The First Rule of Swimming (14 page)

Marin nodded, although he knew the man had been reading from the newspaper only moments before. But by the time of his next visit, the newspaper was gone, and Nada told him that he was only imagining it.

Despite his suspicion that she was lying to him, it was still a shock to learn several weeks later that Šimun had been arrested.

“But—”

“Don’t ask me any questions,” Nada begged, and Marin sat beside her in stunned silence, picturing the slender man whose hands had been as white and delicate as a woman’s. Šimun had told him that he had managed to avoid most of his own military service because of his weak lungs, and Marin could not imagine how he would survive jail or, worse, slave labor.

On the night that Nada did not answer the door to his knock, he waited in her hallway, thinking that she had gone to buy bread, or to visit a friend. But an hour went by and still she did not come.

I was here, waiting for you,
he teased her in the note that he slipped beneath her door.
But I couldn’t wait any longer because the sergeant will skin me alive if I’m not
back by lights out.
He had signed it with his first name, leaving the doodle of a fishing boat beneath it.

She was not there the next day either, or the next. On the fourth day, he knocked on a neighbor’s door, and an old woman opened it to peer into the hallway with a frightened expression.

“They took her,” she whispered. “The police came and took her away.”

He went through the rest of that week as if he were dreaming. At every point that he could get away from the base, he returned to her apartment, but she was gone. When he walked past the neighbor’s door, he thought he could feel the weight of the woman’s stare through her keyhole.

The first time he was taken for interrogation, a man not much older than himself asked so many questions that he became dizzy. He tried to confuse Marin in his answers, doubling back to ask the same questions a dozen ways. He wanted to know the names of Marin’s friends, whether he had attended any political meetings, what his links were to dissidents abroad. “What kind of shit have you gotten yourself into?” he asked finally, producing the note that Marin had pushed beneath Nada’s door.

Marin took it with shaking hands. “It’s mine,” he admitted. “Of course it’s mine.”

She was a good comrade, he insisted, and had never talked against the government. “She’s a teacher,” he protested. “She has no interest in politics.”

But the man only laughed in his face. “You’re either a liar or extremely stupid,” he told Marin.

Each time he was summoned for questioning, they kept him for hours, asking him the names of her friends, of others involved in her movement.

“Movement?” He had only frowned. “What movement?”

He waited another week before returning to her apartment. But this time a middle-aged woman answered the door. When he looked past her, the threadbare couch in the small room was the same, but her books were gone.

“Yes?” the woman asked him with a frown, the smell of cabbage soup filling the hallway in great, nauseating waves.

“Who is it?” a gruff male voice called from inside.

Backing away from the door, Marin only mumbled that he had confused their apartment with another.

He did the only thing he could think of doing: he went directly from her front door to the bus station. The first bus went to Sarajevo, and it took him another day to reach Rosmarina.

When he reached the courtyard of their house, he found his father sitting on the stone bench, mending nets. “You have to go back,” Luka pleaded with him. “You’re playing with fire.”

The police were already looking for him and had come to their house that morning.

“Just one night,” Marin begged. “I only want to spend one night on the island.”

But they arrested him for desertion just before dawn.

He saw Šimun once more, on Barren Island. He nearly failed to recognize the strange, gaunt prisoner who stared at him on his first march to the gravel pits. It was only when the other man lifted his slender hands to his face that Marin connected the birdlike figure to Nada’s friend.

“Do you have any news of her?” Marin whispered.

The other man’s hair, clipped close to his scalp like every other prisoner, had turned completely gray, and the once sardonic mouth was a single, grim line. “I don’t know anything,” he responded tightly.

In that moment the world went black, and when Marin finally awoke, believing for a joyful moment that he was back on Rosmarina, a guard was throwing water in his face.

“You have lost the right to talk,” this dark shadow informed him.

He did only the minimum to survive. He did not snitch, once spending two weeks in solitary confinement because he would not denounce another man. The floor where he slept was covered in an inch of water, and rats scurried over his face at night.

He never saw Šimun again, and he never saw Nada. Those three years were a progression of beatings and thirst, exhaustion, and hunger. In winter, water on the floor of his cell regularly froze, and in summer the harsh sun made the prisoners appear as if their skin had been peeled from their bodies.

Nor did his misfortunes end with his release. Instead they followed him back to the island, where his every errand was recorded, his every statement added to a file somewhere, on which he imagined the words
MARIN MORI
Ć
, ENEMY OF THE STATE
.

At home he was not prepared for the suspicion of their neighbors. Barren Island in those days was considered a prison like any other, filled with rapists and murderers. It was a well-known fact that those who made it out had likely paid for their freedom by informing on someone else. Or by agreeing to become an informer once home, listening to the conversations of friends, writing reports on the movements of neighbors.

It was useless to explain that he was none of these things. That he did not know why he had been released, the day coming so abruptly that he did not trust them even when he was given civilian clothes and told to change. He was so thin that the trousers hung from his hips and he needed to hitch them up, to the constant hilarity of the guards, whose eyes he refused to meet. It would be just like them to find some technicality to delay his freedom, to tell him in the end that it had all been a joke, to return him to his cell without ceremony.

You didn’t imagine we’d let you go that easily, did you?
he expected them to tell him.

Before boarding the small police boat to the mainland, he was taken once more for questioning. His interrogator told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to reveal a single detail about the years of his incarceration. Not the color of the prisoners’ uniforms, not the names of those on his work details, names he did not know in any event because anything as intimate as a name had been stripped from them the moment they reached that island gulag.

“I could have you back here tomorrow,” the man had told him.

So that even when he returned to Rosmarina he could feel those invisible strings tethering him like a marionette. Threatening to lift him from the island and return him to hell.

