The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  To see the finished painting here unsettled her, though she quickly found her sternest teacher’s voice. “You’ve seen her since she left my cousin’s.”

  She did not know what made her so certain of this. Perhaps it was the jumble in Theo’s living room, the proof of a creative mind turned inside out and so like every space that Jadranka had ever inhabited. Perhaps it was the painting, which perched atop the bureau like her sister’s familiar.

  He nodded. “She crashed here for a few nights when she left Katarina’s. But I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

  “You didn’t tell our cousin.”

  A guilty expression flashed across his face. “Jay asked me not to.”

  Magdalena blinked at this. Jay. But she let it go for now.

  Jadranka had knocked on his door in the middle of the night. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and dragged a small suitcase behind her. He had been sleeping, but even through the peephole—and the murky light of the hallway—he could see that she had been crying.

  “I can’t go back,” was all that she would tell him.

  She stayed with him for the next several days while she looked for work. She had found something—although she did not specify what—and on the fifth day he returned to the apartment to find that she had pushed his spare key under the door together with a note, which he handed to Magdalena now. Thanks for everything. I’ll be in touch soon.

  Theo had insisted on seeing Magdalena in person, away from Katarina’s. This had made her hopeful. On the subway ride here she had allowed herself to imagine Jadranka waiting for her, apologetic, feeling a little foolish to have dropped from sight for so long. But now Magdalena felt as if she’d lost her bearings, as if some internal compass were spinning wildly, and she sat heavily upon the sofa.

  “I don’t know why I was so surprised to realize who you were last night,” he told her. “Your sister said that you were close.”

  Magdalena gave a short laugh at this. “Yes,” she said, scanning the apartment’s walls: posters for exhibits and a few photographs. “You can see how close. I haven’t heard from her in a month.”

  He shrugged at this. “She was upset.”

  “Why?”

  “Something spooked her but I don’t know what.”

  Magdalena frowned. “You don’t know much, do you?”

  Something changed in his eyes, a flicker of irritation or amusement. “I know that she was happy in New York.”

  Magdalena leaned her head back and closed her eyes. A moment later she felt the couch sag as he sat down beside her, and when she opened her eyes again, his earnest face loomed close to hers. His eyes were blue but his pupils were very dark, and the contrast was almost shocking at this close range. Magdalena considered them. “You and my sister—” she began.

  When he understood what she was asking, he looked amused. “No,” he told her. “We were friends.”

  “So she slept here?” She patted the couch between them.

  “That’s right.”

  She considered this.

  “Surprised?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m flattered,” he told her. “But I prefer men.”

  He was grinning now, and she flushed, feeling naive and provincial. To hide her discomfort, she looked around the living room with its odd assortment of furniture and mismatched cushions. She realized that he had probably accumulated most of these at stoop sales—a New York tradition that Jadranka had described enthusiastically in her letters, fascinated by the fluidity of American property ownership.

  Although Katarina had introduced them, Theo and Jadranka kept their subsequent friendship to themselves. “We didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” Theo said by way of explanation. On Jadranka’s days off, she would often visit and they would talk. He lent her books, and sometimes they went to see films together.

  Once, she had taken him to a Croatian bar in Astoria. “She wanted to give me a taste of what life was like at home,” he told Magdalena.

  “What was it called?” Magdalena asked. “The bar?”

  “Something like Club Darkness.”

  Magdalena had not come across it in any of her wanderings.

  “It was strange,” he said. “Intense.”

  He had observed the men in leather jackets at the bar, the groups of young women in skimpy tops and makeup. The girls swayed to music imported from home and sent smoky-eyed glances at the men, who watched them over the tops of their glasses. The ones—Jadranka had explained—who hoped to go home with them, but who would be the first to call them whores in the morning.

  “One guy looked like something out of a mob film,” he told her. “He bought us a round of drinks. Apparently, he told her that she should stick to men from your country. To real men. When we left, she said, ‘See? My people are as narrow as they are mean.’”

  Magdalena bristled at this. “There are idiots everywhere,” she said. “Even in America.”

  “Of course there are,” Theo told her, surprised. “But New York is like a separate country. I told Jay that she should stay and go to art school, but she took off before I could convince her.”

  Magdalena digested this in silence, conscious that Theo was studying the skepticism on her face.

  “Anyway, that isn’t the reason I wanted to see you,” he told her, abruptly rising from the couch and walking over to a laptop that sat charging on a windowsill. “I found something that might help you find her.”

  Last night, after returning from the gallery, he had looked through his computer’s browsing history and discovered a single map search for an intersection in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of checking before,” he said, refreshing the page for Magdalena now. “But it’s the only thing she looked up the morning she left.”

  It took her half an hour to reach Park Slope on the subway, coming aboveground to a light drizzle. It was the first cool day since Magdalena’s arrival, a relief after the hot hours she had spent searching Queens. The island had heat like the inside of an oven, but she had not been prepared for the humidity of New York.

