The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “It should blow over in a few minutes,” he told her back. “If you want to wait.”

  She gave no indication that she had heard him, and a moment later she was gone, her hair a red motion outside the same rain-spattered window where she had been sitting.

  Hector, his headwaiter, looked up from the other end of the bar where he was folding napkins.

  “I guess we scared her off,” Marin told him with a chuckle.

  She returned a week later.

  “The little red bird is back,” Hector told Marin, passing behind him in the kitchen. “And she’s asking for rožata.”

  Marin straightened at this. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll bring it out.”

  Writing the word on the menu next to flan had been his idea, a caprice not altogether typical of him. But it was the food that he would forever associate with his mother’s kitchen: the cool creaminess of the custard, the smoky sugar on top. “Just listen to the sound of that word,” he had told his wife. There was something of dawn in rožata, of a Mediterranean sky climbing out of darkness. And Luz had sensed the word’s importance to her husband, so that the dessert appeared on the menu under both its Spanish and Croatian names.

  Only rarely did someone order it as rožata, however. So that it also served a different purpose, immediately identifying the patron as his countryman.

  “I like to see them coming,” he’d once told his wife in the dark days of the beginning, when such things had seemed a matter of survival because there were informers—and worse—even in America.

  He imagined that they came armed with small notebooks in which they wrote down every detail, his life cracked open like the ribcage of a small, roasted animal. Over the years he had grown adept at recognizing them, and although he had not sensed their presence in years, he felt the same wariness whenever someone from his country appeared in the restaurant, the life he had left unrecognizable in the one he now led.

  She was seated as before, watching traffic pass slowly in the street. Her red hair was gathered back from her face in an almost austere fashion, and a tiny fleck of gold sparkled at her nostril. It was not a typically Croatian face, although he wondered if he even knew what that was anymore. In his first years in America, he could identify his brethren at a distance of twenty feet. There was always a gaunt, careful look about them, and they wore the clothes that he, too, had worn upon arrival: the same pressed white shirts and dark slacks, the well-worn shoes, polished each morning before Mass, for jobs in factories and warehouses. In the 1970s, urban Americans did not polish their shoes like that. Only foreigners did.

  But while it was still easy to identify his contemporaries—the middle-aged men and women who had never given up their gold or their Sunday best—youth perplexed him, and he would sooner have thought this young woman a Hungarian or a Swede.

  “Rožata,” he told her, presenting the plate with a flourish. Then, in Croatian: “We don’t get requests for this every day.”

  She studied him for a moment, smiling with an uncertainty that was at odds with the intensity of her gaze.

  “It’s my favorite,” she told him in the familiar singsong of Split. Her voice was huskier than he had expected, and he placed a spoon beside her plate. A smoker, he thought, for this was another thing that often differentiated his countrymen from Americans, although this pattern, too, was changing.

  “It’s why I came in,” she said, nodding at the plate. “It was a surprise to see it on the menu.”

  He looked at her in amusement. “It’s why you came in the first time,” he corrected, and for a moment she looked uneasy.

  “Yes,” she said. “The first time, although I ended up having cake.”

  “The cake is good, too,” he told her. “My wife’s recipe.”

  She nodded.

  He held out a hand to her. “Marin Morris.”

  The dark centers of her pupils widened at this, like two tiny lungs filling with air, and he felt suddenly self-conscious, as if she were about to laugh at the ridiculousness of this name. Decades later and it still sat strangely upon his tongue. But it had been the suggestion of the judge who presided over his immigration case. Forget all that, the man had counseled him, and because Marin’s country had spat him out with no more ceremony than an incinerator shows to ash, he had dropped Morić to become Morris.

  But she did not laugh. If anything, she looked a little stricken.

  “Jadranka,” she told him. She looked down at her own hands, which lay clasped in her lap. Church hands, it occurred to him as she raised one to shake his, like the smooth skin of a plaster Madonna, a rosary clasped between them the only thing missing.

  It was a strange thought for an agnostic. Besides, Marin chided himself in the same moment, there was nothing churchlike about the girl. She wore dark clothing that Luz would call edgy, and the nose ring gave her a slightly rakish appearance.

  “Do you ever go back?” she asked him. “Home, I mean?”

  The question caught him off guard. It seemed overly personal to him, and he had the same feeling as when a stranger addressed him with the familiar ti, a further bewildering characteristic of the younger generation of Croatians, whom he met only rarely, although she had been careful to use the polite vi. “Never,” he told her.

  Her nod was thoughtful. “I don’t think I’ll go back either,” she said, and he felt something pull in his chest at the earnest way she said it.

  “Surely it’s not as bad as all that,” he told her easily. “It isn’t like before.”

  She looked down at her napkin, which she had started to fold into small squares. “No,” she conceded after a moment. “Probably not.”

  A boyfriend, he thought then. Someone has broken her heart. Or she broke his. And as a result here she is, alone in America. He felt inexplicably sad for this young woman with the wide-set green eyes who slouched in her chair like a teenager. He resisted the temptation to sit down across from her, to warn her about the tricksters and cheats that populated this country, side by side with all the wondrous possibilities one always imagined before coming here.

