The First Rule of Swimming (7 page)

Inside were receipts and old pay stubs, batteries, and half-empty tubes of makeup. There were photographs, pictures of their grandfather in his boat and of the sisters as children. In one shot they stood against a wall of the house, Magdalena—about five—looking to the side, as if something had suddenly caught her attention. But Jadranka, who appeared to be barely walking at the time, was laughing at the photographer, so that her eyes were nearly shut in the baby fat of her cheeks.
Who could have made her laugh like that?
Magdalena wondered. She could no longer remember.

Down the hall, her mother turned off the shower, and a short time later Magdalena heard the radio on top of the washing machine jump to life. There were a few moments of white noise as she twirled the dial, passing through a weather report and a classical music station. She settled finally on the Beatles and began singing along in broken English.

She had a good voice, and Magdalena listened for a moment, softening slightly when she heard that in her mother’s interpretation, Lucy was in a sky with lions.

Halfway through the year that she and Jadranka spent in Split, her younger sister stopped speaking. It happened without warning. One day she was chattering about the stray cats in the courtyard, and the next she was absolutely silent.

“Say something,” their mother had insisted on the first morning, kneeling before her seven-year-old daughter on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, shaking Jadranka as if she could make the words fall out of her mouth like apples from a tree.

But Jadranka only stared at their mother as Nikola muttered in the background that he knew the surest way to restore her speech.

“Shut up!” their mother had told him for once. “Can’t you see that the girl’s upset?”

But Jadranka did not look upset. She returned to her breakfast of bread and butter and refused to meet anybody’s eyes. Even later, when she and Magdalena were alone in their room, she refused to say a single word.

Don’t worry,
she wrote on a piece of paper as her sister watched. But when Magdalena insisted that she write more, Jadranka only crumpled it in her fist.

The silence continued for several weeks, their mother coaxing her to speak, Jadranka resolutely staring back as if she could not be certain as to the nature of these requests, Nikola raging in the background that it was clear the girl wanted nothing more than attention. Even one night when he hit her, the blow landing on the side of her face with such force that she crumpled to the floor, Jadranka refused to make a sound.

Their mother had been working an evening shift, and Magdalena lowered her head and charged him like a bull. But Nikola had swatted her away, stumbling to the kitchen in search of a bottle.

“It’s okay,” Magdalena promised her sister in a whisper when they were safely in their room, the door locked, lying face-to-face on the mattress. “I’m going to make him sorry.”

But Jadranka only regarded her sister somberly and shook her head.

Children in the neighborhood began to call her names, but she ignored them. Teachers punished her, nonplussed by her willfulness. But still she maintained her obstinate silence. She was taken to see a doctor, an older man with snowy hair who could find nothing wrong with her. He sat her on his examining table and looked into her eyes. “Now, child,” he told her sternly. “Explain this nonsense.”

But Jadranka merely blinked at him.

“There’s no physiological reason she isn’t speaking,” Magdalena overheard him explain to their mother. “This degree of stubbornness is rare in such a small child.”

She drew incessantly. She sketched on napkins and scraps of paper. After school, she drew taunting children’s faces. When Nikola went on benders, she drew pictures of the sisters flying high above the city or huddled together in a room with earthen walls.

“Like rabbits,” Magdalena had said, because she knew they were Jadranka’s favorite animal.

“No more drawing!” their mother had screamed, confiscating her pencils and scraps of paper, emptying the drawers in the desk that the girls shared. “No more drawing until you stop this!”

But Magdalena always managed to smuggle paper to her sister: the back of her math homework, a page torn from the end of a book, pieces of cardboard that she scavenged from the garbage. And in this way they developed a secret language. Slowly at first, Magdalena not always understanding the nature of her sister’s drawings, Jadranka frustrated at not being understood.

“You could always open your mouth and say something,” Magdalena would remind her.

But Jadranka’s lips remained steadfastly shut until six months later when their mother admitted defeat and returned them to the island.

Today, Jadranka continued to sketch constantly. She drew on napkins and paper tablecloths. She carried a small sketchbook with her and always kept a larger one at home, and it puzzled Magdalena not to find any of them among her sister’s things.

Ana had returned to the room and was standing in front of a floor-length mirror, drying her hair with a towel. “I burned them when she left,” she explained calmly. “I didn’t want her coming back here.”

