The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  The first rule of swimming, he had told her, was to stay afloat. He had demonstrated by lying back in the water, buoyed by the warm currents on the surface.

  The first time he let go, she went under and came up coughing water, but the second time her hair spread out on the surface like the sudden blooming of a flower, and she smiled. “It’s like flying,” she told him happily as they walked home.

  News of the drowned women reached his mother before he did. “What is it?” she asked frantically when he burst into the kitchen. She took his pale face in her hands. “What did you see?”

  He wanted only to hide in some dark corner of the house, but instead she hurried him to the chapel that was halfway to the Peak, dragging him along so quickly that they were breathless when they reached its doors. They knelt before an oil painting of the Virgin Mary, and although his mother usually prayed quietly, on that day he could hear each word of her lamentations.

  He reached out and grabbed a handful of her dark skirt. Without pausing in her prayer, or even looking at him, she took his fist into her warm hand.

  He discovered that his sister was a fearless diver, and together they explored the ledge that separated Rosmarina’s shallows from the open sea. Beyond it was a sharp drop where the water turned inky and cold, and although their grandfather had warned him against going so far from shore, they returned there on dive after dive. Sometimes, holding hands, they allowed the currents to sweep them over so that they had to kick furiously until the ledge was beneath them once again and they could go back to taunting the open sea from safety.

  He taught each of his sisters, then his children. He taught his granddaughters, one after the other. He wanted to teach his wife, but she was part of that modest generation and claimed that she did not wish to learn.

  “What if something happens?” he wanted to know.

  But she rarely left the island and was content with dry land. “What’s going to happen?” she asked him in amusement, telling him that she was too old to learn new tricks and that he should concentrate his efforts on the young.

  Both their children took to the water like fish, but Marin was more cautious than his younger sister, coaxing Ana to stay close to the shore. “If you drift out too far,” he told her reasonably, “you’ll get swept out into the Channel.”

  Luka had also warned his daughter not to go past the shelf, but the girl was stubborn, and one day he looked up to discover her floating far from the shore. He panicked because strange tides began where the seafloor dropped off, and he had seen sharks in the deep water.

  It was the only time that Luka spanked her, dragging her from the water by her arm, her mouth open in shock. For the duration of the punishment she was silent, and it was Marin who pleaded with him. But he shook the boy off, and it was only when her brother stumbled and fell that she burst into tears.

  Afterwards, shame overwhelmed Luka, and he took a crying child in each arm, wading back into the shallows with them. He looked down to see a thin, red ribbon in the water and realized that he had bloodied one of Marin’s knees.

  He could not stand the look of fear that was in their eyes.

  The jugo has blown for several days. Warm and sallow, it stirs up the detritus of the sea and brings it into Rosmarina’s shallows. The waves move in long rows from the south and crash against the shore like an assault by lines of endless infantry. In the morning, the rocks will be covered with seaweed and rotting pine branches, soda bottles and plastic bags.

  His father’s drinking was always especially bad during the jugo, so that from an early age Luka took it as a bad omen. None of the islanders are themselves when the wind blows. His wife becomes melancholy and his daughter uncharacteristically silent. Magdalena becomes irritable, and Jadranka grows angry over nothing at all. Those are always the days when motors refuse to start or glass breaks without reason.

  But tonight the wind has brought an unsettling clarity, and it is like reaching the surface for a breath of air. He can neither move nor speak, but he watches his wife’s still profile from the corner of his left eye. He cannot untangle one day from the next.

  He did not like Ana’s new boyfriend from Split. He did not like the man’s eyes, his way of speaking, and he initially refused to relinquish his granddaughters to their mother’s care. “Use your head for once,” he told her angrily. “The girls are used to life here. Come back and make a life with them on the island.”

  But they were her daughters, she told him, and it was her right.

  At seven Jadranka was too young to understand. She was a girl who laughed easily and found her way into everything: her grandmother’s pots and pans, the shed in the courtyard. Luka had caught her trying to uncover the cistern. “I only wanted to see what was underneath,” she told him, sniffling, after he shouted at her.

  Why does he prefer to use the silver line for fishing, she wanted to know, and not the white? Why are there figs at the beginning of summer and at the end of summer, but very few in the middle? Why do islands stay in one place and not move around like boats?

  But she never wondered why she was leaving.

  At least he could teach her to swim before she went. At least he could do that much.

  Up to that point, she had refused to learn, and he thought he knew the reason. Two years earlier a child visiting from the mainland had drowned in Rosmarina’s waters. While Magdalena took the news in stride, Jadranka developed an immediate fear of the sea, waking some nights to the belief that her hair had caught in something and was holding her underwater. She refused lessons the summer she turned five, then again at six, shivering in his arms, and would not relax her stranglehold around his neck when he insisted that she try. Both years his wife had told him, “Patience, Luka. She’ll learn when she’s ready.”