  “There are no jobs at home,” she continued in a neutral voice, meeting his eyes again. “No prospects.”

  “It’s hard here, too,” he told her.

  She nodded.

  “Too many of our people come expecting that things will be easy—”

  Her nostrils flared slightly, and he realized that she was irritated with this observation. “I never thought it would be easy,” she told him.

  She did not come in again for several weeks, an absence that troubled him, although he could not understand why. The girl was a stranger to him, after all. He did not know where she worked, though she had mentioned something about looking after a rich woman’s children, and for all he knew she had returned home in the end, despite her brave words. He had seen it a hundred times: sooner or later, the teeth of home worked their way beneath your skin and carried you back the same way a wolf transports its cubs. It was only for a chosen few that return was impossible.

  But it was uncanny how she had brought his nightmares back. He did not know if it was her Split accent or the orphaned air that surrounded her. She had not mentioned family or friends, and to his eyes she appeared as lonely as he had been some thirty years before her. If she died tomorrow, he wondered, would anyone mourn her?

  His nightmares were the same as in the early days of escape, and after waking, he felt the same unease. The dreams revisited him every few years, always prompted by some trigger. He had once passed a woman on the street who so resembled his sister, Ana, that he called out to her by name, only realizing his mistake when she frowned and moved away from him. Another time he had opened an order of olive oil for the restaurant, the pungent smell of that crushed Spanish fruit so instantly familiar that it had forced him out of the kitchen for an entire hour.

  Those dreams always took him back to prison, to the same cell and quarrying detail. There was the same inedible gruel, with its rotten veg
etables and insect carcasses. The same rank smell of shuffling prisoners, all malnourished and blistering in the sun. “We knew we’d find you sooner or later,” his interrogator always told him with a satisfied smile. A psychopath’s smile, he’d since realized, like a deranged mother who sings her children to sleep beneath the peaceful surface of a bath.

  Times had changed, of course. He’d had reason to be afraid in the beginning—even in America—and so he had lived carefully. But all that was over.

  He did sometimes wonder what had become of his interrogators, and of several of the others. For years he had nursed a collection of revenge fantasies as brutal as they were unrealistic, always discarding them in the end. But he was not naive enough to believe them tucked safely away in jail for their misdeeds. Life shunned such symmetrical resolutions, and besides, those men were nameless, faceless. They were made of a slippery substance whose properties were unfathomable. He imagined that they lived quietly today, old men who read newspapers in the morning and puttered in their gardens.

  Something about the girl took him back to that time, although he could not understand why. It was her guarded attitude, perhaps. A certain hunted quality in her eyes. She was running from something, and he had not believed her explanation about the unemployment rate at home. Perhaps that was partly it, but in this day and age one did not draw a line through the possibility of return. There simply wasn’t the need.

  Perhaps this boyfriend was the jealous type, he thought. Perhaps she had needed to put an ocean between them, or perhaps she was in some other kind of trouble. He remembered that on both of her visits to his restaurant she had stared out at the sidewalk. Perhaps, he thought now, she had expected someone to appear.

  He was familiar with that degree of watchfulness, and he chided himself for having missed it earlier. He who had seen danger everywhere in the first few years: in the small Italian town where they had languished for months in a refugee camp after their escape, little Katarina bitten mercilessly by the mosquitoes that swarmed whenever the lights went out, so that she picked at her bites until they bled and scarred.

  He’d seen danger on buses, and in the vinyl booth of a New York diner. Unlike in films, their agents did not wear trench coats, nor did they have thin and furtive faces. They were the most ordinary of people, but they would occasionally make their presence felt by jostling him on the subway or nodding at him on the street.

  When he had first started working as a waiter, a customer once wrote Marin’s full name on the back of his bill and, beside it, the date of his departure from Rosmarina. “Do you remember what he looked like?” Marin asked the other waiters when he discovered it on the table, but none could remember a single detail about the man who had ordered the steak, well-done.

  “Why, Papi?” one of his sons had asked tearfully when Marin reprimanded him for chattering to a neighbor about where he went to school, his parents’ restaurant, the vacation they had taken to Miami the year before.

  The city was a dangerous place, he insisted. But, really, it was his need for secrecy, that jagged border between what he confided to his wife late at night, whispering miserably as she rubbed his back, and the man who rose in the morning, teased his sons, and did his restaurant’s books.

  He knew that the secret police had infiltrated Croatian communities abroad, and he did not attend a single Mass in his own language until the end of communism. Unlike Vlaho, Katarina’s father, he avoided Croatian centers, Croatian clubs, and Croatian gatherings. He had no interest in cultural festivals or concerts because he imagined those sly note-takers everywhere, recording who went where and attended which meeting. And, anyway, he did not like the narrowness of his countrymen abroad, the way they wore their exile like a badge of honor and barricaded themselves inside their communities.

