Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

  “Why did you do that?” He was as hurt as he was angry, but Anna explained that her mother had been lovely and kind and would never have left her, and if his face didn’t precisely soften, the little warm light did rekindle itself, far, far behind the Swallow Man’s eyes.

  “But, Sweetie,” said the Swallow Man. “Don’t you remember? That’s Anna’s mother you’re talking about.”

  She had forgotten, and the embarrassment of this oversight only swelled her upset. “Well, Sweetie has too many mothers and I don’t know any of them and I can’t keep them straight, and whenever you say ‘Mama,’ I think of Anna’s mama, and it’s not true, I’m Anna.”

  The Swallow Man sat lightly down on the dusty side of the road opposite her. Even so, she had to crane her neck to look up and see his face.

  “Can I tell you something?” he said. His voice was almost always soft, but now it was soft and gentle. “I miss all our friends. I remember every one of them, all those people whom we meet on the road or talk to in front of a cottage hearth. I really do. Sometimes I think about one of them before I fall asleep, or I remember one of them while we’re walking, one of them whom I haven’t thought about in a very long time, and it makes me sad, wondering if they’re still OK. Do you know why?”

  Anna frowned. “Why?”

  “Because it’s real. Everything. Just because I give them names that are not my own and tell them about things that didn’t happen, it doesn’t mean it’s fake. We still become friends. I still care about them.”

  “But you’re lying. Lies are bad. Everyone says.”

  The Swallow Man leaned back. “How do you say ‘bird’ in French?”

  “Oiseau.”

  “In German?”

  “Vogel.”

  “And in Russian?”

  “Птица.”

  “Did you lie about any of those?”

  “No! I swear! That’s how you say it!”

  “I know it is. The thing is, I’m trying to teach you a whole new language. My language: Road. And in Road there’s more than one way to say everything. It’s very tricky. In Road, if you say, ‘My mother left me with Sergei Grigorovich and ran off,’ you might very well be saying, ‘My mother is gone and now I travel with my Swallow Man.’ You might also be saying, ‘I don’t remember my mother and it makes me sad to think about her.’ It’s very simple to translate something into Road, but it’s very difficult to translate anything back.”

  Anna wanted this not to make sense. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t help but see the logic in it.

  “Speaking Road is different from lying?”

  “They couldn’t be more different. In Road there is no way to lie.”

  This also made its own sense. “ ‘Swallow Man’ is in Road, isn’t it?”

  The Swallow Man nodded.

  “Is anything else you said to me in Road?”

  “No.”

  The Swallow Man got up and started walking again, and Anna followed after him. The deluge that had overflowed the riverbank swirled quietly in her chest now, captured in a perfectly round little pool of the Swallow Man’s making.

  She was relatively certain he was telling the truth, but nonetheless, Anna couldn’t help wondering what “no” might mean in Road.

  Anna was very precocious.

  —

  Anna and the Swallow Man never had much trouble with the people they met. Of course, that was due in large part to the fact that they almost only ever met people they wanted to meet—new friends for the Swallow Man’s vast catalog. On rare occasion they would, by chance, encounter someone unfriendly, but these people were mostly suspicious, or put upon, and they only wanted to be alone. Once they were surreptitiously unburdened of whatever it was that the Swallow Man had need of, they were easily obliged.

  There was, however, another category of person that did not fit into the Swallow Man’s system of understanding:

  Soldiers were unlikely ever to increase the odds of a person’s survival.

  As the time went on, Anna began to see more and more soldiers, not just at crossroads and border checkpoints and city gates, but walking through fields or sleeping in forests.

  After a certain point it was difficult to find new friends to meet, for all the soldiers between them.

  The Swallow Man explained them like this:

  “Those look like young men, don’t they? But they’re not. The ones from the west—those are wolves. And the ones from the east are bears. They disguise themselves as young men because it’s easier for them to travel in human places like roads and cities that way. Can you imagine how foolish a wolf would look trying to drive an automobile?

