Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

This made perfect sense to Anna, and the more she thought of it, the more her understanding unfolded. A name was like a language. If she didn’t have one of her own—if “Anna” was not tied to her—she could use whichever one she wanted. She could be whatever she wanted to be.

  “And you’re the daddy of all my new names, aren’t you?”

  The Swallow Man smiled. “Yes. I am.”

  He held out his hand, as a man might do to put the period on a well-struck bargain.

  But Anna was not a man, and so she did what any little girl will do when her daddy extends his hand.

  She held it.

  In 1939 the Germans pushed in from the west, and the Soviets closed in on the east, and between them they split the carcass of Poland. Around, toward, behind, and between these two imperial beasts, Anna and the Swallow Man made it their labor to walk.

  The first order of business was to procure for Anna a suit of country clothes. The pretty red-and-white dress in which she had walked out of Kraków was a decent analogue for the Swallow Man’s three-piece suit when it came to city clothing—nice enough that it might provoke some passive admiration—but in the country this was no advantage.

  The Swallow Man’s next lesson:

  Wherever people gather, one ought to appear to them as they themselves would wish to appear. In the city this means looking effortlessly prosperous. In the country this means looking as if one is not from the city.

  Clothing aside, this principle made heavy demands on people aiming to make their lives on the move. Prosperity provides not only for the accumulation of a great number of possessions, but also for their discreet housing in lofty, wide apartments above the ground floor. What kind of prosperous city dweller carries much of anything at all on his or her person? And in the country there was no clearer way to indicate you were from somewhere else than to carry heavy bags.

  This was the reason for the Swallow Man’s physician’s bag. It was not so large that it passed into the realm of conspicuousness, but with careful arrangement he could manage to provision himself decently from what he could fit inside. He packed the bag with extreme deliberation, not only to maximize the space within, but also to avoid any external indication that it might be anything approaching full. In this way he avoided the attention of the curious and the unscrupulous alike.

  Inside the bag were the following items:

  The two sets of their clothing not currently in use; these the Swallow Man rolled together so tightly that his knuckles turned white with the effort, and Anna sometimes wondered how the garments could ever come apart again when they had need of them.

  A German and a Polish passport, neither of which carried a photograph at all resembling the Swallow Man; these were packed away neatly in precisely symmetrical positions opposite one another, against the right and left sides of the bag. In their travels in the eastern, Soviet end of Poland, when he would have occasion to lift a Soviet passport from the body of an old, done-up babushka on the side of the road, he would pack it away at the back edge of the bag, so that his things were flanked on every side but the front by stolen identities.

  A small, rectangular hand mirror; this was used mostly to assist the Swallow Man in shaving, which he did every several days using his pocketknife, usually before dawn. It never looked pleasant. But it was one of the Swallow Man’s many policies never to go into the city with a face freshly shaven, lest his appearance look too effortfully maintained. By the same token, though, he would never allow his stubble to evolve into a beard—beards held far too much political significance in those days.

  A small glass jar of mismatched cigarettes; the Swallow Man hated the smell of tobacco, and when not obliged to present a facade for anyone in particular, he would go to great lengths to avoid its smoke. But as the war wore on, cigarettes came to hold increasing value—they could be given as tokens of goodwill, or traded for other necessaries, and if he thought it important enough, their thoughtless consumption could be displayed as a sign of power or affluence. Also in this jar was a small box of matches that the Swallow Man valued more highly even than others valued cigarettes, and when the time came to use one of them up, he would handle it with reverence and care, as if each were a holy relic or a living thing.

  A tin drinking cup; there is abundant fresh water in Poland, and a cup to put it in was all Anna and the Swallow Man ever needed to keep from going thirsty.

  A small whetstone; this the Swallow Man used to sharpen his pocketknife every evening before he slept. Whether he gave it two ritual, place-holding strokes or a thorough sharpening depended on the level of its use the foregoing day.

  A bright copper pocket watch; the first time Anna saw this, she held it eagerly up to her ear. There had been a huge old cabinet clock in the Łania apartment in Kraków, and one of the things she most missed about her home was the sound of its reliable, limping workings, the tock just a touch longer than the tick. She was, however, disappointed to find that the watch was broken and made no sound of any kind. When, on very rare occasion, Anna and the Swallow Man were obliged to sleep amongst other people, in place of sharpening his knife (which he preferred to keep hidden from others unless its use was unavoidable) the Swallow Man would ineffectually wind the broken copper watch.

  And a heavy fountain pen in a small wooden case; the initials DWR were painted on the top in faded red. This pen remained in its case, and the case in the bag, almost always.

