The Narrator Attacks a Cinema Attendant with Bricks

The Narrator Attacks a Cinema Attendant with Bricks is a postwar act of private retaliation, set in a city where the narrator’s inability to speak makes an ordinary dispute at a cinema impossible to resolve on equal terms. After an attendant dismisses his attempt to retrieve a ticket, the boy returns at night with two bricks and uses a dropped bottle to draw the man into position. The episode links humiliation, enforced silence, and calculated revenge, then marks a change in the narrator’s daily rhythm: afterward, he goes out only at night.

Causes and Setting

The episode begins with an outing arranged by the narrator’s parents. They give him money to attend a cinema showing a Soviet film about a man and a girl who have agreed to meet at six on the first day after the war. The film’s premise sets a small, planned encounter against the narrator’s own experience of exclusion: in the queue, access depends on being understood and treated fairly, neither of which he can secure through speech.

The crowd at the box office keeps him waiting for several hours. When his turn comes, he discovers that he has lost one coin. The cashier recognizes that he is mute and puts his ticket aside until he can bring the missing change. The boy hurries home, obtains the money, and returns within half an hour. The attendant, however, tells him to join the line again. The ticket’s temporary reservation has not protected his place, and the boy has to make his case without his slate, relying instead on signs.

The Public Humiliation

The attendant does not try to understand the signs. In front of the people waiting outside, who find the episode amusing, he takes the boy by the ear and pushes him out. The narrator slips and falls on the cobblestones; blood runs from his nose onto his uniform. The injury is mentioned briefly, but the scene’s social force lies in its public character: the attendant controls the doorway, the queue watches, and the boy cannot answer verbally or make the people around him acknowledge his account of what has happened.

He goes home, applies a cold compress, and begins plotting revenge. The sequence makes the plan a response to a specific encounter rather than an impulsive continuation of the fall: first he tries to retrieve the ticket by explaining himself, then he is physically removed, and only after returning home does he decide to retaliate. His silence has not prevented him from forming a plan; it has shaped the means by which he will carry it out.

The Retaliation

That evening, as his parents prepare for bed, the narrator gets dressed to leave. They ask anxiously where he is going. He tells them through signs that he is taking a walk, but they try to persuade him that going out at night is dangerous. He does not stay home. The contrast between their warning and his departure establishes that the revenge is deliberate: he knows his parents object, yet proceeds with the plan he has made.

At the cinema, few people are waiting at the box office. The attendant who expelled him earlier is strolling idly in the yard. The narrator picks up two good-sized bricks from the street and climbs the staircase of a building adjoining the cinema. From the third-floor landing, he drops an empty bottle. The attendant comes over to examine where it has fallen; when he bends down, the boy drops both bricks and runs down the stairs into the street. The account establishes the diversion, the attendant’s movement, the attack, and the escape, but does not specify the attendant’s injuries or what happens to him afterward.

Aftermath and Significance

After the incident, the narrator goes out only at night. His parents protest, but he refuses to listen; he sleeps during the day and is ready to go out at dusk. This change in routine is the clearest stated consequence of the attack. The retaliation does not restore the lost ticket or undo the earlier humiliation. Instead, the episode ends with the narrator adopting a different pattern of movement through the city, one that places his activities outside the hours his parents try to govern.

The event gives the narrator’s muteness a practical and narrative significance. At the cinema, signs fail to persuade the attendant, and the crowd’s amusement compounds his exclusion. In the return visit, he does not attempt to win a hearing: he arranges a distraction, acts when the attendant bends down, and escapes without speaking. The episode therefore moves from an unsuccessful effort to claim a place in a public queue to a private act of revenge, with the two bricks and the empty bottle replacing the explanation that no one would hear.