Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “I know,” said the Swallow Man. “I am sorry.”

  He began talking again, slowly, over days. Anna’s Swallow Man was returning to himself, but now, instead of the monument, the pillar of defiance and brilliant, beautiful deception that he had been, there was a stoop in his height. He could not be what he had been for her before.

  She had seen his Anna.

  —

  The Swallow Man’s convalescence continued. With every passing day he grew stronger, and eventually he began to walk with Anna around the city streets for brief periods. The bullet was still embedded in his hip, and he did not walk with ease, but he quickly regained some fluency in his stride, and if there was pain, he learned to disguise it.

  The Swallow Man had made for himself a complex lifestyle of silence, and over time Anna had learned to recognize its different aspects. Now, though, as he recovered his strength, she became acquainted with a new one: he was silent in a furtive, defensive fashion, as if his eyes were always a second away from avoiding hers—as if he was embarrassed at the weakness of having a body prone to injury.

  This was no demon.

  On one of their walks, he paused, retraced his steps several feet, and turned his head to a certain angle, as if, like a film projector, it were replaying a memory out through his eyes and onto a very particular patch of masonry. “This is Gdańsk,” he said. “We’re in Gdańsk.”

  Anna nodded.

  “Huh,” he said.

  It did not take him long.

  It rained the next day, and from sunup to sundown, the light remained an hourless, overcast gray beneath its blanket of thick, dark clouds.

  They took time and pains to ensure that their fine city clothing looked its very best, and then they walked under the great black umbrella to a dark wooden door in an old building.

  The street was cobbled, and the road ran along the slope of a hill. Despite having marched for years through muck and snow and every dirty thing, Anna stood tiptoe in the middle of a paving stone so that the rainwater might pass her by in the thin cracks between the stones. She knew the importance of dry feet.

  An older German man opened the heavy door. He was wearing a fine suit that had not been well cared for. He looked back and forth several times between the two of them until, all at once, like a sudden explosion, he realized at whom he was looking.

  “My God,” he said to the Swallow Man. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  The Swallow Man didn’t speak.

  The German welcomed them swiftly into his house, and as the Swallow Man shook his umbrella dry of rainwater, the other man spoke. “I have to say, I don’t think this beard suits you at all.”

  She hadn’t realized it—it had been slow and incremental—but the Swallow Man had grown a beard. It was thick now, like Reb Hirschl’s had been.

  She thought it suited him very well.

  The Swallow Man never said that he needed to speak to the older fellow in private—he scarcely said anything at all—but shortly they packed Anna off into a sitting room, and she remained there alone as the two men went into an adjoining space, some smoking room or study, to talk.

  A fat lady brought tea and a plate of cookies for Anna and did not speak to her. Anna drank the tea but felt nauseous when she thought of a cookie. She left them on the plate.

  She could hear the guarded voices of the Swallow Man and his elder in the next room, seeping out in tiny, supercharged particles through the cracked door.

  “…war effort?”

  “…committee…practically stalled…well, you know, but…still…fissile material…thermonuclear temperatures…tremendous pressure to…”

  “…know you think…contribution…flatter myself…something of an asset.”

  “Yes, of course…never thought…without you.”

  “…few ideas…remember, we…research into…working on enriched…supercritical mass…chain reaction. Which would…”

  “…think…weaponized?”

  “Yes. I think so, yes.”

  “…safe?”

  “That…can’t say.”

  Abruptly the voices broke off. Anna leapt to look as if she hadn’t been straining to hear, but no one came into the sitting room.

  There was an old clock somewhere nearby, ticking loudly.

  Suddenly Anna heard a sharp intake of breath from beyond the door, and someone spoke.

  “Why have you come here, Professor?”

  An unseen hand reached out and softly shut the door that had been left ajar between their room and hers, and soon the voices beyond it began to rise in a manner that was not entirely friendly. Anna strained to hear what they said, but she managed to discern only one further word, spiking up beyond the rim of their hush, through the barrier of the heavy wooden door.

