The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “Our son had to leave,” he had once howled to Ružica, “while that kreten can stay.”

  When Nikola retreats to the kitchen, Luka considers simply walking out and closing the door behind him. The man is so far gone he may not later realize that Luka has been there at all. But he hesitates too long, and Nikola reappears with a bottle of beer in his hand for Luka, who takes it unhappily and sits in one of his daughter’s chairs.

  “You must…” Nikola pauses so long that Luka thinks he has forgotten what he is about to say.

  “Spit it out, man!”

  “You must pay me…”

  This half-finished imperative enrages Luka, who rises. For years he has avoided Nikola for his daughter’s sake, but the farce has gone on too long. “Pay you?” He places the beer upon the table and picks his keys up from beside it. “For what?”

  “…or else I’ll…”

  “You’ll what?”

  It is no secret that Luka blames his daughter. She who was so filled with promise, so beautiful that people stopped and stared at her in the street.

  “Or else I’ll tell everyone about Jadranka.”

  Luka stops. A coldness rises from his heels. It rises so that he feels the hackles of his flesh.

  “…that UDBA agent’s bastard…”

  And he sees it suddenly—all of it—the way the sun comes over a mountain in a matter of seconds and floods the sea with light. His daughter, who would lay down her life for her brother, who would risk everything to keep him safe. He sees how long he has misjudged her, how long they have all misjudged her. “What are you saying to me?” Luka asks in a voice so quiet that the other man flinches.

  “…see what that bitch Magdalena thinks of her sister then…”

  Nikola is younger, but he is no match for Luka’s sober rage. His fist, a piece of iron, makes blood pulse from the other man’s mouth. It makes him howl. Nikola’s teeth cut his hand, a gash that will grow infected in days to come, so that his wife must attend to it with antibiotic cream and plasters.

  “What on earth happened, Luka?” Ružica will ask him.

  But he will not speak of it to anyone. He will not describe the way that his own fist comes down, again and again, from a secret place inside him. It was different in the war because then it had always been from fear, but here there is a detachment that arrives after the anger breaks. He will not describe how he holds the man down—Nikola’s face becoming Vico’s, for though he has not put it together until today, it is painfully clear—and takes one of the pillows from the couch and holds it over his face until he is nearly dead.

  “You’ll go from here,” he tells the man when he is done. “You’ll disappear.”

  Nikola is breathing raggedly through a nose that is bent and teeth that are broken, because at some point Luka has picked up one of his daughter’s figurines and smashed it into his face. He cannot remember doing it, but the proof lies on the carpet: a china ballerina cracked in half with blood at the base.

  In the bathroom Luka cleans himself up. He takes off the shirt he wears on top of his undershirt and rolls it up and puts it in the garbage can. He washes his face and weeps into the sink, thinking of his daughter at five during their swimming lessons, how she tells him shrilly not to take away his hands, believing stubbornly that she can bend everyone in the world to her will. And how there is nothing she will not do for her brother.

  Ružica turns him, humming under her breath. The nurse has shown her how to change the sheets, and though she is a slight woman, she has grown proficient at this task. He feels himself rocked onto one hip, and then onto the other. Her hands are so cool, so light, that he does not feel the shame of this maneuver.

  His violence towards Nikola had stunned him because he never considered himself a violent man. Stop, the small voice in his head had pleaded, and he had stopped, just as his fist was poised to strike again.

  “Alive,” his wife is telling him in relief. “Just think of it, Luka. After all these years.”

  But his entire attention is on Jadranka. Her hair is spread upon the surface of the water, and each time she takes a breath, it sways gracefully, like red sea grass. He lowers his arms and sees her stretch. She opens her eyes and grins up at him.

  “That’s it,” he tells her when she begins to float.

  Chapter 15

  It was love that made her burn Jadranka’s sketchbooks, all those months ago.

  She used Nikola’s grill, the low, iron mouth that had not tasted flame in over ten years but which she could not bring herself to abandon when moving to her new apartment. It sat in one corner of her balcony, a dark and brooding presence that turned blacker with every passing winter. The year before, when tiny, rodentlike animals had used it for their nest, she did not have the heart to dislodge them. Instead she brought them offerings of old bread and apple peels, although they had since decamped with their offspring, leaving nothing behind but shredded paper and droppings.

  She started with the sketchbooks beside her daughter’s bed, stacking them inside the grill. She was traditional enough to believe fire the exclusive domain of men, and her lack of expertise meant that she spent several frustrated minutes trying to light them from above, the matches merely charring the front cover of the topmost book and scenting the air with phosphorus.

  She had better luck when she opened the cover, lifting the first few pages so that she could light them one by one. But although the edges caught initially, the flames died within seconds.

  It was going to take longer than she had envisioned, and so she went to get a kitchen chair and her cigarettes. Passing through the room she had shared with Jadranka, she stopped to study the drawings taped to the wall beside her daughter’s bed. She had forgotten these: a scene from Split’s riva, a picture of herself—unflattering, she thought, because her face managed to appear both swollen and wrinkled—and a portrait of her older daughter. Magdalena stared back at her now from the wall so accusingly that Ana’s resolve cracked for the briefest of moments. “I’m doing it for her own good,” she told those dark eyes.

