Anna and the Swallow Man Read online

  But he did not come.

  Whenever she felt her surety fading, Anna tried the apartment doorknob. Over and over she tried it, each time becoming slower, thoroughly convinced that, in fact, her father had not locked her out, but that she had simply not turned the knob hard enough.

  As much as she wanted it to be true, though, the door never budged. In days of peace, sometimes such fancies can prove true. Never, though, in times of war.

  It felt like an eternity to Anna, sitting there, and in a sense it was. To a child, an empty hour is a lifetime. Anna sat there for at least two or three, and if it hadn’t been for old Mrs. Niemczyk across the hall, she might’ve sat there waiting for her father until the war stopped her.

  Mrs. Niemczyk frequently complained to Professor Łania (and others) that he and his girl spoke too loudly too late at night, but Anna’s father had been convinced that she simply didn’t like their bringing Gypsies and Armenians and Jews into the building. Mrs. Niemczyk spoke only Polish, and only very little of it at any one time. In all her life she had never spoken one word directly to Anna, though the old lady had frequently spoken of her to her father in her presence, usually to tell him how he was failing to bring his daughter up properly. Needless to say, she was never a particularly happy sight to Anna, and Anna was a girl who was rather well disposed to meeting people.

  Shortly after Anna began her wait in front of the apartment door, Mrs. Niemczyk left her apartment briefly to run an errand. Her eyes lingered on Anna as she passed down the hall, and upon her return they didn’t move from Anna once until she shut the door of her apartment behind her.

  Anna wasn’t sure what she thought Mrs. Niemczyk would do, but the old lady began cracking her door open every so often to check and see if the little girl was still sitting in the hall, and every time Anna saw her, what little of Mrs. Niemczyk’s face she could see behind the door looked somehow better and better pleased.

  If it hadn’t been for old Mrs. Niemczyk, Anna might very well have stayed to wait for her father.

  If it hadn’t been for old Mrs. Niemczyk, Anna might very well never have met the Swallow Man.

  —

  There were scores of apartments and rooms, even cafés and taverns, across Kraków where Anna would’ve been welcomed in any number of languages for a day or two by one of her father’s scattered friends, but still, she made her way back to Herr Doktor Fuchsmann’s shop. After all, this was the last place she had seen her father. This was where he thought her to be.

  It was getting later. Anna was hungry, and as the sun began its descent toward the horizon, she began wondering where she would sleep that night. It was a new feeling to her, that worry—up until the night before, the only place she’d ever slept in her life had been the little bed behind the locked door of her apartment, just down the hall from her father.

  Herr Doktor Fuchsmann was busy with a customer when Anna arrived in the street outside his shop. She could see him through the big plate-glass windows, talking to a man in a suit, and though he looked directly out at her, he did not seem to see her.

  It was cold there in the street.

  Though she was in many ways accustomed to comporting herself like an adult even at her age, Anna was, in those days, never short of the most childlike obedience. Herr Doktor Fuchsmann had told her he couldn’t have her in his shop; no matter how sure she was that the circumstances were different from what he had thought, no matter how desperate she became, she wouldn’t go in unless she was told that it was all right.

  This was what adults called “being a good girl.”

  Anna settled down on the street to wait for a father who would not come. The street that held Herr Doktor Fuchsmann’s shop was short—a curving, cobbled way, and narrow, that connected two major thoroughfares and continued beyond neither. There wasn’t a lot of traffic there, and aside from those customers who came to the pharmacy and the few other shops on the ground level, most of the people that came or went from the little street lived up above it and did not linger as they arrived or departed. Anna kept her eyes down, silently pleading with each passing person not to see her, or else to be her father. She passed the time by fidgeting and seeking out what loose threads her skirt could offer for pulling.

  It was the sound of shoes that finally caught her attention. The klak-klak rhythm must’ve gone up and down the street a hundred times that afternoon, circling around, back and forth, disappearing for a while and then returning again, before the sound of his wooden heel blocks against the stones of the street finally became familiar to her. When she raised her head in surprise, it was in the certainty that she knew those shoes. It wasn’t long after she did that the man above the shoes noticed her noticing him.

  The man was tall and exceedingly thin. His suit, brown wool and in three pieces, must’ve been made specifically for him. It was difficult to imagine any other man with such measurements, and his clothes fit him closer than a glove. He carried an old physician’s bag, the brown leather worn a bit lighter than the color of his dark suit. It had brass fittings, and on the side of the bag was the monogram SWG in a faded red that must’ve originally been the color of his dark necktie. A tall black umbrella rode between the two handles of the bag, stacked on its top, despite the clearness of the sky.

  The thin man stopped when he noticed Anna looking at him, and he looked back down at her from a terrible height through his round, gold-rimmed spectacles. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth, which he took between his long, spindly fingers and removed, breathing in to speak.

  At precisely that moment, the bell rang a young German soldier out of Herr Doktor Fuchsmann’s shop and into the street. The thin man turned his head sharply to the young soldier and addressed him in bright, crisp, supremely lettered German, asking him if this was the famous doctor’s establishment that everyone seemed to like so much. Anna found that she had been holding her breath.

