The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  Ana had kept the mirror, giving it to Jadranka on one of her visits to the island. This was proof, Jadranka thought, that the mirror was somehow significant to her history, although her mother had made the gift in an offhand way, telling her that she had no need for it anymore.

  It had been Pero Radić who found Goran Babić’s boat on the day of his likely death and came to the courtyard with his hat crushed between his hands.

  “He asked your mother to marry him a dozen times at least,” the neighbor had told Jadranka, who was already coming to the conclusion that the lanky fisherman—who had never married—was her father.

  And nobody could deny that he had taken a special interest in both Jadranka and her sister, giving them some of the stranger objects he dragged up in his nets: a piece of driftwood in the precise shape of a sleeping dog, a string of purple beads, a piece of incised pottery that Jadranka imagined had come from some ancient shipwreck on the seafloor.

  Why, she reasoned, would he bother giving her these things if he were not her father?

  In the second year of the independence war, when Jadranka was fourteen, he was on the front lines near Dubrovnik. One day in the port Jadranka overheard that he had been wounded badly.

  “I have to find him,” she told Magdalena that night, who looked at her as if she had grown a second head.

  “Please,” she begged her sister. “I need to talk to him before he dies.”

  Magdalena looked perplexed at this. “Why on earth do you think he’s your father?”

  “I just know that he is.”

  Reaching Dubrovnik in those days had been no small feat, with so many areas of the coast under attack. It had taken them nearly two days, through a combination of ferries, which now ran on abbreviated schedules, and hitchhiking down the coast as far as they could. On the last leg of their journey, they caught a ride with a young private around Magdalena’s age who was on his way to pick up his boss, the colonel. “He’s constantly on my case,” he had confided in them as the sound of shelling grew louder in the distance. The private—not missing a beat—turned his music up to full volume. “Just think of the shelling like bass,” he told them when both girls jumped at an explosion nearer than the rest. “It’s one more part of the music.”

  He drove them to a military outpost, some distance north of Dubrovnik, where the older man in charge made them sit in his makeshift office, a classroom in a bombed-out school. “This is a war,” he told both girls sternly. “What are you thinking by coming here?”

  “My father is dying,” Jadranka told him, and surprised herself by bursting into tears. “It may be my last chance to see him.”

  The man—Jadranka thought he had also been a colonel, though she could not remember much about him—had softened at this. After making a few calls on a scratchy handheld device, he told them that Pero Radić was in a hospital nearby.

  “You have half an hour,” he informed the girls. “And then you go back to where you came from.”

  Magdalena swore to him that it would be so, but Jadranka barely heard their conversation, so elated was she at the prospect of seeing her father. If he were conscious, she imagined, he would envelop her in his arms. If he were truly near death’s door, she would hold a washcloth to his forehead the way she had seen in films.

  Her elation lasted throughout the short jeep ride, the colonel himself driving them the four miles to the military hospital. He let them out in front. “Half an hour,” he told them, looking uneasily at the building they were about to enter. “This isn’t a place for little girls.”

  Magdalena gave him a withering look, but Jadranka was out of the car before it had even come to a halt, running into the hospital with her sister calling out behind her.

  She found him on the second floor, in a room with at least a dozen other men. She found him as if she had been guided to him by sonar. He was sitting up, playing cards with another man who sat at the foot of his bed. He must have just won a round because he was smiling, but when he saw Jadranka, he only looked confused. “Who have you come to see?” he asked her. “I thought I was the only one from Rosmarina here.”

  When she explained that no, she was not here to visit anyone but him, that she had figured it all out and knew that he was her father, his eyes became as round as two plates. The man playing cards with him shot him an amused look, then beat a hasty retreat to his own bed at the other end of the room.

  Jadranka had not cared. Nobody could keep her from her father. Not his friend the cardplayer, not the nurse who had caught sight of her and was now heading purposefully in her direction, not Magdalena, who was calling her name in the corridor. Not the war. And not her mother, who had withheld this most important information for all of Jadranka’s life.

  But the man in the bed clearly did not share her wild elation at their reunion, and for the first time Jadranka faltered. If anything, he looked a little uncomfortable, fumbling for his cigarettes after the initial shock of her appearance had passed. He would not meet her eyes, in marked contrast to the men in the beds on either side, who watched in rapt attention.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  But he only shook his head. “I’m sorry, mala,” he told her.

  It was their mother who came to collect them, driving down the coast and through the checkpoints in her battered Yugo in record time.

  “Get in the car!” she shouted when she saw them, the shelling that had been a low roar in the background growing ever louder, though several people had told the girls that it wouldn’t reach the hospital, that the spot had been chosen for precisely that reason.

  The colonel had washed his hands of both of them, leaving them on a bench on the hospital’s ground floor with stern instructions not to move until their mother arrived. And it was there that Ana found them, Jadranka weeping quietly into her sister’s lap, the hallway filled with beds of wounded.

