The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  He worried about what it might mean, although he did not press her for an explanation. He continued to imagine a jealous boyfriend, someone who was lying in wait for her should she return. He had witnessed such incidents himself. In his youth one of their neighbors had beaten his wife with such regularity that his mother had secretly bought her a ferry ticket back to her parents on the mainland.

  “She doesn’t seem the type,” Luz told him doubtfully. “Look at how she is with Hector.”

  His headwaiter—impervious to the charms of other women and, in truth, a bit of a snob—was now smitten with the young, red-haired woman. He watched her pass from dining room to kitchen, from bar to hostess station. His eyes followed her through the mirror behind the bar like the pining subject of a Cuban song.

  Jadranka did not appear to notice when he trailed after her. She teased him, but subtly and without cruelty, which only made him redouble his efforts, one day leaving a red carnation in the pocket of the backpack she hung in the office. The busboys sniggered at this act, which might have remained anonymous had one of them not opened the door at that very moment.

  All that evening the restaurant’s staff was abuzz with the story that played out before them, watching both the lovelorn Hector, who appeared not to care that he had been found out, and the expressionless Jadranka. Each time the office door opened, the restaurant held its collective breath, but halfway through the evening, the same busboy reported, the flower had disappeared from the backpack’s pocket and was no longer anywhere in evidence.

  Until closing, it was clear that Hector awaited her reaction. He searched Jadranka’s face. He followed her to the kitchen door, then nearly collided with her when she emerged with a tray of food. She smiled at him a little sympathetically, stepping around him in the next moment.

  “The women from your country are a mystery,” he told Marin in disappointment as he left that night.

  She had few possessions, as far as Marin could tell: the backpack and a small suitcase that she kept zipped in the corner of the office. Luz had brought her a sleeping bag from home, and each morning it was neatly folded at the end of the couch.

  “I’ve found a place to stay,” she announced on the morning after Hector’s flower.

  “With a friend?” he asked.

  “Something like that.”

  And although he was relieved—it was technically illegal for her to continue sleeping at the restaurant—the vagueness of her answer bothered him.

  “Do you trust this friend?” he pressed.

  She looked surprised at the question. “Yes,” she told him. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  It was because she could not be running from politics that Marin cast her unknown hunter in the shape of a man. He was not conscious of his own chauvinism in this regard, and would have been alarmed to hear his theory characterized as paternalistic. His intentions were good, even if his vision was limited.

  But her eyes widened when he asked her outright. “What makes you think I’m running from anything?” she asked him.

  “It’s as clear as the nose on your face,” he told her.

  She was folding white napkins into flowers, and for a moment her nimble hands slowed over the half blossom in front of her. “Well, it’s certainly not a man.”

  “No?” he asked uncertainly.

  “The day I run from any man is the day that gravity reverses itself.”

  He swallowed. “I’m glad.”

  Her eyes traveled to the family photograph that sat behind the bar, then back to the pile of folded napkins she had amassed to one side. “Your sons are lucky to have a father as protective as you,” she told him. “Everyone should be so lucky.”

  He felt a sudden sharpness in his chest at her words. “You weren’t?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “But don’t feel sorry for me. My sister nearly poisoned our stepfather. He’s lucky he got out with his life.”

  A smile pulled at the corners of Jadranka’s mouth, so that he did not know whether to believe her.

  “It was her job to make his sandwiches for work, and she put rat poison in them.”

  “You’re joking, surely.”

  “No.”

  He watched the top of her head, the way she matched up the corners of the linen, folding and rolling so that she reminded him of the women he had seen working in Caribbean cigar factories.

  “What about your own father?” Marin asked. “Where was he in all of this?”

  Her hands had regained their momentum, and now they made him think of a musician’s, the long, tapered fingers making a stringed instrument sing. But she did not answer.

  She was not a musician, but one day she showed Luz the sketchbook she carried in her backpack, the renderings of subway passengers and of nannies on benches in Central Park. There were pictures of the children she had taken care of. One, a little boy, looked out from the page with a near-radiant expression of adoration.

  “What happened?” he overheard Luz ask. “Why did you leave?”

  But Jadranka only mumbled something halfheartedly about wages.

  There were also pictures of the restaurant. Of Marin standing behind the bar and talking to his customers, of Hector in his apron and Luz sampling something from the stove. There were pictures of the young men who worked in the kitchen, the delivery boys, the customers.

  “These are good,” Marin said, looking over his wife’s shoulder. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  But Jadranka only shrugged. “It’s just a hobby,” she told him.

  “It should be more than a hobby,” Luz told her, looking carefully at each of the pages. When she had reached the last, she asked, “Do you think you could draw something for us?”

  Jadranka’s expression was cautious.

  “What do you call it?” Luz turned to her husband, then answered her own question with a snap of her fingers: “A commission.”

  Marin smiled inwardly at this suggestion, but Jadranka looked taken aback. “A picture of the restaurant?” she asked.

