The First Rule of Swimming (20 page)

It came upon her without warning then: the face of the woman who was not Jadranka.

“Lena,” Damir said again. He held the palm of her hand to his cheek.

She wanted in that moment to do as Jadranka had done, to slip loose from her life like a fish that breaks free of a hook. And so she led him into his bedroom, which was plainer than she had thought, the walls more austere, the beige coverlet bereft of any pattern.

There was an open package of almonds beside the bed, and she placed one experimentally on her tongue, as if it were a magic pill that could transport them to another dimension, away from New York, and away from Rosmarina. She offered him one, so that this was what he tasted of when he kissed her.

A low current passed from her legs to the muscles in her arms, more pronounced than in her youth, to the tip of her tongue, which had found a chip in one of Damir’s teeth and probed gently at this new geography. In a moment, she thought, something inside her would contract so violently that it would pull them both under.

But after the undressing and the matching of curved and hollow parts, after the twisting and the joining of their bodies, after they lay side by side on his bed and looked at the ceiling, neither daring to look at the other, she felt the invisible fishing line growing back. Stretched taut, even from this distance.

The next morning she rose before dawn. He was still sleeping, facedown, one arm outstretched as if reaching for her in his sleep. Quietly, she gathered her still-damp clothes from the bedroom floor and dressed in the kitchen, the linoleum cool against the soles of her bare feet.

There was a writing tablet on the counter, and as she buttoned her shirt she read a few of his notes in the glow from the oven’s clock.
Interview at UN, 3 p.m. Must replace tape recorder. Bread.

She tore a sheet from beneath this one and stood looking at it for a long moment. But she could think of nothing to write, and so she folded the empty page and threw it in the garbage.

She let herself into Katarina’s house quietly, climbing the stairs to Vinka’s room in socked feet.

Magdalena had been a toddler when Katarina’s family left Rosmarina, and so she could not connect the elderly woman who lived in the time capsule of her third-floor bedroom to the photographs in her album. And while it was true that Luka had spoken of his escapades with Vinka, she had been like a storybook character to his granddaughters, as remote and fantastical as America itself.

Katarina had already explained that emigration had been hardest on her mother. Her father had his political gatherings, his protests and his causes, but it was Vinka who stayed up half the night doing other people’s mending as Katarina slept and Vlaho dozed on the couch.

She had given birth to Katarina late in life, at the age of forty-five, and she had been fifty at the time of their emigration to America. “That type of thing,” Katarina had explained. “It’s harder when you’re older.”

The forgetting had started eighteen months ago. At first Vinka forgot little things: the date or where she’d left her knitting. She would smile in embarrassment when it happened, telling Katarina,
Your mother has become a silly old woman.
But within a few months she was misplacing ever more valuable things: money, a piece of jewelry.

It had been her custom to take daily walks in Central Park, and one day she got lost, wandering for hours until night fell. A policeman found her by the park’s boathouse, trying to unchain a rowboat. “She wanted to go back to Rosmarina,” Katarina told Magdalena. “She’d decided that life was better back there.”

Because of her rapidly worsening dementia,
Nona
Vinka rarely remembered Pittsburgh anymore, even in lucid moments like the one Magdalena had witnessed the day before. She could not recall the names of families they had gone to church with, or any of the schools Katarina had attended. She merely looked confused at the mention of the tailor shop, although sometimes in dreams her hands moved as if she were sewing.

But she remembered everything about Rosmarina, and about her family’s escape. Sometimes her eyes darted around the room, her hands poised as if to strike mosquitoes that had descended on their refugee camp room again.

She was wide awake and dressed when Magdalena pushed open her bedroom door. She sat on her bed crocheting, not bothering to look up. “I knew you’d be back,” she told Magdalena in a level voice.

“What is it that I did?” Magdalena asked. “You said that I brought something upon us.”

“You know,” her great-aunt said, looking up in exasperation.

“Tell me.”

“He killed himself because of you, because he couldn’t stand the shame.”

Magdalena’s heart beat like an erratic drum. “Goran,” she said, her father’s name foreign on her tongue.

