The unnamed boy narrator

The unnamed boy narrator is a displaced child whose survival depends on reading the dangers around him and adjusting to the people who take him in. At one farm, he is treated as an outsider and subjected to unpredictable punishment; later, a crowd’s approach sends him into desperate flight. In 1944, after recovering in a regimental hospital, he is allowed to remain temporarily with a communications regiment, where the political instructor Gavrila teaches him to read. These episodes trace a movement from exposure and fear toward a limited but consequential form of care: access to books, and to a future imagined through them.

Identity and Life Among Farmers

The boy’s status as an outsider shapes his treatment in the rural households where he is placed. At Garbos’s farm, the household consists of Garbos, his dog Judas, and the boy. Garbos is a widower, and village neighbors recall an orphaned Jewish girl whom he once took in as a boarder. They accuse him of abusing her and of using the money paid for her keep to renovate the farm; she eventually vanished. Garbos responds angrily to these accusations, threatening to set Judas against the neighbors. No one visits him, and he lives alone with the boy, whose work is to tend two pigs, a cow, twelve hens, and two turkeys.

Garbos’s treatment of the boy is arbitrary rather than disciplinary in any consistent sense. He strikes him unexpectedly, twists his ears, and torments him until he shakes; at other times he threatens to unleash Judas. Garbos regards him as Roma and demands stories associated with that identity. The boy can offer only poems and stories learned at home before the war, and their unfamiliarity to Garbos sometimes provokes further anger. The episode shows how the boy’s uncertain identity is not simply a private matter: adults impose a category on him, then punish him when he cannot perform the expectations attached to it.

Flight and Transfer to Makar

The boy’s danger becomes immediate when he returns home and finds that the farmer whose protection he seeks has not yet come back from church. A crowd of men and boys advances with clubs and sticks. Believing that the wounded boy’s father or brothers may be among them, he expects no mercy. He runs into the kitchen, gathers glowing coals in the Comet stove, and takes refuge in the barn. There he remembers the buried mines, sets a fuse between the tightly bound soap charges, lights it from the stove, and pushes the device beneath broken plows and harrows. As the fuse burns, he pries a board from the back wall. The account establishes the preparation and his attempt to escape, but does not specify what follows from this particular act.

A later transfer begins when village boys catch him in the forest. Rather than subjecting him to what he fears, they take him to the village head, who checks that he has no sores or ulcers and can make the sign of the cross. After several unsuccessful attempts to place him with other peasants, the head gives him to Makar. This administrative inspection and succession of placements frame the boy as someone whose safety depends on judgments made by others, not on any stable home of his own.

Makar lives apart from the settlement with his son and daughter. His wife apparently died long before, and rumors cast suspicion on his relationships with the children he calls his own. Makar also suspects that the boy’s muteness is deliberate, meant to conceal Roma speech. At night he sometimes enters the small attic where the boy sleeps and tries to make him scream. The boy wakes frightened and opens his mouth, but no sound comes; after repeating the test, Makar eventually stops. Makar’s son, Anton the Quail, is twenty, red-haired, and pale-eyed. Shunned like his father, he turns away without answering when addressed; his nickname reflects his habit of speaking only to himself. The boy’s placement therefore brings him into another isolated household, where silence is treated as something to test rather than understood as a condition he cannot change.

Recovery and the Regimental Household

By autumn 1944, the boy has been released from the regimental hospital. The pain in his chest has gone, and the damage caused by a rifle butt has healed. He is allowed to stay with the Red Army soldiers, though he understands that this arrangement is temporary and expects that the regiment may leave him in a village when it moves to the front. For now, the communications regiment is encamped by a river, and no immediate departure is in view.

The regiment’s calm routines contrast with the boy’s earlier life of uncertain shelter. Its equipment is new and untested, its young soldiers train, and small biplanes bring mail and newspapers every few days. Reports describe German defeats and ruined cities; soldiers receive letters from home as people begin rebuilding. The war is still present in the news, but the camp’s daily order offers the boy a different environment from the farms where he had been isolated or threatened.

Gavrila and the Red Army sniper Mitka look after him, as do many of their friends. Gavrila spends time with him in the field library and teaches him to read. Since the boy is already over eleven, Gavrila points out that Russian boys his age can read and write and may even fight the enemy. The boy does not want to be regarded as a child, so he studies diligently and watches the soldiers, imitating their behavior. Learning is thus both a practical discipline and a way to approach the adult world that has repeatedly judged him by his vulnerability.

Books, Hope, and Narrative Significance

Books impress the boy because their printed pages allow him to enter a world as real as the one reached through his senses. He finds that books disclose what people think and plan, whereas everyday encounters leave many people unknown. This contrast gives reading a particular force for a child whose experience has often been governed by other people’s suspicions and unexplained actions: the book offers access to inward lives that ordinary life withholds.

With Gavrila’s help, the boy reads his first book, Childhood. Its protagonist is a boy like him who loses his father at the beginning, then is left alone after his mother dies. The story does not promise an easy life, but its hero grows up to become Maxim Gorky, a celebrated Russian writer whose works fill shelves in the regimental library. The boy reads the book several times, and it gives him hope. Its significance lies not in erasing his hardship but in presenting survival and later achievement as imaginable, even for a child whose life has been marked by separation and displacement.

Across these episodes, the boy’s vulnerability is visible in the repeated dependence on adult decisions: Garbos controls his labor and punishment, the village head determines his next placement, and Makar tests his silence. The regiment introduces a different relation. Gavrila’s instruction and the soldiers’ protection do not remove the boy’s uncertainty about what will happen when the regiment leaves, but they give him a skill and a model of a life beyond immediate fear. The movement from the barn’s improvised escape to the field library is therefore not a complete arrival at safety; it is a change in what the boy can imagine for himself.