The Painted Bird

18

It took me several days to become reconciled to the idea of leaving Gavrila, Mitka, and all my other friends in the regiment. But Gavrila was very firm in explaining that the war was ending, that my country had been fully liberated from the Germans and that, according to regulations, lost children had to be delivered to special centers where they would be kept until it was determined if their parents were still alive.

I looked at his face while he was telling me all these things and held back my tears. Gavrila also felt uneasy. I knew that he and Mitka had discussed my future, and if there had been any other solution they would have found it.

Gavrila promised that if no relatives claimed me within three months after the end of the war, he would take care of me himself and would send me to a school where they would teach me to speak again. In the meantime he urged me to be brave and to remember everything I had learned from him and to read Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, every day.

I was given a bag full of gifts from the soldiers and books from Gavrila and Mitka. I put on a Soviet Army uniform which was made especially for me by the regimental tailor. In a pocket I found a small wooden pistol with a picture of Stalin on one side and Lenin on the other.

The moment of parting had come. I was going away with sergeant Yury, who had some military business in the town where there was a center for lost children. This industrial city, the country’s largest, was where I had lived before the war.

Gavrila made certain that I had all my things and that my personal file was in good order. He had assembled in it all the information I had given him concerning my name, previous place of residence, and the details I remembered about my parents, my hometown, our relatives and friends.

The driver started the engine. Mitka patted me on the shoulder and urged me to uphold the honor of the Red Army. Gavrila hugged me warmly, and the others shook hands with me in turn as though I were a grownup. I wanted to cry but I kept my face straight and laced tight like a soldier’s boot.

We started for the station. The train was packed with soldiers and civilians. It stopped often at broken-down signals, went on and stopped again between stations. We passed bombed-out towns, deserted villages, abandoned cars, tanks, guns, airplanes with their wing and tail surfaces cut away. On many stations ragged people ran along the tracks, begging for cigarettes and food, while half-naked children stared openmouthed at the train. It took us two days to reach our destination.

All the tracks were being used by military transports, Red Cross carriages, and open cars loaded with army equipment. On the platforms crowds of Soviet soldiers and ex-prisoners in a variety of uniforms jostled along with limping invalids, shabby civilians, and blind people who tapped the flagstones with their canes. Here and there nurses directed emaciated people in striped clothes; the soldiers looked at them in sudden silence—those were the people saved from the furnaces who were returning to life from the concentration camps.

I clutched Yury’s hand and looked into the gray faces of these people, with their feverishly burning eyes shining like pieces of broken glass in the ashes of a dying fire.

Nearby a locomotive pushed a gleaming railcar to the center of the station. A foreign military delegation emerged in colorful uniforms and medals. An honor guard quickly formed and a military band struck up an anthem. The smartly uniformed officers and the men in striped concentration camp clothes passed without a word within a few feet of each other on the narrow platform.

New flags were flying over the main station building and loudspeakers blared music interrupted from time to time by hoarse speeches and greetings. Yury looked at his watch. We made our way to the exit.

One of the military drivers agreed to take us to the orphans’ home. The streets of the city were full of convoys and soldiers, the sidewalks swarmed with people. The orphanage occupied several old houses on a side street. Innumerable children peered from the windows.

We spent an hour in the lobby; Yury read a newspaper and I feigned indifference. Finally the woman principal came over and greeted us, taking the folder with my documents from Yury. She signed some papers, gave them to Yury, and placed her hand on my shoulder. I firmly shook it off. The epaulets on a uniform were not meant for a woman’s hands.

The moment of parting arrived. Yury pretended to be cheerful. He joked, straightened the forage cap on my head, and tightened the string round the books with Mitka’s and Gavrila’s inscriptions which I carried under my arm. We hugged each other like two men. The principal stood by.

I clutched the red star attached to my left breast pocket. A gift from Gavrila, it had Lenin’s profile on it. I now believed that this star, leading millions of workers throughout the world to their goal, could also bring me good luck. I followed the principal.

