The First Rule of Swimming (10 page)

Jadranka’s drawings began to appear across the island, on the crumbling stucco of abandoned houses and in the dark tar of roads. “I saw Jadranka’s pictures,” islanders would tell Luka in awed tones on the waterfront, occasionally adding that his granddaughter was destined for fame and that the newspaper was sure to write an article about her.

Jadranka’s drawing, though harmless at first glance, made her stand out still further. Over the course of that summer, the island adopted a subtle guardedness towards the six-year-old, as though she were something native but not quite right, like their half-Swiss neighbor, or like the boy up the lane who was Magdalena’s age but crawled on all fours and could not speak.

“That girl’s a strange one,” Magdalena overheard on the
riva
one day, repeating this statement in confidence to her grandfather, certain that the woman had been talking about her sister.

“Why do people look at her like that?” Magdalena wanted to know.

“Like what?”

“Like she’s from outer space.”

“You’re imagining it,” he had told her carefully. “She’s as much from the island as you or I.”

It did not help, he thought, that Jadranka resembled nobody else on Rosmarina, not even the members of her immediate family. Her red hair stood out like a flame among all the blond and brown-haired children, making her look like she had indeed been delivered by aliens, or switched at birth in the Split hospital where she was born.

For his part, Luka could not understand Jadranka’s need to leave drawings of birds and dancing figures in her wake. He believed that it was a game whose novelty would wear off, even as she wore the sticks of chalk into tiny pebbles.

On the afternoon Jadranka first drew pictures on the lane in front of their house, Magdalena embarked on a project of outlining things. She circled the cistern with blue and drew a white rectangle on the ground around Luka’s car. She drew the lines, he thought, like defenses, and he watched her work feverishly to contain the entire house, pushing her way through the bracken that grew outside the kitchen window.

“Come and draw me,” he heard her tell her sister, who left her pictures to trace an outline of Magdalena’s legs and arms as Katarina looked on. When Jadranka was done, Magdalena instructed her to lie down in the same position. When she finished, the outline of her sister’s body was contained entirely within her own.

Luka did not notice Katarina’s repeated inspections of his wife’s Bible, nor the way she became suddenly watchful in those days. Her boasts of early summer had ceased, and if anything, he thought that she and Magdalena had declared a truce, the cousins eating side by side in companionable silence and disappearing to remote corners of the island together when meals were done.

He did not realize that Katarina was biding her time for the ideal opportunity to reveal what she knew. But Magdalena sensed it. She felt something brewing within her American cousin. Each time Magdalena looked up, Katarina was watching with a little smile. Each time Jadranka drew something else—a playful monkey, a fishing boat—Katarina’s silence became deeper.

“Your mom is pretty,” she told Magdalena unexpectedly one day.

Her cousin shrugged. “I guess,” she said.

“When she was here, all the men on the
riva
were looking at her.”

Magdalena frowned, unsure what her cousin was getting at.

“I bet she’s had a lot of boyfriends,” Katarina added.

In truth, Magdalena did not know her mother very well, and had certainly never stopped to ponder her boyfriends.

“You’re becoming a real little fisherman,” Ana had told Magdalena on her visit earlier that summer, taking in her sunburnt nose and calloused hands with an expression that was more annoyed than playful.

It was clear that she found it easier to talk to Jadranka, who loved to have her hair brushed and decorated with barrettes.

“Your mother said that she’ll never come back to Rosmarina,” Katarina told Magdalena after she had left. “She likes it better in Split.”

Magdalena shrugged her response, prompting a stare from Katarina.

“What a funny thing you are,” she said, in her amused older-cousin voice. “I’d die if I couldn’t live with my mother.”

Magdalena understood that Katarina was lying in wait. She saw it every time the American girl observed Jadranka with her chalk. It was there—a naked jealousy that both satisfied and disturbed Magdalena—whenever their cousin considered those drawings that belonged at once to nobody and everybody, decorating roads one day only to be washed away in storms the next.

“Maybe you should draw on paper,” Ružica had suggested to her younger granddaughter. “So you can keep the things you’ve done.”

But it was clear that Jadranka was unconcerned with building such an archive. For her, the joy was in the making. And once that was done, she happily consigned her creations to the elements.

Katarina, on the other hand, was possessive of her sketchbook, her pencils, her position as older and wiser cousin. And so she began by picking at Jadranka’s pictures, ever so slightly. This face was a little long, she offered in pleasant tones, or that cat looked more like a rabbit.

“I like rabbits,” Jadranka told her enthusiastically, and then proceeded to draw an entire family of them on a large, flat rock beneath the Peak.

Katarina and Magdalena sat on a stone outcropping above her, swinging their legs over the side, watching the top of Jadranka’s bent head.