The women regarded each other for a long moment through the reflection, and then it was her mother who broke the silence, her eyes sliding away from Magdalena’s. “I wanted her to go. To be rid of us.”

At first Magdalena did not believe her. She watched the rigid line of her mother’s shoulders, a pose that managed to be both resigned and challenging.

“Why?” she asked after a stunned moment. “Why would you burn them?”

“I needed to be certain that she would stay away,” Ana said, applying powder to the bridge of her nose. “That’s what they did in the war. When they wanted to make sure nobody returned to the villages, they would burn them down and kill all the animals. They’d make sure there was no reason to come back.”

Magdalena felt the old fury rise.

“She’s making a new beginning—” Ana started to say.

Magdalena stopped only long enough in the kitchen to yank her purse from the back of a chair, upending it with a crash. But even as she plunged down the stairs, she could hear her mother calling after her, down the building’s stairwell. “If you were smart, you’d leave, too,” she was shouting.

T
he courtyard gate creaks open, and for a brief moment Luka picks up the sounds of Rosmarina’s port: women hawking their lavender oil from stands and the laughter of boys who are fishing from the pier. He thinks he can even hear one man slap another on the back and say something about the previous evening. But as he waits for a response, the gate slams as if the wind has blown it back on its hinges, or as if someone has leaned against it with all their weight.

He can hear a woman’s steps through the courtyard, the way they falter outside the kitchen door. But when she enters the rooms below him, her voice is artificially bright. His daughter’s voice, perhaps, or one of his granddaughters. He cannot be sure.

Ružica’s response is low and worried.
Drowned,
he thinks she is saying.

He was six on the day a ferry from the mainland capsized. The sea was perfectly calm, a
bonaca
turning its surface into a single sheet of glass, but the ship had overturned regardless. By the time the alarm was raised in the town, most passengers had swum to the Devil’s Stones or awaited rescue by hanging on to the ship’s debris. But two women, both from Rosmarina, had not even known how to float.

He was on the
riva
when their bodies were brought in. He had slipped between adults who spoke in low, anxious voices and shaded their eyes to watch the horizon where the survivors treaded water, too far away to identify. When the fishing boat conveyed the drowned women to shore, a collective silence fell over the waterfront, and it was the boat’s owner who noticed him standing where he meant to tie up. He shouted for the boy to move away, but it was too late, and all the way home Luka was pursued by the sight of the wet and twisted dresses at the bottom of the boat.

He could not fathom what it meant to drown, nor why women of his mother’s generation considered swimming an indecent act, preferring the stifling drapery of their long skirts. He had been secretly teaching his sister Vinka to swim in deserted coves where they stripped down to their underwear and then allowed the sun to dry all evidence of this transgression.

The first rule of swimming, he had told her, was to stay afloat. He had demonstrated by lying back in the water, buoyed by the warm currents on the surface.

The first time he let go, she went under and came up coughing water, but the second time her hair spread out on the surface like the sudden blooming of a flower, and she smiled. “It’s like flying,” she told him happily as they walked home.

News of the drowned women reached his mother before he did. “What is it?” she asked frantically when he burst into the kitchen. She took his pale face in her hands. “What did you see?”

He wanted only to hide in some dark corner of the house, but instead she hurried him to the chapel that was halfway to the Peak, dragging him along so quickly that they were breathless when they reached its doors. They knelt before an oil painting of the Virgin Mary, and although his mother usually prayed quietly, on that day he could hear each word of her lamentations.

He reached out and grabbed a handful of her dark skirt. Without pausing in her prayer, or even looking at him, she took his fist into her warm hand.

He discovered that his sister was a fearless diver, and together they explored the ledge that separated Rosmarina’s shallows from the open sea. Beyond it was a sharp drop where the water turned inky and cold, and although their grandfather had warned him against going so far from shore, they returned there on dive after dive. Sometimes, holding hands, they allowed the currents to sweep them over so that they had to kick furiously until the ledge was beneath them once again and they could go back to taunting the open sea from safety.

He taught each of his sisters, then his children. He taught his granddaughters, one after the other. He wanted to teach his wife, but she was part of that modest generation and claimed that she did not wish to learn.

