But Magdalena declined the second part of this offer, uncomfortable with the idea of her cousin playing the generous benefactor.
School was in its final weeks, and an older friend—one of Jadranka’s former teachers, in fact—agreed to come out of retirement to teach Magdalena’s remaining classes.
“Your sister has always moved to her own music” was all she would say when told about the matter, her reticence so welcome, her lack of questions such a departure from the prying of other islanders, that Magdalena startled her with a small, fierce hug.
So she kissed her grandmother, who had wept silent tears since making Magdalena’s coffee that morning, and she shut the gate on the quiet courtyard behind her. On her walk to the port, she took in the dark stone houses and the occasional burst of purple bougainvillea. Since her childhood, each leave-taking of Rosmarina had resembled the first one, so that something inside her rebelled at going, even as her feet carried her towards the ferry landing.
She had left everything in order behind her—her grandmother had access to the funds in Magdalena’s bank account, and she had paid the newest crop of bills—but still she descended through the village like a woman on the way to her place of execution. It was as if a cord connected her to Rosmarina, and only for Jadranka did she have the will to fight against it.
This attachment was both habit and biology.
In her childhood a researcher had studied the islanders’ sense of direction. It was a capability he explained in terms of the Inuit in the far-off Arctic, who could find their way through blizzards. “It’s a rare genetic gift,” he had explained to her grandfather.
Magdalena was the only girl involved in his study. She could remember being tested with blindfolds, her boat turned in so many circles that it made her dizzy, and striking out on moonless nights. The scientist had concluded that not everyone on the island possessed the skill—which he termed innate nautical orientation—but she belonged squarely to the group that did. As an adult she had looked up the study and found herself referred to simply by her initials: M.B.
It was a pull, she could remember explaining to the scientist when pressed. Like a nail that is dragged across a table by a magnet.
The subject spent one year of childhood on the mainland, he had written in the study, although this has not compromised her instincts.
While Jadranka Babić’s forays had taken her farther and farther from home, her older sister had never flown before the day she left for America, had certainly never stopped to consider the nature of sky she could not see from the ground. While people around her inspected the contents of their seat-back pockets or read newspapers and books, she stared through the window and searched for the plane’s shadow on the runway. But the day was overcast, and she did not think that the ground registered the shape of their ascent.
She was a voracious reader, and so books had already introduced her to the winding alleyways of London and the high passes of the Himalayas. She had stood on the ramparts of barricaded Paris and moved along New York City’s teeming streets.
Although she would not be parted from Rosmarina for long, she had always meant to visit other places, and had even saved her meager teacher’s salary for this purpose. She envisioned returning from those destinations with postcards that she could tack to the bulletin boards of her Rosmarina classroom. The suitcase she checked at Split Airport had lurked in a corner of the attic since her student years, however. She had evicted a family of spiders nesting inside and taken a damp cloth to its exterior, but it still retained a musty odor.
She wore her teacher’s clothes on the journey but left her hair loose. In the harsh fluorescence of the airplane’s toilet, she regarded her reflection dispassionately: small and lithe, her dimensions had not changed appreciably in fifteen years, but tiny fault lines had started at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was still the same dark mass, but there were several long silver threads at the front that she had not considered pulling until that moment. In the end, she left them where they were and returned to her seat for the duration of the flight.
She had not seen Katarina in over twenty years, not since the summer her cousin had spent on the island. She still remembered her as the girl with the piggy eyes, although Jadranka had sent pictures of the family, and Magdalena knew that Katarina’s face had lost its baby fat, that her hair—at one time mousy brown—was now the color of honey. She’s a big deal, her sister had written. Her gallery is always in the newspaper.
The woman in the photographs looked younger than her age. She shared Magdalena’s strong jawline and wore funky silver jewelry. Her smile for the camera was broad. She has a chip on her shoulder about Rosmarina, wrote Jadranka. She got a little drunk one night and told me that the smartest people had been forced to leave the island. That the ones left were mostly gangsters and former Party hacks.
This did not surprise Magdalena, who remembered that, after a year of exchanging postcards and letters, their cousin had arrived on Rosmarina at the age of twelve prepared to find nothing but informers—in the newspaper sellers on the riva, and the shopgirls in the market, even among their closest neighbors.
Sunlight struck the airplane’s metal wing, and Magdalena closed her eyes. She imagined Jadranka sitting in a window seat, months earlier, and cloud cover as thick as today obliterating the sea beneath them.
She wondered if Jadranka had the Rosmarina gene. Or, for that matter, if Katarina did.
The American girl who had landed at Split Airport in the summer of 1984 was different from what Magdalena expected, despite the photographs they had exchanged. She was taller, for one thing, with breasts that already stretched the cotton of her T-shirt. Her braces—strange, torturous-looking devices—had been removed and perfect white teeth left in their place. But she was also softer around the middle, a detail her school pictures had hidden, and had an oily complexion that caused tiny white pimples to sprout in the creases of her nose. And while it was impossible for Magdalena to register all these details from the observation deck, watching with her grandfather as her cousin walked across the tarmac, she already sensed that Katarina’s arrival meant trouble.
