The First Rule of Swimming (17 page)

Magdalena had studied English at university, but only now did she realize how fully her English was the English of schoolbooks, of professors who had enunciated every syllable. Her English had nothing to do with the cacophony that emerged from people’s mouths, the slang, the half-eaten words, the way that one sentence ran into another. People in Queens spoke English as if they were shouting, or crying or laughing. There was the singsong of girls who giggled together on the subway and the slurring of drunks who stood on street corners with paper bags.

She further discovered that there was an entire nether language spoken by people who did not really speak English at all. Its hand gestures and grunts enabled her to trade mutual complaints about the heat with a woman who wore a head scarf, and to accept a handful of salted pistachios from an elderly man on the street.

“Subway?” she could ask a group of men milling around a gas station parking lot waiting for work. And they could point her in the right direction, holding up four fingers to show how many blocks she had to go.

But nobody had heard of her sister.

It bothered her that so few people knew of Rosmarina—even among New York’s Croatian population—as though it were a mythical kingdom like Atlantis. It seemed to cast doubt on her sister’s existence by association. As if one day Magdalena would pull out the photograph she carried for sentimental reasons—a shot of the sisters in a Split photo booth—only to discover a picture of herself, sitting alone.

For this reason she felt her spirits lift when she ran into the same elderly man from Vis a week later. “Rosmarina!” he hailed her on the pavement in front of a ninety-nine-cent store. “I was hoping I would see you again. Any luck finding your sister?”

“None,” she told him.

He nodded gravely at this. “Might I make a suggestion?”

His words surprised her. “Please,” she told him.

“It occurred to me a few days after I ran into you. You see, an old man like me hates to throw anything away. My children say that I’m a pack rat, but I consider myself more of a collector. You never know when you’ll need something, Miss—?”

“Magdalena.”

He smiled at this name, as if it reminded him of something pleasant. “Magdalena. And it occurred to me that your sister might have answered an ad in one of our local Croatian newspapers, if she was looking for employment. Or even placed one.”

This idea had not occurred to her.

“I have copies of all of them, you see. Going back months.”

She could just imagine it: towers of newsprint filled with stories about picnics and church bake sales, but she nodded anyway. Her sidewalk canvassing had certainly brought her no closer to finding her sister.

“I would be most obliged if you could show me,” she told him.

He walked with a cane, and so their progress was slow. Several times people nodded at him, or greeted him with
Ej, profesore!

“Professor?” she asked him.

“Of history,” he told her, wheezing slightly. “But that was long ago.”

Professor Bari
ć
was a widower and nearing eighty. He lived alone in a block of two-story homes that were identical except for their flourishes: one house had neoclassical railings, while a plaster Madonna holding an Italian flag guarded the narrow concrete garden of a second. A Greek flag hung in the window of a third.

“An international neighborhood,” he told Magdalena with a smile.

There was a small, well-tended garden to one side of the front door, and inside, his rooms were filled with bookcases. Hard-backed tomes covered every surface, and a marble chess set occupied a low table in the living room, the whites and blacks regarding each other impassively across the board.

“Do you play?” he asked when he saw the direction of her gaze.

“I used to,” she told him, brushing her fingertips over the ridged halo of a rook. “With my grandfather.”

He nodded. “An excellent game. A teacher of strategy and life.”

She had been quite good, in fact, occasionally beating Luka by the time she was thirteen, although now it occurred to her that he had let her win.

“You’ve just reminded me,” the professor told her. “I promised a friend that we would play this afternoon.”

“Do you play often?”

“As often as we can,” he said, so that Magdalena pictured two old men sitting on opposite sides of the board, staring at it with the same concentration as the players in Washington Square Park, but with coffees and glasses of brandy.

“Now about those newspapers—”

She followed him into the kitchen, where papers stood in stacks on the counters and floor. His children were right in calling him a pack rat, she thought, taking in the rest of it: an assortment of third-class mail, pill bottles, and empty yogurt containers, washed and stacked neatly against the refrigerator. But the expression on his face was so pleased as he regarded the kitchen’s contents that she told him, “It’s lucky for me that you collect things, Professor.”

“Please,” he told her, pulling a chair out from the kitchen table. “Make yourself comfortable.”

As he filled a pot with water for coffee, she pulled the nearest stack towards her. It was a weekly broadside, printed in New York, and she stifled a smile when she noticed that one of the articles on the first page was, indeed, about a church bake sale.

“The advertisements are in the back,” he told her, looking up.

The classified section was not extensive, and there were ads for restaurants as far away as San Francisco, as well as descriptions of items for sale.
Brend new!
one of these proclaimed beside the picture of a lawn mower.

