprivation, and unequal power. It also becomes a turning point in his own thinking. Faced with the possibility that hatred can be rewarded while love and compassion leave a person exposed, he begins to picture himself as a future agent of the evil he has feared.

Origins in a Violent World

The boy’s theory emerges from a setting where hardship and superstition are already intertwined. The villages are remote, with few roads or bridges and no schools, hospitals, or electricity; people feud over rivers, woods, and lakes, while traditional power favors the strong and wealthy. Catholic and Orthodox villagers share pervasive beliefs in supernatural dangers, even as disease and material hardship shape everyday life. The account stresses that their brutality is not simply a chosen disposition: poor soil, severe weather, floods, and marshland narrow the possibilities of survival.

War makes that scarcity more coercive. Under German occupation, peasants must surrender much of their meager harvest both to regular troops and to Partisans; refusal can bring punitive raids that leave villages ruined. Elsewhere, German soldiers arrive three times a year to collect food and materials owed to the army. Exchanges also structure ordinary survival: Lekh trades caged birds for food and household goods, while villagers later bring produce to the Red Army camp in return for canned meat, shoes, or tent canvas. These arrangements are not evidence that demons exist, but they help define the material world in which the boy’s imagined bargain takes shape: resources, protection, and power are unequally distributed, and assistance often comes with conditions.

Fire is another measure of that vulnerability. The boy learns that a portable stove made from a perforated one-quart can can supply heat and cook food, and that an extinguished fire in winter can expose a person to frostbite as well as hunger. Cans are difficult to obtain along military rail lines; rival communities send search parties and even arm them with axes to defend their finds. Olga the Wise One gives the boy his own stove in payment for treating a patient, and he guards it carefully. In his experience, safety depends on scarce, practical resources. His later supernatural explanation recasts that precarious dependence as a contest over who will help him and at what moral price.

The Bargain and Its Rules

The boy develops his account of the Evil Ones after witnessing conduct in Makar’s household that shatters his previous understanding of the people around him. He had heard villagers explain extraordinary success by saying that its possessor had entered into an alliance with the Devil. Now he takes that saying as a possible description of how the world works. The Evil Ones, he imagines, are not merely frightening beings outside people; they inhabit human souls and watch both actions and motives.

In this imagined system, a person’s mind is like a field into which evil powers scatter seed. They offer help when someone welcomes their influence and uses it selfishly, to the detriment of others. Their favor grows with the misery, injury, and bitterness a person deliberately causes. Love, friendship, and compassion are liabilities in this scheme: if a person refrains from hurting others, the boy believes, the powers withdraw their aid, leaving that person to bear the suffering that would otherwise have been inflicted outward.

The boy names Lucifer, Cadaver, Mammon, and Exterminator among the demons peasants accuse one another of serving. Yet he distinguishes a true bargain from confused or inconsistent behavior. People divided between curses and prayers, the tavern and the church, may struggle through life without help from either God or the Devil. The successful recruit, by contrast, must possess a sufficiently strong passion for hatred, greed, revenge, or torture to pursue a definite objective. The boy is disturbed to recognize that he has so far belonged among those without such assistance, and annoyed with himself for not having understood these supposed rules earlier.

A Scale of Harm

The bargain is also imagined as a system of measurement. A person who has sold out to the Evil Ones must continue producing misdeeds, and the boy supposes that the powers assess each act by its reach and consequences. Harming one person counts for less than affecting many; ruining a young person’s life counts for more than harming someone near the end of life. Most valuable of all is damage that changes its victim, turning someone toward a life of evil. In this logic, inducing hatred is more effective than simply beating an innocent person, and hatred spread across a large group is the greatest achievement.

That scale makes the boy’s theory more than an explanation for isolated acts of cruelty. It describes evil as something that reproduces itself: injury can alter a victim’s character, and the altered person may then harm others. The boy imagines that anyone who comes into contact with a successful agent of the Evil Ones might become infected with evil and carry the destruction onward. Each new success would, in turn, win further powers for the original agent. His supernatural system thus mirrors the spread of collective hatred: one person’s actions may reach far beyond their first victim.

Germany and the Boy’s Self-Recognition

The boy applies this theory to Germany’s military power. Recalling a priest’s explanation that Germans had long preferred waging war and taking other peoples’ harvests to cultivating the soil and waiting for their own, he imagines that they attracted the Evil Ones through an eagerness to do harm. Their success becomes a vicious cycle: the more harm they inflict, the more supernatural power they secure, and the more power they gain, the greater the harm they can carry out. He pictures them as able to impose highly developed methods of wrongdoing, spread hatred, and condemn whole nations to extermination.

This is the boy’s fearful, sweeping interpretation, not a verified account of German motives or supernatural intervention. It converts the violence of occupation and mass persecution into a demonic explanation, and extends guilt indiscriminately to every German. The claim reveals how urgently he is searching for a rule behind events that otherwise appear terrifyingly arbitrary. The Evil Ones give him a pattern in which cruelty is not senseless: it is rewarded, organized, and capable of reproducing itself.

The pattern also turns back on the boy. He recognizes his own hatred and remembers fantasies of returning to burn settlements, poison children and cattle, or lure people into deadly swamps. He takes these wishes as signs that he has already been noticed by the Evil Ones, though he has not yet made what he considers a real contribution to their work. Rather than treating his violent thoughts as evidence of injury or despair, he interprets them as the beginning of a possible career in evil. He expects that his hatred may grow, bring him powers, and eventually make him as prominent as the Germans he fears.

The Wind and the Unconfirmed Pact

Later, during a journey across frozen ground, the boy’s comet goes out, leaving him unsure whether he can find shelter before nightfall. In the whistling wind he hears what seems to be a chuckle and wonders whether the Devil is testing him, leading him in circles while waiting for him to accept an offer. He interprets the wind and its whispers as signs that the Evil Ones have finally taken an interest in him. In his account, they have separated him from his parents, taken Marta and Olga the Wise One from his life, delivered him to the carpenter, deprived him of speech, and taken Ewka from him; now they have left him alone on an immense sheet of ice.

That sequence is the boy’s explanation of accumulated losses, not proof that supernatural beings caused them. Its force lies in the way it gathers separate experiences into a single imagined design. He feels less passive because he thinks he can recognize the powers behind his suffering, but that recognition points toward revenge rather than safety or recovery. He decides that he must build up enough hatred to force himself into action and attract the Evil Ones’ attention. The narrative leaves the pact unconfirmed: what it establishes is the boy’s growing conviction that cruelty offers agency, and his fear that the world’s violence may teach him to become one of its agents.