The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  As Magdalena prepared to leave the room, the sketches clutched against her chest like something she had rescued from drowning, she saw the canvas that leaned against the wall, nearly hidden by the open studio door.

  It was a picture very like one that Jadranka might paint, a length of craggy Rosmarina shoreline viewed from underwater. It was the perspective that was familiar, Jadranka forever seeing things in a way nobody else would see them.

  Magdalena did not understand much about art—she had only a rudimentary grasp of its history and movements—but she would recognize Jadranka’s work anywhere, the use of color and the brushstrokes as familiar as her sister’s voice. Which is why she knew that the painting she looked at now was not Jadranka’s. It was not even a competent piece of mimicry.

  Katarina had even copied Jadranka’s way of signing, the thin red strokes of her name like the footprints of a wounded bird.

  The address of Katarina’s gallery was printed on her business cards, one of which Magdalena found in the kitchen. She let herself out of the house quietly, and for the duration of the subway ride south she thought about the copycat painting, her face a stormy reflection in the subway car’s dark window. Katarina had always begrudged Jadranka her ability, she thought, and it was clear that while their cousin might run a gallery, she had fallen short of the illustrious artistic career she had predicted for herself the summer she was twelve.

  She wondered if Katarina had copied Jadranka’s work outright, or whether the imitation had been subconscious. But then she remembered those damaged pages from the folder. What had prevented Katarina from throwing them away, she wondered? Was it a guilty conscience, or had she intended to copy those as well?

  Magdalena’s anger propelled her through crowds of commuters, but when she emerged from the station in Chelsea, she felt momentarily disoriented. This happened whenever she came aboveground in Queens, too, and she stood for some moments in the early evening sunshine, blinking in confusion as other pedestrians hurried past.

  Gallery K was nearby, in the middle of a block filled with other galleries. Magdalena slowed to look through the windows at the well-heeled men and women who stood inside them. A party was going on in the gallery next to Katarina’s. The people who packed its interior were holding glasses of wine, their mouths moving with exaggerated fervor, like the chins of marionettes.

  By contrast, her cousin’s gallery was deserted. A long, white space, it was fronted by an enormous floor-to-ceiling window. Once through the heavy glass door, she studied the mishmash of paintings on the walls. The exhibit was titled Tomorrow, bringing together young artists who—a brochure explained—were on the “cusp of arrival.” Magdalena did not have to look too hard to ascertain that her sister was not among them.

  The gallery was empty, though she could not see past the point that it narrowed, like an hourglass, flanked on one side by a desk and on the other by a small seating area. “Katarina?” she called.

  But the figure that rounded the corner was a man’s. Dressed in a gray T-shirt and faded dark jeans, he stopped when he caught sight of Magdalena. “Judging by the expression on your face,” he told her, “I’d hate to be Katarina.”

  He was about her age, with sandy hair, and although he was not smiling outright, his eyes were amused. He was clearly at ease in the empty gallery, and Magdalena looked past him for some sign of her cousin.

  “She’s on the phone,” he added, then nodded towards the black couch. “Have a seat.”

  Magdalena took in the rich leather of the couch and a vase of flowers so brightly colored that she would have assumed them to be artificial if not for the almost overpowering musk that filled the air.

  She shook her head. “I will look around,” she told him stiffly.

  To her surprise he followed her to the front of the gallery, and as she pretended to take in the paintings, she was aware that he was studying her profile.

  “What do you think of them?” he asked, then immediately laughed at her uncomfortable expression. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I didn’t paint any of them.”

  “You’re a painter?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “My sister, too.” She looked at the canvas in front of her, where a mouse’s skeleton had been affixed to a painted maze. “And she’s better than this.”

  “That wouldn’t be too hard,” he told her.

  For a moment they studied the tiny skeleton together in silence.

  “You’re from Katherine’s country,” he observed.

  “Yes.”

  But before he could say anything more, Katarina’s voice called from the back of the gallery. “Theo?”

  “My master’s voice,” he told Magdalena with the ghost of a smile.

  Katarina’s shoes made a clicking sound against the floor, but when she rounded the corner her broad smile vanished, and she stopped short at the sight of her cousin.

  “We need to talk,” Magdalena told her in Croatian.

  Katarina’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, but she recovered quickly. “You’ve met Theo,” she replied in English.

  Magdalena nodded.

  “This is Magdalena—”

  But before Katarina could say anything more, he whistled as if putting two and two together. “You’re the one who made the poison sandwiches,” he told her.

  Chapter 12

  Her stepfather had not actually eaten those sandwiches, a fact that she did not bother to point out to the stranger in the gallery, who regarded her with a certain presumptuous sympathy, as if Jadranka’s tales gave him access to the inner workings of her mind.

  She had found the box of rat poison beneath their mother’s sink in Split, the white pellets that could be ground into powder and mixed with warm butter. Alone, the mixture was gritty and slightly bitter, but the taste could be masked when smeared on bread. Magdalena knew this because she had taken a bite herself, spitting it out after the first experimental morsel.

