The Painted Bird

When Chapter 4 begins, the boy is living with a miller, “Jealous,” who suspects his wife of flirting with the young plowboy and whips her nightly. One day, after the couple’s cat “was seized by a frenzy” (35), the miller brings the plowboy home for dinner. He also brings a tomcat. As the cats mate, the household sits around the dinner table watching, the miller’s wife and the plowboy blushing, sweating, and (rather unsubtly) sneaking glances at each other. When the cats have calmed, the miller downs his vodka, rises from his chair, and accuses the plowboy of lusting after his wife. When the plowboy doesn’t respond, the miller pushes him against the wall and, to the screams of his wife, gouges out his eyes.

The miller opens the door and kicks the wailing plowboy outside. The boy wishes he could take the eyeballs, believing he could use them to “see twice as much, maybe even more” (39). When the miller crushes them under his boot, the boy is devastated, for “a marvelous mirror, which could reflect the world, was broken” (39).

After the drunken miller falls asleep, the boy, whose “duty” is “to keep the room neat” (39), cleans the dishes and tosses the crushed eyes into the oven. He then packs food and embers for his comet and sneaks outside, where he finds the plowboy sobbing. Though he feels sorry for him, he also wonders if he can still see in his memories, which “would not be too bad”—it’s possible, the boy considers, that “the plowboy would start seeing an entirely new, more fascinating world” (40).

The boy flees, frequently touching his eyes, having learned of their frailty. He takes special note of natural elements around him; if ever his eyes are plucked out, he’ll remember these sights forever.

The boy now lives with a bird catcher named Lekh, setting traps in hard-to-reach places in exchange for space to sleep in one of Lekh’s cages. Lekh, who barters the birds for food, “studied the ways of birds and envied them their ability to fly” (42). He tells the boy about various bird-related omens and believes people should pay attention to birds and learn from them. He explains how a stork had bitten him and that he’d enacted revenge by planting a goose egg in her nest; her family accused her of adultery and killed her. The boy describes how Lekh removes frightened birds from his traps and throws them in a sack over his shoulder, killing “the friends and family of the prisoner” as they circled above, “twittering curses” (46).

Every day, Lekh leads the boy to a secret clearing where he hopes to meet “Stupid Ludmila,” as she is called by the villagers. Ludmila “lured men into the bushes and pleased them so much with her voluptuousness that afterwards they could not even look at their fat stinking wives” (48). Lekh wrote “tender songs” for her, casting her “as a strange-colored bird flying to faraway worlds, free and quick” (49). Waiting by the clearing, the boy watches as they kiss and “slid[e] down into the tall grass” (49).

When Ludmila fails to meet him, Lekh, enraged, brightly paints his strongest bird and releases it to its flock who, not recognizing it, attack and kill it. She doesn’t return, and he continues to paint and release his birds to be killed by their flocks. Lekh finally disappears into the forest. Weeks pass. One day, Ludmila appears at Lekh’s house and is distraught by his absence. She orders the boy to go with her to the pasture, setting her dog on him when he objects. There, by the cemetery, she sexually assaults him, drawing the attention of nearby peasants, who take turns lying with her until village women arrive with rakes and shovels. As Lekh runs to save her, the women hold Ludmila down, beating and sexually assaulting her until she’s dead. The peasants leave, but Lekh remains, hunching over her and sobbing. The boy, who’d been hiding in the cemetery listening to the dead “whispering about the wandering soul of Stupid Ludmila” (55), decides to leave Lekh’s hut.