The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  You asked about my cat, Marvin. I have sad news. He wandered off some time ago, and he has never come home since. We don’t know what happened to him, whether a car got him or if he found another home. It’s been a long time now.

  Magdalena stared at these words over her grandfather’s shoulder.

  “I thought her cat’s name was Lola,” she said.

  But she realized her mistake when her grandfather bent forward over the table like a man in physical pain: there was no cat named Marvin. Only an uncle who had disappeared somewhere down the rabbit hole of America.

  A small white rectangle had fallen out of the envelope onto the kitchen table, and she picked it up to find a picture of her grinning cousin. Light brown hair was feathered back from a heart-shaped face, and she wore braces, but her eyes were small and hard. Piggy eyes, Magdalena decided suddenly, hating this cousin who had lost her uncle.

  She ran from the house, not even waiting for her sister, who was playing in the courtyard and called after her. She ran so that her sandals slapped the street with whiplike sounds, and did not stop even when she reached the dirt road that ascended the Peak. The town fell away behind her, and she had the sensation, for a moment, that she was flying, her feet nothing but motion and dust. Evening was falling, and somewhere far below her a man called out a name that was not hers, nor her sister’s. The sound made her run faster, upward through the fallow olive groves to where the abandoned houses sat upon the hill.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Although it had been over sixty years since the occupation—and more than four thousand miles separated her from Rosmarina—Nona Vinka was convinced that the reprisal would take place that afternoon. A few unlucky souls would be rounded up in the village and taken to the Devil’s Stones, just beyond Rosmarina’s harbor. The distant crack of gunshots would break the hushed silence of the riva, and then those same rowboats would return without their cargo, the oarsmen unable to meet the eyes of the few who waited there. This was why she had ordered her American grandson to hide beneath her bed.

  She sat above him, so tiny that the mattress did not sag beneath her weight and her feet barely touched the floor. She was crocheting something, a cream-colored length that grew steadily in her hands as Jadranka observed her from the doorway. On the television across the room, a woman with very white teeth was advertising something: a bar of American soap, perhaps, or breakfast cereal. But there was no sound, and the set seemed to function solely as a source of light. Its flickering caught the darting of the crochet hook as it passed in and out of the wool.

  At six, Christopher was still willing to humor his grandmother in a way his older sister, Tabitha, would not. He had wedged himself obligingly beneath the bed and grinned at Jadranka from between Nona Vinka’s slippered feet.

  “Is it fascists or communists this time?” Jadranka asked him, noting that the older woman did not look up at these English words.

  “Fascists,” he told her, although he appeared uncertain. In recent months, his grandmother had regressed into a dialect so thick that he needed his adult cousin to translate. Nonetheless, he understood the insistence of her hands, the way she lifted the coverlet and motioned him into that hiding place, her voice entreating him to be silent.

  Nona Vinka had lived in America since 1977. By all accounts, she used to speak English, something even Christopher’s sister remembered. “Da veels on da bus go rount and rount,” Tabitha would sometimes sing, but the blank expression on the older woman’s face made it clear that she never understood this joke.

  Jadranka wondered if the English words were simply gone, or trapped beneath sludge so thick that they only sometimes made it to the surface. “Apples,” the older woman had surprised them all by saying last week, then proceeded to laugh uproariously at this word. But when Jadranka cut up an apple, removing the skin so that it did not get stuck in Nona Vinka’s dentures, she merely looked perplexed.

  She spent most of her time conversing with her dead sisters, unable to grasp that she and Luka were the last of their siblings to remain. And when Jadranka tried to explain that even her grandfather had suffered a stroke the year before, the older woman only nodded sagely. “Have you seen my brother?” she asked a moment later. “It’s getting dark.”

  But while Luka lay insensate on Rosmarina, Nona Vinka had become an adroit time traveler. In one moment she was off to tend the goats, and in the next UDBA assassins were lying in wait for her husband in the bushes outside their house.

