The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  A neighbor had given them an old baby monitor, and on nights when Ružica was particularly tired, when she was afraid that she might not wake up in a moment of grave consequence, Magdalena plugged the receiver into the electrical outlet beside her bed. She turned the volume to high and slept with her grandfather’s shallow breaths in her ear and, behind them, the nonsensical sleep talk of her grandmother. “Three yards of fabric,” she would hear the older woman comment.

  She had quickly realized that her grandmother woke many times each night to make sure that Luka had not slipped away from her in the darkness. Lying in her own room next door, Magdalena would hear the squeal of the mattress as Ružica sat up beside him to hold her open palm above his mouth, waiting for the reassurance of his breath. “Don’t think you can leave me behind, old man,” she had told him once, so fiercely that Magdalena did not know whether to smile or weep in the dark.

  It was remarkable, in fact, what the monitor picked up: people calling to one another in the lane outside and the subsequent barking of village dogs; the house’s creaks and groans, so human in their elocution that Magdalena awoke several times convinced that someone was wandering the rooms; even the faint sound of her own pacing on the nights she gave up on sleep, the muffled footfalls arriving with a slight delay.

  Ružica spent much of the day at Luka’s bedside, but Magdalena always relieved her after school. She talked to him aloud, not caring what people passing in the lane beyond the courtyard might think. She told him news from the port and about her plans to repair the shack at their fishing camp on the Devil’s Stones. She repeated jokes that she heard on the waterfront, leaning close to his ear so that her grandmother would not hear the ruder punch lines.

  But today was different. “There’s a fire on the island,” she told him.

  A shadow moved across the features of his face, and Magdalena held her breath. But she was imagining things. Her grandfather looked the same as when she’d first walked into the room, the same as he always did. It was a trick of the light. In moments like those, a part of her always believed that his eyes were about to open, but in nine months it had not happened once.

  For Jadranka, their grandfather was already gone, and she did not like this business of oxygen and artificial life.

  “Why don’t we electrocute him so that he dances?” she had muttered the first time she saw Luka, his skin almost the same color as his hair, both an unhealthy gray against the starched whiteness of the sheets. “Why don’t we paint eyeballs on his lids, and carry him down to dinner?”

  “Shh,” Magdalena had told her, hugging her so fiercely that she felt her sister’s tears run down her neck. “Don’t let Nona hear you.”

  Jadranka found it maudlin when their grandmother spoke of his getting better. And she did not approve of the fact that Magdalena talked to him, or of the town’s consensus that his suffering was all part of God’s great plan.

  “It’s a great plan that He has,” she finally told a distant cousin who had come to sit with their grandmother. “We should all be so lucky to be part of a plan like that.”

  Jadranka had never understood—or observed—the thousand customs required by island life: she could not bring herself to greet old women she knew would gossip about her once she had passed, and she did not make pilgrimages to the graveyard, nor to old and dying extended family members whom she had not been fond of before their afflictions. “It would be hypocritical,” she said.

  She openly derided the island’s hospitality—the quantities of food and wine at celebrations—and grew irritated with the exaggerations in gift giving: an excess of gold charms for baptisms and birthdays. She did not want to be godmother to someone else’s children. “I’m an atheist,” she said, turning down one such request from a close family friend, an unforgivable refusal in many people’s eyes.

  “Your religious views are beside the point,” their grandmother had told her in a burst of uncharacteristic irritation.

  “Not to me, they’re not,” she had responded gently, leaving the matter there.

  Jadranka had long ago lost the thread of island life, and while she did not despise it as their mother did, she was restless when she spent more than a few days on Rosmarina. Their grandfather’s stroke had merely been the final straw.

  Despite what his younger granddaughter believed, however, Luka was not in a state of darkness, nor of silence. The house’s strange electricity reached him even past his shroud of sheets, although he could not untangle time. Wars separated by fifty years were fought simultaneously, and from where he lay, people took their first and last breaths in a single instant. Houses collapsed and were built again.

  It had taken him eighty-three years to discover that a third, intermediate state existed between consciousness and sleep, between breathing and the grave. Though not fully awake, he was sensitive to his surroundings—the smell of his wife’s iron pressed against a linen tablecloth, or the ferry’s horn as it departed every morning at six. But while that sound might once have pierced his days, stringing them together like beads on an abacus, the weeks and months and years had since shaken themselves loose of that device and now lay in wild disarray on his bedsheets.

  He neither knew nor cared which pair of pajamas he wore, nor what the newscasters said each evening during Dnevnik, although his wife turned up the volume so that the reports reached the room where he lay. He was no longer the man who had watched the news every night, slapping his hands against his knees or muttering his outrage at the shameless behavior of politicians.

  When the disembodied voices floated in to Luka, they pulled themselves apart like tufts of cloud. He was aware of the distorted echoes but, if he considered them at all, assumed them to be announcements from a distant railway station.

  Often he existed in a half-consciousness in which his wife could feed him with his eyes closed. She mixed vitamins and made teas from herbs that women brought her from the Peak. She massaged his legs and rubbed rosemary oil into his chest.

