Anna and the Swallow Man Read online

  And yet there had been something behind his impassive face as he watched her reach out for the swallow, or taste the sweet stuff of the cookie—there was something in him other than all that dazzle and shimmer, something solid and firm and true. Something hidden.

  This was a man who did not always say what he meant or felt.

  Anna knew that different languages dealt in nuances of expression with different levels of explicitness—in one tongue an idiom might lay out quite directly what the speaker meant to communicate, whereas in another, via the legerdemain of a self-effacing metaphor, a depth of feeling or a sly opinion might very well only be hinted at.

  All this is to say that Anna knew with a startling fury, great enough to give her the strength to tear through cold iron with her own bare hands, that there were other words between those that the tall stranger had said to her.

  “Stay out of sight,” the tall man had said. “For as long as you can.”

  Anna smiled to herself. “Here I come.”

  She had decided.

  Anna had never been outside of Kraków, but she had accompanied her father to many of the public gardens of the city before the pall of war had descended, and when, far off ahead of her, she saw the tall stranger reach the hills, she thought with a thrill that he was taking her into the grandest park she had ever seen.

  It had not been difficult for Anna to track the thin man through the streets in the city center. He stood at least a head above most everyone he passed, and even from far behind she had no trouble locating the head that sprouted up beyond all the others, so long as she did not allow it to escape around a corner.

  What was difficult was staying out of sight, as the thin man had instructed. There are two kinds of children in wartime streets—those who provoke passing adults to turn their heads toward their plight, and those who provoke them to turn away. Anna was, if inconveniently under the present circumstances, fortunate enough to be one of the former; those children who fall into the latter camp are, more often than not, far beyond help.

  Nonetheless, Anna very much wanted to avoid attention, and it was not long before she discovered the trick of doing so. A well-fed little girl in a pretty red-and-white dress immediately raises alarm if her face is covered with concern and effort, if she strains to see what is far ahead of her, if she moves only in fits and starts—and this was precisely what her present labor required her to do. At one intersection, though, she felt certain she had seen Monsieur Bouchard, her father’s old French friend, in the street ahead, and suddenly, impulsively, abandoning all effort of following the tall stranger, she smiled and ran gleefully toward the familiar man.

  In the end he was not Monsieur Bouchard, but the effect of this burst of glee was immediately apparent to her. When she passed through the street hesitantly and with concern, the grown-ups who saw her seemed to latch on to her distress, trying to carry it off with them despite themselves, and the strain of the effort would cause a kind of unwilling connection between the adult and the child until they were out of one another’s sight. For the most part Anna felt certain that their intentions were good, but it seemed only a matter of time before someone stopped her, and then she did not know what might happen.

  On the other hand, when she ran through the street with a smile of anticipation, passing adults still took notice, but they did not try to carry off her joy with them—instead, it engendered a kindred kind of joy inside of them, and well satisfied with this feeling, particularly in the eternally threatening environment of a military occupation, they continued on their way without giving her a moment’s thought.

  It was with joy, then, and not concern, that she followed the thin man past the guards at the outskirts of the city—they didn’t give her a second glance—and by the time Anna was alone in the twilit hills, this effort of counterfeiting happiness had brought to bear a true sort of excitement within her.

  The problem was that the thin man’s legs were very long, and every quick stride of his required three or four of her own to match its progress. Now that they were out of the city and out of the sight of its thousand shifting denizens, Anna thought it time for the two of them to reunite; after all, she had fulfilled the task the tall man had set for her, avoiding attention until there seemed to be none left, and now she very much wanted the security of company in the growing dark.

  The sun had been gone beyond the horizon for many minutes when the thin man stopped short in the middle of the packed earth path he had been following. His stillness was so sharp and abrupt that Anna herself instinctively froze for a moment before realizing that this was her chance to make up ground.

  It was in that moment of stillness that she realized just how cold it had become. The wind whipped around her as she made her way down the hill toward the tall man, but just when she thought she was drawing near enough to call out to him, he turned and, with redoubled speed, lit out into the dark, open pasture to his right.

  Without thought Anna followed him.

  It was only when she looked over her shoulder, back toward the road, that she saw the bobbing, jostling motion of the beams of flashlights, and heard the clamoring conversation between whoever it was that had been coming down the road.

  “Stay out of sight,” he had said.

  It had been difficult for Anna to keep pace with the thin man before. Now it seemed nearly impossible. He was making his way into the wide fields off the road as quickly and quietly as he could, and as the darkness gathered in around him, Anna began to worry that she would lose sight of him. She broke into a trot, and then into a run, and it seemed to her ages and ages that she ran into the uncharted darkness after the thin stranger.

  Before she knew it, the darkness was deep and thick, and she could scarcely see who or what was moving down in the fields ahead of her. She wanted to call out, felt the growing throb of panic in the idea that she might have found a way to make herself yet more alone than she had been before, but something in the notion of raising her voice felt forbidden by the very air that surrounded this tall man. His entire existence was like a giant, silent forefinger raised to the lips of the universe.