  “Bargain.”

  The furnishings in the old man’s house were grand, almost as nice as those that had been in the dwór, and the presence of so much thick fabric, so much carven and varnished wood, made her uneasy.

  There were many beautiful things inside the old German’s house, so many possessions and furnishings on which to snag her attention, but what Anna noticed most was the sound of the rain, like a stream of little pebbles against the aged glass casement.

  She had forgotten what rain felt like from the indoors.

  After one of the longest spans of solitude she had known since she left Kraków, the door to the next room opened again, and the old German followed the Swallow Man out. No one spoke. The Swallow Man held out his hand to Anna, and she went to join him. Whatever strange pleasure the old man had taken in seeing the Swallow Man on his doorstep had gone, and though she did not believe that the two were angry with one another, neither seemed happy when they emerged from the next room, either.

  The older man’s eyes lingered, almost sadly, on her face.

  The Swallow Man was retrieving his umbrella when the older man spoke. “Professor,” he said, and the Swallow Man turned, slowly, studiously avoiding Anna’s eyes. “If I do this for you…if you disappear again…they’ll come after me, too.”

  The Swallow Man did not move, but beneath the thick stubble of his unmown cheek, Anna could see his jaw clench once, and then twice again.

  “Yes,” he said.

  None of this was discussed in the days that came. It had never been the Swallow Man’s way to explain to Anna what he was doing, the decisions he was making, but she knew as well as he that the dynamic of their relationship had changed. As much as he had been her caretaker, now Anna, for her part, however briefly, had also been his. It felt somehow dishonest to behave as if it were otherwise. And yet they did.

  About a week later Anna and the Swallow Man began frequenting certain central points in the city together. At precisely noon on each successive day, they would pass by one of three major landmarks: the Basilica of Saint Mary the first day, the Neptune Fountain the next, the Artus Court on the third, and then back to the basilica again the following day. Every day they would groom their fine clothes in preparation for this outing, and they would take all of their belongings along when they went.

  There was never any explanation for this.

  It was on the way to one of these outings that the Swallow Man, without turning his head to look at her, said, “When I killed the Peddler, it was with one smooth stroke.”

  Then he stopped, turned to Anna, and, with the tip of his shortened right pinkie, touched five points around his neck. “Jugular vein, carotid artery, trachea, carotid, jugular.”

  He began walking again. Anna did not say anything.

  “One smooth stroke,” said the Swallow Man.

  It was at the Neptune Fountain that they finally met the old fisherman.

  In his hand he held a small bundle of white cotton.

  The Swallow Man seemed delighted to see him, greeting him as an old friend. The fisherman did not speak very much at first, and when he did, it was in an accent that Anna did no
t recognize.

  The Swallow Man passed several minutes engaged in the sort of politesse and personal inquiry that Anna had not heard since she and Professor Łania had gone visiting with their friends of different tongues all those thousands and millions of lifetimes ago in Kraków. The Swallow Man seemed to know the fisherman, and although the old fellow rarely got a word in edgewise, it comforted her to know that he was a close friend of the Swallow Man’s.

  Shortly the Swallow Man found himself looking at his old copper watch. “Ah!” he said. “Is that the time?”

  Anna knew that the watch had long ago stopped ticking, but the fisherman didn’t. By now it was second nature to her, living in a world that twisted and squirmed in order to line up properly with fact, and she didn’t even give it a second thought.

  “You know, my friend,” continued the Swallow Man, “I really must fly—I have a pressing engagement, something I simply must attend to on my own—but I would dearly love to hear more about what your life has been, how you’ve been passing your war, you know, and so on. Why don’t you take my Greta out onto the water? I’m sure she’d love it, and I can meet up with you later.”

  It was hardly the first time the Swallow Man had casually applied a foreign name to her, and she might’ve been mistaken, but Anna could not recall an instance in which it had sounded so very much like an accident in his voice.

