Anna and the Swallow Man Read online

  As she crashed down, the sound of nimble feet behind her fell silent.

  In the sudden still, she heard, far off, muted laughter, the plucking of a stringed instrument, song. The smell of burning was stronger here, and with a surge Anna’s heart filled with hope. People. There must be people near.

  Human beings are the best hope in the world of other human beings to survive.

  Far off, beyond the trees, she thought she could see the vague orange glow of fire, and she pushed herself to her feet and made to run again when she heard a voice.

  “Anna,” it said, and her heart froze solid like winter earth.

  Then, between the trees, a match flame flared into tiny life, and in the sudden illumination far above her, Anna saw the dark countenance of the Swallow Man.

  “Anna,” he said. “Stop.”

  —

  The last thing Anna wanted to do was cry. Every muscle in her face ached.

  “Where were you going?” The match light flickered beneath the empty face of the Swallow Man and threatened at every moment to go out. Anna would much have preferred that he raise his voice for once, that he yell and storm, but when he spoke again, his intonation was as even and measured as it had been the first time.

  “Where were you going?”

  Anna didn’t answer.

  Just as the Swallow Man extended his long, open, empty hand in front of her, the match flame in his other guttered and died in a tiny plume of smoke. She put the heel of bread into the Swallow Man’s hand, and in the silent darkness she began to cry.

  “Will you tell me,” said the Swallow Man in the dark for the third time, “where you were going?”

  Anna did her best to keep the sound of tears from her voice, straining to keep hers as balanced as the Swallow Man’s had been. “Don’t you know?”

  “Of course I know,” said the Swallow Man. “But I need you to tell me.”

  This seemed like cruelty to Anna.

  “Why?” she said, her voice erring far too close for her liking to the wobble of distress.

  “Because,” said the Swallow Man, “I need to know if you thought you were going back toward the Jew, or if you thought you were going away from me.”

  If Anna had been able to see the Swallow Man’s impassive face, she might not have felt so viscerally the force of sadness in this question. She had not thought how the Swallow Man might feel to wake and see her gone, but this was not a particular omission. She had not thought in general.

  “I was not going away from you,” she said, and for all her effort, her distress deepened at the thought that the Swallow Man might have even considered this possibility. “I was not.”

  “Ah,” said the unseen Swallow Man, “but you were. No matter what you meant to do, the distinction exists only in words. Toward him is the same as away from me. It is only by a trick of language that we may say one and not the other.”

  Anna wanted to protest, but she could not still her tears long enough.

  “Do you understand me?”

  Anna could not answer.

  For a moment the Swallow Man allowed her to cry in silence, and then he spoke.

  “Anna,” said the Swallow Man. “If I wake up and you have gone away from me again, you will not find me. I will make certain of it. Do you understand that?”

  The darkness was impenetrably thick, but forgetting herself, Anna nodded vigorously. She would’ve said that she was sorry—she was—but her voice threatened to detonate into shrapnel if she let it loose.

  A tiny sigh entered into the world from the direction of the Swallow Man, far above her, and he said, “Tell me why you went.”

  The corner of the darkness where the Swallow Man was hidden felt so taut to Anna in its quiet that she was afraid it might rip open.

  Somewhere she could hear men singing together.

  The Swallow Man’s inquiry seemed cruel, and unfair—like a trap. He knew where she had been going. Didn’t he know, then, why? Couldn’t he guess, he who knew where to find every sustaining thing in the world, how to pass by every threat in safety, he who carried wisdom in one hand and danger in the other—how could he possibly not know? And if he knew all of this, what use was there in asking her?

  Anna was not sure if the Swallow Man spoke again or if it was the warm breeze of the night that whispered Why? up above her. She tried to restrain herself, tried to keep calm, but as soon as she opened her mouth, her tears redoubled.

  “Why?” Her voice trembled at first, and soon she was sobbing. “Why? I thought you knew! Because he is good and kind and foolish! Because he is alone, and doesn’t know enough to be afraid! Because I still see his face and chest and hands when he’s gone from me! Because he knows how to laugh, Swallow Man! Because he is not like you!”

