52 pages • 1 hour read
The Painted Bird
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Chapters 18-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary
The country is liberated from the Germans, and the boy goes to an orphanage. Gavrila promises that if no one claims him in three months, he will take him in himself. The boy holds back tears as his car drives away. On the train, he observes evidence of the war: towns destroyed by bombs, abandoned airplanes, former concentration camp prisoners.
At the orphanage, children laugh at his Soviet uniform, which he wears at all times. When the principal attempts to pry it from him, he runs into the street and, using pen and paper, tells Soviet soldiers that he’s the son of an officer and that the principal, an enemy of the Red Army, regularly beats him. The soldiers enter the school, damaging property and harassing the nurses. The boy has confidence in the Red Army. He sneaks out and buys a newspaper each day, enjoying the pictures of Stalin.
Many of the children in the orphanage were injured during the war. Fights break out among the children, who have nicknames reflecting their attack technique of choice. The boy is frequently attacked by bigger boys. Though he remembers Mitka’s teaching that one must avenge oneself according to the severity of the injury, he finds himself unable to flee. The fearful teachers distance themselves from the fighting.
The boy befriends the Silent One, who has decided there is no point in speaking; the two communicate with signs. They cause mischief in town, stealing bicycles, spying on girls bathing, and attacking pedestrians. Sometimes, the boy flattens himself between train tracks and lets trains run over him. He is exhilarated by “the simple fact of being alive” (218) and by the admiration of the Silent One. They figure out how to move the lever of an unfinished railroad spur, switching the points so a train would go off a cliff; they push it back, but the boy enjoys knowing the lives of strangers are in his hands.
At the marketplace, the boy stumbles into a table and knocks over buckets of milk. The dairy vendor beats him. A couple of weeks later, the Silent One excitedly takes him to the railroad tracks, where they watch as a train full of peasants veers onto the unfinished track and tumbles off the cliff. On the next market day, they discover that while many of the stand owners had been killed, the man who attacked the boy is alive. The Silent One falls to the ground and sobs.
Chapter 19 Summary
One day the boy is brought to the principal’s office, where his parents await. At first, he doesn’t recognize them; when he does, he considers not admitting it. His parents check his birthmark, hugging him and crying. The boy feels “cramped” and still hopes to be claimed by Gavrila. He finds obeying out of fear similarly distasteful as obeying out of love, and he is “smothered by [his parents’] love and protection” (228). Though he feels a boy of twelve should have his freedom, when he studies his crying mother, he can’t bring himself to run away: “I suddenly felt like Lekh’s painted bird, which some unknown force was pulling toward his kind” (227). He’s reminded of a hare Makar had caught, who’d struggled against being captured but ultimately submitted to his cage. When Makar left the cage open one day, the hare decided to stay. “Freedom,” the boy concludes, “had left him” (228).
His parents take him to their tiny apartment, where “everything was very predictable” (229). The apartment is too small for the boy, his parents, and the four-year-old orphan his parents adopted during the war. The boy continues to read about the Red Army in the newspaper. He is annoyed by the younger child, who gets in his way, and one day breaks his arm.
When the war ends, the city celebrates. The boy fruitlessly continues to go to the orphanage to check for letters from Gavrila or Mitka. Meanwhile, many hopeful people move to the city to work and make new lives for themselves, but they find jobs and shelter scarce.
A misunderstanding with a movie theater attendant leaves the boy beaten and humiliated; that night he tells his parents he’s going for a walk, then takes revenge by dropping two bricks on the attendant’s head. Though his parents protest, the boy now goes out every night. He is “soon familiar with the night city” (231), blending in with drunken men, prostitutes, rapists, and murderers. He frequents a park where people “trade, drink, and play cards” and where women seduce him. Feeling “at ease” with them, he stealthily delivers packages for them and learns from them how to throw and steal knives. One night the park is raided, and the boy is thrown in jail. His parents bring him home, and the boy misses “the night people” (232).
Chapter 20 Summary
The boy’s father takes a job outside the city because the boy isn’t growing and doctors suggest “mountain air and a lot of exercise” (233). The boy is sent to the mountains to be cared for by a ski instructor, and his parents visit him once a week.
When the instructor prays each morning, the boy watches “indulgently.” He can’t understand how an educated man from the city prays. He ponders how no one can ever know anyone else, believing that “[l]ike the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens” (233). Nevertheless, he finds the instructor kind and enjoys receiving his praise.
While skiing one day, the boy loses the instructor and falls into a gully. In his hospital room later, he picks up the ringing phone and listens to the person speaking on the other end. Gradually, words form in his throat, until he begins talking, unbelieving, and “loudly and incessantly” (234) so speech can’t escape through the window.
Chapters 18-20 Analysis
The boy says, “In daytime the world was at peace. The war continued at night” (232). While the boy says this of the city, it’s an apt metaphor for him, as well. In one sense, he’s been saved from the villages. However, civilized society is not much better. He’s tormented at the orphanage just as he was in the villages; his only friend murders a train full of people. Later, he surrounds himself with criminals. War survivors moving into the city are “nervous, short-tempered, and quarrelsome” (230). The people the boy encounters are no happier or kinder than the peasants; violence and misery appear to be humankind’s natural state.
Equally important is that the boy himself has changed. He lies about his principal to the soldiers. He and the Silent One sneak into the city and hurt innocent people. Against the wishes of his parents, he goes out every night and is even arrested. Though the war is over, its impression is stamped on his soul, and he’s more comfortable among the denizens of the city’s dangerous nightlife. After the traumas he’s suffered, he’s drawn to the dark side of humanity. The aggression of the children in the orphanage suggests he’s not the only one.
It’s for this reason that he flattens himself against the railroad tracks and lets the train run over him: it allows him to feel. That others have been killed doing it only makes it more exhilarating, for “at the very bottom of this experience [is] the great joy of being unhurt” (218). Emerging safely from danger after years of submission and fear makes him feel powerful. Similarly, he feels “a great sense of power” knowing he can switch the railroad spur at any time, that “[t]he lives of the people on the train were in my hands” (220). He imagines the men who felt this power as they drove people toward the gas chambers, equating himself, finally, with the Germans who fascinated him for so long.
Unsurprisingly, he refuses to relinquish his Soviet uniform, in which he identifies as a member of the powerful liberating army. Using violence to display his power, he assaults a nurse who tries to take it away; when it is wrested from him, he recaptures this identity by telling Soviet soldiers he’s the son of an officer. On the other hand, when he is claimed by his parents, he feels “tame” (227), “shrunken” (228), and submissive, like a hare in Makar’s cage. His hope of living with Gavrila disappears, and with it, the identity he achieves while wearing his uniform. It’s little wonder, then, that while living with his parents, he continues to check for letters from Gavrila and Mitka and religiously reads the Soviet paper.
However, despite the turmoil of a country, and a boy, emerging from war, the boy’s final caretaker, the ski instructor, is kind. Though the boy cynically watches the instructor’s prayer, the instructor is a reminder that people can be good, that some believe in better days. Will the instructor, too, be disappointed? The novel doesn’t say. However, we leave the boy, at least, with something to believe in: he receives a phone call that elicits “the overpowering desire” to use his voice. Kosiński concludes the Afterword by stating that “[t]he urge to survive is inherently unfettered”; he asks if “imagination, any more than the boy, [can] be held prisoner” (xxvi). The mysteriousness of this phone call seems to leave his future open-ended. His regaining of his voice offers a final glimmer of hope.
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