The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski [13]
The flames sparkled like a Christmas tree, and then burst into a high blaze, forming a peaked hat of fire on Marta’s head. Marta became a torch. Flames circled her tenderly from all sides, and the water in the bucket hissed when shreds of her ragged rabbit-fur jacket fell into it. I could see under the flames patches of her wrinkled, sagging skin and whitish spots on her bony arms.
I called out to her for the last time as I ran outside into the yard. The hens were cackling furiously and beating their wings in the coop adjoining the house. The usually placid cow was mooing and butting the barn door with her head. I decided not to wait for Marta’s permission, and set about freeing the hens on my own. They rushed out hysterically, and tried to take flight on desperate, beating wings. The cow succeeded in breaking down the barn door. She took up an observation point at a safe distance from the fire, pensively chewing her cud.
By now the inside of the hut was a furnace. Flames jumped through the windows and holes. The thatched roof, catching fire from below, was smoking ominously. I marveled at Marta. Was she really so indifferent to all this? Had her charms and incantations granted her immunity against a fire that turned everything else about her into ashes?
She still had not come out. The heat was becoming unbearable. I had to move to the far end of the yard. The chicken coops and the barn were now on fire. A number of rats, frightened by the heat, scurried wildly across the yard. The yellow eyes of a cat, reflecting the flames, gazed from the dark edges of the field.
Marta failed to appear, though I was still convinced that she could emerge unscathed. But when one of the walls collapsed, engulfing the charred interior of the hut, I began to doubt that I would ever see her again.
In the clouds of smoke rising to the sky I thought I detected a strange oblong shape. What was it? Could it be Marta’s soul making its escape to the heavens? Or was it Marta herself, revived by the fire, relieved of her old crusty skin, leaving this earth on a fiery broomstick like the witch in the story my mother told me?
Still staring into the spectacle of sparks and flame, I was jolted out of my reverie by the sound of men’s voices and barking dogs. The farmers were coming. Marta always warned me about the village people. She said if they ever caught me alone they would drown me like a mangy kitten or kill me with an ax.
I started running as soon as the first human figures appeared within the circle of light. They did not see me. I ran madly, hitting unseen tree stumps and thorny bushes. I finally fell into a ravine. I heard the faint voices of people and the crash of the falling walls, and then I fell asleep.
I woke up at dawn, half frozen. A shroud of mist hung between the edges of the ravine like a spider’s web. I scrambled back to the top of the hill. Wisps of smoke and an occasional flame rose over the pile of scorched wood and ashes where Marta’s hut had stood.
Everything around was silent. I believed that now I would meet my parents in the ravine. I believed that, even far away, they must know all that had happened to me. Wasn’t I their child? What were parents for if not to be with their children in times of danger?
Just in case they should be coming near, I called out to them. But no one answered.
I was weak and cold and hungry. I had no idea what to do or where to go. My parents were still not there.
I trembled and vomited. I had to find people. I had to go to the village.
I limped on my bruised feet and legs, cautiously making my way over the yellowing autumn grass toward the distant village.
2
My parents were nowhere. I began to run across the field toward the peasants’ huts. A rotting crucifix, once painted blue, stood at the crossroads. A holy picture hung at the top, from which a pair of barely visible but seemingly tear-stained eyes gazed into the empty fields and the red glow of the rising sun. A gray bird sat on an arm of the