Walking along crowded corridors we passed the open doors of classrooms, in which lessons were in progress. Here and there children were scuffling and shouting. Some boys, seeing my uniform, pointed their fingers at me and laughed. I turned away. Someone threw an apple core; I ducked and it hit the principal.

I had no peace for the first few days. The principal wanted me to give up my uniform and wear ordinary civilian clothes sent to the children by the International Red Cross. I nearly hit a nurse on the head when she tried to take away the uniform. I slept with my tunic and trousers folded under my mattress for safekeeping.

After a while my long-unwashed uniform began to smell, but I still refused to part with it even for a day. The principal, annoyed by this insubordination, called two nurses and had them take it away by force. A jubilant crowd of boys witnessed the struggle.

I broke from the clumsy women and ran out into the street. There I accosted four quietly strolling Soviet soldiers. I signaled with my hands that I was a mute. They gave me a piece of paper on which I wrote that I was the son of a Soviet officer who was at the front and that I was waiting for my father at the orphanage. Then I wrote in careful language that the principal was the daughter of a landlord, that she hated the Red Army, and that she, together with the nurses exploited by her, beat me daily because of my uniform.

As I expected, my message aroused the young soldiers. They followed me inside, and while one of them systematically smashed the flowerpots in the principal’s carpeted office, the others chased the nurses, slapping them and pinching their bottoms. The frightened women yelled and screamed.

After that the staff let me alone. Even the teachers ignored my refusal to learn reading and writing in my mother-tongue. I wrote in chalk on the blackboard that my language was Russian, the speech of a land where there was no exploitation of the one by the many and where teachers did not persecute their pupils.

A large calendar hung over my bed. I crossed off every day with a red pencil. I did not know how many more days were left to the end of the war still being waged in Germany, but I was confident that the Red Army was doing its best to bring the end nearer.

Every day I sneaked out of the orphanage and bought a copy of Pravda with the money Gavrila had given me. I read hastily all the news about the latest victories and I looked carefully at the new pictures of Stalin. I felt reassured. Stalin looked fit and youthful. Everything was going well. The war would end soon.

One day I was summoned for a medical examination. I refused to leave my uniform outside the office and I was examined carrying it under my arm. After the examination I was interviewed by some sort of social commission. One of its members, an older man, read all my papers carefully. He approached me in a friendly manner. He mentioned my name and asked me whether I had any idea where my parents were planning to go when they had left me. I pretended not to understand. Someone translated the question into Russian, adding that he seemed to think that he had known my parents before the war. I wrote nonchalantly on a slate that my parents were dead, killed by a bomb. The members of the commission gave me suspicious looks. I saluted stiffly and walked out of the room. The inquisitive man had upset me.

There were five hundred of us at the orphanage. We were divided into groups, and attended lessons in small dingy classrooms. Many of the boys and girls were crippled and acted very strangely. The classrooms were crowded. We were short of desks and blackboards. I was sitting next to a boy about my own age who kept muttering incessantly, “Where is my daddy, where is my daddy?” He looked around as if he expected his daddy to emerge from under a desk and pat him on his sweaty forehead. Directly behind us was a girl who had lost all her fingers in an explosion. She stared at the fingers of other children, which were as lively as worms. Noticing her glance they quickly hid their hands as if afraid of her eyes. Farther away there was a boy with part of his jaw and arm missing. He had to be fed by others; the odor of a festering wound emanated from him. There were also several partly paralyzed children.

We all looked at one another with loathing and fear. One never knew what one’s neighbor might do. Many of the boys in the class were older and stronger than I. They knew that I could not speak, and consequently believed that I was a moron. They called me names and sometimes beat me up. In the morning when I came to the classroom after a sleepless night in the crowded dormitory I felt trapped, fearful and apprehensive. The anticipation of disaster increased. I was as taut as the elastic in a slingshot, and the slightest incident would throw me off balance. I was afraid not so much of being attacked by other boys as of seriously injuring someone in self-defense. As they often told us in the orphanage, that would mean jail, and the end of my hopes of returning to Gavrila.

