Anna and the Swallow Man Read online

  Reb Hirschl, on the other hand, seemed to actively keep himself from ignoring these questions. When he finally began to join the harvest, he quickly made it a policy to look the dead men straight in their faces, and before he launched into his rapid Hebrew prayer, he would greet them politely.

  “Hello, sir,” he would say, and when he was finished, “Thank you,” or, “Please pardon me,” or, most ridiculously, “Be well.”

  He never said so, but it was not difficult to see that the Swallow Man found this an absurd, weak practice.

  Once, Anna asked Reb Hirschl what he was saying when he searched the bodies of the dead.

  “It’s a prayer, yidele,” he said, “called El Malei Rachamim. It asks God to enfold the souls of the dead beneath the wings of His holy presence and to lift them up like brilliant lights to the sky.”

  Anna imagined bombs falling in reverse, their fiery explosions contained in swirling spheres of human proportion, flying back up out of the pine forests and into the night sky. Anna could not tell if she thought the beauty of this idea was related to its terror.

  “If you’d like, I can teach it to you,” said Reb Hirschl. “Or if you just want something to say, you can always just use ‘Baruch atah, Adonai, mechaye hameytim.’ ”

  The Swallow Man sighed loudly, and not wishing to be thought a fool, Anna never said Reb Hirschl’s little phrase. But she never forgot it, either.

  —

  It was a delicate and peculiar thing, the relationship between Reb Hirschl and the Swallow Man. They did not like each other particularly, would never have called one another a friend or even have associated under different circumstances, and wherever they were, an argument seemed to lie only a few seconds’ journey from them in any given direction.

  But something had begun to grow between them as well—a sort of cooperative understanding—and the moments in which this was most obvious were the moments in which one of the two men would forgo his own strongly held way of being and embrace the other’s, as if giving a moment of his life to his opposite in tribute. For example: Reb Hirschl never thanked the Swallow Man for his clarinet’s shoulder strap. Anna was worried, that first morning, that this was an affront or perhaps an oversight, but she quickly saw that this was not the case. It was visibly difficult for Reb Hirschl not to explode with gratitude, and his forbearance in the face of the Swallow Man’s habitual, cultivated composure was the ultimate show of thanks. There was no mistaking the contact their eyes made before they set off that morning.

  It was perhaps more difficult for the Swallow Man to reciprocate these moments of deference—his ways were so strongly regimented and surely determined, his categories so black and so white—but he showed his affection by slackening in the furious stricture of his sense of order. The time was made for prayer, without reservation or trouble, and comments or little hummed melodies that before would’ve drawn scorn or an increase in the pace of the Swallow Man’s gait were now more easily (if never very enthusiastically) tolerated.

  It was blitzkrieg, and the three of them stayed close behind the German advance without much direct threat for two, perhaps two and a half months before the danger began to mount again. This is, of course, not to say that their travels in those days were ever at all comfortable. There was scarcely a day without flame or without the evidence of death at their feet, and it seemed somehow that, almost as a policy, the wild, maniacal blast of ordnance shook the air and lit the sky just when Anna lay down to sleep—as if it knew.

  There was not much sleep for her to take in those months anyway.

  They had wandered deep into the Soviet Union when they began to feel the threat of counteroffensives against the German advance. They’d stayed far enough behind the line that they hadn’t felt terribly endangered by the fighting until this point, but the leaves were beginning to change, and the rain was falling steadily, and the Germans had been forced nearly to a halt. The Swallow Man was afraid to slow too much, lest a second wave of Germans should catch them up, but if they kept at their pace, they would almost certainly meet the back of the first wave.

  Not infrequently now they could hear serious tank fire far too close to them for comfort. Reb Hirschl endlessly speculated about the pain of being hit by a tank shell, and while this was hardly the deciding factor in the Swallow Man’s determination to turn back to Poland, it could scarcely have bolstered what little resolve he had left.

