The First Rule of Swimming (13 page)

Jadranka’s expression was cautious.

“What do you call it?” Luz turned to her husband, then answered her own question with a snap of her fingers: “A commission.”

Marin smiled inwardly at this suggestion, but Jadranka looked taken aback. “A picture of the restaurant?” she asked.

Luz waved her hand. “What do we need a picture of the restaurant for when we’re standing right here?” She looked at her husband. “A picture of your country.”

Marin shifted uncomfortably. “We can’t ask her to—”

But Luz cut him off with a glare. “Haven’t you been telling me for years that you don’t have any pictures,
loco?
Haven’t you been talking to me about the sea, the sky?”

Marin shrugged.

“A picture of your country,” she told Jadranka, as if it were decided. As if she were placing their weekly order with the fishmonger. “Can you do that?”

Jadranka nodded.

He insisted on giving her money for the supplies.

“That’s not the way a commission usually works,” she told him.

“It does this time,” he responded.

His wife had surprised him with her request, but he could see that she was pleased with the agreement. Jadranka would make some extra money, and Marin would receive something tangible from home.

“Not from home exactly,” he corrected her. “She’s from the mainland.”

But Luz waved away this technicality. “You said she’s from the coast.”

“She is.”

“Entonces?”

“It’s a long coast.”

Luz’s eyes narrowed. “As long as your face?”

He smiled. “Longer.”

He had assumed that Jadranka was from Split, but he did not tell his wife that her accent had lately begun to confound him. Slightly, at first. The occasional word he recognized from childhood sneaking in to replace its urban counterpart.

At first Marin thought he was imagining it. Then he considered the possibility that the language had undergone such a revolution in his absence that words specific to the islands had migrated north. He thought he even recognized inflections similar to Rosmarina’s dialect but ultimately decided that he heard them because he wanted to hear them.

“You’re not from Split,” he told her one day when she was setting tables. “As they say in America, your mustache is slipping.”

Jadranka’s arm froze in midair, holding a fork.

“You sound more like a
bodul
to me.”

“I’m a lot of things.” She placed the fork carefully on the table.

“There’s no shame in being from an island,” he said. “I’m from Rosmarina myself.”

She hesitated. “I’m from Čiovo.”

This surprised him—the accent that peeked through the city veneer seemed too much a product of the southern islands—but he said nothing to this.

“I had no father,” she added unexpectedly. “That was difficult on an island.”

“It’s difficult anywhere,” he conceded. “But especially in a place where people remember everything.”

“Do you remember everything?”

She had a knack for this, he had realized. For asking disarming questions with such ease that he always said more than he intended. “Yes,” he admitted. “Everything.”

It was true. His memory was singularly infallible, able to summon the smallest details. The smell of carob in the sun. The taste of island figs. The sound of the guards’ boots in the corridors, and the way they would always come at night, with other prisoners who were anxious to do their bidding.

For three long years he had filled bags with gravel from the seafloor, standing up to his hips in water as the sun beat down without respite. He remembered how his skin had blistered and peeled from his face and arms in so many successive layers that it was a surprise to find that there was any skin left underneath at all.

Today, dark tumors continued to pepper his skin like something molting from the inside. It was his wife who insisted that he see a doctor, a man scarcely older than their sons, who clucked his tongue over the damage, mistakenly assuming that Marin had been a sun worshipper in his youth. Periodically he insisted on cutting those growths from Marin’s face and hands.

Marin had a standing appointment every six months. Luz always insisted on coming into the examination room to point out the new and ominous additions to the map of her husband’s body, holding his hand as they waited afterwards to pay the receptionist, because Marin found that he could not speak through any of it, could only stand as still and remote as a plaster figure.

But he showed the starfish on his arm to Jadranka, the one with the many arms and hazy borders. The one that had prompted Luz to make an earlier appointment, only rolling her eyes at Marin’s protests that it was nothing.

“These are the memories our country gave me,” he told her.

Aside from her accent, there were other things about Jadranka that unsettled him. There was the fact that she could not produce a passport, telling him that it had been retained by her former employers.

“That’s illegal,” he told her. “You’ve got to get it back.”

But when he suggested paying them a visit together, she shied at this idea.

“You can pay me less,” she told him nervously, after he had already agreed to pay her under the table because of her uncertain visa status.

He looked at her in shock. “I’m not going to pay you less,” he told her. “But it isn’t right for them to keep it.”

Then there was the fact that she had searched the drawers of the desk in his office. He had found some papers disturbed, and although there was nothing of value in there—and certainly nothing incriminating—the idea of it troubled him.

