The First Rule of Swimming (15 page)

It had been years since he and his sister had swum naked together as children, but he recognized her bare, slick back at once. Vico was watching her with those lifeless eyes, the expression on his face somewhere between a smile and a grimace. He had wrapped her hair around his hand, pulling it so far back that her face was turned up, towards the ceiling.

In the first moment it was shame, not rage, that washed over Marin. He was ashamed for her, ashamed for himself that he had come upon her like this, that he was witness to her bare feet planted firmly on the floor, to the way she strained against her lover. He wanted to weep, and when he saw Vico take the same nipple into his mouth that she had regularly offered her infant daughter, he turned blindly from the window and fled.

A voice wailed in his head as he ran all the way back to his boat.
Not him,
it pleaded.
Not him. Not him.
It was only as the distance between them grew that he began to curse them both. They had tainted the thing he was building, and he was sorry that the wind and rain had not demolished it.

Later that day he saw Ana back on the
riva,
selling rosemary oil from the tourist stand where she worked, no hint of shame in her heart-shaped face.

“What’s eating you, brother?” she asked, but he did not acknowledge her as he walked past.

He did not know how long it had been going on, nor whether his brother-in-law suspected. For weeks Marin brooded, so that his sister looked curiously at him, and his father commented that he had grown surly.

He watched Ana feed Magdalena and iron her husband’s shirts, and she looked up anxiously whenever she felt the weight of his eyes. He even goaded her slightly until she finally cornered him one day in the courtyard, telling him to spit it out.

The ugly words flew out of him then.
Slut
and
whore
and
I know what you’ve been doing,
and she could only look at him stunned, her eyes filling with tears. At that moment Goran appeared at one of the windows, telling her in a strange voice that Magdalena had fallen and hurt herself. Vinka, who was visiting their mother, stood behind him, her eyes everywhere and nowhere at once.

He did not know how long Goran had been standing there, but his brother-in-law’s ashen face and his aunt’s open mouth made Marin think they had heard everything.

That night Goran went out alone to fish. Marin did not accompany him because he had agreed to patch an elderly cousin’s roof in the morning, a chore that needed to be done before winter. And he feared the other man’s questions.

The next day he and Luka hiked up to the cousin’s house at dawn, carrying tiles on their backs. They stopped once, halfway, to slake their thirst and looked out across the bay, at the dots of boats below them, and he wondered which of those boats might be Goran’s, for now was the time when he would be returning to port.

They spent all morning on the Peak, replacing cracked and decrepit tiles, launching them from the roof into the courtyard below so that they exploded on the stone in bursts of red clay. Afterwards his cousin fed them before they returned to town, a walk that was five times quicker than the ascent.

It was when they turned onto their lane that they heard wailing, both men breaking into a run when they realized that it was coming from their house. “Dead!” Ana was screaming inside, sitting on the kitchen floor and pulling at her black hair. “Dead!”

The fisherman who had found Goran’s boat adrift and towed it back to the island was smoking nervously in the courtyard, and in a daze Marin returned to the port with him. He found the boat in its usual station, bobbing eerily at the end of its rope. He searched it as several people watched him from the
riva
with somber faces, and found two drops of dark blood on the gunwale. The sun had dried them to the consistency of thin rubber.

It was Vico who came to file the report. “Unlucky bastard,” he said, taking one look at the blood.

The death was declared an accident, although a body was never found. Marin thought he knew better.
You drove him to it,
he wanted to tell his sister.
You killed him as surely as if you held a gun to his head.

Ana took to her bed and did not eat. He avoided her, taking the tiny Magdalena with him when he went out, because she was nearly two now, and fascinated by boats of every size and shape. He had scrubbed those drops of blood away, the pigment more stubborn than he would have guessed, trailing red threads through the water he poured over the side.

He could not stand the way Magdalena’s eyes scanned every room for her father, the way she looked for him behind doors, scrambling upstairs to check every corner of the house whenever they returned home. She was too young to understand that Goran Babi
ć
was not merely on an extended fishing trip and would not be coming home to play with her in the courtyard, to hide candies behind his ears, revealing them with flourishes that made her squeal with laughter.

