The First Rule of Swimming (27 page)

Five years later

H
is aunt has sent him a picture of his name. In a letter that accompanies the flat cardboard envelope, she explains that it is an exercise she has done for school, and she is glad he does not have a name with many letters.

From the
L
she has made a drawing of Rosmarina’s lighthouse, a length of the
riva
at its feet.
U
is the hull of a boat that plies a very blue sea. For
K
she has chosen an overhang of rock on the Peak, with small olive trees that cling to the slopes of the letter.
A
is the boy’s great-grandmother, and although the figure is clad in black from her skirt to the kerchief that holds back her hair, her cheeks are a soft pink, and the boy recognizes her at once.

Magdalena hangs the picture over the bed in his room. She is aware that he watches it until he falls asleep, especially the figure of a small boy that her sister has drawn just above it, who lies on his stomach and holds a pencil as if he has just finished drawing those letters himself.

“It’s me,” he tells her in excitement, pointing at the figure’s familiar head of dark hair, the shirt that is identical to a photograph she had sent her sister some weeks before with the message
He’s getting so big that you’ll hardly recognize him.

The boy has a vague picture of his aunt because she has visited the island only a few times since his birth. He remembers her red hair and recognizes her photograph, the one where his mother stands beside her and the two women have linked their arms and are smiling into the camera. He opens each envelope with anticipation, never sure what he will find inside, and the drawings arrive so regularly that they paper the walls of his room.

It is not like his father, who is often gone to places with names he cannot pronounce. Places like Kandahar and Havana and Durban that sound as if they come from storybooks. His father has given him a map, and when he is at home the two of them sit together at the kitchen table—Magdalena watching them with a smile over the assignments she is grading—and place little pins in all those distant places. The map had frightened him at first because when his father showed him Rosmarina, it was so small that it appeared like a speck of dust in all that vastness.

He has been to Split several times with his mother, a ferry ride so long that their passage seems to take days, although his mother shows him the elapsing hours on her watch, the big hand that moves quickly and the small hand that hardly seems to move at all. But the distance on the map is tiny, so that when his father shows him the places he goes on his trips, Luka is under the impression that it takes his father weeks to get there, then weeks to get back.

He recognizes his father’s voice because he hears it regularly on his mother’s radio. He is aware even at the age of four that it is much more serious than the voice he hears through the telephone each Friday. He has also heard his aunt’s voice because she sometimes calls from New York, a city that is marked on the map with a special red pin. His aunt is studying art there, and his mother explains that students do not have much money and therefore cannot make many telephone calls to Rosmarina.

His cousins José and Adriano live in New York, as well. He likes them because whenever they visit Rosmarina with their parents, they teach him the Spanish names for things, words he forgets between visits but which his uncle Marin explains have planted themselves in his mind like seedlings.

This summer his mother is teaching him to swim, and every afternoon they walk to a shallow cove where she slides from the rocks first, making sure that there are no urchins in the way. He is a brave boy, but he is frightened of those black creatures with their ruffling spines, and he is glad each time she holds her arms out to him so that she can lift him away from the rocks where they may be hiding.

She will not buy him inflatable water wings like the tourist children often wear. “No, Luka,” she has explained. “You’re an islander, and that means you must learn to really swim.”

But he likes the idea of those bright plastic doughnuts that keep other children afloat and watches jealously as they kick their feet and swim as far from shore as the grown-ups. They do not have to worry about their heads dipping beneath the surface and swallowing salty water that burns their noses.

“What if all the air goes out of them?” his mother asks him reasonably. She points to the distance, where the Devil’s Stones loom. “What if you get out there and you don’t know how to swim?”

He had not thought of this and concedes that this would be a problem, and besides, he likes their lessons. He lies back in the water, stretching out his arms and legs. For him, swimming is coolness and the sun that is always warm upon his face. He likes his mother’s cheerful green bathing suit and the long, wet hair that she usually pins back. He likes that even when she removes her hands, insisting that he must learn to do it on his own, they are always somewhere there below him.

I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the Bellagio Center, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, and George Mason University. To Asya Muchnick, whose suggestions were so astute that they often took my breath away. To Elise Capron, who believed though the road was long. To Ethan Nosowsky and David Groff, who gave invaluable advice on early drafts. To my friends Maria Mayo, Laura Sims, Jennie Page, Nina Herzog, Mei Ng, and Meeghan Truelove, whose readings helped lift numerous fogs. To my mother, whose thoughtful comments helped shape this book. To my father, who gave me the sea. And to my husband, who ate each sack of salt with me so that I would not have to eat a single one of them alone.

Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of
Stillness: And Other Stories,
named a 2003 Best Book by the
Chicago Tribune,
a Notable Book by the
New York Times,
and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Her memoir
The Stone Fields
was short-listed for the Freedom of Expression Award by the Index on Censorship. Brkic has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives outside Washington, DC.

Stillness: And Other Stories

The Stone Fields

courtneyangelabrkic.com

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Title Page
Welcome Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part II
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part III
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part IV
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part V
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part VI
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Courtney Angela Brkic
Newsletters
Copyright Page