Anna and the Swallow Man Page 9

  “Oh,” he said. “You must be—”

  “Daddy,” Anna said. She hoped that her unprompted return to the riverbank might mitigate the danger that she felt creeping through the Swallow Man’s hard finger bones where they wrapped around her wrist, but the Swallow Man did not relax.

  A light of real, genuine relief lit in Reb Hirschl’s eyes. Anna could see him beginning to reach his hand out to shake her daddy’s when the Swallow Man spoke.

  “Thank you,” he said, and the words seemed sudden, like the quick clearing of an unseen throat in the darkness. “For looking after her.”

  His hands did not stir, and Reb Hirschl abandoned his intended handshake before his arm could even fully extend. “Ah,” he said. “It was no trouble at all.”

  This was a first in Anna’s travels with the Swallow Man. Reb Hirschl was extending himself in kindness, and the Swallow Man was rebuffing him. At every turn the Swallow Man had espoused and incarnated a very simple philosophy that relied upon the idea that one needn’t suffer to give benefit to another person, that the connections between people, however brief, however ephemeral, however false, even, had the very real potential to save us all.

  And here he was, doing his best to drive someone away.

  “Daddy,” said Anna. “This is Reb Hirschl.”

  Reb Hirschl inclined his head. “A pleasure.”

  The Swallow Man did not answer him. “Sweetie,” he said, “are you ready to go?”

  There was only one answer to this question. The Swallow Man knew it, Anna knew it, and even poor Reb Hirschl knew it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  —

  Anna and the Swallow Man moved through the trees, silent, side by side, away from the place where they had met Reb Hirschl the Jew, walking just as they always had. Only for Anna it was nothing like it had been before.

  There were many things Anna was unsure of. She didn’t know very well how life was supposed to work under normal circumstances. She didn’t even know what normal circumstances were, really, or what things like “real” or “fake” meant.

  She certainly didn’t understand the boundaries that people wrapped around others in their different varieties—the Swallow Man and she crossed these borders as easily as they breathed. In fact, if Anna and the Swallow Man could have been called any one thing, in the way that some people are called farmers or cobblers or milkmen, they would’ve been called crossers-over. And yet, for the life of her, she couldn’t see how they weren’t walking away from Reb Hirschl because of the borders and boundaries that other men had drawn around him.

  “Because he’s a Jew?” Anna asked. This was the first thing either of them had said since they had left Reb Hirschl behind.

  “For a lot of reasons,” said the Swallow Man. He did not look at Anna.

  “Is one of them that he’s a Jew?”

  “Yes.” The Swallow Man was unapologetic. “There are some ways of being that are more dangerous than others right now, and the Jewish way is one of the worst.”

  “But I like him.”

  Anna thought for sure that this would compel the Swallow Man to stop and turn to face her, as he had done so often in the early days of their travel, but he did not stop. He did not even turn his head.

  “I know you like him,” said the Swallow Man. “But we are not chasing after things that we like. We are chasing after our lives. We are trying to earn our survival.”

  “Why ours and not his?”

  “Because we are us and he is not. The world is at war.”

  “Are we at war?”

  It took the Swallow Man a moment to answer, but it was not a very long moment. “Yes,” he said.

  “On whom? On him?”

  “No. Not on anyone. For ourselves.”

  She tried as best she could, but Anna couldn’t see how you could be at war without someone to fight against.

  “But if we’re at war for ourselves…does that mean we’re at war on…everyone else?”

  This made the Swallow Man stop and face her, and in Anna’s aching little chest, this attention felt like a distinct victory, until she heard what he had to say.

  “Sweetie,” said the Swallow Man. “Anna—yes.”

  Anna frowned. This did not seem right. “But what about the other people? The people that we like?”

  “Like whom?”

  “Like Reb Hirschl.”

  “I don’t like Reb Hirschl the way that you do.”

  This felt like avoidance—a technicality. “Well,” said Anna, “you must like someone.”