  Together they filled a fallen soldier’s pack with as many field rations as they could gather for the return, and with surprisingly little complaint, Reb Hirschl carried the huge, heavy thing all the way back.

  At first Anna thought the return homeward simply arduous, and much time was lost lying still on the forest floor while supply vans and troop transports rumbled by on nearby roads. Of course they never traveled on the roads themselves, but aiming to escape the front as rapidly as possible, they couldn’t avoid them as thoroughly as they would’ve liked, either—their traffic was a more reliable indicator of direction relative to the front than any compass or more objective instrument could possibly have been.

  It felt oddly relieving, going back toward Poland, as if the entire way were sloped slightly downhill, and they managed to reach the Bug with little incident. Once, caught nearly by surprise, Anna and the Swallow Man had fallen to the ground and held their breath, playing dead for the benefit of a squad of German scouts, who tsked their tongues and lamented the early demise of such a beautiful, obviously Aryan little girl, while Reb Hirschl cowered quietly in a treetop above them, hugging the food tightly to his chest.

  When they were long gone, and Anna and the Swallow Man had risen from the fallen leaves on the forest floor, she asked him what the word “Aryan” meant, and the Swallow Man told her that it was Wolfish for “Wolfish.” At first Anna felt affronted to have been described in such a manner, but the Swallow Man raised his eyebrows and told her that they were right. She looked very much like a Wolf cub when she slept. This was perhaps the most frightening thing Anna had heard since the war began.

  What started arduously ended horrifically.

  In their own quiet ways, each of the three of them had begun to feel its presence, begun to understand more and more with every passing footfall, but soon they knew for certain: Death had come to dwell in that part of the world.

  She could not now recall precisely when it had happened, whether it had been in the year and a half before they acquired Reb Hirschl, or if perhaps he had been by her side when she’d seen it, but on some wintery day, in some wintery clearing, Anna remembered coming upon a huge dump of old and broken things. They seemed to have been removed from an office building, or perhaps a government ministry, and they had been carefully sorted into piles: here a high stack of chairs with broken legs or arms, there a rank of file cabinets to which the keys had been lost, or the drawers of which had irreparably jammed. In the clearing’s center there had been a high mound of broken typewriters.

  There had been a light dusting of snow on the ground, but none had accumulated on the discarded things, and boot prints, still wet, had recently sunk into the ground. There was no knowing if or when people might return, and there was no great benefit to be found in filing cabinets anyhow. They hadn’t stayed long, but the image of the dump had stuck strongly in Anna’s mind.

  It was all she could think of when they first came upon one of the mass graves. Perhaps it was the angle of the light, or perhaps that the snow was similarly powdery and sparse, but more than likely what made her think of the discarded office equipment was the peculiar blend of organization and chaos that reigned there.

  The edges of the pit were straight, the hole in the ground meticulously squared despite the frozen-earth, but the bodies had flopped in at attitudes that seemed inhuman—feet draped backward toward the backs of heads, arms bent at unnatural angles, faces buried in the bodies of strangers.

  This was more death than Anna had ever seen in one place, and its presence here did not feel the same as the small
, lingering wake that she’d come to know in harvesting from fallen soldiers. Here the death did not seem to dissipate. Here it felt as if Death were at home.

  Anna was uncertain. This was, without doubt, a particular horror, but despite her uncertainty, Anna acted, and she did what she’d become accustomed to doing. She went to harvest amongst the dead.

  This is a rare and unforgettable thing: the texture of a footfall on the chest of a dead man resting on top of others twenty deep—the slight give and rebound beneath the pressure of your boot.

  The crows began jealously to cede their meal as Anna advanced to the middle of the grave, and by the time she reached it, nearly all of them had shifted to the trees above to stare down at her, as much with their beaks as with their eyes.

  It was not long before the Swallow Man spoke.

  “Anna,” he said. In all their life together, it was the first time he had called her by that secret name in front of anyone else. “No.”