“Of course Goran. And with
him.
The chief of police and biggest UDBA agent on the island.”

A radio alarm jumped to life somewhere in the house below them. It meant that Tabitha and Christopher would soon fill the air with their laughter and complaints, and Katarina would want to know where she had been all night.

But it was clear that
Nona
Vinka was only getting started. “And your poor daughter—”

She hesitated at this. “Magdalena?”

“No, the other one. You poisoned her life from the very start.”
Nona
Vinka looked away, as if she could not stand to look at Magdalena anymore. “It’s a sin,” she muttered.

“What is?”

“To make a child share the blood of a man like that.”

F
rom his sickbed, Luka cannot identify the sound that comes after every roll of thunder, the one that goes
clack-clack-clack, clack-clack.
It is both metallic and wooden, like hail falling on a rooftop. But there is cause and effect between the thunder and that sound which perplexes him, each deafening roar followed immediately by
clack-clack,
and then by calm.

A child is shouting in the lane outside. Luka can hear the scraping of the boy’s bicycle tires as he turns circles, the muffled sound of his sandal on the pavement as he steadies himself to make his revolutions tighter, the chain jumping from one gear to the next.

The sound reminds him of his mother’s wooden knitting needles. Firecrackers. A game his sisters—sitting cross-legged in the courtyard—used to play with pebbles that they attempted to catch in a single hand.

His granddaughters demand to know how the story ends. They are no longer satisfied with the happy tales of his childhood, the adventures and escapades. He realizes that he cannot protect them from everything, but even so, there are things one does not tell children.

“Luka?” someone beside his bed leans forward so that the chair creaks. They press their fingers into his wrist, and he feels the echo of his heartbeat beneath this pressure, an erratic reverberation along the length of his entire arm:
clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

His granddaughters must never learn of it, he wants to tell the sound.

It is 1942 and freezing rain pelts the forest, striking bark and bouncing from the wintry ground. It showers the coat he and Vinka huddle beneath, curled tightly together as if they share the same womb, and when they finally rise after the downpour, there are red welts where their hands held the edges of thick fabric.

They look so alike that in the mountains they are mistaken for twins, although Vinka is his junior by five years. She is also tiny by comparison, so that when she wears his trousers she must roll them at the cuff. But she shares his dark eyes and arched nose, and since they have cropped her brown hair—the lice too fiendish to be endured—she looks like his miniature double.

Clack-clack-clack,
the crack of gunfire in the forest.
Clack,
the sound an axe makes when it splits wood.

Vinka had insisted on accompanying him into the war, but he had refused. “It isn’t safe,” he told her.

“Where is it safe?” she had wanted to know.

The danger is no longer their father, who is a shadow of his former self, but the Italians. They take a group of the town’s young men to the Devil’s Stones and mow them down with machine guns. He goes later to the site of that reprisal, the same place he has tied up his boat a thousand times. There are sharp chips in the pier’s stone wall, and although an unknown hand has removed the bullet casings and washed away the blood, fragments of stone litter the ground. He crouches to pick up the sharp pieces, passing them from hand to hand:
clack-clack, clack-clack.

It is sheer coincidence that prevents his inclusion in their number. The morning of the reprisal, his mother asks him to go up to the Peak and gather herbs for a cough that has plagued them all during the long winter. She gives strict instructions of where to look, which grasses to select, whether to cut them at the stalk or at the root. One of the herbs requires that he wait for the sun to dry all the moisture from its leaves, and it is while he is severing this very plant with his knife that he hears the reports from below.

Things look unchanged from his position on the Peak: woodsmoke rises lazily from several chimneys in the town, and the sea shimmers hundreds of feet below him, its surface fretted by a wind that has started in the middle of the previous night. Later he wonders if his mother had somehow prophesied the day’s events. She usually sends her daughters on such tasks, but that morning insisted that he be the one to go on the errand. “It isn’t safe,” she told him, walking away from him abruptly, the matter settled, the rosary’s wooden beads clicking in her pocket.