  A moment of ringing silence chased this explosion, but this silence was not tight like a tensed muscle—it was desolate.

  And then: “Yes,” said the Swallow Man. “I see.”

  Almost without meaning to, Anna let a small aftershock roll out of her into the darkness. “Don’t say you see unless you really do.”

  Anna heard the Swallow Man breathe out through his nose. “I do,” he said in certainty, and despite her frustration and anger, she could not help believing him for the threadbare, weary quality in his voice.

  Anna’s crying did not abate as the Swallow Man walked her gently out of the trees and into the soft moonlight. Together they walked across an unfamiliar field at a small distance from one another. If Anna had had her wits about her, she might’ve noticed an unfamiliar aspect in the Swallow Man’s gait—a slow quality, somehow diffuse—but as it was, her tears clouded the world around her to near complete obscurity.

  Shortly they came to an old wooden fence that cut haphazardly through the pasture. Once it had been white, but all the paint had long since stripped and curled away, and now the wood seemed to have trouble deciding if it was brown or gray. After a short time spent walking along its length, they found a gate. It had been locked fast by ancient hands, and even if they had removed the lock, it was clear that the hinges of the gate would remain rusted shut.

  In her tiny, tired, heartbroken chest, Anna wondered to herself what the difference was between such a gate and the rest of the span of fence into which it had been set.

  It was at this point, standing with Anna in front of a useless portal in an antique boundary, that the Swallow Man made up his mind.

  He lifted Anna easily to the other side of the fence and then, with little trouble, hopped himself over after her.

  In short minutes they had arrived at the exact section of hedgerow beneath which they had originally encamped. This was clear because in his haste to pursue Anna, the Swallow Man had neglected to replace his long umbrella atop the physician’s bag. It was still there where it had fallen, in precisely the same position, nestled amongst the bush roots.

  Exhausted from her midnight march and from the heavy tax of her sobbing, Anna quickly fell into sleep.

  Just when the dawn had begun to creep into the great black night, Anna awoke.

  She was alone.

  No one was near her.

  There was no bag and no umbrella to be seen.

  Alone beneath the bushes, Anna Łania allowed a heavy tide of tears to wash her back out into empty, oblivious sleep.

  Anna was woken by the sound of something very close to her head. It squeaked and clicked, like an ungreased device of metal, and before she even opened her eyes, her entire body tensed. The Swallow Man had taught her the danger of mechanical noises, and even if he was gone, she still believed with a full heart in the truth of all his teachings. The sound of a machine where it was not expected could well be relied upon to belong to a machine for making deaths.

  But then, in the precise position from which the clicking sound had come, Anna heard a bright whistling and a brush of wings, and when she opened her eyes, it was to the sight of a lone starling flitting off across the bright spring green.

  It was not
this sight, though, that brought her such racking joy.

  There, lying in front of her, curled up close in the precise spot from which he had been gone in the night, was her tall, wise, beautiful, terrifying Swallow Man. A shuddering sigh escaped from her lips.

  And then she saw: sprawled out beyond the Swallow Man, barely a sixth of him still beneath the hedge, mouth open, left boot hanging from his toes and clarinet clutched in close, was beautiful, happy, bright, loudly snoring Reb Hirschl.

  Where last night she had shaken her body so hard with sobbing that she’d thought she would fly apart, now Anna treasured her tears, as if they were a butterfly of deep blue at flight in the small, sunlit jar of her chest.

  When finally she turned her head away from the sight of the Jew, she found the Swallow Man awake and watching her. This did not surprise her—she had long since come to the conclusion that every moment of her life would be subject to his observation—but she could scarcely catch hold of enough breath to speak.

  “Why?” she almost didn’t say.

  The Swallow Man pulled himself lithely out from beneath the hedge and arranged himself in a seated position. “Because,” he said. “Just as it is impossible to say ‘I was going toward the Jew’ without saying ‘I was going away from you,’ so, too, is it impossible to say ‘riverbank’ without saying ‘river.’ ”

  Anna nodded.