“You’re imagining it,” Luz told him. “What could she possibly be looking for?”

He did not know, but he grew more reserved in Jadranka’s presence. This stood in marked contrast to Luz, who was developing a soft spot for the girl. “She knows how to work, that one,” she told him.

But it was when Jadranka began following him like a pale shadow that he understood her to be more than what she seemed.

At first he thought he was imagining it. He would see the reflection of her face in the window of a shop or passing car, but when he turned she was gone. He sensed her presence once or twice on the way to work, and on the way home. Once, when walking the dog in Prospect Park, he had been certain that she traveled the paths behind him. But when he telephoned the restaurant upon his return home—the dog pushing her wet nose into the palm of his hand—he was told that she had just finished her break.

“Do you want to speak to her?” Hector had asked.

But Marin had only muttered something about talking to her later and hung up the phone.

He sensed her surveillance for several weeks, but it was only one day in Saints Cyril and Methodius Church that she grew sloppy enough to give him proof.

Despite his lack of faith, he sometimes traveled into Manhattan to visit the Gothic Revival structure on Forty-first Street. He usually went during the week, when the church was nearly empty, when only the first few pews were occupied by a gang of black-clad women whose recitations of the rosary before Mass sounded like weeping, their hymns like wailing.

He always sat in the back.

He did not attend regularly and did not know the priests by name. If he happened to attend on a Sunday, he did not gather with the other men on the sidewalk, and he did not drink coffee in the hall behind the church. He did not speak to anyone, and if they had spoken to him, he was not certain how he would have responded. Only rarely did someone stand close enough to him to shake his hand during the Sign of Peace, and he never took Communion.

He told no one that he attended the occasional Mass. Not even his wife, who had attempted to nurture a certain religious devotion in their sons because she was Cuban of the old school and had never lost her God. She had suggested many times that they go as a family to Mass, but something always held him back.

“You go,” he would tell her. “I have things to do.”

He had stood in churches for his children’s baptisms, their First Communions and confirmations. He acquiesced for funerals and weddings, but he could not agree to a standing date with God.

And it was not embarrassment that made him reticent on the subject, for his wife surely would have understood. He simply did not know how to explain it to her, the way his adult skepticism was the exact inverse of his childhood faith. He did not know how to enunciate the feeling that washed over him once, twice in a season. That longing for rote, familiar words, the songs from his childhood, the responses in his own language. The language that each year died slightly more in him, so that English words flew with greater ease into his speech than Croatian ones.

But in the church it was as he remembered.
My peace I have, my peace I leave you.
The way the women in front of him tapped their chests and murmured, “My sin, my sin, my enormous sin”—just as his mother had done—even as he wondered which sins old women like those could possibly commit. And even as he dismissed the mysteries he had long ago discarded, the grown men dressed up in baptismal dresses turning wine into blood.

It was more than language. It was the song, the voices that were one part melody and two parts tears. And in that church, as in the church of his childhood, the sound tapped at some hollow, secret place in him. It tapped and the door swung open, and the knowledge inside glided slowly out. It usually followed him onto the street afterwards, into the grayness that New York was never entirely without, irrespective of season. So different from the place he had known, an island that matched his heart’s circumference perfectly.

But on the day he turned in his pew to discover Jadranka disappearing through the church’s front doors, he attained a different form of knowledge. He took it as proof that her appearance in his restaurant was not a matter of chance, and he felt both embarrassment at having been so gullible, and fear.

He had heard stories about the secret police regrouping after the end of communism—of former UDBA operatives using dossiers for the purpose of blackmail, or even landing on their feet in the new government—but he had never taken them seriously. Now he was not so sure.

Her questions about his past and the deliberate vagueness of her own biography had long troubled him. Sitting in the pew, he built his case against her, not stopping to ponder the fact that she was too young to have had any hand in the old system or that most of the details were circumstantial.

When he rose, one of the women at the front of the church turned to stare in disapproval, but he paid her no mind. He hurried past the table of church circulars and the bulletin board where a hundred flyers flapped in his wake. He pulled open the door to the street. The sunlight outside blinded him for only a moment.

She was at the restaurant, standing across the bar from Hector. The two of them were so deep in conversation that they did not sense him passing the restaurant’s windows. Nor did they hear him come in, their heads nearly touching above the bar. As Marin watched, Jadranka smiled and touched Hector’s arm.