  “The Wolves and the Bears, neither of them like human beings at all, and if they can find a reason to hurt you, they will. They’re here because they want the world to be full of animals like them. They’re making as much space as they can, and they make space by getting rid of people, and at any moment that people could be you.

  “Of course, there’s a way around this. If you can make one of them wonder if you, like him, are not a person but a disguised Wolf or Bear, he will likely let you pass by in safety. This is a very useful technique, but it is easier accomplished with Bears than with Wolves. I will tell you why.

  “Wolves define themselves by what they are. They form a pack, and only other Wolves like them are admitted to it. A Wolf decides who he is by looking around and seeing what kinds there are in his pack. If there are big Wolves in the pack, he says to himself, ‘I must be big!’ If the pack is made up of purple Wolves, a Wolf will surely decide, regardless of the color of his own fur, that he, too, is purple. One day, one hopes, the members of the pack may begin seeing good, kind Wolves around them, but for the moment it is a particularly cruel and angry pack that the Wolves inhabit. But that is the Wolf’s delusion: he mistakes himself for his friend.

  “The Bear’s delusion is a bit more peculiar, but once one understands it, it is rather easier to take advantage of. The Bears, unlike the Wolves, do not define themselves by the things that they, taken as a pack, are. The Bears do not think of themselves as a pack. Bears are solitary animals. They think of themselves as one gargantuan Bear that spans half the globe. They understand what that Bear is not by looking at what other Bears are, but by looking at what they, the great global Bear, do. These days the Bear works hard at its labor and proclaims itself proud to be a Bear. And it is much easier to convince someone that you work and are proud than it is to convince him that you, like him, are cruel and angry.”

  “Why?”

  “Wolves are never cruel and angry toward other Wolves. How should you convince a Wolf that you are a cruel and angry Wolf when you cannot treat him cruelly or angrily, and you do not look like a Wolf?”

  This was a good question.

  “It would be much easier for you to convince a Bear that you are like him than a Wolf, but in either case you should avoid a soldier at all costs if I am not with you. They are dangerous. They want nothing more than to hurt you.”

  “How do I know if a soldier is a Bear or a Wolf?”

  “Generally, the Bears wear brown coats and the Wolves wear gray.”

  “Not purple?”

  “Not purple. But anyone wearing any red at all ought to be avoided. The dukes and captains of Wolves and Bears frequently wear red somewhere on themselves.”

  “Oh.”

  Anna couldn’t help remembering that the Swallow Man’s tie had been red when first she met him in Kraków. In happy moments when she thought of this, she assumed it must have been because he was a duke of some sort, or maybe a prince. Anna loved hearing the stories he told about himself to the people they met on highways and paths, but she knew they were all in Road, and she wondered about who he was in other languages.

  In one particularly upsetting moment, Anna thought of the Swallow Man’s red tie and wondered just how cruel and angry a captain of Wolves would have to be in order to lay such a deep trap for a little human girl.


  But Anna knew her Swallow Man, and whatever he was, he was not an angry man.

  And she had not yet seen him cruel.

  —

  Borders were everywhere in those days. The Swallow Man preferred to avoid them as well as could be, but if one walks for long enough, no matter what the direction, eventually a boundary will need crossing over. When they had to do so, it was much preferable to pass by soldiers than to risk being seen sneaking—better, said the Swallow Man, to be where one is meant to be, if you’re going to be caught. Better not to risk being seen for what they think you are.

  The Swallow Man’s strategy for passing through checkpoints was much more regimented than his strategy for finding new friends, and Anna had an indispensable role to play in the performance. In the days leading up to a planned border crossing, the two of them would spend much of their time searching the nearby forests and farms to find something small and sweet for her to carry. An apple was ideal, but could be found only in certain months. Anything sweet and natural, though—a handful of cherries or small wild strawberries—would do.