The employment listings were limited to a handful of advertisements placed by businesses looking for help: a restaurant, a florist, a travel agency in San Pedro, California. There were no advertisements placed by anybody looking for work, far less one that might have been her sister.

She refolded the pages.

“Take heart,” he told her, looking around the kitchen at the issues still waiting to be searched.

The professor collected three different newspapers in addition to two church circulars and the newsletter of the Croatian Fraternal Union. The pages swam in front of Magdalena’s eyes, with their digests of old-world news and new-world celebrations.

As she read, the professor hovered. The yogurt containers, she gathered, were for seedlings, because an open bag of soil stood beside them. She did not know what the pills were for, but she watched him read the label of one bottle, then sigh. “They’re always making mistakes,” he muttered, then went into the next room to telephone the pharmacy.

He returned after a few minutes with a sheepish smile. “Getting old is a terrible thing, Magdalena. It’s only slightly better than the alternative.”

In dozens of newspapers, Magdalena found a single advertisement that might pertain to her sister. It had been placed by a woman looking for a room to rent.

As Magdalena considered the details—
responsible, neat, non-smoker
—she heard someone knock at the professor’s front door. She looked at the clock above the sink, surprised to see that two hours had already elapsed. “Your chess partner,” she said, rising. “I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

“No, no,” he told her. “There’s no hurry.”

But she capped her pen and picked up her purse. She was about to follow him to the front door when she heard it: the voice from the radio, but very near at hand.

She froze, straining to make out the professor’s response, a low collection of words that sounded like the faint thrumming of a motor.

“But she’s still here?”

The voice was unmistakably Damir’s, and Magdalena felt a tightening in her chest, as if the house’s oxygen supply had abruptly run out. Her eyes traveled to the kitchen door, whose rectangular window looked out onto a narrow garden. But when she grasped the doorknob, it did not give.

When she turned, Damir already filled the kitchen’s other doorway.

It was the professor who spoke, appearing behind him in the hall. “Forgive my subterfuge,” he told her. “But my young friend explained that you weren’t likely to wait for him if you knew.”

“Your chess partner,” she said flatly.

“That’s right,” Damir told her with no hint of irony. “You came up during our last game.”

Professor Bari
ć
cleared his throat a little anxiously. “One runs into so few people from Rosmarina, you see. And I really did think that it was worth looking through the newspapers.”

She stared at Damir. His dark brown hair was shorter than she remembered. His body, too, was different, as if the substance that composed it had hardened like clay, making his shoulders more pronounced and deepening the grooves in his suntanned face. Beneath his smart clothing, she knew, there was an oval birthmark on his shoulder and a scar that ran down one knee. And there would be new marks, of unknown shape and location, although his newspaper had reported the shrapnel wounds from Iraq as
non–life threatening,
just as his mother had promised.

What did he see when he looked at her, she wondered?

But his face gave no indication of what he might be thinking.

H
is car stood in front of Professor Bari
ć
’s house.

“I nearly missed you,” he said, descending the front steps and turning to look up at her. He made his voice light. “You wanted to make a break for it.”

It was more a statement of fact than an accusation. As she followed him down the steps, regarding him with equal caution, she was aware from the way the curtains trembled that the professor continued to watch them from his living room window. She nodded.

“What stopped you?”

“The door was locked.”

He smiled at this. “Foiled,” he told her softly and unlocked the car doors.

Going for a drive was his idea, and for the first few minutes they said nothing. They turned from Professor Bari
ć
’s quiet street to one with a profusion of restaurants and fabric stores, throngs of people pushing past each other on the pavements and into the crosswalks.

“I saw your sister,” Damir said as they waited at one of these. “That’s why I wanted to see you.”

Magdalena met his eyes in surprise. “When?” she demanded.

“A few weeks ago. She invited me to an exhibit at your cousin’s gallery.”

Jadranka had said nothing about this in her letters, and Magdalena felt herself sink into the leather of the passenger seat. “You didn’t mention it when you telephoned,” she told him with a frown.

“I wanted to see you,” he told her again. He reached over to touch the back of her hand. “I really do want to help you, Lena. Can you believe that?”

Magdalena stared at his hand. When she did not answer, he returned it to the wheel.

“What did she say?”

“We talked about New York, mostly. She said she was happy here. She told me that she was painting again.” He turned onto another street, this one with shops whose awnings were covered in Arabic. “And naturally you came up.”

She did not doubt it. But there was something unsettling about knowing she had been discussed. She could just imagine it—
You know her, stubborn as a Rosmarina mule, a real island fixture these days
—and so she changed the subject, telling him evenly, “I don’t understand her disappearing act. It’s not like her.”

“She’s disappeared before,” he pointed out.

“But never from me.”

He was silent for a moment. “No,” he acknowledged. “And in the beginning you disappeared together.”