What had she been asking his headwaiter all these weeks, he wondered, and what sorts of things had he revealed? Hector had been with them for ten years, a distant cousin of Luz’s who had started as a busboy. In his panic, Marin did not stop to consider how little Hector knew.

He wondered if she reported to someone else, or if she was planning to blackmail him with some tidbit of information. He imagined the front of his restaurant defaced with spray paint:
The owner of this establishment is a common criminal.

“Leave us,” he barked at Hector, who looked at him in shock because in ten years Marin had never raised his voice.

Jadranka went so pale that a birthmark below her right eye stood out in stark relief, but her face was devoid of all expression. And it was this look that he recognized, this look that had haunted his dreams, prompting the realization that she was not the hunted but the hunter.

“I should have known you were one of them,” he told her in a low, angry voice, ignoring Hector’s worried expression as he hovered by the kitchen door. “I should have understood from all your questions.”

She looked at him in shock. “Who do you think I am?”

“Not who,” he corrected her. “What.”

Her face fell.

“You want to hear it all?” he asked her.

She looked down at her hands, which were resting on the bar. Those hands had tricked him. They had even prompted his wife to ask her for a picture. The idea of it made hysterical laughter rise in his throat, but he pushed it back.

“You want to hear every last ugly detail?” he pushed.

She did not look up.

“Don’t be timid. It’s why you came, after all.”

Still she did not lift her head. Her eyes were dry and her mouth did not tremble. No delicate flower, this one, he thought. Had anything she told him been real? Her name? The bit about the rat poison had seemed a stretch, but he had ingested her bastard status like a greedy fish swallows a hook.

“It’s why you came!” he roared and struck the bar with his fist, so that the resulting tremor shook the liquor bottles behind her.

She looked up at last. She nodded.

I
t was his father who had told him, “A flood begins with a single drop.”

But even in 1969, when Marin returned from the far reaches of landlocked Macedonia for leave, he could not bring himself to tell Luka of the daily humiliations and the constant stupidities that compulsory military service entailed: the fleas, the stink of other men’s feet, the pointless tasks. It was not that he minded the fellow conscripts in his barracks; they were all more or less all right. But when the commanding officers screamed that they would kick his soft Dalmatian ass, which did nothing but sit in the sun all day, drinking wine and chasing women, he felt a fury of which he had never known himself capable.

He had worked his entire life, he longed to shout back. He had fished from the time he was a boy, and his hands were covered with the scars and calluses to prove it.

His worst persecutor was his sergeant, a gaunt man from a town near Zadar. Because they were both from the Adriatic, Marin had expected a measure of sympathy. “I was once like you,” the sergeant yelled instead. “All I cared about were my nets and my boat and my wine, but the Germans cared nothing for these.”

When Marin protested that his father, too, had fought the Germans, the sergeant made him do push-ups until the muscles of his arms felt like they were on fire.

No matter how Marin completed his tasks, Sergeant Pavlovi
ć
made him start over again. No matter how many times he remade his bed, pulling the rough blanket taut over the straw mattress beneath, the sergeant tore it off and threw it on the floor. No matter how often Marin had sentry duty, again and again the sergeant assigned this duty to him. He grew so exhausted from lack of sleep that several times he fell asleep during meals, his forehead resting against the greasy surface of the table as the men around him ate and burped, kicking him roughly awake at the sergeant’s approach.

It did not seem right that the same territory had produced them both, that instead of feeling a kinship with him the sergeant lost no opportunity to ridicule his island accent or tell crude jokes about the region’s indolence. During the daily hour of political education, Pavlovi
ć
would read aloud to recruits from the morning newspaper, peppering his semiliterate orations with his own political musings. “Croatian nationalists want their own language, Mori
ć
,” he would bark. “What do you think of that?”

Marin had little opinion on the matter. On Rosmarina, his aunt Vinka’s husband had already attempted to stoke his national pride, citing hundreds of years in which their people had been under the yoke of others. He had tried to lend Marin books and invited him to secret political gatherings. “Where’s your anger?” Vlaho had once asked in disgust. “Your dignity?”

But Marin cared nothing for politics or ethnic solidarity. Rosmarina’s dialect would be equally unintelligible to someone from Belgrade or Zagreb, its way of life as foreign. He knew nothing of theaters and libraries, of traffic jams or victory squares, but he knew the coves that sardines favored and how best to press grapes into wine.

He did not have the energy to consider political movements, and the years of his mobilization stretched before him like an empty waste, bereft of light and warmth. The men in his barracks came from cities and mountains, from farmland and border towns, but most had never heard of Rosmarina.

