Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

  And good.

  Despite the weight of truth in each of his words, to Anna it felt very much like a lie that this man would throw her back unattended into the maelstrom of Kraków.

  Anna had always been what adults called “precocious,” and this was a word, her father had once upon a time explained, with various uses. To some adults it allowed an escape from the wise clear-sightedness of a child:

  “Ah,” they would say in the face of an observation of unwelcome young wisdom, “how precocious she is!” and they would move on.

  To others it functioned as a reminder of their easy badge of adult supremacy:

  “Ah,” they would say in the face of some inconveniently valid challenge to their grown-up certitude, “how precocious she is!” and they would move on.

  Anna was afraid to ask the thin man the question that would not leave her mind now—it had the undeniable ring of the questions most often labeled precocious and packed away by adults for later, surreptitious disposal—but she very much wanted to hear, in the truth-laden voice of this tall man, if her father had taught her correctly.

  Whenever she had grown indignant at the dismissal of her thoughts and ideas and questions by those adults who had grown too old to see past her precocity, her father had reassured her softly, wiggling his mustache and smiling.

  “It’s their failure, my little Anna, not yours. Men who try to understand the world without the help of children are like men who try to bake bread without the help of yeast.”

  This had seemed so true.

  She struggled there, beneath the trees, deciding first to speak her precocious question and then to stay silent, over and over and over again, until finally, her mind already half immersed in sleep, she gathered her courage.

  “I’m sorry,” she said through a wide yawn. “I know it’s not good for a girl to be without a father these days. But is it any better for a father to be without a daughter?”

  There was silence in the grove of trees for a long moment.

  And then she heard the thin man begin to chuckle, low and bright and impossibly sunny in the dark night.

  This was the second time that Anna heard the Swallow Man laugh.

  —

  There are those people in the world for whom sleep is an indulgence, and there are those for whom it is a compromise, and Anna had always been one of this second set. In the best of circumstances, she slept lightly and woke early. In the November cold, resting out of doors for the very first time, and beset on all sides with what seemed like the world congress of inconvenient tree roots, she hardly slept at all.

  But to say that she hadn’t slept only because of the external conditions in which she found herself—this would not have been true.

  It was very difficult for her to take her attention away from the thin man, even for a moment. Somewhere, tickling the back of her brain, she felt a certainty that if she wasn’t constantly watching this fellow, she would miss whole miracles, whole wonders—things that he let fall incidentally off himself as other men might shed dandruff.

  By the time the morning arrived, Anna had made a careful study of the sleeping thin man—his aquiline nose, his broad forehead, the threads of gray in the mad, unraveled tapestry of his hair. He slept with his arms folded, and the long-fingered hand closest to her had wrapped itself almost all the way around his biceps.

  There was something in him that needed explanation.

  Anna did her best not to think of the drawing of the Alder King at the back of her thick book of stories.

  There seemed to be no one moment in which the thin man passed the transition of waking. First he was asleep, his eyes shut, and the very next moment, in precisely the same position, his eyes were open and he was completely alert.

  It was with some disappointment that Anna put the thin man’s suit coat back into his waiting hand. Even now that the sun was up, the air remained cold, and she would very much have liked some extra warmth to wear.

  As he had the night before, the thin man took off his overcoat, but instead of putting his suit jacket back on, he undid the clasp on the top of his physician’s bag, and turning to face away from her, he began to change his clothes.

  When he turned back to Anna, he was almost completely unrecognizable. A rough, baggy shirt of no color billowed around his narrow chest, and below it he wore a pair of unremarkable, ill-fitting pants, kept up with a shabby leather belt.

  This man was not the powerful sophisticate of the city. This was a humble, simple country peasant. Even his overcoat seemed changed—rougher, harder worn—and had Anna not seen him take it off, set it down, and later lift it again from where it had lain to put it back on, she would’ve thought it another garment entirely.

  “You look like a different person,” said Anna.

  “Yes,” said the thin man. “If ever I look too much like myself, you must tell me.”

  His suit was rolled and deposited into the vacancy in his bag that the rough clothes had left. All things were straightened and fastened and put in place. The thin man lifted his bag and strode out from under the trees, and Anna followed behind him.

  It was only a moment before she realized that they were still heading away from the dirt track—and away from Kraków.

  Anna faced a terrible dilemma now. No part of her wanted to return to the city. More even than she had the night before, she wished she could stay with this man. She had seen him sleep. She had heard him laugh. She had even come, somehow, to like him. He had spoken truths to her that no one else had dared. Even if they’d hurt.

  “The world as it exists is a very, very dangerous place,” he had said, and he had not equivocated.

  She did not want to go back to Kraków.

  But he had told her the night before that that was his plan. And now he was moving away from it. It was not right to pretend that she did not know.

  “Um, excuse me?” she said, and with a shock she realized that she did not know a name by which to call out to him.

