Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

  Of course, even when she was angry, this bitter speculation couldn’t last long. Whenever a plume of smoke rose beyond the horizon, or the noise of an engine or a raised voice reached their ears, the Swallow Man hurried back to Anna’s side as swiftly as she hurried to his.

  If the forests made him instructive and the hills and plains made him reflective, nothing pleased the Swallow Man better than the wetlands.

  There is a great system of lakes and rivers and marshes that occupies more than six hundred miles of Poland’s northeast, and they returned to this stretch with disproportionate frequency.

  There was, of course, a significant risk to them there—for those who walk, nothing is more important than one’s feet, and there is nearly no danger so insidious to feet than the damp that does not dry. For this reason they most often wandered the wooded areas of higher elevation that dotted the marshes. Only in those places did the Swallow Man ever stop to sit simply for the pleasure of it.

  There were masses of birds there, birds that the Swallow Man loved to watch in flight. These Anna learned to identify as well, but by their common names, like friends. If the Swallow Man knew their scientific names, he did not use them, and he pointed them out for Anna’s admiration and not her study.

  There were fish to catch there, and few other people that might catch them. Some of their best days were spent in those wetlands, and it was always a sad occasion when the Swallow Man led Anna away from them.

  It was one such day, as their second winter approached, walking up and away from the low wetlands, tired and fearful of the coming cold, that she finally asked the question that had been dogging her mind for months and months.

  The Swallow Man walked ahead of her that day. The truth was that she didn’t enjoy the wetlands as much as her Swallow Man did—there was something in the smell of the sitting water that she never found entirely palatable—but she was dragging her heels nonetheless, wishing to stay where they were as long as possible, as if their mere presence in the wetlands might ward off the coming cold. At least, this was what she told herself. In truth, her reluctance had much less to do with the cold or the wetlands than it did with the Swallow Man himself.

  It was not ever, under normal circumstances, entirely clear to Anna that the Swallow Man was human in the same way that she was. He was systematically aloof, he could operate as if the world were other than it was, and the moments when she most wanted to know what he was thinking were the moments in which it was least likely that she would be able to tell.

  But in the wetlands he relaxed. In the wetlands he was closer to being something she knew how to understand, and it was this more than anything that she desired. She had long since abandoned the project of assembling an analogy to describe him out of people she had known before—the fact was that there was simply no one like him—but she still wanted to know who he was beneath all his long fingers and stubble and Road speech. She wanted to know what language his heart spoke.

  And so she dragged her heels, and she asked her question to the back of his head.

  “Swallow Man?” she said. “Where are we going?”

  The Swallow Man stopped and turned. He did not immediately have an answer for her.

  This might seem as if it were a pointed question, intended to highlight Anna’s weariness—after all, by this point they had been walking over a year, and they showed no sign of stopping—but the truth was, naive as it must seem, that Anna was convinced there was some direction to their wanderings. The Swallow Man always had very particular ideas about where they ought to be heading and always decided their direction with authority. What was more, he seemed completely certain of and invested in his decisions, even when those decisions took them near to cities or across checkpoints.

  How could this be explained, if not by some destination or plan?

  The question caught the Swallow Man off guard, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it did not take him terribly long to find an answer for Anna.

  “Ah!” said the Swallow Man, hatching a secret grin at the corner of his cheek. “I’m glad you asked. I’ve been wanting to tell you, but I wasn’t sure you were old enough to know yet.”

  “I’m old enough.”

  “Are you sure?” The Swallow Man raised his eyebrow.

  “Of course I am. Tell me!”

  “Well,” said the Swallow Man. “You and I are on a mission of crucial scientific significance.” This he said with such somber intention that the ache in Anna’s feet was swept momentarily away in her madness of pride.

  “We are?”

  “We are. Do you know what an endangered species is?”

  “No.” At first Anna had been embarrassed by the things that she did not know, but by now she had seen that there was no shame in learning. Besides, no one could possibly know everything the Swallow Man knew.

  “A species is a kind of animal,” he said. “And to say that a species is endangered means that for one reason or another there are almost none of them left.”

  “Oh,” said Anna. This was sad. “I don’t like that.”

  The Swallow Man shook his head. “Me neither. That’s why we’re out here. There’s a bird in this country, an extremely rare bird that’s very, very endangered. There’s only one left. And I want to save it. The Wolves and the Bears desperately want to find the bird, because it tastes delicious—and because it’s the last, they think that whoever eats it will become very, very strong.”

  This seemed like a peculiar injustice to Anna, and somehow a terribly personal one. She understood well that Wolves and Bears hated humans, but this seemed like the natural order of things—in every story she knew, beasts were the enemies of people. But to wipe out a kind of thing entirely…

  “But there’s only one of them left!” she said.

  “That’s right. The Wolves and the Bears have eaten the rest. I’m going to make sure the last one stays safe.”

  “Wow.”

