Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

  She was trying to get him to lean on her shoulder, which required him to stoop, when Anna hit upon the solution. The umbrella was sturdy and tall, and if he used it like a cane, he could move at speed with a minimum of pain.

  But it was once they got moving that the real troubles began.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the importance of moving quickly—Anna firmly believed that—but she’d lost count of the number of days since he’d ingested anything but beads, and what was more, as they hurried away from the dwór, she could see small droplets of blood stretching out in a trail behind them in the snow, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs. He was losing blood quickly, and no matter the strength of their conviction, it could only be a matter of time before he fell, and when he fell, he very well might never get back up.

  Every passing step felt like a step toward death, but all the same, Anna knew that they couldn’t stop. Even if they found a place to rest, they were still far too close to the dwór to be safe, and regardless of whether they were moving or stationary, there was still, despite it all, a trail of blood that would lead any even marginally industrious pursuer directly to them.

  There was no reason to keep going, except that to stop would be worse.

  Anna was cold, but she walked.

  Anna was tired, but she walked.

  Anna was hungry, but still she walked, unsure that the Swallow Man could continue without her example. She was as certain then as she’d ever been that she was directly facing her own death. And still—Anna walked. It would have been easier than ever just to lie down in the snow and give up, and after two hours’ trek the prospect seemed even more wonderfully seductive.

  Anna could feel the emptiness of her own body.

  It seemed inevitable. There was nothing left inside of her.

  But in the distance, just cresting the horizon, she began to hear and see a small encampment. They were far, far from the battle lines there, but if Anna had had to guess from the way the men were carrying themselves, she would’ve said they were coming back from the front and not going out to it.

  Now Anna had two opposing pieces of information in her head.

  The first was something she knew for a certainty from her own experience: as much as they did anything, German soldiers killed people, and she had no strong sense of when they did it or why.

  The second was something that the Swallow Man had taught her long ago:

  Human beings are the best hope in the world of other human beings to survive.

  Anna did not know for certain that the tall man tottering over his umbrella by her side was, in fact, a human being, any more than she knew with certainty that a given soldier was a human being and not a rabid, feigning Wolf.

  But one thing she did know: there, in that moment, in the dark of that night, she did not like the look of her death. There was no reason—she simply hated the cruelty of the world too much to let it beat her.

  And so Anna made a decision.

  When they were about a hundred yards out from the camp, its reflected light just beginning to illuminate their approaching silhouettes, she whispered aloud, “Fall over, Swallow Man,” and without comment or question, he obliged.

  It must’ve been a field medic or surgeon that stood by the tree, but when she grew close enough to see the bloody splotches that stained his white apron, to see the completely red hands and forearms that lifted his cigarette to his lips, all Anna could remember was what the Swallow Man had taught her:

  Anyone wearing any red at all ought to be avoided. The dukes and captains of Wolves and Bears frequently wear red somewhere on themselves.

  One half of Anna was as certain as anything that someone bedecked in so much red as this Wolf could only be a great sovereign, a great emperor of Wolves. Perhaps oddly, perhaps obviously, it was the half of her that was convinced that the Swallow Man was only a human being and not a demon that held this fear, but by the time she’d recognized the blood, it was too late anyhow—the Wolf had already seen her.

  “Please,” said Anna in the finest German she could muster. “Please, sir, my father…”

  The soldier heaved a heavy, put-upon sigh, dragged hard on his cigarette, and followed her out into the snow. It seemed as if it were the most natural thing in the world that a little German girl and her wounded father would come to him for help out of the snow—as if this were the ninth time today it had happened.

  He moved with terrible and practiced ease, injecting the Swallow Man with a syrette of morphine, examining the wound, sprinkling some procoagulant or antibacterial powder over the bleeding, binding it up with a gauze bandage. He sounded bored and tired as he lifted his canteen of water to the Swallow Man’s lips and spoke.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood. Hopefully, the bleeding will stop soon, but he really ought to be in bed. Danzig’s not far. You should be able to find him a room there. Eventually that bullet will need to come out, but for now just get him to bed.”

  Many people talk about the sort of desensitization to human suffering that must’ve been necessary for the Germans to have killed as many as they did during that war, and surely they are correct—dehumanization opened the gates to thousands and millions of evil acts—but Anna and the Swallow Man benefited from the phenomenon that night. In its absence neither of them might have survived.

  The soldier was only doing what he’d done a hundred times before—treating the wound and ignoring the man.

  It would be easy to dismiss the virtue of his help in this way, to say that he was only acting like a cog in his machine, just like the rest of the German mechanism in those days, simply following his training—except that he stopped halfway to his encampment, and, turning, he jogged back to hand Anna a small, thick, rectangular paper package, inside of which there was a thick chocolate wafer.

  He didn’t speak.

  He didn’t smile.

  He turned and went back to his camp again.

  This time Anna gave the Swallow Man all of the chocolate, and he finished it alone.