He never spoke to his father or mother about what he had seen. When he could not avoid his sister, because it was a small house that had grown suddenly smaller as if the thing were deflating, its dimensions shrinking more every day, they barely spoke to each other.

When Ana started to get up again, she sat at the kitchen table and smoked cigarettes—a habit she had always hidden but now found pointless to conceal. She smoked cigarette after cigarette until Luka finally forced her into the courtyard, where she sat on the stone bench for days at a time, watching the grapevine that Goran and Luka had planted at Magdalena’s birth. She watched it as if she could see it growing, never taking her eyes from it. The movement of her hands was mechanical as she brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, then lit the next.

“You have to pull yourself together,” Marin overheard his mother saying. “You have a child.”

Her only response had been silence, and the sound of smoke being drawn deep into her lungs. When she exhaled he imagined the thick clouds that blurred the features of her face.

Ana returned to her stand on the
riva,
to selling rosemary oil and wreaths. She worked without smiling, without really looking at the faces of tourists or at the girls at other stands. From the opposite end of the
riva,
Marin watched her mark prices on the tiny bottles and twist the still greenish-yellow stalks into bundles and hearts.

On the night he came home to find her weeping in the courtyard, it was so dark that he could barely make out the shining features of her face. Nor did he understand immediately what she was telling him, though it clearly had something to do with leaving the island.

“You can’t,” he told her, surprised by his sudden grief. “Where would you go?”

“No,” she told him with a shake of her head. “It’s you who has to leave.”

At her words the moon came out from behind the clouds, and it was as if his sister’s face changed in front of him, as if the bone and flesh retracted beneath her skin.

“What are you saying?” he demanded, although later he would realize that he had known the answer all along.

“They’re arresting you tomorrow.”

In the morning, his father left with him so that no one would be suspicious.

His aunt and uncle went, as well, having appeared in the middle of the night as if a second sense alerted them to his departure. He later learned that news of his impending arrest had already made it around the island.

“It’s time to leave all this behind,” Vlaho said, slapping his arm, and there was something about his glee that only increased Marin’s desolation.

His aunt and uncle took their own boat, pretending that they were going to the Devil’s Stones for a picnic. Katarina took only her stuffed bear.

Marin and his father made it look as if they carried nothing but their lunches. As he left their house for the last time, his mother wept, so that Magdalena watched her with a puzzled expression. His sister stood at an upstairs window, hidden by the wooden shutters. In the last moment in the courtyard, he looked up and saw her silhouette.

He left with money shoved into the waistband of his trousers, documents in the lunch bags, some food and water.

He dropped his father off on another island. Luka would catch a ferry to the mainland, then another back to Rosmarina, and Marin would rendezvous with his uncle and aunt so that the boats could cross to Italy together.

“The boat,” Marin said miserably, because father and son owned it jointly.

It was Luka who had insisted that they take two vessels, believing that safety lay in numbers. But now he looked away, and Marin realized that he was crying.

“There will be other boats,” Luka told his only son.

M
arin had left that boat—his last, as it turned out—on a dirty beach in Italy, surrendering immediately to the
carabinieri
with his aunt’s family, who had come ashore alongside him. He did not know what became of it, whether it was given to some Italian fisherman, the Rosmarina markings painted over by a new owner, or left to rot where he had pulled it up.

Some nights in America he dreamed about it, the inverted hull sinking beneath empty bottles and old newspapers, decomposing as a human corpse might until there was nothing left but its sun-bleached wooden ribs.

Sometimes he dreamed of Vico. That the policeman watched as Marin and his wife made love, as they slept, as they pulled the boys into bed with them on Sunday mornings and warmed cold, bare toes against flannel and skin. In the dreams Marin always realized his presence belatedly, looking up in shock to see the derision in the other man’s eyes.

He always sat in the chair across from the bed, where Luz had draped her dress, or where her stockings trailed on the floor. No matter how many times Marin moved the chair before sleep, dreaming would return it to its familiar station, and Vico would be sitting upon it easily.

Marin would awake to find the room empty except for his wife’s slumbering form, the lights of the alarm clock making their bedspread green, the time always between one and two in the morning. The seventh hour of the day at home. The hour in which he was usually already on the sea.