  Luz waved her hand. “What do we need a picture of the restaurant for when we’re standing right here?” She looked at her husband. “A picture of your country.”

  Marin shifted uncomfortably. “We can’t ask her to—”

  But Luz cut him off with a glare. “Haven’t you been telling me for years that you don’t have any pictures, loco? Haven’t you been talking to me about the sea, the sky?”

  Marin shrugged.

  “A picture of your country,” she told Jadranka, as if it were decided. As if she were placing their weekly order with the fishmonger. “Can you do that?”

  Jadranka nodded.

  He insisted on giving her money for the supplies.

  “That’s not the way a commission usually works,” she told him.

  “It does this time,” he responded.

  His wife had surprised him with her request, but he could see that she was pleased with the agreement. Jadranka would make some extra money, and Marin would receive something tangible from home.

  “Not from home exactly,” he corrected her. “She’s from the mainland.”

  But Luz waved away this technicality. “You said she’s from the coast.”

  “She is.”

  “Entonces?”

  “It’s a long coast.”

  Luz’s eyes narrowed. “As long as your face?”

  He smiled. “Longer.”

  He had assumed that Jadranka was from Split, but he did not tell his wife that her accent had lately begun to confound him. Slightly, at first. The occasional word he recognized from childhood sneaking in to replace its urban counterpart.

  At first Marin thought he was imagining it. Then he considered the possibility that the language had undergone such a revolution in his absence that words specific to the islands had migrated north. He thought he even recognized inflections similar to Rosmarina’s dialect but ultimately decided that he heard them because he wanted to hear them.

  “You�
�re not from Split,” he told her one day when she was setting tables. “As they say in America, your mustache is slipping.”

  Jadranka’s arm froze in midair, holding a fork.

  “You sound more like a bodul to me.”

  “I’m a lot of things.” She placed the fork carefully on the table.

  “There’s no shame in being from an island,” he said. “I’m from Rosmarina myself.”

  She hesitated. “I’m from Čiovo.”

  This surprised him—the accent that peeked through the city veneer seemed too much a product of the southern islands—but he said nothing to this.

  “I had no father,” she added unexpectedly. “That was difficult on an island.”

  “It’s difficult anywhere,” he conceded. “But especially in a place where people remember everything.”

  “Do you remember everything?”

  She had a knack for this, he had realized. For asking disarming questions with such ease that he always said more than he intended. “Yes,” he admitted. “Everything.”

  It was true. His memory was singularly infallible, able to summon the smallest details. The smell of carob in the sun. The taste of island figs. The sound of the guards’ boots in the corridors, and the way they would always come at night, with other prisoners who were anxious to do their bidding.

  For three long years he had filled bags with gravel from the seafloor, standing up to his hips in water as the sun beat down without respite. He remembered how his skin had blistered and peeled from his face and arms in so many successive layers that it was a surprise to find that there was any skin left underneath at all.

  Today, dark tumors continued to pepper his skin like something molting from the inside. It was his wife who insisted that he see a doctor, a man scarcely older than their sons, who clucked his tongue over the damage, mistakenly assuming that Marin had been a sun worshipper in his youth. Periodically he insisted on cutting those growths from Marin’s face and hands.

  Marin had a standing appointment every six months. Luz always insisted on coming into the examination room to point out the new and ominous additions to the map of her husband’s body, holding his hand as they waited afterwards to pay the receptionist, because Marin found that he could not speak through any of it, could only stand as still and remote as a plaster figure.

  But he showed the starfish on his arm to Jadranka, the one with the many arms and hazy borders. The one that had prompted Luz to make an earlier appointment, only rolling her eyes at Marin’s protests that it was nothing.

  “These are the memories our country gave me,” he told her.

  Aside from her accent, there were other things about Jadranka that unsettled him. There was the fact that she could not produce a passport, telling him that it had been retained by her former employers.

  “That’s illegal,” he told her. “You’ve got to get it back.”

  But when he suggested paying them a visit together, she shied at this idea.

  “You can pay me less,” she told him nervously, after he had already agreed to pay her under the table because of her uncertain visa status.

  He looked at her in shock. “I’m not going to pay you less,” he told her. “But it isn’t right for them to keep it.”

  Then there was the fact that she had searched the drawers of the desk in his office. He had found some papers disturbed, and although there was nothing of value in there—and certainly nothing incriminating—the idea of it troubled him.

  “You’re imagining it,” Luz told him. “What could she possibly be looking for?”

  He did not know, but he grew more reserved in Jadranka’s presence. This stood in marked contrast to Luz, who was developing a soft spot for the girl. “She knows how to work, that one,” she told him.

  But it was when Jadranka began following him like a pale shadow that he understood her to be more than what she seemed.

