“Not who,” he corrected her. “What.”
Her face fell.
“You want to hear it all?” he asked her.
She looked down at her hands, which were resting on the bar. Those hands had tricked him. They had even prompted his wife to ask her for a picture. The idea of it made hysterical laughter rise in his throat, but he pushed it back.
“You want to hear every last ugly detail?” he pushed.
She did not look up.
“Don’t be timid. It’s why you came, after all.”
Still she did not lift her head. Her eyes were dry and her mouth did not tremble. No delicate flower, this one, he thought. Had anything she told him been real? Her name? The bit about the rat poison had seemed a stretch, but he had ingested her bastard status like a greedy fish swallows a hook.
“It’s why you came!” he roared and struck the bar with his fist, so that the resulting tremor shook the liquor bottles behind her.
She looked up at last. She nodded.
Chapter 8
It was his father who had told him, “A flood begins with a single drop.”
But even in 1969, when Marin returned from the far reaches of landlocked Macedonia for leave, he could not bring himself to tell Luka of the daily humiliations and the constant stupidities that compulsory military service entailed: the fleas, the stink of other men’s feet, the pointless tasks. It was not that he minded the fellow conscripts in his barracks; they were all more or less all right. But when the commanding officers screamed that they would kick his soft Dalmatian ass, which did nothing but sit in the sun all day, drinking wine and chasing women, he felt a fury of which he had never known himself capable.
He had worked his entire life, he longed to shout back. He had fished from the time he was a boy, and his hands were covered with the scars and calluses to prove it.
His worst persecutor was his sergeant, a gaunt man from a town near Zadar. Because they were both from the Adriatic, Marin had expected a measure of sympathy. “I was once like you,” the sergeant yelled instead. “All I cared about were my nets and my boat and my wine, but the Germans cared nothing for these.”
When Marin protested that his father, too, had fought the Germans, the sergeant made him do push-ups until the muscles of his arms felt like they were on fire.
No matter how Marin completed his tasks, Sergeant Pavlović made him start over again. No matter how many times he remade his bed, pulling the rough blanket taut over the straw mattress beneath, the sergeant tore it off and threw it on the floor. No matter how often Marin had sentry duty, again and again the sergeant assigned this duty to him. He grew so exhausted from lack of sleep that several times he fell asleep during meals, his forehead resting against the greasy surface of the table as the men around him ate and burped, kicking him roughly awake at the sergeant’s approach.
It did not seem right that the same territory had produced them both, that instead of feeling a kinship with him the sergeant lost no opportunity to ridicule his island accent or tell crude jokes about the region’s indolence. During the daily hour of political education, Pavlović would read aloud to recruits from the morning newspaper, peppering his semiliterate orations with his own political musings. “Croatian nationalists want their own language, Morić,” he would bark. “What do you think of that?”
Marin had little opinion on the matter. On Rosmarina, his aunt Vinka’s husband had already attempted to stoke his national pride, citing hundreds of years in which their people had been under the yoke of others. He had tried to lend Marin books and invited him to secret political gatherings. “Where’s your anger?” Vlaho had once asked in disgust. “Your dignity?”
But Marin cared nothing for politics or ethnic solidarity. Rosmarina’s dialect would be equally unintelligible to someone from Belgrade or Zagreb, its way of life as foreign. He knew nothing of theaters and libraries, of traffic jams or victory squares, but he knew the coves that sardines favored and how best to press grapes into wine.
He did not have the energy to consider political movements, and the years of his mobilization stretched before him like an empty waste, bereft of light and warmth. The men in his barracks came from cities and mountains, from farmland and border towns, but most had never heard of Rosmarina.
He missed his mother’s cooking, his sister’s laughter, his father’s counsel. Most of all he missed their touch: his father slapping his back and his mother’s hands zipping up his jacket, believing even sunny days capable of conferring colds. Army life was pushing and shoving, a barely controlled violence as Pavlović shouted in his ear, misting it several times daily with his spittle.
After the first few weeks, he forged a friendship with the conscript who shared his bunk. “The sergeant is in love with you,” the fair-haired Bosnian told Marin, laughing. “That’s why he gives you so much attention. Perhaps you shouldn’t play so hard to get.”
Siniša made those first months bearable. When the sergeant left the barracks, he reduced him to a caricature, demonstrating his erratic gait and beetling eyebrows. “Morić,” he would order. “Drop and give me fifty.” He painted wild scenarios in which the sergeant wore women’s stockings in his spare time and enjoyed being prodded with leather whips. “Have you seen the sergeant’s wife?” he would say. “She could wither a man’s balls with a single glance.”
Like Marin, his bunk mate cared nothing for politics. “There’s only one doctrine I subscribe to,” he announced one day when the sergeant left the room during political instruction, “and it involves cold beer.” Whenever the conscripts were allowed into town, he would demonstrate this by getting loudly drunk.
