Anna and the Swallow Man Read online

  She tried to imagine what Reb Hirschl would have asked for, but no illumination visited her mind. It had never been difficult to discern what had delighted this poor, sweet man in life—he had not guarded his pleasure in any way—but what he had wanted was more obscure. He could never have been seriously praised as an undemanding man; his very existence had taken significant stores of energy to witness. But it was a surprise for Anna to realize that she could not recall, in a single instance, one request that he had made for his own benefit.

  When Anna asked herself what he would have done for himself, though, all her uncertainty evaporated.

  If she had paid attention, she might’ve remembered the words of the prayer, but Anna had heard Reb Hirschl recite it so often that, despite her lack of effort, the cadence and music of each line, its rise and fall and rhythm, were simple enough for her to reproduce. For words she simply babbled. Gibberish.

  The Swallow Man had heard the prayer, too, just as often as she, and as soon as he realized what Anna was doing, in glorious, foolish deference to feebleness, and to indulgence, and to irrationality, he joined in with her.

  Instead of nonsense words, though, he reproduced the melody of Reb Hirschl’s prayer for the dead in the language of the birds.

  When the prayer had finished, Anna cast her eyes upward, and there was a tiny moment in which she thought Reb Hirschl’s end upon the tree had somehow enchanted it. Despite the high-summer season, the canopy above them was lit up with colors—yellow and white and orange and green and iridescent blue and red and brown and even black—and then one of them turned its head, and this motion fractured the magic into a hundred little pieces of sky.

  The birds were haphazardly arrayed in the branches of the tree, crowded in wherever they could fit, but there was a surpassing decorum to their still gaze that very much made Anna want to begin crying again.

  The Swallow Man had never been one in the particular habit of acknowledging surprise, but then he gave a little intake of breath and said, “I—I had not thought that so many would come.”

  He put his lips together and called as he had done all those many, many lifetimes ago in Kraków, and sure enough, a bright-blue-and-orange swallow flitted down to his finger. Gingerly the Swallow Man lifted the lapel of Reb Hirschl’s jacket and nestled the bird inside the breast pocket, close to his stilled chest.

  “He’ll stay there,” said the Swallow Man, as if to Anna. “He’ll protect Reb Hirschl—keep the crows off. He’ll be all right.” And then again, “He’ll be all right.”

  Anna’s mind conjured, suddenly, an image of a far-off time when there would be nothing left of Reb Hirschl but a bearded skeleton, a time when the swallow would build himself a nest inside the broad ribs of the Jew’s chest.

  They left that place and walked the better part of an hour before Anna turned them around. When they returned to the body, she swiftly found what she was looking for. To leave Reb Hirschl’s last reed, cracked though it may have been, to eternity with a corpse—even his—would’ve been a betrayal of what Reb Hirschl had lived for. She took it from his loose, sagging sock and tucked it into her own.

  Anna did her best to ignore the fact that every single bird—even the sentinel swallow that had been left in his jacket pocket—had departed.

  Walking is a constant. No matter what the pace or the gait, first one foot falls and then the other. To certain people this is a kind of comfort, but it is an undeniable fact that the drumbeat of two pairs of feet falling on the face of the earth makes up an impoverished repertoire of rhythms in comparison with the drumbeat of three.

  The Swallow Man had been stoic as long as Anna had known him, but there had always been a liveliness behind his eyes, a sort of gleam that had shepherded her through even the quietest periods of their partnership. Now whenever she had the opportunity to look into those eyes, she found them cold and tired and empty of resolve, like two vacant lots whose buildings have long since been forgotten.

  In quiet and in isolation Anna and the Swallow Man saw the autumn come.

  The Swallow Man finished the bottle of vodka that he’d taken from the Peddler, and left it empty in the woods.

  The autumn began to pass.

  They did not talk quite so much anymore, and when they did, their speech was mostly utilitarian in its purpose. There were no more stories, no more tales or lessons or explanations of things in the terms of the road.

  Anna had not understood that the Swallow Man had cared so much for Reb Hirschl. Perhaps neither had he.

  The number of tablets left in the Swallow Man’s brown bottle began to dwindle lower and lower, and now whenever he would take one of his thrice-daily pills, Anna became accustomed to hearing the Swallow Man recite the short formula that Reb Hirschl had taught her as an alternative to his prayer for the dead.

  Baruch atah, Adonai, mechaye hameytim—“Blessed are you, my Lord, who puts life in the dead.”

  It is perhaps no surprise that this formula was pronounced, three times a day, with a bitter edge.

  As winter approached, the number of pills left in the Swallow Man’s reserves fell so low that the tablets rattled in the bottle with every step he took. Anna was sure that any day now they would make one of their rare stops in a city. She wondered whether she would be allowed to cross in from the wild this time, or if, like the last time, she would be left out in the trees.

  But neither of these things occurred. The pills simply ran out, and almost immediately the Swallow Man became something terrifying.

  —

  The Swallow Man was not an easy person to be around if you were not assured of his friendship. There was a sort of simmering threat that seemed to live behind his eyes, and if he was not a man whom you knew how to trust, then the quiet confidence, the fierce poise, the collection, the sense of waiting and anticipation in his resting muscles—whatever it was that made him the Swallow Man and not simply a tall stranger, that could be a terror.