  “Poison sandwiches?” Katarina echoed in confusion, waiting to be let in on the joke. Her eyes traveled from Magdalena’s stony face to Theo’s expectant one.

  But in the ensuing silence the painter began to look unsure. “She mentioned what things were like with your stepfather,” he said, so that Katarina’s eyes widened.

  The summer that Magdalena’s mother began to see Nikola was the same that Katarina had spent on the island. Ana Babić had smiled mysteriously whenever mentioning her new friend in Split. He had a solid job with the railroad, she told them. And he was so strong that he had once piggybacked her home in the rain. But Katarina had never met this pillar of chivalry, and she certainly knew nothing of the year her cousins had spent under his roof.

  Theo cleared his throat. “It was very heroic, the way your sister described things. It even gave me the idea for a new piece.”

  Magdalena gave him a hard look. She had encountered this fascination with her past before. Some people nursed the vain notion that they could peel back the layers of her brain and expose the hidden things beneath, and Theo was watching her as if intending her to be flattered.

  “Jadranka should paint those things,” she told him. “They don’t belong to anybody else.”

  When she and Katarina left the gallery, night had already fallen, and for the first time since arriving in America, she felt a wave of homesickness so great that she was tempted to lean her forehead against the glass window of her cousin’s gallery. But Theo still stood inside, and although she avoided looking in his direction, she could tell that he was watching them.

  In New York there was no such thing as true night. Buildings held light the same way that they trapped heat during the day, and the air had a bleached quality, like overexposed film.

  She and Katarina got into the sedan that arrived within moments, as if equipped with sensors. But the street’s unnatural glow penetrated the car’s dark interior, and Magdalena could feel it lighting up the features of her face.

  “You never told me that things we
re so bad in Split,” Katarina told her quietly.

  The driver—an unsmiling man who had opened the rear passenger door with surgical precision—started the engine, and Magdalena studied the back of his neck.

  “No.”

  “What did he—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Katarina stared at her. “But it explains so much.”

  Magdalena did not believe that it explained anything, and she did not like the expression of understanding on her cousin’s face. “It’s in the past,” she said carefully.

  “Your mother—”

  “—did nothing.”

  They spent the rest of the journey home in silence.

  Nikola’s temper had been known throughout their building. As an eleven-year-old, Magdalena had felt that the apartment always darkened before his arrival, as if the sun fled behind clouds at his approach. Sometimes he arrived an hour before their mother, and that hour was always the worst. He would enumerate every mistake of that morning—the milk had been left out of the refrigerator, or she had dawdled in the bathroom. It was her task to make sandwiches for his lunch, and he always complained that there was too much ham, or not enough, or that she had sliced the bread too thickly.

  Even on the days he returned in a better mood, she knew to lock herself and Jadranka into their room the minute he began searching for a drink. Their mother made halfhearted attempts at hiding his bottles at the backs of cupboards and in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator, but she never poured them out. The first drink would make him quiet, the second surly. By the third he would pound the door so that it shook on its hinges. But on other days, they would find him already lying in wait when they got home.

  It was only later that Magdalena realized with shame that their neighbors heard the punishments of that hour: the belt, the shoe, the palm of his rough hand.

  Magdalena could not battle her mother’s new husband physically, and so she developed subtler forms of warfare. When he returned to the apartment after drinking, she hid his wallet or his keys while he lay passed out on the sofa. Once, after he had cursed their grandfather—“He thinks he’s better than anyone else,” Nikola had slurred, “but you’re all the same shit”—she took his shoes and threw them into the courtyard of the building.

  Jadranka watched her wide-eyed as she did it.

  “You came home barefoot,” Magdalena told him the following morning when he woke up, her sister nodding in confirmation.

  They tried to run away once but were caught at the Jadrolinija ferry landing, their mother shouting at Magdalena that she could not just go anywhere she pleased and had better stop teaching Jadranka her tricks. Nikola glowered at them from the idling car where he waited on the other side of the street, saying nothing when they got in the back.

  “I don’t know what to do with you anymore,” her mother began to cry, turning around in the passenger seat as they drove. “I’m at my wit’s end.”

  When they pulled up in front of their apartment building, her mother got out first, hauling Jadranka out of the backseat and slamming the door. Magdalena met her stepfather’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Just you wait,” he told her.

  For the next three days, Nikola tied her to her bed. The rope would not allow her to do more than stand beside the bed, and she was not permitted to wash. She ate her meals on the bed, slept in the clothes she had worn on the day of her escape, and used an old kitchen pot as her toilet.

  “We should let her use the washroom, at least,” her mother pleaded with Nikola, after she had emptied it the first time.

  But he would not be swayed. “This is what they do to deserters,” he told Magdalena.

  During the day Jadranka was not allowed into the bedroom, but at night she would crawl into bed beside Magdalena, casting an arm around her sister and holding the rope in her small fist.