  “I had lost sight,” said the Swallow Man, “of the fact that survival in and of itself is not sufficient to support every life equally.”

  Anna thought he might have been preparing to apologize, but just then Reb Hirschl choked deafeningly on a noseful of snore and shifted in his sleep.

  “God help us,” muttered the Swallow Man.

  “Thank you,” said Anna. “Thank you.” It was only her aching cheeks that finally made Anna aware that she was smiling.

  The Swallow Man did not answer, but set about preparing himself to depart. He was fully assembled for the day’s walking when, almost as an afterthought, he held out the heel of bread. Anna could see where her clutching fingers had dented its flesh in the night.

  “Here,” he said. “He insisted that you have it.”

  There was no lack of judgment in this statement, and that was the way Anna preferred it. Just because she wanted Reb Hirschl by her side, it didn’t mean she wanted the Swallow Man at all less, or to be at all different.

  Reb Hirschl woke slowly and only at the insistence of the Swallow Man, but from the moment his eyelids lifted, so, too, did his apple cheeks.

  Anna had never felt such fulsome gratitude from any “thank you” in any language before in her life. Reb Hirschl pronounced the phrase like a prayer, and for half an hour thereafter, Anna could not speak for blushing.

  —

  Despite the bond of Anna between them, the Swallow Man and Reb Hirschl proved thoroughly constitutionally averse. There was hardly anything the Jew did that did not seem to offend the Swallow Man’s sensibilities.

  The Swallow Man favored strong divisions in all things, but most notably in communication: if he was talking, he was talking, and if he was not, he walked in silence. Reb Hirschl, even once sober, walked in a cloud of small noises. He hummed or sang when there was no conversation to be had, or spoke to himself, muttering small phrases in Yiddish or Hebrew, chuckling, sometimes laughing outright as he went, boots flopping off his heels. To Anna this was a delight, but to the Swallow Man it was distasteful at best and frequently became obnoxious. It was no difficulty to see that, in his more mercurial moments, the Swallow Man found Reb Hirschl truly and completely intolerable.

  Though the noise was perhaps the most noticeable issue, it was hardly the only way in which the Jew bothered the Swallow Man. Anna and the Swallow Man had become expert in making use of every last scrap and crumb of food that they encountered—a grain of salt dropped in the dirt, an oily residue left on a fingertip—nothing could escape their mouths for long. When Reb Hirschl ate, on the other hand, half of his food stayed in his beard. This would’ve been forgivable, perhaps, as clumsiness, but when it resulted from such an obvious combination of zeal and carelessness as to prompt him to sing a little ditty about wiping the crumbs away, it began to rankle.

  Anna and the Swallow Man had become accustomed to putting food in their bellies twice in a day—once when they rose and once before they lay down—and in the time between they walked without stopping. Now, though, when they awoke each morning (the first notwithstanding), they found Reb Hirschl already risen, praying silently, his body rocking back and forth at the waist, his palms turned very slightly out and up. He prayed like he sang, with his eyes firmly shut, his lips flitting rapidly through the words of his prayers as his breath flowed into him and back out.

  Of course, no matter when he got up, there would still be a troubling amount of prayer left to get through before he was done, and there was nothing that the Swallow Man could less abide than idleness when he wanted to be moving. As if this weren’t enough, Reb Hirschl insisted on stopping at midday for a second round of prayer. He prayed a third time at night, before sleeping, often left standing in that shut-eyed, muttering posture when Anna nodded off, and if she hadn’t known better, she might’ve thought he stood praying all throughout the night.

  But despite this troublesome piety, most of Reb Hirschl’s time was not spent praying. It was spent walking.

  Reb Hirschl, though, was a decidedly different sort of walker than the Swallow Man. Where the Swallow Man might lecture and instruct while walking, or, as his only alternative, might remain entirely silent, Reb Hirschl had an immense and variable and delightfully erratic range of walking pastimes.