  Outside the bag the Swallow Man carried these items:

  The wide black umbrella; it was of great use not only in the rain, but also in the snowy months, which were many. More than once the Swallow Man carved a small notch out of Poland—with his fingers when the earth was soft enough, with his pocketknife when it was not—and stuck the umbrella in to keep the falling snow off while Anna and he slept. They would frequently awaken curled up beneath an umbrella groaning under the weight of the snow, but it never failed to stay up. This umbrella was the Swallow Man’s only constant concession to comfort. Every year when the temperature began to grow truly cold, of course, out of necessity they acquired, frequently by easy theft or other unauthorized means, heavy coats, hats, and, if they could be found, suitable gloves (the Swallow Man’s narrow hands and long fingers almost never fit into a pair). Even so, when the warmth returned, their precious winter-weather comforts would simply be abandoned in a heap on the ground. They could not be transported easily if they were not worn—coats particularly—and winter wear in the summer months was a clear sign of vagrancy. Whether one truly was vagrant or not, its advertisement was held an untrustworthy quality, and nothing was more anathema to the Swallow Man than untrustworthiness.

  His pocketknife.

  His round, gold-rimmed spectacles in a soft tan leather case; these the Swallow Man needed very much in order to see at any distance, but he categorically refused to wear them outside of a city setting. “They make me look too intelligent,” he said. “One can’t go about looking intelligent.” Frequently, in the country, he would take them out to survey the land ahead or to examine some far-off, unknowing person, but they would never stay out for long.

  A brown glass flask that contained no liquor, but rather a multitude of tiny white pills; in the beginning the Swallow Man tried not to let Anna see these tablets or their consumption, but he took them meticulously, three times a day, and eventually it became untenable to keep the practice hidden. Anna was familiar with pills. In her mind they were harbingers of trouble rather than wardens against it, but she never asked about them. By now she knew the difference between those secrets they shared and those that the Swallow Man held hidden. If he hadn’t wanted her to see in the first place, what good could possibly come of asking? In addition, the Swallow Man kept a large bottle of the tablets in his bag as an emergency reserve, the secrecy of which he never relaxed. Twice they had to return to a sizable city in order to find more.

  And money, if there was any, which, almost always, there was not; even when there was an opportunity to acquire some, th
ey frequently passed it by. Money has a peculiar effect on otherwise generous and friendly people and has the tendency to make them avaricious. Even the most gentle farmsteader who fully intended to allow this tall stranger to split some paltry, nominal amount of wood in exchange for a couple of small loaves of bread; even the traveling salesman who was going to throw the rest of his cheese to the dogs so as to avoid having to carry it along with him; even the marketer returning home who took pity on the man and his daughter, very much wanting to give them one of the chickens she had failed to sell that day when they parted ways—none of them would have been as friendly if the sight, the smell, even the thought, of money had entered into the deal. Money divides people into buyers and sellers. The Swallow Man wanted to meet a person only if he could make that person a comrade or a friend for the brief duration of their acquaintance, and it is a heavy task for buyers and sellers truly to be friends. The liabilities of money far outweighed its advantages.

  And all of these things were carried while carefully maintaining the impression that Anna and the Swallow Man had thoughtlessly stepped out the door no longer than a bare hour or two before.

  For the most part, each of these individual objects was a constant companion, but clothing a growing girl is, under the best of circumstances, something of an undertaking, and on the road it was terribly troublesome. Far more often than the Swallow Man would’ve liked, one dress had to be changed for the next.

  The red-and-white dress did fine for city clothing in the beginning—cities were, in the main, avoided anyhow, and it spent most of its time rolled tightly between the vest and jacket of the Swallow Man’s suit. And as long as one was not scrupulously honest, it was never such a great feat to find a simple, modest dress for the wilderness with enough room for growing into.

  Of course, when the time came to make a visit to a city and the red-and-white dress came out of the physician’s bag again, it had grown hopelessly small for Anna, and against the Swallow Man’s better judgment, he left her outside of Gdańsk for an hour while he went to procure something new.

  The Swallow Man seemed quite ambivalent about Anna’s safety, particularly as it related to cities. At first he took very close care of her, making certain, whether on the road or off, in the country or outside a town, to keep her near. But as time wore on and she came to understand the lessons and principles by which they navigated their life, his care began to slacken, and he seemed, for lack of a better phrase, to begin to trust her much more with her own self.

  Of course, this did not last. The world was closing around them like a fist, tighter and tighter with every passing week, and Anna grew older and taller and her body began to change, and the question of whether it was safer to take her into the city or leave her outside of it became more and more difficult to answer simply.

  “Why must you grow?” the Swallow Man asked on one occasion. “Really. It’s very inconvenient.” Anna was not sure whether or not he was joking, but this was an uncertainty she encountered frequently.

  Her father, on the other hand, had always been a joker, though a sensible one—he’d smiled wide beneath his mustache or laughed in celebration of his own jokes. The most Anna could hope for from the Swallow Man was some tiny, secreted fragment of a smile.

  He never smiled at all, though, when Anna complained that her shoes were becoming too small. Shoes were a particular and grave hardship to the Swallow Man.

  The Swallow Man had sturdy boots of wood and leather that kept his feet warm, dry, and strong throughout the year, and when he had to appear in the city, he could easily spend half a day shining them up and no one would be the wiser. His fine heel blocks did begin to wear and round with the constant roughness of the road, but Anna was the only one who seemed to notice that.

