Anna and the Swallow Man Page 16

  The truth is that it was more comfortable sleeping there. Though the fireplace was smaller, the room was as well, and where, in the kitchen, she might’ve been woken suddenly in the night by a draft of air, in the library she was never too cold to sleep. The fireplace was set deep in its own little fortified nook, and the single window was covered with a heavy brown curtain, which left the study dim no matter the time of day or night.

  Though he remained in motion, the Swallow Man never once made any move to leave his new nest throughout that first day, and Anna told herself that if he passed a second one within the study of his own volition, it would be safe to leave him there on the third and go out seeking food.

  The problem was that by the end of the first day, she would gladly have gone another week without eating in order to avoid having to spend even a moment longer in the study with him. At least when he had had space to roam, the Swallow Man’s psychoses had remained, for the most part, inside of himself. She had been able to deal with what little overflowed the bounds of his mind, blocking out most of what he muttered as long as she wasn’t required to be too close to him, but now that he had found his nest, the Swallow Man began slowly to transfigure it into a diorama of his bleeding mind, and Anna could bear neither to watch him do it nor to avoid its observation.

  It was a slow process. The very first thing he did was to carefully unpack his bag. Things of importance, such as his fine clothes and his identity documents, he threw unceremoniously into the corner. Things like the battered tin drinking cup, his glasses case, his whetstone: these took places of special prominence, carefully laid out like offerings on an altar, on the writing table that he had drawn up in front of the door.

  The large black umbrella he opened and secured by its tip to the small chandelier that hung from the ceiling, as if, at any time, the ceiling might begin to drop rain upon him.

  And then he started in on the books.

  All of them.

  In a furious tempest of activity, he threw them from their places on the shelves down into chaotic piles on the ground, and then each successive volume was lifted, and both sides of each page were swiftly but intensively examined. This procedure was occasionally performed with the book upside down. Most of the volumes were abandoned unharmed, but some—those that met with his immediate disdain—were violently hurled into the fireplace.

  Those leaves, though, that particularly pleased him (and these seemed to have nothing notable in common) were carefully cut from their bindings, and soon a pattern of pages grew, laid out in concentric, semicircular ranks, like rays out of the sun, emanating from the fireplace.

  At entirely unpredictable intervals the Swallow Man would interrupt this work with a start, consult the immobile face of his broken pocket watch, and dash to his bag.

  At first Anna could not see what he was doing, but this behavior repeated itself quite frequently, and despite her fright, she could not help angling for a better view.

  It was a tiny little thing that she had never seen before—a little shoe, too small for anyone but an infant, covered in minuscule, bright beads of pink and white and gold, which, one at a time, the Swallow Man pulled off and swallowed with a full cup of water.

  Anna did not have to hear what he was whispering to know the words.

  Baruch atah, Adonai, mechaye hameytim.

  Perhaps the most disturbing part of his nesting ritual was the moment in which, with great care and with awful ceremony, he used his whetstone to shatter his hand mirror. This he had mounted on the back of the library door, and he often stared into it for long periods of still, uninterrupted time, which would terminate unexpectedly in a great flurry of motion, and he would throw himself back into the books.

  Once a mirror is shattered, there is no knitting it back together again.

  Now whatever causeway of communication there had been between the two of them was not just vacant—it was obstructed, dammed, blockaded at his end, and if ever Anna spoke to him during all this work, she was met with the hysterical reprimand “Not now, Greta!”

  Anna hadn’t the faintest idea who Greta was.

  All of this was unsettling, to be sure, even very frightening, but what finally put Anna over the edge was the singing.

  There had been a time when she had fullheartedly embraced the idea that she and the Swallow Man were two partnered conservationists, that they were following the last example of a rare and beautiful bird around a battleground upon which an endless pack of Wolves and a Great Bear the size of a continent were pitched in endless war. The Swallow Man was a wonderfully compelling storyteller, and she was very thirsty for stories, but something in the Peddler’s slaughter or in the death of Reb Hirschl had shown her the truth hidden beneath the story hidden beneath the truth of the world.

  Anna could no longer say with honesty that she felt sure that a soldier from Germany was not simply a soldier from Germany.

  This is not to say that in any way she had ceased to think of the Germans as Wolves or the Soviets as a Great Bear—just, perhaps, that she learned late the way in which the rest of the world understands stories, not as absolute, irrevocably factual truths that simply don’t exist, but as flaccid allegories or metaphors.

  Either way, by the time they’d taken up their place in the dwór, Anna no longer believed these things the way that she had when first she heard them.

  Until the Swallow Man began to sing.

  It was not a certainty. In fact, perhaps that is how her fear is best understood: it was a grave uncertainty.

  This man whom she loved, who was certainly responsible for her current existence in the world, who had quietly and placidly and without complaint or second thought provided for her under the most dire and extreme circumstances, this man:

  He was losing his hair.

  He was wasting away.

  His mind, it seemed, was becoming less and less human with each passing minute.

  And now, every so often, he would cock his head to the side, there in his nest of madness, and sing to himself, little giggling calls and chirrups and twittering songs in the language of birds.

