The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “I heard her tell some old lady that her father was captain of a Jadrolinija ship.”

  Magdalena stared at her schoolmate, a girl with whom she was neither friendly nor at odds.

  “Just thought you ought to know.”

  The schoolmate was telling the truth, as it turned out, and in the next few days Magdalena eavesdropped on her sister as she chattered to several strangers. Once, her father was a stonecutter in the island’s quarry. Another time, he was a teacher in the local school. In every telling, he was kind. He had a gentle voice and never raised his hand in anger. Magdalena did not know how Jadranka had discovered that Goran Babić was not her father, but it was obvious that she had gleaned this information somewhere, although she had never asked her older sister about it.

  “What are you doing?” Magdalena demanded once, after hearing her sister describe the last film her father had completed, an action movie exactly like one they had seen in the summer kino the month before.

  But although Jadranka’s cheeks flushed, she did not attempt to explain herself. If anything, her tales grew more outlandish. And when the summer ended and the tourists disappeared, she began to try these tales out on other island children.

  “What a liar you are,” one older boy told her in disgust, “when everybody knows your father didn’t want you.”

  Years later, when Jadranka applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, her portfolio contained a wider range of subject matter: charcoal portraits of her family, paintings of abandoned houses beneath the Peak, and the mist that shrouded Rosmarina’s harbor on winter mornings. But here and there, Magdalena still found evidence of the men. Jadranka no longer left their faces blank, but they were always looking away, or turning, or studying something of interest on the ground.

  Jadranka’s pictures were not recreations of life. They did not depict every line of a wrinkled face, or translate every window or tree onto paper, but they were something closer to truth. She captured exactly the curve of their grandfather’s shoulders when he sat in his boat, the one eyebrow their mother raised when she told Jadranka that only rich people’s children studied art, and that it was all a matter of connections anyway.

  During high school—as the war on the mainland dragged on endlessly—Jadranka had been the star pupil of an ill-tempered art teacher. A former professor living out his retirement on Rosmarina, the man gave the occasional art lesson in order to supplement his pension. He had struck fear into the hearts of his other pupils but refused to charge for Jadranka’s lessons, going so far as to give her a key to his studio so that she might have a place to work.

  One day he had come to see Luka, sitting awkwardly at the other man’s kitchen table. “Your granddaughter has a gift,” the art professor said. “Please don’t let her waste away on Rosmarina.”

  Their grandfather had frowned at this. “The island isn’t a jail.”

  The professor had looked thoughtful at these words. “No,” he conceded. “But for someone like your granddaughter, it could easily become one.”

  Jadranka was accepted to the Academy the same year that the war ended, the same year Magdalena returned to the island without Damir, refusing to tell even her sister what had happened between them. But within months Jadranka had dropped out, reappearing on Rosmarina one day in the middle of her second term. It was too constricting, she told her sister. And the professors were too old and set in their ways. They prattled endlessly about solid foundations, assigning tiresome exercises and stamping out any hint of innovation. “They wanted me to crawl,” she told Magdalena finally. “And I’m ready to run.”

  But if Jadranka had run in the years since then, it had been primarily in circles. To Zagreb or to Italy, then back to Rosmarina. To Split for several months, then back home again. She never struck Magdalena as unhappy. But she was restless if she stayed anywhere for very long.

  Magdalena did not know what to make of her sister’s self-portrait, the face so shredded that even the color of the skin was gone, and so she placed the canvas flat on the studio’s table. But it looked like a body being prepared for burial there, so she changed her mind and propped it against one of the table legs, turning off the light, a faceless Jadranka watching her go.

  When Magdalena climbed the steps to the second floor of Katarina’s house, she stopped outside the children’s half-closed playroom door. Christopher was telling his mother something another boy had done at camp, his voice high-pitched with excitement.

  Magdalena wanted to believe that Katarina was lying. She could not imagine Jadranka attacking her own image like that—for all her restlessness, her sister had always been easygoing and slow to anger, and Magdalena had difficulty picturing this frenzied, knife-wielding version of her sister. But since her arrival in America, Jadranka had grown less and less recognizable, and there was something—some irrefutable seed of truth—in what Katarina had told her, though she had not bothered to explain her own copycat painting.

  “Ma, nemoj,” Katarina was telling Christopher now. “You don’t say.”

  Whatever her frustrations with her art, Katarina was a good mother. She listened patiently to Christopher’s tales and to Tabitha’s woes. In their father’s presence, she spoke to them in English, but when they were alone she used her rusted mother tongue, and Magdalena could see that Croatian functioned as a secret language between them.

  The playroom was at the foot of the stairs to the third floor, and as Magdalena listened to their interchange, a sound on the staircase made her look up to see Nona Vinka sitting on the top step. Since Magdalena’s arrival, her great-aunt had been too unwell to leave her room, but now she gave a wan smile.

  Magdalena considered knocking on the playroom door to alert her cousin, but she could hear that Tabitha was into her rendition of the day, and so Magdalena climbed the steps instead. “Do you want to go back to bed?” she asked softly in Croatian.

