The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

It was the closest they came to discussing what Katarina had revealed that summer so many years ago. In the next few days, she described how Jadranka had learned to make grilled-cheese sandwiches, how she had taught the children a new card game and a trick with vinegar and baking soda, but she did not return to the subject of Rosmarina.

  The autumn exhibit Katarina had mentioned was three months away, and so Magdalena suspected that her cousin’s frequent absences had as much to do with discomfort as with any pressing business. During her explanations of deliveries or lighting mishaps, Katarina’s hands moved constantly. They worried at her hair or rubbed invisible spots on her sleeve.

  “It’s okay, Katica,” Magdalena finally told her. “Jadranka is a grown woman. It isn’t your fault that she ran off.”

  The nickname—which Magdalena’s grandfather had used that summer—won a small smile from Katarina, but she continued to twist her wedding ring.

  Magdalena had met Katarina’s husband, Michael, only once. A dark-haired man who wore Clark Kent glasses, he had mixed her a gin and tonic on the afternoon of her arrival, and they had chatted in perfunctory English. But he traveled frequently for work, and Magdalena had not seen him in the days since.

  In the end it was Jazmin, the housekeeper, who provided Magdalena with a map of the city, explaining that streets increased numerically from south to north, and avenues from east to west. A friendly, older woman from Bangladesh, she had fallen silent in the middle of these explanations. “I showed your sister, as well,” she said almost apologetically.

  According to Jazmin, Jadranka had fallen easily into the rhythm of the household, and Christopher and Tabitha, while a bit spoiled, were still a hundred times better behaved than the children in other families. Her previous employers, she confided, had a little girl of Christopher’s age who would follow her around rooms she had already cleaned, intentionally dropping things behind her. “She emptied an entire carton of apple juice on the kitchen floor once, just after I finished mopping it,” she said indignantly. “She thought it was funny.”

  Christopher was a sturdy and amiable boy who enjoyed digging in sandboxes and thrashing high weeds with sticks. He had begun almost immediately to call her Lena, following his mother’s lead in a way that astounded her with its confidence.

  Tabitha had an oily, moon-shaped face, reminiscent of her mother’s at that age, and she wore baggy clothes to camouflage her growing breasts. The other girls at camp were mean, she told Magdalena, and her younger brother could do anything and not get into trouble for it.

  It was clear to Magdalena that both children saw her as an extension of her sister. Tabitha had immediately confessed to hating their mother’s gallery, and Christopher insisted that Magdalena read to him in the evenings as Jadranka had done. “She left before we got to the end,” he said, handing her a copy of Charlotte’s Web.

  Magdalena did not open it immediately. “Did she say anything before she left?” she asked.

  But Jadranka had gone while he was sleeping, without even saying goodbye.

  “She told me stories about a magic island,” he added unexpectedly.

  “Rosmarina?”

  But he did not think it had a name.

  It was only in Jadranka’s letters that Magdalena recognized her sister. She had brought the entire half year’s archive with her, clipping the letters together and printing out the e-mails.

  It was through one of those missives that she had first learned of her ex-boyfriend’s presence in New York. Jadranka’s casual mention of him, months ago, almost prepared her for the way Damir’s voice sprang to life on radios all across the island as he reported on some session of the United Nations or high-level meetings between heads of state.

  I haven’t seen him myself but I’ve heard that he’s almost fully recovered, Jadranka informed her.

  He had been wounded while reporting in Iraq the year before, his mother delivering this news on Rosmarina’s waterfront. The two women rarely did more than exchange a few awkward words, but Magdalena’s face must have betrayed her on that occasion, because the older woman tried immediately to comfort her. “He won’t die, dear,” she said, patting Magdalena’s arm. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  For several years now, she had secretly followed news of his movements, from exhumations in Bosnia to bombings in Afghanistan. He would disappear from print for months, only to reappear in some distant and usually dangerous place. He was a common subject of island conversation because Rosmarina had never tired of hearing its native son on the radio.

  Likewise, the global network of island gossip made it inevitable that he would learn of Jadranka’s disappearance, and on the day before Magdalena’s departure from Rosmarina, he had telephoned, his voice deep and unmistakable.

  “They’re saying that you plan to come look for her,” he said.

  “Who’s saying?”

  “Come on, Lena. Let me help you.”

  Her sister and Damir had always gotten along. One summer he had tutored her in mathematics. She amused him because every time he left her with equations to balance, he returned to find that she had left drawings in the margins instead.

  But Jadranka had only mentioned him once in her letters. There was no indication that their paths had crossed in New York, and Magdalena convinced herself that curiosity had prompted his call. Perhaps he wanted to see for himself that she had remained in place for all these years, exactly as he had prophesied at their parting. Perhaps he wanted to congratulate himself on his lucky escape.

  “I’ll let you know” was all she would tell him before hanging up.

  Katarina had already filed a missing-persons report at the local police precinct, but they had been dismissive. “Your cousin is an adult,” they had told her. “She’s free to come and go as she likes, for the duration of her visa.”