  Hush.

  But then she saw it—approaching the thin man in the dark, cutting in quickly from some deeper corner of the pasture, in front of her but behind him—the soft, reflected flicker of a shielded lantern. The flattened glow of the flame was vague, but in the field of sudden night, it shone forth to her eye like a beacon, and she clearly saw the figure of a broad, tight man following after the taut leash of a great dog.

  Anna was a young girl of uncommon attention, but it had taken no particular skill to learn, in the Kraków from which she had lately come, what a dog at the end of a taut lead meant.

  There was no hesitation in Anna’s voice. “Hey!” she called, and again, “Hey!”

  Three heads turned swiftly to face her. The tall stranger’s response was fluid, nearly seamless, as if Anna and he had rehearsed it.

  “Oh!” said the thin man on a breath of unspeakable relief, and dropping the bag that he carried, he ran as quickly as he could to where Anna was standing.

  “Thank God,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  Anna was going to speak, but the thin man smoothed past any moment in which she might’ve, a swift torrent of chastisement and relieved affection pouring forth from him in “What were you thinkings” and “You had me so worrieds.”

  With one long hand he gathered Anna in close to his side. With the other he swiftly, deftly pulled the spectacles from his face, depositing them in an inner pocket of his coat, which he closed up to the neck in order to hide the well-tailored suit beneath its wide, upturned lapels.

  The broad man and his dog stood where the thin man had dropped his bag, and Anna was now shepherded gently back toward them. She was overwhelmed in the torrent of attention, so much so that when the thin man asked her a direct question, she didn’t think to respond.

  He stopped and asked again.

  “Sweetie—I said, d
o you promise to be more careful?”

  Anna frowned. She had been very careful. It had been the thin man who had not seen the approach of the dog and lantern man. But then again, he had told her to stay out of sight, and she’d very deliberately called attention to herself. Perhaps this was what he meant. She hated breaking the rules and doing the wrong thing, and even this peculiar kind of transgression, of which she had little understanding, engendered real contrition in her.

  Anna nodded ruefully. “Yes,” she said. “I promise.”

  The thin man sighed heavily and turned a conspiratorial gaze to the man behind the lantern, as if to say, Why do children never learn?

  “This must be your land, hm? I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Sweetie, apologize to the man.”

  By now Anna had admitted her wrongdoing, and in this state no child will fail to apologize, at the very least halfheartedly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said the thin man. “Ah! We’re much later than we said. Grandma will be worried. You have to be more careful!”

  Anna couldn’t for the life of her think of whom the thin man might be talking about. None of her grandparents were even still alive.

  There was no time for questions, though. With fluent but unhurried speech, the thin man turned again to the man behind the lantern and spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m all turned around. Can you point me back to the road?”

  There was sudden silence.

  This was the first moment in which the man of the dog and lantern had been required, even allowed, to speak.

  The thin man’s question hung in the air.

  Anna did not breathe.

  Finally the broad man lifted his arm and gestured with the lantern. “That way,” he said in rough, rolling Polish. “Ten minutes’ walk.”

  The thin man smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and gathering Anna in close, he turned and, with deliberate steps, led her toward the road.

  Anna did not know what she’d expected, but it had not been this. They walked silently, the two of them, and the air between them was heavy and hard. Had she been wrong to alert the thin man of the coming danger? Should she have stayed farther out of sight? For the first time since he had handed her the cookie in Kraków, she found herself wondering if, in fact, the tall man had meant for her to follow him in the first place.

  But all the same, she had felt real shelter when he had gathered her into his side, felt real concern when he’d run across the field to her. The feeling that she recognized now in the air—this was not a simple, monolithic sense of adult displeasure. This was a fraught thing—divided, thick with cross-woven and conflicting kinds of worry. Something was going on, something inside the tall stranger, hidden just behind the curtain.

  This, Anna knew with perfect, intuitive certainty. She was a child.

  At home in Kraków, Anna had developed a habit of understanding people by comparing them to those with whom she was already acquainted—as if she were translating the unfamiliar phrase of each new human being using her full, multilingual range of vocabulary. Frequently when, in the presence of her father, she had been introduced to new people, she had found herself looking forward to a private moment in which she might tell him of whom else this new person was composed:

  “Like Mrs. Niemczyk if she had never gotten old, and was not mean.”

  Or:

  “Like Professor Dubrovich if he spoke Madame Barsamian’s Polish and had the goofiness of Monsieur Bouchard.”

  Sometimes, in the course of these descriptions, Anna had hit upon some distinct quality or attribute—the aforementioned goofiness had been one—that was shared amongst many people, and her father had named it for her.

  Goofiness.

  Resilience.

  Assurance.

  Deference.

  Pride.

  Now, trying to understand the thin man, Anna thought that perhaps she had discovered a new example of such a quality.

  Of course, the thin man was like her father in his facility with language. That was obvious. But that was not what Anna meant when she thought of daddiness.