“It’s funny,” Katarina told her unexpectedly. “Before you wrote back to me, we didn’t know that Jadranka existed. We thought you were an only child.”

Magdalena looked at her cousin in surprise.

Katarina lowered her voice. “It will be hard on her when she finds out. About her father, I mean.”

“What about our father?” Magdalena asked automatically.

“Not
your
father,” Katarina said, studying a fissure in the rock, a nervous smile playing around her mouth. “
Her
father.”

Magdalena only looked at her blankly, but that night the two girls descended quietly to the kitchen, where Katarina showed her the dates in Ružica’s Bible—Goran Babi
ć
’s death, which was followed two years later by Jadranka’s birth—her hand shaking slightly in the flashlight’s glow.

“It’s a mistake,” Magdalena told her stubbornly, slamming the book shut. She took the flashlight from the other girl’s hand and turned it off.

Katarina gave an exasperated sigh. “It takes nine months to make a baby,” she told her younger cousin. “Everyone knows that.”

Magdalena could sense the other girl watching her in the dark, waiting to see what she would do.

And so Magdalena rose wordlessly and returned to their bedroom, where she crawled into bed beside a sleeping Jadranka. Katarina appeared in the doorway, and again Magdalena could sense the other girl watching her, nervously this time. After a moment Katarina slipped quietly, almost contritely, into the other side of the bed.

The next morning when Katarina awoke, she discovered with some shock that she was pinned against the mattress, Magdalena’s face mere inches above her own. The girls stared at each other for several seconds, Jadranka’s voice rising from the courtyard as she said something to her grandmother.

“If you tell anyone,” Magdalena said in a fierce whisper, “I’ll make you sorry. Do you understand?”

Katarina nodded, her expression so stunned that a rush of satisfaction momentarily blinded Magdalena to what she now knew.

They did not speak of it again. In August, Katarina left Jadranka the box of colored pencils, the fractured yellow bound together with tape. Magdalena understood that this was a peace offering, but while Jadranka exulted over this bounty, Magdalena did not acknowledge it in any way.

On the day of Katarina’s departure, the entire family accompanied her to Split Airport, Magdalena’s mother showing up unexpectedly to give the girl some chocolates for her trip. Katarina hugged each of them in turn, but when she got to Magdalena, who allowed herself to be embraced for the benefit of the adults who were present, Katarina burst into tears.

“There, there,” Ružica said, and placed an arm around each girl. “Don’t worry. You’re family. You’ll see each other again.”

T
he first time the red-haired woman came into his restaurant, in May, she ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of cake, a chocolate and hazelnut concoction that his wife, Luz, had created when they first opened some years before. It was just past the lunchtime rush, and he was going over receipts at the bar, so he did not pay much attention to the young woman, who sat alone and stared at the rainy street. But when an enormous umbrella bobbed past outside—a shock of yellow in a colorless landscape—he looked up to discover that she was not watching its owner but studying him in the reflection.

“Lousy weather,” he offered as their eyes met.

“Yes,” she agreed without turning.

She rose a few moments later, half the cake still on her plate and a ten-dollar bill beside her empty cup. She did not meet his eyes again but hovered by the restaurant’s entrance, watching the rain come down so heavily that the buildings on the other side of the street appeared deserted in their grayness.

“It should blow over in a few minutes,” he told her back. “If you want to wait.”

She gave no indication that she had heard him, and a moment later she was gone, her hair a red motion outside the same rain-spattered window where she had been sitting.

Hector, his headwaiter, looked up from the other end of the bar where he was folding napkins.

“I guess we scared her off,” Marin told him with a chuckle.

She returned a week later.

“The little red bird is back,” Hector told Marin, passing behind him in the kitchen. “And she’s asking for
rožata.
”

Marin straightened at this. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll bring it out.”

Writing the word on the menu next to
flan
had been his idea, a caprice not altogether typical of him. But it was the food that he would forever associate with his mother’s kitchen: the cool creaminess of the custard, the smoky sugar on top. “Just listen to the sound of that word,” he had told his wife. There was something of dawn in
rožata,
of a Mediterranean sky climbing out of darkness. And Luz had sensed the word’s importance to her husband, so that the dessert appeared on the menu under both its Spanish and Croatian names.

Only rarely did someone order it as
rožata,
however. So that it also served a different purpose, immediately identifying the patron as his countryman.

“I like to see them coming,” he’d once told his wife in the dark days of the beginning, when such things had seemed a matter of survival because there were informers—and worse—even in America.