I could not control my movements in a scuffle. My hands acquired a life of their own and could not be torn away from an opponent. Besides, for a long time after a fight I could not calm down, pondering what had happened and getting excited again.

I was also unable to run away. When I saw a group of boys coming toward me I immediately stopped. I tried to convince myself that I was avoiding being hit from behind and that I could better gauge the strength and intentions of the enemy. But the truth was that I could not run away even when I wanted to. My legs became strangely heavy, with the weight distributed in an odd manner. My thighs and calves grew leaden, but my knees were light and sagged like soft pillows. The memory of all my successful escapes did not seem to help much. A mysterious mechanism bound me to the ground. I would stop and wait for my assailants.

All the time I thought of Mitka’s teachings: a man should never let himself be mistreated, for he would then lose his self-respect and his life would become meaningless. What would preserve his self-respect and determine his worth was his ability to take revenge on those who wronged him.

A person should take revenge for every wrong or humiliation. There were far too many injustices in the world to have them all weighed and judged. A man should consider every wrong he had suffered and decide on the appropriate revenge. Only the conviction that one was as strong as the enemy and that one could pay him back double, enabled people to survive, Mitka said. A man should take revenge according to his own nature and the means at his disposal. It was quite simple: if someone was rude to you and it hurt you like a whiplash, you should punish him as though he had lashed you with a whip. If someone slapped you and it felt like a thousand blows, take revenge for a thousand blows. The revenge should be proportionate to all the pain, bitterness, and humiliation felt as a result of an opponent’s action. A slap in the face might not be too painful for one man; for another it might cause him to relive the persecution he had endured through hundreds of days of beating. The first man could forget about it in an hour; the second might be tormented for weeks by nightmarish recollections.

Of course the opposite also held true. If a man hit you with a stick but it only hurt like a slap, take revenge for a slap.

Life at the orphanage was full of unexpected attacks and brawls. Nearly everyone had a nickname. There was a boy in my class called the Tank because he pummeled with his fists anyone who stood in his way. There was a boy labeled Cannon because he threw heavy objects at people for no particular reason. There were others: the Saber, who slashed his enemy with the edge of his arm; the Airplane, who knocked you down and kicked you in the face; the Sniper, who hurled rocks from a distance; the Flamethrower, who lit slow-burning matches and tossed them into clothing and satchels.

The girls also had their nicknames. The Grenade used to lacerate the faces of her enemies with a nail hidden in her palm. Another, the Partisan, small and unobtrusive, crouched on the ground and tripped passersby with a neat leg snatch, while her ally, the Torpedo, would hug a prostrate opponent as though trying to make love, and then deal him a professional knee kick in the groin.

The teachers and attendants could not handle this group, and they often kept out of the way of the brawls, fearing the stronger boys. Sometimes there were more serious incidents. The Cannon once threw a heavy boot at a young girl who apparently had refused to kiss him. She died a few hours later. On another occasion the Flamethrower set fire to the clothes of three boys and locked them in a classroom. Two of them were taken to the hospital with severe burns.

Every fight drew blood. Boys and girls battled for their lives and could not be separated. At night even worse things happened. Boys would assault girls in dark corridors. One night several boys raped a nurse in the basement. They kept her there for hours, inviting other boys to join them, exciting the woman in the elaborate ways they had learned in various places during the war. She was finally reduced to a state of insane frenzy. She screamed and yelled all night until the ambulance came and took her away.

Other girls invited attention. They stripped and asked boys to touch them. They discussed blatantly the sexual demands which scores of men had made on them during the war. There were some who said they could not go to sleep without having had a man. They ran out into the parks at night and picked up drunken soldiers.

