The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “There’s no going back,” he said, to her visible relief.

  They had two sons.

  Perhaps that was it, he thought. A father’s protectiveness. The girl had to have come from somewhere, after all. She could not have sprung to life from a clod of earth, and he imagined a father and mother waiting for her.

  His own sons were nearly adults now. Twin boys who had grown into tall young men, one of whom studied economics, the other who loved stories of any kind.

  They knew Cuba, although they had never set foot upon that island. They spoke Spanish fluently and had grown up in a large circle of cousins, aunts, and uncles that stretched from Florida to New England. Their mother had arrived with family photographs sewn into her dress, and before his death their grandfather had shown the boys books from his collection, with photographs of the village where he was born. Cuba was all around them. It was in the food they ate and the music they listened to, the jazz and rumba beats slipping beneath their door long past the hour they were supposed to be asleep.

  Marin, on the other hand, had no photographs of Rosmarina to show them. He had only once found a picture book about the Adriatic in the local library, the deep blue sea like sapphires. There had been photographs of Vis and Mljet, of Korčula and Brač, but none of the island where he was born.

  Still, he kept the book even when notices from the library arrived in the mail, even when a woman informed him over the telephone that another patron had requested it.

  “I think I returned it,” he lied, unable to part with it in the end. “But I am happy to reimburse you.” After mailing them a check, he had torn out the small paper pocket from the book’s last page, which detailed its history in other hands, and scraped the call number from its spine.

  His sons had delighted in hearing stories about his childhood when they were young, and it bothered him that he had no pictures to show them. He told them about diving contests from high outcroppings of rock and about the time he and his father had caught a shark. They shuddered at this last story because those were the years after Mariel, when people floated to Florida in rubber boats or on rafts held together by floss. And they had both overheard their mother’s family discussing the sharks that circled the people gliding to the United States.

  The boys had wanted to see Rosmarina, land of peaceful olive groves and sardines whose bodies raced so quickly through the water that they left silver traces behind them. And of klapa, the soft and gentle songs their father sang when they had nightmares, but which they steadily outgrew as they hurtled bravely towards adulthood.

  He had shown them the book’s photographs of other islands, as well as Rosmarina’s location on the map that hung in the room they shared. It was a tiny island like an escaping button from Italy’s boot, in the very middle of the Adriatic Sea and half a world away from the zoo in Central Park, Circle Line cruises, and Nathan’s hot dogs. As they grew older, however, Rosmarina became just one more storybook from childhood, like Clifford the Big Red Dog or Goodnight Moon. And while his sons might one day remember enough details of those stories to tell their own children, might even recall a few notes of those klapa songs, it pained him that they would not be able to describe the exact color of that water or the nature of that sky.

  Over the years he had written to his family a handful of times. From Italy, then Germany. From Chicago, where they had stayed upon arrival in the United States but which they abandoned because Lake Michigan did not resemble the open sea to him, no matter what other immigrants said.

  For the duration of the old regime, he did not sign the letters. Occasionally he would send his niece, Magdalena, a gift, a toy, once an Easter dress, though he had no idea of her size, or if the packages were ever delivered to his family. I did not abandon you of my own free will, he longed to tell her, but it was like sending letters into a void. He did not know if his parents were still living, if his sister had left, as she had always threatened. He did not know if there was anyone who bore the name Morić left on the island.

  What could he say in letters that were by necessity vague? I am well and I hope you are well. How many times could he say it?

  In the first few years of his exile, he imagined that their lives remained the same as when he left—that his father painted his boat every spring, and his mother still attended Mass. Magdalena remained a toddler, and his sister sat in her folding chair on the riva, extolling the virtues of rosemary oil to the tourists in halting German.

  As the years went by, however, he could no longer be sure.

  Little by little, he resigned himself to separation. It seemed to him that his life on the island was something another person had lived. It did not so much fade in his memory as sit behind glass, exactly as images appear on a television screen. Here he repairs the motor on his boat. Here he must dive down to loosen the anchor that has caught on some rocks. Here his mother hums as she bakes bread, and his sister tosses her head.

  It was only when Croatia’s independence war started in 1991 and effectively ended communism that he began to regard things a little differently. In the longest letter he had ever written, he told his parents of his wife and his two sons, of his restaurant and his life in New York. He gave them his address. I am relieved by the news, he wrote a little stiffly, but am also afraid for your well-being. He told them that he was planning to visit. Once this madness ends, I will bring my sons to show them the place where I was born.

  He realized that the Croatian he had once written with ease now came out with wild inconsistencies. There were words he had to think about for a long time, and twice he crumpled the sheets of paper and began again. He included family photographs with this letter, stopping to look at his own face, rounder than it had been in his youth. His hair was half gray, and for a moment he was afraid of what they would think, looking at him. He certainly grew fat in America, he imagined his sister commenting with some disgust, while we stayed here, waiting for him.

