The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “Hate me, then,” she had told her daughter before hanging up. “But don’t you dare come back.”

  She did not think Jadranka capable of disappearing for long. Too much still bound her to her sister. During that year in Split they had spoken a secret language, so that when Jadranka turned mute it was Magdalena who answered for her, demanding drawing paper or declining vegetables.

  As adults they had never gone more than a handful of days without speaking, as different as earth and sky but bound by some mysterious connection. So that when the telephone woke her again some weeks later, she answered it with relief. “Enough, Jadranka,” she told the silence in a weary voice. “Your sister is out of her mind with worry.”

  But it was a man’s voice, at once foreign and familiar. It was a voice she knew, and down the dark tunnel of history their last evening came back to her, brother and sister weeping in the darkness of their island Gethsemane.

  “Jesus,” she said to this unexpected ghost. “Jesus Christ.”

  He had telephoned Rosmarina first, he said, sounding almost apologetic, and their mother had given him her number.

  For a moment Ana thought that it might be a trick, that the caller was only someone posing as her brother. Vico, perhaps, exacting some revenge. But then the voice began again. A voice that was older, yes, and cracking around the edges like dry leather, but irrefutably Marin’s.

  Her immediate response was not relief but nausea, and lying in her bed, she drew the covers up to her chin.

  “I thought our parents were dead,” he told her in wonder. “I didn’t even know you had a second child.”

  She did not break the silence that stretched between them then, the one he rushed forward to fill, telling her that he had written at the beginning of the war, but one of his letters had been returned with that word on it, stark and terrible: Deceased.

  Her hand on the telephone trembled uncontrollably now.

  “Do you believe me?” he asked her, a note of desperation in his voice.

  “Yes,” she told him. “I do.”

  The letters had arrived together, two full years after their postmarks. She had intercepted them on her final visit to the island, during the same summer that Nikola had deserted her, chairs overturned in his wake. She had run into the postman on the riva. “Here,” he told her, barely able to conceal his smirk as he handed her a bundle of mail. “You can save me the trip to your parents’ house.”

  The entire island knew of her abandonment. She did not understand how the news had made it back so fast, but twice after exiting the ferry, old acquaintances had hailed her with scandalized expressions and gossip-hungry eyes. “Is it true about Nikola leaving you?” one had asked.

  The postman was the final straw, with his gaze of ill-concealed amusement and his jaunty cap. So agitated was she by the way he kept looking back at her as he walked away that she almost failed to recognize the neat, forward-leaning slashes of her brother’s penmanship on the envelopes.

  She tore the first envelope open when she was a safe distance away. As she read, it became clear that her brother was enjoying an easy life, and each step towards her parents’ house drummed in another of its details: the successful restaurant and the loving wife, the photographs of the two handsome boys who looked at their father with adoration. As she reached the courtyard gate, she buried the letters deep inside her purse.

  “Sister?” Marin asked.

  Months later, it had been she who wrote Deceased on one of the envelopes, disguising her penmanship by writing with her left hand. It was an act of cruelty, she knew, but she took for granted that he would write again. For months she prepared herself for their mother’s telephone call, bearing news of his imminent arrival. When it did not come, she felt vindicated by how easily he had given up.

  She hated him. She hated him, but she had been unable to throw away the first letter. She kept it in a bureau drawer, together with its envelope and photographs. In June, when Magdalena telephoned with her intention of searching Jadranka’s things, she went to move it to a new hiding place, but it was gone. She emptied that drawer, and all the others. She called in sick to work and spent all night searching the apartment but never found it.

  Throughout Magdalena’s visit the next morning, she had held her breath. Every time the girl opened a box or inspected a drawer, she expected the accusing weight of those black eyes. How could you do it? she expected to hear her ask.

  But it had been Jadranka, she realized now. Jadranka who had embraced her before leaving, Jadranka of the poker face, who had set off for America with her uncle’s letter.

  “Sister.” Marin broke the silence with an agitated voice. “Please.”

  She felt the saved-up bile of years rise, and although she wept easily into the telephone’s receiver, she could not speak. In the filmstrip that played before her eyes, she could scarcely believe how slowly—how senselessly—the decades since his departure had passed.

  It was clear that he thought she might blame him for not recognizing Jadranka, for turning the girl away. But she understood what he didn’t: that Jadranka had not found him by chance. And it was this subterfuge that rattled her, this proof that her daughter believed herself capable of controlling certain outcomes. Jadranka was more like her than she had realized, an idea that frightened her like no other.

  She did not drink on the airplane. She did not accept the small bottle of wine that the stewardess handed out to other passengers, even when the woman sitting beside her whispered in encouraging English that it was free. Nor did she allow herself a cocktail from the tiny plastic bottles, miniatures of the ones in Frankfurt’s duty-free. She did not do it because she knew that her older daughter would be waiting on the other side with her bloodhound’s sense of smell.