  That thing was the very first part of him to go. He became nervous, and the quiet assurance around which his entire being seemed to have been constructed turned quickly into a writhing column of anxiety. Suddenly Anna was traveling with a stranger.

  Winter had come. The previous two, they had not settled in the way they had done before, but now they were without Reb Hirschl again, and Anna couldn’t imagine passing another winter on the move without her old Swallow Man to help. And he was hardly the same person. He began retracing routes, sometimes pacing up and down the center of a valley over and over, back and forth again, for an entire day.

  He stopped sharpening his knife.

  He sweat profusely despite the extreme cold.

  His hands began to shake.

  There had always been an unspoken trust between the two of them, Anna and the Swallow Man, and she had rarely felt compelled to speak to him directly of practical issues, but now he seemed to be making decisions almost completely at random, and when she spoke up to ask about their plans, he grew irritable and said scathing, hurtful things to her in his smooth, placid voice. Later he would demonstrate no memory of this having ever occurred.

  Eventually she had to stop asking.

  When he walked (which was now every moment that he was awake, even pacing in circles around Anna as she fell asleep), he rubbed his hands together or twisted the long fingers of one hand around the knuckles of the other.

  If she needed to, Anna could pretend to herself that he was not losing weight, not growing even thinner, that his skeleton wasn’t beginning to show through his papery, sallow skin, even despite his increased appetite. If she needed to, Anna could simply stop herself from thinking about it. But when his hair began to break off, she knew that things were not going to go back to normal on their own.

  Soon he began to babble, saying all sorts of odd, disconnected things, things that she couldn’t grasp even when she understood which language he was speaking. It took far too long for Anna to finally realize that it was not a fault of hers that she could
n’t understand him, that the things he was saying were, at best, small fragments of sense scattered so randomly and so thick as to drown out all semblance of their meaning, and eventually, exhausted by the futility of it, she gave up trying to talk to him at all.

  In those days he almost always walked so quickly that she was unable to keep up, and the day she stopped trying to communicate with him, Anna asked her question to his back, off in the middle distance, more loudly than he would ever have thought prudent had he been himself.

  The question itself was not particularly notable—some invented curiosity, some meaningless inquiry after their course—and bare days later she would not be able to remember what she had asked.

  But this was not the important thing. The important thing was the Swallow Man’s response.

  He didn’t break stride, didn’t pause or turn his head or even increase his speed. He just kept walking steadily. Walking away from her.

  Never before had the Swallow Man failed to come up with an answer for a question of Anna’s, no matter how unsatisfying it might’ve been to her.

  That particular moment—its sensation of the unavoidable knowledge that the Swallow Man was beyond her reach—was the loneliest and most isolated time Anna had ever known in a short life that had been long on solitude.

  Something was clearly happening—clearly had happened—and it was not difficult to see that the something was dangerous. Of course it hurt Anna not to be the Swallow Man’s immediate intimate anymore, but aside from all that, and aside, even, from the terrifying, gigantic question of his health, things clearly could not continue the way they were going if she intended for either of them to survive for very long.

  The dwór was only supposed to be a stopgap at first. It was an entirely unsuitable situation—the nearby village was too small and too close, and furthermore, everyone there was acquainted. It had been nearly impossible for Anna to walk through the streets without feeling as if those she passed knew she shouldn’t be there. Under any other circumstances at all, she would have passed by the dwór at some distance, but at the time she needed to feel as if she were in control of what was happening, and even if it was false, a closed arena for a few hours would at least give her the illusion of some control. If she had feelings of guilt at the thought of caging her Swallow Man, well, they were easily mitigated by his increasingly feral, unpredictable ways.

  Besides—it was just so beautiful.

  A dwór is a Polish manor, a seat of the nobility built on a country estate, and this one was as old and as grand and as huge as any. The ceilings were carven, figured wood, and the windows were green glass, and its halls and rooms spread out, rambling, it seemed to Anna, unendingly in every direction, back and out from the great portico at the house’s center.

  She thrilled the moment she saw that porch, with its tall, strong columns. They immediately reminded her of the palace that stood behind King Solomon in her book of illustrated children’s tales back in Kraków, and Anna felt somehow that if she could make that dwór the place where she belonged, if she could find a way to stand in front of it the way that Solomon stood in front of his palace, it would make her safe and prosperous and great—as if simply belonging there might cure the Swallow Man.

  Perhaps it was not belonging there specifically that Anna so deeply, so almost spiritually wanted, but simply to belong somewhere.

  It was the largest single house she had ever seen. City girl that she was, Anna thought at first that it must be some big, old country apartment building, but the moment they were inside, the Swallow Man identified it.

  “Ah,” he said in Russian to no one in particular, “a place to make people think they’re better than others,” and he spit on the floor.

  It was clear that the dwór had been used by the Germans at some point as a kind of regional command center or bureaucratic field office, but they mustn’t have been there long, because the house seemed frozen in transition.