  She had rejected Theo’s offer to go with her. At his front door, she had held out her hand, but he ignored it and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “Good luck, Lena,” he told her. “Tell your sister that I miss her.”

  Park Slope was quiet in the rain. On the way to the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Carroll Street, she passed an animal hospital, a bar, a few restaurants, and it was as she studied the interior of one of these—a Cuban restaurant with checkered tablecloths—that she caught sight of the red-haired figure walking on the other side of the street.

  This had happened several times since she had arrived in New York. Magdalena would see her sister in women who rounded corners in front of her, and who rode by in buses. But none of them had turned into Jadranka, and now she followed the figure at a distance.

  The woman walked quickly, a black umbrella in her hand. She headed south, then west on Ninth Street, Magdalena so intent on her careful pursuit that she no longer noticed the rain.

  It was only when the figure ducked beneath an overpass, entering a subway station on the opposite side of the street, that Magdalena shouted her name aloud, people on the sidewalk turning to stare. But the woman did not hear her above the traffic, and Magdalena watched as she was swallowed by the station’s dark mouth. A man on the corner tried to shove a piece of paper into her hands—an advertisement about English lessons or dry cleaning—but Magdalena’s eyes did not stray from the subway entrance, and the green rectangle he released swooped to the pavement.

  When the ground began to shake—a train arriving above them—she darted out into the intersection.

  “No walk!” the man shouted behind her because she had not waited for the light to change, had not even noticed the car approaching from her left, which now swerved to avoid hitting her, the driver’s angry honking no match for the swift beating of her heart.

  Once on the other
side of the street, she saw the woman’s black umbrella ascending the steps on the left, and she followed quickly, nearly tripping at the top. A train was just pulling away from the opposite platform, ferrying passengers away in a kaleidoscope of purses and open mouths, shopping bags and shirtfronts. A child’s face was pressed against one of the windows, but turned into a gray motion as the train disappeared down the track, a single sheet from a newspaper sliding along the platform in its wake.

  The red-haired woman was waiting at the far end of the platform, her head turned, one foot over the yellow line as she peered down the track.

  This was typical, Magdalena thought as she walked towards the figure. Jadranka never missed an opportunity to tempt fate.

  But as she approached, the woman resembled her sister less and less, like an optical illusion in which one object is slowly replaced by another. Although the figure held herself as Jadranka often did, with her shoulders rolled slightly forward and her long, pale arms crossed, it was clear to Magdalena that she had made a mistake.

  A train was coming. Magdalena could see it approaching, a length of moving gray in an overcast landscape, and she watched the woman step back from the platform’s edge, then turn to look in her direction. Her face was rounder than Jadranka’s, and there was no light of amusement in her eyes.

  As the train pulled in, the two women stared at each other, Magdalena uncertainly, the stranger with an expression of warning, as if she had been conscious of Magdalena’s scrutiny all along.

  It was the stranger who looked away first, stepping inside the car, the doors closing behind her. The train began to creep forward again, and as she passed Magdalena, the woman raised her hand in a little wave. Her expression was bemused, but Magdalena dropped onto a scarred platform bench.

  For a long time after the train disappeared, she stared down the rain-soaked track, remembering how the palm of the stranger’s hand had left a momentary trace of white in the air behind her.

  When she returned to the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Carroll Street, the sidewalks were deserted and rain was falling steadily. She stood for a while on one corner, taking in the awnings of restaurants and grocery stores and the dripping fire escapes of tenements. There was nothing remarkable about the intersection, and as she stood there she had the sensation that the buildings were drawing closer together, that they would never surrender her sister no matter how long Magdalena waited in the rain.

  If Damir was surprised by her telephone call, his voice did not betray it. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he told her, arriving in twenty to find her sheltering beneath some scaffolding, her clothing soaked and her hair plastered to her head.

  She did not want to go back to Katarina’s, and so she returned with him to Queens. They did not speak for the duration of the drive, but several times he reached over to take her hand, holding it tightly in his own, and she could not tell if it was her hand that shook, or his, or whether the trembling was from the engine and the uneven city streets.

  His apartment was bare and startlingly clean and looked as if it had been recently painted. No pictures hung from the white walls, and there were only a few pieces of furniture in each room. The beige wall-to-wall carpet had been vacuumed into neat, horizontal stripes, and the kitchen looked as if it had never produced a meal.

  Through an open doorway she saw that there were no bureaus or drawers in the bedroom, no table beside the bed. He had arranged his library in a row on the floor against one wall, and his shoes against another.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, handing her a towel from the bathroom.

  She shook her head.

  “Are you sure? I can make us some din—”

  But she placed a hand over his mouth.

  “Lena,” he said against her fingers. “She’ll turn up.”

  It came upon her without warning then: the face of the woman who was not Jadranka.

  “Lena,” Damir said again. He held the palm of her hand to his cheek.

  She wanted in that moment to do as Jadranka had done, to slip loose from her life like a fish that breaks free of a hook. And so she led him into his bedroom, which was plainer than she had thought, the walls more austere, the beige coverlet bereft of any pattern.

