Fairy houses, she remembered suddenly. Her sister had built fairy houses as a child, taught by a German-speaking summer visitor who had shown her how to build the tiny structures with stones and sticks. He had been accompanied by his two children. Little girls, Magdalena seemed to remember. Jadranka had spent the afternoon with them, continuing to construct the houses for years afterwards, decorating their pitched roofs with bougainvillea blossoms, pinecones, and sea glass.
Once, as a joke, Magdalena had brought her the bleached spines of a long-dead sea urchin. “You can build a booby trap to keep intruders out,” she had teased her sister. But Jadranka declined, telling her sister in utter seriousness that she did not wish to booby-trap anybody.
There it was again, and Magdalena stopped. This time a pile of stones in the shape of a long and winding snake.
Up ahead, Ana had also slowed. She was wheezing softly, and Magdalena was about to suggest turning back—not for the first time—when her mother stopped. “Look,” she ordered, staring at something on the ground.
But now Magdalena saw only ferns and leaves and rotting branches.
Her mother dropped stiffly to her knees, crawling forward a few feet. “Look,” she ordered again, so that Magdalena knelt as well, the damp earth soaking the fabric of her jeans.
It was when Magdalena followed the line of her mother’s arm that she saw it, the long sticks heaped in an orderly pile. They were all approximately the same length and beyond them was another pile. And another.
She sat back. The sticks were as straight as arrows, each with a sharpened point.
“It’s her,” Ana said.
They heard her before they saw her, the scraping of stone against wood like something burrowing through dry ground.
Magdalena was on her feet in an instant. Ahead in a clearing, a woman lowered her rock. She looked as if she were building a raft in preparation for a flood. Her back was white, her bra soaked through with sweat and blood. But even in the shadows Magdalena recognized her.
“Jadranka.”
The figure picked up another stick, as if she had not heard her name. “Is he coming?” she asked.
Magdalena covered the ground quickly, pulling her sister to her feet. She placed a hand on Jadranka’s cheek, which was hot to the touch and smeared with dirt. Looking down, Magdalena saw that her sister was shoeless, and that she still held a stick in one hand like a spear.
“What are you doing?” Magdalena asked softly, aware that Jadranka’s hair was matted with blood.
At this question her sister dropped the spear. “Getting ready,” she said, as though it should have been obvious.
“For what?”
“For when he comes back.”
“He isn’t coming back,” Magdalena told her. “And you’re bleeding.”
“Am I?”
Jadranka’s eyes glittered like a madwoman’s, and Magdalena realized then that she was feverish. “We need to find a hospital,” she said.
Magdalena was several inches shorter, but when Jadranka did not respond, she pulled her younger sister forward until her face was buried in Magdalena’s neck, her eyes watering at the burnt and metallic smell of Jadranka’s hair. When she lifted an uncertain hand to Jadranka’s head, she realized that the back was singed all the way to the scalp and that the blood came from a cut in her scalp. “We need—” she began again, but Jadranka cut her off.
“You’re sure he’s gone?”
Magdalena was suddenly afraid to speak, uncertain what it was that her sister was asking. In her mind she was already guiding Jadranka through the woods, her sister’s body like a flame.
And so it was their mother who responded. “They’re all gone, mila.”
Part VI
Chapter 20
Luka is getting ready to walk out, to shed this body that has become a cage. They will have to burn the sheets, he thinks with some regret. They were a part of his wife’s dowry and, in their day, as white as the flakes he had once seen fall during a freak snowstorm upon the sea. But he is certain that his body has discolored them, that it has left an oblong shadow in the shape of a man.
There are a great many footsteps in the house now. They tramp up and down the stairs, and he thinks that he can even hear them up on the roof. They shuffle through the courtyard beneath his window, and in the lane beyond the wall. The gate opens and closes, and he can tell that the latch is rusting because of the scraping sound it makes.
He knows that it is the salt air that corrodes everything. It eats away at bolts and paper clips, the metal parts of engines and the undercarriages of cars.
His daughter had owned a fancy silver mirror once. He remembers that the rust had risen in furrows behind the glass, and that each day she looked in it there was less of her.
What he knows: his son has returned and weeps in the chair beside his bed. He speaks strangely, as if he has forgotten how, but the timbre of his voice is the same.
