The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  The sound reminds him of his mother’s wooden knitting needles. Firecrackers. A game his sisters—sitting cross-legged in the courtyard—used to play with pebbles that they attempted to catch in a single hand.

  His granddaughters demand to know how the story ends. They are no longer satisfied with the happy tales of his childhood, the adventures and escapades. He realizes that he cannot protect them from everything, but even so, there are things one does not tell children.

  “Luka?” someone beside his bed leans forward so that the chair creaks. They press their fingers into his wrist, and he feels the echo of his heartbeat beneath this pressure, an erratic reverberation along the length of his entire arm: clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

  His granddaughters must never learn of it, he wants to tell the sound.

  It is 1942 and freezing rain pelts the forest, striking bark and bouncing from the wintry ground. It showers the coat he and Vinka huddle beneath, curled tightly together as if they share the same womb, and when they finally rise after the downpour, there are red welts where their hands held the edges of thick fabric.

  They look so alike that in the mountains they are mistaken for twins, although Vinka is his junior by five years. She is also tiny by comparison, so that when she wears his trousers she must roll them at the cuff. But she shares his dark eyes and arched nose, and since they have cropped her brown hair—the lice too fiendish to be endured—she looks like his miniature double.

  Clack-clack-clack, the crack of gunfire in the forest. Clack, the sound an axe makes when it splits wood.

  Vinka had insisted on accompanying him into the war, but he had refused. “It isn’t safe,” he told her.

  “Where is it safe?” she had wanted to know.

  The danger is no longer their father, who is a shadow of his former self, but the Italians. They take a group of the town’s young men to the Devil’s Stones and mow them down with machine guns. He goes later to the site of that reprisal, the same place he has tied up his boat a thousand times. There are sharp chips in the pier’s stone wall, and although an unknown hand has removed the bullet casings and washed away the blood, fragments of stone litter the ground. He crouches to pick up the sharp pieces, passing them from hand to hand: clack-clack, clack-clack.

  It is sheer coincidence that prevents his inclusion in their number. The morning of the reprisal, his mother asks him to go up to the Peak and gather herbs for a cough that has plagued them all during the long winter. She gives strict instructions of where to look, which grasses to select, whether to cut them at the stalk or at the root. One of the herbs requires that he wait for the sun to dry all the moisture from its leaves, and it is while he is severing this very plant with his knife that he hears the reports from below.

  Things look unchanged from his position on the Peak: woodsmoke rises lazily from several chimneys in the town, and the sea shimmers hundreds of feet below him, its surface fretted by a wind that has started in the middle of the previous night. Later he wonders if his mother had somehow prophesied the day’s events. She usually sends her daughters on such tasks, but that morning insisted that he be the one to go on the errand. “It isn’t safe,” she told him, walking away from him abruptly, the matter settled, the rosary’s wooden beads clicking in her pocket.

  The place for women during wartime is at home, and he does not realize that Vinka intends to follow him in the next group of Partisan hopefuls who escape the island, the boats carrying only three or four people at a time, sliding quiet and dark into the nighttime waters. He does not realize that she has left a note for their sisters to read to their mother, and that by the time she finds him in Split nobody is able—or willing—to ensure her safe return to the island.

  Other women have joined the guerrilla bands in the mountains, though at seventeen she is among the youngest. They show her how to fire a gun, how to conceal a knife. They tell her what happens to Partisan women who are caught, and her young face goes pale at the details of this torture.

  “They’ll never catch me,” she tells him afterwards. “I’ll kill myself first.”

  The words strike fear in Luka, and he will not allow their separation. At night he sleeps beside her, aware that even the other men in their unit—men he would lay down his life for under other circumstances—follow her with their eyes.

  She is hungry for olive oil. Rancid pork fat and suet turn her stomach, and she is growing thin. He can see her cheekbones beginning to form triangles of shadow in her face. He is afraid that she will disappear before his eyes.

  For his part, he longs for the smell of Dalmatian pine, its sap oozing in the sun. And for the sage, bay, and juniper that grow in the underbrush. It is his father’s custom to infuse his grappa with those plants, and although Luka is no drinker, he imagines the way that sweet-smelling fire will burn a path down to his stomach.

  It is his sense of smell that is most assaulted in the war. He does not mind the danger of living in the forest as much as he minds the unwashed bodies huddled together. Nothing is ever completely dry—not their coats or their socks—and everything festers with a whitish, human-smelling rot. Lice have the full run of their bodies, and he shaves his own head before helping Vinka crop her hair.

  “It’ll grow back,” he tells her softly, running one hand through the uneven tufts, unable to look directly at the braid he holds in the other. But no sooner does he speak than she takes it from him and hurls it into the underbrush.

  One day the political officer in their unit sees them praying before a meal. “Where is your God?” he asks them in amusement, waving at the trees, lifting his eyes to the sky. “How can you prove to me that he exists?”

  “How can you prove to me that he doesn’t?” Vinka asks evenly. “You keep your Marx, and I’ll keep my God.”

  But the man does not smile at this. He tells them: “We are all brothers and sisters now, but I am telling you for your own good that a new day is coming.”

