52 pages • 1 hour read
The Painted Bird
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Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
The boy begins Chapter 6 by describing the peasants’ beliefs about lightning storms. He’s now living with a carpenter and his wife, who are sure that the boy’s dark hair will bring lightning to the farm they work. Because lightning is a message from God, the villagers didn’t try to put out fires caused by lightning. If a house caught fire after being struck by lightning, objects saved from the house “were similarly possessed and could attract new lightning” (57).
At the onset of a storm, the carpenter would attach a padlocked harness to the boy and bring him out to a field where, frightened, the boy would spend the night in the rainstorm surrounded by “forest werewolves,” “translucent demons,” and “graveyard ghouls” (58). On one occasion, the boy hides in the barn when the storm begins. The barn is struck by lightning and catches fire, and the boy runs away, fearing the villagers will kill him. He jumps aboard a passing train and goes deeper into the forest, coming out by an abandoned military bunker. Upon investigating the bunker, the boy discovers that it’s filled with cannibalistic rats. He continues on his way, approaching a village that evening.
He discovers quickly that the village is the village he just left. The carpenter, alerted to his arrival, beats him senseless, then prepares a sack in which to drown him. Thinking quickly, the boy says he found a military pillbox filled with valuables inside a bunker and offers to show him. The carpenter tethers himself to the boy with some string, and the two set off in the carpenter’s ox-drawn cart.
When they arrive, the carpenter peers inside the opening of the bunker. The boy pulls the string until the carpenter tumbles inside; the string attaching them snaps as he falls. Looking into the hole, the boy sees the rats swarming over the carpenter, eating him alive until only the skeleton remains. The boy jumps into the cart and hastens into the woods. After traveling for two days, he arrives at a new village, where a wary villager agrees to shelter him in exchange for the ox and cart.
Chapter 7 Summary
The boy experiences a period of respite when he lives with a blacksmith, the highly regarded “head peasant of the village” (66). The peasants don’t bother the boy, the blacksmith’s wife feeds him well, and the blacksmith only slaps him when he’s drunk. The boy helps the family by driving the cattle and picking louses from the blacksmith’s jacket.
The village is frequently visited by soldiers. German soldiers collect food and other items “which the peasants were obliged to provide for the army” (66). They also question the peasants about partisans—bands of Polish soldiers opposing the occupying army, in this case the Germans—who, armed and mounted, frequently search houses and disrupt the village with their violent brawls. During visits from the Germans, the blacksmith hides the boy while he appeases the soldiers by assuring them their food deliveries will be on time.
One night, the blacksmith’s wife wakes the boy just in time for him to hide in the attic. As the boy watches through the planks, two partisans bring the blacksmith into the yard, berate him for helping enemies of Poland, and beat him to death. They then beat to death the blacksmith’s wife, son, and hired hands. After roughing up the boy, whom they’ve located in the attic, they decide to turn him over to the Germans at a nearby outpost. The Germans punished those who housed Jews and Gypsies; the partisans hope to gain their good graces and make them “less suspicious of the village” (70).
At the outpost, a young German officer has the boy inspected and issues orders to an older, bespectacled soldier to lead the boy toward the forest, his wrist tethered to the boy’s ankle. When the soldier is handed a can of gasoline, the boy realizes the soldier was told to shoot him and burn his body. He is surprised when, nearing the forest, the soldier stops, smokes a cigarette, and gently cuts the rope from the boy’s ankle. The soldier gestures toward the forest, appearing to send him off. The boy hesitates, and the soldier points again to the forest, covering his eyes. When the soldier finally lies down on his rifle, the boy backs away, eliciting a smile from the soldier. The boy runs down the embankment. From the forest, he hears gunshots as the soldier pretends to kill him.
Chapter 8 Summary
After a harsh winter during which the boy is unable to find shelter and survives unbothered in the woods, he comes across an overturned cart and an injured horse. He helps the horse hobble toward a village, where the owner decides the horse must be killed. The boy is heartbroken to have brought the horse to his death and shudders under its gaze.
The farmer takes the boy in as a workhand. Though the villagers distrust him, they are amused by his way of speaking, which they deem “urban.” He sometimes attends weddings with the farmer, who makes him recite poetry and tell stories as the villagers, “convulsed by the fables and rhymed stories about animals,” force him to drink vodka. Amazed by his recitations, they believe his “fast speech was some sort of infirmity” (83).
On one such occasion, the boy witnesses a man stab another man to death. After the man’s funeral, the blood is not washed away; the peasants believe it will attract the murderer and lead him to his death. However, the boy watches with “morbid fascination” as the murderer walks over the stains without consequence. He recalls the story of a skull that jumped from the grave and caused an accident that killed its murderer. He concludes that “the workings of justice were often exceedingly slow” (86).
The village boys often attack the boy as he takes the cattle out to graze. They also like to play with discarded military equipment they find in the forest, including land mines (or “soaps”) and rifles; they prank each other and experiment with these items even though many gruesome accidents occur. The boy, who himself keeps a time fuse and soaps in the barn, wonders why the Germans have been able to invent complex items while the peasants use such simple instruments. He muses that if the Germans want to eradicate people who look like him, “my chances of survival were obviously poor” (91).
When the boy is accosted on the road by village boys, he throws a rock at the largest boy, injuring him. After running to the farmer’s house, he catches sight of an approaching mob and rushes to the barn, where he lights a fuse attached to two soaps. He sneaks out of the barn and escapes before the soaps explode, destroying the barn. Knowing he cannot return, he flees to the forest.
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
Chapter 7 offers a rare glimpse of kindness when the German soldier defies orders to execute the boy and instead lets him escape into the woods. As they walk along the railroad tracks, the boy tries to balance on the rails, and the soldier smiles; later, he carefully cuts the rope from the boy’s ankle. These are gestures of shared humanity, and the boy is understandably skeptical. We see, however, that the boy takes the soldier’s act of mercy to heart: immediately upon being freed, he exercises mercy himself when he declines to kill a lizard, even though “I could have squashed it with a whack of my hand” (76).
In the previous section, we saw that beauty can exist among the violence. In this section, we see the power of one kind gesture. On the other hand, the soldier is but one gear among many in the Nazi machine, and he saves the boy in secret; whether individual kindness can overcome societal evil is an ongoing question.
In these chapters, the outside world creeps into our line of vision for the first time. The German soldiers in Chapter 7, as well as the ammunition the village boys find in the woods, remind us of the historical context. The boy, immersed in the primitive lifestyle of the isolated villagers, marvels at the Germans’ ingenuity and questions “[t]he peasants’ plows, scythes, rakes, spinning wheels, wells, and mills” which “were so simple that even the dullest man could invent them and understand their use of working” (90).
Though humans can be ingenious, we cannot forget that the outside world is at war, and that just as the boy has been persecuted and cast out of villages, so have his parents fled to escape the genocide of World War II. In Chapter 7, the boy recalls the bombing of a building, and how pianos, chandeliers, and armchairs were destroyed. Readers are left asking whether, for all the peasants’ violence and superstitions, civilization is any better. It’s a question perhaps answered by the rats in the bunker; like humans, they devour each other in a facility used for war.
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