Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

  Reb Hirschl’s nerves were visibly excited by their transgression, and standing beneath the last of the trees before the river as the sun sank into the leaves and branches on the opposite bank, he hopped lightly from one foot to the other.

  “So?” he said. “Shall we go?”

  “Not,” said the Swallow Man, “until you fasten your boots.”

  Reb Hirschl was very hesitant to do this, and argued, postulating slightly variant iterations of the same fantasy in which he forgot or dropped or otherwise lost his clarinet without its bootlace shoulder strap, but the Swallow Man categorically refused to set a single foot forward until Reb Hirschl’s boots were done up.

  He spoke in a cold, slightly sharp, and terribly rational voice. “What should happen if your boot should lodge amongst the rocks on the river bottom, Hirschl? Or if you should simply lose it in the undertow while lifting your foot to step? What if a Russian soldier should spot us and we should be required to run once we reach the opposite bank? What if—”

  “All right,” said Reb Hirschl. “All right. You’ve made your point,” and he began dismantling his clarinet sling in order to lace his boots up.

  “At least,” he said, “we are crossing from the German side to the Russian. There are fewer of them there to chase us, and I can’t imagine that the Germans will come after us across the bridge.”

  He pulled his bootlaces tight and smiled up at Anna. “Thank heaven for small mercies.”

  “Come on,” said the Swallow Man. “We’re losing our dim.”

  The Swallow Man had carefully articulated a strict edict before they’d arrived at the river’s edge (“Move as quickly as you can without moving quickly. Nothing attracts pursuit so much as flight”), and Reb Hirschl had fully intended to follow this rule when they set forth from the cover of the trees. As it happened, though, Anna and the Swallow Man had thin bodies that cut easily through the water, but Reb Hirschl’s broad frame plowed up against it, and he struggled to keep pace with the casual hurry of the other two even at his top speed.

  They had nearly reached the opposite bank when the Russian started firing.

  It was one at first, a watchman patrolling near the center of the bridge, but it wasn’t long before there were five or ten rifles, Russian and German, all firing in their direction. The soldiers shot from where they had been, both midpatrol and from their fortified positions at either end of the bridge, and the bright flashes as they fired speckled the length of the bridge in the dark like tiny stars being born, living, and dying all within a moment.

  When people are shooting at you, your gut turns into a black hole. When people are shooting at you, all the blood in your body burns.

  Anna’s feet caught easily on the riverbank, and she scrambled and pushed herself up against the dry land and ran for the woods. She was halfway gone before she turned back to look at Reb Hirschl and the Swallow Man.

  Everything seemed to be happening in the tiny, gasping breaths between bullets.

  The Swallow Man had one lanky leg up on the dry riverbank. He was turned back to check on Reb Hirschl. Reb Hirschl was struggling through the river, perhaps two-thirds of the way across. Little patches of water exploded all around him as the bullets missed nearly.

  The Swallow Man yelled to Anna, “Make the trees! Go!” and he turned to throw himself back into the river.

  It happened just as the Swallow Man had feared it would—Reb Hirschl’s fingers failed, and his clarinet floated away from him, downstream toward the bridge, black wood in blackening water. Anna could see it in his eyes: his desire to reach the far bank had been supplanted by the need to retrieve his beloved, foolish, useless clarinet.

  Anna was afraid now. She could see how it would happen. When the Swallow Man reached Reb Hirschl and lifted himself from the water, he would not have seen the clarinet float away, and he would take hold of Reb Hirschl and try to pull him toward the forest, and Reb Hirschl would fight him, unwilling to leave the thing, and both of them would be caught and killed and she would be alone.

  But the Swallow Man lifted his head from the water and yelled to Reb Hirschl, “Go! Walk!” and as the Swallow Man disappeared again beneath the water, Anna was surprised to see Reb Hirschl fighting strongly and swiftly, with all his might, through the water toward her.

