Anna and the Swallow Man Read online

  What had kept her alive until now was not rules—it was the Swallow Man.

  And the Swallow Man was singing.

  If they had been looking when they first arrived, it is quite likely that the soldiers would’ve seen the footprints dotting the area, but their prey had gone ahead of them and wiped the tracks into oblivion with their own trudging feet. Perhaps one or two amongst the fallen had seen the footprints—perhaps had even understood what they meant. But that was no danger anymore.

  The soldiers left after a brief quarter of an hour, but the Swallow Man didn’t come and get Anna until the morning.

  They left directly, without speaking.

  Anna didn’t look at the twenty or so empty bodies as they passed by. Instead, she looked at the spent shell casings.

  Several months earlier, in the autumn of the eastern part of the country, Anna and the Swallow Man had come upon a tree to which someone had tacked a church ikon. She had seen trees with bits of their bark stripped off before, and to her it seemed entirely natural that, in that season, one of those great trees that rained down leaves of red and brown and gold would be hiding such a brilliant, colorful picture beneath its skin. She went over for a closer look, to pull back more of the bark in order to see the parts of the picture that remained hidden, but something else caught her eye—around the foot of the tree there was a litter of small, cylindrical, brass-colored things. They were cold in her palm and smelled vaguely of smoke, and she tucked one of them into the pocket of her dress to take with her. It followed that a peculiar tree with pictures beneath its bark might very well bear peculiar nuts. In fact, this was so intuitive that she didn’t even think to ask the Swallow Man about it.

  But when Anna saw the shells here amongst the bodies of the dead, she knew instantly that they didn’t belong to nuts.

  She dropped the one she’d picked up, still riding in her pocket, down into the snow.

  Now she knew what rifles did.

  —

  It was something like six months later when Anna met a man in the woods who was kissing his rifle.

  The Swallow Man was close to running out of his pills, and beyond question he needed to find more. By this point he no longer hid the ritual of their consumption from Anna, in the morning, afternoon, and evening, but neither did he tell her why he was leaving her alone in the forest when he went into Lublin. Of course she knew, and of course he knew that she knew. He made no effort to disguise the dwindling number of pills in his flask every day. But some secrets, though widely known, are better kept hidden away.

  There was a complex calculus that determined whether it was safer to leave Anna in the forest or take her into the city, and the value of many of the variables in the equation was left to speculation.

  Anyone could see that things were changing, worsening in the cities—this was the high period of the ghettos—but to what extent this might affect Anna and the Swallow Man should they venture into the jumbled tangle of rusty, barbed city chaos was not clear.

  Whether he was alone or accompanied, it was a delicate thing the Swallow Man had to do, to appear so unassailably authoritative that people feared to look him in the eye. Being accompanied by little girls tends to humanize great men, and there was nothing the Swallow Man wanted less in that moment than humanization.

  They’d never spoken of the winter massacre, simply moved on with their lives and found a place to finish out the winter before setting off again at its end, and that day in the trees, watching him walk away from her, tall and spindly, the bag hanging down from his bough of an arm, Anna wanted to say something about it for the first time. She didn’t like being without the Swallow Man. She didn’t like to remember that she’d forgotten about him, even for a moment. It gave her an old, familiar pain in her fingertips, as if they were trying to rip through cold, rusty metal.

  But no words came, and soon he was gone between the thin trees.

  There was little for Anna to do but wait. She sat down on the soft forest floor, adept now at maneuvering herself into a place of comfort between the tree roots, and pulled, with quiet gratitude, the small pair of leather shoes from her pinched, pained feet.

  She wiggled her tingling toes in the warm breeze, and she sighed. The day was unreservedly beautiful.

  It has always been a mystery how it is possible that in the midst of great horror, the weather can continue on so obliviously warm and bright and lovely. Horrors were not few on that day, not even so very far from where Anna sat. But the sunlight never seemed to know, and thank God for it. If there had been no sunlight behind the thin green leaves in the wilds of Poland, Anna Łania might have had no understanding at all of why it was not good to die.