  He was several strides ahead of her now, and at the sound of her voice, the thin man stopped, but he did not turn back to her.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Anna. “You said you wanted to go to Kraków.”

  “Yes?” said the tall man.

  Anna sighed. “But this isn’t the way to Kraków.”

  Only now did the tall man turn back. He was not smiling, but something in the air he exhaled gave Anna the feeling that he was, and it made her want to smile as well. “No,” he said. “It isn’t, is it?”

  Just as he had in the street across from Herr Doktor Fuchsmann’s, the tall man crouched himself down in order to face her directly.

  “Do you want to go back to Kraków?”

  He hadn’t even finished pronouncing the name of the city before Anna was shaking her head. “No.”

  Now something akin to a grin crept into the tall man’s face; his right eyebrow rose slightly, and the right corner of his mouth bunched up to itself. The movements were tiny, infinitesimal shifts, and yet they alone transformed his hard, long face into something that shone out brightly to her.

  “It’s not good for a father to be without a daughter, hm?”

  Anna was afraid to breathe now, just as she had been before in the narrow street, lest the swallow should fly away. The thin man’s eyes flicked swiftly over her face, first once, and then a second time.

  And then, in a rush of loose clothing, he straightened up and began to walk again. Anna ran to catch him. She wanted to ask what was going on, what he meant by all this, but before she found the words, he spoke, and whatever mirth she had seen in his face just a moment before was gone from his voice.

  “You must make me two promises,” he said.

  “OK,” said Anna.

  “First,” said the tall man, “you must always do as you did in the pasture last night. Do you promise?”

  Anna did not know what this meant, but she felt so near to escaping the empty void of Kraków tha
t she would’ve promised whatever the thin man had asked of her. “Yes,” she said.

  “Good,” said the tall man. “The second promise you must make to me is that you will ask me every single question that you wish to ask, with no exceptions. But never until we two are alone. Do you promise?”

  Anna’s brows knit together. “Well,” she said. “Yes. I do—but then I have a question.”

  The thin man turned his head. “Yes?”

  “What did you mean, ‘Always do as you did in the pasture last night’?”

  The thin man frowned and then he said, “The Wisła River passes through Kraków, does it not? You know about rivers?”

  Anna nodded.

  “A river goes wherever the riverbank does. It never has to ask which way, but only flows along. Yes?”

  Anna nodded again.

  “Just so,” said the thin man. “What I mean, then, is I’ll be the riverbank and you be the river. In all things. Can you promise me that?”

  Anna nodded a third time. “Yes,” she said.

  “Very well,” said the tall man. “Then you will come with me.”

  Anna’s heart flooded with happiness.

  “And someday,” said the tall man, “when you are much, much older, you must ask me what erosion is.”

  —

  There is a kind of uncontainable, fascinated pride to be had in recovering a thing you think you have lost forever, and every so often that first morning, Anna looked up toward the tall man’s sharp-edged face and smiled to herself.

  Who was this tall miracle?

  Despite what she had feared, he was not like the wicked Alder King. Not really. Anna had never read the story all the way through, but she had opened to its first page in the big book innumerable times, and there, beneath the title of the story, had been an illustration of him, tall and dark and thin, pointing his long finger out across the endless world of the page. She had loved to see that drawing. Looking at the king, narrow and still in his dark black ink, had given her a delicious, secure little fright.

  The thin man made her feel the same way, as if whatever danger there was in him—more than a little—somehow belonged to her. As if it was, in some small part, of her doing.

  No, the thin man was not like the Alder King, though he didn’t lack for similarity. But it would’ve been a mistake to understand him solely in that way. He was far too good, and he smiled and laughed and he summoned swallows.

  In fact, there was another character in Anna’s big book of stories that the tall man made her think of just as much as the Alder King. They didn’t look nearly as alike, but the second man had been a king as well, very long ago, and he had been a good and wise man. There was a measure of fright to be found in this king, too. He had wanted to cut a baby in half, but it had only been a trick—and a very precocious one, too, Anna had thought—to help return the child to his mother. He had been smart and clever, and what was better, the big book of stories had told her that God had granted him the miraculous ability to speak with birds.

  His name was King Solomon.

  “Ah!” said Anna with joy in the bright sunlight of midday. “You’re Solomon!”

  The tall man stopped. “What did you say?”

  He did not seem pleased, and suddenly he was far more Alder King than King Solomon.

  “You’re Solomon,” said Anna again.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I am not. That name isn’t safe. No name is.”

  This introduced a nagging, itchy fear to the back of Anna’s head. She had a name. In fact, she had many.

  “Names are ways for people to find us,” said the tall man. “If you keep a name, people know whom to ask after. And if people know whom to ask after, they can find out where you’ve been, and that brings them one step closer to finding you. We don’t want to be found.”

  “We don’t?”

  The thin man shook his head. “No.”