  In winter, when nothing grew, they did their best not to cross through checkpoints at all.

  Everything living tightens and contracts in the cold of winter. This includes borders and their small gaps.

  If Anna and the Swallow Man were to pass by Wolfish soldiers, they would take their time in careful preparation and don their city clothes. If the soldiers were Ursine, they would remain in their walking outfits, but in either case, as they approached the checkpoint, Anna would lag slightly behind her daddy and eat idly at her sweet thing. She would not speak.

  Usually there was a pair of soldiers to pass between, and the first and perhaps most crucial part of the crossing ritual was the Swallow Man’s selection of which of the two he would speak with. For this reason he preferred checkpoints that stood at a short distance from tree cover or, perhaps, a bend in the road—too much distance to cross and they would be seen by the soldiers long before he could greet them, and the choice would be lost; too little distance and the Swallow Man’s great height might set them on guard.

  He never had long to decide which soldier he liked better—only moments, really—and when they were crossing the Bear’s border, he would have to do it all without his spectacles. Once he had chosen, he would smile, fix his eyes upon his soldier, and raise his hand in a neutral, friendly wave.

  Invariably, the greeting he would receive in return would be curt, in some cases even bored. Never did a soldier return a smile of his own accord. More often than not, the response consisted of a simple “Papiere, bitte” or, in the case of a Bear or a particularly invested Wolf, “Dokumenty,” the word in both Russian and Polish. This slightly hostile starting point was fine with the Swallow Man—even preferable. People (including wild beasts in disguise) are more confident in their decisions when they think they have changed their own minds.

  Generally, this demand—a bare word or two—was all the Swallow Man would have to go on for a regional accent, but he was very skilled, and he would take a moment, muttering to himself, rummaging in his physician’s bag.

  “Ah!” he would say in the soldier’s language and dialect. “Of course. Papers, papers, papers…” In truth, he knew precisely where in the bag the proper document could be found, but he never seemed to manage to lay a hand on it until the soldier invariably asked, “You are German?” or “You are Russian?”

  It was from these border crossings that Anna’s mind gleaned the certainty that all the world’s Bears came from Russia and all the world’s Wolves from Germany.

  When the question had been asked, the Swallow Man would hold up the appropriate passport and flash a smile of quiet pride. This moment never failed to terrify Anna. It was perhaps the most delicate of the entire interaction, and she knew full well that should the soldier choose to look inside the passbook—the natural enough next step in the process—then he would easily uncover the entire deception.

  The timing of the document’s transfer from the Swallow Man’s hand to the soldier’s was crucial. He had to begin asking his question before offering the passport for inspection, so that the soldier would answer before opening it, but he couldn’t afford to appear to be dallying.

  “Where,” the Swallow Man would ask, “are you from?” Each time, the question sounded offhanded, obligatory, almost as if it were a slight imposition to him to have asked it in the first place.

  No matter what town or district name passed the lips of the soldier, the Swallow Man’s eyes would crack open wide and he would find himself laughing with thorough, genuine, surprised delight. It was a reaction that could come only from a fellow hometowner—the joyful surprise of hearing the name of a cherished place when you stand as far away from it now as you ever have in your life.

  At first Anna could not believe how seamlessly his falsehood could counterfeit truth. After all, she saw him react, if not precisely the same way, then certainly with no less delight and surprise at hearing words as far-flung and strange as Lindau, Zaraysk, Makhachkala, Quedlinburg, Gräfenhainichen, Mglin, and Suhl, words that might as well have stood for stars in the farthest reaches of the sky, for all she knew of them. But she soon came to understand that this was not falsehood at all.

  The practice of lying is concerned with attempting to overlay a thin paper substitute atop the world that exists in order that it seem to suit your purposes. But the Swallow Man didn’t need the world to suit him. He could make himself suit whatever world it pleased him to agree existed. This was what it was to be a native speaker of Road.