  At first he thought he was imagining it. He would see the reflection of her face in the window of a shop or passing car, but when he turned she was gone. He sensed her presence once or twice on the way to work, and on the way home. Once, when walking the dog in Prospect Park, he had been certain that she traveled the paths behind him. But when he telephoned the restaurant upon his return home—the dog pushing her wet nose into the palm of his hand—he was told that she had just finished her break.

  “Do you want to speak to her?” Hector had asked.

  But Marin had only muttered something about talking to her later and hung up the phone.

  He sensed her surveillance for several weeks, but it was only one day in Saints Cyril and Methodius Church that she grew sloppy enough to give him proof.

  Despite his lack of faith, he sometimes traveled into Manhattan to visit the Gothic Revival structure on Forty-first Street. He usually went during the week, when the church was nearly empty, when only the first few pews were occupied by a gang of black-clad women whose recitations of the rosary before Mass sounded like weeping, their hymns like wailing.

  He always sat in the back.

  He did not attend regularly and did not know the priests by name. If he happened to attend on a Sunday, he did not gather with the other men on the sidewalk, and he did not drink coffee in the hall behind the church. He did not speak to anyone, and if they had spoken to him, he was not certain how he would have responded. Only rarely did someone stand close enough to him to shake his hand during the Sign of Peace, and he never took Communion.

  He told no one that he attended the occasional Mass. Not even his wife, who had attempted to nurture a certain religious devotion in their sons because she was Cuban of the old school and had never lost her God. She had suggested many times that they go as a family to Mass, but something always held him back.

  “You go,” he would tell her. “I have things to do.”

  He had stood in churches for his children’s baptisms, their First Communions and confirmations. He acquiesced for funerals and weddings, but he could not agree to a standing date with God.

  And it was not embarrassment that made him reticent on the subject, for his wife surely would have understood. He simply did not know how to explain it to her, the way his adult skepticism was the exact inverse of his childhood faith. He did not know how to enunciate the feeling that washed over him once, twice in a season. That longing for rote, familiar words, the songs from his childhood, the responses in his own language. The language that each year died slightly more in him, so that English words flew with greater ease into his speech than Croatian ones.

  But in the church it was as he remembered. My peace I have, my peace I leave you. The way the women in front of him tapped their chests and murmured, “My sin, my sin, my enormous sin”—just as his mother had done—even as he wondered which sins old women like those could possibly commit. And even as he dismissed the mysteries he had long ago discarded, the grown men dressed up in baptismal dresses turning wine into blood.

  It was more than language. It was the song, the voices that were one part melody and two parts tears. And in that church, as in the church of his childhood, the sound tapped at some hollow, secret place in him. It tapped and the door swung open, and the knowledge inside glided slowly out. It usually followed him onto the street afterwards, into the grayness that New York was never entirely without, irrespective of season. So different from the place he had known, an island that matched his heart’s circumference perfectly.

  But on the day he turned in his pew to discover Jadranka disappearing through the church’s front doors, he attained a different form of knowledge. He took it as proof that her appearance in his restaurant was not a matter of chance, and he felt both embarrassment at having been so gullible, and fear.

  He had heard stories about the secret police regrouping after the end of communism—of former UDBA operatives using dossiers for the purpose of blackmail, or even landing on their feet in the new government—but he had never taken them seriously. Now he was not so sure.

  Her questio
ns about his past and the deliberate vagueness of her own biography had long troubled him. Sitting in the pew, he built his case against her, not stopping to ponder the fact that she was too young to have had any hand in the old system or that most of the details were circumstantial.

  When he rose, one of the women at the front of the church turned to stare in disapproval, but he paid her no mind. He hurried past the table of church circulars and the bulletin board where a hundred flyers flapped in his wake. He pulled open the door to the street. The sunlight outside blinded him for only a moment.

  She was at the restaurant, standing across the bar from Hector. The two of them were so deep in conversation that they did not sense him passing the restaurant’s windows. Nor did they hear him come in, their heads nearly touching above the bar. As Marin watched, Jadranka smiled and touched Hector’s arm.

  What had she been asking his headwaiter all these weeks, he wondered, and what sorts of things had he revealed? Hector had been with them for ten years, a distant cousin of Luz’s who had started as a busboy. In his panic, Marin did not stop to consider how little Hector knew.

  He wondered if she reported to someone else, or if she was planning to blackmail him with some tidbit of information. He imagined the front of his restaurant defaced with spray paint: The owner of this establishment is a common criminal.

  “Leave us,” he barked at Hector, who looked at him in shock because in ten years Marin had never raised his voice.

  Jadranka went so pale that a birthmark below her right eye stood out in stark relief, but her face was devoid of all expression. And it was this look that he recognized, this look that had haunted his dreams, prompting the realization that she was not the hunted but the hunter.

  “I should have known you were one of them,” he told her in a low, angry voice, ignoring Hector’s worried expression as he hovered by the kitchen door. “I should have understood from all your questions.”

  She looked at him in shock. “Who do you think I am?”