  —

  It was morning by the time they made Danzig, which is the German name for Gdańsk. The night had been long, and Anna had struggled to make her feet carry her forward. Staring at that German encampment, she had made a decision—to get help not simply so that they might survive until the morning, but so that they two would live. As long as they could. That neither the Swallow Man nor his daughter would die.

  Anna never abandoned that conviction up until the very end of her life.

  She knew there would be food in Gdańsk, and she knew they could get their hands on it one way or another. If they had to eat scraps and garbage, they would. No one will ever go hungry in a city on the sea if he or she can forget the word “dignity.” That was one need taken care of.

  Anna also knew there would be medicine somewhere in the city, and that if ever her Swallow Man were to regain himself, he would need that medicine. But she didn’t know what kind of medicine would help.

  Psychosis and opiates are, however, a potent mix, and with the Swallow Man under the influence of the morphine, any direct inquiry she made earned her not the simple name of a pharmaceutical that she might request from the proper apothecary, but rather an elaborate tale designed to explain that Boruta did not take pills, that instead, three times a day, in order to gain mastery over the secrets of fire, he swallowed the shrunken eggs that were produced in the mating between the phoenix and the żar-ptak, the firebird, brought to him by a baron amongst the hummingbirds as tribute for a good turn he had once done them long, long ago. Under any other circumstance Anna would’ve gladly embraced this story as a thing of filigreed beauty, but all she wanted now was the name of a drug, and by no means would he tell it to her or even admit that he required any.

  They found an alleyway in Gdańsk, truly so narrow that it might not even have merited that name. It was a gap between two stone buildings, one red and one gray, and the ground was littered with so much detritus that Anna could hardly imagi
ne anyone had been there before them for decades. No one other than a child or a man as unnaturally spindly as the Swallow Man could have fit into the space.

  They ate what, to them, felt like a feast—so much, in fact, that Anna vomited and kept going—though it was hardly the size of a light meal, and all of it harvested from trash heaps and gutters. Anna could scarcely move for the pain in her belly that day, and needless to say, the Swallow Man showed no sign of movement other than his low, steady, animal breath.

  When she recovered herself, Anna began to wonder what she might do next. Certainly, they might stay where they were for several days more, recover their strength before moving on again, so long as they made little noise, but there was still the problem of the Swallow Man’s medicine. She couldn’t understand any way forward without it—not any way that could lead to a place she wanted to go.

  So she resolved: she would not leave Gdańsk with any Swallow Man other than the one that had taken her out of Kraków.

  She would find him medicine.

  It was a desperate plan, entirely harebrained, but at the time it was all that Anna could think of: she would find a pharmacy and she would break in by night and she would look amongst all the medicines, and anything that remotely resembled the small, round white pills she had become accustomed to seeing the Swallow Man take, she would bring back.

  This led her, on two counts, to the Swallow Man’s bag. First, she needed as much room to carry things inconspicuously as she could muster, and if she emptied the Swallow Man’s bag, she could bring back many more bottles than she might if all she had to rely upon was her two hands. More bottles meant more possible successes.

  It had also occurred to her that if she was going to wander the city streets after dark with a laden bag, it would not be unintelligent for her to carry a knife.

  When she had tucked it into her waistband (she did not mind taking it from the Swallow Man because she knew that at the small of his back he still had his revolver), Anna set about emptying the bag.

  In their hurry to vacate the dwór, Anna had failed to recover everything that the Swallow Man had taken out of his bag to begin with. His clothes were there, and his identity documents, and, thank goodness, the knife had been as well, but what remained of the cigarette collection was missing, as were the whetstone, the shattered mirror, the tin cup….

  The bag was nearly empty when she came upon it—only the spilled box of ammunition and the baby shoe remained floating at the bottom as it came up in her hand: the small brown glass bottle, now empty, in which the Swallow Man had kept his cache of pills.

  “Ohhh,” said the Swallow Man, giggling like a child. “You caught me.” It was the first thing he’d said since they’d crossed into Gdańsk, and the third and final time that Anna heard the Swallow Man laugh.

  On the bottle, in a loose German hand, was written, “Potassium iodide, 130 mg, taken orally three times daily, if you want to keep your wits about you.”

  —

  If the German surgeon had not helped them, Anna would likely never have been so emboldened. But then, if the German surgeon had not helped them, they would likely never have made it to Gdańsk.

  It was not hard for Anna to find a pharmacy—there were several—but she took pains to find the one that seemed most prosperous, and this was a mistake on her part. Prosperity in time of war is rarely the mark of the scrupulous.

  It was cold and clean and bright inside, and Anna quickly made another mistake—she spoke German.

  “I’m sorry, sir, to bother you—”

  “What is it?” His German was not refined, nowhere near the clipped, educated level of Anna’s own. His language was clearly Polish. She had missed the mark. She had spoken first.

  “My father,” said Anna. “He’s very sick. He needs medicine.”

  The pharmacist did not seem at all impressed by this, but he did stop what he was doing to turn and face her. He let out a heavy sigh. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Anna was not sure how to answer this question, so she said, “Potassium iodide. A hundred thirty milligrams. He needs many.”