  The tall man and the stranger spoke briefly, congenially, the soldier vouching for the quality and eagerness of the service within. After all, the physician was German, and you could hardly expect one of these Polish doctors to rival him.

  After an appropriate pause the thin man nodded his thanks to the soldier and turned his eyes toward the shop. He had an air of authority about him, and Anna began to wonder, as the soldier must’ve, if she ought to know who he was. The young soldier, well used to the customs of the implicit superior, interpreted the nod of curt thanks as the dismissal it was intended to be, but before he’d gotten very far off, the thin man called him back again.

  “I wonder, Soldat,” he said, “if you might light my cigarette.” The thin man’s long hands were clasped behind his back. There was no question at all that he might be troubled to light the thing himself.

  The young soldier dutifully complied. The thin man made no eye contact and offered no word of thanks, or even of acknowledgment.

  He took a long drag on his cigarette.

  The soldier disappeared out into Kraków.

  The thin man took another chestful of smoke before turning back to Anna.

  “So,” he said in his fine German, as much smoke as sound escaping his lips. “Who are you?”

  Anna had no idea how to answer this question. Her jaw worked, trying to find some word in any language to sculpt out of the air—she knew that there was a version of “Anna” that the Germans used for her, but it felt somehow wrong to say to this stern authority of a man that that word was who she was. She was, just as much, cold, and hungry, and frightened, and her mind labored to recall which particular diminutive it was in the first place.

  The thin man raised an eyebrow and cocked his head to the right. He frowned and switched to Polish. “For whom are you waiting?”

  Where his German had been bright and crisp, his Polish was just as round and swift. He was the first person Anna had heard since her father who had an equal command of more than one language.

  She wanted to answer him, wanted to talk, but she didn’t know what sh
e could tell him. It occurred to her to say that she was waiting for her father, but, in point of fact, she was not so sure of the truth of this anymore, and if one thing was clear about this tall stranger, it was that he was not someone to whom one offered a lie.

  The thin man nodded in answer to Anna’s silence and switched to Russian. “Where are your parents?”

  This question should’ve been easy to answer, except that Anna honestly couldn’t say because she didn’t know. She was about to tell him so, but by this point the tall man had grown used to her unresponsiveness and he cycled rapidly and spoke again: Yiddish.

  “Are you all right?”

  It was this question that made Anna cry. Of course, in their way, the others and their answerlessnesses were just as confounding, just as troubling. Perhaps it was the sudden softening of his tone—him, a man who was more than a little frightening to her then, towering up there above her, suddenly concerned. Things had been getting progressively less all right for weeks and months now, and she couldn’t remember anyone else ever having asked how she was. Even her father had been so busy laboring to provide an acceptable sort of all-rightness for her that he had neglected ever to ask if it had worked.

  Perhaps it was the Yiddish. That was Reb Shmulik’s language. Anna had not seen Reb Shmulik in many weeks, and though she was a child, she was not blind to what was happening to the Jews of the city. Part of her had been unsure that Yiddish still survived at all until the thin man had spoken it.

  The most likely explanation for Anna’s tears, though, was that this was the one question that, with certainty, she knew the answer to:

  She was not all right.

  The thin man seemed more puzzled than concerned by her tears. Again his brows bunched together, and he cocked his head to the side as he looked down at her. As much as anything, the thin man seemed curious.

  The man’s eyes were very sharp. They were deep-set in his head, and even if a girl was working very hard to hide her tears from the world, she would have quite a time of trying not to watch them. Like fishhooks, his eyes captured Anna’s and drew them in to him.

  The next thing he did changed Anna’s life forever.

  The thin man turned his sharp eyes up toward the eaves of the buildings that huddled around the short street. Anna’s captive gaze followed close behind. Spotting what he wanted, the thin man brought his lips close in together and spoke a chirruping, bright whistle of a phrase up in the direction of the sky.

  There was a sudden noise of wings, and a bird came plummeting down to the street like a falling bomb. It spread its wings to gather in the air and slow its descent, alighted on a small gray paving stone, hopped, blinked, and cocked its head to the side, looking up at the thin man.

  He passed his cigarette from his left hand to his right, and crouching down to street level, his peaked knees reaching nearly to the height of his ears, the tall man proffered his left forefinger, pointing right, parallel to the ground.

  For a moment the bird was still. The thin man spoke to it again, and as if called by name, it flitted up to perch on the branch of his finger.

  He turned slowly, carrying the bird over to Anna, looked her straight in her wide eyes, and raised his right forefinger to his lips in hush.

  It was unnecessary. Wary of frightening the beautiful, delicate little creature, Anna had not only already stopped her crying, but again found that she was holding her breath.

  Anna could see the creature incredibly clearly where he held it out to her, just inches from her face. Its head and wings were a bright, vibrant, iridescent blue, and its face and ruff were pale orange. Its tail was split in a wide fork, and it moved in quick bursts, otherwise holding itself in absolute stillness, looking up at her, as if the thin man had managed to produce a series of perfectly lifelike sculptures to perch atop his hand, each of which he seamlessly replaced with the next.