  How was she to know? How could she be confident that he himself was not slowly becoming a bird? Or, rather, that he was not slowly returning to his natural form? That he would not one morning spread his wings and fly away into the sky?

  And then how could she track him? Despite his promise, he’d never taught her the signs.

  He would be gone.

  Anna did not want to think it. Anna wanted to be out of his room.

  The night after the first full day in the study, Anna awoke to the sound of shattering glass, and, heart in her mouth, she sat sharply up, but it was not the sound of a great bird escaping through a closed window—it was the sound of a deranged man shattering a small jar that, up until that evening, had held his most valuable possessions: cigarettes and matches.

  She watched him—crouched down, maniacal eyes close to his work—in the dim flicker of the dying fire for perhaps ten minutes. He was playing with fire, cutting apart his box of matches bit by bit, burning the striker panel with one of the matchsticks, scraping the residue away with a jagged piece of the thick glass jar. Anna did not know whether to be saddened or frightened at this mad experimentation, and finally she passed into sleep with the exhaustion of holding such tremendous questions tight inside of her.

  Early in the morning on the second day, Anna left to wander the dwór on her own. There was a moment in which she was afraid that the Swallow Man might follow her out, but he didn’t, and to her great shame, for a moment she thought of just walking out of the old house and leaving him there, going off into the forests and plains and wetlands to fend for herself alone.

  But she did not.

  That evening Anna returned to the study, where the Swallow Man sat, draped in his overcoat, chittering to himself, a book raised up on his knees. Nothing in his demeanor indicated that he had noticed her arrival, or even her earlier departure. In the morning, she thought, she
would leave again and go to find food in the town.

  But she did not.

  Again Anna was woken in the night, but this time the Swallow Man was as well, and, like an animal, he leapt to the defense.

  There were voices in the corridors, and heavy footfalls.

  The sound was obscure. Who was to say how many they might be? Last night she had been unsure whether to be saddened or frightened when she had awoken. Now there was only one feeling in her: pure, unmitigated terror.

  It surprised Anna to realize that she was afraid not of German soldiers, or of incursive Soviets, or even of local Poles; instead, she found that she was afraid of the Peddler, utterly convinced that, open throat or no, he would follow wherever they went. He would find them.

  The Swallow Man was on his feet, light and swift, before there was even time for speech. This was the first time Anna had seen the revolver, which he took from the bottom of his bag and tucked into the back of his pants, beneath the hem of his loose, baggy shirt. She did not find its presence reassuring.

  In a flash the Swallow Man was out of the study, and Anna hurried to follow, but before she could even reach the door, he turned back to retrieve the great, long coat, which he draped about his narrow frame like a protective mantle of thick-woven dark. His hands fell easily into its deep pockets, and again he darted, light and silent, out into the corridor.

  The clomping boots they had heard belonged, luckily enough, only to a pair of local boys. Neither could’ve been even a handful of years older than Anna herself, but they thought themselves terribly important, terribly adult, in undertaking their quest up to the dwór on the hill, and the rough, sharp grain alcohol that had been purloined from beneath an older brother’s pillow was, of course, an integral part of this maturity.

  Anna heard them talking before she saw them, and the swish of the liquor in the small bottle they passed between them only made her miss Reb Hirschl the more.

  “No, idiot, I saw smoke. I promise.”

  “Are you sure it came from here? There’s smoke everywhere nowadays.”

  “Yes, stupid! It was coming out of one of the chimneys. If someone’s in here taking things, my father will want to know. He says if anyone deserves this estate, it’s us. Our family has been working this land since before there was even a dwór here.”

  “Fine. But I’m cold. When I’m right and this place is as empty as always, can we just go home?”

  Their little boots and little voices drew closer. At any moment, it seemed, they would round the corridor’s corner and discover Anna and the mad Swallow Man, and there would be nothing the two of them could do to stop the boys from raising the alarm. But just as the boys passed into view, the Swallow Man tucked her into the small inlet of a doorway behind him and leaned back, half hidden in the corridor’s own shadow, against the wall.

  The sharp flicker of the boys’ overbright lantern served two purposes: it kept their young, round faces very well illuminated, and it kept them blind to the lurking contents of the dark. Without intending to, Anna’s mind replayed the Swallow Man’s old lesson:

  Carrying light in darkness is an invitation to be snuffed out. Learn to keep your sight in the dark.

  “You ought to be more careful,” said the Swallow Man softly, aiming his eyes at a point in space just ahead of the boys, “about claiming things that are not your own.”

  The bigger boy swore and nearly dropped the small bottle in his fright, but the smaller boy did what small boys always learn to do in times of conflict and war: he lifted his father’s pistol and pointed it at the Swallow Man.

  The Swallow Man did not flinch. He did not move even the smallest muscle, despite the answering weapon that sat silently pushing its handle into his back. It was as if he were completely unaware that he was under threat at all, or as if he simply didn’t care.

  It was this second possibility that more concerned Anna.

  “It is,” said the smaller boy. “It is mine, this house. My family deserves to have it. And who are you, anyway? This place isn’t yours. I’ve never seen you before, and I know all the members of the family that used to live here.”