  Luka shakes his head dismissively. The new country will be all things that they envision, an end to plague and pestilence. He has lived a hungry life, and he looks forward to a time of plenty, a time of justice. The fight is pointless otherwise.

  They dismiss this skinny man from a far-off city they have never heard of, aware as they do that he writes details in his little book. “There will be a time,” he tells them.

  In those days they see God everywhere, or what they assume to be God. In the songbirds that sing from the branches, but with different voices from the birds in Rosmarina’s carob trees. In the creaking of timbers at night and the fires that they are allowed to build in caves, the wood never entirely dry, so that it crackles when exposed to the flame.

  The clatter of horses’ hooves, the sound of artillery, the quick boring of a bullet through bone: he will remember these things all his life. He remembers them now as he lies waiting in the anteroom of death.

  Despite his best intentions, they are separated during heavy fighting. He thinks it is for the best and that she will be more protected at their base camp. And so he is farther up the lines when someone gets word to him that Vinka is ill.

  “Typhus?” he demands fearfully, because the disease is tearing through their numbers, borne by the vermin that have permanently occupied their bodies. But they will not confirm this, nor will they meet his eyes.

  He finds her curled in a tight ball beneath a tree, lying on her side. Another woman he does not recognize sits beside her, stroking her hair.

  Vinka’s forehead is cool to the touch, and so Luka runs his hands down her arms and legs, over her face. In his mind, he is looking for bullet holes, but when he rips her coat open he finds no blood. “You’re fine,” he insists, rebuttoning her coat clumsily with numb hands. “Fine.”

  But when he makes her stand, he sees that the cord that held up her trousers has been slit, and that there is blood on her legs.

  “What happened?” he demands of the woman who holds Vinka up on the other side.

  “
What do you think?” she asks him. She is at least a decade older than him, with the thick skin and blunt speech of a peasant.

  “Who?”

  She shakes her head. “I found her like this.”

  “Who?” he demands of Vinka this time. He carries a knife in his boot, and he reaches for it now. “I’ll kill him.”

  And perhaps for this reason, she refuses to say anything at all.

  It is January and one of the key battles of the war is being fought, a German offensive that will end in failure, so that generations of Yugoslavia’s children will sing of it in triumph. His own children will memorize its circumstances, the movements of divisions, the speeches of great men.

  “Lice,” he will tell them, because of all the details they are taught, this one is most commonly overlooked. “We were crawling with lice, at every moment of every day. That vermin even walked among us.”

  But in that moment he still thinks he can bring the lost thing back to Vinka’s eyes, that he can avenge her, and so he hoists her over his shoulder. He makes it across the bridge with her, the Germans bombing with planes and the shrapnel tearing swaths through the canopy. On the safety of the far shore he lies all night beside her, holding her cold hand in his warm one. Clack, the sound of shovels in the distance, clack, the meeting of metal and stone.

  Many years later, a semiconscious Luka lies in the dark, finally piecing together that the sound is the trembling of his closed bedroom door, the lightning strikes so close that they cause it to quiver on its hinges.

  But the young Luka has no language for things such as this, and so he kisses his sister’s hands and weeps on the papery skin of her face as she stares at the stars above them. She wears a pendant of the Virgin Mary, and at one point she removes it from her thin, white neck and he places that failed talisman between his chattering teeth.

  For years after the war he is dogged by the smell of death, and he supposes that it is the same for Vinka, although she never speaks of it.

  It rises suddenly as he passes the doors of dark and abandoned houses, or when he climbs upward through fallow olive groves. He will be working on the engine of his car, hands blackened, and it comes upon him without warning so that he freezes and quickly expels all the air from his lungs. Then he counts to thirty before breathing again. In this way, he manages again and again to elude it, though only for a time.

  He is not a violent man, but he is prone to violent dreams: bright splashes of blood upon white walls and bones that give like wooden boards beneath his fists.

  “Stop,” a tiny voice orders him in the dream, and he sits back in surprise, only then noticing the man he has pinned to the ground and the rawness of his own knuckles.

  He takes several shaky breaths, realizing that he has very nearly killed the man whose face he never recognizes, just like the faces he never saw from the Second World War, the ones he shot at in the forest just as they shot back at him in explosions of bark, as shrapnel dropped through the canopy of trees.

  Sometimes the man is his enemy. Sometimes Vinka has agreed to point him out. But often it is a perfect stranger. And Luka looks at him in shock, taking in his swollen eyes and bloody mouth, feeling the burn of his own raw skin, and says in a choked voice, “I mistook you for another.”

  After the war ends and brother and sister return to Rosmarina, there are several plagues, in quick succession.

  One year, a blight strikes the vineyards and half the vines die, shriveling beneath the sun like dead worms. In another, the sea is thick with jellyfish, their bodies gliding in eerie formations through the water like the airplanes he remembers from the war. In a third, a number of dogs in the village die of a mysterious ailment, including his bitch, Roki, who refuses to take food or water and slowly wastes away on the courtyard’s stones, Magdalena slipping from her bed at night to lie alongside her, as if believing her body a shield that can keep death away. He refuses other dogs after that, even after the village has repopulated itself with new litters. He tells his wife and granddaughters that they must be content to play with the cats that appear in the courtyard from time to time.

