The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  She could not remember him opening the gate or walking rapidly through the courtyard, where she had been chasing lizards along the stone wall. But she thought she remembered being lifted into someone’s arms while her mother screamed the word dead from inside the house, repeating it so many times that after the first moments it sounded more like the cries of an angry seagull than any human voice.

  To this day, Pero Radić—the man who had delivered the news of her father’s death—always made a point to stop and talk to her, to inquire after her mother and her grandparents’ health. She knew that it was not affection that prompted his concern but the simple fact that he had been the one to find the empty boat with Rosmarina markings turning towards the channel. “A strange sight,” she had heard him tell others.

  Magdalena clung to snatches of information about her father the way other girls filled jewelry boxes with seed pearls and gold. She was more curious about him than Jadranka, who was born after his death.

  “You look exactly like him,” Katarina told her, having already scoured Ružica’s photograph album for his picture, and even examined the pages of the family Bible where births and deaths were recorded. Her cousin’s words swelled Magdalena with silent pride, although she refused to acknowledge them.

  Jadranka was less fascinated by Katarina than she was fascinated by Katarina’s enormous box of colored pencils. Before bedtime, she would sit at the table in the room the girls shared and pull them out, one by one.

  “Look,” she demanded of Magdalena, who could not see anything out of the ordinary in the blue-gray color that Jadranka waved in front of her, nor about the red. But her younger sister spent hours organizing them in careful piles, divisions of color that made little sense to anybody else.

  “It’s okay to look at them,” Katarina told her. “Just be careful. They were expensive.”

  On the day she discovered their points dulled, she knew exactly where to find the culprit. “They’re mine,” she told Jadranka, small lights flaring in her eyes.

  Observing the way that her younger sister’s lower lip trembled, Magdalena grabbed the box in one sudden movement and emptied it on their bed. She picked up one and snapped it in half, then picked up a second as if she meant to do the same.

  Katarina only looked at her in shock before turning on her heel and running down the stairs. But when Jadranka dove for the broken pencil—a sunny shade of yellow—Magdalena was surprised to see that her sister was crying. She sat on the floor, trying to refit the two halves.

  She looked up at Magdalena. “It was beautiful,” she told her. “And now it’s ruined.”

  Within half an hour, Luka Morić had remedied the situation. The pencils were Katarina’s, and Jadranka was to leave them alone. But he found a box of colored chalk and gave this to his granddaughter instead.

  He did not remember where the chalk had come from, but it bore the unmistakable scent of the mainland—a sharp and slightly chemical odor with no trace of mildew. On Rosmarina, damp inhabited every room. It softened bread and rendered paper as pliable as cloth, and like other island fishermen, Luka brought it ashore in his nets and sodden trouser cuffs. But the cardboard box was exotic in its stiffness, and Jadranka was immediately captivated by the crisp edges of the chalk inside.

  He watched in satisfaction as she left a flurry of handprints on the stone walls of the house, likening the pastel sticks to a type of candy sold by Rosmarina’s only shop. When she placed the chalk on her tongue, however, she observed with disappointment that the taste was not at all like the candies.

  “That isn’t for eating,” he told her in amusement, selecting one of the pieces from the box and leading all three girls through the courtyard to the lane. The tarmac had lightened beneath the Adriatic sun, and he knelt before them to draw the rough outline of a boat, giving it a tall mast and triangular sail. He drew an island beside it, pleased when they immediately identified its crescent shape as Rosmarina.

  “Now me!” Jadranka begged, so that he handed her a few pieces of chalk, then did the same with Magdalena and Katarina.

  He watched as they set to work a short distance from each other, intent on their stick figures and lemon suns.

  It was not long before Magdalena tired of this new game, however. She threw down the chalk and announced that she wanted to go for a walk. Katarina, still miffed, turned her back at this suggestion, and Jadranka was too intent on her drawing to even lift her face.