  Vinka nodded and held out her hand, allowing herself to be guided back to her room like a child.

  When Magdalena tucked the sheets around her, Vinka gave a contented sigh. “Have I shown you the album?” she wanted to know.

  The question made Magdalena blink in surprise. Vinka had not managed a single coherent sentence in all the weeks that Magdalena had been in America, but now her eyes studied the younger woman’s face.

  She shook her head.

  “It’s on the bureau,” Vinka said, motioning towards the wooden chest. “With my spectacles.”

  Magdalena looked at her uncertainly.

  “Go on, child,” she urged with a little smile.

  Magdalena found the album beneath the Bible and returned with it, sitting beside Vinka on the bed.

  “I like to think they’re all here,” Vinka said, patting the album’s cover.

  Magdalena nodded.

  Vinka opened the album to the first page, to a picture of Luka and their other siblings. “Look how young we were,” she told Magdalena in wonder, and the younger woman studied the unbent figures and their smooth, unwrinkled skin. The photograph must have been taken just after the Second World War, and instinct made her reach out and touch her grandfather’s face.

  “He’s a good father, isn’t he?” Vinka asked her.

  Of course, thought Magdalena, withdrawing her hand. She thinks I’m Ana.

  But Vinka was already flipping the album’s pages. She seemed to be looking for one photograph in particular, but when she reached the end, she gave an agitated shake of her head and started again from the beginning.

  “May I help?” Magdalena asked her.

  “Nobody can help,” said Vinka, leaning back against her pillow. “You should never have done it, girl.”

  Magdalena hesitated at this, unsure whom her aunt was seeing. “What?” she asked curiously. “What have I done?”

  Vinka closed her eyes. “It was you who brought these things upon us.”

  Magdalena wanted to ask more, but her great-aunt’s breathing became even, and so she slid the album from be
neath Vinka’s hands. She removed the spectacles from her face, folding them carefully.

  When she looked up, Katarina was watching from the doorway with an unhappy expression. “She fades in and out like that sometimes,” she told Magdalena quietly.

  “She was showing me her photographs.”

  Katarina’s eyes softened as they fell on the album. She nodded. “She says funny things sometimes, upsetting things.”

  Magdalena waited.

  “She doesn’t mean anything by them. But sometimes she’ll tell you things you didn’t know, things you wish she hadn’t told you.”

  Magdalena waited, but if Katarina was going to say anything more, she thought better of it. “Come downstairs,” she told Magdalena. “We need to finish what we started.”

  It was Jazmin’s evening off, and Magdalena sat at the kitchen table as Katarina chopped vegetables at the counter, a glass of whiskey in front of both of them. The children were upstairs, and from time to time Magdalena could hear a television or the sounds of electronic death from Christopher’s video games. The cat lay curled in her lap, purring, its tail moving in arcs as if trying to inscribe a message in the air.

  Magdalena studied Katarina’s bent head. Her cousin’s hair was gathered in a loose ponytail, and she had washed off her makeup. Magdalena thought that she looked younger like this, like a softer version of the cousin she remembered from their childhood. But her eyes were red, as if she had been crying.

  Magdalena steeled her heart against all of it: the smell of peppers frying in a cast-iron pan, the warmth of the cat, the way her cousin seemed to be searching for the right words, lifting her head several times as if she were about to say something but each time taking a swig of her drink instead.

  “The painting of Rosmarina,” Magdalena finally prompted.

  “Mine,” Katarina said, looking swiftly up. “But based on a conversation I had with your sister.”

  Magdalena did not know what to say to this, and Katarina’s gaze fell to the cutting board again. “I didn’t copy one of her paintings, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  It was exactly what Magdalena was thinking, but she refrained from saying it aloud.

  “And I had every intention of putting that self-portrait in the show, but obviously I couldn’t anymore.”

  “She damaged it before she left?”

  “She did it the same night she left,” Katarina corrected. “She must have. I found it cut up the next morning.”

  “But why?”

  Again that look of discomfort. But Katarina shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  For a long moment, nothing was said between them, Katarina’s knife making a rhythmic chopping sound against the board.

  “I’m sorry about the studio,” Magdalena said, breaking the silence.

  “Are you?”

  Magdalena thought about this. “Yes. Though you should have shown me what Jadranka did to her painting from the start.”

  Katarina did not acknowledge this, continuing to slice the onion in her hand. After a moment she placed the knife beside the cutting board and turned around. “What happened in Split, Lena?”

  The question caught Magdalena off guard, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Katarina was still watching her face. “It’s old history,” she told her cousin. “It’s done.”

  But Katarina, her hand still wet from the onion, reached over the table where Magdalena was sitting and grabbed her cousin’s hand. When Magdalena went to pull away, Katarina held on with a surprising determination. She turned it palm down and studied the knot where the bones had fused improperly. “I wondered about this,” she said. “You didn’t have it that summer.”

  “No.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  People seldom noticed it. Lovers did, occasionally, tracing that deformity in the dark. But on those occasions she usually made up something about a birth defect or a fishing accident.