Jadranka did not appear the next morning at the beginning of her shift, but this did not surprise him. She had not said a word to him after he finished, sitting in a silence so thick that, to his mind, it only confirmed her guilt.

“Vermin,” he had told her. “Those people poison everything they touch.”

In another time and place, he would have refused to reveal so much about his past, but the words had poured out of him. He had told her everything because with each detail he added, the confounding shame of exile grew less.

“It’s they who should be ashamed,” he had told her in an acid voice, looking at her meaningfully. “They should burn with it.”

She had risen unsteadily then and untied the apron around her waist. She retreated to the office for her backpack and left without a backward glance. As she passed the window, her face glowed like a Halloween mask beneath the streetlights, but she kept her eyes straight ahead and did not cast even a sidelong glance into the restaurant’s interior.

“Good riddance,” he told his wife the next morning. But she only looked at him in shock.

“The bogeyman is dead,” she told him. “You really believed that she could be a part of that?”

He said nothing.

“She wasn’t even born when it happened!”

But he only shook his head stubbornly. His wife was an innocent, he thought, if she believed that they had merely ceased to exist. Communism might be dead—in Croatia, at least—but the people who had benefited from it would hardly have given up. No, he thought. They would have clawed to keep their positions, hanging on as he had seen rats do after floods, scrabbling at anything to stay afloat.

“Oh, Mio,” she finally told him. “What have you done?”

He looked at her for a moment, upset that she should doubt his judgment. But she had spent most of her childhood in the United States and, as a result, knew the heartlessness of those systems primarily through the stories of others. He had thought she understood, but it was clear that she didn’t, and in that moment he felt as lonely as the last member of a dying species.

“I survived,” he answered her before retreating to his office.

Jadranka did not appear again, and for the next few days both his wife and Hector went around with a dejected air, refusing to meet his eyes. A pall hung over the restaurant, as if the dining room were filled with smoke, and even their customers seemed to notice it. Their conversations were less animated, and they did not tend to linger at the end of their meals.

“Where’s that nice, red-haired girl?” one of their regulars asked, and Marin mumbled something about her having to return home.

In mid-July, two weeks after Jadranka’s departure, he received a large, flat package at the restaurant. It was addressed to Marin Mori
ć
, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, and he knew without opening it that it was the painting she had promised them.

They had not yet started serving for the day, and he took it to his office, where he stared at the brown paper packaging. He considered placing it on the curb without opening it, letting the garbage collectors haul it away with the morning trash. He thought for a moment of the satisfying sound it would make as they fed it to the iron jaws of their truck.

But curiosity got the better of him, and he found a pair of scissors in the desk drawer to clip the twine. He peeled away the brown paper, careful not to tear it, staring as he did so at the familiar handwriting of the address. He had kept her order pad, which was filled with that looping script. He had pored over it as if the lists of appetizer samplers and glasses of wine might reveal something. Evidence, he had convinced himself when he could not bring himself to discard it.

The view was from the window of the bedroom he had shared with his sister when they were children, and he could make out the grapevine that his father and Goran had planted on the day of Magdalena’s birth.

One of the busboys stuck his head into the office at that moment, but Marin waved him away, rising a moment later to lock the door.

He did not understand. A thousand explanations circled like flying birds. They made such a noise in his head that he sank again into the desk chair and rested his forehead against his palms.

Was she playing with him now? he wondered. Was it not sufficient that she had spied on him, ingratiating herself into their lives so that even he was tricked into feeling her absence?

She had clearly gained access to the Rosmarina house, and he marveled for a moment at the elaborate nature of this plan, at the energy that had gone into snaring such a little fish as himself. What on earth could they have been after? he wondered, not for the first time.

The painting was good. Even his untrained eye could see that. And it contained details that he had forgotten: the way the courtyard gate sagged slightly on its hinges, the vines that covered the walls, the giant flagstones that had been worn smooth.

Had she even painted it? Or was there a studio somewhere filled with artists in their employ? He imagined them hard at work, providing exiles like himself a momentary glimpse of the lost landscapes of their childhoods. Like crumbs of bread placed beneath the noses of starving men.

There was the bench where his sister liked to sit, drying her long, dark hair in the sunlight. There was the stone table where his mother shelled peas, and the place where his father’s boat stood sentry in the winter. In different circumstances, he realized, he might have been grateful to the sender.