  There was an open package of almonds beside the bed, and she placed one experimentally on her tongue, as if it were a magic pill that could transport them to another dimension, away from New York, and away from Rosmarina. She offered him one, so that this was what he tasted of when he kissed her.

  A low current passed from her legs to the muscles in her arms, more pronounced than in her youth, to the tip of her tongue, which had found a chip in one of Damir’s teeth and probed gently at this new geography. In a moment, she thought, something inside her would contract so violently that it would pull them both under.

  But after the undressing and the matching of curved and hollow parts, after the twisting and the joining of their bodies, after they lay side by side on his bed and looked at the ceiling, neither daring to look at the other, she felt the invisible fishing line growing back. Stretched taut, even from this distance.

  The next morning she rose before dawn. He was still sleeping, facedown, one arm outstretched as if reaching for her in his sleep. Quietly, she gathered her still-damp clothes from the bedroom floor and dressed in the kitchen, the linoleum cool against the soles of her bare feet.

  There was a writing tablet on the counter, and as she buttoned her shirt she read a few of his notes in the glow from the oven’s clock. Interview at UN, 3 p.m. Must replace tape recorder. Bread.

  She tore a sheet from beneath this one and stood looking at it for a long moment. But she could think of nothing to write, and so she folded the empty page and threw it in the garbage.

  She let herself into Katarina’s house quietly, climbing the stairs to Vinka’s room in socked feet.

  Magdalena had been a toddler when Katarina’s family left Rosmarina, and so she could not connect the elderly woman who lived in the time capsule of her third-floor bedroom to the photographs in her album. And while it was true that Luka had spoken of his escapades with Vinka, she had been like a storybook character to his granddaughters, as remote and fantastical as America itself.

  Katarina had already explained that emigration had been hardest on her mother. Her father had his political gatherings, his protests and his causes, but it was Vinka who stayed up half the night doing other people’s mending as Katarina slept and Vlaho dozed on the couch.

  She had given birth to Katarina late in life, at the age of forty-five, and she had been fifty at the time of their emigration to America. “That type of thing,” Katarina had explained. “It’s harder when you’re older.”

  The forgetting had started eighteen months ago. At first Vinka forgot little things: the date or where she’d left her knitting. She would smile in embarrassment when it happened, telling Katarina, Your mother has become a silly old woman. But within a few months she was misplacing ever more valuable things: money, a piece of jewelry.

  It had been her custom to take daily walks in Central Park, and one day she got lost, wandering for hours until night fell. A policeman found her by the park’s boathouse, trying to unchain a rowboat. “She wanted to go back to Rosmarina,” Katarina told Magdalena. “She’d decided that life was better back there.”

  Because of her rapidly worsening dementia, Nona Vinka rarely remembered Pittsburgh anymore, even in lucid moments like the one Magdalena had witnessed the day before. She could not recall the names of families they had gone to church with, or any of the schools Katarina had attended. She merely looked confused at the mention of the tailor shop, although sometimes in dreams her hands moved as if she were sewing.

  But she remembered everything about Rosmarina, and about her family’s escape. Sometimes her eyes darted around the room, her hands poised as if to strike mosquitoes that had descended on their refugee camp room again.

  She was wide awake and dressed when Magdalena pushed op
en her bedroom door. She sat on her bed crocheting, not bothering to look up. “I knew you’d be back,” she told Magdalena in a level voice.

  “What is it that I did?” Magdalena asked. “You said that I brought something upon us.”

  “You know,” her great-aunt said, looking up in exasperation.

  “Tell me.”

  “He killed himself because of you, because he couldn’t stand the shame.”

  Magdalena’s heart beat like an erratic drum. “Goran,” she said, her father’s name foreign on her tongue.

  “Of course Goran. And with him. The chief of police and biggest UDBA agent on the island.”

  A radio alarm jumped to life somewhere in the house below them. It meant that Tabitha and Christopher would soon fill the air with their laughter and complaints, and Katarina would want to know where she had been all night.

  But it was clear that Nona Vinka was only getting started. “And your poor daughter—”

  She hesitated at this. “Magdalena?”

  “No, the other one. You poisoned her life from the very start.” Nona Vinka looked away, as if she could not stand to look at Magdalena anymore. “It’s a sin,” she muttered.

  “What is?”

  “To make a child share the blood of a man like that.”

  Part IV

  Chapter 14

  From his sickbed, Luka cannot identify the sound that comes after every roll of thunder, the one that goes clack-clack-clack, clack-clack. It is both metallic and wooden, like hail falling on a rooftop. But there is cause and effect between the thunder and that sound which perplexes him, each deafening roar followed immediately by clack-clack, and then by calm.

  A child is shouting in the lane outside. Luka can hear the scraping of the boy’s bicycle tires as he turns circles, the muffled sound of his sandal on the pavement as he steadies himself to make his revolutions tighter, the chain jumping from one gear to the next.