  There are plagues of tiny, black-winged insects, and his sister gives birth to two dead children in quick succession. There is contamination of the island’s wells. Informers overrun the island, and both his son and Vinka disappear. There are political arrests and other wars.

  In 1991, the island is under a naval blockade. Fishermen pace Rosmarina nervously, unused to so many consecutive days on land, and the island ferry sits uselessly in Split Harbor. After three days, fresh milk begins to sour, and after ten the shelves of the island’s only stores are empty. “Surely they can’t mean to starve us out,” Ružica says with a worried face.

  Even Luka, who never likes to leave the island, scans the horizon for the white shape of the ferry, which plows through the water as resolutely as a matron on her way to Mass. For months it does not appear, and they watch the news tensely as one town and then another on the mainland is bombarded and laid to waste. Sometimes, far above them, they see an airplane, black and birdlike, on its way to a bombing mission.

  “I never thought I would live to see this again,” he tells his wife.

  Only a single bomb falls on Rosmarina for the duration of the war, landing just beneath the Peak and starting a brush fire that is brought quickly under control. Burnt fragments from the projectile are displayed on the riva, where youngsters clamor with a mixture of awe and fear to be allowed to hold one of the pieces of twisted metal.

  Usually the ferry connects them to the world like a breathing tube. It brings food and engine parts, newspapers and mail, in its hull. At the beginning of the war it brought a handful of relatives who were fleeing the shelling on the mainland, women and children who arrived with piles of luggage and dazed, slightly embarrassed expressions.

  “It’s inhuman,” he overhears a woman in the town say, because there is not a diaper to be had on the entire island, and she is forced to swaddle her child in dishrags.

  When a shell falls on the ferry as it waits in Split Harbor, Rosmarina’s residents watch in horror as it burns on their television screens, turning into smoke all the shampoos that promise to turn hair to silk and all the children’s toys that are destined for a single shop on the island. Although the ferry’s tanks are empty, a residue of petrol feeds the fumes, as does correspondence of every conceivable kind: love letters, tax letters, summonses to appear in court, letters with script that is pinched with worry. Thank God, we are fine. But we are afraid for your well-being.

  During those months things unthinkable for generations begin to occur: babies are again born on the island instead of in hospitals on Korčula or Split, and funerals take place without the official paperwork.

  When the naval blockade is lifted, newspapers sell out in the first hour they are delivered to the island kiosks. The ferrymen bring strange tales from the mainland: refugees have flooded Split and Zagreb, staying in hotels where they wash their laundry in sinks and set up camp stoves in the corners of rooms.

  Because everything has changed, he wonders about the policeman, Vico. It has been years since he left the island, but govno like that always finds a way to float. He wonders if there will be political tribunals like there were at the end of the Second World War. Those had been terrible show trials, the innocent hanging alongside the guilty. But the idea of justice—true justice—makes him giddy.

  He even mentions this to Ružica, who surprises him for once with her bitterness.

  “What does it matter, Luka? It won’t bring any of them back.”

  He comes so close to killing the man that he sometimes dreams that he has beaten him flat, deflating him like an air mattress. Sometimes it is with his bare hands around his throat, other times it is with the pocketknife he always carries and uses for gutting fish. He feels the warmth of the man’s blood and wakes to discover his hands sticky with perspiration. In the dreams he always looks down to discover that he is wearing the clothes he had worn as
a young man in the mountains.

  In the third year of the independence war, the kitchen sink overflows, and he makes a last-minute trip to Split to buy a new section of pipe. In the ferry café, two young men from Rosmarina sit at the next table. They have recently begun their military service, and he finds that he cannot help but stare at their baby-smooth faces and their slender hands, which bring cigarette after cigarette to their suntanned faces. They have finished their basic training, and he listens for ten minutes to their bravado. When he rises and goes onto the deck, a punishing wind blows so that he shivers all the way to Split.

  He is startled to realize that years ago, he and Vinka had been around the same age when they went into the mountains, and for the rest of the day he cannot stop thinking about the stiffness of the boys’ camouflage, and their thin and girlish necks. He thinks about them as he visits the hardware store and selects the appropriate length of pipe, and as he pays at the cash register, where a young woman in a blue smock wraps the pipe in paper.

  He has not told his daughter that he is coming and, on a whim, takes a bus to her apartment so that they can drink a coffee together before the afternoon ferry returns him to the island.

  It is not Ana he finds at home, however, but Nikola, who answers the door with a half-empty bottle in his hand. “Tell my daughter I was here,” Luka says shortly, then turns to leave. He has not broken bread with the man since the year his granddaughters spent in Split.

  He is surprised when Nikola protests his departure, following him unsteadily into the hallway. “Don’t go—” he says, his voice strangely tremulous.

  How close he comes to walking away, the sight of those two young men still weighing heavily on his mind. There had been something of Marin in them, as well, during the period of his own military service, and now Luka looks at Nikola in disgust.