“Take over,” he told Hector as he passed through the restaurant, the painting under his arm.

He returned home to find Luz sitting at their kitchen table, looking through old recipe books. She had not heard him enter the apartment and was intent on the pages in front of her, her finger moving from one line to the next. He had always loved his wife’s single-mindedness, the tenacity that had kept their restaurant afloat through lean years when he might have given up, and he watched her for a moment before clearing his throat. He fought hard to adopt a neutral expression, but when she looked at him over the top of her reading glasses, she frowned slightly and rose from her chair.

Over the years of their marriage, it had always amazed him how she was able to decipher his mood, just as she did now, embracing him wordlessly so that he was tempted to linger in her arms the way their sons had done when they were small.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, catching his chin in her palm.

He took her hand in his and studied its olive smoothness, then turned it over and examined its lines, a smattering of scars from handling hot pans and knives in the kitchen of their restaurant. He lifted it to his face again and kissed it.

Usually that hollow place inside him closed up, the door swinging shut as he left the hymns of his childhood behind in the Forty-first Street church. He was an expert at segregation, at keeping the various chambers of his heart walled off from one another, the same way that a single apartment building contained lives that never intersected. But for weeks now the door had refused to swing shut.

“I have something to show you,” he told her, then led her back to the apartment’s entrance, where he had left the painting leaning against a wall.

She did not understand what it was at first, staring at it with a confused expression.

“This is the house where I was born,” he managed to tell her, so that she only stared at it in shock. She picked it up and walked with it into the living room, taking it over to the windows to look at it in the light.

“It’s beautiful,” she told him.

He nodded. “I don’t understand it.”

She studied every inch, drinking in the landscape. She had never before been able to attach an image to the things he had described, he realized. And he had never had tangible proof of them.

“There’s a number,” she told him suddenly.

He joined her at the window, frowning. He looked where she pointed, and it was true. In the left margin was a series of numbers that he had missed.

She read them aloud in her soft Spanish. “They must mean something.”

He watched her copy the numbers onto a piece of paper and frown at them. She had a fondness for riddles and Sudoku puzzles. She would spend hours poring over them, whereas he never had the patience.

“It can’t be a date,” she said. “Perhaps it’s a telephone number?”

He looked at the piece of paper. “Too long,” he told her.

“Too long for a number in the United States,” she conceded. “But it could be an international number.”

He looked at it again. “I don’t recognize the prefix.”

“We can check on the Internet,” she told him.

His wife was already fluent in that strange language of the younger generation, the one he had dismissed in the beginning as a fad, his sons speaking in confounding terms like
web
and
virtual
and
server.
It was she who monitored the restaurant’s website, a useless expense, he had incorrectly predicted in the beginning.

They sat side by side at the computer in their sons’ room, beneath a poster of Robert De Niro in
Raging Bull
. Luz’s hands moved rapidly across the keyboard until she found what she was looking for.

“That’s it,” she told him. “Three-eight-five. That’s the country code for Croatia.”

He stared at the screen.

“Let’s see if we can find an address,” she said.

Ten minutes later he was staring at the address where he had grown up.

Luz sat beside him as he dialed the number. It rang several times before an older woman picked up. He tried to place her voice in the pantheon of neighbors and distant cousins who might have occupied their house after his parents’ deaths. She was going a little deaf, he thought, because at first she could not understand him.

“You’re mistaken,” she said in a wavering voice before hanging up. “My son, Marin, left years ago.”

He stared at the receiver in his hand, a recorded voice now telling him reprovingly that if he would like to make a call, he should hang up.

“Mio,” Luz said in dismay, “why are you crying?”

But he could not bring himself to answer, his hand shaking so badly that Luz had to dial, reading the number from the pad of paper where she had written it, handing him the receiver.

“Mama,” he said immediately the second time, a word that had not passed his lips in thirty years.

And when Ružica Mori
ć
heard his voice, when she heard those two short syllables that were like the beating of a heart, she cried aloud then dropped the telephone against a hard surface—the floor, perhaps, or the kitchen table.

“Luka!” he heard her shouting in the background, above the swift movement of her feet.