  And so Magdalena began searching blindly, armed with her sister’s letters. She visited the places Jadranka had named—the coffee shops and parks, even showing her sister’s picture to the chess players in Washington Square Park—but none of them recognized her, and though Magdalena looked for the man with the missing tooth, she did not think he was among them.

  It was Katarina who suggested that she focus her search on Astoria and Long Island City, places where Jadranka’s immigration status might not prevent her from finding temporary work. Large numbers of Croatians lived in those neighborhoods, where shops sold Vegeta seasoning, Podravka packaged soups, and Čokolino for babies’ bottles. Katarina explained that she had little use for these old-country articles herself, but her mother sometimes pined for them.

  “She has a sweet tooth,” she added. “She’d sell her soul for a few Bajadera.”

  But it was unclear if Nona Vinka would even recognize those chocolates. Since Magdalena’s arrival, the elderly woman had existed in only two states: sleep and exhaustion. She could not seem to keep her eyes open, and when she did manage to utter a few words, she had little grasp of where she was.

  Her bedroom could not have helped in these matters of orientation. Unlike the rest of the house, its contents seemed to have been imported, item by item, from a Croatian island. Lace curtains hung at the window, and doilies covered every surface. A crucifix guarded the head of the bed, whose fuzzy acrylic blanket was identical to those that still graced many bedrooms on Rosmarina. A Bible rested atop a bureau, and Magdalena did not have to open its cover to know that the pages were well thumbed. She recognized some of the photographs that stood beside it as copies of the ones in her grandmother’s vitrine.

  “My mother has been homesick for thirty years” was Katarina’s only explanation.

  And it was homesickness that might have explained the section of western Queens to which Katarina directed her, for it was there that old men stopped and greeted each other in the street, an elaborate ritual of arm slapping that Magdalena had witnessed nowhere else in this American city. Restaurants served grilled fish and palačinke, and newsstands carried the same magazines wh
ose stories of scandals and trysts Magdalena’s grandmother read religiously at home.

  It was like entering a place where two countries, separated by thousands of miles, oozed together. And while Magdalena’s unease over her sister’s disappearance only grew, she roamed this territory comfortably enough, saying her sister’s name to grocers, to an electrician from whose rearview mirror a Split soccer team ornament swung, to an old man on the street who had sounded as if he might be from Rosmarina but, in the end, turned out to be from the nearby island of Vis. He looked so long and hard at the picture of Jadranka that Magdalena was certain that he recognized her. But he finally apologized that his sight was not what it had once been. “I’m sorry, child,” he told her. “I’ve never seen your sister.”

  She repeated the name of the island. “Rosmarina,” she told everyone who asked and some who did not. The elderly man had once visited there. Long ago, he told her, just after the Second World War, when conditions were very difficult.

  “Which island did you say?” one of the waitresses in a Croatian soccer bar on Broadway asked, then wanted to know if it was near Kornati.

  Magdalena shook her head. “Between Lastovo and Vis,” she said, sketching them on a cocktail napkin.

  “In the middle of nowhere” was the waitress’s only reply.

  She was sent on wild-goose chases by people who thought they might have heard about a red-haired Croatian girl living or working in such-and-such place, but when she rang the doorbells of houses and apartments, people looked at her suspiciously through the grilles of their doors. There were raspy voices through intercoms or shouts through open windows. Many were not Croatian, and she explained in careful English why she had come. Some thought it was a trick and threatened to call the police, but some of them agreed to look at the photograph.

  Magdalena had studied English at university, but only now did she realize how fully her English was the English of schoolbooks, of professors who had enunciated every syllable. Her English had nothing to do with the cacophony that emerged from people’s mouths, the slang, the half-eaten words, the way that one sentence ran into another. People in Queens spoke English as if they were shouting, or crying or laughing. There was the singsong of girls who giggled together on the subway and the slurring of drunks who stood on street corners with paper bags.

  She further discovered that there was an entire nether language spoken by people who did not really speak English at all. Its hand gestures and grunts enabled her to trade mutual complaints about the heat with a woman who wore a head scarf, and to accept a handful of salted pistachios from an elderly man on the street.

  “Subway?” she could ask a group of men milling around a gas station parking lot waiting for work. And they could point her in the right direction, holding up four fingers to show how many blocks she had to go.

  But nobody had heard of her sister.

  It bothered her that so few people knew of Rosmarina—even among New York’s Croatian population—as though it were a mythical kingdom like Atlantis. It seemed to cast doubt on her sister’s existence by association. As if one day Magdalena would pull out the photograph she carried for sentimental reasons—a shot of the sisters in a Split photo booth—only to discover a picture of herself, sitting alone.

  For this reason she felt her spirits lift when she ran into the same elderly man from Vis a week later. “Rosmarina!” he hailed her on the pavement in front of a ninety-nine-cent store. “I was hoping I would see you again. Any luck finding your sister?”

  “None,” she told him.

  He nodded gravely at this. “Might I make a suggestion?”

  His words surprised her. “Please,” she told him.

  “It occurred to me a few days after I ran into you. You see, an old man like me hates to throw anything away. My children say that I’m a pack rat, but I consider myself more of a collector. You never know when you’ll need something, Miss—?”