It was true. The first time, they had run away as children to avoid going to live with their mother in Split, a miscalculation that had only stoked their stepfather’s rage. The second time had been later, during the war, and Magdalena knew that this was the disappearance he referred to.

“Jadranka was looking for her father,” Magdalena told him.

“And you?”

She had been looking after Jadranka, who would not be convinced to abandon her harebrained plan, no matter how much Magdalena railed against it. “I’ll tell
Dida,
” she had threatened her sister in desperation, causing Jadranka to counter with her own threat: “Do it and I’ll never speak to you again.”

And although Jadranka had been only fourteen at the time, Magdalena did not doubt for a moment that she meant what she said.

“You didn’t even tell me where you were going,” Damir reminded her now.

“No,” Magdalena conceded. The subterfuge had been difficult at the time, because that was the period of telling Damir everything. But she had known that Jadranka would go, with or without her. That if Magdalena raised the alarm, her sister would find a way of leaving the island and going in search of her father’s shadow. Jadranka had been so utterly convinced that time, so certain that she knew precisely where to find him, that even today Magdalena remembered the ferocious way she said, “You’re either with me or against me, Lena.”

Damir sighed. “Who knows why she didn’t tell you this time? People don’t always make sense.”

This, at least, was something they could agree upon, and as she turned to study his familiar profile, his eyelashes still as black and glossy as the spines of a sea urchin, she felt her resolve waver for the briefest moment.

She and Jadranka had made it all the way to a military hospital near the front line in Dubrovnik. They had come close to the war without actually stepping inside it. But wandering that hospital, Magdalena had seen all she needed to see of it: the beds of wounded crowding the hallways, the way some of the men—not much older than herself—had reached out their hands to touch the two sisters, as if wanting to make sure they were flesh and blood.

“What the hell are you doing here?” one, a complete stranger who was missing an arm, had demanded. He had looked from Jadranka to Magdalena, his eyes wild with panic. “I told you a thousand times to stay at home.”

Two years after that, the draft notice had come for Damir, its blunt lettering returning her to that hospital where all the sheets were stained with blood. They had spent the hours after its arrival curled tightly together on his bed, and she still remembered the way he had promised her that it would change nothing, and that when he came back life would begin again. And she—fool of fools—had believed such a thing possible.

They had been lying to themselves. After his return from the war, they had driven around like this, in a borrowed car, Damir navigating the dark streets of Zagreb, Magdalena strapped into the passenger side, feeling for all the world like the seatbelt was the only thing pinning her to the earth.

I can’t go back to Rosmarina,
he had said, pulling over to the side of the road so that they could face each other.

For years afterwards, she believed that he had betrayed her. Of all people, he best understood what the island meant to her. He remembered her returning from that year in Split so quiet and thin that her former classmates had not recognized her, despite their teacher’s insistence.
But you must remember, children. This is Magdalena.

It was only since her grandfather’s illness that she allowed herself to consider a different explanation for his departure: that the war had changed the course of his life the way an earthquake can crack a road and leave it pointing in a different direction. The way the year in Split had changed hers.

“I mean it, Lena,” he told her now. “I want to help.”

She studied the fine lines around his eyes, the scar that started at the base of his throat and disappeared under his shirt. It was shiny and red, and she had not noticed it at first. “I know you do,” she told him softly.

A subway trestle loomed ahead of them, and Magdalena told him to drop her there. For a moment he looked as though he would object, but he pulled over.

“You never know,” he said as he turned off the car’s engine. “Your sister might decide to come back to see her work on exhibit.”

Magdalena started at this. “What do you mean?”

He looked surprised. “Your cousin promised to put one of her paintings in a group show this summer. Didn’t Jadranka tell you?”

She shook her head.

Neither her sister nor Katarina had breathed a word of it, and she frowned at the subway track above them, the way the entire apparatus now shook with the approach of a train.

He took her hand in his and squeezed it, and this time she did not pull away so quickly. “Maybe your sister wanted to surprise you.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Before she got out he gave her his card. It had been inside his breast pocket and was the same temperature as his hand. She slid it into the back pocket of her jeans without really looking at it, but all the way into Manhattan she was conscious of its warmth.

When Magdalena returned to her cousin’s house, there was a note on the kitchen counter explaining that Katarina would be at her gallery all evening. Neither the children nor Jazmin were anywhere in evidence, and for a moment Magdalena stood in the foyer, listening to the barely audible whirring of a washing machine somewhere within the house. Where the washing machine was located, she had not discovered. Her dirty clothes disappeared as if carried away by phantom hands and only reappeared when they had been washed and folded.