  The Swallow Man nodded. “It’s not always so easy to find, our bird—it’s quite shy. But if you know the signs it leaves behind, it’s no great task to track it. This is the one advantage you and I have over the Bears and Wolves: their weapons are their teeth and their claws—”

  “And their rifles.” Rifles had become a particular fascination of Anna’s in her crossing of borders. She did not know for certain what they did, but by now she knew very well that they were dangerous, and that every soldier carried one.

  “And their rifles,” agreed the Swallow Man. “But our weapons? Our weapons are knowledge and observation and patience and time, and given enough of those last two, our weapons will always prevail.”

  This, of course, was true. Anna didn’t know precisely what it meant, but it sounded terribly wise, and so she nodded. “What makes the bird so special?”

  The Swallow Man sighed, deep and heavy. For the first time he seemed somehow upset at Anna’s question, and she couldn’t help wondering if it was because the answer was obvious or because it was obscure.

  “What makes it special?” said the Swallow Man. “It’s a bird. A bird that flies and sings. And if the Wolves and Bears have their way, no one will ever fly or sing in precisely the same way that it does. Never again. Does it need to be more special than that?”

  For this, Anna had no answer, but she could not tell if it was because the answer was obvious or because it was obscure.

  “Will you help me keep it alive?”

  Nothing could’ve stopped her. Anna nodded her head furiously. “But how can I? I don’t know its signs.”

  The Swallow Man nodded. “I’ll teach you. Someday. For now, the first step is that you must stay safe. Stay alive. If there’s no one around to keep the bird safe, then the Wolves and Bears will get her for sure.”

  “All right. But you stay safe, too, OK? And alive.”

  The Swallow Man nodded solemnly. “OK.”

  He turned back to the road, and after a moment’s walk he called back over his shoulder.

  “How do your s
hoes feel?”

  Winter was different.

  In winter the ground hardens, and the trees are bare and will not hide you, and the earth shows your footprints in the snow wherever you go. Food is scarce, and there is almost no hope of finding enough to fill your belly where there are not people.

  Anna and the Swallow Man resisted the beginning of winter as long as they could. As long as they could gain some nutritional benefit from the earth, they kept on the move, taking pains to traverse only the most remote ground on the days when snow had fallen. But there would always come a point when, exhausted and hungry and cold, they would have no choice but to concede that winter had descended on them. Anna reached this point a day or two before the Swallow Man did, and if it was a disappointment that they would not be able to avoid wintering that year, it was also a relief to her when finally they settled in.

  In order to successfully survive the winter, they needed to be near people. Despite the Swallow Man’s guiding principles, in the case of the winter, it was foolish to look for a small collection; if they’d settled near such a population—a farming village, say—their presence would almost certainly have been quickly found out. Where there are only so many people, there is only so much food, and where there is only so much food, the amount that can disappear without notice can only ever be so large. And they had two bellies to fill.

  This did not, however, mean that the Swallow Man’s principle was ill founded; it was certainly correct, and the more people there were in a particular place, the greater the chance of accidental discovery, or of some inconvenient insomniac catching sight of a strange little girl with an armful of purloined potatoes—and this in addition to the more general danger of Wolves and Bears and those that served them.

  In the winter that straddled the years of 1940 and 1941, their second winter together, Anna and the Swallow Man found an almost optimal situation: a town of middling size with only a nominal Wolfish presence, and nearly an hour’s journey away, mostly through forest, a set of boulders resting in just such a way as to shelter a small triangle of earth between them almost entirely from the wind and snow. It was in this place, no larger than a particularly self-afflicting monk’s cell, that Anna and the Swallow Man spent the winter.

  It is only once one stops that one realizes just how much time and attention walking really consumes. Sitting close to one another in a small enclosure of stone for the length of a season, Anna and the Swallow Man did the only natural thing there was to do to pass the time: they told stories. Or more specifically, the Swallow Man told stories.

  They were good stories, captivating and compelling, and Anna listened with every tiny bit of her being, listened with a fury to close out the cold: stories of men who battled Wolves and Bears and Jackals and Tigers (who were like Bears and Wolves, only from places she had never been); men who learned to speak the secret dialects of the languages of Grass and Star and Tree, and who translated what they said for everyone to hear and then were hunted by great beasts as a reward; men who walked in one direction for years and years and years until they found the part of the sky that had shattered apart the day the first birds had been born, and who broke off a piece to make a new kind of bird for themselves; men who became dear to Anna—nearly as dear as the Swallow Man himself—men with names like Kepler, like Bohr and Heisenberg and Galileo and Einstein and Copernicus. And Anna’s very favorite: grand, imperious Newton and his sweet, backward, bumbling squire, Willy Whiston.

  Every several nights, when it had been dark for so long that Anna was afraid it would never be light again, they would crawl out of their little hole of stone and story and visit the town.

  Their purpose was simple: stay alive and avoid detection at all costs.

  Though they quickly discovered which doors in the town were left unlocked and which pantries were closer to the unlocked doors than they were to their keepers’ bedrooms, often they would have to pass over this low-hanging fruit so as to keep from being known.