  The pharmacist raised his eyebrows. “Potassium iodide! This is not a common thing.”

  Anna’s heart leapt into her throat. If it was uncommon and this finest of the pharmacies in Gdańsk did not have any, could she be sure of finding it anywhere? “Do you have any?”

  The pharmacist sighed again and crossed his arms. “I do. But it is expensive.”

  Anna began, quietly, to panic. She had forgotten all of the Swallow Man’s rules. She had spoken first, she had asked for a thing instead of allowing a friend to discover her need, and furthermore, she was now locked into a transactional relationship.

  “I—I,” she stuttered, “I have no money.” It was true.

  The pharmacist frowned. “A shame for your father.”

  Now there was no way back. Now there was no becoming an endearing friend. Now Anna was only herself. Her stomach pinched and squirmed as if it wanted, of its own volition, to flee the pharmacy.

  “But, sir,” she said. “Sir, he’ll die.”

  “Without potassium iodide?” said the pharmacist. “I doubt it. He might suffer, but I can’t imagine he’d die.”

  “But I don’t want him to suffer.”

  The pharmacist raised his eyebrows again, and after a tight, silent moment, he said, “Come with me.”

  It was never an offer, never couched in terms of something that she might accept or reject. He simply said, “Come with me.”

  It happened very quickly, but it felt interminable.

  He was a very handsome man, the pharmacist, and it was unlikely that he ever had much trouble getting what he wanted from grown ladies, but in fact, perhaps this lack of trouble contributed; it was the gaining of mastery, the overcoming of trouble—it was the getting of the thing, the Anna—that paid the pharmacist.

  His back room was dusty and unswept. The walls were made of coarse red brick, which was nowhere to be seen in the front of his composed shop.

  It was exceedingly cold.

  There was a chair, old and battered and makeshift, in which he sat, and he put a clear glass bottle—large, full of small, round white tablets—on the floor in front of him.

  He never touched her, never rose from his chair, only spoke and instructed, and Anna did what he asked.

  He was the first person ever to see her body bare.

  She was cold, and she held herself for the sake of warmth, but he instructed her to stand uncovered, and so she did.

  He told her to take and hold certain positions so that he might see her display certain portions of her body, and she did what he asked.

  He did not touch himself while she was there, and he did not touch Anna, either, though when he had her facing away from him, she was afraid that he would. He did not threaten, or berate, or bully.

  He asked her to do things, and she did them.

  You should not misunderstand—Anna was a child, and he was an adult. He held the responsibility. But she was a child who knew how to survive. She was a child who knew that adult-sized animals were not always good, ought not always to be trusted. And she was a child with a knife hooked over the waistband of her skirt.

  She took the knife off of her body the same as she did her skirt.

  She did the things he asked her to do.

  Anna had had no instruction or preparation. She knew that her body had been changing. She knew that there were differences between bodies, and that some men wanted the kind of thing that she had. She knew that it felt powerful and frightening and dark and bright and cold and sharp when they did, in the way that vodka feels warm in your belly while your fingers remain freezing.

  He saw her, without any stories to protect her.

  He saw her, and for the first time in years, she could not help being Anna.

  She cried, of course. Not while it was happening, nor when he rose and told her quietly to take her pills and get out, nor even in the bright light of
the front room as he hurried her toward the door, or the white daylight of the street as she struggled to pull the last of her clothing back on, but finally, blocks later, holding the cold glass bottle against her chest, the knife pressing against her hip. She did not cry for long, but she cried.

  She quickly came to wish that the thing that had happened in the back room of the pharmacy never had.

  But she never came to regret it. She had gotten the potassium iodide.

  Anna had expected that the pills would work like magic, that instantaneously, when the first tablet passed the Swallow Man’s lips, he would return to her, collected and orderly and tall, the way he had always been.

  But that is not the way the world works.

  She sat with him in the narrow space between the buildings. It was weeks before he began to return to himself, and that period was the worst in Anna’s entire time with him.

  They were still.

  Though she would not have been able to tell you so at the time, Anna had broken a part of herself like a piggy bank to pay the pharmacist’s price, and it felt to her as if she had already failed to uphold her vow: perhaps the Swallow Man was coming back to life, but it felt very much to her like his daughter was dead and buried. The pharmacist had shown her Anna, and she could not find the way back from her.

  This is what Anna did not know:

  Notwithstanding what she felt, the daughter of the Swallow Man was not dying or dead. In fact, she was hatching, pushing herself up out of her egg, the egg made of shards of porcelain piggy bank, for the very first time.

  At least the Swallow Man did not resist his medicine.

  Winter was beginning to break when his mind returned. She must’ve been scampering about the city periodically, collecting scraps for their consumption, but in her mind all that Anna did in those weeks was sit near him where he lay on the ground, and wait, and remember.

  It was out of this slow, unending stillness that he spoke.

  “Anna,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  It always surprised Anna, the way that one moment a person could be completely calm, and the next, like a stab wound, like a spasm, she could be crying.