  “Jadranka,” Magdalena said, but her sister gave no indication that she had heard her name, and Luka studied the younger girl’s expression of rapt concentration. This temporary deafness descended on Jadranka from time to time. Lost in a game or chore, she claimed not to hear when she was being called. Just a few weeks before, the house had been in a state of panic when Ružica discovered the cistern in the courtyard uncovered and Jadranka nowhere to be found. They had called for her and shone flashlights into the darkness of the well, relieved to see their unbroken reflections looking back from the bottom. A short time later Magdalena found her reading a picture book beneath the bed they shared, oblivious of the commotion.

  Now Luka studied Jadranka’s bowed head, the way her red hair fell forward to reveal the delicate swells of her vertebrae. There had always been something salamander-like about her long limbs, and the back of her thin neck looked in those moments uncannily like the decomposed lizards her sister sometimes produced from the garden, their spines like chain links of bone.

  “Jadranka,” he echoed, his voice soft, the way he would address a sleepwalker.

  Her back was curved like a bow. Her hand made an arcing movement, but she gave no indication that she had heard him. Nor did she seem to sense Katarina, who had raised her head to stare at her younger cousin, nor Magdalena, who was approaching from behind. But as Luka watched, Magdalena faltered, eyes darkening at something on the pavement.

  He thought that she must have seen a scorpion, and so he rushed towards them. The animal’s venom would not kill a healthy adult but could sicken a child, and he had taught them to be wary of those small, dark bodies. The creatures ordinarily kept to the shade, but there seemed to be a greater number of them that year, emerging from beneath stones in the courtyard, on one occasion traversing the kitchen’s whitewashed ceiling, so that his wife’s shriek had brought him running.

  “Where?” he barked at Magdalena, but she only pointed at the ground, where nothing moved except for Jadranka’s arm. Looking for the telltale pincers and curved tail, he realized belatedly that it was Jadranka herself who had caused her sister’s alarm, and he, too, stopped short, taking in the pictures that were flying fully formed from her hand: birds that lifted from the ground with wings in perfect proportion to their bodies, and fish that swam across pavement made to look like water.

  Magdalena’s expression had turned to one of wonder, as if witnessing an act of alchemy, but Luka felt uneasy as he took in his younger granddaughter’s trancelike state. He crouched beside her, placing a hand softly on her shoulder. “Did your cousin teach you that, little one?” he asked, and it was only then that she looked up with a smile of recognition and shook her head.

  Later, he watched her demonstrate this newfound ability for her sister, moving Magdalena’s hand in her own as Katarina watched. He could tell by Magdalena’s pleased expression that for those few seconds she was certain that she understood—that she believed it would be like riding a bicycle or tying a shoelace, a skill she had taught Jadranka just the year before. It was a code that needed only to be cracked, a secret language that practice might improve. But without her sister’s guidance the code was impenetrable, and she invariably produced graceless stick figures and rhomboid houses. After a few attempts, she gave up and watched Jadranka draw the house behind them in startling detail, never once turning to study her subject.

  By that afternoon a small crowd of neighborhood children and curious adults had gathered, and although Luka retreated to the house, he heard someone mention a musical prodigy who ha
d composed an entire symphony by the time he was four. Through the kitchen’s open windows, he thought he could also detect tones of envy and even of suspicion. A neighbor sniffed that her young son could solve complicated arithmetic problems and that this, surely, was more useful than drawing pictures that the rain would only wash away.

  “That’s good,” he heard Katarina concede. “But it’s my turn now.”

  In the weeks that followed, it became apparent that Magdalena possessed no artistic inclinations of her own. Rather than envying Jadranka’s talent, however, she took it upon herself all that summer to scout suitable locations for her sister’s drawings. Katarina was a halfhearted participant in these endeavors.

  “I prefer pencil,” she told her cousins. “Or paint.”

  Jadranka’s drawings began to appear across the island, on the crumbling stucco of abandoned houses and in the dark tar of roads. “I saw Jadranka’s pictures,” islanders would tell Luka in awed tones on the waterfront, occasionally adding that his granddaughter was destined for fame and that the newspaper was sure to write an article about her.