“What if something happens?” he wanted to know.

But she rarely left the island and was content with dry land. “What’s going to happen?” she asked him in amusement, telling him that she was too old to learn new tricks and that he should concentrate his efforts on the young.

Both their children took to the water like fish, but Marin was more cautious than his younger sister, coaxing Ana to stay close to the shore. “If you drift out too far,” he told her reasonably, “you’ll get swept out into the Channel.”

Luka had also warned his daughter not to go past the shelf, but the girl was stubborn, and one day he looked up to discover her floating far from the shore. He panicked because strange tides began where the seafloor dropped off, and he had seen sharks in the deep water.

It was the only time that Luka spanked her, dragging her from the water by her arm, her mouth open in shock. For the duration of the punishment she was silent, and it was Marin who pleaded with him. But he shook the boy off, and it was only when her brother stumbled and fell that she burst into tears.

Afterwards, shame overwhelmed Luka, and he took a crying child in each arm, wading back into the shallows with them. He looked down to see a thin, red ribbon in the water and realized that he had bloodied one of Marin’s knees.

He could not stand the look of fear that was in their eyes.

The
jugo
has blown for several days. Warm and sallow, it stirs up the detritus of the sea and brings it into Rosmarina’s shallows. The waves move in long rows from the south and crash against the shore like an assault by lines of endless infantry. In the morning, the rocks will be covered with seaweed and rotting pine branches, soda bottles and plastic bags.

His father’s drinking was always especially bad during the
jugo,
so that from an early age Luka took it as a bad omen. None of the islanders are themselves when the wind blows. His wife becomes melancholy and his daughter uncharacteristically silent. Magdalena becomes irritable, and Jadranka grows angry over nothing at all. Those are always the days when motors refuse to start or glass breaks without reason.

But tonight the wind has brought an unsettling clarity, and it is like reaching the surface for a breath of air. He can neither move nor speak, but he watches his wife’s still profile from the corner of his left eye. He cannot untangle one day from the next.

He did not like Ana’s new boyfriend from Split. He did not like the man’s eyes, his way of speaking, and he initially refused to relinquish his granddaughters to their mother’s care. “Use your head for once,” he told her angrily. “The girls are used to life here. Come back and make a life with them on the island.”

But they were
her
daughters, she told him, and it was
her
right.

At seven Jadranka was too young to understand. She was a girl who laughed easily and found her way into everything: her grandmother’s pots and pans, the shed in the courtyard. Luka had caught her trying to uncover the cistern. “I only wanted to see what was underneath,” she told him, sniffling, after he shouted at her.

Why does he prefer to use the silver line for fishing, she wanted to know, and not the white? Why are there figs at the beginning of summer and at the end of summer, but very few in the middle? Why do islands stay in one place and not move around like boats?

But she never wondered why she was leaving.

At least he could teach her to swim before she went. At least he could do that much.

Up to that point, she had refused to learn, and he thought he knew the reason. Two years earlier a child visiting from the mainland had drowned in Rosmarina’s waters. While Magdalena took the news in stride, Jadranka developed an immediate fear of the sea, waking some nights to the belief that her hair had caught in something and was holding her underwater. She refused lessons the summer she turned five, then again at six, shivering in his arms, and would not relax her stranglehold around his neck when he insisted that she try. Both years his wife had told him, “Patience, Luka. She’ll learn when she’s ready.”

The summer before his granddaughters’ departure, he enlisted Magdalena’s help, because Jadranka would follow her older sister anywhere, and they spent hours in the shallows. He showed Jadranka how to float, how to tread water, how to take a few strokes. He was trying to cheat time because her mother did not see the importance of this instruction.

“When we get to Split, they’ll probably teach her in school,” Ana said indifferently.

Magdalena floated on the other side, shouting words of encouragement. She showed her sister how to do handstands in the water, how to flip forward and backward. She was a motion of arms and legs, and the dark, slick hair of her head resembled a porpoise’s skin.

Jadranka tried to spin but came up coughing water. It would be a while before she mastered the somersaults, Luka thought, but she was a proficient floater, and he was satisfied. He picked her up and held her so that her legs kicked above the surface and water poured from her in sheets.

The girls were inseparable. At night he could hear them whispering together in their room.