  “You’ve forgotten where you came from,” Vlaho used to accuse him.

  “And you’re playing with fire,” Marin would shoot back.

  He had felt sorry for his aunt Vinka, who observed these exchanges with trembling lips. She had already started to take in sewing for a few extra dollars a week, her English limited exclusively to words like baste and hem. She would mend garments late at night, while Katarina slept. But Vlaho spent hours with like-minded friends who spoke of returning to Yugoslavia to mount armed insurrections. To Marin, these were delusions, fueled by too much wine and rakija.

  Their final falling out had happened after one of those evenings. Vlaho had returned home in a combative mood. “They say I shouldn’t trust you,” he had told Marin, his eyes bright. “They say nobody who did time on Barren Island can be trusted.”

  Marin had gone still at this.

  “That they only released the ones who agreed to be informers.”

  The accusation left Marin breathless, and by the next morning he had gone, leaving a little money for his aunt but no note, an exit that was an unmitigated relief to him at the time but a source of shame in subsequent years.

  But while Vlaho’s ardent nationalism left him cold, he could not stomach the other side of that equation, either, the one that painted Yugoslavia in the 1970s as something innocuous. In his first years in New York, he occasionally ran into people who had visited his country and spoke of the fact that its young people wore blue jeans and listened to American rock and roll. They referenced the Dalmatian Coast so casually that he felt something akin to physical pain.

  “How could you leave such a beautiful place?” a woman at a party once asked him, then went on to describe its sunsets, its strong red wine, the leather belt she had bought at a colorful marketplace.

  He had only nodded miserably, knowing there was no way to make people understand.

  Yugoslavia seems so open, they told him. Not like the Soviet Union.

  No, he had replied. It is not like the Soviet Union.

  After his first attempts, he stopped explaining that there were political prisoners even in Yugoslavia. He certainly never mentioned Barren Island. He no longer spoke of the assassinations that took place abroad, of the men, women, and children who were asphyxiated or shot, who were stabbed when they went out jogging, or hung themselves, mysteriously, with no chair or table to assist their jumps. He had stopped speaking about those things because of the way people looked at him, puzzled, telling him that they had read some article about communism with a human face.

  In America he had no affiliation with separatists or agitators, with émigré newspapers or independence movements, but still the audacity of those UDBA assassinations unnerved him. Until the end of the 1980s, they happened in Germany and England and Canada. He thought they might be happening in the United States as well, and his strategy was never to allow any of his countrymen to get close to him.

  Besides, it had been his father who insisted that he cut himself wholly loose. “If you write to us,” Luka had said with tears in his eyes, “don’t ever sign your name or send an address.”

  It would be the final humiliation, Marin knew, if his father were forced to pen a response filled with lies to his only son. Everything is fine, they had instructed others to write, the words like lures. All has been forgiven.

  He had not felt the weight of these things for years, however. Not since the end of communism, not since the independence war he had followed from America, feeling neither threatened nor entirely unscathed. This was what so unnerved him about the girl: it was somehow ludicrous that she should inspire such a reaction in him, so long after all those things.

  The restaurant was his life’s work. He and his wife had built the business from nothing, so that when he approached it on the street, it seemed that his hands had felt the weight of every brick and that they alone had untangled vast networks of wires—as fine as silver thread—to deliver the light to its lamps.

  In the beginning they had done the cooking themselves, hiring Luz’s brother as maître d’ and some of her cousins as waiters. His wife was a fine chef, overseeing bubbling vats of black beans and ovens filled with slow-roasting pork. The food
had been squarely Cuban in the beginning, but over the years his own influence had begun to sneak in: grilled squid and Swiss chard, which was the nearest he came to blitva.

  It was a neighborhood place, an early outpost on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, long before the area’s gentrification. The tables had checkered tablecloths and candles at dinnertime, and he knew many of his patrons by name. It was the type of place, he liked to think, where one would always feel comfortable. Reviewers had been kind, and the Zagat guide had, year after year, applauded the fusion of Caribbean and Mediterranean influences.

  Mediterranean. He could live with that.

  In New York, he was not even Marin but Mio. Amor mío, his wife had said somewhere near the beginning of things, teaching him Spanish words. Amor mío. It had started as a secret joke, but the nickname stuck.

  Although Luz had been a child when her family fled Cuba, she still remembered taking shelter in her grandmother’s house during a hurricane. “There was a mango tree in the courtyard,” she told Marin. “They planted it when my father was a little boy, and my grandmother said that the day a storm pulled it up by the roots was the day we would all go flying from the face of the earth.”

  In exchange, he told her about the winds of the Adriatic.

  “Is this a bura?” she asked him with a smile, one winter’s day several months after they met in a community college business class, when the Atlantic wind tore bitterly down the New York streets, scattering coffee cups, newspapers, and dead leaves before them.

  He had known then that they would marry because of the simple fact that she had remembered that word, foreign to her ears, and uttered only once in a description of his island.

  “Would you go back if you could?” she asked in the days before their wedding.