  Jadranka’s drawing, though harmless at first glance, made her stand out still further. Over the course of that summer, the island adopted a subtle guardedness towards the six-year-old, as though she were something native but not quite right, like their half-Swiss neighbor, or like the boy up the lane who was Magdalena’s age but crawled on all fours and could not speak.

  “That girl’s a strange one,” Magdalena overheard on the riva one day, repeating this statement in confidence to her grandfather, certain that the woman had been talking about her sister.

  “Why do people look at her like that?” Magdalena wanted to know.

  “Like what?”

  “Like she’s from outer space.”

  “You’re imagining it,” he had told her carefully. “She’s as much from the island as you or I.”

  It did not help, he thought, that Jadranka resembled nobody else on Rosmarina, not even the members of her immediate family. Her red hair stood out like a flame among all the blond and brown-haired children, making her look like she had indeed been delivered by aliens, or switched at birth in the Split hospital where she was born.

  For his part, Luka could not understand Jadranka’s need to leave drawings of birds and dancing figures in her wake. He believed that it was a game whose novelty would wear off, even as she wore the sticks of chalk into tiny pebbles.

  On the afternoon Jadranka first drew pictures on the lane in front of their house, Magdalena embarked on a project of outlining things. She circled the cistern with blue and drew a white rectangle on the ground around Luka’s car. She drew the lines, he thought, like defenses, and he watched her work feverishly to contain the entire house, pushing her way through the bracken that grew outside the kitchen window.

  “Come and draw me,” he heard her tell her sister, who left her pictures to trace an outline of Magdalena’s legs and arms as Katarina looked on. When Jadranka was done, Magdalena instructed her to lie down in the same position. When she finished, the outline of her sister’s body was contained entirely within her own.

  Luka did not notice Katarina’s repeated inspections of his wife’s Bible, nor the way she became suddenly watchful in those days. Her boasts of early summer had ceased, and if anything, he thought that she and Magdalena had declared a truce, the cousins eating side by side in companionable silence and disappearing to remote corners of the island together when meals were done.

  He did not realize that Katarina was biding her time for the ideal opportunity to reveal what she knew. But Magdalena sensed it. She felt something brewing within her American cousin. Each time Magdalena looked up, Katarina was watching with a little smile. Each time Jadranka drew something else—a playful monkey, a fishing boat—Katarina’s silence became deeper.

  “Your mom is pretty,” she told Magdalena unexpectedly one day.

  Her cousin shrugged. “I guess,” she said.

  “When she was here, all the men on the riva were looking at her.”

  Magdalena frowned, unsure what her cousin was getting at.

  “I bet she’s had a lot of boyfriends,” Katarina added.

  In truth, Magdalena did not know her mother very well, and had certainly never stopped to ponder her boyfriends.

  “You’re becoming a real little fisherman,” Ana had told Magdalena on her visit earlier that summer, taking in her sunburnt nose and calloused hands with an expression that was more annoyed than playful.

  It was clear that she found it easier to talk to Jadranka, who loved to have her hair brushed and decorated with barrettes.

  “Your mother said that she’ll never come back to Rosmarina,” Katarina told Magdalena after she had left. “She likes it better in Split.”

  Magdalena shrugged her response, prompting a stare from Katarina.

  “What a funny thing you are,” she said, in her amused older-cousin voice. “I’d die if I couldn’t live with my mother.”

  Magdalena understood that Katarina was lying in wait. She saw it every time the American girl observed Jadranka with her chalk. It was there—a naked jealousy that both satisfied and disturbed Magdalena—whenever their cousin considered those drawings that belonged at once to nobody and everybody, decorating roads one day only to be washed away in storms the next.

  “Maybe you should draw on paper,” Ružica had suggested to her younger granddaughter. “So you can keep the things you’ve done.”