“You must continue looking out for one another now,” he told them solemnly, as autumn drew near.

To this end he had told them stories of his own escapades with Vinka. Those tales were his granddaughters’ favorites, so that they asked for them by name. Again and again he described sawing their parents’ bed in half, their clandestine swimming lessons, the way they shared everything.

“Tell us again,
Dida,
” they begged, “about the asps.”

And so, for the hundredth time, he told them of the warning system that Vinka had devised, the way of hanging laundry a certain way. If a sheet was first on the line, he could come home, but if any article of clothing hung in that position, his father had been drinking and Luka needed to stay away.

“Two nights,” he told his wide-eyed granddaughters. “For two nights we hid out on the Peak, afraid, because it was autumn and the asps come out in autumn. The nights were freezing cold but Vinka refused to leave me, and so we huddled together with the goats.”

“What would have happened if you went home?” one or the other always asked.

“Ajme,”
he would tell them gravely. “I don’t like to consider it.”

For two nights Luka and Vinka had slept side by side beneath constellations so bright that brother and sister could see the features of the other’s face. “I’ll kill him one day,” he had sworn, although he did not tell his granddaughters this part.

He readily narrated the fates of his other sisters: Zora, who died as a young woman in an accident on a foggy stretch of road; Zlatka, who passed away peacefully in her sleep as an old woman. And Iva, who died of cancer a year after Zlatka. But when talking about Vinka, he confined his stories to their childhood adventures.

He suspected that these tales were the reason the sisters disappeared from the house on the morning they were supposed to leave the island, missing the morning ferry and postponing their departure by a day.

Ana looked for them beneath beds and in the courtyard’s shed. She searched all the cupboards and closets, and the expression on her face turned from bafflement to irritation. “I told Nikola we’d be back today,” she kept repeating, looking at her father as if it were his fault, as if he had been the one to suggest they run away.

“They don’t want to go,” he finally told her. “Imagine what life in Split will look like after this?” He gestured towards the lane where cars seldom passed and to the waterfront where every shopkeeper and fisherman knew the girls by name.

It was Magdalena, he realized. Magdalena who had gone to bed last night with that betrayed expression on her face. “I don’t want to go,
Dida,
” she had whispered.

They discovered that the girls had taken their schoolbags, emptying paper and pens in a pile on the desk in their room. Ružica reported a short time later that bread and cheese had been pilfered from the pantry, along with a box of Jadranka’s favorite biscuits. They had taken water, as well, and candles from the box on the washroom shelf, and secretly he marveled at Magdalena’s resourcefulness.

He found them some hours later in a deserted house beneath the Peak, Jadranka grinning at him happily from where she sat cross-legged on the floor, eating her biscuits in the midst of this adventure. But Magdalena backed away from him into a corner of the room.

“Come, child.” He held his hand out to her, heavyhearted.

“No,” she told him evenly.

Her refusal saddened him, not because it was insolent but because it would change nothing. A quick-witted girl, she had been as much his shadow as Jadranka was hers. Since she could walk, she had been fascinated by boats of every variety, missing no opportunity to accompany him when he went fishing. She could recite the names of fish, their feeding patterns, the likelihood of encountering them in shoals or in the deep.

“What will I do in Split?” she had asked him miserably.

At eleven, her contemporaries were already wearing makeup and simpering at boys, but other fishermen observed Magdalena’s proficiency with nets and the lightning speed with which she could scale a fish. “She’s worth her weight in gold,” they told him. “So what if she’s a girl?”

When they were at their fishing camp on the Devil’s Stones, her sister occupied her time by weaving rosemary into wreaths or building small structures with rocks, entire colonies for a race of invisible, three-inch men. But Magdalena was at his side constantly, and years after his son’s escape he poured his knowledge into this second eager vessel.

He was tempted to return and tell their mother that he had not found them, to allow her to return to Split alone, but he knew that this would only postpone the inevitable, and through the window he could see that night was already falling. “Come,” he told her again. “You can do better than the life of a fisherman.”

He had spoken halfheartedly of the better schools in Split, of the city’s illustrious history. But she burst into tears at his words, and he only managed to lure her down with the promise of one more swimming lesson in the morning, Jadranka lying on the surface between them as if they alone could make her float.