  He overheard his wife’s conversations with neighbors who brought news of island scandals to relieve her vigil. The information orbited his head—someone was pregnant, someone had beaten his wife, someone was drinking again. The possibility of reaching out a hand and separating the conversations was always there. He simply lacked the desire to do it.

  He lived, overwhelmingly, in the random scattering of days and weeks. Sometimes he was a boy working in the vineyards. “Like this,” his grandfather would tell him, clipping a bunch of grapes so purple they appeared black, and placing them gently in the basket. Other times, he was a young man, strong enough to lift a laughing sister in each arm. In his world, the dead came back to life and were as real to him as his wife, his granddaughters, or the neighbors. One day he looked at his grandfather and slapped his back. “And all this time you were hiding from me,” he said to the old man, dead more than sixty years, who smiled his good-natured, toothless grin.

  The only thing that concerned him in the present was the bedroom window. He wanted it open morning and evening so that he could hear the island beyond it. So that he could feel day breaking and closing up again by the degree of warmth and shadow that fell across his face and hands, though he was conscious neither of the fact that day actually broke nor that it closed up again. He listened for the sound of Magdalena’s footsteps, but by the time she dropped into the chair beside him, he had disconnected the two events. Seasons stopped. And though he was sometimes warm, sometimes cold, he existed mainly in the cloudy water of his dying, which was of uniform temperature. Very occasionally he was aware of this, of the floating that he could not maintain forever but was frightened to give up. He would think of a baby in the weightless sea of its mother’s womb and even smile slightly.

  How strange, he would think, that there should be exactly the same weightlessness at the end as there was in the beginning. I had forgotten it completely.

  Ružica was in the kitchen. She was humming something beneath her breath, a tune that Luk
a could just make out past the sound of running water. Something was burning on the stove, but she did not seem to notice.

  Luka’s mother was equally unconcerned by that strange smell—like bread that the oven turns to cinder, or palenta that blackens the bottom of a pot. She sat at the table shelling beans, and he was mesmerized by the quick motion of her hands, the pile of husks that grew steadily on one side. When she looked up and saw him, she smiled and told him to play outside. “The sun is shining,” she told him.

  In his floating state, his mother was alive and perpetually pregnant. There had been five surviving children, and dead babies too numerous to count. He was the first to enter the world, then his sister Vinka, then Zora and Zlatka together. His mother had told the story of the twins’ birth many times: Zora appeared first, and then, unexpectedly, Zlatka followed behind. Just as in life. Then the baby, Iva.

  “Only one son. And the rest daughters!” his father would complain.

  But when Iva had appeared, his mother—so drenched in blood and sweat, so frail and old before her time—had looked at Luka with wide, frightened eyes. “I can’t anymore,” she told her eldest child.

  That night when their father was drinking in the harbor, he and Vinka sawed their parents’ wooden bed in half. They dragged the two halves apart and propped them on opposite sides of the room with blocks of wood. He had been seventeen at the time, still young enough to be frightened as he did it. But by the time his father returned, staggering up the stairs, he had been too intoxicated to notice that his bed was smaller.

  “Where’s your mother?” he muttered to Vinka, then fell asleep before hearing an answer.

  In the morning he had awakened in a foul mood and, upon seeing the state of his bed, raged at his son. He threatened to throw him out on the street, to beat him senseless.

  The recipient of his father’s repeated thrashings, Luka curled his hands into fists and narrowed his eyes. He straightened so that he was looking down at his father.

  In his sickbed, Luka drew himself up so that he was very tall.

  There. It had happened again, and Magdalena straightened. She had been fighting sleep, but her eyes had opened just in time to see that shadow cross his face. She wondered if he sensed the commotion in the town. A short time ago there had been sirens, as if the fire were coming closer.

  She took his hand and straightened its fingers between her own, but they curled up again immediately, and she worried that she was hurting him. The island nurse had explained that his muscles no longer engaged to protect his bones. His head, she had demonstrated, turning him, needed to be supported exactly like a baby’s.

  Magdalena placed his hand gently by his side and leaned forward so that her forehead touched the mattress.

  He cared only that the window was open. When his wife closed the shutters at night, his mouth fell into a troubled line. Sometimes he was able to muster a low, almost inaudible moan. He reached very far down into his throat for the sound, and was spent by the effort.

  During his weeks in the hospital in Split, he had grown to hate the air that never moved and the stale smell of the hospital corridors. He was acutely aware of the noise that went on without respite: the one squeaking wheel on the nurse’s medication cart, the voices of visitors in the hallway, the breathing of the other men in his ward. When the doctor stood in front of his bed, flipping through the papers of his chart, the noise was excruciating.

  On the mainland he felt that the thread that bound him to Rosmarina had been cut. In his semiconsciousness, he looked for the outline of the Peak at night, and the smell of the pine trees. Sometimes he carried the smell of ash in the cavities of his nose.