He imagined that they came armed with small notebooks in which they wrote down every detail, his life cracked open like the ribcage of a small, roasted animal. Over the years he had grown adept at recognizing them, and although he had not sensed their presence in years, he felt the same wariness whenever someone from his country appeared in the restaurant, the life he had left unrecognizable in the one he now led.

She was seated as before, watching traffic pass slowly in the street. Her red hair was gathered back from her face in an almost austere fashion, and a tiny fleck of gold sparkled at her nostril. It was not a typically Croatian face, although he wondered if he even knew what that was anymore. In his first years in America, he could identify his brethren at a distance of twenty feet. There was always a gaunt, careful look about them, and they wore the clothes that he, too, had worn upon arrival: the same pressed white shirts and dark slacks, the well-worn shoes, polished each morning before Mass, for jobs in factories and warehouses. In the 1970s, urban Americans did not polish their shoes like that. Only foreigners did.

But while it was still easy to identify his contemporaries—the middle-aged men and women who had never given up their gold or their Sunday best—youth perplexed him, and he would sooner have thought this young woman a Hungarian or a Swede.

“Rožata,”
he told her, presenting the plate with a flourish. Then, in Croatian: “We don’t get requests for this every day.”

She studied him for a moment, smiling with an uncertainty that was at odds with the intensity of her gaze.

“It’s my favorite,” she told him in the familiar singsong of Split. Her voice was huskier than he had expected, and he placed a spoon beside her plate. A smoker, he thought, for this was another thing that often differentiated his countrymen from Americans, although this pattern, too, was changing.

“It’s why I came in,” she said, nodding at the plate. “It was a surprise to see it on the menu.”

He looked at her in amusement. “It’s why you came in the first time,” he corrected, and for a moment she looked uneasy.

“Yes,” she said. “The first time, although I ended up having cake.”

“The cake is good, too,” he told her. “My wife’s recipe.”

She nodded.

He held out a hand to her. “Marin Morris.”

The dark centers of her pupils widened at this, like two tiny lungs filling with air, and he felt suddenly self-conscious, as if she were about to laugh at the ridiculousness of this name. Decades later and it still sat strangely upon his tongue. But it had been the suggestion of the judge who presided over his immigration case.
Forget all that,
the man had counseled him, and because Marin’s country had spat him out with no more ceremony than an incinerator shows to ash, he had dropped Mori
ć
to become Morris.

But she did not laugh. If anything, she looked a little stricken.

“Jadranka,” she told him. She looked down at her own hands, which lay clasped in her lap. Church hands, it occurred to him as she raised one to shake his, like the smooth skin of a plaster Madonna, a rosary clasped between them the only thing missing.

It was a strange thought for an agnostic. Besides, Marin chided himself in the same moment, there was nothing churchlike about the girl. She wore dark clothing that Luz would call
edgy,
and the nose ring gave her a slightly rakish appearance.

“Do you ever go back?” she asked him. “Home, I mean?”

The question caught him off guard. It seemed overly personal to him, and he had the same feeling as when a stranger addressed him with the familiar
ti,
a further bewildering characteristic of the younger generation of Croatians, whom he met only rarely, although she had been careful to use the polite
vi
. “Never,” he told her.

Her nod was thoughtful. “I don’t think I’ll go back either,” she said, and he felt something pull in his chest at the earnest way she said it.

“Surely it’s not as bad as all that,” he told her easily. “It isn’t like before.”

She looked down at her napkin, which she had started to fold into small squares. “No,” she conceded after a moment. “Probably not.”

A boyfriend, he thought then. Someone has broken her heart. Or she broke his. And as a result here she is, alone in America. He felt inexplicably sad for this young woman with the wide-set green eyes who slouched in her chair like a teenager. He resisted the temptation to sit down across from her, to warn her about the tricksters and cheats that populated this country, side by side with all the wondrous possibilities one always imagined before coming here.

“There are no jobs at home,” she continued in a neutral voice, meeting his eyes again. “No prospects.”

“It’s hard here, too,” he told her.

She nodded.

“Too many of our people come expecting that things will be easy—”

Her nostrils flared slightly, and he realized that she was irritated with this observation. “I never thought it would be easy,” she told him.

She did not come in again for several weeks, an absence that troubled him, although he could not understand why. The girl was a stranger to him, after all. He did not know where she worked, though she had mentioned something about looking after a rich woman’s children, and for all he knew she had returned home in the end, despite her brave words. He had seen it a hundred times: sooner or later, the teeth of home worked their way beneath your skin and carried you back the same way a wolf transports its cubs. It was only for a chosen few that return was impossible.

But it was uncanny how she had brought his nightmares back. He did not know if it was her Split accent or the orphaned air that surrounded her. She had not mentioned family or friends, and to his eyes she appeared as lonely as he had been some thirty years before her. If she died tomorrow, he wondered, would anyone mourn her?