The guest room where she slept was unlike her sister’s, where the only furnishings were a mattress with a pine bed frame and a matching dresser. The curtains in Magdalena’s room were a deep, burnished yellow, and the silk bedspread was edged with a border in the same color. There was a painting in black and white that Magdalena had decided depicted either falling rain or the vertical lines of a bar code, and the rug rested on dark floorboards so shiny that she could see her reflection in their surface.

Ordinarily she took her shoes off on the bedroom’s threshold, afraid of tracking the city’s dirt across its floor, but today she turned and descended the stairs again.

She did not know what she was looking for, but as she wandered through the first-floor rooms, she was conscious of seeing things in a different light. She had already searched her sister’s studio several times, surprised to see that Jadranka had not left even a single sketch behind. And so she read the titles of the books in the living room and pored through the extensive notes on a calendar that stood at attention on the kitchen counter. It was a thick book with pictures of paintings from the Museum of Modern Art, and she found a two-month-old entry for Tabitha’s dental appointment in her sister’s hand.

She did not know why Katarina had not mentioned her plans to exhibit Jadranka’s work. The omission made her uneasy. Briefly she considered the possibility that it was an offer her cousin had retracted. But Jadranka’s mention of it to Damir meant she was fairly sure it would happen.

Why, then, had she not mentioned it in any of her letters?

When Magdalena turned the handle to Michael’s office, she was surprised to feel the door move beneath her hands. Her cousin’s husband worked long hours for a firm in the financial district and when he was home spent most of his time here, with the door closed. He traveled on a weekly basis, jetting to places like Geneva and Singapore, and he was in one of those locations now, doing something—Katarina had intimated—that involved lengthy discussions and vast sums of money.

Magdalena could not tell if Michael’s frequent absences made her cousin lonely. In pictures throughout the house, he and the children smiled from fishing trips and from atop snowcapped mountains, their faces rubbed raw with wind, their ski goggles reflecting other mountains. There were few shots of Katarina herself, and so Magdalena understood that her cousin had been the photographer in most of them. But there was something unsettling about the sheer number of pictures, as if Katarina were trying to take hold of each moment, to pin it like a butterfly in a shadow box.

“The children are easily bored,” Katarina explained. “That’s why when we go somewhere on vacation we have to pick a place with lots of activities for them.” When Magdalena pointed out that they could come to Rosmarina, her cousin only mumbled something about its inaccessibility from the mainland.

Her eyes dropped to the documents on Michael’s desk—agreements, fiscal projections, a clipping from the
Wall Street Journal
in which she saw his name. She contemplated opening the desk’s drawers, but the cat, an alien-looking Siamese that had followed her into the office, was watching her from atop a bookcase with unblinking eyes and an expression that seemed to say,
I know what you’re doing.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing, cat,” she told him in soft Croatian, and decided against any further trespass.

The cat accompanied her when she left the study, weaving almost urgently around her ankles when she stopped outside her cousin’s studio door. But while the doors to all the other rooms stood open, the studio was locked. And when she lowered her eye to the keyhole, she could make out nothing in the gloom.

A short time later the children returned, Christopher making the sound of an airplane and Tabitha telling Jazmin—who had been drafted into ferrying the children around since Jadranka’s disappearance—about a computer game she wanted.

Jadranka’s letters had prepared Magdalena for the children’s packed schedule of art classes and playdates. They were as different from the children Magdalena taught as the earth is from the sky. On Rosmarina, children much younger than Christopher knew the tracks that led to the Peak. They spent hours outdoors, in bands that roamed the island. But Katarina’s son and daughter had milky complexions, even in summer, and were as helpless as baby mice.

“
You
have to draw something,” Christopher ordered Magdalena when she passed the open door of their playroom.

“Like what?”

He looked at his sister. “Like us.”

“I don’t really draw,” she told him with a smile.

She was not used to being ordered about by children, but she missed the way her pupils filled her Rosmarina classroom with their laughter and shouts, disrupting the neat rows of desks and spilling into the aisles. And so she joined them at the table, making an attempt at the children’s profiles, satisfied in the end that she had gotten the proportions of their faces. But when she presented the sketches, she saw immediately the guarded look that they exchanged.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Tabitha shook her head.

“Can you keep a secret?” Christopher wanted to know.

“Of course.”

He wore a sly expression when he went to one of the easels, as if knowing he was doing something for which he might be punished. Peeling back the empty sheets of paper, he removed one sheet from beneath and delivered it to her at the table.

Magdalena stared at the multiple studies of the children: Christopher in profile, Tabitha listening to her headphones, both of them sitting at the table where she now sat, working in rapt attention on some project.

“These aren’t even the best ones,” he told her.

“No?” she asked.

“Mom took those.”

“Chris,” Tabitha said in a warning voice.

“Why would she take them?” Magdalena asked.

“She said we couldn’t have them anymore after Jadranka left.”