It might have been her age, and the fact that Katarina threatened to trump Magdalena’s own status as eldest child in their household. Magdalena did not like to think about the years she could not remember, the ones when she had allegedly worshipped her older cousin. At least part of this resistance was territorial. Rosmarina was her island because, after all, the other girl’s family had given it up. They had traded it for ten-speed bikes and colored stationery. In short, they had picked an easier life, and it only seemed fair that they should lose something in that transaction.
Luka had already explained that Katarina was coming alone because her parents would risk arrest by returning. But they wanted her to see the place where she was born and the family that had been denied her in America.
When Katarina emerged from customs, she was clutching a white leather purse. Her expression was uncertain, as if she expected someone to wrest it from her, or as if she were afraid she would be devoured in the crowds of the small airport.
“That’s her,” Luka told Magdalena, who was already taking the other girl’s measure. “She looks exactly like her mother.”
He called out in welcome and walked forward to embrace her.
There was something about his familiarity, about Katarina’s smile of recognition and the arms she threw around his waist, that troubled Magdalena. This was her grandfather, she thought stubbornly from behind them, and for a moment she was afraid that Katarina might not leave at the end of the summer as she was supposed to. That she would stay with them forever.
Katarina had not been questioned about her parents at the airport. She seemed surprised by this fact, and Magdalena made a face in the backseat of her grandfather’s car, wondering if her cousin had expected to end up in jail. It seemed a silly kind of fear to her when everyone knew that this only happened to adults.
They had n
ot even opened her suitcase for an inspection, and for the entire ferry trip Katarina babbled about the things she had brought: chewing gum, vegetable peelers for Aunt Ružica, tape cassettes for Jadranka and Magdalena. She crowed as if she had succeeded in smuggling stolen jewels into the country.
“We have chewing gum,” Magdalena told her, so that the other girl’s face fell.
But her cousin’s response a moment later was confident. “American chewing gum tastes better.”
Jadranka had been running a low fever that morning, and so she was waiting for them on the island. But Magdalena already disliked the way her younger sister talked nonstop about their American cousin. “Will she have pompoms?” she had asked just this morning, having seen these somewhere on a television show.
Now, studying the way Katarina kept the white purse in her lap, winding the strap around her hand, Magdalena realized that her cousin was anxious. It was the first time she had ever been away from her parents, she explained, a revelation that drew understanding grunts from Luka but a stony silence from his granddaughter.
“I brought perfume for Cousin Ana,” she told them.
“Magdalena’s mother lives on the mainland,” Luka told his niece. “But she’ll come for a visit in a few weeks and you can give it to her then.”
Katarina’s bright eyes took in her cousin, who had turned to watch a ferry approaching from the opposite direction. Long after the conversation moved on to other subjects, Magdalena could still feel the American girl studying her, considering this information she had been given.
Katarina’s suitcase did indeed contain many marvels. There were Hershey bars and dozens of packs of chewing gum, which she shared generously with her younger cousins. There were white lace bras and a bag of sanitary napkins, and several books in English about a young red-haired woman who solved mysteries, an idea that enchanted Jadranka so much that she demanded to be told the plots to each of them. There was a Walkman, a rectangle of black plastic that Magdalena secretly coveted. And there was a box of colored pencils such as they had never seen, with a dozen different shades for every color.
“I take art lessons after school,” Katarina told them. “My teacher says that I’m one of her best students.”
At night, when the three girls shared a double bed, Katarina spoke of Croatian picnics in Pittsburgh and the better-looking boys who played soccer there. She performed in a folk-dancing troupe, she told them, demonstrating some of the steps as Jadranka sat up in bed and clapped her hands in time to imaginary music. An authentic Croatian dance, Katarina insisted, although Magdalena stated her suspicion that it had been made up by someone in America.
Her cousin could claim anything, she realized. Katarina’s distance from home meant that she was no longer constrained by the truth. Gems had been sewn onto the hem of her confirmation dress, she told them, and she lived in a mansion.
“She’s making it all up,” Magdalena complained to her grandfather.
“Things, Lena,” he only told her sadly. “Give her that one small satisfaction.”
Katarina hardly remembered her older cousin, Marin Morić ,but she told Luka and Ružica what little she knew about their vanished son. Seated self-importantly at the kitchen table across from them, she explained in a breathless voice that he had lived with them during their first year in America. He had taught her how to tie her shoelaces, but there had been no sign of him in the six years since then.
Magdalena eavesdropped on this conversation. Sitting in the kitchen doorway, she kept her back to where they sat and her bare feet in the sun. She studied a curious lizard that had darted between her legs and waited in the coolness of her shadow.
Marin and her father had fought, Katarina admitted, lowering her voice officiously, sending glances at Magdalena’s back that the other girl could not see but sensed nonetheless. “It had something to do with Barren Island.”
“Barren Island?” Luka asked sharply.