  “I like you.”

  “That doesn’t count. ‘You’ is just a way of saying ‘me’ in Road.”

  Despite himself, the Swallow Man smiled at this. He did not answer, but Anna was not done with the conversation. “But, Swallow Man?”

  “Yes?”

  “You do like people. What about all our friends? The ones that we met on the road? You liked them. They always helped us and gave us nice things.”

  “Yes,” said the Swallow Man.

  “Well, why did we never give them any nice things?”

  “Because,” said the Swallow Man. “A friend is not someone to whom you give the things that you need when the world is at war. A friend is someone to whom you give the things that you need when the world is at peace. And unlike ‘you,’ Sweetie, ‘friend’ is not Road for ‘me.’ ”

  This, troublingly, Anna understood. She knew that she wanted to live, and she knew that she wanted the Swallow Man to live in the same way. More than she wanted others, even nice others, to live.

  But she also knew that she didn’t want poor, foolish, silly, beautiful Reb Hirschl to die. He was other people. But he didn’t have to be. And maybe Anna didn’t want him to be.

  She wasn’t sure how to express this—it felt like a question she wanted to ask, but she couldn’t discover the words to wrap around it to make it askable. Besides, the Swallow Man listened to her, and he gave real consideration to the things she said, but once his mind was made up, she had never known him to reverse a decision. Reb Hirschl was dangerous, he would say. In many ways.

  With this, Anna could not argue. She understood this instinctively.

  And so the matter lapsed.

  But Anna did not forget.

  Lublin was one of the largest cities in eastern Poland, and the Swallow Man had a policy of not lingering in the vicinity of such places any longer than he had to. He would not even stop to change his clothes until they had put a great distance between themselves and that deadly jumble of brick and flesh, and they moved swiftly that afternoon to pass beyond the radius of its danger.

  Many things called Anna’s attention that day, and by the time the residual light of the sky began to hurry to catch up with the sun where it had fallen beyond the horizon, her mind had gone through many occupations: her aching feet; the heel of bread that the Swallow Man had saved in his physician’s bag, and whether tonight would be the night for its consumption; various small sights of beauty, which she had learned to hide away about herself like a squirrel, in the knowledge that the desolation of winter was always on the way. At one point the Swallow Man had given her a thorough lesson on the mysteries of symbiotic fungi, which she had found, as always when he waxed instructive, quite interesting. But the room of each of these ideas, no matter how large or small, was never empty when she came into it.

  No matter where in her mind she wandered, Anna found Reb Hirschl there.

  She wondered where he would sleep that night.

  She wondered if uncracked reeds were common or rare.

  She wondered where he was going—by now she knew that almost no one had so nebulous a destination as the Swallow Man and she—and she wondered what he would do when he got there.

  More than anything, though, she did not wonder. She simply saw him in her mind—his abashing round red cheeks, his thorough chest, his rough, blocky hands lifting his clarinet with delicate care. And she heard his warm voice.
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  Anna and the Swallow Man rarely lit fires, even in the colder months. They almost never ate food that required cooking, and though the warmth would often have been welcome, the attendant light and the notice a fire drew were almost never a worthwhile sacrifice. As a result—particularly in the summer months, when the nights are brief—they often lay down to sleep directly at the coming of darkness.

  That night they stopped at a hedgerow that delineated the border between one farmer’s pasture and the next, and after they ate (that night was not, unfortunately, the night for bread), they settled in beneath it to sleep.

  The Swallow Man, as was his way, simply rolled over and remained still, but Anna could not find the quietude of mind necessary for her own rest.

  Normally, her mind was like a busy beach—all day long she would run back and forth, leaving footprints, building small mounds and castles, writing out ideas and diagrams with her fingers in the sand, but when the night tide came in, she would close her eyes and allow each wave of rhythmic breath to wash in and out over her day’s accumulation, and before long the beach would be clear and empty, and she would drift out to sleep.