  Magdalena had not always been so hard. She had been a joyful child who adored boats and pomegranate seeds, who liked best when Ana sang to her as they lay together in their bed during the thickest heat of afternoon. Lullabies, mostly. Sometimes the Beatles or the Doors. Try to set the night on fire, she used to tell her firstborn’s face.

  Little more than five when Ana left the island, Magdalena became instantly poisoned by the whispering of others. Ana knew the things that were being said: that she was not satisfied with Rosmarina and considered herself too good for its tough life, its scorching heat, its songs of interminable crystal seas and singing crickets, its girls left waiting in windows for their sweethearts. That it was, in fact, she who lured away those sweethearts, creating green-eyed babies that islanders called bastard because they weren’t inventive enough to come up with something new.

  Nobody had suspected the blue-eyed policeman, and though Ana herself had caught wind of the wilder stories—Goran’s best friend, an American sailor, a priest on the nearby island of Vis who was abruptly summoned back to the Vatican—she certainly did not bother to set anybody straight. The only people who might have guessed the truth were her brother and aunt. And they were gone.

  She still remembered Magdalena’s eyes at the table the morning she left the island. Knowing eyes, as if she understood that Ana would be gone for longer than the three months she claimed. And it was not fear of abandonment that shone there, or any fear at all, but suspicion, plain and simple. And so, halfway through feeding Jadranka, Ana handed the spoon to her mother, who took it with a troubled face and finished the job, making small noises of approval that Ana could never have mustered.

  It was only later, when she stood on the ferry she had known her whole life, the ferry she had seen arrive and depart a thousand times but always for others, that she began to feel as though she could breathe. She was surrounded by German tourists who had spent a week on the island, their blond hair strange against their suntanned skin. They were talking and laughing and drinking beers even before the ferry pulled away. And they had already forgotten the island. The week of swimming and afternoon ice creams and mosquito bites was fading from their minds. Ana watched their faces and imagined the cities where t
hey lived, where stately linden trees formed avenues of shade and the people were all well dressed and went to restaurants and the theater, things she had only seen in films.

  She was so intent on imagining it, imagining how she would spend a few months in Split and then go to Germany or Switzerland or France, that she almost forgot them on the pier. Her mother holding Jadranka and showing her how to wave, shaking her fat hand back and forth, the little girl’s attention already elsewhere, on a man selling popcorn to tourists perhaps, or on a seagull that sat on one of the boats. And Magdalena, stubbornly refusing to wave, those black eyes on the ferry, on her, so that Ana felt their burn all the way to Split and through every day that followed.

  It was interminable, this trip. Even the stewardesses were beginning to look worn around the edges, despite their lacquered hair and artfully tied scarves. And when they reached New York at last, the plane was required to circle, the view from the window following the same endless pattern of ocean, land, and ocean.

  Ana imagined Magdalena growing impatient in the airport below, looking at her wristwatch as if it were her mother’s fault for being late. She wondered if her daughter would embrace her, if she would offer to take her bag. For the briefest of moments she allowed herself to imagine Magdalena linking arms with her.

  But she knew how far-fetched this scenario was. She could not remember the last time Magdalena had touched her voluntarily.

  That year in Split would always be between them, a juggernaut that could waken in seconds. She did not approve of these obsessions of the younger generation, this blaming of one’s parents. It had been just one year—not a very good year, Ana could admit now—but just one year. She did not understand why they could not simply leave it behind them.

  But her daughter carried that year within her like a cancer. “You didn’t lift a finger to stop him,” she had told her mother once, an accusation that left Ana indignant and a little light-headed.

  “You turned out all right” had been her retort. “Stop crying about the past.”

  But Magdalena had only waved her hand in disgust.

  That hand was the only impediment to Ana’s forgetting. The left one with the knot, so that in every conversation with her daughter, in every interaction, sooner or later her eyes fell on that ridge of bone.

  It was her fault, Ana knew. She had taken her to the doctor too late, after the bones had fused, and the man had looked at her sharply, though Magdalena said nothing. “She’s so clumsy, my daughter,” Ana had said. And, God help her, she had suggested that the doctor break it again.

  But he would not hear of it. “Ridiculous,” he told her. “The damage is done and she has the full use of her fingers.”

  Sometimes she had the feeling that her daughter taunted her with that hand. Even at rest, the furrow reproached her.

  She felt their descent before it was announced, the captain’s voice tired and—to her ears—unintelligible. America stretched below her, vast and strange. Both her daughters were down there. Her brother, too. But she felt no joy at the prospect of reuniting with any one of them.

  She longed instead for the comforts of her tiny apartment: the bottles she had hidden throughout its rooms, a habit she continued although she now lived alone. She missed her bed, her tiny television. It was Saturday, and on Saturday nights she always watched the late-night mystery movie, wrapped up in her own bed with those flickering images.

  When the plane drew at last to a halt and the doors opened, she waited for the other passengers to disembark first. She stared from the window at the flurry of activity on the tarmac: men dragging hoses and the baggage trolley that had pulled up alongside them. For some time she watched as suitcases were disgorged down a sliding ramp.

  “Madame?” a voice beside her asked in mild annoyance. “We’re here.”