  It had been only half an hour since Jadranka walked away from their apartment building, pulling that suitcase whose wheels would tomorrow make contact with America. Ana had watched from the balcony as her daughter reached the intersection, then turned to wave before continuing down to the port. Long after she disappeared, Ana had watched the lights at the intersection turn red, then green, then red again, groups of people gathering and then dispersing in the very spot where Jadranka had stood, all of them on their way to somewhere. Including—at long last—her daughter.

  Returning to the balcony, she sat down on the chair and lit a cigarette. It was cold even for January, and she pulled her housecoat together at the neck, looking out across the buildings. The sun had just started to drop, and soon there would be patches of pink sky between the buildings.

  Briefly, she considered returning to the kitchen for the canister of butane that she used to refill her lighter. And for a drink. But she imagined this combination having disastrous consequences, and so she took a deep breath and removed the sketchbooks from the grill, placing them in a pile at her feet.

  She tore a few pages from the top one, wadding them into balls. She lit these and watched with satisfaction as they burned, then added a few more to the pile. It took her hours, her Jadranka the most prolific of artists, but as it grew dark the task became easier; she could no longer see what she was burning: the faces of her parents, self-portraits, and—always and everywhere—Magdalena.

  She developed a rhythm, careful after the first few batches to force them down with the rusted metal tongs that had hung from the grill, though even this could not prevent some of the smaller pieces from becoming airborne. They sparked and flickered around her on the balcony. A few landed on her housecoat, and it was only when she smelled the chemical odor of burning nylon that she looked down and saw the small, blackened holes.

  Some must have floated farther out because at one point
she heard her neighbor’s balcony door open. “Hello?” a man’s voice asked, unable to see past the concrete barriers between balconies. When she did not answer, he returned inside.

  Her daughters were driving around tonight. Somewhere, out there, they were saying their goodbyes and, doubtless, complaining about her. But she didn’t care. In the morning Jadranka would get on that airplane. Whatever happened tonight, Jadranka had promised that tomorrow she would leave.

  She built a final tower with the pictures from the wall beside Jadranka’s bed, and when they caught fire she did not bother to tamp them down. Instead she sat back and breathed. For the first time in years, it seemed, she breathed. And she watched those fiery pieces rise, their movements like miniature, combusting birds.

  Seven months later, she followed in both her daughters’ footsteps and packed her own suitcase for America, taking the shuttle bus from Split’s riva to the airport alone.

  She had always imagined airplane travel as something out of a 1960s film: Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni jet-setting with their matching luggage and beautiful Italian clothes. Even as she waited in line at the airport, she continued to envision herself surrounded by pretty stewardesses and stylishly dressed passengers, eating a watercress salad from a china dish and washing it down with complimentary champagne.

  Lying awake the night before, she had wondered what it would feel like to be weightless, to watch the slow progression of clouds and continents below her. She had expected a transformative event.

  They were strange fantasies for such an unsentimental woman, but she had entertained them nonetheless. But as the plane took off, she found herself wedged between a small window and a middle-aged man whose lolling head threatened to land on her right shoulder. And so, in the end, she felt none of the weightlessness she would have liked.

  Her disappointment did not last long before it turned to loathing for the stranger beside her, whose cheap suit and balding head shone with equal brightness in the plane’s fluorescent light. He had displayed none of Marcello’s grace, lumbering down the aisle behind her and taking his seat without so much as nodding in her direction, a slight she deemed especially unforgivable, since he had appropriated the armrest between them. As the plane rose higher, he listed still farther in her direction, as if she were a conveniently placed sofa cushion, as if she were his long-suffering wife.

  At first she attempted to endure the heat from his hovering head, but when she caught a strong whiff of his odor—that particular smell of an unwashed scalp—she could tolerate her predicament no longer, and she brought her shoulder up, hard, to meet his left ear with a satisfying crack.

  He straightened at once, giving a startled grunt. She could feel the way he studied her, shifting uneasily in his seat so that his girth was more evenly distributed between her and his neighbor on the other side, a young man in a suit who did not look up from his newspaper. For the remainder of the flight to Frankfurt, he held himself rigidly upright, stealing an occasional glance in her direction. But now it was her turn to ignore him, and she watched the wispy clouds beneath her, then the patchwork of green fields and mercury-colored lakes.

  She wasn’t a sofa cushion to be leaned on, she thought with satisfaction. She wasn’t anybody’s wife.

  The plane from Frankfurt to America was larger but even more disappointing than the first, with several screaming children and a collection of tiny lavatories whose blue toilet water stopped masking their stench within the first hour.

  While the first leg of her journey had been filled with Croatians, the passengers around her now spoke German and English, and she leaned her head back against her seat and closed her eyes. It was a relief to follow none of the conversations, to lose herself in meaningless thickets of sound. But just as she was drifting off she heard someone speaking her language, several rows behind her. A woman, complaining that her seat would not recline, and Ana opened her eyes as if she had been poked with a stick.