  He thought for a long time about the last paragraph, chewing the cap of his pen. There has not been a day that I did not think of you. He begged for their understanding, for their forgiveness. He begged forgiveness especially from his sister, although he did not put this into words.

  He waited months for a response. He knew that the postal system would surely be affected by the war, and sometime after the first letter, he sent a nearly identical second. Over two years passed before that one was returned with a single handwritten word upon the envelope. Deceased.

  It did not occur to him to question the truth of this. He was too consumed with the idea that his parents had died without ever hearing his voice again. It was like a sharp bit of flint embedded in the flesh near his heart, and it stabbed him each time he turned.

  It was Luz who had suggested that they visit the island together. “The worst is not to know what happened,” she told him, so reasonably that he nearly acquiesced. In 1997, two years after the last shell fell, he went so far as to consult a travel agent. The woman did not know much about Croatia—it was still an unusual destination for Americans in those days—but she promised to investigate the matter. A week later he sat in her office, a giant orange fish bumping against the sides of a gurgling fish tank, and looked through brochures for the Adriatic Sea.

  Through a Slovenian travel agency, she had found a brochure that listed the Hotel Palace on Rosmarina. “It looks like it might be the only hotel on the island,” she told him.

  He looked numbly at photographs of the hotel’s limestone facade, which he could remember from his childhood. His sister had worked there for a time, cleaning the rooms of tourists, and it had not changed at all since then: the awning was still dark blue, and café tables still sat on its stone terrace.

  There were no people in the pictures, just photographs of simple bedrooms with dark blue draperies that could be rooms in any hotel, anywhere in the world.

  He took the brochure home and reread the description of his island. Come see the forested splendor of Rosmarina! Come swim in
its crystal seas!

  It was the idea of returning as a tourist that he could not stomach. He feared finding another family in his family’s house, one who would look at him suspiciously and tell him that there had not been Morićs on Rosmarina for years. The more he thought about it, the less likely he found the possibility that anything of his former life remained.

  He knew other Croatians who had visited home. They spoke wistfully of selling their apartments and their businesses in the United States and returning, buying property perhaps, and recouping the lives that had been denied them. But he found these plans far-fetched and vaguely pathetic.

  Most of all, he imagined stepping from the ferry onto the island’s riva, greeted by blank faces and eyes that took in the American cut of his clothes. Zimmer frei! Camere! he could imagine the old women calling to the foreigners emerging from the ferry’s dark belly. He remembered how they made a beeline for those passengers who exuded the unmistakable glow of the West, forsaking their countrymen for Germans or Swiss. He imagined their hopeful faces, the way they would tell him in English: Rooms!

  Young men would be tying up their boats on the riva, just as he had done. He wondered then if his own eyes had ever passed over one of the island’s returning sons, who had stood for a time in disappointment on the waterfront where nobody now knew him.

  Chapter 7

  She reappeared one day in June, an early summer heat wave bending the air above the pavement so that the city appeared like some rendering of a Martian landscape, the sky hazy and sunless. Although it was only nine in the morning, Marin was walking slowly, his shirt already damp with perspiration, cursing New York’s humidity with every step.

  After nearly thirty years he had yet to grow accustomed to the oppressiveness, to the dead weight of the city’s heat. He did not mind winter’s bitterness or the torrential rains of autumn, but there was something about summer that made him feel trapped.

  He recognized her from a block away. She sat on the bus stop bench in front of the restaurant’s entrance dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt, and for a perplexed moment he took in the whiteness of her elbows and knees, the hair that hung lankly about her face.

  He stopped at a distance, observing her. At first he thought she had fallen asleep, a backpack stationed between her feet, but then he realized that she was studying something on the pavement: a crack in the concrete or a slow-moving insect.

  He did not know how long she had been waiting for him, or even if she was waiting for him at all. She might have planned to take a bus, her appearance in front of his restaurant a mere coincidence. But when a bus halted in front of her, she did not look up.

  Even in profile he could see the hollows beneath her eyes, blue circles that made him think she had been sitting there since before dawn, biding her time on the plastic bench. When she looked up at last, she held his gaze for a long moment, and though a tiny voice inside his head whispered that it all spelled trouble, the larger part of him was already unlocking the door to the restaurant and inviting her inside. Seating her at the bar the way he used to seat his sons at the end of school days when they drank frothy batidos and swung their legs from the high stools. Assuring her that whatever the complication, she would see, these things had a way of turning out all right in the end.

  She stood in the middle of the dining room as he made her a coffee behind the bar. He was aware of the way she studied the walls, her gaze lingering on the paintings by Cuban artists, some their patrons, some their friends. He repainted the walls—the aqua, the green, the blue—every year or two, whenever the city’s grime and the smoke from their own kitchen conspired to dull the Caribbean lagoon they had created in the heart of Brooklyn.