  Any child who plays out and about in the world quickly learns to distinguish between the grown-ups who have learned to deal with children and those who can be exploited for their lack of such experience—some adult authority is a well-supported fortification, and some is a flimsy, often over-elaborate, unbacked facade. It is a child’s business to test these edifices, and Anna had learned as well as any to recognize both kinds.

  This quality of daddiness was in part composed, in Anna’s mind, of the more experienced sense of authority—but only in part. There was something else, too, something that she struggled to describe to herself, something that made her feel the kind of thorough safety and security that frequently, at the end of a childhood, ceases ever to have existed. This thing was the better half of daddiness. Not every man is in possession of much talent in this area, just as many men cannot sing in tune or compellingly depict a sunset.

  But the thin man had many talents.

  Not a word had yet been spoken when they reached the road. The thin man had not looked down at Anna once as they walked, but this did not mean that he wasn’t watching her.

  Anna was well prepared to start back along the dirt track once they found it, but this was not the thin man’s intention, and without a word of explanation, he continued on past the path, bending his course to head for a thick stand of trees on the horizon. She was about to ask him where they were going when he broke the silence.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For warning me.”

  Anna was terribly confused by this. Was he grateful for what she had done, or angry? She didn’t understand. She did, however, know that it was impolite not to answer when someone said thank you.

  “You’re welcome,” she said with as much assurance as she could muster.

  The thin man sighed and said, “You did well.”

  He had slowed his gait significantly out of deference to the difference in their strides, but Anna still had to take two steps to every one of his, and now the only sound that broke the silence of the night was the rapid subdivision in the grass of his footfalls by hers.

  Eventually he spoke again. “Listen very closely,” he said, slowly releasing another sigh. “The world as it exists is a very, very dangerous place.” His voice had turned cold and measured.

  Anna was unprepared for the sudden fright and sadness that this statement brought about in her. Usually when adults spoke of danger in her presence, they were quick to assure her that everything would be all right, that she would be safe. The thin man did none of this, and his omission rang out as true in the night as his words had.

  Everything he said, even—perhaps especially—the things he left out, seemed to carry the reliable weight of truth.

  Anna did her best to choke down her sudden snuffle, but the thin man was perceptive. “Does that frighten you?” he said.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  The thin man frowned. “Good.”

  Ahead of them the dark trees loomed up like a clutch of wooden giants, each one an echo of Anna’s companion.

  “You know people in Kraków?” said the thin man.

  Anna nodded.

  “People who will take care of you?”

  Anna had no good answer for this. Before, she might’ve said yes, but before, she would’ve spoken of Herr Doktor Fuchsmann as amongst the very first rank of those who looked after her. What was more, though she never would’ve allowed herself to admit it, Kraków itself had become threatening. What was that place now, what were its rooms and sidewalks, what was each inch of negative space between the buildings and automobiles and boot heels of the city, if it was not the great open mouth that had swallowed her father up?

  For the first time since they’d begun walking together, the tall man looked down at Anna in her silence.

  His tone was gently instructive now, and his voice fell into the aut
horitative lilt of someone well used to imparting information to the less informed. “Listen to me: if you ever doubt that you have something good or comforting to rely upon, then you must assume that you don’t.” Again the thin man fell silent for a moment. “This is no time for hoping.”

  Anna didn’t answer. Together the two of them crossed in beneath the low hem of the tree branches.

  For a longer time again now, they didn’t speak. The thin man walked them around and around the thicket of trees, until finally he settled down in a corner far removed from the road. Anna sat down beside him. The ground was cold and hard, and the roots of the trees poked at her uncomfortably.

  As soon as she’d squirmed herself into a position she could hold for several minutes at a stretch, the tall man stood up and began to peel layers off of himself. He handed to Anna his long-armed suit coat, which she wrapped around herself gratefully against the cold, and then he shrugged back into his great overcoat.

  “In the morning,” he said, “I will take you back to Kraków, and we shall find someone to look after you. It is not good for a girl to be without a father these days.”

  With that, the thin man turned over and closed his eyes.

  —

  Anna’s heart sank like a heavy stone down into the pool of her gut.

  “In the morning,” he’d said, “I will take you back to Kraków.”

  This was impossible. She knew very well that there was no Kraków anymore, at least not in the true sense. She could not be there.

  But everything he said was heavy, like truth.

  All the same, something bothered Anna about the summary decision that the thin man had made.

  She just didn’t believe it.

  She couldn’t stop thinking of the way he had laughed when she’d spoken to him in all her languages, couldn’t stop remembering the glint he’d hidden in the depths of his eyes as he’d watched her reach out for the swallow he had conjured.

  To be sure, there were people in the world who seemed to have no use for children, people who had been born with an allergy to anything that stood below hip height—usually people who spent a very long time each day on the appointment of their clothing or facial hair. But was this thin man one of them? Most emphatically not. He was frightening in some ways, certainly—in many ways, even—but he was also bright and exciting and potent.