  The summer before his granddaughters’ departure, he enlisted Magdalena’s help, because Jadranka would follow her older sister anywhere, and they spent hours in the shallows. He showed Jadranka how to float, how to tread water, how to take a few strokes. He was trying to cheat time because her mother did not see the importance of this instruction.

  “When we get to Split, they’ll probably teach her in school,” Ana said indifferently.

  Magdalena floated on the other side, shouting words of encouragement. She showed her sister how to do handstands in the water, how to flip forward and backward. She was a motion of arms and legs, and the dark, slick hair of her head resembled a porpoise’s skin.

  Jadranka tried to spin but came up coughing water. It would be a while before she mastered the somersaults, Luka thought, but she was a proficient floater, and he was satisfied. He picked her up and held her so that her legs kicked above the surface and water poured from her in sheets.

  The girls were inseparable. At night he could hear them whispering together in their room.

  “You must continue looking out for one another now,” he told them solemnly, as autumn drew near.

  To this end he had told them stories of his own escapades with Vinka. Those tales were his granddaughters’ favorites, so that they asked for them by name. Again and again he described sawing their parents’ bed in half, their clandestine swimming lessons, the way they shared everything.

  “Tell us again, Dida,” they begged, “about the asps.”

  And so, for the hundredth time, he told them of the warning system that Vinka had devised, the way of hanging laundry a certain way. If a sheet was first on the line, he could come home, but if any article of clothing hung in that position, his father had been drinking and Luka needed to stay away.

  “Two nights,” he told his wide-eyed granddaughters. “For two nights we hid out on the Peak, afraid, because it was autumn and the asps come out in autumn. The nights were freezing cold but Vinka refused to leave me, and so we huddled together with the goats.”

  “What would have happened if you went home?” one or the other always asked.

  “Ajme,” he would tell them gravely. “I don’t like to consider it.”
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br />   For two nights Luka and Vinka had slept side by side beneath constellations so bright that brother and sister could see the features of the other’s face. “I’ll kill him one day,” he had sworn, although he did not tell his granddaughters this part.

  He readily narrated the fates of his other sisters: Zora, who died as a young woman in an accident on a foggy stretch of road; Zlatka, who passed away peacefully in her sleep as an old woman. And Iva, who died of cancer a year after Zlatka. But when talking about Vinka, he confined his stories to their childhood adventures.

  He suspected that these tales were the reason the sisters disappeared from the house on the morning they were supposed to leave the island, missing the morning ferry and postponing their departure by a day.

  Ana looked for them beneath beds and in the courtyard’s shed. She searched all the cupboards and closets, and the expression on her face turned from bafflement to irritation. “I told Nikola we’d be back today,” she kept repeating, looking at her father as if it were his fault, as if he had been the one to suggest they run away.

  “They don’t want to go,” he finally told her. “Imagine what life in Split will look like after this?” He gestured towards the lane where cars seldom passed and to the waterfront where every shopkeeper and fisherman knew the girls by name.

  It was Magdalena, he realized. Magdalena who had gone to bed last night with that betrayed expression on her face. “I don’t want to go, Dida,” she had whispered.

  They discovered that the girls had taken their schoolbags, emptying paper and pens in a pile on the desk in their room. Ružica reported a short time later that bread and cheese had been pilfered from the pantry, along with a box of Jadranka’s favorite biscuits. They had taken water, as well, and candles from the box on the washroom shelf, and secretly he marveled at Magdalena’s resourcefulness.

  He found them some hours later in a deserted house beneath the Peak, Jadranka grinning at him happily from where she sat cross-legged on the floor, eating her biscuits in the midst of this adventure. But Magdalena backed away from him into a corner of the room.

  “Come, child.” He held his hand out to her, heavyhearted.

  “No,” she told him evenly.

  Her refusal saddened him, not because it was insolent but because it would change nothing. A quick-witted girl, she had been as much his shadow as Jadranka was hers. Since she could walk, she had been fascinated by boats of every variety, missing no opportunity to accompany him when he went fishing. She could recite the names of fish, their feeding patterns, the likelihood of encountering them in shoals or in the deep.

  “What will I do in Split?” she had asked him miserably.

  At eleven, her contemporaries were already wearing makeup and simpering at boys, but other fishermen observed Magdalena’s proficiency with nets and the lightning speed with which she could scale a fish. “She’s worth her weight in gold,” they told him. “So what if she’s a girl?”

  When they were at their fishing camp on the Devil’s Stones, her sister occupied her time by weaving rosemary into wreaths or building small structures with rocks, entire colonies for a race of invisible, three-inch men. But Magdalena was at his side constantly, and years after his son’s escape he poured his knowledge into this second eager vessel.

  He was tempted to return and tell their mother that he had not found them, to allow her to return to Split alone, but he knew that this would only postpone the inevitable, and through the window he could see that night was already falling. “Come,” he told her again. “You can do better than the life of a fisherman.”

  He had spoken halfheartedly of the better schools in Split, of the city’s illustrious history. But she burst into tears at his words, and he only managed to lure her down with the promise of one more swimming lesson in the morning, Jadranka lying on the surface between them as if they alone could make her float.

