The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  Jadranka sighed. In the past few weeks, she had been working on a series of paintings about her childhood. All day they had been calling out to her like babies standing up in their cribs, demanding food.

  But her great-aunt’s voice quivered, and Jadranka realized that the older woman was lonely. In moments like these, she always wanted Jadranka to describe what the riva looked like today, or asked if one could still rest in the shade of the carob trees, halfway to the Peak. And so, sensing her yearning for this geography, Jadranka pulled the album from the bookshelf and sat beside her on the bed.

  There were pictures of the Pittsburgh house where Katarina had grown up, with its aluminum siding and its straggling lawn, and of her First Communion. There were tamburitza troupes and church picnics, and the tailor shop that Katarina’s father had opened, a modest business whose interior appeared gloomy in photographs, although he smiled from ear to ear.

  But Nona Vinka was looking for pictures of the island. These photographs numbered far fewer, as the family had not been able to take many when they fled. There was the stone house on Rosmarina, and a feast day procession led by a somber priest Jadranka did not recognize. There were pictures of Vinka’s siblings, and Jadranka felt her eyes burn unexpectedly at the sight of her own grandfather sitting in his boat, restored to health on paper, the sun directly overhead, so that there were no shadows on his face.

  “My only brother, Luka,” Vinka said with a smile, pointing to the photograph. “Just wait until you meet him.”

  Jadranka nodded. Her great-aunt was fading again. In five minutes the fascists would be back at the door and there would be another reprisal. Or UDBA’s secret agents and their minions would fill the hallway.

  “He takes all the beatings,” Vinka whispered, her finger hovering above Luka’s face. “He does it to protect the rest of us.”

  Jadranka swallowed. She wondered if this was what growing old meant for everyone: a variation of the same grotesque film, the scenes cobbled together from the bleakest moments of any given life. She found the idea unbearable.

  Vinka had brighter moments, of course. Days when the olive trees were in bloom, and the afternoon of her wedding feast. But tonight she was on Rosmarina, and the Italian soldiers had eaten all the village cats. “Every last one,” she insisted with the sudden tears of an adolescent girl, for she loved to stroke their silken fur. “They roast them with potatoes.”

  You’re safely in America, Jadranka was tempted to tell her in a soothing voice. But she knew that Nona Vinka would only wave her impatiently away.

  Jadranka had heard most of her great-aunt’s stories before. Prisons and plots and they were fleeing, fleeing through the night, and little Katarina was weeping for the toys she had left behind. There was one doll, in particular, but Vinka would not let her bring it because Katarina already carried a stuffed bear, and they were pretending to leave for just the afternoon.

  “Be a good, brave girl,” Vinka told her, squeezing her hand. “Don’t make a fuss.”

  Jadranka closed her eyes and thought of the studio’s four walls, the empty canvases that awaited their baptisms of color. The last time Vinka had been like this she revealed that she had given birth to two dead children before Katarina. Tonight there were the Italian soldiers, and then, so faintly that Jadranka was not sure she had heard the words correctly, the red-haired baby.

  The last was a new subject for her great-aunt, and Jadranka opened her eyes in surprise.

  The red-haired baby, Vinka told her, moving her hand up to Jadranka’s elbow. She shook it as if for emphasis, or as if the young woman beside her would deny it. This bastard child who unraveled the entire world.

  Chapter 2

  On the day that Magdalena learned of her sister’s disappearance, lightning struck Rosmarina. Two water-bombing airplanes appeared in the sky as she was dismissing school, and her students raced to the classroom windows, shouting in excitement. She stood behind them and watched the planes approach like apocalyptic horsemen. It was clear that a wildfire had started on the remote western part of the island, but instead of rising in a vertical line, the smoke moved in billows across the sky. Even from that distance, Magdalena could tell that the fire was spreading.

  She was not a superstitious woman. She did not, for instance, believe that dreaming of spoons brought good luck to the dreamer or that cracked glass foretold disaster. She was amused by the idea that women of childbearing age should sit along the straight edges of tables lest the corners render them infertile. But even she acknowledged that a warm southern wind could make men temporarily insane, or predicted the arrival of bad news, although in those moments she was not thinking of her sister.

  The fires themselves started earlier every year, whether from lightning strikes or human mischief. Some claimed that global warming was behind their intensity, others that they were a sure sign of Armageddon. Magdalena knew that the village priest preached divine punishment, warning the island’s residents to mend their wicked ways. She knew this not because she herself attended his masses but because her grandmother relayed the information, uncertainly, neither convinced nor dismissing it as so much hocus-pocus, as Magdalena’s grandfather used to do.

  It was the wind that made all the difference, Luka Morić had always insisted. Not some higher power. Without the wind, a fire could be contained with little damage to houses or vineyards. But when it blew, whether from north or south, it carried sparks over fire roads and turned pines into towering matches.

  The bura rushed coldly from the north, but the jugo—which blew today—came all the way from Africa. It climbed the rungs of people’s ribs in shivers and caused nervous dogs to chew their tails so violently that they smeared the limestone blocks of Rosmarina’s main square with blood.

