The First Rule of Swimming (11 page)

The accusation left Marin breathless, and by the next morning he had gone, leaving a little money for his aunt but no note, an exit that was an unmitigated relief to him at the time but a source of shame in subsequent years.

But while Vlaho’s ardent nationalism left him cold, he could not stomach the other side of that equation, either, the one that painted Yugoslavia in the 1970s as something innocuous. In his first years in New York, he occasionally ran into people who had visited his country and spoke of the fact that its young people wore blue jeans and listened to American rock and roll. They referenced the Dalmatian Coast so casually that he felt something akin to physical pain.

“How could you leave such a beautiful place?” a woman at a party once asked him, then went on to describe its sunsets, its strong red wine, the leather belt she had bought at a colorful marketplace.

He had only nodded miserably, knowing there was no way to make people understand.

Yugoslavia seems so open,
they told him.
Not like the Soviet Union.

No,
he had replied.
It is not like the Soviet Union.

After his first attempts, he stopped explaining that there were political prisoners even in Yugoslavia. He certainly never mentioned Barren Island. He no longer spoke of the assassinations that took place abroad, of the men, women, and children who were asphyxiated or shot, who were stabbed when they went out jogging, or hung themselves, mysteriously, with no chair or table to assist their jumps. He had stopped speaking about those things because of the way people looked at him, puzzled, telling him that they had read some article about
communism with a human face.

In America he had no affiliation with separatists or agitators, with émigré newspapers or independence movements, but still the audacity of those UDBA assassinations unnerved him. Until the end of the 1980s, they happened in Germany and England and Canada. He thought they might be happening in the United States as well, and his strategy was never to allow any of his countrymen to get close to him.

Besides, it had been his father who insisted that he cut himself wholly loose. “If you write to us,” Luka had said with tears in his eyes, “don’t ever sign your name or send an address.”

It would be the final humiliation, Marin knew, if his father were forced to pen a response filled with lies to his only son.
Everything is fine,
they had instructed others to write, the words like lures.
All has been forgiven.

He had not felt the weight of these things for years, however. Not since the end of communism, not since the independence war he had followed from America, feeling neither threatened nor entirely unscathed. This was what so unnerved him about the girl: it was somehow ludicrous that she should inspire such a reaction in him, so long after all those things.

The restaurant was his life’s work. He and his wife had built the business from nothing, so that when he approached it on the street, it seemed that his hands had felt the weight of every brick and that they alone had untangled vast networks of wires—as fine as silver thread—to deliver the light to its lamps.

In the beginning they had done the cooking themselves, hiring Luz’s brother as maître d’ and some of her cousins as waiters. His wife was a fine chef, overseeing bubbling vats of black beans and ovens filled with slow-roasting pork. The food had been squarely Cuban in the beginning, but over the years his own influence had begun to sneak in: grilled squid and Swiss chard, which was the nearest he came to
blitva.

It was a neighborhood place, an early outpost on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, long before the area’s gentrification. The tables had checkered tablecloths and candles at dinnertime, and he knew many of his patrons by name. It was the type of place, he liked to think, where one would always feel comfortable. Reviewers had been kind, and the Zagat guide had, year after year, applauded the fusion of Caribbean and Mediterranean influences.

Mediterranean.
He could live with that.

In New York, he was not even Marin but Mio.
Amor mío,
his wife had said somewhere near the beginning of things, teaching him Spanish words.
Amor mío.
It had started as a secret joke, but the nickname stuck.

Although Luz had been a child when her family fled Cuba, she still remembered taking shelter in her grandmother’s house during a hurricane. “There was a mango tree in the courtyard,” she told Marin. “They planted it when my father was a little boy, and my grandmother said that the day a storm pulled it up by the roots was the day we would all go flying from the face of the earth.”

In exchange, he told her about the winds of the Adriatic.

“Is this a
bura?
” she asked him with a smile, one winter’s day several months after they met in a community college business class, when the Atlantic wind tore bitterly down the New York streets, scattering coffee cups, newspapers, and dead leaves before them.

He had known then that they would marry because of the simple fact that she had remembered that word, foreign to her ears, and uttered only once in a description of his island.

“Would you go back if you could?” she asked in the days before their wedding.

“There’s no going back,” he said, to her visible relief.

They had two sons.

Perhaps that was it, he thought. A father’s protectiveness. The girl had to have come from somewhere, after all. She could not have sprung to life from a clod of earth, and he imagined a father and mother waiting for her.

His own sons were nearly adults now. Twin boys who had grown into tall young men, one of whom studied economics, the other who loved stories of any kind.

They knew Cuba, although they had never set foot upon that island. They spoke Spanish fluently and had grown up in a large circle of cousins, aunts, and uncles that stretched from Florida to New England. Their mother had arrived with family photographs sewn into her dress, and before his death their grandfather had shown the boys books from his collection, with photographs of the village where he was born. Cuba was all around them. It was in the food they ate and the music they listened to, the jazz and rumba beats slipping beneath their door long past the hour they were supposed to be asleep.

Marin, on the other hand, had no photographs of Rosmarina to show them. He had only once found a picture book about the Adriatic in the local library, the deep blue sea like sapphires. There had been photographs of Vis and Mljet, of Kor
č
ula and Bra
č
, but none of the island where he was born.

Still, he kept the book even when notices from the library arrived in the mail, even when a woman informed him over the telephone that another patron had requested it.

“I think I returned it,” he lied, unable to part with it in the end. “But I am happy to reimburse you.” After mailing them a check, he had torn out the small paper pocket from the book’s last page, which detailed its history in other hands, and scraped the call number from its spine.