Magdalena continued to watch the lizard. He had gone completely still, but something pulsed in his throat. His heartbeat, perhaps. Or his breath. Behind her, Katarina repeated the words. Barren Island. Magdalena had never heard of it, but she could tell by her grandfather’s voice that it upset him.
“And he hasn’t contacted us in all the years since then.” Katarina’s voice was now adult in its indignation.
Magdalena rose at this and brushed off the seat of her shorts, then turned to find that her cousin was watching her.
“That’s unlike him,” her grandmother was saying in a bewildered voice.
Magdalena had never heard of Barren Island. She imagined it like a dead pine tree that had lost all its needles and was nothing but a brittle piece of timber.
“It’s a terrible place,” Katarina explained that night in the dark. “Not a thing grows there. There are only rocks as sharp as fangs and heat so terrible that people catch fire.”
Magdalena snorted at this, even as her younger sister asked in a small voice: “They catch fire?”
“Just like paper” was their cousin’s knowledgeable reply. “The hair goes first, and then the face. And there are dogs that will eat you if you don’t do exactly what the prison guards say. And the guards—”
“How do you know?” Magdalena demanded. “Have you ever been there?”
“No,” Katarina admitted in a satisfied voice, as if she had been anticipating this very question. “But your Uncle Marin was.”
It could not be true. As far as Magdalena was concerned, it was just one more thing her cousin had made up. She had it under good authority that her uncle had been one of Rosmarina’s best fishermen. He was not a criminal.
“I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it,” her cousin told her in wondering tones.
“You’re making it up,” Magdalena accused.
“Am not,” Katarina told her. “Ask your grandfather.”
But Magdalena could not bring herself to do this.
To Magdalena’s relief, Katarina did not entirely take to life on Rosmarina. She liked to sunbathe on the rocks, but she feared the sharp black urchins in the shallows. She liked to accompany the family to their fishing camp on the Devil’s Stones, but she did not care for fishing, or for boats. Instead she played with Jadranka or drew in her sketchbooks, pictures that Magdalena thought only marginally resembled their subjects. Or she listened to her Walkman, lying on a towel and looking up at the sky, occasionally singing aloud in English.
She liked to prowl around the Peak with Magdalena, but became easily spooked. Magdalena realized this one day when she hid from Katarina behind a crumbling stone wall, watching smugly as her cousin looked for her, the annoyance on her face turning quickly into fear.
“That’s not funny,” she said, pushing Magdalena when she jumped out to startle her.
Magdalena landed on her bottom in the dust, and Katarina did not speak to her for several hours. “Your sister is mean,” she told Jadranka, who relayed this message to Magdalena.
“It’s true,” Jadranka added matter-of-factly to her sister. “You were mean.”
Katarina claimed that the noise of Pittsburgh’s city streets did not bother her, but the crowing of roosters did. She missed her friends at home and her bedroom. She griped about the island’s dearth of television channels, brands of chocolate, jungle gyms.
In her comparisons, America always won out against Rosmarina, and she did not limit reporting this conclusion to her two cousins. One day in the port, she regaled a group of children with stories about cinemas that were as big as cities. “It’s not like here,” she said with a wrinkled nose, gesturing in the direction of the summer kino. “It’s a real movie theater, not just a painted wall.”
“You should go back, then,” one of the older boys told her. “My father says this country knows what to do with govno like you.”
“Shut up,” Magdalena told him, surprised by the venom in her voice. “Everybody knows that your father’s a drunk!”
The boy’s face turned purple
with rage. “Well, your mother—”
But Magdalena swung at him before he could get the word out. Although smaller, she had the advantage of surprise, and he held the side of his face in stupefaction as a circle of children formed. A woman from one of the nearby shops had been watching them. She hurried out and took both Magdalena and the boy by the ear, before the fight could go any further, and ordered them home.
That night in bed, Katarina was quieter than usual. “In America, you can say whatever you want,” she informed them in a whisper. “It’s not like here.”
Magdalena could hear Jadranka’s even breathing, and she pretended to be asleep, as well. But her cousin continued bitterly. “My father says this country is nothing but a giant prison.”
Magdalena’s mother made one trip to Rosmarina after Katarina’s arrival, cooing over the perfume that the American girl presented. “That’s very nice, little cousin,” she said after spraying it on her wrist and sniffing appreciatively. “I imagine that America smells just like that.”
This won a smile from Katarina, but Magdalena merely watched them from a careful distance.
Katarina found it strange that her cousins did not live with their mother, and she was fascinated that nobody ever spoke about their dead father.
“Do you remember him?” she asked Magdalena.
“A little.”
“Even though you were only two?” she pressed with a doubtful smile, reminding Magdalena of a spider that sets a sticky trap.
The truth was that Magdalena knew very little about her father, and still less about his death. She knew that the man who had found her father’s boat adrift had occasionally fished the Devil’s Stones with him, and that he had returned to port that day to raise the alarm in the village that Goran Babić was gone.
The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel Page 8