  “Ah,” said the old fisherman. “This is her.”

  Anna wanted to ask what he was talking about, but the Swallow Man had turned to Anna, and his fishhook eyes probed into her own, demanding her close attention. “I will meet up with you later,” he said. He was looking closer into her eyes than perhaps he ever had before.

  It made her uneasy, but Anna knew to trust the Swallow Man. In fact, she knew very little else.

  They were about to part when the fisherman spoke to the Swallow Man again. “You remember the bargain? He said you were to give it up to me,” he said in choppy, hushed German, and the Swallow Man smiled and said, “Of course.”

  He did not give the fisherman the small box of ammunition, but he reached into his bag and withdrew the revolver, nearly dwarfing it in his large, long-fingered hand, and with only the slightest hint of hesitation, he passed it to the fisherman.

  In return he received the small bundle of cotton.

  It was a subtle exchange, and a passerby would not have noticed it, but the Swallow Man knew Anna had, and he smiled at her calmly, unwrapping the cotton and glancing down to verify the contents of the bundle.

  For a moment Anna thought he meant to give her the nearly entirely unbeaded baby shoe, but after a tiny, uncertain moment, he closed up the cotton around it again and tucked it swiftly into his pocket.

  Then, turning to Anna, he leaned on his tall umbrella and placed one long hand on his hip—his left, at precisely the place where, in the waistband of Anna’s skirt, his pocketknife was still secreted away.

  “Ah,” he said. “You’ll have such a good time on the water!”

  His voice sounded so bright, so pleased.

  “Now, I don’t think you shall need to, if you shouldn’t want, but remember: if you should need to row”—and here he lifted his long-fingered hand nonchalantly from his hip and seemed to wipe some sweat first down one side of his neck and then the other—“the proper technique is with one smooth stroke.”

  The fisherman chuckled. “No oar,” he said. “Engine.”

  “Ah. Well, then,” said the Swallow Man. “As I say, I don’t think there shall be any need.”

  He took the old fisherman’s weathered, knobbly hand in his own then and said, “All right! Must fly. I’ll meet up with you later.”

  Without another word he turned and crossed the square. Anna kept her eyes on him as long as she could, just long enough to see him make a slight detour in order to walk through a flock of grounded, resting pigeons and scatter them skyward.

  And then he disappeared, around the corner of a building, forever.

  There was nothing for Anna to do inside the little rust-red rowboat, no road upon the water with which to keep her feet and mind moving, and so, instead, she worried.

  Her eyes could find no distinction between the gray of the sky and the gray of the water. There seemed to be no horizon anywhere, neither behind nor ahead, no thin black strip of land to show where the sky ended and the water began. Anna couldn’t help thinking that maybe there was no distinction at all anymore, that perhaps she had slipped into a huge, empty sphere of iron water, over the inner surface of which the old knotted fisherman would pilot her now, forever.

  As soon as she had conceived this thought, Anna wished she could forget it.

  The sky was thick and gray over the sea, and though she tried, she couldn’t determine where the sun had hidden itself. Now and again she could hear the cries of unseen birds, carried out over the open water like the chatter and cackle of ghosts. None of the songs seemed familiar to her.

  Time was passing—that she knew—but she couldn’t tell how much. Minutes and hours began to feel indistinct, like cups and gallons and teaspoons of loose and lazy water all intermingled beneath the belly of the boat. Forty seconds; forty days; forty years.

  Every so often Anna’s eyes would, by accident, catch on the old fisherman’s, and he would smile kindly, which made everything worse. The only thing that stood out from the gray of the world now—perhaps the only thing left in the gray world—was that old man in his bright yellow slicker. And he was not the Swallow Man.

  That, of course, was her greatest worry. There had been a time in her traveling, and not so long ago, either, when there wouldn’t have been a question in her mind—no matter where she washed up, the Swallow Man would be there, too.