  The cornerstone of their success in border crossing was that the Swallow Man never, ever said directly that he was from the places the soldiers named. People (including wild beasts in disguise) are far more confident in their decisions when they think they have changed their own minds themselves.

  Instead of giving a simple lie, the Swallow Man would launch into a series of questions and appreciations.

  “Why can’t they make beer here like they do at home?” he would say. “What I wouldn’t give for a glass of real lager.” Even if a particular soldier wasn’t partial to beer (but what young man isn’t?), none would deny that his hometown had the best of anything.

  Or perhaps he would say, “How’s the old Prospekt Lenina?” There was hardly a single town in all of the Soviet Union without a Lenin Street anymore.

  Or: “Oh!” he would cry. “I missed the Platz so much this Weihnacht. Most beautiful time of year.”

  What German town didn’t have a square? What town square wasn’t amply decorated for Christmas? What young man didn’t miss home when the holiday came and he was off tramping around through some godforsaken Polish field?

  It would not take the Swallow Man long to get a smile or an agreement out of the soldier, and when Anna saw this, it was her time to speak up.

  “Daddy?” she would say, and the first time the Swallow Man would dismiss her.

  “One moment, Sweetie.”

  Anna would wait a moment then, giving him just enough time to pull the soldier back into discussion, but not so much that he could be caught out on any particular specific detail. Again she would say, “Daddy?” and this time the Swallow Man would turn and crouch down next to her, and flashing an apologetic smile to the soldiers, he would say, “What is it, Sweetie?” and she would ask him her question.

  “Do soldiers like strawberries, too?”

  They’d hit upon this question by accident. At first the plan had simply been for Anna to hold up the fruit to the soldier wordlessly, but when first they’d crossed a border, Anna had become frightened at the last moment, unsure of whether Wolves and Bears and other wild beasts even ate fruit.

  So she’d asked, and the effect had been magical.

  The Swallow Man would answer, “Oh, Sweetie, I think they’d like them very much.”

  When she first began to travel with the Swallow Man, Anna looked even younger than she was, and the Swallow Man showed her how to wipe the
loose hair out of her face with the flat palm of her hand, like younger girls still did. She would hold up her sweet thing to the second soldier first—the silent man to whom her daddy had not spoken—and then the other, and their mouths full of sweetness, they never seemed to remember to look at the passport before handing it back to the Swallow Man.

  In this way Anna and the Swallow Man tamed wild beasts with wild fruit.

  —

  Most of the time Anna spent with the Swallow Man, though, was spent not meeting strangers or passing border guards, but walking through Poland.

  Poland is, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) all her bloodshed, a country of singular magic. Everything in the world exists in Poland, and exists in an old and silent way that is somehow more than natural. Anna took great delight in all the new things that there were to see and learn about, and the Swallow Man was an excellent teacher. Before very long she could recite the scientific names of the vast majority of the different varieties of trees and plants that watched them pass by, and she had soon chosen her favorites from their overgrown ranks.

  It was only thanks to the Swallow Man’s encyclopedic knowledge that they didn’t starve in the wild. Of course, it took time to adapt. Anna always preferred when there was someone carrying bread or meat to befriend, but when there was not, the Swallow Man knew well which roots were good to eat, which berries were safe, which fruits yielded a good nut or seed, and which leaves left a sweet taste in the mouth and which a bitter, and over time it became no longer a strange thing to go a week or maybe two eating nothing but Poland.

  The forests seemed to bring out the instructor in him, and in those places where growing, living things thrived, the Swallow Man talked the most.

  Sometimes in the hills and plains, though, they would go an entire day or two together without speaking, walking in parallel at a distance of fifty or a hundred yards through dewy, tall green grasses. The Swallow Man never told Anna to stay close, never chided her for wandering, and in angry or tired or hungry moments, she sometimes wondered if he would even have noticed if she had simply gone off in a different direction and never come back.