The place for women during wartime is at home, and he does not realize that Vinka intends to follow him in the next group of Partisan hopefuls who escape the island, the boats carrying only three or four people at a time, sliding quiet and dark into the nighttime waters. He does not realize that she has left a note for their sisters to read to their mother, and that by the time she finds him in Split nobody is able—or willing—to ensure her safe return to the island.

Other women have joined the guerrilla bands in the mountains, though at seventeen she is among the youngest. They show her how to fire a gun, how to conceal a knife. They tell her what happens to Partisan women who are caught, and her young face goes pale at the details of this torture.

“They’ll never catch me,” she tells him afterwards. “I’ll kill myself first.”

The words strike fear in Luka, and he will not allow their separation. At night he sleeps beside her, aware that even the other men in their unit—men he would lay down his life for under other circumstances—follow her with their eyes.

She is hungry for olive oil. Rancid pork fat and suet turn her stomach, and she is growing thin. He can see her cheekbones beginning to form triangles of shadow in her face. He is afraid that she will disappear before his eyes.

For his part, he longs for the smell of Dalmatian pine, its sap oozing in the sun. And for the sage, bay, and juniper that grow in the underbrush. It is his father’s custom to infuse his grappa with those plants, and although Luka is no drinker, he imagines the way that sweet-smelling fire will burn a path down to his stomach.

It is his sense of smell that is most assaulted in the war. He does not mind the danger of living in the forest as much as he minds the unwashed bodies huddled together. Nothing is ever completely dry—not their coats or their socks—and everything festers with a whitish, human-smelling rot. Lice have the full run of their bodies, and he shaves his own head before helping Vinka crop her hair.

“It’ll grow back,” he tells her softly, running one hand through the uneven tufts, unable to look directly at the braid he holds in the other. But no sooner does he speak than she takes it from him and hurls it into the underbrush.

One day the political officer in their unit sees them praying before a meal. “Where is your God?” he asks them in amusement, waving at the trees, lifting his eyes to the sky. “How can you prove to me that he exists?”

“How can you prove to me that he doesn’t?” Vinka asks evenly. “You keep your Marx, and I’ll keep my God.”

But the man does not smile at this. He tells them: “We are all brothers and sisters now, but I am telling you for your own good that a new day is coming.”

Luka shakes his head dismissively. The new country will be all things that they envision, an end to plague and pestilence. He has lived a hungry life, and he looks forward to a time of plenty, a time of justice. The fight is pointless otherwise.

They dismiss this skinny man from a far-off city they have never heard of, aware as they do that he writes details in his little book. “There will be a time,” he tells them.

In those days they see God everywhere, or what they assume to be God. In the songbirds that sing from the branches, but with different voices from the birds in Rosmarina’s carob trees. In the creaking of timbers at night and the fires that they are allowed to build in caves, the wood never entirely dry, so that it crackles when exposed to the flame.

The clatter of horses’ hooves, the sound of artillery, the quick boring of a bullet through bone: he will remember these things all his life. He remembers them now as he lies waiting in the anteroom of death.

Despite his best intentions, they are separated during heavy fighting. He thinks it is for the best and that she will be more protected at their base camp. And so he is farther up the lines when someone gets word to him that Vinka is ill.

“Typhus?” he demands fearfully, because the disease is tearing through their numbers, borne by the vermin that have permanently occupied their bodies. But they will not confirm this, nor will they meet his eyes.

He finds her curled in a tight ball beneath a tree, lying on her side. Another woman he does not recognize sits beside her, stroking her hair.

Vinka’s forehead is cool to the touch, and so Luka runs his hands down her arms and legs, over her face. In his mind, he is looking for bullet holes, but when he rips her coat open he finds no blood. “You’re fine,” he insists, rebuttoning her coat clumsily with numb hands. “Fine.”

But when he makes her stand, he sees that the cord that held up her trousers has been slit, and that there is blood on her legs.

“What happened?” he demands of the woman who holds Vinka up on the other side.

“What do you think?” she asks him. She is at least a decade older than him, with the thick skin and blunt speech of a peasant.

“Who?”

She shakes her head. “I found her like this.”

“Who?” he demands of Vinka this time. He carries a knife in his boot, and he reaches for it now. “I’ll kill him.”