  After those three days, Magdalena returned to school, to brushing her sister’s hair, to making their stepfather’s sandwiches, cutting them into triangles and wrapping them tightly in waxed paper. But something was changed. Some shift had taken place, so that when she regarded herself in the bathroom mirror, the face that peered back was no longer one she could claim with any certainty.

  In the days that followed, she became increasingly quiet and withdrawn, Nikola observing this transformation with satisfaction. “You’re learning,” he said as her mother looked on with troubled eyes, watching the way she pushed the food listlessly around her plate.

  She had not tried to feed Nikola the first poisoned sandwich, shoving it into the garbage instead. But two days later Jadranka told her tearfully that several cats had died in the courtyard. Instead of sunning themselves in patches of sunlight, she had found them in stiff piles.

  Magdalena immediately understood that the sandwich was responsible. Horrified and triumphant, she returned to the box of poison repeatedly in subsequent days. Sometimes she would hold it in her hands, shaking it so that the contents danced. Once she extracted a single pellet and licked it with her tongue, spitting out a mouthful of cloudy saliva in the next moment. To this day, she could still remember its bitter, noxious taste.

  She did not know how Jadranka discovered her plan, but for an entire week Magdalena had waited for Nikola to die, increasing the dosage by one pellet every evening, while her younger sister secretly remade the sandwiches. It was a fact she only discovered years later on an evening when Jadranka had drunk too much wine, confessing her sabotage through laughter and sobs.

  It was the reason Jadranka had turned mute, all those years ago. Her strategy promised less disastrous consequences than Magdalena’s, and six months later—after Jadranka had been taken to countless specialists, one psychiatrist, and a travar who instructed her to drink a dark green concoction of herbs and grasses—their mother agreed to return both sisters to Rosmarina.

  It was only as Katarina unlocked the house’s front door that Magdalena remembered leaving her cousin’s first-floor studio open. Let her see, she had thought, too angry at the time to cover up the evidence of her search.

  Now she watched Katarina falter at the sight of the open door, peering worriedly up the stairs to the second floor as if she expected thieves to be lying in wait.

  “You didn’t tell me about Jadranka’s drawings,” Magdalena told her cousin’s back, which went rigid in surprise. “In the folder on your bookcase?”

  Katarina turned slowly. “Chris found them,” she said. “In the trash can in Jadranka’s stu—”

  “And that’s an interesting picture behind the door.”

  Katarina reddened.

  “I didn’t know you still painted.”

  “I don’t,” she said quietly. “Not really.”

  “It doesn’t look like my sister’s work,” Magdalena pressed. “I mean, it does. But it isn’t my sister’s work.”

  Katarina stared at her. After a moment, she said, “You’ve always hated me.”

  “And you’ve always been jealous of Jadranka.”

  The two women regarded each other in silence. “Of course I’m fucking jealous,” Katarina said finally. “Your sister has youth and talent on her side. Why wouldn’t I be jealous?”

  Magdalena turned away in disgust, but Katarina grabbed her arm. “I was jealous of both of you. You had the island, and everything that was familiar to you. What the hell did we have?”

  Magdalena shook off her hand. “You told Jadranka that you were going to exhibit one of her paintings.”

  “I was.” There was no hint of deception in Katarina’s face, and a moment later she turned and went to her open studio door. “You want to see?” she demanded.

  As Magdalena stood in the entrance to the room, Katarina went to the bookcase—the same one where Magdalena had found the crumpled drawings—and pulled a canvas from behind it.

  “You should have looked a little harder,” she told Magdalena, pushing it into the other woman’s hands as she brushed past her in the doorway.

  It was a self-portra
it, the figure on the canvas clearly Jadranka. But the face had been repeatedly scored by a knife or a razor.

  “And before you ask,” Katarina told her, already climbing the stairs, “I had nothing to do with cutting it up.”

  “Who—”

  “Who do you think?”

  After their return to the island, Jadranka began again to draw obsessively. She had always been prolific, filling any scrap of paper she found with her pictures, but at the age of eight she entered a phase with her art that bordered on mania. Late into the night she would sit at the desk in the room the sisters shared, her pencil making a scratching sound against paper.

  There was only one subject that interested Jadranka in those days, and she committed hundreds of renderings to paper.

  The men, Magdalena began to call them.

  Some were light haired, some dark. Some were stout, and others thin. Some resembled people they knew, but most were complete strangers, figments of her sister’s imagination. But all had faces that were uniformly featureless, a strange fog stretching from forehead to chin.

  “Give him eyes, at least,” Magdalena had teased her once. “The poor guy must bump into things everywhere he goes.”

  And for the first time Jadranka became secretive, electing not to show her sister every drawing she completed.

  Jadranka had always been a talkative girl, often striking up conversations with tourists in the port in fragmented English or German. But the summer after their return she seemed to seek them out, asking them about the places they came from and how they were enjoying Rosmarina.

  Magdalena would never have suspected what she was doing if a schoolmate had not mentioned overhearing her one day. “Your sister is telling fibs,” she told Magdalena, who bristled at the accusation.

  “What do you mean?”