  It always took Jadranka a moment to catch on to her role; sometimes she was one of Vinka’s sisters, sometimes a childhood friend from the island. It was easier to play along, even as she was observed by those sharp, black eyes but never really seen.

  But today it was clear that the older woman was more terrified than nostalgic, that she had averted her eyes from the figure lurking in the doorway. And so Jadranka walked slowly into the bedroom and sat beside her on the bed. “What are you making?” she asked softly in the island’s dialect.

  The crochet hook stopped in midair. “It’s for the baby,” Vinka said, holding up the rectangular length for Jadranka’s inspection.

  For this anonymous baby, she crocheted day and night. Blankets, booties, caps: she turned out more woolens than a factory, garments that filled brown paper bags and which her daughter donated to charity.

  Jadranka knew nothing about crocheting—had not been patient enough to learn something as simple as sewing on a button, though her grandmother had attempted to teach her several times—but she admired her great-aunt’s even stitching aloud. “That’s very pretty,” she told her.

  The hook began to move again, and Jadranka watched it go in, then out. Beneath the bed, Christopher was so quiet that Jadranka suspected he had fallen asleep. She thought that she could feel his even breath on her ankles.

  After a moment of silence, Nona Vinka shifted beside her on the bed. “Are they gone?” she whispered, her eyes once again avoiding the doorway.

  Jadranka studied that empty space. “They left hours ago,” she assured her.

  Jadranka had arrived in New York in January, when the weather was so raw that her cousin immediately took her shopping for a new winter coat.

  “I have a coat,” Jadranka protested.

  But Katarina only looked skeptically at the three-year-old peacoat Jadranka had brought with her. “That will let the wind go right through you,” she said, browsing the coat racks in Saks Fifth Avenue. “And the stuff they make over there is shitty quality.”

  She selected a down-filled coat that reached past Jadranka’s knees, then tied the belt so tightly that it forced the breath from her lungs. When she turned Jadranka to face the store’s mirror, the reflection’s red hair was startling against the charcoal color of the coat. “You’re not on a small island anymore,” Katarina told her softly, resting her chin on the younger woman’s shoulder.

  Jadranka was tempted to point out that she had bought the peacoat in Italy and that winters were cold even on Adriatic islands, but she had already realized that it was useless. In Katarina’s mind they were all trapped in amber on Rosmarina, a place she knew as much from her parents’ descriptions as from a single childhood trip in 1984.

  The cousins had not seen each other in more than twenty years, although they continued to exchange letters. Jadranka and Magdalena had taken turns answering this older American cousin whose details of slumber parties and ice-skating classes were as remote to them as life on Mars.

  Last year, it was that distant correspondent who boldly suggested that Jadranka come to America. It will be good for everyone involved, Katarina had written, their exchange of letters having outlasted communism. You’ve always wanted to travel and this way the children can practice their Croatian which, I warn you, is terrible.

  This was not false modesty, Jadranka discovered upon arrival. Christopher and Tabitha paid no attention to tense or case. They drawled through vowels and swallowed the ends of all their sentences. It c
learly bothered their mother, but their father was an American who understood next to nothing of his wife’s native tongue, and so they had grown up primarily in English.

  Jadranka did not point out that Katarina’s Croatian was also rusty. Her family had emigrated before her fifth birthday, and today there was an antiquated quality to the way she spoke, her vocabulary trapped in the time warp of her parents’ generation. She speaks like someone’s grandma, Jadranka told her sister in a letter, feeling guilty as she wrote the words because it was clear that their cousin felt cheated of the island.

  “It was easier for you and your sister,” Katarina had told her, not long after her arrival. “At least you knew your places in the world.”