  “Magdalena.”

  He smiled at this name, as if it reminded him of something pleasant. “Magdalena. And it occurred to me that your sister might have answered an ad in one of our local Croatian newspapers, if she was looking for employment. Or even placed one.”

  This idea had not occurred to her.

  “I have copies of all of them, you see. Going back months.”

  She could just imagine it: towers of newsprint filled with stories about picnics and church bake sales, but she nodded anyway. Her sidewalk canvassing had certainly brought her no closer to finding her sister.

  “I would be most obliged if you could show me,” she told him.

  He walked with a cane, and so their progress was slow. Several times people nodded at him, or greeted him with Ej, profesore!

  “Professor?” she asked him.

  “Of history,” he told her, wheezing slightly. “But that was long ago.”

  Professor Barić was a widower and nearing eighty. He lived alone in a block of two-story homes that were identical except for their flourishes: one house had neoclassical railings, while a plaster Madonna holding an Italian flag guarded the narrow concrete garden of a second. A Greek flag hung in the window of a third.

  “An international neighborhood,” he told Magdalena with a smile.

  There was a small, well-tended garden to one side of the front door, and inside, his rooms were filled with bookcases. Hard-backed tomes covered every surface, and a marble chess set occupied a low table in the living room, the whites and blacks regarding each other impassively across the board.

  “Do you play?” he asked when he saw the direction of her gaze.

  “I used to,” she told him, brushing her fingertips over the ridged halo of a rook. “With my grandfather.”

  He nodded. “An excellent game. A teacher of strategy and life.”

  She had been quite good, in fact, occasionally beating Luka by the time she was thirteen, although now it occurred to her that he had let her win.

  “You’ve just reminded me,” the professor told her. “I promised a friend that we would play this afternoon.”

  “Do you play often?”

  “As often as we can,” he said, so that Magdalena pictured two old men sitting on opposite sides of the board, staring at it with the same concentration as the players in Washington Square Park, but with coffees and glasses of brandy.

  “Now about those newspapers—”

  She followed him into the kitchen, where papers stood in stacks on the counters and floor. His children were right in calling him a pack rat, she thought, taking in the rest of it: an assortment of third-class mail, pill bottles, and empty yogurt containers, washed and stacked neatly against the refrigerator. But the expression on his face was so pleased as he regarded the kitchen’s contents that she told him, “It’s lucky for me that you collect things, Professor.”

  “Please,” he told her, pulling a chair out from the kitchen table. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  As he filled a pot with water for coffee, she pulled the nearest stack towards her. It was a weekly broadside, printed in New York, and she stifled a smile when she noticed that one of the articles on the first page was, indeed, about a church bake sale.

  “The advertisements are in the back,” he told her, looking up.

  The classified section was not extensive, and there were ads for restaurants as far away as San Francisco, as well as descriptions of items for sale. Brend new! one of these proclaimed beside the picture of a lawn mower.

  The employment listings were limited to a handful of advertisements placed by businesses looking for help: a restaurant, a florist, a travel agency in San Pedro, California. There were no advertisements placed by anybody looking for work, far less one that might have been her sister.

  She refolded the pages.

  “Take heart,” he told her, looking around the kitchen at the issues still waiting to be searched.

  The professor collected three different newspapers in addition to two church circulars and the newsletter of the Croati
an Fraternal Union. The pages swam in front of Magdalena’s eyes, with their digests of old-world news and new-world celebrations.

  As she read, the professor hovered. The yogurt containers, she gathered, were for seedlings, because an open bag of soil stood beside them. She did not know what the pills were for, but she watched him read the label of one bottle, then sigh. “They’re always making mistakes,” he muttered, then went into the next room to telephone the pharmacy.

  He returned after a few minutes with a sheepish smile. “Getting old is a terrible thing, Magdalena. It’s only slightly better than the alternative.”

  In dozens of newspapers, Magdalena found a single advertisement that might pertain to her sister. It had been placed by a woman looking for a room to rent.

  As Magdalena considered the details—responsible, neat, non-smoker—she heard someone knock at the professor’s front door. She looked at the clock above the sink, surprised to see that two hours had already elapsed. “Your chess partner,” she said, rising. “I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

  “No, no,” he told her. “There’s no hurry.”

  But she capped her pen and picked up her purse. She was about to follow him to the front door when she heard it: the voice from the radio, but very near at hand.

  She froze, straining to make out the professor’s response, a low collection of words that sounded like the faint thrumming of a motor.

  “But she’s still here?”

  The voice was unmistakably Damir’s, and Magdalena felt a tightening in her chest, as if the house’s oxygen supply had abruptly run out. Her eyes traveled to the kitchen door, whose rectangular window looked out onto a narrow garden. But when she grasped the doorknob, it did not give.

  When she turned, Damir already filled the kitchen’s other doorway.

  It was the professor who spoke, appearing behind him in the hall. “Forgive my subterfuge,” he told her. “But my young friend explained that you weren’t likely to wait for him if you knew.”