  The man came crashing through the trees, so loudly she thought he must’ve been making a joke.

  He was not too tall—broad, but not stocky—and his beard was full and on the long side. Beneath his round, boxy cap, his hair was close-cropped. To Anna he registered simply as a grown-up, but he could hardly have been past his twenties or, at best, the shallow end of his thirties.

  Most fascinating and terrifying to her, though, was the rifle slung over his shoulder. By that time Anna had seen an endless array of personal weapons: automatic, semiautomatic, bolt-action, of all makes and origins and colorations, with varying degrees of wear. What that man was carrying, though, was a weapon she had never seen.

  Some soldiers had fine leather shoulder straps for their rifles; others, simpler cloth arrangements; and still others chose to carry their weapons in the crooks of their arms, like children. This was the first time Anna had seen a rifle held in place with shoelaces. Around his feet the tongues of the young man’s boots flapped and wagged as his heels came unseated with each step.

  And what manner of soldier was this? He wore no uniform, seemed to have no regard whatsoever for his feet….He was acting very strangely, and his weapon was terribly odd.

  The wood of the thing was dark, nearly black. That in and of itself was not so out of the ordinary as to raise Anna’s curiosity—guns came in all colors—but the fittings to this man’s looked like silver, and her eyes could find no triggering mechanism. How would she know when it was necessary to become frightened if she couldn’t see when he was preparing to shoot?

  The shape of the gun itself was the main irregularity. Where most rifles had a long, thin barrel coming off of a thicker stock that grew back into a butt shaped for bracing against the shoulder, this one was cylindrical for nearly the entire span of its length. The muzzle tapered into a wedging, rounded point, and down near the bottom, where the butt ought to have been, it flared out like the end of a bell.

  The young man took a drink from the glass bottle in his hand and sat roughly down on the trunk of a fallen tree. If Anna had known what drunkenness was, she would certainly have had no trouble in recognizing it.

  Her fascination only grew when the young man lifted the rifle to his lips.

  What was he doing? This was entirely wrong. Anna was not a soldier herself, of course, had never learned the protocols and regulations of any military, but she prided herself on her understanding of the importance of rules and systems and grammars and standards—the Swallow Man himself, after all, was half man and half command—and everything about this strange new fellow seemed to be a gross violation of The Rules.

  The young man closed his eyes, and holding the narrow end of his rifle in his mouth, he breathed in deeply through his nose.

  There was a question germinating inside Anna’s chest, a question too large to be bounded in by language—the question of the young man himself—and before she could stop herself, words came tumbling forth out of her mouth.

  “What are you doing?”

  The moment she spoke, Anna knew it had been wrong. Instinctively she clapped one hand over her mouth, and just as quickly she dropped it again, the Swallow Man’s teaching echoing in her head:

  Regret is like golden jewelry: at the proper moment it may prove immeasurably valuable, but it is rare
ly wise to advertise its presence to strangers.

  Fortunately, the young man had missed her momentary show of regret entirely; in his bewilderment at Anna’s sudden voice, he had jumped and fallen backward off of his tree-trunk seat.

  “Oh my…” The fear in his eyes as he turned to look at Anna was completely and utterly transparent. She was unaccustomed to people in the woods who became frightened and made no attempt to hide it.

  Everything about this man was strange.

  “Riboyno shel oylum! Just a little girl,” he said, dusting himself off and repairing to his tree trunk. “You scared me!”

  Anna was not terribly pleased to be called “just” anything, but she was too curious to allow herself to become distracted.

  “What kind of rifle is that?”

  The young man wheeled about furiously, looking directly behind himself and then, somehow staggeringly despite his seated position, in every other conceivable direction. “What? Where?”

  “Your rifle. What kind is it? Why were you kissing it?”

  The young man stared at Anna, wide-eyed, red-faced, and sweating, brow wrinkled in incomprehension for a long moment.