  But it was precisely because Jadranka was not sure of her place in the world that she had agreed to come. Most other women of twenty-seven—at least the ones she knew on Rosmarina—were wives and mothers. They cut recipes from the pages of magazines and were already making costumes for school pageants. While such domesticity left her cold, Jadranka could not escape the feeling that she was missing something. She did nothing more than drift from one job to the next, alternately typing letters or putting dresses on mannequins, sometimes on Rosmarina, but more frequently on the mainland, where she had grown accustomed to her anonymity. Most of her possessions—except for her paintings—could be packed into a few cardboard boxes, and she had never felt the slightest inclination to get married.

  The problem, as she saw it, was that nobody had yet demonstrated a viable alternative for how to live. Her grandmother, though happy in her marriage of many decades, belonged to a generation as different from Jadranka’s as the earth is from the sky. She lived only to cook and feed her flock. To mend. To clean. To tend her garden. By contrast, Jadranka’s mother considered herself a modern woman. But she had been miserable since her second husband abandoned her, and she would sometimes inform Jadranka that a woman without a man was nothing. “What’s wrong with you and your sister?” she would demand. “It’s not natural to be alone.”

  Even Magdalena had settled down, in her own fashion. She had adopted a tight schoolteacher chignon and the crisp blouses that Jadranka considered evidence of her capitulation. She slept in the same whitewashed room on Rosmarina that the sisters had once shared, a room that Jadranka found so far removed from reality that it was like entering the set of a film being shot about their childhood.

  “I don’t know how your sister stays sane living there,” Katarina had commented. “Of all people, I expected her to have larger ambitions.”

  This had annoyed Jadranka, for while she agreed in sentiment, she did not consider her American cousin equipped to understand Magdalena’s choices. Katarina, who had married a rich man and whose maid vacuumed their home with a special machine as efficient as it was noiseless.

  Katarina’s ambitions, on the other hand, were on full display: in her understated designer clothing and expertly cut hair, in the collection of blue glass in her living room and the brocade chairs that, she had twice explained, were upholstered with silk from Assam silkworms, the best and most industrious in the world.

  “You’re more like me,” she had told Jadranka drunkenly one night, at an opening in her gallery where amorphous sculptures copulated on various surfaces. “You understand that life is short.”

  The ephemeral nature of life had not been the reason for Jadranka’s trip to America, however. Nor ambition, nor the limbo of home, although it was true that in the months before her departure she had started to feel like a fish that merely traveled the circumference of its bowl. It was the picture of the empty room that her cousin sent, the bait dangling at the end of Katarina’s hook. No more than ten paces across, it had one window and a wooden floor whose scars Jadranka could make out even in the grainy photograph. It resembled nothing so much as a prison cell, but it took Jadranka’s breath away.

  It’s empty, Katarina had written to her. We’ve only ever used it for storage, but it would make a perfect studio. You’d have plenty of time to do your work. And I can help arrange the visa and pay for your ticket.

  When Jadranka relayed this information to Magdalena, her sister was surprised. “If that’s what you want, we can find something on the island,” she protested. “Why would you go all the way to America for that?”

  Jadranka could already see the wheels in her sister’s head turning, planning to empty one of the rooms at their fishing camp, perhaps, or to find her a room somewhere in the village. “No,” she told her shortly.

  Their cousin’s Manhattan brownstone was large and beautifully furnished, with slate showers and a gigantic stainless steel refrigerator. Paintings by well-known New York artists hung on the walls, and everywhere were silky Persian rugs so large that if they were to rise like the carpet in the story of Aladdin, they would be capable of transporting multitudes. But it was the tiny third-floor studio that was Jadranka’s favorite room, its rough wooden planks now spattered with paint. Blue dots like electric lights extended in a line, and she had tracked crimson footprints into all the room’s corners like the scene of a crime. She went there whenever she could: when the children were in school or in summer camp, or after Katarina and her husband returned in the evenings. Each time she closed the door behind her, she experienced the same weightlessness at being alone.