Many of the boys and girls were quite passive and listless. They stood against the walls, mostly silent, neither crying nor laughing, staring at some image which they alone could see. It was said that some of them had lived in ghettos or concentration camps. Had it not been for the end of the occupation, they would have died long since. Others had apparently been kept by brutal and greedy foster-parents who had exploited them ruthlessly and flogged them for the slightest sign of disobedience. There were also some who had no particular past. They had been placed in the orphanage by the army or the police. No one knew their origins, the whereabouts of their parents, or where they had spent the war. They refused to tell anything about themselves; they responded to all questions with evasive phrases and indulgent half-smiles suggesting infinite contempt for the questioners.

I was afraid to fall asleep at night because the boys were known to play painful practical jokes on one another. I slept in my uniform with a knife in one pocket and a wooden knuckle-duster in the other.

Every morning I crossed one more day off my calendar. Pravda said that the Red Army had already reached the nest of the Nazi viper.

Gradually I became friendly with a boy called the Silent One. He acted as though mute; no one had heard the sound of his voice since he had come to the orphanage. It was known that he could speak, but at some stage of the war he had decided that there was no point in doing so. Other boys tried to force him to speak. Once they even gave him a bloody beating, but did not extract a single sound from him.

The Silent One was older and stronger than I. At first we avoided each other. I felt that by refusing to speak he was mocking boys like me who could not speak. If the Silent One, who was not mute, had decided not to speak, others might think that I too was only refusing to speak but could do so if I wanted to. My friendship with him could only enhance this impression.

One day the Silent One unexpectedly came to my rescue and knocked down a boy who was beating me in the corridor. The next day I felt obliged to fight on his side in a scuffle which broke out during a recess.

After that we sat at the same desk in the rear of the classroom. We first wrote notes to each other, but then learned to communicate by signs. The Silent One accompanied me in expeditions to the railroad station, where we made friends with departing Soviet soldiers. Together we stole a drunken postman’s bicycle, went across the city park, still sown with land mines and closed to the public, and watched the girls undressing in the communal bathhouse.

In the evening we sneaked out of the dormitory and roamed through the nearby squares and courtyards, scaring love-making couples, throwing stones through open windows, attacking unsuspecting passersby. The Silent One, taller and stronger, always acted as the striking force.

Every morning we were awakened by the whistle of the train which passed close by, bringing peasants to the city with their produce for the market. In the evening the same train returned to the villages alongside its single track, its lighted windows twinkling between the trees like a row of fireflies.

On sunny days the Silent One and I walked along the track, over the sun-warmed crossties and the sharp pebbles which hurt our bare feet. Sometimes, if there were enough boys and girls from nearby settlements playing close to the tracks, we would put on a show for them. A few minutes before the arrival of the train I would lie down between the tracks, face down, arms folded over my head, my body as flat as possible. The Silent One would assemble an audience while I waited patiently. As the train was approaching, I could hear and feel the thudding roar of the wheels through the rails and ties until I was shaking with them. When the locomotive was almost on top of me I flattened even more, and tried not to think. The hot breath of the furnace swept over me and the great engine rolled furiously above my back. Then the carriages rattled rhythmically in a long line, as I waited for the last one to pass. I remembered when I had played the same game in the villages. It so happened that once, at the very moment of passing over a boy’s body, the engineer had released some burning cinders. When the train was gone we found the boy dead, his back and head burned like an overbaked potato. Several boys who had witnessed the scene claimed that the fireman had leaned out of his window, seen the boy, and released the cinders on purpose. I recalled another occasion when the couplings hanging free at the end of the last carriage were longer than usual and they smashed the head of the boy lying between the rails. His skull was staved in like a squashed pumpkin.

Despite these grim recollections, there was something immensely tempting about lying. between the rails with a train running above. In the moments between the passing of the locomotive and the last car I felt within me life as pure as milk carefully strained through a cloth. During the short time when the carriages roared over one’s body, nothing mattered except the simple fact of being alive. I would forget everything: the orphanage, my muteness, Gavrila, the Silent One. I found at the very bottom of this experience the great joy of being unhurt.