  He had nearly made the bank when the Swallow Man rose from the water only feet from the clarinet. Within seconds he had it, and he dove again, his long body undulating expertly, as if he himself were only a wave of the current.

  Reb Hirschl and Anna were at the edge of the trees now, waiting for the Swallow Man, and when he emerged from the water, holding the clarinet like a waterlogged torch, all three of them took off running into the forest with greater swiftness than Anna had ever known at any other time, and then she was running with and for and of her life, and she found herself crying and laughing, whooping with a terrible, indescribable glee at not yet having died.

  At the time it seemed to Anna miraculous that they all had passed the river unhurt. It was only that evening, when Reb Hirschl helped to cauterize the wound with one of the matches from the jar, that she learned that the top joint of the Swallow Man’s long right pinkie had been shot off.

  They must’ve been pursued, but they saw no Russians that night. Perhaps their commander had judged their force insufficient to lose any men from the defense of the bridge. Perhaps he knew something that the three companions did not know.

  As Anna and the Swallow Man settled in to sleep, Reb Hirschl cradled his clarinet in the crook of his arm and prayed with greater vigor and conviction than Anna had thought possible.

  That night, or early the next morning, all three of them woke together at the massive, thundering sound of the bombers passing overhead, like all the storms the sky had ever seen playing out at once. Shortly thereafter they felt the ordnance begin to fall on the cities and airfields of Soviet-occupied Poland.

  That was the morning of June 22, 1941. Operation Barbarossa had begun. Hitler was invading the Soviet Union.

  And they were on the front line.

  —

  Operation Barbarossa was the largest military action that there has ever been. Three million German troops and their allies made incursion into Soviet-controlled territory along a front that stretched nearly two thousand miles, from the Black Sea all the way up to the Baltic. The number of bombers that roared over Anna and her companions was so great that the planes seemed to block out the sky entirely.

  It was a massive, furious, swift attack.

  And Anna thought they were after her and her friends.

  They had lain themselves down well away from the road, but as soon as the sun rose, they saw the immense clouds of dust that the advancing German forces had stirred up. It was, of course, only an ill-tended rural dirt road, loosely packed and scarcely ever traveled by anything heavier than a buggy or farmer’s cart. When the tires and boots of the mechanized infantry and the treads of the panzer groups began to smash against the road, it reacted the same way everything did—it fled into the air in terror.

  The Soviets were shockingly unprepared for the invasion, and most of the fighting that occurred on the banks of the Bug was over long before midday. Anna tried to take comfort, hearing the gunshots fade into the distance, but there is no comfort when the sound that replaces gunfire is the unending march and grind of advancing armies.

  That day they stayed precisely where they’d slept the night before, lying quietly on the earth, careful never to stand, nor to move too rapidly. They were far from the road, but who knew where the next column of advancing Germans was to be found, and who knew where the scattered, retreating Soviet defenders might be?

  To spend an entire day facedown in the brush is no easy thing. None of the three of them spoke. The noise of the march and their distance from the road almost certainly made it safe to whisper, but none of them seemed to have the desire.

  Three times that day, as every day, the Swallow Man took his pills, and three times that
day Reb Hirschl muttered his prayers.

  It was not until well after dark that the cacophony of the German advance faded into the distance (though for days afterward Anna swore she could hear it just at the very edge of her awareness), and they remained still on the ground for nearly an hour thereafter, until the Swallow Man finally got to his feet and immediately, silently, led them farther into the forest.

  There was nearly as much adrenaline in all their veins as there was blood, and almost no opportunity for disagreement or the release of tension was passed by untaken between the two men, but very likely the original trigger was food. None of them had eaten in the last day at the very least, and the Swallow Man seemed to have no intention of stopping to forage.

  The argument reached a head close to the old Soviet camp. It was, of course, not truly old—it couldn’t have been deserted earlier than fifteen or twenty hours previous, and there were still fires burning where the bombs had fallen. Over the crackle of the blazes, a record that had been playing during the attack was left skipping, repeating itself over and over, looping two string-orchestra chords endlessly. All the same, the place had a feeling to it of true antiquity—like some ancient temple, doomed to be burned forever and ever in perpetual fire.

