The narrator’s mother

The narrator’s mother reappears in the boy’s life when a member of the Social Commission brings her and his father to the orphanage. The boy recognizes that they may be his parents before the birthmark confirms it, and her tearful embrace makes reunion both an act of love and a crisis of choice. Through the boy’s wary perspective, she is at once a vulnerable woman seeking her son and the bearer of a domestic life he fears will confine him.

Identity and Recognition

The mother first appears beside the man from the Social Commission in an adjoining room. The boy finds the pair strangely familiar, but resemblance alone cannot settle who they are. When they come closer, she bends over him and begins to cry; her husband supports her, himself shaking with sobs. The scene makes recognition bodily before it becomes certain: the boy hears his heart beating beneath his uniform and struggles to decide whether to acknowledge the parents he suspects he has found.

Her husband asks him to open his uniform so they can look for a birthmark on the left side of his chest. The boy knows it is there and understands that showing it will establish beyond doubt that he is their son. He hesitates, then opens the uniform because he feels sorry for the crying woman. The mark confirms his identity, and she and her husband bend over him, weeping, embracing, and kissing him. The reunion is not presented as a simple recovery of what was lost: the proof answers the question of kinship, but it cannot make the boy immediately feel at home in that kinship.

The mother’s face is described through the boy’s close, unsentimental attention: she smiles through tear-smudged powder. Her appearance does not make her threatening to him. He thinks she and his husband seem frail and ailing, not like people who would beat him. That distinction matters to the boy, whose experience has taught him to measure safety through the possibility of violence. Their gentleness offers a different kind of security, but one he has not yet learned to trust.

A Reunion That Feels Like Confinement

The boy understands that, at twelve, he is still a child and that his parents have a right to take him with them. He also knows that he could escape, board a crowded train, and make himself difficult to trace. He does not run. Part of his reasoning is practical: he wants Gavrila to find him, and staying put seems the wiser way to be found. Yet he also sees that returning to his parents will end his dreams of becoming an inventor of fuses that could change people’s color and of living in the land of Gavrila and Mitka, where today already seemed to be tomorrow.

His mother’s reunion therefore arrives alongside a sharp contraction of possibility. The boy imagines his world becoming as cramped as the attic of a peasant’s shed. He fears not only punishment but the obligations of being someone’s real son: being cared for, caressed, and expected to obey because of parental rights rather than another person’s physical strength. He believes a boy his age should choose for himself whom to follow and learn from. As he looks at his tearful mother and trembling father, however, an inner force holds him back. He compares himself to Lekh’s painted bird, drawn toward its own kind by an unknown pull. The comparison gives family belonging a force he cannot simply reason away.

Left alone with him while his husband handles the formalities, the mother tries to reassure the boy that he will be happy with his parents and can do anything he wants. They will even make him a new uniform, an exact copy of the one he is wearing. The promise meets his fear in its own terms: it offers welcome without requiring him to give up the identity he has built in the uniform. But the boy remains unconvinced that love and freedom can coexist. He recalls a Hare once caught by Makar: after being caged, covered with a tarpaulin, and eventually tamed, the animal leaves its open cage only to return and settle inside it. The boy’s reflection ends with the thought that the cage can be carried within. This remembered animal story frames his apprehension about home without making his mother a captor; the constraint he anticipates has become as much an inward condition as an external rule.

Care in the Postwar Household

After the reunion, the mother and her husband hug the boy and look him over before leaving the orphanage. They take him to their apartment, which they had borrowed with difficulty after learning that a boy matching their son’s description was at the local Center. The boy learns there that they have adopted another child, a four-year-old whose parents and older sister were killed. An old nurse saved him and handed him to the boy’s father during the family’s wanderings in the third year of the war. The boy sees that his parents love the younger child, a fact that intensifies his doubts about whether he would rather remain alone and wait for Gavrila to adopt him.

The apartment gives those doubts a physical setting. It consists of one room and a kitchen, with a washroom on the stairs; the space is stuffy and crowded, and the family repeatedly gets in one another’s way. The mother rises at dawn to wait in long food queues. When she returns, she cooks and cleans. These routines establish her care as labor performed under difficult postwar conditions, rather than as an abstract promise of protection. The same domestic care that sustains the household presses against the boy’s longing for the uncertain movement between villages and towns.

That strain becomes visible when the younger boy disrupts the narrator’s reading of newspaper reports about Red Army successes. The child pulls at his trousers and knocks over his books. The narrator grabs and squeezes the child’s arm until a bone breaks. His father calls a doctor; that night the child wears a cast and looks at the narrator in terror. His parents look at him without speaking. The mother’s silence is part of the household’s response, but the account does not assign her a separate action or explain her private thoughts. The injury makes the home’s promise of safety painfully complicated: the reunited family is also a place where the narrator’s violence harms someone who depends on its protection.

Relationships and Narrative Significance

The mother’s relationship with her son is shaped by an asymmetry of knowledge and expectation. She receives the birthmark as proof that the missing boy has been found; he receives it as proof that escape will become harder and that parental claims will apply to him. Her assurances that he can do what he wants do not immediately overcome his fear of dependence. The narrative thus allows her tenderness to remain real while showing why it cannot, by itself, restore trust or erase the boy’s attachment to the life he had imagined elsewhere.

The departure from the orphanage also separates the boy from the Silent One. Before leaving, the family goes to say goodbye, but the Silent One regards the parents suspiciously, shakes his head, and refuses to greet them. In the street, the boy walks between his parents as displaced, ragged people return to homes occupied during the war and quarrel with those who have taken them over. He feels his parents’ hands on his shoulders and hair, yet describes their love and protection as smothering. The mother is therefore introduced not just as the answer to a family search but as part of a postwar world in which reunion does not instantly produce ease, trust, or a settled sense of home.

The boy’s later secret visits to the Silent One, and the news that the Silent One has been transferred to another city, leave the mother’s new household in tension with the attachments he has made outside it. Her role is defined less by independent scenes or stated motives than by what her return means to him: the recovery of a parent, the arrival of practical care, and the possibility of an inward cage. That tension gives the reunion its complexity. The mother’s embrace draws the boy toward family, while his own comparisons and choices show that belonging cannot simply be imposed as the happy ending to separation.