The narrator’s remembered Marta

The narrator’s remembered Marta appears in two sharply different forms: as someone whose incantations the boy recalls trying to understand, and as the face of death in a later scene. Together, these moments make her a figure through whom memory and folk magic shape the narrator’s interpretation of frightening events, while leaving the supernatural explanation uncertain.

Memory and Folk Knowledge

When trying to account for Garbos’s seemingly unmotivated outbursts, the boy recalls incantations associated with the narrator’s remembered Marta and Olga the Wise One. He understands these formulas as attempts to affect illnesses and other matters with no obvious connection to magic. That recollection becomes part of his effort to find a cause: he watches the circumstances around Garbos’s attacks and wonders whether scratching his head, and disturbing the lice there, might have provoked them. The hypothesis fails when the boy is beaten again after refraining from scratching for two days, leaving him to search for another explanation.

The Face of Death

Later, as a gust moves the trees and the assembled peasants make the sign of the cross, the boy senses death nearby. In his perception, death bears the face of the narrator’s remembered Marta as it moves among the men hanging from the oak branches. The scene presents Marta not as an independently acting ghost but as the appearance through which the child apprehends death; the narrative does not resolve whether this is supernatural or an image shaped by memory and fear.

Narrative Significance

The narrator’s remembered Marta connects the boy’s earlier recourse to folk knowledge with his later attempt to give an overwhelming scene a recognizable form. In both moments, the child confronts events whose causes exceed what he can confidently explain: first Garbos’s anger, then the presence of death. Marta’s return as a remembered face gives that uncertainty a personal image, while the contrast between practical speculation and visionary perception keeps the account poised between ordinary explanation and the supernatural.