  It was, nonetheless, this winter that, in defiance of all good reason, the Swallow Man opened a low window and climbed through to fetch Anna a thick slice of the babka that had been sitting on the counter as they passed.

  In truth, there was only so much they could do about their footprints in the snow. Entering or exiting the town, they kept on the road, and from there, there was no real problem. Even if it was snowing in the dead of night when they visited, they could easily keep to the street and their footprints would be lost by morning. On the one or two occasions that they encountered a fresh, new blanket of snow in the town with no more falling, they simply took care and brushed their tracks out behind them with a pine branch where they led to and from the road.

  It was in the trees that the problem came about. Moving between the road and the forest was easy enough—a brook cut beneath a little bridge where it met the road just a few minutes’ walk in the wrong direction, and as long as they didn’t spend too much time wetting their shoes, they could easily get in and out of the forest without leaving a trail. In the forest itself, however, there were few options. The trees were not sturdy enough or close enough together that they could climb one to another to make their way through the canopy, and finally they had simply to resign themselves to leaving tracks in the deeper forest, where (as much as any one place in the world) it could be said that they lived.

  They had done about as well as could’ve been expected—there was no trail to lead anyone from the missing food back to the forest.

  In the end, though, no amount of caution could have kept them safe there.

  Aside from telling stories, the dominant occupation of time in their little stone hole was napping. An excellent pastime and assuager of hunger pangs, it had the added benefit of keeping them rested up for their nocturnal excursions into town.

  The Swallow Man often left for short walks around the immediate area while Anna dozed. He was always there when she closed her eyes and when she opened them back up again, but she was a very light sleeper, and she nearly always heard the crunch of his boots in the snow as he left.

  Anna didn’t walk when the Swallow Man slept. She liked to watch him. His face in sleep reminded her of the Swallow Man he became when they visited the wetlands. Perhaps it was only the memory of their first night in the hills outside of Kraków, but watching him in that state, witnessing his even, measured sleeping breath, she always felt as if she were closer to seeing into who, precisely, he was.

  It was dark when Anna awoke that night. It was the feet first, crunching the snow, just as the Swallow Man’s had done when he’d left, only now there were more, many, many feet more, and metal brushing lightly against metal with the movement of bodies.

  The Swallow Man had not returned. Out beyond the rocks it was dark. A few voices murmured as the feet tramped by her, but Anna couldn’t make out any specific words or language. She held her breath.

  They had passed her by when it started. She could still hear their feet in the snow, but they were a ways off now, not so near that she feared to breathe.

  The first gunshot was single, from a handgun or rifle, and then there was the sound of a woman screaming.

  There is no way to properly describe this sort of screaming to a person who has never heard it. It’s a sound somehow beyond the limitations of the body that produces it, so harsh and sharp as to seem almost otherworldly, but so animal as to produce in your witnessing body a sort of shadow scream that echoes violently around the inside of your chest. The word for it is not “distress,” or “horror.” Really, there is not an adequate word in any language. The only way to imagine the sound of that sort of screaming is to think of it as the sound produced when the universe rips itself open to let Death come through.

  It was only one person screaming at first, then a ripple of muttering, and then raised voices yelling at the mutterers. Still, Anna couldn’t make out the language. Dogs began to bark, and then gunshots, more and more, quickly, on the heels of one another, and then the screaming and cr
ying multiplied, spreading outward amongst the voices like a contagion.

  Someone was laughing.

  By the end the only sounds were gunshots. They tapered off, until at last there were only intermittent spurts, two or three at a time, correcting any residual life that had been left behind.

  Anna was gripping so hard with her throat, her hand clapped over her mouth, to keep herself from making any noise that she thought her head would burst. Her face, her jaw, her throat, her eyes, all pounded from the squeezing tension. She wanted so badly not to be crying, but she couldn’t stop.

  Anna could hear the soldiers’ boots and their idle conversation tracking back toward her, could smell cigarette smoke stronger and stronger as they approached. The dogs’ collars clinked lightly against their leads.

  “Frightened” does not describe how she felt. Fright is an uncertainty. She was certain that she would shortly die.

  Her footprints were all over the area, and the Swallow Man’s, too, and each set led either to or from the place where she was sitting at that very moment.

  These Bears or Wolves, these animals, they would sniff her out and come and find her, for certain. She was alone.

  She would be found.

  Her mind raced madly, but she couldn’t think of a name to call herself in order to stop them from hurting her, and she had no berries, and outside of her hole, so very near, one of them was laughing. She had followed, as best as she had been able, all the rules and principles and systems that the Swallow Man had laid in place, but no matter how much planning and logic one arms oneself with against the world, still the snow falls, and still your feet mark tracks behind you where you go.

  No amount of theory could have saved her.

  And then she heard it. Somewhere, nearby:

  The swallow’s song.

  Perhaps it was impossible that she would survive, but hearing the song of a bird sung by a man—this introduced to her mind the forgotten notion that impossible things could exist in the world.