His nightmares were the same as in the early days of escape, and after waking, he felt the same unease. The dreams revisited him every few years, always prompted by some trigger. He had once passed a woman on the street who so resembled his sister, Ana, that he called out to her by name, only realizing his mistake when she frowned and moved away from him. Another time he had opened an order of olive oil for the restaurant, the pungent smell of that crushed Spanish fruit so instantly familiar that it had forced him out of the kitchen for an entire hour.

Those dreams always took him back to prison, to the same cell and quarrying detail. There was the same inedible gruel, with its rotten vegetables and insect carcasses. The same rank smell of shuffling prisoners, all malnourished and blistering in the sun. “We knew we’d find you sooner or later,” his interrogator always told him with a satisfied smile. A psychopath’s smile, he’d since realized, like a deranged mother who sings her children to sleep beneath the peaceful surface of a bath.

Times had changed, of course. He’d had reason to be afraid in the beginning—even in America—and so he had lived carefully. But all that was over.

He did sometimes wonder what had become of his interrogators, and of several of the others. For years he had nursed a collection of revenge fantasies as brutal as they were unrealistic, always discarding them in the end. But he was not naive enough to believe them tucked safely away in jail for their misdeeds. Life shunned such symmetrical resolutions, and besides, those men were nameless, faceless. They were made of a slippery substance whose properties were unfathomable. He imagined that they lived quietly today, old men who read newspapers in the morning and puttered in their gardens.

Something about the girl took him back to that time, although he could not understand why. It was her guarded attitude, perhaps. A certain hunted quality in her eyes. She was running from something, and he had not believed her explanation about the unemployment rate at home. Perhaps that was partly it, but in this day and age one did not draw a line through the possibility of return. There simply wasn’t the need.

Perhaps this boyfriend was the jealous type, he thought. Perhaps she had needed to put an ocean between them, or perhaps she was in some other kind of trouble. He remembered that on both of her visits to his restaurant she had stared out at the sidewalk. Perhaps, he thought now, she had expected someone to appear.

He was familiar with that degree of watchfulness, and he chided himself for having missed it earlier. He who had seen danger everywhere in the first few years: in the small Italian town where they had languished for months in a refugee camp after their escape, little Katarina bitten mercilessly by the mosquitoes that swarmed whenever the lights went out, so that she picked at her bites until they bled and scarred.

He’d seen danger on buses, and in the vinyl booth of a New York diner. Unlike in films, their agents did not wear trench coats, nor did they have thin and furtive faces. They were the most ordinary of people, but they would occasionally make their presence felt by jostling him on the subway or nodding at him on the street.

When he had first started working as a waiter, a customer once wrote Marin’s full name on the back of his bill and, beside it, the date of his departure from Rosmarina. “Do you remember what he looked like?” Marin asked the other waiters when he discovered it on the table, but none could remember a single detail about the man who had ordered the steak, well-done.

“Why,
Papi?
” one of his sons had asked tearfully when Marin reprimanded him for chattering to a neighbor about where he went to school, his parents’ restaurant, the vacation they had taken to Miami the year before.

The city was a dangerous place, he insisted. But, really, it was his need for secrecy, that jagged border between what he confided to his wife late at night, whispering miserably as she rubbed his back, and the man who rose in the morning, teased his sons, and did his restaurant’s books.

He knew that the secret police had infiltrated Croatian communities abroad, and he did not attend a single Mass in his own language until the end of communism. Unlike Vlaho, Katarina’s father, he avoided Croatian centers, Croatian clubs, and Croatian gatherings. He had no interest in cultural festivals or concerts because he imagined those sly note-takers everywhere, recording who went where and attended which meeting. And, anyway, he did not like the narrowness of his countrymen abroad, the way they wore their exile like a badge of honor and barricaded themselves inside their communities.

“You’ve forgotten where you came from,” Vlaho used to accuse him.

“And you’re playing with fire,” Marin would shoot back.

He had felt sorry for his aunt Vinka, who observed these exchanges with trembling lips. She had already started to take in sewing for a few extra dollars a week, her English limited exclusively to words like
baste
and
hem.
She would mend garments late at night, while Katarina slept. But Vlaho spent hours with like-minded friends who spoke of returning to Yugoslavia to mount armed insurrections. To Marin, these were delusions, fueled by too much wine and
rakija.

Their final falling out had happened after one of those evenings. Vlaho had returned home in a combative mood. “They say I shouldn’t trust you,” he had told Marin, his eyes bright. “They say nobody who did time on Barren Island can be trusted.”

Marin had gone still at this.

“That they only released the ones who agreed to be informers.”