“What about the sergeant’s daughter?” he asked Marin on one such evening. “A face like a doll’s and tits like jelly-filled doughnuts.” Several other conscripts at their table shot him warning looks, but the café was loud and filled with drinking men.
Marin only shook his head in amusement. The sergeant’s daughter had a greasy face and the gait of a draft horse.
The object of Marin’s affections was not that sallow girl, nor any one of the pictures his fellow recruits had shown him: an odd assortment of girls from home and well-thumbed pictures from pornographic magazines.
He had seen her only twice in the town. Once, through a bakery window when he was sent on some errand, and another time when she walked down the street in front of him, the wind lifting her skirt slightly so that he glimpsed the smooth skin on the back of her thighs for just a moment before she smoothed the fabric down again.
He did not know her name or who she was, though she seemed out of place in that small town. The girls of Bitolj, like the ones on Rosmarina, tried too hard to copy the pages of fashion magazines, resulting in overdone makeup and bouffant hairstyles. But this woman had an easy grace, and every time he was in town he found himself searching for her long brown hair, so silky that he was certain his hands would pass right through it.
With time he discovered that her name was Nada. She was from Zagreb and taught in the local school. She did not have the face of a doll, he decided with all the ardor of youth, but that of an angel.
He guessed that she was his senior by at least ten years, but he found that he could not stop thinking of her, of the way she moved, of the wind lifting the thin material of her skirt. He imagined the way it would feel in his hands, the pale smoothness of her thighs beneath.
One day when he was sent to do an errand in town, he went past the building where she held her classes. He had noticed the room before, the construction paper pictures visible from the street, but he had never seen her there, and he stopped to watch her distribute paper to the children inside. He stood there so long that he did not immediately register when she looked up and gave him an amused stare in return.
Two days later he ran into her on the street. “Do you have an interest in long division?” she asked him. “Perhaps you should join our class. You’re just a little older than my students.”
He felt himse
lf flush, but before he could hurry away she wrote something on a piece of paper and pressed it into his hands. “Be a brave boy and come visit me sometime,” she told him. “We can talk.”
“T-talk?” he stuttered. But she only smiled, then walked away without looking back.
He did not know what to do about the paper, which he kept long after memorizing the address. He lay awake for several nights before falling into tormented dreams in which he undressed her, waking only to discover that he was pressing his erection into his sheets.
The following week he had an evening’s leave, and after gathering his courage, he set off for the address on the far side of town. The building’s front door was open, and he climbed slowly to the third floor, telling himself that he could leave at any time. On the landing outside her door, he hesitated, looking behind him, back down the dark stairway that was dimly lit by only a few working lightbulbs. Before he could decide what to do, however, she opened the door, a small spark of surprise in her violet eyes. He had not noticed their color before, always too shy to do more than glance nervously at her, but now he stood on the threshold, staring and feeling foolish. “I was about to ring,” he said, thankful that he did not stutter.
“Come in,” she said, taking his arm and leading him into a room where books covered every surface.
He could not seem to find his voice, and so he looked around him, taking in the worn couch and the scuffed parquet floor.
“God knows it’s not much,” she said with a laugh.
He was only nineteen and he had never been with a woman, though he had naturally said otherwise to the men in his barracks. Now, all the easy words he had rehearsed on his slow march up the stairs deserted him.
“Undress,” she told him.
He blinked hard at this unexpected order.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll undress too,” she said gently.
Before he could respond, she undid the skirt at her waist and lifted her blouse over her head. She wore no slip or bra, and he stared at her flat stomach, at her small nipples, inexplicably darker than her lips—a correlation he had learned from listening to the conversations of other recruits. In a state of wonder and befuddlement, he allowed her to unbuckle his trousers, taking her hand as he stepped out of them. When she pulled off his shirt, he lifted his arms as a child would. She took one of his hands in hers and, smiling, placed it against her breast.
It was only in retrospect that he would understand that she had been as lonely as he was, though he would not remember how many months they continued to see each other. Time, he would come to understand, could contract or expand memory, so that events he remembered as consecutive actually occurred more than a month apart, and a single day could register, in retrospect, as endless.
He went to her apartment whenever he could pilfer a few moments from errands or make excuses to Siniša on the nights they were allowed into town. He made love to her on the couch, on each of the chairs, on the low, humming refrigerator in the kitchen.
“Why so happy these days, Morić?” Siniša asked with amusement. “You look like the fox that ate the chicken in one bite.”
The hours with her took away the sting of army life and filled the long months of his recruitment with something other than homesickness. Even the sergeant became less harsh towards him, no longer singling him out for particularly unpleasant tasks, sometimes actually making small talk with him.
Then, one evening, Pavlović materialized beside him as he left the mess hall. “There are undesirable elements among us, Morić.”
Marin faltered.
“Take your friend Siniša. His father was a provocateur who spent ten years in prison.” He paused. “I bet you didn’t know that.”
Marin shook his head.
“You’re a good soldier,” the sergeant continued. “I know because I’ve been watching you. If he were to say anything suspicious, it would be your duty to talk to me about it.”
