The Narrator and Garbos

The Narrator and Garbos are brought together when a priest seeks a place for the boy to stay until the war ends. Garbos offers shelter only under pressure, and then makes the boy’s dependence the setting for repeated cruelty. The Narrator tends Garbos’s livestock and tries to avoid provoking him; Garbos nevertheless beats and frightens him without an intelligible reason. Their relationship is therefore not one of reciprocal care but of forced proximity, in which the adult controls the household and the child’s safety while the child searches for narrow ways to endure.

Placement in Garbos’s Household

The priest takes The Narrator by borrowed cart to a village and first stops at a church, where he consults The village vicar. At an isolated farmhouse, Garbos objects to taking in the child, identifying him as Romani and warning that German soldiers visit the village and could punish anyone found sheltering him. The priest protests, then speaks privately to Garbos. Garbos eventually tells the boy to follow him inside, but the reluctant agreement sets the terms of the placement: the child is admitted not as a welcomed family member but as a danger Garbos believes he has been pressed into accepting.

Garbos is a widower, and the household consists of him, The Narrator, and Judas, the dog. The boy’s work is to look after two pigs, a cow, twelve hens, and two turkeys. He is thus incorporated into the farm through labor, but the evidence gives no sign that this work secures him affection or reliable protection. Garbos can order him about, leave him alone with the dog, and punish him at will; the boy has no family member in the house to counter that authority.

The wider wartime setting sharpens the precariousness of shelter. The village lies far from the railroad and river, but German soldiers arrive three times a year to collect food and materials that peasants are required to supply. More broadly, the occupation forces the rural population to provide crops both to regular troops and to partisans, while refusal risks punitive raids. Garbos’s fear of attracting German attention is therefore grounded in a real danger to the household, even as his choice to take the boy does not lead him to treat the child humanely.

Suspicion, Rumor, and the Dog

Garbos’s treatment of The Narrator occurs in a household already shadowed by a story about another child. Neighbors refer to an orphaned Jewish girl whom Garbos had once taken in as a boarder after her parents fled. They accuse him of abusing her and profiting from her disappearance, saying that he used the money paid for her care to renovate his farm. These are reported accusations, not an independently established account of what happened. Garbos responds angrily and threatens the neighbors with Judas, whom he has used against people accused of stealing apples. The story places the boy’s dependency within a pattern of allegations about Garbos’s exploitation of vulnerable children, while preserving the distinction between what the neighbors say and what the narrative confirms.

With The Narrator, Garbos’s hostility is direct. He expects the boy to tell Romani stories, but the child knows only poems and stories learned at home before the war. Their failure to satisfy Garbos sometimes makes him more angry, and he responds with further punishment or a threat to set Judas on him. Garbos also asks why a child such as The Narrator is allowed to live when his own boys died young. The boy cannot answer; when he fails to do so, Garbos hits him. The question reveals grief in Garbos’s household, but it does not explain or excuse his violence toward the child.

Judas makes Garbos’s power tangible. The dog is already known to have killed a person after being unleashed on an apple thief. Garbos repeatedly incites him against The Narrator, and the animal learns to treat the boy as an enemy. At times Garbos brings Judas close enough to menace him, holding the dog by its collar and urging it forward. The boy’s fear is part of the spectacle Garbos creates: Garbos watches his terror and sometimes asks why he should be allowed to live, then strikes him when he does not answer. The dog is not merely a guard animal in their relationship; Garbos turns it into an instrument of intimidation and makes the boy’s dependence on the household feel inseparable from danger.

A Private Strategy of Resistance

The Narrator tries to stay out of Garbos’s way and obey his instructions, but compliance does not stop the beatings. Garbos also intrudes on the boy’s sleep, startling him awake or bringing Judas into the room. The pattern extends beyond isolated punishment: each return from work in the pasture, henhouse, or stable can be followed by another session of violence. His injuries have no chance to heal, and fear of Judas disrupts his sleep. The boy’s daily life becomes organized around anticipating what Garbos or the dog might do next, rather than around any stable promise that obedience will protect him.

Against that power, The Narrator develops a small, exacting form of leverage. When Garbos is drunk and asleep with his mouth open, the boy painstakingly counts his teeth, including those at the back of his mouth. If Garbos’s beatings go on too long, The Narrator tells him the number and invites him to check it. The boy believes that if Garbos kills him, Garbos himself has only a few years left to live. Counting becomes a weapon precisely because it converts close observation into a warning: the child cannot match the farmer’s physical control, but he can make Garbos aware that his habits and vulnerabilities are known.

That strategy does not free The Narrator, and the episode with the hooks and straps shows how limited his control remains. Garbos suspends him by leather handles fixed to two ceiling hooks, then brings Judas into the locked room. The boy understands the arrangement as a test of endurance: his feet are within the dog’s reach if fatigue makes him lower them, and Garbos may expect the ensuing attack to appear accidental. The Narrator remembers the tooth count as his protection, while recognizing that a fall could make that protection useless. The scene makes the relationship’s imbalance stark: Garbos controls the room and the immediate danger, while the child’s resistance consists of staying alert and holding on.

Intervention and the Continuing Pattern

The village vicar briefly challenges Garbos after seeing the boy’s bruises. Garbos admits that he has punished The Narrator for laziness; The village vicar admonishes him mildly and tells him to bring the boy to church the next day. The intervention identifies the abuse but does not secure lasting protection. After the vicar leaves, Garbos punishes The Narrator again, taking care to avoid visible parts of his body. The boy’s appearance at church therefore does not end the private violence at the farm.

The abuse continues as a repeated routine rather than a single confrontation. Garbos practices new ways of hurting the boy, and the accumulating injuries become open sores. At night The Narrator remains alert to sounds in the house and yard, afraid that Judas will come near his bed. Even when he sleeps, dreams of dogs leave him expecting danger; if he wakes screaming, Garbos beats and kicks him for disturbing the household. The cycle binds the two figures through fear and control: Garbos creates the threat, the boy’s terror becomes visible, and Garbos treats that terror as another occasion for punishment.

The relationship exposes how shelter can become a form of captivity when the person offering it holds unchecked power over a child with nowhere else to go. Garbos’s fear of wartime reprisals is set beside his own repeated choices to make The Narrator unsafe inside the farmhouse. The boy’s work, his attempts at obedience, and his careful count of Garbos’s teeth all arise from the same constrained situation: he must live within the farmer’s authority while searching for any means, however slight, to keep that authority from becoming fatal. Their relationship remains defined by that unresolved conflict between dependence and survival.