  And then he started to laugh.

  This man’s laughter was, to Anna, wonderfully instructive. The Swallow Man was truly a great man, and his life was beautiful, but he guarded his laughter jealously—he had given none in close to two years—and in her childhood there had been so much laughter that was the laughter of one person exalting over another. This young man, though, he laughed for joy and for relief. He laughed because things were not as bad as they might’ve been. He laughed easily, and he laughed well.

  “Oh, darling girl, no!” he said. “No! This is not a rifle! This is a clarinet!”

  “What’s a clarinet?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “A clarinet is a musical instrument. Like me.”

  In Yiddish both the instrument and the player are called klei-zemer—or klezmer.

  Anna frowned.

  “What,” said the young man. “You don’t know music?”

  She did. Anna knew the word, and she knew the experience, but she hadn’t heard any in a very long time.

  “I remember music,” said Anna. “I just don’t know any.” She had become accustomed, in the Swallow Man’s company, to forgoing desires. It had been a very long time since she had asked for anything she wanted, and there was a dangerous, transgressive pleasure in asking now. “Can you play for me, Reb Clarinet?”

  Reb Clarinet smiled at this from behind his thick brown beard, his apple cheeks rising toward his eyes.

  “This,” he said, hoisting his instrument, “is a clarinet. I am Hirschl.”

  This could not have been less interesting to Anna. “All right. Can you play for me, Reb Hirschl?”

  Reb Hirschl’s face fell. “Oh. No, I’m very sorry. I can’t, Miss…uh…Miss…What’s your name?”

  Perhaps it was the sudden absence of his beautiful mirth, or perhaps it was the inquiry itself, but with a jolt a bright, stark light came on in Anna’s head. She didn’t have a name. She couldn’t have a name. And here this man threw his about like it was nothing. She could feel the dangerous, easy joy of this odd, fabulous, intoxicating man like a warm, sweet deluge beginning to sweep her off her guard. She struggled to want to resist.

  He was looking at her, waiting. What was her name? His round red cheeks drew her eye irresistibly, and the vocabulary of Road names she had collected slipped and squirmed around in her mind, evading capture.

  After a moment’s stutter she gave up and changed the subject. “But why can’t you play?”

  This question brought Reb Hirschl sadness again, and Anna felt immediately sorry. She liked the way Reb Hirschl looked. His shoulders were square, and she wanted to put her palm against his chest and feel it rise and fall and vibrate with his speech, almost as much when he was happy as when he was sad.

  “Because,” he said, “my last reed is cracked.” He reached down into the grubby sock on his right foot and pulled out a strip of yellowish cane, rounded at the top. There was a clear crack running down the grain, through which the sunlight shone.

  Anna cocked her head to the right in inquiry, as she had seen the Swallow Man do so many times. “What does that mean? What’s a reed?”

  “Well,” said Reb Hirschl, tucking his reed back into his sock, “if a clarinet is like a rifle, which it isn’t, and if the notes of music are like the things a rifle shoots, which they aren’t, then the reed is like the cartridge, you know, the magazine you put into the gun to make it shoot. It makes it work. When it vibrates—like your throat when you speak—sound comes out of it. If there’s no reed, there’s no sound.”

  “So really, the reed’s the instrument. Not you or the clarinet.”

  “In a way,” said Reb Hirschl. “If it’s cracked, then the sound won’t be any good.”

  “But there’ll be sound?”

  He frowned and bobbed his head back and forth in equivocation. “Sure,” he said. “Some.”

  “Well, then why don’t you play it?”

  “Because the sound won’t be as good as if it wasn’t cracked. And if I play on it, the crack will get worse.”

  This made absolutely no sense to Anna. “But if you don’t play on it, there’ll be no music at all.”

  Reb Hirschl frowned and nodded. “This is true.”

  “So will you play?”

  Reb Hirschl shook his head. “No. I can’t risk ruining the reed.”

  Anna was incredulous. This was nonsense.