  It was not a scolding or an angry no. It was as gentle as anything he’d ever said to her, and when Anna came off of the pile, he placed his long hand tenderly on the back of her head, and it was the closest thing to an embrace he’d ever given her. “I think we shall leave them what they have.”

  Anna couldn’t bring herself to tell him that each of the pockets she had encountered had already been emptied.

  “May we please,” said Reb Hirschl, standing still at the tree line where they had come into the clearing, “leave this place?”

  One of the things Anna loved about Reb Hirschl was the way his singing inflected his speaking voice. No matter whether loud and wry or soft and tender, there was a way of light and brightness in almost every word he spoke.

  Almost. Not all. Those six words—“May we please leave this place?”—sounded as if they had been spoken by a different man: an old man, and impossibly tired. They were as dark as closed eyes at midnight, those words, with not a spot of brightness in them.

  Reb Hirschl did not speak again for two days, and that evening he did not pray before he lay down to sleep.

  They walked back into Poland across the very same bridge from which they’d been fired at when first they crossed the Bug. It was, of course, a risk, and one that the Swallow Man would never have allowed before he met Reb Hirschl, but there was no one in sight, and it gave them all some small sense of pride to do it, as if their passing boot marks could conquer the bridge, sanctify it against all the destruction that surrounded it. Despite their having been within her borders for some time at that point, only when their feet landed on the other bank did they finally feel as if they were back in Poland.

  But Poland had changed while they were gone, and she was more like the lands of war and death across the river than they wanted to believe.

  They kept to the woods in those days. The trees seemed to make the Swallow Man more comfortable, and their trunks and boughs helped to conceal their presence when the three of them needed to disappear.

  There is less to say about this period in their wanderings than any other. This is because they took pains that nothing at all notable should happen. Before, Anna and the Swallow Man might have sought out conversation with an affable stranger if the opportunity had arisen, but now other people were avoided at any cost. Even when they discovered the manna of a soldier lying dead amongst the trees, they would pass by his provisions in silence if there was even the slightest evidence of people remaining nearby.

  Anywhere, behind the cunning disguise of any pair of mundane, commonplace eyes, Death himself might be found to lurk.

  They passed two winters without stopping, as Anna and the Swallow Man had before. Eating became difficult, and each of them lost weight. The Swallow Man, naturally thin to begin with, grew willowy and gaunt, and Reb Hirschl’s wide rib cage slowly bared itself of any covering, until the individual bones began to show through his skin when he washed.

  Anna would not have tolerated the advantage of an inequitable division of food, had she known. She never felt full or satisfied, of course—none of them did—but somehow her nutrition remained sufficient for her continued growth and development, and by the time they met the Peddler, Anna was beginning to resemble a young woman, albeit a thin one.

  Of course, outward changes do not occur without internal ones.

  The Swallow Man was a master of easy metamorphoses and Reb Hirschl of secret understandings, and yet between the two of them, they had worse than no knowledge of the intimate mysteries of femininity. The best they could do for Anna was to be where she expected them to be when she wanted them, and to be elsewhere when she did not.

  Things were happening to her body—things that made her self-conscious—and where, as a younger girl, she’d felt little shame in simply squatting to relieve herself, she began to require more privacy as time went by.

  It was high summer when the Peddler came toward her through the trees, and she had not encountered another living person that was not the Swallow Man or Reb Hirschl in so long that she was immediately frightened.

  Of course, in those days it was far from uncommon to encounter persons who were not living. They weren’t as numerous as the trees of the forest, but over time they came in Anna’s mind to be just as natural an outgrowth of it, and by now, whether or not she knew the words, she had memorized the rise and fall and the rhythm of each sentence in Reb Hirschl’s El Malei Rachamim prayer. These days he would not continue on his way until each fallen man or woman or child had received the benefit of its recitation.

  Anna was squatting in the brush when the Peddler came walking through the trees, and she hurried to stand and cover herself before he noticed, but his eyes found her while she was still completing the process.

  This did not help to ease her anxiety.