  “Are you out of your minds?” she demanded after they had traveled a safe distance north, destroyed buildings giving way to ones that were merely shuttered, two tourist seasons already—and countless lives—pissed away by the territorial pretensions of others.

  It was during that drive, Jadranka had thought, that her mother told her the truth at last. A Norwegian. Lie upon lie, she now realized, had unspooled as her mother gripped the steering wheel and ordered Jadranka to put away these childish notions about finding her father because it would be like looking for a needle in a great Scandinavian haystack.

  “He was a nice guy,” Ana had told her finally. “And that’s about all there is to know.”

  It surprised Jadranka, knowing what she now knew, that her mother had allowed her to live at all. An abortion would have meant a trip to the mainland under the scrutiny of others, but there were always other ways—secret practitioners on the island, recipes involving parsley and juniper. Jadranka was wise enough to understand that there had been methods for as long as there had been women.

  And perhaps her mother had tried, after all. Perhaps she, Jadranka, was the result of some failed attempt. The daughter who was not meant to be, botched and unnatural. And perhaps she was the reason that their mother had left them both, all those years ago.

  She had begun working for Marin with the notion that she would eventually tell him of her true identity. She would prove herself to him, show him that she was not afraid of hard work, that she was worthy of his affection in spite of who her father was. But it had all gone wrong in the end.

  Most of all, she withheld the truth because of the suspicion that he might know more about her paternity, and she was afraid that she would never learn those things if he understood her to be his niece, opting to keep her in the fog of ignorance she’d been in all her life.

  “And are you happier for knowing?” her mother had demanded during that same telephone conversation so many weeks ago, prompting Jadranka to reply that it had nothing at all to do with happiness.

  She had brought most of the materials for Marin’s commission to Shelter Island
, hitchhiking from the ferry landing with the canvas under one arm. She spent the first week working in the shadow of the house, taking the canvas into the sunshine when she wanted to make sure that she was getting the colors right: the deep green of the vines, the gray limestone of the courtyard, the sea beyond her grandfather’s gate, so deeply blue that it put to shame this murky ocean.

  She painted the details simply but with a loving hand—the courtyard, the cracked plaster beneath the bedroom window, and the sheer lace curtains that her grandmother had hemmed with needle and thread. How many times had she and Magdalena stood on either side of the window with those curtains draped over their heads, as if preparing for their wedding days?

  Adding her grandparents’ telephone number had been an afterthought, but once she did it she realized that the intention had been there all along, from the moment she had stepped into Marin’s Brooklyn restaurant.

  “This much I can do for you,” she muttered to herself, though even she did not know to whom she was speaking.

  She walked into town to mail the canvas. After a week alone, it was strange to see people on the streets of Shelter Island Heights, shopping for antiques and licking ice cream cones. She felt at a great distance from them.

  “No return address?” The clerk in the post office asked, regarding the painting, which she had packed in brown paper and twine.

  “No,” she told him.

  “Anything hazardous, fragile, liquid?”

  She hesitated, and his watery blue eyes searched her face.

  She shook her head.

  A collection of postcards stood by the post office’s front door. As she paid postage for the canvas, she briefly considered writing to her sister.

  Magdalena would be done with school by now. She would be painting their grandfather’s boat and making repairs to the house, doing all the things she never had time for while she was teaching. Jadranka wondered whether their grandfather had finally slipped loose of this world, and for a terrible moment she pictured their grandmother draped in black. Most of all, though, she wondered what her sister knew.

  For several years after her own discovery that she and Magdalena were half sisters, island children had made a game of guessing her father’s identity. It was as if they sensed this knowledge the moment she herself attained it, and they had taunted her by naming all the island’s drunks and village idiots. “Some German tourist!” they snickered within earshot. And their mother was a whore. Kurva. A word both soft and harsh, like an axe splitting wet wood.

  Magdalena had bloodied a boy’s nose once. Jadranka didn’t remember precisely what he said, but she remembered the rage that surged through her sister’s body as she bent and hoisted a rock.

  Later, at home, Jadranka had crawled beneath the bed they shared. “Does it mean that we’re not really sisters?” she asked between sobs.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” Magdalena had responded, fiercely wedging herself next to Jadranka. “You can’t listen to stupid people.”

  In the Shelter Island post office, Jadranka turned away from the selection of postcards. How would her sister answer that question, she wondered, if she knew that Jadranka’s father was responsible for her own father’s death?

  She was at loose ends after mailing the painting. She was not ready to abandon the greenhouse and, anyway, did not know where to go next. She needed time to figure these things out, to figure herself out, as if her very anatomy had changed. She felt like an alien life-form who, despite years of thinking she is human, suddenly learns the opposite.

  She was dimly aware that her hair had grown wild and that her lips were badly chapped. But she was glad that she did not own a compact and that the surface of the ocean was too rough to show her reflection. Otherwise she might have spent all of the second week staring at her face. She had always looked so different from Magdalena.

