The narrator

The narrator is a war-separated child whose inability to speak shapes how others treat him, how he protects himself, and how he imagines a future. His story turns on repeated threats to connection: he is sent away from the soldiers who have become his family, misread as intellectually disabled by other children, and confronted with the possibility that the parents he has lost are standing before him. The eventual return of his voice does not erase those ruptures, but gives him a means of expression that he had feared was gone for good.

Identity and Circumstances

The narrator is a boy separated from his family during the war and unable to speak for much of the period described. He understands speech and is acutely aware of what his silence prevents him from doing. While accompanying Red Army sniper Mitka on a secretive journey, he wishes he could repeat the Russian curses Mitka mutters after stumbling. He regards the words as magnificent, even imagining them as ripe plums, but can only nod when Mitka orders him to forget them. His silence is therefore not an absence of thought or linguistic understanding: it is a barrier between an active inner life and the voice through which he wants to participate in the world.

That journey also reveals the boy’s position beside Mitka. He does not know where they are going or why, yet suspects that Mitka is acting alone and against Army expectations, at possible cost to his rank and public standing. The uncertainty does not make him withdraw. He feels proud to have been chosen as Mitka’s companion and to help a Hero of the Soviet Union on a mission whose purpose remains mysterious to him. Mitka pats him on the head as they hurry toward the woods; the boy notices the man’s sweat, limp, and slipping rifle. The child’s attachment is expressed through attention and loyalty, even when he cannot ask what is happening or speak the words he longs to learn.

Separation and the Orphanage

The boy’s bond with his military companions is disrupted when the war ends. He takes several days to accept that he must leave Red Army mentor Gavrila, Mitka, and the other soldiers in the regiment. Gavrila explains that the country has been liberated from the Germans and that regulations require lost children to be sent to special centers while their families are sought. The separation is consequently presented not as a personal rejection but as the consequence of postwar rules and the uncertain status of children whose relatives may still be alive. The boy looks at Gavrila and holds back tears; he knows that Gavrila and Mitka have discussed his future and would have chosen another solution if one had been available.

Gavrila offers a specific promise against that uncertainty. If no relatives claim the boy within three months after the war ends, Gavrila will take care of him and send him to a school where he can learn to speak again. Until then, he urges the child to be brave, remember what he has learned, and read Pravda every day. These practical instructions carry the prospect of continuing care beyond the regiment’s immediate protection. The boy’s hope of returning to Gavrila becomes a measure of how sharply the orphanage differs from the companionship he has lost.

At the orphanage, five hundred children are divided into groups and taught in small, dingy, crowded classrooms short of desks and blackboards. Many have severe injuries or disabilities. The boy sits beside a child who repeatedly asks where his father is; behind them, a girl who has lost all her fingers watches the hands of other children, who hide them from her. Farther away is a boy missing part of his jaw and arm, dependent on others for feeding, as well as several partly paralyzed children. The narrator records these details within a setting where fear and vulnerability are shared, but not enough to create solidarity: the children look at one another with loathing and fear, unsure what a neighbor might do.

The narrator’s own silence makes him a target. Older, stronger boys take him for a moron because he cannot speak; they insult him and sometimes beat him. After sleepless nights in the crowded dormitory, he arrives in class trapped in anticipation of disaster. He is afraid not only of being attacked but of injuring someone while defending himself, since the orphanage warns that such violence could mean jail and end his hopes of going back to Gavrila. The prospect of punishment gives each confrontation a second danger: survival in the moment might jeopardize the future to which he is clinging.

His responses to physical threat are not under reliable control. In a scuffle, his hands seem to acquire a life of their own and remain locked to an opponent; afterward, he cannot calm down, repeatedly turning over what happened until the excitement rises again. Nor can he flee. When a group of boys approaches, his legs grow leaden and he stops, despite his efforts to tell himself that standing still will let him judge their intentions or avoid a blow from behind. Memories of earlier successful escapes do not release him from this bodily arrest. The account thus makes his danger more than a matter of other children’s aggression: fear, silence, and involuntary physical reactions combine to narrow the choices he can actually make.

Recognition and Family

The possibility of family return becomes immediate in the principal’s office. A member of the Social Commission, who believes he knew the boy’s parents before the war, is present with the principal. Both adults seem nervous, and voices can be heard from the adjoining office. When the Commission member opens its door, a man and woman stand there. The narrator finds them somehow familiar and notices his heart beating beneath the star on his uniform. He scrutinizes their faces while trying to appear indifferent: their resemblance is striking, but recognition brings a decision as well as hope. He wonders whether to admit that he knows them or pretend he does not.

The woman bends over him in tears. The man supports her, adjusts his spectacles on his moist nose, and struggles with sobs before speaking Russian. The narrator notices that the man’s speech is as fluent and beautiful as Gavrila’s. The request that he unbutton his uniform makes the reunion hinge on a physical sign: a birthmark on the left side of his chest. The narrator knows it is there and understands that revealing it would remove doubt that he is their son. He hesitates, aware that showing the mark will settle the question, then slowly unbuttons the uniform because he feels sorry for the crying woman. Recognition is not presented as effortless certainty; it arrives through resemblance, a test of identity, and a deliberate response to another person’s grief.

Recovery of Speech

The narrator’s voice returns after a period in which he has been unable to speak. In April sunshine, he gets out of bed and answers an insistently ringing telephone after the nurse has left. A man is waiting on the other end of the line, and the narrator feels an overwhelming desire to speak. He strains to form sounds, then hears them emerge as syllables and words. The image of peas jumping from a split pod conveys the suddenness and abundance of what had been held back: he sets the receiver aside and begins reciting words, sentences, and fragments of Mitka’s songs.

The recovery is both physical and emotional, but the account concentrates on its audible evidence rather than explaining it as a cure for every earlier injury. The narrator speaks loudly and incessantly, imitating the rapid speech of peasants and then city people. He listens to the sounds as meaningful and repeatedly reassures himself that speech is his again and will not escape through the door to the balcony. The ending answers the earlier wish to repeat Mitka’s curses with a far greater return: language, once inaccessible to his mouth, fills the room. His voice reconnects the silent child with the world of people and remembered songs, while the intensity of his repeated assurance preserves the fear that this recovered ability might still disappear.