  The most common, of course, was song, and before very long he began to teach Anna a few of his little wordless melodies so that she might sing along with him. Her favorite by far was a brief little two-part walking song that Reb Hirschl had devised to loop back on itself. At any point in their progress, she might start it out, and they would sing together, their notes and phrases and pieces interlocking in a harmonizing double melody. This, Anna loved to do so much that she entirely missed the Swallow Man’s exasperation at being subjected to the same thirty seconds of music over and over and over again.

  In some long stretches Reb Hirschl would devote his time to the invention of the most asinine and puerile puns and riddles for Anna’s attention (“Look! Look! If I’ve toad you once, I’ve toad you a thousand times. Look, see? Toads!”), and each one of these would draw a more exaggerated display of protest and disdain from her than the last. She was nonetheless completely, if covertly, delighted by them. The Swallow Man, needless to say, was not.

  On some occasions (usually in midafternoon, when they were all at their tiredest and most hungry and were apt to fall into periods of silent trudgery), Reb Hirschl would simply throw back his head, roar at the top of his lungs, and take off chasing after Anna, who would squeal and run away ineffectually until he caught up with her, threw her over his shoulder, and tickled her until her laughter caught in her throat and tears flooded her eyes. Once this was achieved, he would put her, breathless, back down and proceed as if nothing at all had happened.

  Perhaps it was simply willfulness that kept the Swallow Man from enjoying these outbursts in any way, but all the same, he winced whenever the sound of their presence echoed out beyond the hills, and often in those days Anna caught him scanning the horizon compulsively for a hint of anyone who might be following.

  One final habit of Reb Hirschl’s met with the Swallow Man’s express disapproval, though he never wasted his energy in combating it—Reb Hirschl drank. Fortunately, there was no great supply of alcohol to be found in the Polish wild, and even if he’d had the stuff, Reb Hirschl might’ve found his inclination toward its indulgence waning. Drink, by its nature, is an excess that contributes nothing—it only takes away. Reb Hirschl was a man who had reasonably thought that a good few of his problems might be solved in judicious takings-away, but the more time he spent under Anna’s leavening
influence, the more he came to feel as if a kind of reconstruction might be preferable to the wholesale demolition offered by the perpetually emptying bottle.

  However much Reb Hirschl may’ve benefited from Anna’s influence, he certainly didn’t benefit any from the Swallow Man’s. Perhaps Anna had been naive. She had not assumed that the two men would become the best of friends—in fact, that was one of the reasons Reb Hirschl had so appealed to her—but she had thought that the Swallow Man would, as an extension of herself, take Reb Hirschl on in the way he had done for her, teaching him how to creep through the forest, what plants were good to eat, how to be someone who was not himself—in short, all the ways of the road—but the Swallow Man kept his doors firmly shut to the Jew, and Reb Hirschl remained, despite all her desires, other than “us” in practicality as well as in Road.

  More than once, in small instances of—for lack of a better word—neglect from the Swallow Man, Anna had wanted to speak up. “Why,” she wanted to say, “why do you not show him the proper way? Why do you leave him outside? Why do you so dislike him?” But to speak against the Swallow Man, to reference the existence of some vault of knowledge or wisdom or benefit in the presence of a person to whom he had explicitly elected not to reveal it—this was undoubtedly a betrayal.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, Anna’s fondness for Reb Hirschl only grew, and she spent as much of her walking time as she could diverted in his foolish, lovely little world.

  Bit by bit the two of them began to shade in their walking song with words. The very first line (“Schlep, schlep, schlep, schlep”) came rolling out of Reb Hirschl one day near dusk, and for the next several rounds, he and Anna sang the entire song (with freshly renewed enthusiasm, at the top of their lungs) on this single syllable. In no time they had a full verse.

  Schlep, schlep, schlep, schlep,

  Walking, walking, step by step.

  Where we’re heading, I don’t know,

  But schlepping, schlepping, here we go!