And perhaps for this reason, she refuses to say anything at all.

It is January and one of the key battles of the war is being fought, a German offensive that will end in failure, so that generations of Yugoslavia’s children will sing of it in triumph. His own children will memorize its circumstances, the movements of divisions, the speeches of great men.

“Lice,” he will tell them, because of all the details they are taught, this one is most commonly overlooked. “We were crawling with lice, at every moment of every day. That vermin even walked among us.”

But in that moment he still thinks he can bring the lost thing back to Vinka’s eyes, that he can avenge her, and so he hoists her over his shoulder. He makes it across the bridge with her, the Germans bombing with planes and the shrapnel tearing swaths through the canopy. On the safety of the far shore he lies all night beside her, holding her cold hand in his warm one.
Clack,
the sound of shovels in the distance,
clack,
the meeting of metal and stone.

Many years later, a semiconscious Luka lies in the dark, finally piecing together that the sound is the trembling of his closed bedroom door, the lightning strikes so close that they cause it to quiver on its hinges.

But the young Luka has no language for things such as this, and so he kisses his sister’s hands and weeps on the papery skin of her face as she stares at the stars above them. She wears a pendant of the Virgin Mary, and at one point she removes it from her thin, white neck and he places that failed talisman between his chattering teeth.

For years after the war he is dogged by the smell of death, and he supposes that it is the same for Vinka, although she never speaks of it.

It rises suddenly as he passes the doors of dark and abandoned houses, or when he climbs upward through fallow olive groves. He will be working on the engine of his car, hands blackened, and it comes upon him without warning so that he freezes and quickly expels all the air from his lungs. Then he counts to thirty before breathing again. In this way, he manages again and again to elude it, though only for a time.

He is not a violent man, but he is prone to violent dreams: bright splashes of blood upon white walls and bones that give like wooden boards beneath his fists.

“Stop,” a tiny voice orders him in the dream, and he sits back in surprise, only then noticing the man he has pinned to the ground and the rawness of his own knuckles.

He takes several shaky breaths, realizing that he has very nearly killed the man whose face he never recognizes, just like the faces he never saw from the Second World War, the ones he shot at in the forest just as they shot back at him in explosions of bark, as shrapnel dropped through the canopy of trees.

Sometimes the man is his enemy. Sometimes Vinka has agreed to point him out. But often it is a perfect stranger. And Luka looks at him in shock, taking in his swollen eyes and bloody mouth, feeling the burn of his own raw skin, and says in a choked voice, “I mistook you for another.”

After the war ends and brother and sister return to Rosmarina, there are several plagues, in quick succession.

One year, a blight strikes the vineyards and half the vines die, shriveling beneath the sun like dead worms. In another, the sea is thick with jellyfish, their bodies gliding in eerie formations through the water like the airplanes he remembers from the war. In a third, a number of dogs in the village die of a mysterious ailment, including his bitch, Roki, who refuses to take food or water and slowly wastes away on the courtyard’s stones, Magdalena slipping from her bed at night to lie alongside her, as if believing her body a shield that can keep death away. He refuses other dogs after that, even after the village has repopulated itself with new litters. He tells his wife and granddaughters that they must be content to play with the cats that appear in the courtyard from time to time.

There are plagues of tiny, black-winged insects, and his sister gives birth to two dead children in quick succession. There is contamination of the island’s wells. Informers overrun the island, and both his son and Vinka disappear. There are political arrests and other wars.

In 1991, the island is under a naval blockade. Fishermen pace Rosmarina nervously, unused to so many consecutive days on land, and the island ferry sits uselessly in Split Harbor. After three days, fresh milk begins to sour, and after ten the shelves of the island’s only stores are empty. “Surely they can’t mean to starve us out,” Ružica says with a worried face.

Even Luka, who never likes to leave the island, scans the horizon for the white shape of the ferry, which plows through the water as resolutely as a matron on her way to Mass. For months it does not appear, and they watch the news tensely as one town and then another on the mainland is bombarded and laid to waste. Sometimes, far above them, they see an airplane, black and birdlike, on its way to a bombing mission.