  In one bedroom lush curtains framed the windows, fine upholstery adorned the furnishings, and the shade of the linens on the meticulously made grand old canopy bed had been carefully selected to cohere with the color palette outlined in the rich wallpapering. Everything, beneath the layer of dust, was arranged just so, to a degree that Anna had never before seen.

  Directly across the hall, though, a room that had been designed with precisely the same level of painstaking care was rendered a riot: mismatched furniture from every corner of the house—wingback armchairs, plain wooden three-legged stools, a candy-striped satin settee, a gardener’s bench, even a heavy gray velveteen sofa—all crowded around a long, wide dining table that had been shoehorned into the room, forcing the bed back awkwardly against the wall. There was a regional map tacked crooked against the fine wallpaper. Cigarette butts littered the floor, and papers, mugs, and empty ration tins were everywhere.

  It was as if two places were attempting to occupy the same house at one time: the first an ornate seat of the gentry, and the other an industrial military command.

  It was difficult to know who to be in that house.

  At the beginning Anna worried that perhaps they might round a bend in some corridor and encounter a pack of German soldiers. Then, once it had become clear that they had all gone, she worried that they might return at any moment. Soon enough, though, she passed through a doorway and saw the reason they had left: as huge as the house still was, a third of its expanse had been demolished by a bomb or a shell or some other sort of explosive, and it all lay where it had fallen in a huge pile of rubble.

  Perhaps it was truly three places trying to occupy the house, then: the elegant country manor, the military command post, and the battered, chaotic shrine of destruction.

  Anna chose simply to ignore the cold, blue, frozen hand at the end of the uniformed arm that rose up from the rubble. Better simply to stay away from the destroyed third of the house. Best not to look it in the eye.

  —

  At first Anna harbored the hope that they might happen upon some richly stocked neglected pantry, but whatever food there had been in the dwór had long since been eaten or packed away by retreating soldiers, or else by other scavengers like them. Anna’s belly complained endlessly of hunger. The Swallow Man’s mind was beyond practical considerations now, and she knew that if she didn’t find them something to eat, no one would. And soon there would be nothing left of either of them to be hungry.

  Anna never thought of the Swallow Man starving. It seemed impossible in her mind for him to die in the same ordinary way that other men did, but it was a very real fear to her that he might continue to get skinnier and skinnier, until one day his clothing would simply fall empty on the ground and he would be gone.

  The problem was that she couldn’t just instruct him to stay in one place. No matter what Anna did, the Swallow Man would wander and pace and roam, and it was only by her continual efforts that he remained within the house itself. She was terrified that if she left to go after food in the town, his wandering might lead him out, away from the dwór and away from her. Worse yet, even, to where people might find him, and who could say what the end of that might be?

  Finally, though, the answer presented itself.

  Two days now Anna had spent lying on her back, trying to convince herself that she was not as hungry as she was. Following the Swallow Man vaguely around the dwór was her only respite from this activity, and he had his own ineffable wandering inclinations, which she found more exhausting than distracting. He might stand in one place, examining some facet of the wood for a full hour, or for ages he might meticulously walk the grid formed by the tiling on the kitchen floor, back and forth and back and forth across the room. Even when he was simply haunting the hallways, she couldn’t be assured that he wouldn’t, without explanation, break and run off full speed down some corridor. After a while, as long as she had a close enough watch on him to know that he was still inside the house, she was content not to hover over him. Once every couple of hours, she would seek hi
m out, following the noises that all old wooden houses make when even the lightest feet press against their floorboards, until she found him talking to himself in the chapel, or running his fingers carefully over each individual sconce in the downstairs passage.

  One day, though, Anna woke from the sort of daytime sleep that can never quite prevail against the gnawing hunger in your belly, and she couldn’t find the sound of his feet anywhere. Her first panicked thought was that he must have wandered away from the house, but there were no footprints in the snow, and even he couldn’t walk as lightly as that. She scoured the dwór, but the only sign of him that she came upon was the pair of fine leather gloves that she had given him in Belarus, tossed into a brimming washbasin, the rolled-up bandage waterlogged at the end of the right pinkie.

  In the house’s eastern wing, on an upper floor, there was a door of dark wood that had managed to remain shut and locked despite all the tumult the dwór had gone through. Time and time again, Anna had seen the Swallow Man walk up to it, lay his hand lightly on its impassive knob, and, finding it immobile, pass on to other quarters of the house. It was in front of this locked door that she found him that day, sitting on his knees, his head pulled down low so that he might face the lock at eye level. Just when she came down the corridor, he managed to trip the locking mechanism with the tip of his pocketknife, and the bolt slid back with a thunk.

  The Swallow Man crowed with glee.

  It was a library—a gentleman’s study appointed in dark wood and lined with hundreds of calfskin-bound books—and from the moment the Swallow Man stepped inside, he never showed any sort of inclination to leave.

  They had been sleeping in the kitchen at the very bottom of the house—the large stove had a great supply of chopped firewood stacked by its side, and the warmth of the fire had always been enough to coax the Swallow Man down. But that night he never came, and so it simply became Anna’s duty to carry the wood up the long staircase from the kitchen to the small fireplace in the library at the top of the house.