  It had been blowing on the day of her grandfather’s stroke, as well, so that Magdalena would forever associate those two sights: the way he fell forward suddenly, grabbing the edge of the kitchen table, and the jagged surface of the sea.

  She let the children go. At eight and nine, they were still too young to join the lines, but their fathers would be on call to remove underbrush or operate the fire trucks.

  “Will it reach the town?” one of the boys, more nervous than the rest, had asked.

  “No,” Magdalena answered, aware that twenty pairs of eyes had turned in her direction. “The fire is miles away from here.”

  Now, looking out the window, she was not so sure. Smoke filled the sky in greasy plumes, and when she leaned forward to pull the windows closed, the smell of charred pine burned her throat.

  From the school she walked home along the riva, where a few fishermen were tying up their boats. They had seen the smoke from the water, and one or two called out to her in greeting. She raised her hand in answer but did not stop. Her grandmother was at home alone with Luka, and Magdalena imagined her listening to the radio in the kitchen, hands shaking as she cut tomatoes for their dinner.

  Along the strand all the cafés had tuned their radios to Rosmarina’s only station. People milled about on the pavement, watching the smoking sky and listening to the news reports. “They’re fighting the whole fire from the air,” she heard someone say behind her.

  It made sense, she knew. There were few roads on that part of the island, and it was clear from the airplanes’ jerking that the wind was complicating their approach. When fires were especially bad, every able-bodied person on Rosmarina joined the lines, but today they could only watch the horizon uneasily and hope that the wind would not blow the fire towards the town.

  When one of the airplanes passed overhead, she slowed. She watched it sweep low over the sea in front of them and rise, and was about to resume her walk home when a neighbor called out to her from his boat. “How’s your grandfather?” he asked.

  She started at this question. “No change,” she told him.

  The abruptness of her response seemed to distress him, and she noticed the man in the next boat stare down at his palm as if he did not wan
t to meet her eyes. Luka’s condition had been unchanged for months. But the men in front of her had fished the channels with her grandfather, so she softened her reply. “Only time will tell.”

  They nodded, as if relieved by this, as if a crack had been left in the inevitable and they could now all comfortably breathe. The one who had been studying his hand looked up. “And those children?” he asked with a shy smile. “Are they behaving themselves?”

  His daughter was in her class, and she made herself smile back. “Most of the time,” she told him. “Your Verica is, anyway.”

  He looked pleased at this answer, and so she turned and continued home. She did not need to look back to know that they were watching her walk away, or that by the time she reached the end of the riva they would be deep in conversation over the gunwales of their boats.

  Magdalena knew that the island viewed her with a mixture of pity and respect. Few who attended university ever returned for more than holidays, and at thirty-one she was an oddity in a place where teenage girls tended to marry out of boredom.

  It did not help that on Rosmarina there was no such thing as privacy, one house so near the next that a man could hear his neighbor’s toilet flush. Grudges went back generations, and children were judged by things their parents had done, some of them years before their birth. Small wonder, Magdalena sometimes thought, that her sister preferred places where nobody knew her.

  “It’s been a long time since you had a boyfriend,” one officious neighbor had pointed out to Magdalena only yesterday, sympathetic but disapproving, too, as if sensing something defiant in her spinsterhood. And because Magdalena had a knack for picking discreet lovers, no one, not even Jadranka, suspected her of those encounters.

  Her men usually came from other islands or from the mainland, and she met them secretly in hotel rooms in Split or in apartments they borrowed from friends. Some were strangers, others old acquaintances whom she ran into, unexpectedly, when she was running errands—buying construction paper for the bulletin boards at school, or filling a prescription for her grandparents. Sometimes attraction bloomed in the time it took to exchange pleasantries.

  She had planned to meet one of them this afternoon, an electrician from Korčula. She had thought about it all day: his large, uncanny hands, which could untangle the finest wires, the way he would meet her at his front door and carry her to his bed. The fact that there was not a single book in his entire apartment, a distinct advantage because it meant that their relationship would never progress beyond the physical.

  She favored easygoing men like him who did not talk of love. She did not want to carry anyone’s photograph in her wallet, or go on holidays with them, or meet their mothers. It was only rarely that someone became possessive or demanding, and in such circumstances she would end things immediately.

  “She should never have let that Damir get away,” the same neighbor had told Magdalena’s grandmother, loudly enough for her to hear.

  More than ten years had passed since Damir’s departure, but the island was agreed on this fact. As a result, he was mentioned often in her presence, as if she were solely at fault for their parting. As if she had defied the natural order of things.

  She and Damir had known each other all their lives, even sitting together in the same Rosmarina classroom where Magdalena now taught. But it was only when she was seventeen—the same year the country’s independence war began—that Magdalena considered the quiet, older boy with the widow’s peak, the one she had never heard brag of summertime conquests with foreign girls. The one whose father had occasionally fished the Devil’s Stones with her father when they were young men.

  For several years they had studied together in the capital, where an atmosphere of near calm prevailed after the first year of the war. They frequented student bars and walked hand in hand along Tkalčićeva Street, and Magdalena regularly sneaked him into the room she rented from a half-deaf spinster aunt. They lay naked on the bed’s crocheted coverlet, plotting the life they would one day build on the island.