His daughter worries at her necklace in the corner of the room, where the longest shadows stretch. She twists it until the thing snaps and its beads scatter across the floor.
Lena searches the floor on her hands and knees, retrieving the tiny pieces of perforated glass. She drops them into a tarnished metal dustpan so that each one makes a sound like a fat raindrop hitting a sturdy leaf. She misses a few but comments that she will search for them another time.
He knows by the way her voice tightens that this will happen on a day when he is already gone, but he also knows that they will never find all the beads. That they have slid so far between the wooden floorboards that they will remain there for as long as the house is standing, and he smiles very faintly at this thought. Somewhere, centuries from this day, perhaps, a child will discover one of the beads and roll it around his mouth with his tongue.
He knows that his wife sits at her kitchen table below him. That while she is relieved to have them all surrounding her, she also longs for those days of quiet when she heard only his breathing in the house, when she thought that he could continue like this for as long as they both were living and that when the appointed hour came, she would crawl into the bed as well and walk out with him.
Rosmarina, he longs to tell her despite her devoutness. It is my final destination.
The island has a history that stretches back through centuries of settlers and marauders, centuries of people who, like him, have been blessed by chance. Its residents’ bloodlines are so mixed that untangling them would be as impossible as it is pointless. In addition to the happy unions that propagate the human race, he wonders now how many rapes and murders, how many kidnappings, illicit trysts, and unhappy couplings have gone into the making of any one person.
But the island is constant. It existed before the name by which it is now known. There have been Greek names, Illyrian names, names that existed before man became conceited enough to record his own history. Those names are lost in the present. The bays that he has navigated have seen generations of fishermen and sailors, naval battles and deaths at sea. And the bays will remain, he thinks, long after he is gone.
Days collide and the sea becomes the air. There are fish swimming through his room, and the smell of paint rises from the courtyard beneath his window.
He knows that it is Lena, that the others will leave again and she alone will stay. She has whispered something else in his ear, and he imagines that she is carrying a little girl, dark and strong, who will learn to fish the channel between Rosmarina and its neighbors like her mother. Perhaps it is the grandchild of this girl’s grandchild who will one day find the bead, but he knows that these things are by no means predetermined.
He imagines that Marin stands behind Magdalena in the courtyard, that he is watching her prepare the boat, at last, for the sea. He imagines her small hands sanding the wood and applying the varnish, just as he has shown her.
His daughter sits on the stone bench, smoking and watching them. She refuses to sing, a little wearily, and tells them that she doesn’t bo
ther to remember any of the old songs anymore. Her brother tells her that this would be a mean trick: to forget exactly the things she chooses.
And it is Magdalena who begins to sing, her voice out of tune and missing some of the notes altogether, so that her mother laughs and tells her that it’s a good thing she likes her job because she should not hope for a career in music. And so Ana gives in at last.
It is an old song that she sings. It was popular in his youth, but he cannot remember it being sung in years, decades perhaps. It is like finding something he has not realized is missing.
When she has finished, his wife’s voice calls out that it is time for dinner, and he hears them filing into the house below him, and their voices disappear from the garden the same way that stars fade one by one at dawn.
He picks the same track he has walked a thousand times, the one that leads upward through the town and to the olive groves beneath the Peak. When he arrives, the light is thin and he must feel his way from trunk to trunk. He finds the sturdiest among them, and as he buries his face at its base, he hears his sisters laughing from the ground.
Epilogue
Five years later
His aunt has sent him a picture of his name. In a letter that accompanies the flat cardboard envelope, she explains that it is an exercise she has done for school, and she is glad he does not have a name with many letters.
From the L she has made a drawing of Rosmarina’s lighthouse, a length of the riva at its feet. U is the hull of a boat that plies a very blue sea. For K she has chosen an overhang of rock on the Peak, with small olive trees that cling to the slopes of the letter. A is the boy’s great-grandmother, and although the figure is clad in black from her skirt to the kerchief that holds back her hair, her cheeks are a soft pink, and the boy recognizes her at once.
Magdalena hangs the picture over the bed in his room. She is aware that he watches it until he falls asleep, especially the figure of a small boy that her sister has drawn just above it, who lies on his stomach and holds a pencil as if he has just finished drawing those letters himself.