  “I just want to get there,” the voice was grumbling.

  For her part, Ana was not at all sure that she agreed.

  “What good is coming here going to do?” Magdalena had demanded ungraciously when learning of her mother’s trip.

  “I know things” was all Ana would tell her, not entirely surprised by her daughter’s acid response that she, too, knew things.

  Jadranka’s 4 a.m. telephone call had come weeks before, on the night of her disappearance. Good news seldom traveled in the dark, and so Ana nearly hadn’t answered, expecting it to be her older daughter calling from Rosmarina and bearing news of Luka’s death. She had expected that call for months, but still it shocked her, the telephone screaming at her in the early morning hours like a red-faced child.

  But it had been Jadranka. “Is it true that he is my father?” she demanded from America.

  She could have lied. Again. Years ago she had told Jadranka that her father was a Norwegian, an autumn visitor to the island who had carried about him an air of grace. A man with long, tapered fingers and eyes as green as sea glass, who had lifted her out of her widow’s grief for a single night. This Sven. This Erik. This gentle Viking whose last name she had never caught. She had made him a violinist, a detail she knew her younger daughter would appreciate but which prompted Magdalena to stare at her with eyes like black nails.

  But Jadranka was old enough to know. Old enough to eat her sack of salt.

  Tell me, Jadranka had ordered. And so she told her.

  She stopped short of revealing that she had seen Vico last year in Split. Almost three decades had passed, but there he was, walking as if he did not have a care in the world, looking into shop windows before finally pausing in front of a display of men’s clothing.

  God help her, she had followed him. She carried a metal nail file in her purse, and for a feverish moment she considered plunging it into his neck while he perused those ties and shirts.

  She had not seen him since before Jadranka’s birth, and for years after his departure nobody on Rosmarina spoke about him. If anything, she assumed that he had left the country at the beginning of the war, or finished in jail. But there he was, milling around as innocently as a bank clerk.

  She had stood too close in the end. Her reflection appeared in the store window beside his, and their eyes met through the glass. He must have recognized her—or something about her—because he turned immediately and walked away.

  A week later, he appeared at her apartment while Jadranka was out. Standing awkwardly in her living room, he explained that he had done some digging into her details, a statement that caused her to go momentarily breathless because it meant that he still had access to the information in her files.

  “Don’t tell me you’re in this government, as well,” she practically spat at him.

  He did not answer, telling her simply that he knew Jadranka was his. He had never married and had no other children. “I have a right to know her,” he insisted, his face so earnest that an outside observer might have believed them lovers, reuniting despite cruel fate.

  “We,” Ana told him, stabbing his chest with her finger. “We were never lovers.”

  “Regardless,” he told her, “I have a right to know her.”

  No sooner did he leave her apartment than she embarked single-mindedly on the campaign of America, writing to Katarina with the suggestion of a babysitting arrangement. Jadranka’s pride would never allow her to ask you, she had added, thereby winning Katarina’s complicity. But perhaps if you suggested it?

  As for Rosmarina’s former chief of police and top UDBA agent, she allowed him to believe that she had acquiesced. “Wait,” she implored him. “I need to prepare her first.”

  By his next visit, Jadranka was gone, and she had merely looked at him in triumph, this man who was now slighter than she, with gray skin and lips that time had thinned so that his mouth was like an incision in his face. It was unbearable to her that he had once been inside her body, a contagion—stick with me and I’ll keep your brot
her safe—like some venereal disease that she now realized would be with her for life.

  Holding Marin’s freedom over her head had not been enough for him, however. For two nights after her brother’s escape, they had kept her for questioning, this man her interrogator.

  “Don’t you know that I could squash you like a bug?” he had asked her.

  There were prison camps for women, she knew, but she only shook her head dumbly. “I’m not my brother’s keeper,” she answered. “I have no idea where he went.”

  For months afterwards he had threatened to imprison her father. “It was stupid what he did, pretending to go fishing with your brother,” Vico told her. “They’ll send him away for years. They’ll throw away the key.”

  She would go to extreme lengths to avoid him, but every time she went somewhere alone—to the Peak to visit her aunt, to the Devil’s Stones—he would materialize, the most unwelcome of apparitions. His eventual transfer from the island and to points unknown had been the only thing that saved her.

  “Tell me everything,” Jadranka had demanded from America. “I deserve to know everything.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “You can tell me why you did it,” Jadranka wept.

  But Ana could not bring herself to supply this missing puzzle piece. She knew her daughter’s tendency to romanticize things, and she could imagine Jadranka casting her in the role of saint. “But you saved him,” Jadranka would tell her. Better that her daughter think her the whore that everybody claimed she was.

  “I’ll find out,” Jadranka threatened. “I’ll ask Nona.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Who then?”

  Ana hesitated. “Nobody.”

  “Liar.”

  “Nobody who wants anything to do with us,” Ana said wearily.

  She could hear Jadranka digesting this information.

  “I hate you,” her daughter said a moment later, causing something inside Ana to snap, some final thread that had held her insides together the way butchers bind certain cuts of meat with string.