He missed his mother’s cooking, his sister’s laughter, his father’s counsel. Most of all he missed their touch: his father slapping his back and his mother’s hands zipping up his jacket, believing even sunny days capable of conferring colds. Army life was pushing and shoving, a barely controlled violence as Pavlovi
ć
shouted in his ear, misting it several times daily with his spittle.

After the first few weeks, he forged a friendship with the conscript who shared his bunk. “The sergeant is in love with you,” the fair-haired Bosnian told Marin, laughing. “That’s why he gives you so much attention. Perhaps you shouldn’t play so hard to get.”

Siniša made those first months bearable. When the sergeant left the barracks, he reduced him to a caricature, demonstrating his erratic gait and beetling eyebrows. “Mori
ć
,” he would order. “Drop and give me fifty.” He painted wild scenarios in which the sergeant wore women’s stockings in his spare time and enjoyed being prodded with leather whips. “Have you seen the sergeant’s wife?” he would say. “She could wither a man’s balls with a single glance.”

Like Marin, his bunk mate cared nothing for politics. “There’s only one doctrine I subscribe to,” he announced one day when the sergeant left the room during political instruction, “and it involves cold beer.” Whenever the conscripts were allowed into town, he would demonstrate this by getting loudly drunk.

“What about the sergeant’s daughter?” he asked Marin on one such evening. “A face like a doll’s and tits like jelly-filled doughnuts.” Several other conscripts at their table shot him warning looks, but the café was loud and filled with drinking men.

Marin only shook his head in amusement. The sergeant’s daughter had a greasy face and the gait of a draft horse.

The object of Marin’s affections was not that sallow girl, nor any one of the pictures his fellow recruits had shown him: an odd assortment of girls from home and well-thumbed pictures from pornographic magazines.

He had seen her only twice in the town. Once, through a bakery window when he was sent on some errand, and another time when she walked down the street in front of him, the wind lifting her skirt slightly so that he glimpsed the smooth skin on the back of her thighs for just a moment before she smoothed the fabric down again.

He did not know her name or who she was, though she seemed out of place in that small town. The girls of Bitolj, like the ones on Rosmarina, tried too hard to copy the pages of fashion magazines, resulting in overdone makeup and bouffant hairstyles. But this woman had an easy grace, and every time he was in town he found himself searching for her long brown hair, so silky that he was certain his hands would pass right through it.

With time he discovered that her name was Nada. She was from Zagreb and taught in the local school. She did not have the face of a doll, he decided with all the ardor of youth, but that of an angel.

He guessed that she was his senior by at least ten years, but he found that he could not stop thinking of her, of the way she moved, of the wind lifting the thin material of her skirt. He imagined the way it would feel in his hands, the pale smoothness of her thighs beneath.

One day when he was sent to do an errand in town, he went past the building where she held her classes. He had noticed the room before, the construction paper pictures visible from the street, but he had never seen her there, and he stopped to watch her distribute paper to the children inside. He stood there so long that he did not immediately register when she looked up and gave him an amused stare in return.

Two days later he ran into her on the street. “Do you have an interest in long division?” she asked him. “Perhaps you should join our class. You’re just a little older than my students.”

He felt himself flush, but before he could hurry away she wrote something on a piece of paper and pressed it into his hands. “Be a brave boy and come visit me sometime,” she told him. “We can talk.”

“T-talk?” he stuttered. But she only smiled, then walked away without looking back.

He did not know what to do about the paper, which he kept long after memorizing the address. He lay awake for several nights before falling into tormented dreams in which he undressed her, waking only to discover that he was pressing his erection into his sheets.

The following week he had an evening’s leave, and after gathering his courage, he set off for the address on the far side of town. The building’s front door was open, and he climbed slowly to the third floor, telling himself that he could leave at any time. On the landing outside her door, he hesitated, looking behind him, back down the dark stairway that was dimly lit by only a few working lightbulbs. Before he could decide what to do, however, she opened the door, a small spark of surprise in her violet eyes. He had not noticed their color before, always too shy to do more than glance nervously at her, but now he stood on the threshold, staring and feeling foolish. “I was about to ring,” he said, thankful that he did not stutter.

“Come in,” she said, taking his arm and leading him into a room where books covered every surface.

He could not seem to find his voice, and so he looked around him, taking in the worn couch and the scuffed parquet floor.

“God knows it’s not much,” she said with a laugh.

He was only nineteen and he had never been with a woman, though he had naturally said otherwise to the men in his barracks. Now, all the easy words he had rehearsed on his slow march up the stairs deserted him.