  “But,” said Reb Hirschl, “I’ll do what I was about to do when you stopped me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was going to practice. All the fingerings and everything, only instead of blowing, I was just going to hum.”

  “What?”

  For a moment Reb Hirschl looked as if he were going to try to explain again, but then he sighed. “Just listen.”

  Reb Hirschl put the reedless clarinet in his mouth, closed his eyes, breathed in deep through his nose, and began to hum. The sound of his voice coming through the instrument was odd and muffled, and his fingers clacked on the stops and catches of the thing in a strange way, but through it all Anna could hear the music in him.

  His was a dark and soft and round voice, and on it he played a sweet, mournful doina.

  He played and he played, simply at first, and low, but soon rising and climbing, and every so often Anna looked up and saw him, eyes pressed closed, swaying gently, walking deeper into his music.

  There was a moment in which she knew that if she didn’t stand up and sneak off now, she would not be able to later, but this prospect was not entirely unpleasant, and she had already made up her mind.

  Finally she leaned her back up against the trunk of his tree and closed her eyes like him, that she might be able to hear the music the way he did.

  This is how Anna fell in love with the man who kissed his rifle.

  —

  Anna saw it, but Reb Hirschl did not. The Swallow Man had his knife in his hand.

  If her eyes had not been closed like his, Anna might’ve seen the Swallow Man coming. She might’ve been able to catch his eyes and show him without speaking that everything was all right. Things might’ve been different from the very beginning.

  As it was, the Swallow Man had made a small noise, a rustle in the brush, the snap of a twig, and both Anna’s eyes and the Jew’s had flown open. Anna knew perfectly well that this was a sign of their relative safety from the Swallow Man—had he wanted, he could easily have come upon both of them silently with his knife, and, eyes pressed closed to better hear the music, neither of them would’ve known until they felt the blade.

  But Reb Hirschl was aware of none of this.

  Despite his inebriation and his flapping boots, he was on his feet before Anna. With his right hand he held his clarinet by his side, parallel to the ground, and with his left he drew Anna in and sheltered her behind his leg.

 
; The Swallow Man had gathered Anna close on more than one occasion, but to put himself between her and danger—this was not something that the Swallow Man would’ve done.

  “Well,” said Reb Hirschl. “This is a popular corner of the woods today.” There was a chuckle in his voice, light and reassuring, inoffensive. Friendly. This, too, was a departure from what Anna knew. Despite the Swallow Man’s skill in turning strangers into compatriots, he himself was never friendly. Friendly was an extension of self. Friendly was easily rebuffed.

  Friendly was weak.

  The Swallow Man did not speak at first. There was a perfect stillness to him in that moment that seemed terribly dangerous. He simply looked. And then, finally, he turned his gaze from Reb Hirschl’s face down to Anna’s.

  “Are you all right, Sweetie?”

  He extended his long-fingered hand—the right, palm upward.

  Anna knew that he favored his left hand, the hand that hung down by his side, its back facing out, concealing the unendingly sharpened knife blade like a scythe amongst the boughs of his fingers. She felt no choice in the matter but to work herself free of Reb Hirschl and go to take the Swallow Man’s waiting hand.

  Looking at Reb Hirschl from the opposite side of the situation was a jarring experience. It was viscerally frightening to see the Swallow Man across from you, still and silent, waiting, ready. To see Reb Hirschl in the late-spring sunlight was almost laughable. His round, boxy cap was off-center on his close-shorn, perfectly round head, his beard was thick and unruly, his clothes unkempt, and his boots only a moment or two from coming off. He swayed slightly on his feet, like the trees in the breeze. His clarinet hung loose in his fingertips.

  He didn’t even have a reed for the thing.

  With the authority and implacability that only a nine-year-old can have in rendering such judgments, Anna found herself thinking how childish he looked.

  There was a moment of alarm and disappointment, and sadness, almost betrayal, in his face when she went to the Swallow Man, and then in his slow, hazy eyes she saw understanding.