  Another one of the Swallow Man’s rules: Transitions are periods of weakness. If the choice was between being seen doing something and being seen attempting not to be seen doing it, the former was always the stronger choice. This was true irrespective of what, particularly, it was that you shouldn’t have been doing.

  The Peddler’s eyes twinkled in a very unsettling way when he saw Anna, though she couldn’t say if they unsettled her for their similarity to or for their difference from the Swallow Man’s.

  “Ah. Hello there, madam,” he said in rough, thick Polish.

  Oh, he frightened her.

  On his back was a soldier’s pack very much like the one Reb Hirschl carried, only to this one myriad little bags and boxes and parcels had been strapped or tied, with rope or twine or leather. Despite the warmth, he was wearing a good, heavy overcoat, which hung open to reveal, at first count, three pistols of varying design, and these amongst other weapons. There was a long blade, like a cross between a hunting knife and a short sword, that Anna recognized as a German bayonet tucked into the leather bandolier around his waist, but his pack was of Soviet issue, and his coat seemed to be of civilian orientation. He himself was small, his pack nearly as large as he, and despite his belly and nascent double chin, his frame seemed as if it ought to have belonged to a skinny man.

  Nothing about this fellow made sense.

  “Hello,” Anna replied, doing her best not to sound frightened. She tried to speak as loudly as she could in order that the Swallow Man or Reb Hirschl might hear and come to investigate, but as much as she wanted to lift her voice, it came out tremulous and soft.

  The Peddler began to step slowly closer in to her. “You’re not out here alone, are you?” He was smiling, but it did nothing to settle Anna’s nerves. “It’s a long way to the next town, and the woods can be dangerous.”

  “No,” said Anna affably. “No, my friends are just over that rise.”

  The Peddler stopped just outside of arm’s reach and began to lower his pack. “Is that so.” It wasn’t a question.

  Anna smiled as brightly as she could. “Yes, of course. Reb Hirschl!” she called.

  She knew that the Swallow Man would almost certainly have been a more effective de
fender to her. But she didn’t call for him. She called for Reb Hirschl. “Hirschl” was, after all, the only name they had amongst the three of them.

  It was, nonetheless, the Swallow Man who came over the ridge first.

  “Hirschl, hm?” said the Peddler, casting his eyes up and down the Swallow Man. “I’m not sure I would’ve pegged you for a Jew. I was just preparing to show your friend here my wares. I have plenty of things to trade, if you’re interested.”

  Before the Swallow Man could say anything, Reb Hirschl came charging over the ridge.

  “Ah!” said the Peddler. “Two Jews! Young lady has a taste for the forbidden, hm? Unless she’s a Jewess, too?”

  Anna didn’t know how to answer this question. In fact, it was one that she had never considered. Reb Hirschl called her yidele, “little Jew,” but she had only ever thought of it as an endearment, and no one in her life had ever told her that she belonged—or didn’t—to any particular tribe or nation, one way or another.

  “No,” said the Swallow Man. “No, unfortunately, she is Polish.”

  The Peddler smiled. “I don’t know why you say ‘unfortunately.’ These days it’s hardly good fortune to be running around Jewish. But you probably know that yourself, Mr. Hirschl, hiding in the forest like this.

  “Perhaps I have something in my pack that can help you survive your misfortune, hm? Matches, ammunition, food…I accept zlotys, reichsmarks, even rubles if you have them, but I do my primary business in trade. I may even have some chocolate, if there’s something special you can do for me. Surely, we can reach some mutually beneficial arrangement.”

  It was, at base, an offer of assistance, but from his lips it did not sound friendly.

  Reb Hirschl was about to speak, but the Swallow Man held up his hand to stop him.

  “You’ve been in the cities?” he said.

  The Peddler sighed. “If you’re looking for a specific friend or relative, I’m afraid it’s unlikely I’ll be able to help you, but if you’d like to send a letter or a message, I’ll see what I can do about helping it along. For a price.”