  Anna smiled in spite of herself and reached out her hand to touch the bird. For a moment she thought she might just lay her fingertips on its soft feathers, but in a shocking burst of motion, it flew off, up into the sky, rather than stay and be touched.

  The thin man’s mouth was locked in an impassive expression, but his sharp eyes flashed with a sort of fire of triumph, and with startling speed and fluency he unfolded himself back to his full height and began to make his way across the road toward Herr Doktor Fuchsmann’s shop. Anna was shocked that he could even hear her when she breathed her little question to herself out into the air.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “That,” said the thin man, not turning back, “was a swallow.”

  The bell on the pharmacy door jingled shut.

  It was clear to see, when the thin man pushed his way out of Herr Doktor Fuchsmann’s shop, that he had no intention of engaging in further conversation with Anna. His eyes, purpose-made tools for the capture of others like them, swept fluidly past her where she huddled against the wall, without even pausing, and before Anna could push herself to her feet, his gunshot footsteps had carried him halfway to the mouth of the small street.

  But Anna had been ready when he came out of the pharmacy.

  In a rapid riot of conflicting languages, she answered all his questions.

  In Yiddish she said, “I am better now,” and then in Russian, “I do not think my father will come back.” In German she said, “I am myself,” and then in Polish, “And now I am waiting for you.”

  The tall man was silent for a moment in the street. Any other man alive would’ve been dumbfounded, but he registered no particular impression at all, only watched Anna closely with dark, evaluative eyes.

  When she couldn’t wait any longer, Anna added, in French, because it was the closest thing she could think of, “And I don’t speak Bird.”

  This was the first of three times that Anna heard the Swallow Man laugh.

  “I don’t speak French,” he said.

  He stood a moment in silence then, watching Anna’s stillness, as if waiting to see some sign or signal of what was to come in the expansion and contraction of her small rib cage.

  Anna felt herself drowning in the empty stillness. It was the first time she had said it, the very first time she had even allowed herself to think it so clearly:

  She did not think her father would come back.

  It felt rough and wrong to have said it, like tearing jagged, rusted metal with her bare hands—as if her father had called out to her from across a crowded courtyard and she had heard him and turned away.

  Everything was still.

  Abruptly the thin man made some sort of decision, and when Anna saw him begin to stride across the way toward her, she was surprised to find herself suddenly frightened.

  There was no question that the tall stranger was not a reassuring presence. There was a menace to him, a quiet intensity that was in no way akin to the sort of quality that people cultivate in order to attract the affections of children. All the same, though, there was something in him—perhaps the part that had spoken so easily to the swallow—that fascinated her. He was strange, to be sure, this man, but his was a pungent, familiar sort of strangeness. Perhaps Anna and her father had not had a language of their own—or perhaps their language had been every language. Anna felt irresistibly that in this tall stranger she had found another of their rare tribe—a man of many tongues.

  By the time the thin man had, in a few long strides, covered the distance across the road to her, Anna was ready, despite all her fear, to hear that this stranger had been sent to collect her. She was ready to be told that if only she would trust and follow close behind him, she would be taken back to where her father was, that this man had been sent to be her guardian and caretaker until she could be returned to her proper place.

  She had decided.

  But the man made no such declaration. Instead, crouching down low, he handed her a cookie, exactly like the ones Herr Doktor Fuchsmann had always given her.

  Just a cookie.

  But in Anna’s made
-up mind, this was a sort of transubstantiative miracle; it indicated a kind of transfer of fatherly ordination between Herr Doktor Fuchsmann and the tall man, and this development was better than any of the other possible, more verbal scenarios she could have imagined. Not only was it delicious—this was a kind of magic. And also, it was delicious.

  The tall stranger watched with real pleasure as Anna bit into the cookie. She had not eaten in a very long time for a little girl, and certainly nothing so delicious as a buttery, sugary sweet. It wasn’t long before the whole thing was gone.

  By the time Anna lifted her attention from the suddenly, inconceivably vanished cookie, the thin man had straightened back up and was standing far above her.

  “Stay out of sight,” he said after a long moment. Turning his eyes back out to Kraków, he added, “For as long as you can.”

  And then, wooden heel blocks loudly announcing his progress, he walked away from Anna and disappeared into the busyness of the far street.

  It was perhaps a bit late, but at age seven Anna was still very much in the process of figuring out how the world really worked. Seven short years had been punctuated by a series of incredible upheavals and overturns in the way that her life functioned—her mother gone, and then a world at war, and now a father disappeared as well. For all she understood, this was The Way of Things. What one knew did not linger; what one expected disappeared. For a coddled girl of seven, then, Anna had become exceedingly skilled at adaptation. Whatever language someone spoke to her was the language she spoke back.

  So when the thin man came, speaking to swallows and pulling her favorite cookies out of the air, why should she not have learned to speak his language? And the thin man’s language was an erratic, shimmering thing: to soldiers he spoke with an authority that bordered on disdain; to small birds of the air he spoke with gentle tenderness.