  She turned to see one of the stewardesses looking down at her, and only a handful of stragglers in the aisles.

  “Do you require assistance?”

  Ana did not understand the question, but she shook her head, sensing that this was the reaction expected of her. She rose stiffly, clutching her purse to her chest.

  “Ready?” the woman asked with the briefest of smiles, then stepped back to let her pass.

  Ana did not understand this word, either, but she nodded because that was what the stewardess was doing, making a subtle up-and-down movement with her head as if she were trying to convince Ana of something.

  She walked a little unsteadily towards the rectangle of light at the front of the plane, towards the captain and crew members bidding farewell to passengers who slipped like parachutists into the American beyond.

  Part V

  Chapter 16

  Two days after leaving Marin’s restaurant, Jadranka took a bus to Greenport and caught the ferry for Shelter Island. Because she was afraid of setting off the alarm in her cousin’s weekend house, she decided to sleep in the greenhouse, an ornate structure of wrought iron and fogged glass that stood at the top of a slope behind the large Victorian. Woods covered most of the property, and Jadranka could remember wondering in April—during her only previous visit—if the trees had been felled to build the house, or if the forest had been planted afterwards for the pleasure of the inhabitants.

  There was an outdoor tap for drinking water, and a wooden dock provided easy access to the ocean. Jadranka did not like the murky bottom with its slick seaweed, but day after day the July heat drove her to strip naked and float on the swells. If she closed her eyes, the rhythm was familiar. But if she did not rinse her hair with water from the tap immediately afterwards, a marshy odor followed her for the rest of the day.

  According to Katarina, the greenhouse had been built in the late 1800s, a monument to another age when—Jadranka assumed—ladies attempted to outdo each other with their flower arrangements. It stayed cool at night but became unbearable when the sun rose, even if she propped the door open.

  It had not been difficult to force the lock. Inside, she expected to find unused gardening tools or the remnants of old plants, but it was empty save for an ancient broom that she used to sweep the cobwebs away.

  She slept on the dirt floor, on top of the sleeping bag Luz had given her to use in the restaurant. She had purchased food and candles before catching the ferry, the busybody at the cash register remarking brightly that Shelter Island was a wonderful destination for camping.

  She did not need much: she slept when she was tired and dug into her arsenal of crackers and peanut butter when she was hungry. She had bought a bag of apples, and blackberries grew in the forest behind the house. The saltwater scoured her skin, and the soles of her feet thickened as morning after morning she left her shoes where she had kicked them off the first night.

  For the first time in months she felt at ease. The house was separated from the road by a long and twisting drive, so if someone approached by car, she would hear them long before they turned the final curve and have plenty of time to reach the edge of the forest.

  Sometimes when it was dark she could see lights from the neighboring property flickering through the trees. Occasionally, she would hear a car on the main road, or distant voices in the woods, but nobody approached the house.

  She was not lonely. Not in the beginning, at least. If anything, it was a relief to be on her own. No Katarina with her unsolicited advice. No Nona Vinka and her secrets. No Marin with his disappointment.

  After so many months in a city, she was preoccupied with the novelty of warm dirt and the clamor of birds that woke her at dawn. She had never seen fireflies before and spent her evenings mesmerized by the weaving and bobbing of their fat bodies, which always grew brighter in the moments before fading out. She thought that one day she might paint these things.

  It was only once darkness fell that she found her circumstances difficult, lying alone in the dampness of the glass house. The wind would start, and the nearest tree tapped its branches against the panes of the roof. It was an uncanny sound, and night after night
she dreamed of something outside, asking to be let in.

  She blamed the dreams on her uncle’s story about the policeman. She knew his name was Vico. Vico, the sadist. Also—and disastrously—her father. Nona Vinka’s midnight revelation had been so unexpected that Jadranka had not even stopped to write a note to her cousin explaining that she was leaving.

  Her mother had withheld this information for over twenty years, allowing Jadranka to believe—stupidly, she now thought—in a more auspicious version of her birth. On the night of their telephone conversation, Jadranka had not been able to see further than her mother’s lies, but in the days since then she had begun to look at things differently.

  “You were never supposed to know,” Ana had nearly wailed. “Imagine what hell your life on Rosmarina would have been if everyone knew.”

  “So you were protecting me?” Jadranka demanded, the silence on the other side making her think for a moment that Ana had hung up.

  “Is that so hard to believe?” a voice much smaller than her mother’s had finally asked.

  Their conversation made Jadranka feel a keen sadness now, and for the first time she regretted her own childish words. I hate you. She did not hate her mother, but while Jadranka had long ago accepted that she was not a child of love, to be the child of such a man was quite a different matter.

  When Jadranka was eleven, a neighbor had mentioned that Pero Radić—one of the island’s fishermen—had spent his whole youth in pursuit of Ana. He had brought her flowers, figs, and girice, their scales like delicate filigree. He had once serenaded her from the lane—to the amusement of all their neighbors—and brought her an ornate silver mirror with a pattern of flowers on the handle.