  “No,” said the Swallow Man, rubbing his palms together smoothly, over and over. “No, I’ve never lived here before. All places like this belong to me. Empty, half-eaten noble homes, rivers in the moonlight, forests of silence—these places belong to me in a way that they can never belong to the people who only live in them. These places are mine.”

  Anna believed him. She was confident that she knew as well as anyone else alive who and what the Swallow Man was—she had been welcomed to live inside his curtain—but still, she believed him when he said these impossible things. Because he was speaking the truth. And it took her heart away.

  The larger boy was very clearly shaken. No human sort of thing ought to be able to make the claims that the Swallow Man was making.

  “Who?” he said. “Who are you?”

  The Swallow Man turned his head away from the pistol and locked his eyes onto the pair blinking out of the chubby boy’s face. “You don’t know?” he said, and he smiled in a distinctly unfriendly fashion.

  The bigger boy, who carried the bottle in one hand and their lantern in the other, took a slow step backward. “Sergiusz,” he said. “Sergiusz, it’s Boruta.”

  Anna could not recall anyone at all having first taught her about Boruta—he was of the class of bogeymen that seem to creep, unbidden, into the minds of children. Like all the young of Poland, she knew him very well, and though she was quick to reassure herself that it was not true, that the Swallow Man and Boruta were not the same thing, it seemed an apt fear—perhaps more apt than the boy knew.

  Boruta is a demon well known in Polish wisdom and lore, a lurker in marshes and forests, a trickster, tall and thin and dark-eyed, most famous for winning the castle seat of a fourteenth-century king by magicking his carriage up out of the mud. Like most devils, demigods, and demons, Boruta has often been encountered in forms other than his own—sometimes as an old owl or a horned fish, but most often as a huge, black, vast-winged bird.

  It was not true. Anna’s Swallow Man was clever, and he used stories to clothe and protect himself like armor. This was only one of those stories.

  It was not true.

  Except in the sense that all of the stories that the Swallow Man told were true, which was a very real sense. Held still behind his back, Anna fought hard against the urge to physically shake the idea of Boruta the Swallow Man from her head.

  Sergiusz, whose trembling arm was beginning to tire of holding the pistol out, laughed, just a bit too loudly and just a bit too insistently for the darkness of the hallway. “Of course that’s not Boruta. Boruta’s only a story.”

  The Swallow Man said nothing.

  “And besides,” he said. “Boruta is from Łęczyca, and Łęczyca is hundreds of miles away. Why would he be here?”

  The Swallow Man frowned and shrugged, busying himself with the inspection of his fingernails. “Oh, war moves everyone around. You boys haven’t known the aftermath of a war yet. You’ll see. I’ve known more wars, beginning and end, than you have little teeth in your little mouths.”

  The big boy nervously probed at his teeth with the tip of his tongue.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Sergiusz. “You’re just some old hobo Gypsy or something. I’ll tell my father about you, and you’ll never make it to the end of this war.”

  The Swallow Man had been leaning against the wall, and he stood now, drawing himself up to his full, absurd, spindly height. He did not sound angry when he spoke, and that was, perhaps, the most frightening thing.

  “It is unwise,” said the Swallow Man, “to speak with such certainty of things that you do not understand.”

  In standing, he had tucked his hands into the deep pockets of his overcoat, and now he withdrew them with grave deliberateness and began, as before, slowly, smoothly rubbing them together.

  “You will find, Sergiusz, that in such circ
umstances you are not often correct.”

  The big boy gasped and dropped the lantern, which blinked out quickly. In the sudden darkness it was much easier to see what was happening.

  Anna was standing behind the Swallow Man, so the first thing she saw was a faint, pale, flickering glow, dimly illuminating the pallid faces of the boys.

  Where he was rubbing his hands together, the Swallow Man’s skin had begun to smoke, and then to glow with quiet green fire.

  Young boys are impulsive, foolish things. Even when they are fleeing in terror, even when they are frightened and unsure, they fire their fathers’ pistols, even if blindly—and even when they are fleeing the great demon Boruta.

  —

  Anna wept as she dragged the Swallow Man back to his study, and she was terrified, and she was panicked. For all she knew, she was dragging a demon to safety, but even that was not what so terrified her—for all she knew, she was dragging a demon to safety, and what most frightened her was that she didn’t care.

  When she had begun to move him, the Swallow Man had been laughing, and by the time she had him back in the library, he was chittering like a bird. She had no idea when the transition between the two had been made.

  Anna anticipated a terrible battle in getting him up, getting him out, but even in his madness, the Swallow Man knew as well as she that those boys would not soon forget what had happened to them in the great dwór on the hill, and that whether or not they intended to come back themselves, the stories they told would quickly bring others poking about.

  Her main struggle was in finding a way for him to walk. He had been hit, struck by at least one bullet in his hip, and he couldn’t put any weight on his right leg. His inability did not, however, preclude him from trying, and as Anna dashed around the room collecting as many of the Swallow Man’s belongings as she could lay her hands on, over and over he laid his foot softly on the ground, and over and over he muffled a cry of pain.