  But tonight, silhouetted in the moonlight, a man stood on her beach. The tide of her breath rose and washed around his ankles, but still Reb Hirschl stood there, unmoving, and she could not make herself sleep. She tossed and she turned, but nothing she did could shake him loose from the place where he stood.

  Go to sleep.

  The problem was that there were so many elementary things that the Jew clearly did not understand. She knew intimately the feeling of insufficient shoes, and his seemed as if they might’ve fit rather well if he hadn’t madly chosen to pull out the laces. It was impossible that he understood the grave consequences he was tempting. Furthermore, he had given his name up with such careless largesse—without concern, as if it cost him nothing. Slowed as he must’ve been by his flapping shoes, throwing his name out onto the wind as if he were sowing seed—in no time he would be found. It was a surety. And Anna knew what it meant to be found.

  Go to sleep.

  That was assuming he didn’t simply stumble into trouble, which was more than likely. He’d been completely unaware of Anna when he tramped into the clearing that day, and she hadn’t even been putting forth any effort at hiding herself. Did he know the utility and the danger of roads and paths? It seemed clear that he did not. Likely, he would simply continue tromping aimlessly on until he ran into one of the many thousands of things in the world that could stop people from moving.

  He was like an old blind man in the middle of a vast thicket of angry iron thorns.

  Go to sleep.

  But even if, miraculously, he managed to avoid all these snares, it was more than likely that he would waste away and die in the short term anyway. It was plain to see that he had no knowledge of the country, no expertise in roots and plants, and no one was very likely to give of their precious stock of food to a bumbling Jew these days. Even with skill and cunning, Anna and the Swallow Man often went for an exceedingly long time without the sort of stuff common to larders and pantries and other vaults of cultivated human food. What were his chances? Nil.

  Just go to sleep.

  In point of fact, she had not seen that Reb Hirschl had been carrying anything at all about him, excepting his clarinet and his small bottle. He was undoubtedly hungry now. How likely was it that he had eaten in the past day? And food was the one indulgence she knew could draw a person forward through the pain of ill-shod walking. In fact, she herself would very likely not have been able to make it through today’s progress if she had not had the memory of that heel of bread in the Swallow Man’s bag to chase after.

  Forgetting even the real thing itself, would poor Reb Hirschl ever taste the anticipation of bread again before, as was practically inevitable, he was wiped carelessly out of the world?

  The answer to this question was clear, and it weighed Anna down so heavily that no breath, no matter how steady, could ever hope to wash her out to sleep.

  And so she opened her eyes and sat up.

  —

  Anna did not so much make a decision as understand what it was that she was going to do.

  The Swallow Man was curled up around his physician’s bag, facing in toward the hedgerow, but fortunately Anna was nimble, and the Swallow Man’s umbrella had fallen from its accustomed place atop the bag. All she had to do was open the clasp and take the bread.

  Before long she had the heel of bread in her hand. It seemed awfully small now, smaller than she had remembered, but this was mainly by comparison with the massive idea of Reb Hirschl in her mind. For a tiny moment she wondered if the task she had set for herself was even worth the effort for so insufficient a quantity of comfort.

  But the life she had built with the Swallow Man was an existence predicated on the value of insufficiencies. Anything was always better than nothing.

  And so, re-creating as best she could the opposite of their arrival trajectory, Anna set out away from the hedgerow to find Reb Hirschl the Jew.

  If she had stopped to think, she would’ve known that what she was attempting was a thing of terrible risk, that it fiercely violated the Swallow Man’s principles, that she was tempting harm upon herself, and even that the likelihood of her success was ludicrously small—all of these things were well within the grasp of her mind.

  But it is the peculiar talent of a child to exist in perfect comfort and happiness entirely without the burden of forethought. All she knew was that out there, in a place in the woods near Lublin, there was a beautiful man to whom she wanted to give the taste of bread one final time before he died.