  She, though, had been wearing a pair of shiny little red shoes the day the Swallow Man led her out of Kraków—the most ill-suited things imaginable for any sort of serious travel—and at that time winter had been fast approaching. The Swallow Man managed to find her a good pair of boots in a village several weeks later, but they were on the small side to begin with, and by the end of the season, they squeezed her feet intolerably. She could barely get them back on when she had necessity to take them off, and no matter how many pairs they went through, this problem almost never seemed to recede.

  “Why must you grow?” the Swallow Man had asked.

  The grief of little girls’ shoes contributed a great number of wrinkles to the Swallow Man’s sharp face, as if the look of the battered old leather of each successive pair were contagious and left its lingering mark on him long after the shoes had been cast aside. This, Anna had no trouble seeing.

  But Anna saw this grief the way the upward-facing trunk of a tree might see its foliage—she rightly assumed it was an outgrowth of her own self, but she never saw the thick, dense, monolithic root system out of which she herself grew.

  This is what Anna did not know:

  Another constant companion traveled with them in the company of the knife and the watch and the glasses and the pills. The Swallow Man kept it wrapped up in clean white cotton in a little bundle, safe within the physician’s bag: one rigid, beaded handmade baby shoe.

  Anna did not know about it, because the Swallow Man almost never took it out once they began to travel together, and when he did, it was only long after she was asleep. Even so, he worried constantly that the tiny beads of pink and white and gold were falling off with each jostling step of his constant motion through the world, though in truth it was usually the unwrapping of the thing to check the damage that pulled them loose.

  Of course, what Anna did know was not wrong—the very real, very practical, continual problem of her inadequate shoeing caused the Swallow Man very real and very practical grief—but what she did not know was no less true: the Swallow Man grieved because he could not think of little girls’ shoes without thinking of little girls’ shoes.

  This was the sum total of all the things that the Swallow Man had elected to carry with him out of desire. There was one other secret thing, though, that Anna and the Swallow Man carried along with them out of necessity:

  At the very bottom of the Swallow Man’s bag, where hands could be laid upon it only deliberately, was a peculiar seven-shot revolver and a small cardboard box of cartridges.

  —

  The Swallow Man was meticulous in the observation of his strategy for living in the odd, angry place that the world became in those years. He had many lessons to teach Anna, and over time his lessons began to describe the outline of the several guiding principles that governed his strategy.

  The first and perhaps most significant of these principles was this:

  People are dangerous. And the more people there are in one place, the more dangerous the place becomes. This was true of buildings, of roads, of towns, and of cities. It was particularly true of the encampments and factories that seemed to be popping up everywhere in the wilderness, and the Swallow Man gave their smokestacks a wide berth whenever he saw them on the horizon.

  The second principle that guided the Swallow Man was this:

  Human beings are the best hope in the world of other human beings to survive. And as the number of human beings other than oneself in a particular place at a particular time approaches one, the hope of help rises exponentially.

  Of course, the Swallow Man curated the first impressions of these new people carefully. He never spoke to strangers first, preferring to allow them to reveal their language and accent to him, and once they had, it was a rare occasion upon which he didn’t closely match them. This went a very far length toward putting them at their ease.

  Mostly he was scrupulous. Mostly he did not take what was not given, and when he did, it tended to be from the unfriendly or the hostile. But Anna did learn, in his company, to be wary of the agility of long fingers.

  He did not prefer to take, though—he preferred to speak and to listen.

  The Swallow Man was a master conversationalist, findin
g and assuming the role best suited to each new acquaintance’s personality, whoever that person might turn out to be. With some he would nod softly without much speaking at all, while with others he would consider quietly what it interested his new acquaintance to say, and at a precisely selected moment, he would ask a simple question that would turn an otherwise taciturn individual into a whirlwind of animated speech. With still others Anna watched him speak at length, telling incredibly textured stories of his past, no two of which were ever the same, or even particularly consistent.

  These she liked best.

  Sometimes the Swallow Man’s discussions would last great swaths of the day, and other times no more than half an hour’s time. However long he spent with his strangers, though, Anna found that, more often than not, whatever the Swallow Man had come wanting would be offered to him without his ever asking for it.

  Another lesson:

  Asking a stranger for something is the easiest way to ensure that he will not give it. Much better simply to show him a friend with a need.

  At first Anna was not permitted to speak during these encounters. The Swallow Man frequently referred to her obliquely, sometimes even directly asking her questions, but each of these was calculated to appear as if it might have an answer, while Anna herself knew it did not. She knew the rule—he was the riverbank. She would remain silent, and the Swallow Man would shrug and sigh. “She’s a little bit shy today.”

  This suited Anna perfectly—until one day the Swallow Man told a truck driver that her mother had left her with him and run off.

  “Poor girl,” the truck driver had said, frowning, but Anna was incredulous. Her mother had not abandoned her. She would never have done such a thing, and Anna was shocked that the Swallow Man would have said so.

  “No!” said Anna, aggrieved.

  In the moment it did not seem to be any huge transgression. The Swallow Man smiled and shook his head at the truck driver, saying something like, “No, of course not, Sweetie. Daddy was just telling a joke,” but as soon as the truck disappeared over the horizon, the Swallow Man turned. His eyes were dark and cold.