  “There’s nothing from home,” she told him.

  He poured her coffee in a shallow white cup.

  Her voice had been neutral, but there was a deflated look on her face. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”

  She needed a job, and while he did not, strictly speaking, need another waitress, he did not have the heart to turn her away. His earlier self—the one who asked nothing of his countrymen and offered nothing in return, the one who sensed betrayal behind every word spoken in the ghost language he so rarely used—had disappeared. He imagined his own sons in some kind of trouble, so that there was a strange relief in showing kindness to this girl. The equation made sense to him today, the heat rising in the street outside so that the people who passed the restaurant’s windows resembled sleepwalkers.

  “You’re too soft,” Luz said when he telephoned to tell her, although he sensed only minor reproach in her voice.

  “I think she’s all alone,” he said in his basic Spanish, watching as Jadranka cradled her coffee cup in both hands. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes were visible for the first time today, like the invisible-ink trick his wife had shown their boys with lemon juice, the letters appearing beneath a lightbulb’s heat.

  She sipped methodically, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the sign beside the cash register that read, Occupancy by more than 125 persons is dangerous and unlawful.

  “What did you say her name was?” Luz asked him.

  “Jadranka,” he said.

  She did not look up at this, her eyes fixed on the sign as if it alone might save her.

  “I don’t know her last name,” he added.

  “Is she legal?”

  Marin considered this. “I don’t know.”

  Luz sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Hector won’t be pleased at having to train somebody new.”

  “No,” he assented. “He won’t.”

  There was a moment of silence. “But I suppose we all needed to be trained in our time. Even Hector.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, and smiled into the telephone.

  She needed very little training in the end. She had worked as a waitress in Split, and so she knew to serve from the right and to clear from the left. She was as skilled at uncorking wine as she was at deboning fish, and once dressed in the white apron that all their staff wore, she was an unobtrusive presence in the restaurant. She quietly refolded napkins and retrieved fallen forks in such a way that conversations between customers never flagged.

  “She’s like a ghost,” Hector told him towards the end of service on that first night, clearly meaning his words as a compliment.

  Marin turned to watch her pour wine for one of the tables.

  “—which is strange for a beautiful woman.”

  “Trust you to notice,” he told Hector.

  She had spent the afternoon studying the menu. It was not an extensive list, but in the space of a few hours, she had memorized its entire contents, and several times Marin eavesdropped as she described the pork jus or the ropa vieja. Only occasionally did she get tangled up in the Spanish words, or the English descriptions, and he was on hand to clarify things, hovering behind her like a mother hen.

  “Leave us,” Luz finally told him, taking the girl into the kitchen to sample the ropa vieja.

  “Pašticada,” Jadranka pronounced when she emerged, so that Marin laughed at the comparison.

  “It’s similar,” he conceded.

  All during that first evening, Marin studied her movements, pleased and yet somehow puzzled by her single-minded dedication to each task presented her. Gone was the slouching girl of their first meetings, the one who had told him with some annoyance that she had never expected things to be easy in America. The nose ring had been removed, and in its absence something else had shifted as well.

  “Slow down,” he had to tell her several times. “Take a sip of water.”

  But she only took breaks when he told her to, and only ate when he insisted, although a meal each shift had been part of their agreement.

  Luz watched from the bar as the girl traversed the dining room. “She’s a hard worker,” she told him approvingly.

  He placed an arm around his wife’s shoulders, pleased that she had noticed. He sensed that Luz had left her observation u
nfinished. “But?” he prodded.

  She did not answer right away, watching as Jadranka took drink orders from a table of four businessmen, her brow wrinkled with concentration.

  “Her eyes, Mio,” she said at last.

  He frowned. “What about them?”

  But his wife only shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen.

  It took him a week to realize that she needed a place to sleep. He did not know where she had been going each night at closing, but one morning Hector discovered her in the bathroom, brushing her teeth at the sink.

  “You can stay here for a little while,” Marin told her, showing her the small office in the back, with its narrow, sagging couch.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him, unable to meet his eyes.

  “Why are you sorry?” he asked her. “All beginnings are difficult. Mine was. My wife’s. Hector’s. Nobody is spared.”

  She said nothing to this.

  “I lived from church donations in the beginning,” he told her with a laugh. “We were so poor that my cousin received a bag of socks for her first Christmas present in America.”

  Jadranka looked up.

  “She was five. Now, I ask you: what kind of gift is that for a little girl? But she needed socks, and that was what the charity could give us.”

  She considered this. “You were never tempted to just go back?”

  She had asked something similar before, and he marveled for a split second at stubborn youth, at a generation for whom things appeared just that easy. “There was no going back. Going back meant jail, or worse.”

  She swallowed.

  “But you could go back,” he said, watching her carefully. “There’s no reason you couldn’t.”

  “There is,” she said just as quickly, and something about the decisive way she said it made him believe her.