After the train had passed I would rise on trembling hands and weak legs and look around with greater satisfaction than I had ever experienced in exacting the most vicious revenge from one of my enemies.

I tried to preserve that feeling of being alive for future use. I might need it in moments of fear and pain. By comparison with the fear that filled me when I waited for an approaching train, all other terrors appeared insignificant.

I walked off the embankment feigning indifference and boredom. The Silent One was the first to approach me, with a protective, though elaborately casual air. He brushed off bits of gravel and splinters of wood embedded in my clothing. Gradually I subdued the trembling of my hands, legs, and the corners of my parched mouth. The others stood in a circle and watched in admiration.

Later I returned with the Silent One to the orphanage. I felt proud and knew that he was proud of me. None of the other boys dared to do what I had done. They gradually stopped bothering me. But I knew that my performance had to be repeated every few days; otherwise there would surely be some skeptical boy who would disbelieve what I had done and openly doubt my courage. I would press my Red Star to my chest, march to the railroad embankment, and wait for the thunder of an approaching train.

The Silent One and I used to spend a good deal of time on the railroad tracks. We watched the trains go by and sometimes we jumped on the steps of the rear cars, getting off when the train slowed down at the crossing.

The crossing was located a few miles from the city. A long time ago, probably before the war, they had started building a spur which was never finished. The rusty switching points were overgrown with moss, for they had never been used. The unfinished spur line ended a few hundred yards away at the end of a cliff from which a bridge had been planned to extend. We carefully inspected the switching points several times and tried to move the lever. But the corroded mechanism would not budge.

One day we saw a locksmith at the orphanage open a jammed lock simply by soaking oil into it. On the following day the Silent One stole a bottle of oil from the kitchen and in the evening we poured it over the bearings of the switch mechanism. We waited for a while to give the oil a chance to penetrate and then we hung on the lever with all our weight. Something creaked inside and the lever moved with a jolt, while the points switched to the other track with a screech. Scared by our unexpected success we quickly threw the lever back.

After that, the Silent One and I exchanged knowing glances whenever we passed by the fork. This was our secret. And whenever I sat in the shade of a tree and watched a train appear on the horizon, I was overcome by a sense of great power. The lives of the people on the train were in my hands. All I had to do was leap to the switch and move the points, sending the whole train over the cliff into the peaceful stream below. All it needed was one push on the lever . . .

I recalled the trains carrying people to the gas chambers and crematories. The men who had ordered and organized all that probably enjoyed a similar feeling of complete power over their uncomprehending victims. These men controlled the fate of millions of people whose names, faces, and occupations were unknown to them, but whom they could either let live or turn to fine soot flying in the wind. All they had to do was issue orders and in countless towns and villages trained squads of troops and police would start rounding up people destined for ghettos and death camps. They had the power to decide whether the points of thousands of railroad spurs would be switched to tracks leading to life or to death.

To be capable of deciding the fate of many people whom one did not even know was a magnificent sensation. I was not sure whether the pleasure depended only on the knowledge of the power one had, or on its use.

A few weeks later the Silent One and I went to a local marketplace where peasants from the neighboring villages brought their produce and home crafts once a week. We usually managed to snare an apple or two, a bunch of carrots, or even a glass of cream in return for the smiles we lavished on the buxom peasant women.

The market was swarming with people. Farmers loudly hawked their goods, women tried on colorful skirts and blouses, scared heifers mooed, and pigs ran squealing underfoot.

Staring at the gleaming bicycle of a militiaman I stumbled against a tall table with dairy produce on it, knocking it over. Buckets of milk and cream and jugs of buttermilk spilled everywhere. Before I had time to run away a tall farmer, purple with rage, hit me hard in the face with his fist. I fell down, spitting out three teeth together with blood. The man lifted me by the scruff of my neck like a rabbit and went on beating me until the blood spattered over his shirt. Then he pushed aside the gathering crowd of onlookers and jammed me into an empty sauerkraut barrel and kicked it over into a garbage heap.