  This was puzzling. In a very deep place, a room hidden far within her, Anna held, side by side, two twin certainties: that she very much wanted her father to come and find her, and that he would not. “Why don’t we want to be found?”

  The tall man sighed. “Was your father a nice man?”

  “He’s the nicest man.”

  “Do you think he would’ve left you all alone on purpose?”

  “No.” But, thought Anna, he hadn’t left her all alone. He’d left her with Herr Doktor Fuchsmann, and he’d left her all alone.

  “And don’t you think he would’ve come back to get you if he could’ve?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well,” said the thin man. “Would you like to know why he didn’t?”

  This was not an easy question to answer, but after some hesitation Anna nodded. She wanted to know most things, if she could stand to.

  “Your father did not come back to get you,” said the tall man, “because someone found him.”

  He turned again and began to walk.

  Anna felt a deep, sick, plunging sensation somewhere at the very insidest portion of her, somewhere at the very heart of her gut. Just like that, there was no hidden room left inside of her, no space for her secret certainties—there wasn’t even an empty void where it had once been. It was just gone. And all her certainties with it.

  Her father had been found.

  This was the first lesson of the Swallow Man:

  To be found is to be gone forever.

  They walked in the silence for long minutes before Anna spoke.

  “But…,” she said. “But what happens when I have to call to you?” she said. “What name”—quickly she corrected herself—“what word should I use?”

  The tall man thought for a moment without breaking the rhythm of his stride.

  “I’ll call you Sweetie,” he said. “And you call me Daddy.”

  Anna had no objection to being called Sweetie. “But you’re not my daddy.”

  “No,” said the tall man. “But isn’t the riverbank the father of the river?”

  In silence Anna considered this notion, and above and beside her the thin man thought on a problem of his own.

  Abruptly the tall man stopped walking and turned. Only the most important things seemed to make him stop walking, and this would soon become another lesson:

  One can’t be found as long as one keeps moving.

  “Listen to me,” said the tall man. “I would like to ask you a favor.”

  Anna nodded.

  “Will you give me your name?”

  “Anna.”

  “No,” he said, crouching down low. “Give it up to me.”

  This was confounding and a little bit concerning. Even if she wanted to give up her name, Anna did not at all know how it could be done. “I don’t understand. How?”

  “Well,” said the tall man, “what if we decided that your shoes were mine? I’d still let you use them and walk in them, but they’d belong to me.”

  “All right,” said Anna.

  “Your name is just like your shoes,” said the tall man. “You don’t have to be able to get rid of a thing to give it over to someone else.”

  “All right,” said Anna.

  “So,” said the thin man. “You’ll give your name to me? You still get to hold it, but when someone calls it out, or asks you what yours is, you must remember: “Anna” isn’t your name.”

  The thin man spoke so smoothly and so beautifully, like moving water with a glassy surface, and Anna wanted very much to agree with whatever words floated down on his breath to her. But her name was her very own—perhaps the only thing she really had—and the idea of just giving it away made her chest feel tight.

  “But that’s not fair,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s mine. I like it.”

  The tall man frowned and nodded. “What if I give you something in return?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, what seems fair to you?”

  Anna did not know what the price of
a name should be. All she knew was that she didn’t want to give hers up. She liked “Anna,” and she liked the people who had used it to call to her. Besides, there wasn’t any name, nothing that the tall man liked to be called, that she could take away from him. He had no name.

  “What name can I take away from you?” she said.

  The thin man smiled a thin smile that did not reassure her. “You can’t take the name from a nameless man.”

  This seemed very much to Anna like something the Alder King might say. She suddenly wished he hadn’t been so angry when she’d called him Solomon. She wanted him to be like Solomon.

  “Let me call you Solomon, and I’ll give you my name.”

  The thin man shook his head without hesitation. “I can’t have a name. Particularly not that one.”

  Anna was not a temperamental child, but this seemed like injustice. She opened her mouth to protest, but with a twinkle in his sharp eye, the thin man stopped her.

  “But,” he said, “what about something very similar? What about…” And here he chirruped and twittered through his lips. “What about ‘Swallow Man’?”

  Anna couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah,” she said.

  “But only when we’re alone. And when we’re alone, I’ll let you borrow ‘Anna’ back.”

  “OK.”

  “Good. Now, Anna and her daddy and her home in Kraków and everything? That’s not yours anymore.”

  This was very sad.

  “It’s all right,” said the tall man. “I promise I’ll keep her safe for you, and you’ll have her in the dark, when we’re alone.”

  This made Anna want to cry. What was the use of a name in the dark? But there was not much that the Swallow Man failed to see, particularly things so close to himself. “Someday you can buy your name back from me. I promise.”

  Anna was dangerously close to asking when, but the Swallow Man quickly turned to walk and continued, “But now that you have no name, you can use any name you like. Even more than one.”