  In the hospital he could not remember childhood or the war, could not remember his sisters or his parents’ bed. He existed in a constant, thick fog, where he was no longer Luka Morić but a barely breathing corpse in a hospital bed. Even his wife, holding his hand in hers and shedding her tears onto his hospital gown, bore no relationship to the place she had left only a few days before.

  On Rosmarina, he knew only that when his bedroom window was open, something came through it and connected him to the world again. He could see the wire-haired goats on the hill and the grapes growing heavy upon the vines. His mother crouched in an open field as on the day he had been born, her labor pains arriving so quickly that she barely had time to make it back to the house. At night wind tore through the olive trees, and he heard their dry, leathery leaves brushing against one another like the palms of old women.

  Sometimes his son was restored at last to the island. Marin hunched in his boat beneath a black sky, just beyond the harbor, and watched the fishing lamp light up the water like a low, hovering star. Luka could feel the fish rising, swimming gleefully towards that light. His daughter braided her daughters’ hair in the courtyard, first one and then the other, humming under her breath. This although Ana abandoned the island years ago, as his granddaughters had likewise abandoned their braids.

  His heightened sensitivity to noise continued on Rosmarina, but erratically. Sometimes nothing could interrupt the low humming noise in his head, not Magdalena’s footsteps, nor the way his wife searched her kitchen drawers frantically for a missing ladle. At other times he was conscious that his wife prayed beside his bed, and he could follow each word of her laments. He was uncomfortable in such moments, almost embarrassed, and wished that she would stop. He believed in many things—the laws of navigation, the way a bura wind was always followed by clean, bright air, the fact that spring would come for as long as the earth spun on its axis. But he no longer believed in God.

  Sometimes he said their names, but they were so garbled that by the time they reached the air, they sounded like nothing more than ragged breath. Sometimes he realized that only Magdalena remained. Her troubled face hovered for a moment in front of him like a fishing lamp bending the dark water with light.

  When the telephone rang in the kitchen, he could hear her rise from the chair beside his bed. He could not make out the words, but whatever she was saying, she was insistent. He opened his eyes, and the ceiling stretched above him, blue and cloudless. She sounded upset, as if she were on the verge of tears. Something has happened, he thought, frowning. His thoughts startled him because they seemed to arrive from nowhere. His lips struggled to produce words, but it was like wringing water from a dry cloth. She must not learn of it, he wanted to call out, even as he knew that the words would not translate to the air. She must not, he thought fiercely, already forgetting who she was, and what she must not do.

  His dead sisters were filing down from the Peak. Their figures were recognizable despite the distance, and their voices carried across the afternoon. At the other end of the hall, Magdalena was not speaking at all, but singing, unaware of their approach. He wanted to tell her to boil water for their coffee, to set the table for their meal.

  There was something unsettling about his granddaughter’s song, but even as he attempted to understand the words, his sisters were singing along. It was a different song, now, the shift so fluid that he was unsure where the first stopped and the second began. From the window he watched them enter the courtyard, one by one, the skin of their young faces glowing smoothly in the fire of the sun.

  It has been so many years, he thought, listening to them, since I have heard that song. It had been popular in his youth, but he could not remember its being sung in decades. It was like finding something he had not realized was missing. He could not even remember the name of the song, but his heart started painfully when he realized that Magdalena—a child again—was singing along. She looked up and smiled when she saw him at the upstairs window. She raised her hand in greeting.

  She had been dreaming of birds. Thousands of them glided through the sky in slow formation, like her grandfather’s stories of World War II bombers, and she was so intent on the strange sight that it took a moment to realize that she had fallen asleep.

  But when the telephone rang a second time, she lifted her hea
d from the mattress. She could hear her grandmother outside in the lane, talking to one of their neighbors. Her grandfather’s hand was exactly where she had placed it, and she watched his chest for a moment, to be certain that it still rose.

  Her head was still thick with sleep when she reached the kitchen. The birds had been heading north, she remembered, like the smoke clouds she had seen that afternoon. The kitchen smelled like fire, and for a moment she wondered if they were evacuating the town. It had only happened once in her lifetime, but she dreaded the idea; she did not know how she would get her grandfather down to the waterfront.

  When she picked up the receiver there was a moment of silence on the other side. Those delays often preceded Jadranka’s calls, which made the space between the sisters seem greater. She did not know if it was because of the geographical distance or satellites orbiting overhead, but even when she called Jadranka back at the numbers she provided—imagining her sister standing at a pay phone in the unfamiliar city—there were the same awkward delays in conversation, so that it felt to Magdalena that they had not talked properly in months.

  “Jadranka,” she said, by way of greeting. “There’s a fire on the island.”

  But it was Katarina calling to tell her that Jadranka was gone.

  Chapter 3

  Three days had passed since Jadranka’s disappearance in New York. Katarina’s family had risen one morning to find the door to her room ajar and the narrow window cracked, as if she had turned into air and merely slipped out into the atmosphere. The children, Katarina told Magdalena, had crossed to it instinctively and searched the street below.