Marin found his voice. “Suspicious?”
“Anything at all,” the sergeant said. “I think we understand one another.”
When he told Nada, she looked at him carefully. “He wants you to become an informer.”
On Rosmarina there were at least a half-dozen known informers, and everyone was careful in their dealings with them. Marin had never considered their recruitment, the way they would have been approached as the sergeant had approached him, slapping his arm and speaking of duty. If anything, he had thought of them as born that way, their treachery an innate flaw of character.
“What a mess this country is,” Nada told him late one afternoon as they lay naked on her couch. “When things could be so different.”
“Why are you whispering?” he asked, and she lifted her head from his chest, telling him with a smile that one never knew who might be listening.
“Anything yet?” Pavlović asked the next day, looking at him with a guarded expression.
“Not a word,” he replied.
“Good,” Nada told him later, so that he basked in the warmth of her approval. “Let those bastards do their own dirty work.”
He was aware of the stacks of books in her apartment, the way she would remove a volume from one towering pile, read a few passages, then leave it on top of another. Sometimes she would read lines of poetry aloud to him, always locating the book she wanted within seconds, as if she had mapped out the contents of those stacks.
He never stopped to study their titles, although she admitted that a few were banned. “There’s an entire world inside those covers,” she told him once, “if you’d only stop to enter.”
But his world was one of fish and sea, and he had teased her that there was no room in it for poetry.
“But look how much poetry has to do with the sea!” she insisted. “Pages and pages of it. Your Rosmarina is more connected to the world than you’d like to think.”
A constant stream of friends stayed in her apartment, so he could not always see her when he liked. Most were friendly enough, but he knew that some merely tolerated his presence, as if he were a child. A woman from Ljubljana had cornered her in the kitchen, the sheer astonishment in her voice carrying to the next room where he sat: “But he’s a teenager, Nada!”
Another who came to visit with his wife found Marin’s sudden appearance in his army uniform one evening highly amusing. “Tell me, young fisherman,” he said, lifting his glass of wine as if Marin’s response would determine whether he took a sip. “What is your opinion of Kant?”
Across the room, Marin saw his lover flush at these words. “Leave him alone, Šimun,” she said in a warning voice, for although she had offered to lend Marin several of her books, he had always declined, fearing the mockery of the barracks.
He was aware, as well, that certain conversations were subverted in his presence, that when he came in, the words trailed off into discussions of films or reminiscences. He had once found Šimun pacing the living room in agitation as his wife and Nada looked on, trailing off when he caught sight of Marin in the doorway. “We were just discussing these awful Macedonian summers,” he said, fanning himself with the newspaper in his hand as if to prove his point. “Must be hard for someone from the sea, to be in a place where the air never moves.”
Marin nodded, although he knew the man had been reading from the newspaper only moments before. But by the time of his next visit, the newspaper was gone, and Nada told him that he was only imagining it.
Despite his suspicion that she was lying to him, it was still a shock to learn several weeks later that Šimun had been arrested.
“But—”
“Don’t ask me any questions,” Nada begged, and Marin sat beside her in stunned silence, picturing the slender man whose hands had been as white and delicate as a woman’s. Šimun had told him that he had managed to avoid most of his own military service because of his weak lungs, and Marin could not imagine how he would survive jail or, worse, slave labor.
On the night that Nada did not answer t
he door to his knock, he waited in her hallway, thinking that she had gone to buy bread, or to visit a friend. But an hour went by and still she did not come.
I was here, waiting for you, he teased her in the note that he slipped beneath her door. But I couldn’t wait any longer because the sergeant will skin me alive if I’m not back by lights out. He had signed it with his first name, leaving the doodle of a fishing boat beneath it.
She was not there the next day either, or the next. On the fourth day, he knocked on a neighbor’s door, and an old woman opened it to peer into the hallway with a frightened expression.
“They took her,” she whispered. “The police came and took her away.”
He went through the rest of that week as if he were dreaming. At every point that he could get away from the base, he returned to her apartment, but she was gone. When he walked past the neighbor’s door, he thought he could feel the weight of the woman’s stare through her keyhole.
The first time he was taken for interrogation, a man not much older than himself asked so many questions that he became dizzy. He tried to confuse Marin in his answers, doubling back to ask the same questions a dozen ways. He wanted to know the names of Marin’s friends, whether he had attended any political meetings, what his links were to dissidents abroad. “What kind of shit have you gotten yourself into?” he asked finally, producing the note that Marin had pushed beneath Nada’s door.
Marin took it with shaking hands. “It’s mine,” he admitted. “Of course it’s mine.”
She was a good comrade, he insisted, and had never talked against the government. “She’s a teacher,” he protested. “She has no interest in politics.”
But the man only laughed in his face. “You’re either a liar or extremely stupid,” he told Marin.
Each time he was summoned for questioning, they kept him for hours, asking him the names of her friends, of others involved in her movement.
The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel Page 13