  She could not in good conscience convince herself of this any longer.

  This was not the whole of the trouble, though—much more difficult to accept was the idea that, still, he might find his way back to her. Disappointment, though heavy, is an easy enough thing to pack away in a suitcase—it has straight edges and rounded corners, and it always fits into the last remaining empty space. Hope is much the same. But somehow the hybrid of the two is something much less uniform—awkward, bulkier, and no less heavy. It is far too delicate to pack away. It must be carried along in the hands.

  The shifting current pushed back and forth at the sides of the boat, and though the old outboard motor juddered along steadily behind them, Anna found herself wondering if they were even moving at all.

  After some time she decided her best escape from the uncolored, unprogressing universe was simply to shut it out, and so she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She was not terribly successful in the attempt—or perhaps she simply slept lightly and dreamt creeping dreams of a slow, noisy engine that hummed mournful doinas beneath the iron sea.

  Soon, though, her mind began to wander, and she found it following the sounds of water and birds back to the wetlands of Poland.

  It had been the first time her Swallow Man had taken her there, when she had still been very young. He had sat, his back against a long, thin tree, looking out into the blue sky, watching the birds call and wheel and dive into the water below the ridge.

  “Look, Anna,” he said, his voice bright with fondness. “There, standing, is a black stork. She only comes this far north in the summer. She is, of course, quite an elegant flier, but I prefer to imagine her walking up from Africa every year. Watch for her stately gait.

  “There is the little wigeon duck, who never seems to worry.

  “And there—a red-throated loon. Watch him fly. He looks as if he came to it by accident.”

  Of course Anna enjoyed learning the names and characters of all these birds, and it was clear to her that the Swallow Man loved them all very much. Where in Kraków she and Professor Łania had been gladdened to see Monsieur Bouchard, here on the road the Swallow Man smiled to see the red-throated loon.

  But try as she might, she could not find her way to loving these creatures the way that
the Swallow Man did. Flying birds still made Anna feel nothing so much as loneliness.

  She never thought about Kraków until she was lonely, and this was precisely the time when she most wished she could forget it.

  “Swallow Man?” she said, and the Swallow Man said, “Yes.”

  “Do you never miss the city?”

  The Swallow Man frowned. “I do.”

  Across the slope the black stork raised up its long-legged foot and then put it back down in indecision.

  “I do, too,” said Anna. “I miss the bells tolling the hour of the day. Sometimes I forgot that there was even such a thing as time, but then the bells would chime out and all of a sudden you knew that it was five o’clock.”

  The Swallow Man turned to look at Anna, and after a moment she saw an idea steal in through his eyes. With his long, delicate fingers, he plucked a thin pine needle from the heavy coat of them that the trees had dropped onto the ground, and with great care he sank it into a patch of sunlit earth at a very particular angle. Then, craning his neck to see the soft shadow it cast, he frowned and nodded gravely.

  “Bong,” he said in solemnity. “Bong. Bong.”

  It was a moment before Anna realized that this was not a word in an unfamiliar human language, but rather a very bad imitation of a clock-tower bell.

  The Swallow Man allowed a tiny scrap of a smile in at the left corner of his mouth. “Actually,” he said, “closer to three-fifteen.”

  Anna couldn’t keep her smile down as well as the Swallow Man could, and she beamed up at him. “But how can you tell?”

  The Swallow Man frowned and bobbed his head from side to side. “If you know true north and can estimate your latitude with some accuracy, it’s no great feat to construct a rudimentary sundial. It’s like a shadow clock. Look—the pine needle is the gnomon, and around it we imagine a clock face.”

  “What’s a no-man?” asked Anna.

  “The gnomon is the long, thin arm that points to the hour with its shadow. You see? Its name comes from Greek—‘knower,’ because it knows the hour and tells us in its shadow language.”

  Anna nodded in understanding. “Oh,” she said. “Like you.”