“It’s me,” he tells her in excitement, pointing at the figure’s familiar head of dark hair, the shirt that is identical to a photograph she had sent her sister some weeks before with the message He’s getting so big that you’ll hardly recognize him.
The boy has a vague picture of his aunt because she has visited the island only a few times since his birth. He remembers her red hair and recognizes her photograph, the one where his mother stands beside her and the two women have linked their arms and are smiling into the camera. He opens each envelope with anticipation, never sure what he will find inside, and the drawings arrive so regularly that they paper the walls of his room.
It is not like his father, who is often gone to places with names he cannot pronounce. Places like Kandahar and Havana and Durban that sound as if they come from storybooks. His father has given him a map, and when he is at home the two of them sit together at the kitchen table—Magdalena watching them with a smile over the assignments she is grading—and place little pins in all those distant places. The map had frightened him at first because when his father showed him Rosmarina, it was so small that it appeared like a speck of dust in all that vastness.
He has been to Split several times with his mother, a ferry ride so long that their passage seems to take days, although his mother shows him the elapsing hours on her watch, the big hand that moves quickly and the small hand that hardly seems to move at all. But the distance on the map is tiny, so that when his father shows him the places he goes on his trips, Luka is under the impression that it takes his father weeks to get there, then weeks to get back.
He recognizes his father’s voice because he hears it regularly on his mother’s radio. He is aware even at the age of four that it is much more serious than the voice he hears through the telephone each Friday. He has also heard his aunt’s voice because she sometimes calls from New York, a city that is marked on the map with a special red pin. His aunt is studying art there, and his mother explains that students do not have much money and therefore cannot make many telephone calls to Rosmarina.
His cousins José and Adriano live in New York, as well. He likes them because whenever they visit Rosmarina with their parents, they teach him the Spanish names for things, words he forgets between visits but which his uncle Marin explains have planted themselves in his mind like seedlings.
This summer his mother is teaching him to swim, and every afternoon they walk to a shallow cove where she slides from the rocks first, making sure that there are no urchins in the way. He is a brave boy, but he is frightened of those black creatures with their ruffling spines, and he is glad each time she holds her arms out to him so that she can lift him away from the rocks where they may be hiding.
She will not buy him inflatable water wings like the tourist children often wear. “No, Luka,” she has explained. “You’re an islander, and that means you must learn to really swim.”
But he likes the idea of those bright plastic doughnuts that keep other children afloat and watches jealously as they kick their feet and swim as far from shore as the grown-ups. They do not have to worry about their heads dipping beneath the surface and swallowing salty water that burns their noses.
“What if all the air goes out of them?” his mother asks him reasonably. She points to the distance, where the Devil’s Stones loom. “What if you get out there and you don’t know how to swim?”
He had not thought of this and concedes that this would be a problem, and besides, he likes their lessons. He lies back in the water, stretching out his arms and legs. For him, swimming is coolness and the sun that is always warm upon his face. He likes his mother’s cheerful green bathing suit and the long, wet hair that she usually pins back. He likes that even when she removes her hands, insisting that he must learn to do it on his own, they are always somewhere there below him.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the Bellagio Center, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, and George Mason University. To Asya Muchnick, whose suggestions were so astute that they often took my breath away. To Elise Capron, who believed though the road was long. To Ethan Nosowsky and David Groff, who gave invaluable advice on early drafts. To my friends Maria Mayo, Laura Sims, Jennie Page, Nina Herzog, Mei Ng, and Meeghan Truelove, whose readings helped lift numerous fogs. To my mother, whose thoughtful comments helped shape this book. To my father, who gave me the sea. And to my husband, who ate each sack of salt with me so that I would not have to eat a single one of them alone.
About the Author
Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of Stillness: And Other Stories, named a 2003 Best Book by the Chicago Tribune, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Her memoir The Stone Fields was short-listed for the Freedom of Expression Award by the Index on Censorship. Brkic has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives outside Washington, DC.
Also by Courtney Angela Brkic
Stillness: And Other Stories
The Stone Fields
courtneyangelabrkic.com
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part II
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
>
Part III
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part IV
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part V
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part VI
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Courtney Angela Brkic
Newsletters
Copyright Page
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Courtney Angela Brkic
Cover design by Lindsey Andrews. Cover photograph by Andrea Hübner / Quadratiges.de
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel Page 29