He tried to live quietly after his release, but still they summoned him for questioning. In 1974, the year after he returned to Rosmarina, Yugoslavia adopted a new constitution with greater protection for individual rights—except for anyone attempting to subvert the country’s social order. Marin had no intention of subverting anything. But Barren Island marked him as an agitator forever.

The chief of police was a younger man from the mainland whose path Marin went to extraordinary lengths to avoid. There was something that reminded him of his sergeant, of that tough and brutish man who had enjoyed stripping conscripts naked during winter, although the policeman—Vico was his name—was in fact soft-spoken.

Sometimes when Marin was in the middle of some errand, or sitting in his boat on the
riva,
he would look up to see the man’s cold eyes watching him.

Only his sister understood the depth of his despair. After his return it was Ana who noticed certain people listening more carefully in his presence. “I’ll never let them take you back,” she told him.

In another period her fierceness might have amused him. But he had come back to them a different man, his mother pressing her handkerchief to her eyes on the night of his return as much from shock, he realized, as from relief.

“You’ll do nothing,” he ordered his sister.

He had been her keeper from an early age, adoring the abundance of dark hair already on her baby’s head, so unlike their distant cousins, who looked like old men as newborns, wrinkled and bald. Later, it was Marin whom she would allow to remove a splinter from her foot or the occasional needle from a sea urchin, a rare event, anyway, because he cleared a path for her whenever they went swimming.

A light burned more fiercely in Ana than burned in others, and she was fearless, so that their parents worried constantly that she would fall into the harbor or from a balcony, or that she would walk through the plate glass window of the ferry office, like the island’s birds who could not identify that smooth surface and ended up in twitching heaps on the pavement outside.

She had been a heartless flirt throughout her youth, and so it had been a relief to their parents when she met her husband at the age of twenty. Marin had returned from Barren Island to find her already married, and pregnant with Magdalena.
Electricity needs to be grounded,
he would think, watching her with Goran,
lest it burn everything in its path.

His brother-in-law was the only man, aside from his father, with whom he still fished, his former friends too frightened by the prospect of that association. The two spent long hours talking—though never about Marin’s imprisonment—and taking turns with the engine. It was Goran who asked him to be godfather to their child, a tiny and delicate baby whose eyes grew from a deep sapphire blue to black. Goran asked apologetically, understanding that his brother-in-law risked inciting the regime’s wrath by standing up with them in a church.

“We don’t want to get you into more trouble,” he told Marin.

For much of the ceremony, Marin held Magdalena in his arms, looking at her sleeping face, so peaceful that he missed several of the responses. Her innocence both frightened him and filled him with longing. He doubted that he himself would ever be capable of producing something so unspoiled.

If his sister’s face grew longer after his return, he did not notice because her tongue was as sharp as it had always been. But he was aware when she and Goran began to argue sometime later, angry whispers that broke the confines of their bedroom and brushed uneasily through the rest of the house. If anything, he assumed them to be the growing pains of a young marriage, just as his mother claimed.

A pall descended over the entire house, and something about his brother-in-law also changed abruptly in those days. Goran no longer laughed as easily. He grew thin, Ružica wringing her hands when he claimed that he could eat no more than a few bites of food at a time, and she worried aloud that he had developed an ulcer. For the first time, he began drinking in the port, stumbling home in the early hours of the morning.

“Come on, man,” Marin heard Luka tell him in the courtyard once, his voice heavy with dismay. “This is no way to live.”

But if Goran responded, he did not hear.

To escape the house, Marin went often to the Devil’s Stones. He had long planned to build a shelter at their fishing camp, and he began to spend several days at a stretch there, sleeping beneath the stars, thinking that a more expansive sky could surely exist nowhere else in the world. He had missed that sky. He had missed its blackness and the crisp edges of its stars, and he was relieved to find himself beneath it again.

He spent days drawing a simple two-room design, planning a window in each room and how he would rig a lamp from a generator. There would be no running water, but there was a cistern on a nearby hill, and he designed a small paved area in front for drying nets. His father and Goran both liked the idea and agreed to help him when they could.

His design was deliberately simple, and he liked the way the structure grew, slowly, to resemble what he had sketched on paper. For several years after his release, he worked on it whenever he was not fishing. All the materials had to be taken from Rosmarina, which in turn had to be brought from the mainland or building-supply stores on larger islands. He waited for the cinder blocks to come in on the ferry, and he cannibalized stone from derelict buildings across the island.

The night he put on a temporary roof of corrugated iron, however, a storm blew up from the sea. He heard it from his bed and imagined the wind peeling the roof back like a sardine tin, a fierce rain toppling the walls. The project had begun to obsess him, and while the storm raged for two days, he waited impatiently on Rosmarina, looking out towards the Devil’s Stones, which were at times obliterated by rain.

On the third day he woke to a calm sea and set off anxiously to check the roof. “Whatever damage there is can be repaired,” his father told him reasonably before he went, and although Marin nodded, there was a tightness in his throat. All the way to the Devil’s Stones, he thought about what he might have done differently, which building materials he should have used instead. He had bought some of the cinder blocks cheaply, and now he fretted over their quality, imagining that they had dissolved in the rain like lumps of sugar.

It was on his approach to the hut that he heard the low groans. He was too relieved to see the walls standing and the roof intact to register what the sounds were at first. They grew louder as he neared, however, and he concluded that some teenagers had escaped the town to rut in privacy. He stopped uncertainly a few meters away, both amused and annoyed by this trespass.

But something about the woman’s voice made the hairs on his arms stand up like tiny needles, and he approached the window cautiously, the way one would the edge of a precipice.