  But it was clear that Jadranka was unconcerned with building such an archive. For her, the joy was in the making. And once that was done, she happily consigned her creations to the elements.

  Katarina, on the other hand, was possessive of her sketchbook, her pencils, her position as older and wiser cousin. And so she began by picking at Jadranka’s pictures, ever so slightly. This face was a little long, she offered in pleasant tones, or that cat looked more like a rabbit.

  “I like rabbits,” Jadranka told her enthusiastically, and then proceeded to draw an entire family of them on a large, flat rock beneath the Peak.

  Katarina and Magdalena sat on a stone outcropping above her, swinging their legs over the side, watching the top of Jadranka’s bent head.

  “It’s funny,” Katarina told her unexpectedly. “Before you wrote back to me, we didn’t know that Jadranka existed. We thought you were an only child.”

  Magdalena looked at her cousin in surprise.

  Katarina lowered her voice. “It will be hard on her when she finds out. About her father, I mean.”

  “What about our father?” Magdalena asked automatically.

  “Not your father,” Katarina said, studying a fissure in the rock, a nervous smile playing around her mouth. “Her father.”

  Magdalena only looked at her blankly, but that night the two girls descended quietly to the kitchen, where Katarina showed her the dates in Ružica’s Bible—Goran Babić’s death, which was followed two years later by Jadranka’s birth—her hand shaking slightly in the flashlight’s glow.

  “It’s a mistake,” Magdalena told her stubbornly, slamming the book shut. She took the flashlight from the other girl’s hand and turned it off.

  Katarina gave an exasperated sigh. “It takes nine months to make a baby,” she told her younger cousin. “Everyone knows that.”

  Magdalena could sense the other girl watching her in the dark, waiting to see what she would do.

  And so Magdalena rose wordlessly and returned to their bedroom, where she crawled into bed beside a sleeping Jadranka. Katarina appeared in the doorway, and again Magdalena could sense the other girl watching her, nervously this time. After a moment Katarina slipped quietly, almost contritely, into the other side of the bed.

  The next morning when Katarina awoke, she discovered with some shock that she was pinned against the mattress, Magdalena’s face mere inches above her own. The girls stared at each other for several seconds, Jadranka’s voice rising from the courtyard as she said something to he
r grandmother.

  “If you tell anyone,” Magdalena said in a fierce whisper, “I’ll make you sorry. Do you understand?”

  Katarina nodded, her expression so stunned that a rush of satisfaction momentarily blinded Magdalena to what she now knew.

  They did not speak of it again. In August, Katarina left Jadranka the box of colored pencils, the fractured yellow bound together with tape. Magdalena understood that this was a peace offering, but while Jadranka exulted over this bounty, Magdalena did not acknowledge it in any way.

  On the day of Katarina’s departure, the entire family accompanied her to Split Airport, Magdalena’s mother showing up unexpectedly to give the girl some chocolates for her trip. Katarina hugged each of them in turn, but when she got to Magdalena, who allowed herself to be embraced for the benefit of the adults who were present, Katarina burst into tears.

  “There, there,” Ružica said, and placed an arm around each girl. “Don’t worry. You’re family. You’ll see each other again.”

  Part II

  Chapter 6

  The first time the red-haired woman came into his restaurant, in May, she ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of cake, a chocolate and hazelnut concoction that his wife, Luz, had created when they first opened some years before. It was just past the lunchtime rush, and he was going over receipts at the bar, so he did not pay much attention to the young woman, who sat alone and stared at the rainy street. But when an enormous umbrella bobbed past outside—a shock of yellow in a colorless landscape—he looked up to discover that she was not watching its owner but studying him in the reflection.

  “Lousy weather,” he offered as their eyes met.

  “Yes,” she agreed without turning.

  She rose a few moments later, half the cake still on her plate and a ten-dollar bill beside her empty cup. She did not meet his eyes again but hovered by the restaurant’s entrance, watching the rain come down so heavily that the buildings on the other side of the street appeared deserted in their grayness.