  But he had been drafted into the military after finishing his degree in journalism, and she had not recognized the man who returned at war’s end, the one who took her face in his hands one night and told her gently that they could have a good life on the mainland, but he would not be going back to Rosmarina.

  And because Rosmarina was the only solid ground she’d ever stood on—a fact he knew, a fact that made his defection all the more difficult to bear—she had returned to the island alone.

  He was a journalist today. He circumnavigated the globe while she traveled Rosmarina’s circumference again and again. He learned French and Russian and English, and she prowled the abandoned hamlets of the island’s interior, watching the moon rise in different parts of the sky.

  Sometimes he returned to Rosmarina to visit his parents, but he would only wave at her from a passing car, or on the street. She always smiled tightly and waved back, but they did not stop to speak.

  Her grandparents knew better than to mention him. But while Luka had never expressed concern at her solitary state, her grandmother had long despaired. “What will become of you, Lena, when we’re gone?”

  Magdalena could not help viewing her grandfather’s stroke as the warning shot, and sometimes she saw herself wandering from room to room in an empty house.

  “A baby,” had been her grandmother’s solution. “You ought to have a baby.”

  This had caused Magdalena to shout with laughter. Most men of her generation had either left the island, like Damir, or married. And as far as having a baby on her own, Rosmarina was a conservative place. She could just imagine how they would whisper in the harbor that the splinter did not fall far from the trunk.

  It was true that she dressed severely for teaching: snow-white cotton blouses and dark slacks whose only distinguishing feature was the sharp creases left by her grandmother’s iron. True, as well, that she pulled her hair back into a tight knot so that when her pupils saw her at other times, fishing or riding her scooter on the island’s back roads, they often failed to recognize the woman with the long, dark hair. But she did this because she was the size of some of the school’s eleven-year-old students and not, she insisted to Jadranka, as an act of capitulation.

  She was a good teacher who prepared her lessons at the small, scarred table in her room where she had done her homework as a child. It was the same surface where, years before, her mother had kept cosmetic tubes and pots that dripped onto the wood, leaving a pattern that could not be deciphered from one generation to the next.

  Within the school she had a reputation for being stern and a second sense for malingerers and the clandestine passing of notes. Unlike some of the older teachers, she never coerced her students physically. This was a result not of her size, as many people assumed, but of her belief that a child should never feel threatened. She despised bullies and became adept at separating boys in fights, holding each by the back of his shirt with a ferocity that belied her size.

  She had been at the school for eight years, and some of her first pupils now fished or worked in the island’s small quarry or in cafés along the riva. It was always a shock for Magdalena to run into these young men and women, who towered above her without exception, proof that time was passing but she herself was standing still.

  The afternoon ferry to Korčula was already slipping out to sea when she left the port and climbed upward through the town, past stone houses whose roof tiles had lightened in the sun. The dwellings closer to the riva were occupied by islanders and cluttered with the evidence of life: laundry lines and dog food bowls, children’s tricycles and fishing nets that had been left outside to dry. But the farther she went, the more frequently she passed empty houses. These were the ones that had been refurbished, with air-conditioning and the occasional picture window. The roof tiles were startling in their ruddy newness, but because the tourist season was only just starting, many of the windows were still shuttered. Only the houses on the Peak remai
ned entirely deserted, though in recent years there had been talk of summer visitors buying up these, as well.

  Ash began to fall as she climbed. It drifted lazily through open windows and over walls. She saw through several open courtyard doors that it was already landing in a fine layer on sheets and undershirts that had been hung to dry. It fell like snow, which had fallen rarely on the island in Magdalena’s lifetime. Twice on her way up, she stopped to watch it fall, holding out her hand so that a few flakes landed on her palm.

  When she reached her grandparents’ house, she put her full weight against the gate and pushed so that it made a scraping sound. The courtyard and the kitchen were deserted, but she found her grandmother upstairs, asleep in a chair beside Luka’s bed.

  “Nona,” she whispered, prompting her grandmother’s eyes to flutter. “I’ll sit with him a little while.”

  “The fire,” her grandmother said, immediately awake.

  “They’re using the planes to fight it.”

  Ružica sighed and rose stiffly. “A bad sign that they’re starting this early,” she pronounced, and Magdalena heard her careful steps as she descended the stairs. A short time later there was the sound of running water in the kitchen.

  “Hello, old man,” she greeted her grandfather, although she no longer expected him to respond. Since his stroke he had been like a leaf in a bathtub from which water was being slowly drained. He clung to the surface, just barely, even as he sank. Although her grandmother had claimed small improvements in the months since then—he swallowed black tea from a spoon one day, and another time, she swore, he winked at her—the doctors had said that recovery was impossible.

  He would die soon, in the same room where he had first taken breath, an idea that comforted Magdalena and which she often repeated to herself. It was a plain, whitewashed room with a single window that overlooked the courtyard. Beyond it was the town and beyond that the sea. In his childhood, she knew, he had slept there with his siblings, and it was the room that he had shared for more than sixty years with his wife. It seemed to Magdalena that he slept more easily there than in the hospital, although she could not be sure that he was aware of his surroundings.