  Now, Magdalena studied the way the bone pushed her skin out like a small tent pole. “Sometimes,” she admitted.

  Katarina let go of her hand. “I don’t know why your sister went,” she said, standing so that the kitchen counter was at her back and folding her arms across her chest. “And I don’t know why she would do that to her painting.”

  Magdalena nodded, but did not take her eyes from Katarina’s face.

  Her cousin was also watching her, and for a moment Magdalena had the sensation that they were engaged in a staring contest, like the summer they had spent together on the island, neither girl willing to admit defeat.

  “You’re not sure whether you believe me,” Katarina told her.

  Magdalena nodded again.

  Both women were quiet as they ate dinner, and it was the children who filled up the silence with their stories of camp and a minor squabble about who deserved the last ice cream sandwich in the freezer. Magdalena excused herself early to go to bed, prompting an immediate protest from Christopher, who wanted her to read to him.

  “Magdalena’s had a long day,” Katarina told him, neither child seeming to notice the way their mother suddenly used the formal version of her cousin’s name.

  “Sleep well,” Katarina told her over the children’s heads.

  “You, too,” responded Magdalena.

  But every time she closed her eyes, she saw the shredded canvas where Jadranka’s face had been.

  In the morning she rose to find the house deserted. A note in the kitchen explained that Katarina had taken the children to visit a friend, and Magdalena stood barefoot and slightly hungover at the counter, surprised to see by the oven’s clock that it was already past ten.

  She did not feel like going to Queens. On her last trip there, she had begun to hang up flyers with her sister’s picture, but she could not bear the idea of talking to any more strangers today. Briefly, she considered telephoning Damir. But she did not know what she would say to him, and so she took her time making coffee, drinking it as she stood at the kitchen window and looked into the small garden behind the house.

  When she was done, she climbed the stairs, pulling the T-shirt she slept in over her head as she went. She padded into the guest bathroom, waited until the shower grew hot, then stepped in and lowered herself to a seated position, resting her chin on one knee.

  Somewhere in the house a telephone began to ring, a sound she could barely make out above the shower. She closed her eyes and nearly fell asleep like that, her forehead resting on her knee, so that the water drummed against the back of her head. But eventually she pulled herself up, turning off the water and wrapping herself in a towel.

  Downstairs, the telephone rang again, no doubt some art world critic or camp counselor. Six rings, and then it fell silent, voice mail picking up somewhere in the tangle of New York.

  Magdalena dressed slowly and then brushed her hair, watching her pale face in the mirror. She did not know whether she should stay in her cousin’s house or leave. And if she left, she did not know where she would go.

  When she descended once more to the kitchen, the telephone began to ring a third time, insistently, the caller clearly not satisfied with leaving a message. It fell silent and then started up once more, the shrill noise like an alarm.

  She picked it up on the fifth ring. “Hello?” she asked.

  There was a brief pause on the other side, and then a man’s voice told her, “I was hoping you would answer.”

  It was Katarina’s painter, his voice more solemn than the day before.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  But Magdalena ignored this. “What else did my sister tell you?” she asked him.

  Chapter 13

  That afternoon when Theo answered his front door, he wore a wrinkled T-shirt, and his hair stood up on end as if he had been sleeping. Several fingers of his right hand were stained dark blue, and a string of tattoos—black symbols that looked like something from a book
of necromancy—covered the inside of his right forearm, a detail Magdalena had missed at the gallery the night before.

  “Theo,” she said a little testily, because she had been knocking for some time.

  He had not been sleeping, he told her apologetically, but painting. “My studio is in the back,” he said, running a hand through his hair as she followed him down a hallway to his living room. “I tend to lose track of time when I work.”

  A fan in one open window made the sections of a newspaper flutter on the scratched parquet floor. Papers covered other surfaces, pinned down by books and coffee mugs, their edges quivering, so that the room had the appearance of a staging area for birds preparing to take flight.

  As he moved to clear a place for her on the sofa, she studied his wiry frame, the trousers that were slung low over his hips, the sleeves of his T-shirt revealing arms taut with muscle and sinew.

  He was exactly her sister’s type, she realized, wondering how she had missed it the night before. Jadranka had always been drawn to people who stood on the periphery of things. The ones who thumbed their noses at convention, who stayed up until dawn and only went to bed when the rest of the world rose for work.

  She took in the tilting cushions of the couch and the blanket that hung over one armrest. She could easily imagine her sister sitting there, smoking weed, picking out shapes in the smoke that rose above her head the way she used to do with clouds. Down the hall a hastily made bed was visible through an open door, and Magdalena made note of the unlaced men’s boots on the floor.

  “Your sister gave me that one,” he said, pointing out a canvas that sat on a bureau, atop two even stacks of books, and Magdalena was surprised to see herself: a nude sitting in a chair, face turned towards a source of light.

  She remembered sitting for the sketches the previous winter, during her sister’s last trip to Rosmarina. They had gone to the Devil’s Stones despite the cold weather, and Magdalena had built a fire in the old-fashioned stove at their fishing camp.