At night it is dark only for a short time until morning dawns again. The sky is always pink and the days grow hot. Each one hotter than the one before.
They often suffer from hunger. The thirst is worse. There is war everywhere and no one needs a painting.
‘Which doesn’t mean that none should be done,’ says the painter, and uses the colours he has left to paint on the paper he has left. Eventually all the sheets are used up. He continues to paint on wood, on stone, and then he runs out of colours. First blue, then yellow. In the end, the paintings are all red, and then nothing at all. The painter has used up all his materials.
‘Now I have nothing,’ he says, and looks into space.
‘Can we get more paint?’ Martin asks.
‘There probably is some. Somewhere.’
‘Then we will get you what you need.’
The painter says nothing.
They stay away from the cities but keep coming across homeless people in the forests, wandering among the dry trees just as they are. One time they meet a mother and daughter. The mother seems half-dead with fear. She keeps asking for a knife. It takes them a long time to find out what the woman wants. Only then do they give it to her and look on as she cuts her daughter’s hair. She begs Martin to give her his trousers so that the girl will look like a boy and perhaps be spared the worst.
‘That is for me to bear,’ she says.
The painter says nothing.
‘Please,’ the mother begs Martin. Tears stream down her cheeks, but her face does not cry. The sadness just pours out of her as if there were no end to it. Where might her husband and the other children be?
The dead are everywhere. They lie in the bushes, one finds them like one finds berries. They are piled up in the towns and burned. Martin knows that he will find other trousers. He gives them to the girl.
This thirst. The painter swears a lot and claims that’s the reason. But it’s because he can’t find work as a painter, Martin is sure of it. Soon the painter no longer speaks to the child. He trudges silently through the dry woods and across the parched fields teeming with potato beetles, which shred everything that remains. He no longer pays attention to whether Martin is keeping up.
Martin has to keep the rooster constantly hidden all the time. Everyone who crosses their path has hollow cheeks and fever-glazed eyes. They would kill one another to eat the rooster. Why don’t they just eat one another? They probably already do.
The terrible days erode all love, patience and care between the painter and the boy. The trust is ebbing away. More and more often, Martin gets a fright when the painter appears silently behind him and stares dully at him and the creature on his lap. One night Martin wakes up and the painter is standing over him, his head with the tangled hair floating like black doom against the starry sky. He is holding a heavy stone in one hand.
‘What are you doing?’ Martin whispers fearfully.
He hears the painter grind his teeth.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks again.
But it may be that he didn’t say it again, because his heart is beating so fast that he can’t hear himself speak.
This shocks the painter out of his paralysis. He runs off, runs into the nearest bushes, tearing and cracking through the branches. And Martin also jumps up and runs off in the other direction, away from the painter whom he loves.
He has seen the superhuman effort it took the painter not to bash in his and the rooster’s head. Not yet.
So Martin must get away from him.
He runs until he coughs up blood. And he runs until he can’t think any more.