  The thrust of the argument was this: The Swallow Man felt certain that pursuing the advancing Germans was the safest course of action—as long as they could stay away from the conflict proper, they would surely be the least of the concerns of those soldiers fighting for their lives. Reb Hirschl, on the other hand, thought that moving back across the Bug and retreating from the battle lines was the best option. There could be nothing to help them survive here, no food stores that would go unraided by the vast swarm of Germans that they had seen pass. And besides, since when did the military consist of one unbroken line of attack? Wouldn’t there be reinforcements, a second wave, support troops? How could they be assured of staying safely ahead of the next wave?

  “How?” argued the Swallow Man. “By not turning around and heading directly for it.”

  Reb Hirschl shook his head and muttered to himself, “It is not good to stay living amidst death. It is not good to stay amidst death.”

  Anna was surprised by the virulence of Reb Hirschl’s argument—he had, up to this point, never been bashful about sharing his views and ideas, but neither had he ever pushed them when presented with the Swallow Man’s authority. Reb Hirschl must’ve been badly shaken by the crossing, the bombings, the advances, because the argument was long fought, and for a time she doubted if either man would yield.

  Finally the Swallow Man spoke, as always when in extremis, with quiet articulacy and decorousness. “Hirschl,” he said. “No one will tell me where to go. If you will follow me, then follow me, and if you will go, then go, but I have not slept since the onslaught began, and I have no more words to give you.”

  Anna was still awake that night when Reb Hirschl finished his prayers, and the Swallow Man tossed and turned uncharacteristically, finding no sleep, either. The fires were burning quieter now, but still, in the distance, there were gunshots and explosions, and throughout it all the record played its two chords, over and over and over again.

  The sounds in the world kept Anna awake, but Reb Hirschl had never shown any difficulty in finding rest, and she thought that the Jew had long since fallen asleep when finally, grumbling to himself, he pushed up to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” asked the Swallow Man from behind closed eyes. Anna was surprised to find him awake; he spoke out of utter stillness.

  “I’m going to turn off that record, is where I’m going,” said Reb Hirschl. “For God’s sake, at least we could hear a different chord.”

  The Swallow Man sighed. “I am relatively certain that there’s no one left alive in that building, Hirschl, but if there’s anyone else even within earshot, and the record were suddenly to go silent…”

  Reb Hirschl sat back down, hard.

  It was only a few minutes before he began singing with the record, lifting and flicking his nimble voice around and between and over the two chords, now fighting them, now embracing them, now turning them about. It was a good thing and beautiful, his singing, but somehow it made Anna extraordinarily melancholy.

  His singing lasted near twenty minutes, and then he rolled over onto his side.

  The Swallow Man waited until Anna’s little tiny snore reached up and joined the Jew’s—like a nighttime parody of that obnoxious walking tune—before he rose and walked off into the forest.

  In the morning Anna was the first to wake.

  The Swallow Man was sleeping just where he’d first lain down. Next to Reb Hirschl, attached to his beloved clarinet, there was a fine leather shoulder strap bedecked with hand-tooled Slavic iconography. It was a thing of beauty.

  When she saw this, something fell into place inside of Anna. Ever since the onslaught of the Germans had begun, even by the side of Reb Hirschl, she had managed to forget completely that there had ever been such a thing as gladness. But here in front of her was indisputable evidence that the world was not everywhere on fire, and was, in fact, growing kinder in places—the Swallow Man had ventured out to forage not for food, not for gain, not for his benefit or for Anna’s, but only for the surprise and delight of her beautiful Reb Hirschl.

  —

  Reb Hirschl was right. It is not good to live your life amidst the deaths of others. Here there were no foolish riddles, no little tunes to sing. Here they could not play at running from one another for amusement. Here they were running in earnest.