  When the heart is heavy, the hands crave work. This had always been her grandmother’s motto, and she followed it now, taking to the forest during daylight hours. There, she became an architect of sorts, building anything that took her fancy: a flimsy wooden bridge between stones, a pattern of green leaves on the dark earth. When she was a child, an island visitor—from Switzerland perhaps?—had shown her how to build fairy houses, tiny structures of stone and bark, and now she built an entire settlement around the twining roots of a massive oak. Rain would eventually demolish it, but she did not mind.

  It was only at night that she missed her sister. She had never gone so long without hearing Magdalena’s voice. Most of all, she missed her practicality, the way she rolled her eyes at old wives’ tales and scoffed at dreams. If Magdalena were lying in the greenhouse, the tree branch that brushed the glass would be just a tree branch.

  For Magdalena only two things were sacred: Rosmarina and Goran Babić. As a child, the mention of her dead father gave her a dreamy look. She hoped to grow tall like him, she had confided to Jadranka long ago, a desire that did not in the end translate into reality. She did not drink coffee for several years when she learned that he had avoided it.

  During their time in Split, Magdalena once found a piece of paper with his handwriting among their mother’s things. Goran Babić had been making a list of supplies he needed to buy for his boat, and his daughter took this list making as proof that he had not killed himself as they said on Rosmarina.

  “See?” she told Jadranka triumphantly. “It isn’t true.”

  The piece of paper was one of the last objects he had touched that she, too, could touch. Their mother had sold most of his things and given away anything that she judged of little value. When asked, Ana would say that she wanted to make a fresh start with Nikola, who did not like the idea of her dead husband’s possessions lying about.

  Magdalena carried the piece of paper around in her pocket for months. It grew soft as tissue, and the writing began to fade. That year for her birthday, Ana gave her a large, square locket, and she folded the paper tightly and placed it inside.

  Just weeks later, after their foiled escape to Rosmarina, their mother ripped the locket from her neck. “Stop living in the past!” she had screamed, and flung it through the Split apartment window. It traveled five floors down to the courtyard, and Magdalena wailed as she tore down each flight of stairs, Jadranka at her heels. They spent hours searching but never found it among the broken glass and cigarette butts.

  At the end of the second week, Jadranka ventured into town again, no longer satisfied with crackers and peanut butter. Her money was running out. She had less than two hundred dollars left—the remainder of her earnings from working in the restaurant—and that would not last much longer.

  She spent some time walking the streets of Shelter Island Heights. Comparing the menus in several restaurants, she picked the least expensive, an Italian restaurant with scuffed wooden floors and plastic tablecloths.

  She knew already what she wanted, and ordered a breaded chicken cutlet with a glass of water.

  “That comes with potatoes or pasta,” the waitress told her.

  “Pasta,” she said, hunger thrashing its tail in her stomach.

  “And a side vegetable.”

  It was as the waitress reeled off the list of possibilities that Jadranka saw the man with the shaved head walk in, his sunglasses on top of his head, his shoulders straining the fabric of his black T-shirt. She knew that he was Croatian, although she could not place him in that moment.

  The waitress was looking at her expectantly.

  “Broccoli,” Jadranka told her.

  He owned the Croatian bar in Queens, she realized then. He had been rude to Theo, and a short time later Jadranka had made a flourish of leaving with her friend, letting the door slam shut behind them. But now Jadranka sank into her booth, pretending to study the paper placemat with interest. It had a map of Shelter Island on it, and she traced the shoreline with one absentminded finger.

  He passed right by her table, and for a moment she thought that he would not notice her, but then she
felt him stop. “I thought it was you, mila,” he told her in Croatian. “Where’s your friend?”

  She looked up at him, feigning surprise. “Around,” she told him with a small smile.

  “May I join you?”

  “Sure,” she said after a split second of hesitation. “Why not?”

  He slid into the booth across from her, smiling as though they were old friends. “What are you doing so far from home?”

  She did not know if he meant from Croatia or from New York, and so she told him, “This and that.”

  “Mysterious lady” was his response.

  “That’s me.”

  For a moment they simply stared at each other across the table. Then he chuckled and picked up the menu that the waitress had brought over. “What are you drinking?” he asked, eyeing her glass.

  “Water,” she told him.

  “Wine it is.”

  She had known plenty of men like him in Split. Macho men who were equal parts charm and swagger, they called her names like ljepotica—beauty—and princeza. They bore tattoos of sharks and leopards and spent their spare time in dark gyms lifting weights. Many worked regular jobs, but some aspired to gangster status. Jadranka was adept at dealing with either type, flirting with them in cafés but letting them down easy at the end of an evening. She had a talent for keeping things light, so that no matter how single-mindedly they pursued her, she always parted with them on friendly terms. Little sister, she had been called more than once, and the truth was that she had a soft spot for their streetwise wit.

  “None for me,” she told him when the waitress brought a bottle of wine over, but he was already motioning for another glass.

  “Jadranka,” he told her, and she was surprised that he remembered her name.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve forgotten my name.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. When she didn’t answer, he held out his hand across the table. “Darko,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”