  Rosmarina had always existed, he told them in his stories, although he knew this could hardly be true. He was not an educated man, but he understood that land rose upward into mountains only to be scraped down again by wind and rain. Tundras melted and froze over, entire seas dried up into deserts. Still, he let them think that Rosmarina had existed since the dawn of time.

  It was the farthest inhabited island from the mainland. The journey took five hours, but he could remember a time when Rosmarina was remoter still, before automobiles and daily ferry connections, when a trip to Split was like striking out into a different country. Now the mainland drew them ever closer, as if it had caught Rosmarina on a hook and was reeling it steadily in.

  He was often returning from night fishing as the ferry slipped out of the harbor towards the open sea. He watched its illuminated bulk from his fishing boat, imagining the hull filled with the island’s children, all lying head-to-toe in stacks like canned sardines. The problem, he thought, was that they had watched too much television and believed in softer lives in other places.

  “As if we’re bleeding to death, my Lena,” he told his elder granddaughter on nights she accompanied him, the ferry lights spectral on her young face.

  He himself went to Split on the same ferry several times a year. So, really, he knew the passengers did not lie head-to-toe in stacks like sardines. He made the trip when he needed to buy fishing equipment or when Ružica needed something for the house. She packed his lunch—a sandwich and some hardboiled eggs—and he drove his ancient Fiat onto the floating monster. Each time his wheels relinquished the stone pier of the island for the rumbling metal loading plank, he panicked and had to concentrate on keeping his hands on the steering wheel. The episodes had only worsened with age.

  Sometimes he grew angry with himself. He asked himself, a little viciously, What is it that you fear, stupid old man? And the answer had not changed in twenty years or more. He saw it in the eyes that watched him from the rearview mirror: I fear death away from the island.

  Part of him believed he might die on the boat, or in Split. He was afraid that the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes would be Rosmarina receding behind him, or, worse, the filthy water along Split’s riva from where the island could not be seen even on the clearest days. In fact, he knew that it could not be seen from any point in the city because decades ago, returning from the Second World War, he and Vinka had climbed Marjan Mountain to see for themselves. Rosmarina was so far out to sea as to be wholly invisible, a state of affairs that pleased him when he was home and frightened him when he was not. In a recurring nightmare he’d had since the war, he was returning from the mainland in his own boat, but the island had vanished. He crossed the space where it should be, oriented himself using the other islands, and recrossed it. But the island had disappeared.

  On the ferry journey back, he usually bought coffee. In good weather, he found a bench outside and watched the other islands slip by like pebbles through his fingers. First Brač and Šolta, then Hvar, then Vis and Lastovo on opposite sides in the distance. In summertime billowing sails dotted the sea, and he watched their graceful dips and turns. He looked around him, noting that there usually seemed to be fewer passengers on the return.

  Rosmarina always appeared in the distance like a mirage, the Peak like a titan’s head breaking the surface of the water. As they drew closer, he could make out the town and the abandoned olive groves on the terraces beneath the Peak. Like all neglected things, the trees had mutinied. Many had stopped producing fruit because they were not pruned, and because the weeds at their feet sucked all the moisture from the soil. Logically, he knew this, but he could not help thinking that the trees had stopped producing out of anger. Because there were no hands left to pick the olives.

  These dark thoughts usually accompanied him on his drive home from the ferry landing. Inside the house, however, he always found warmth and the smell of soup, the girls doing their schoolwork at the kitchen table or helping Ružica slice cucumbers.

  If Luka’s dominion was water, then his wife’s was air, and Ružica was teaching Magdalena
to pray. She showed the girl how to place her palms together, to point her fingers to the sky, just as she had once shown their son and daughter.

  “In the beginning was the sea,” Magdalena told her grandmother confidently one evening as he was coming in.

  Ružica laughed at this, looking over the girl’s head at Luka, who was hanging his jacket behind the door.

  “That’s not how it goes,” she told her, and showed her in the Bible. “In the beginning was the Word.”

  But each time Magdalena began, she got it wrong. “In the beginning was the sea,” she said, so that Luka’s heart expanded, exactly as wind filled a white sail. “And the sea was God.”

  Chapter 5

  It was not easy to say goodbye to her grandfather’s unconscious form, so still at dawn that Magdalena wondered if he had died in the night. But when she placed the flat of her palm on his chest, she could feel its incremental rise and fall.

  She was leaving because there was still no word from her sister. No matter how abrupt her previous departures, Jadranka had always confided her movements to Magdalena, telephoning from a bus station or ferry terminal and leaving it to her older sister to break the news to their grandparents. “I’ll always tell you,” Jadranka had once assured her.

  “So, I’m your keeper,” Magdalena told her a little testily.

  “Yes,” Jadranka had responded automatically, with no trace of guile.

  She had never vanished altogether, until now.

  “Of course you should come,” Katarina told her. “We know people in the State Department who can rush your visa. And I can send the money for your ticket.”