  Anna spent quite a while trying to recover the woods, and when she turned around to check that she was still moving away from the hedgerow at the proper angle, she had wandered far from its sight. The only things around her were grass and field and hill, and when she finally stilled her frantic scanning of the horizon, she had lost her sense of direction entirely.

  There is no labyrinth as treacherous as that with neither paths nor walls.

  Anna was immediately terrified. Never before had she felt lost moving in the forests and plains, because never before had she done so without the Swallow Man, but now she could no more point herself in his direction than she could in Reb Hirschl’s.

  But she knew the Swallow Man’s dictum. You can be found if you stay still, and to be found is the greatest danger. Better lost than found.

  Anna chose a direction and began to walk.

  But now she was frightened, and there is no greater explicator of one’s own mistakes than sudden fear.

  If you could be found if you stayed still, did it not follow that if you moved, you could not be found? This was why she herself was walking. Why was it at all likely that Reb Hirschl would not have moved? Anna and the Swallow Man had covered much ground since they met the Jew—who was to say that he had not also? And even if she managed to find Reb Hirschl, how would they make their way back to the Swallow Man?

  And what if she were to come upon Reb Hirschl in the midst of trouble? It was clear that he would not stay out of it for long. How might she save him from what threatened? Surely, the Swallow Man might’ve invented some sort of plot or method to help him, and she might’ve contributed somehow, in her way, but she could not imagine what she might do if a Bear or a Wolf leveled his rifle at her poor, sweet, beautiful Reb Hirschl.

  When the trees of the woods came into view, darkening the horizon, Anna seized on them like a piece of happy news. Surely, they were the same trees out of which she and the Swallow Man had come earlier that day. Surely, she was on the right track. The direction forward was ahead, and the direction back was behind.

  In vain security Anna clutched her bit of bread to her chest, tried to stir up a smile, and trotted forward toward the trees.

  At first she attacked the woods with urgency, moving swiftly through the thick ranks of trees. Of necessity, though, she began slowly to correct her course by
tiny degrees in order to move around brush and trunk, and before long she realized how great a challenge it was to maintain a straight direction of travel in a pathless forest. She had not bothered to note the position of the moon or stars when she’d ducked beneath the lowest branches, but even if she had, the canopy was so thick here that there could be no help for her above. Almost no light filtered down to her. She could not clearly see what lay ahead of her, or behind, or to either side. She attempted to set her feet quietly down, one after the other, but she often could not clearly see what lay beneath her, either, and frequently she would tread on a root or a fallen branch, and her clumsy noise would seem to fill the forest.

  Anna tried not to think about how obvious she must’ve been to things with nighttime eyes and thick jaws.

  Each further step was a terror.

  Each breath was a loud, echoing betrayal.

  On the wind she could smell burning and smoke. She wanted to get back out of the trees, would’ve settled for simply returning to the hedgerow and abandoning her goal if she could be back in a safe place, but even this was impossible now. Back was as obscure as forth.

  Anna stopped and sat down on the ground. A part of her longed to think that perhaps she could just stay here, simply sit and be safe until the rising of the sun, but another part, just as large, questioned if the sun ever rose in these dark woods.

  And then, behind her and to the left, something moved.

  Anna was on her feet and running before she had time to think. Nothing is so terrifying as unexpected motion in the dark, and now she could hear, coming swiftly after her, feet falling in easy, loping pursuit. With everything she had, Anna battled away forward, but she could not escape the sound of the long legs that seemed to box her in wherever she turned. She ran as hard as she could, holding one hand out in front of her to ward off the branches that clawed at her face, wishing beyond hope for some sort of salvation to swoop down from the canopy and carry her away before thick, sharp teeth penetrated her skin at the shoulder or heel, but her foot caught on something unseen, and she stumbled, clutching the bread close to her chest, her fingers cutting into its stale crumb, and fell hard onto the ground.