For a moment I did not know what had happened. I heard the laughter of the peasants; my head was spinning from the beating and the rolling in the barrel. I was choking with blood; I felt my face swelling.

Suddenly I saw the Silent One. Pale and shaking he was trying to get me out of the barrel. The peasants, calling me a Gypsy stray, laughed at his efforts. Afraid of further attacks, he started rolling the barrel with me inside toward a water fountain. Some village boys ran along, trying to trip him and take it away. He warded them off with a club until we finally reached the fountain.

Soaked with water and blood, with splinters sticking in my back and hands, I crawled out of the barrel. The Silent One supported me on his shoulder as I staggered along. We reached the orphanage after a painful walk.

A doctor dressed my cut mouth and cheek. The Silent One waited outside the door. When the doctor left, he contemplated my lacerated face for a long time.

Two weeks later the Silent One woke me at dawn. He was covered with dust and his shirt clung to his perspiring body. I gathered that he must have been out all night. He signaled me to follow him. I dressed quickly and we were soon outside with no one the wiser.

He took me to a derelict hut not far from the railroad crossing where we had oiled the points. We scrambled onto the roof. The Silent One lit a cigarette which he had found on the way and gestured for me to wait. I did not know what it was all about, but I had nothing else to do.

The sun was just beginning to rise. Dew was evaporating from the tar-paper roof and brown worms started to crawl out from under the rain gutters.

We heard the whistle of a train. The Silent One stiffened and pointed with his hand. I watched the train appear in the faraway haze and slowly come nearer. It was market day and many of the peasants took this first morning train which ran through some of the villages before dawn. The carriages were filled. Baskets stuck out of the windows and people hung on to the steps in bunches.

The Silent One drew closer to me. He was sweating and his hands were moist. He licked his drawn lips from time to time. He brushed back his hair. He stared at the train and suddenly he seemed much older.

The train was approaching the crossing. The cramped peasants leaned out of the windows, their blond hair flying in the wind. The Silent One squeezed my arm so hard that I jumped. At the same moment the train’s locomotive veered aside, twisting violently as if pulled by some invisible force.

Only the two front cars followed the engine obediently. The others hobbled and then like frisky horses started climbing on one another’s backs, falling off the embankment at the same time. The crash came with a tumultuous crunch and screech. A cloud of steam shot up into the sky obscuring everything. Screams and cries came from below.

I was stunned and quivered like a telephone wire struck by a stone. The Silent One sagged. He gripped his knees spasmodically for a while, looking at the dust settling slowly. Then he turned and dashed for the stairs, pulling me along behind him. We quickly returned to the orphanage, avoiding the crowd of people rushing to the scene of the accident. Ambulance bells were clanging in the vicinity.

At the orphanage everyone was still asleep. Before going into the dormitory I took a good look at the Silent One. There was no trace of tension in his face. He looked back at me, smiling softly. If it had not been for the bandage over my face and mouth I would have smiled too.

During the next few days everyone at school talked about the railroad disaster. Black-bordered newspapers listed the names of the casualties; the police were looking for political saboteurs suspected of previous crimes. Over the track cranes were lifting the carriages, which were entangled with one another and twisted out of shape.

On the next market day the Silent One hurried me to the marketplace. We pushed through the crowd. Many of the stands were empty and cards with black crosses informed the public of the deaths of their owners. The Silent One looked at them and signified his pleasure to me. We were heading for the stand of my tormentor.

I looked up. The familiar shape of the stand was there, with its jugs of milk and cream, bricks of butter wrapped in cloth, some fruit. From behind them, as in a puppet show, popped up the head of the man who had knocked out my teeth and pushed me into a barrel.

I looked at the Silent One in anguish. He was staring at the man in disbelief. When he caught my glance he grabbed my hand and we quickly left the market. As soon as we reached the road, he fell down on the grass and cried as though in terrible pain, his words muffled by the ground. It was the only time that I had heard his voice.