“Undress,” she told him.

He blinked hard at this unexpected order.

“If it makes you feel better, I’ll undress too,” she said gently.

Before he could respond, she undid the skirt at her waist and lifted her blouse over her head. She wore no slip or bra, and he stared at her flat stomach, at her small nipples, inexplicably darker than her lips—a correlation he had learned from listening to the conversations of other recruits. In a state of wonder and befuddlement, he allowed her to unbuckle his trousers, taking her hand as he stepped out of them. When she pulled off his shirt, he lifted his arms as a child would. She took one of his hands in hers and, smiling, placed it against her breast.

It was only in retrospect that he would understand that she had been as lonely as he was, though he would not remember how many months they continued to see each other. Time, he would come to understand, could contract or expand memory, so that events he remembered as consecutive actually occurred more than a month apart, and a single day could register, in retrospect, as endless.

He went to her apartment whenever he could pilfer a few moments from errands or make excuses to Siniša on the nights they were allowed into town. He made love to her on the couch, on each of the chairs, on the low, humming refrigerator in the kitchen.

“Why so happy these days, Mori
ć
?” Siniša asked with amusement. “You look like the fox that ate the chicken in one bite.”

The hours with her took away the sting of army life and filled the long months of his recruitment with something other than homesickness. Even the sergeant became less harsh towards him, no longer singling him out for particularly unpleasant tasks, sometimes actually making small talk with him.

Then, one evening, Pavlovi
ć
materialized beside him as he left the mess hall. “There are undesirable elements among us, Morić.”

Marin faltered.

“Take your friend Siniša. His father was a provocateur who spent ten years in prison.” He paused. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

Marin shook his head.

“You’re a good soldier,” the sergeant continued. “I know because I’ve been watching you. If he were to say anything suspicious, it would be your duty to talk to me about it.”

Marin found his voice. “Suspicious?”

“Anything at all,” the sergeant said. “I think we understand one another.”

When he told Nada, she looked at him carefully. “He wants you to become an informer.”

On Rosmarina there were at least a half-dozen known informers, and everyone was careful in their dealings with them. Marin had never considered their recruitment, the way they would have been approached as the sergeant had approached him, slapping his arm and speaking of duty. If anything, he had thought of them as born that way, their treachery an innate flaw of character.

“What a mess this country is,” Nada told him late one afternoon as they lay naked on her couch. “When things could be so different.”

“Why are you whispering?” he asked, and she lifted her head from his chest, telling him with a smile that one never knew who might be listening.

“Anything yet?” Pavlovi
ć
asked the next day, looking at him with a guarded expression.

“Not a word,” he replied.

“Good,” Nada told him later, so that he basked in the warmth of her approval. “Let those bastards do their own dirty work.”

He was aware of the stacks of books in her apartment, the way she would remove a volume from one towering pile, read a few passages, then leave it on top of another. Sometimes she would read lines of poetry aloud to him, always locating the book she wanted within seconds, as if she had mapped out the contents of those stacks.

He never stopped to study their titles, although she admitted that a few were banned. “There’s an entire world inside those covers,” she told him once, “if you’d only stop to enter.”

But his world was one of fish and sea, and he had teased her that there was no room in it for poetry.

“But look how much poetry has to do with the sea!” she insisted. “Pages and pages of it. Your Rosmarina is more connected to the world than you’d like to think.”

A constant stream of friends stayed in her apartment, so he could not always see her when he liked. Most were friendly enough, but he knew that some merely tolerated his presence, as if he were a child. A woman from Ljubljana had cornered her in the kitchen, the sheer astonishment in her voice carrying to the next room where he sat: “But he’s a teenager, Nada!”

Another who came to visit with his wife found Marin’s sudden appearance in his army uniform one evening highly amusing. “Tell me, young fisherman,” he said, lifting his glass of wine as if Marin’s response would determine whether he took a sip. “What is your opinion of Kant?”

Across the room, Marin saw his lover flush at these words. “Leave him alone, Šimun,” she said in a warning voice, for although she had offered to lend Marin several of her books, he had always declined, fearing the mockery of the barracks.

He was aware, as well, that certain conversations were subverted in his presence, that when he came in, the words trailed off into discussions of films or reminiscences. He had once found Šimun pacing the living room in agitation as his wife and Nada looked on, trailing off when he caught sight of Marin in the doorway. “We were just discussing these awful Macedonian summers,” he said, fanning himself with the newspaper in his hand as if to prove his point. “Must be hard for someone from the sea, to be in a place where the air never moves.”