  The Swallow Man quickly became a carrion crow in that place, and they followed after him in the wake of battle, fleeing before the unseen next wave of death, with perfect trust into places that even he did not know and had never been. None of the three knew that area—Belarus, perhaps, or Ukraine—and despite their penchant for crossings-over, it somehow deepened the distress they felt, being in that place of war. Poland, they believed, they knew. Poland, they believed, was theirs. The border may have been only a line in the sand, but the difference between wandering in your own yard and wandering in your neighbor’s feels vast when you are afraid.

  Cruelly, of all the time they spent wandering, this was when the three of them ate easiest and most. It was blitzkrieg: the Germans were advancing as quick and as hard as they could. They left no one—neither the retreating Soviets nor their own troops—the time to stop and pick over the dead, and there was hardly a fallen man that didn’t have some small ration in his pocket or pack.

  The Soviet rations were those they came to know best—most often cracked wheat or hardtack, but frequently there were sunflower seeds, which they ate endlessly as they walked, collecting the shells in a small bag to avoid leaving a trail. Canned beets were also common, or tins of mysterious meat, sometimes labeled with words that the Swallow Man read out as pork, chicken, or beef, though those labels could best be relied on to say what was not in the cans. These rations were so plentiful that Reb Hirschl even had the luxury of declining to consume those labeled pork, though he knew very well that he was likely enough frequently eating it under other names.

  German rations were less commonly found, but more likely to contain some wonderful surprise: usually a small fruit-flavored candy or two, and once a bar of chocolate.

  Anna’s third of the chocolate disappeared almost instantly, and as they walked the rest of the day, Reb Hirschl’s dwindled smaller and smaller as he handed her little bites.

  “Better you should have it,” he said.

  Anna never saw the Swallow Man eat any of his chocolate. It was possible that he was keeping it to trade, but he had already stocked up on so much tea for that purpose that she couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t simply eat the delicious stuff.

  At first Reb Hirschl was terribly hesitant about the prospect of taking from the dead for his own benefit. He did not argue as he had before, but grumbled endlessly, and hardly ever took part in the harvest. When he did, it was only under duress, an
d if one listened closely, he could be heard in quiet prayer whenever he came into contact with the dead.

  Anna quickly became acquainted with the locations and the depths of the various pockets and pouches standard in a Soviet or German uniform, and her small hands learned to work into them with ease. Her only difficulty was in undoing the tight buckles or laces or fastenings that kept things closed, and as the carrion days continued, a system developed whereby the Swallow Man would swoop forward over the dead bodies and undo all their fastenings with his swift, nimble, long, strong fingers, and Anna would follow behind and strip them of all their benefit.

  On occasion she would discover some small item of particular use to one of her companions, and she would hide it away for an opportune moment. Once she found a pair of fine leather gloves from a German officer with hands shaped like the Swallow Man’s, the right pinkie joint of which she filled with a thin strip of rolled bandage. Anna gave them to him when Reb Hirschl went off into the trees to relieve himself. She said nothing and he said nothing back, but he rewarded her with a smile—rarer, even, than normal in those days—and from that day forward, it was uncommon for the gloves not to be either on his hands or hanging from his belt.

  Once, in the pocket of a Soviet officer’s greatcoat, she found a glass flask of vodka wrapped in cloth, and she gave it to Reb Hirschl when the Swallow Man had gone ahead to survey a road he wished to cross. To the Swallow Man it was necessary to give in silence, and without celebration, but when she gave the vodka to Reb Hirschl, she grinned and said, “Better you should have it,” and for a day and a half he wouldn’t stop singing her praises.

  It was not pleasant to harvest from the dead—particularly the recently dead, whose warmth thwarted Anna’s efforts at stoicism—but soon she learned not to look at their faces, and if she interacted with only their clothing and their kits, she didn’t have to wonder about what their names had been, or what it had sounded like when they sang.