The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski [37]
After the battle the village would slowly return to life. But there would be fights among the peasants and boys for the weapons, uniforms, and boots abandoned by the partisans, and also arguments about where to bury the dead and who should dig the graves. Days would pass in argument as the corpses decomposed, sniffed by dogs in the daytime and chewed by rats at night.
I was awakened one night by the blacksmith’s wife who urged me to flee. I barely had time to leap out of bed before male voices and rattling weapons could be heard surrounding the hut. I hid in the attic with a sack thrown over my body, clinging to a crack in the planks, through which I could see a large part of the farmyard.
A firm male voice ordered the blacksmith to come out. Two armed partisans dragged the half-naked blacksmith into the yard, where he stood, shivering from cold and hitching up his falling trousers. In a tall cap with star-spangled epaulets on his shoulders, the leader of the band approached the blacksmith and asked him something. I caught a fragment of a sentence: “... you helped enemies of the Fatherland.”
The blacksmith threw up his hands, swearing in the name of the Son and the Holy Trinity. The first blow felled him. He continued his denials, rising slowly to his feet. One of the men tore out a pole from the fence, swung it through the air and clouted the blacksmith in the face. The blacksmith fell, and the partisans began to kick him all over with their heavy boots. The blacksmith groaned, writhing with pain, but the men did not stop. They leaned over him twisting his ears, stepping on his genitals, breaking his fingers with their heels.
When he ceased to groan and his body sagged, the partisans hauled out the two hired hands, the blacksmith’s wife, and his struggling son. They opened wide the doors of the barn and threw the woman and the men across the shaft of a cart in such a way that, with the shaft under their bellies, they hung over it like upset sacks of grain. Then the partisans tore the clothing off their victims and tied their hands to their feet. They rolled up their sleeves and, with steel canes cut from track signal wire, began to beat the squirming bodies.
The crack of the blows rebounded loudly off the taut buttocks while the victims twisted, shrinking and swelling, and howled like a pack of abused dogs. I quivered and sweated with fear.
The blows rained one after another. Only the blacksmith’s wife continued to wail, while the partisans exchanged witticisms over her lean, crooked thighs. Since the woman did not stop moaning, they overturned her, face to the sky, her whitening breasts hanging down at both sides. The men struck her heatedly, the rising crescendo of blows slashing the woman’s body and belly, now darkened by streams of blood. The bodies on the shaft drooped. The torturers put on their jackets and entered the hut, demolishing the furniture and plundering all in sight.
They entered the attic and found me. They held me up by the neck, turning me around, punching me with their fists, pulling me by the hair. They had immediately assumed I was a Gypsy foundling. They loudly deliberated what to do with me. Then one of them decided I should be delivered up to the German outpost about a dozen miles from the hut. According to him, this would make the commander of the outpost less suspicious of the village, which was already tardy in its compulsory deliveries. Another man agreed, adding rapidly that the whole village might be burned down because of a single Gypsy bastard.
My hands and feet were tied and I was carried outside. The partisans summoned two peasants, to whom they carefully explained