  Only someone who had spent a lifetime sharing rooms with other people would be capable of understanding it. Not Katarina, who had grown up an only child. Not Tabitha or Christopher, who slept in separate rooms and whose conjoined play area was outfitted with duplicates of everything: bookshelves, beanbags, art supplies so luxurious that they made Jadranka, a grown woman, envious.

  Since Jadranka’s birth, there had always been another person present as she drifted off to sleep: her sister, assorted boyfriends, roommates too numerous to count. Before coming to America, she had been staying with their mother in her one-room apartment in Split, an experiment Magdalena predicted would end in disaster.

  A chain-smoker and world-class snorer, their mother snooped during Jadranka’s absences, sometimes resurrecting items indignantly from the garbage. “There’s nothing wrong with this,” she would say, waving an old nail file or battered shoe when Jadranka returned. Her mother, who professed to find privacy a perplexing notion of the young but who—Jadranka had special reason to know—guarded her own secrets with the ferocity of an attack dog.

  Best of all, Katarina had given her a key for the room, and the space was hers alone.

  Katarina had her own studio on the house’s first floor, although she seldom went there. She had shown it to Jadranka once: a large, airy room with floor-to-ceiling windows that let in radiant light. Chrome lamps hung from the ceiling, and there was a large table of dark wood whose surface was entirely unmarked. It looked, Jadranka had thought in awe, like something from the pages of a magazine.

  Christopher was less fascinated with his mother’s studio than with Jadranka’s narrow, locked room. He thought that something mysterious transpired there, although she had explained about the painting. He did not understand why she could not draw with them at the special table that existed in their play area for just such a purpose. He liked when she sketched his portrait and thought that she must be doing more of the same in that locked room. “Why can’t we watch?” he wanted to know, because he loved this magic trick of making figures rise from the page.

  Nona Vinka thought the room was her mother’s larder, that her father had locked it to keep his children out. “I’m so hungry,” she told Jadranka in a plaintive voice when Jadranka emerged one night to find her great-aunt standing naked in the hallway. “Can’t I have a piece of bread?”

  Jadranka allowed herself to slip in and out of Vinka’s world because she could not see the harm in it. Katarina, she had noticed, was more squeamish. “That was years ago, Mama,” she would insist, only to have Vinka look at her as if she had just announced an invasion of talking locusts.

  Jadranka did the same with Christopher, after all
, alternately playing ogre, space alien, and princess. It was not such a stretch to play Vinka’s mother, to smuggle her a crust of bread.

  But tonight Nona Vinka was fully dressed and crocheting furiously. Christopher was fast asleep beneath the bed, just as Jadranka had suspected, and so she pulled him out and carried him to his own room. He protested for a moment but then dropped off again, his mouth half open. His bedroom resembled the clutter of a toy store, and she left him dreaming in the middle of stuffed bears and dolphins.

  She had left the door to Nona Vinka’s room ajar, and although she wanted nothing more than to go to her studio, she watched the flickering light from the television. No sound came from within, but she knew that she should at least close the door. That, otherwise, the old woman would sit there in rigid terror all night, believing the hallway filled with ghosts.

  But this time when Jadranka stood in the doorway, Nona Vinka regarded her with a wan smile. “Hello, dear,” she said. “I can’t seem to find my cigarettes.”

  These lucid moments no longer surprised Jadranka. She had always thought of dementia as a permanent destination, but now she understood that her great-aunt made the occasional return flight.

  Katarina did not like anyone to smoke inside the house—least of all her mother—but Jadranka did not have the heart to refuse her. She crossed the room to open Nona Vinka’s window and lit one of her own. When she handed it over, careful that none of the ash landed in the bed, her aunt drew on it and smiled.

  “And my spectacles?”

  The glasses were on the bureau, folded neatly atop a Croatian Bible whose gold lettering was so faded that Jadranka could see the grain of the leather underneath. “Bring the album, as well,” Vinka said as the younger woman picked them up.