His sons had delighted in hearing stories about his childhood when they were young, and it bothered him that he had no pictures to show them. He told them about diving contests from high outcroppings of rock and about the time he and his father had caught a shark. They shuddered at this last story because those were the years after Mariel, when people floated to Florida in rubber boats or on rafts held together by floss. And they had both overheard their mother’s family discussing the sharks that circled the people gliding to the United States.

The boys had wanted to see Rosmarina, land of peaceful olive groves and sardines whose bodies raced so quickly through the water that they left silver traces behind them. And of
klapa,
the soft and gentle songs their father sang when they had nightmares, but which they steadily outgrew as they hurtled bravely towards adulthood.

He had shown them the book’s photographs of other islands, as well as Rosmarina’s location on the map that hung in the room they shared. It was a tiny island like an escaping button from Italy’s boot, in the very middle of the Adriatic Sea and half a world away from the zoo in Central Park, Circle Line cruises, and Nathan’s hot dogs. As they grew older, however, Rosmarina became just one more storybook from childhood, like
Clifford the Big Red Dog
or
Goodnight Moon
. And while his sons might one day remember enough details of those stories to tell their own children, might even recall a few notes of those
klapa
songs, it pained him that they would not be able to describe the exact color of that water or the nature of that sky.

Over the years he had written to his family a handful of times. From Italy, then Germany. From Chicago, where they had stayed upon arrival in the United States but which they abandoned because Lake Michigan did not resemble the open sea to him, no matter what other immigrants said.

For the duration of the old regime, he did not sign the letters. Occasionally he would send his niece, Magdalena, a gift, a toy, once an Easter dress, though he had no idea of her size, or if the packages were ever delivered to his family.
I did not abandon you of my own free will,
he longed to tell her, but it was like sending letters into a void. He did not know if his parents were still living, if his sister had left, as she had always threatened. He did not know if there was anyone who bore the name Mori
ć
left on the island.

What could he say in letters that were by necessity vague?
I am well and I hope you are well.
How many times could he say it?

In the first few years of his exile, he imagined that their lives remained the same as when he left—that his father painted his boat every spring, and his mother still attended Mass. Magdalena remained a toddler, and his sister sat in her folding chair on the
riva,
extolling the virtues of rosemary oil to the tourists in halting German.

As the years went by, however, he could no longer be sure.

Little by little, he resigned himself to separation. It seemed to him that his life on the island was something another person had lived. It did not so much fade in his memory as sit behind glass, exactly as images appear on a television screen. Here he repairs the motor on his boat. Here he must dive down to loosen the anchor that has caught on some rocks. Here his mother hums as she bakes bread, and his sister tosses her head.

It was only when Croatia’s independence war started in 1991 and effectively ended communism that he began to regard things a little differently. In the longest letter he had ever written, he told his parents of his wife and his two sons, of his restaurant and his life in New York. He gave them his address.
I am relieved by the news,
he wrote a little stiffly,
but am also afraid for your well-being.
He told them that he was planning to visit.
Once this madness ends, I will bring my sons to show them the place where I was born.

He realized that the Croatian he had once written with ease now came out with wild inconsistencies. There were words he had to think about for a long time, and twice he crumpled the sheets of paper and began again. He included family photographs with this letter, stopping to look at his own face, rounder than it had been in his youth. His hair was half gray, and for a moment he was afraid of what they would think, looking at him.
He certainly grew fat in America,
he imagined his sister commenting with some disgust,
while we stayed here, waiting for him.

He thought for a long time about the last paragraph, chewing the cap of his pen.
There has not been a day that I did not think of you.
He begged for their understanding, for their forgiveness. He begged forgiveness especially from his sister, although he did not put this into words.

He waited months for a response. He knew that the postal system would surely be affected by the war, and sometime after the first letter, he sent a nearly identical second. Over two years passed before that one was returned with a single handwritten word upon the envelope.
Deceased.

It did not occur to him to question the truth of this. He was too consumed with the idea that his parents had died without ever hearing his voice again. It was like a sharp bit of flint embedded in the flesh near his heart, and it stabbed him each time he turned.

It was Luz who had suggested that they visit the island together. “The worst is not to know what happened,” she told him, so reasonably that he nearly acquiesced. In 1997, two years after the last shell fell, he went so far as to consult a travel agent. The woman did not know much about Croatia—it was still an unusual destination for Americans in those days—but she promised to investigate the matter. A week later he sat in her office, a giant orange fish bumping against the sides of a gurgling fish tank, and looked through brochures for the Adriatic Sea.

Through a Slovenian travel agency, she had found a brochure that listed the Hotel Palace on Rosmarina. “It looks like it might be the only hotel on the island,” she told him.

He looked numbly at photographs of the hotel’s limestone facade, which he could remember from his childhood. His sister had worked there for a time, cleaning the rooms of tourists, and it had not changed at all since then: the awning was still dark blue, and café tables still sat on its stone terrace.

There were no people in the pictures, just photographs of simple bedrooms with dark blue draperies that could be rooms in any hotel, anywhere in the world.

He took the brochure home and reread the description of his island.
Come see the forested splendor of Rosmarina! Come swim in its crystal seas!

It was the idea of returning as a tourist that he could not stomach. He feared finding another family in his family’s house, one who would look at him suspiciously and tell him that there had not been Mori
ć
s on Rosmarina for years. The more he thought about it, the less likely he found the possibility that anything of his former life remained.