The First Rule of Swimming (8 page)

Rosmarina had always existed, he told them in his stories, although he knew this could hardly be true. He was not an educated man, but he understood that land rose upward into mountains only to be scraped down again by wind and rain. Tundras melted and froze over, entire seas dried up into deserts. Still, he let them think that Rosmarina had existed since the dawn of time.

It was the farthest inhabited island from the mainland. The journey took five hours, but he could remember a time when Rosmarina was remoter still, before automobiles and daily ferry connections, when a trip to Split was like striking out into a different country. Now the mainland drew them ever closer, as if it had caught Rosmarina on a hook and was reeling it steadily in.

He was often returning from night fishing as the ferry slipped out of the harbor towards the open sea. He watched its illuminated bulk from his fishing boat, imagining the hull filled with the island’s children, all lying head-to-toe in stacks like canned sardines. The problem, he thought, was that they had watched too much television and believed in softer lives in other places.

“As if we’re bleeding to death, my Lena,” he told his elder granddaughter on nights she accompanied him, the ferry lights spectral on her young face.

He himself went to Split on the same ferry several times a year. So, really, he knew the passengers did not lie head-to-toe in stacks like sardines. He made the trip when he needed to buy fishing equipment or when Ružica needed something for the house. She packed his lunch—a sandwich and some hardboiled eggs—and he drove his ancient Fiat onto the floating monster. Each time his wheels relinquished the stone pier of the island for the rumbling metal loading plank, he panicked and had to concentrate on keeping his hands on the steering wheel. The episodes had only worsened with age.

Sometimes he grew angry with himself. He asked himself, a little viciously,
What is it that you fear, stupid old man?
And the answer had not changed in twenty years or more. He saw it in the eyes that watched him from the rearview mirror:
I fear death away from the island.

Part of him believed he might die on the boat, or in Split. He was afraid that the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes would be Rosmarina receding behind him, or, worse, the filthy water along Split’s
riva
from where the island could not be seen even on the clearest days. In fact, he knew that it could not be seen from any point in the city because decades ago, returning from the Second World War, he and Vinka had climbed Marjan Mountain to see for themselves. Rosmarina was so far out to sea as to be wholly invisible, a state of affairs that pleased him when he was home and frightened him when he was not. In a recurring nightmare he’d had since the war, he was returning from the mainland in his own boat, but the island had vanished. He crossed the space where it should be, oriented himself using the other islands, and recrossed it. But the island had disappeared.

On the ferry journey back, he usually bought coffee. In good weather, he found a bench outside and watched the other islands slip by like pebbles through his fingers. First Bra
č
and Šolta, then Hvar, then Vis and Lastovo on opposite sides in the distance. In summertime billowing sails dotted the sea, and he watched their graceful dips and turns. He looked around him, noting that there usually seemed to be fewer passengers on the return.

Rosmarina always appeared in the distance like a mirage, the Peak like a titan’s head breaking the surface of the water. As they drew closer, he could make out the town and the abandoned olive groves on the terraces beneath the Peak. Like all neglected things, the trees had mutinied. Many had stopped producing fruit because they were not pruned, and because the weeds at their feet sucked all the moisture from the soil. Logically, he knew this, but he could not help thinking that the trees had stopped producing out of anger. Because there were no hands left to pick the olives.

These dark thoughts usually accompanied him on his drive home from the ferry landing. Inside the house, however, he always found warmth and the smell of soup, the girls doing their schoolwork at the kitchen table or helping Ružica slice cucumbers.

If Luka’s dominion was water, then his wife’s was air, and Ružica was teaching Magdalena to pray. She showed the girl how to place her palms together, to point her fingers to the sky, just as she had once shown their son and daughter.

“In the beginning was the sea,” Magdalena told her grandmother confidently one evening as he was coming in.

Ružica laughed at this, looking over the girl’s head at Luka, who was hanging his jacket behind the door.

“That’s not how it goes,” she told her, and showed her in the Bible. “In the beginning was the Word.”

But each time Magdalena began, she got it wrong. “In the beginning was the sea,” she said, so that Luka’s heart expanded, exactly as wind filled a white sail. “And the sea was God.”

I
t was not easy to say goodbye to her grandfather’s unconscious form, so still at dawn that Magdalena wondered if he had died in the night. But when she placed the flat of her palm on his chest, she could feel its incremental rise and fall.

She was leaving because there was still no word from her sister. No matter how abrupt her previous departures, Jadranka had always confided her movements to Magdalena, telephoning from a bus station or ferry terminal and leaving it to her older sister to break the news to their grandparents. “I’ll always tell you,” Jadranka had once assured her.

“So, I’m your keeper,” Magdalena told her a little testily.

“Yes,” Jadranka had responded automatically, with no trace of guile.

She had never vanished altogether, until now.

“Of course you should come,” Katarina told her. “We know people in the State Department who can rush your visa. And I can send the money for your ticket.”

But Magdalena declined the second part of this offer, uncomfortable with the idea of her cousin playing the generous benefactor.

School was in its final weeks, and an older friend—one of Jadranka’s former teachers, in fact—agreed to come out of retirement to teach Magdalena’s remaining classes.

“Your sister has always moved to her own music” was all she would say when told about the matter, her reticence so welcome, her lack of questions such a departure from the prying of other islanders, that Magdalena startled her with a small, fierce hug.

So she kissed her grandmother, who had wept silent tears since making Magdalena’s coffee that morning, and she shut the gate on the quiet courtyard behind her. On her walk to the port, she took in the dark stone houses and the occasional burst of purple bougainvillea. Since her childhood, each leave-taking of Rosmarina had resembled the first one, so that something inside her rebelled at going, even as her feet carried her towards the ferry landing.

She had left everything in order behind her—her grandmother had access to the funds in Magdalena’s bank account, and she had paid the newest crop of bills—but still she descended through the village like a woman on the way to her place of execution. It was as if a cord connected her to Rosmarina, and only for Jadranka did she have the will to fight against it.

This attachment was both habit and biology.

In her childhood a researcher had studied the islanders’ sense of direction. It was a capability he explained in terms of the Inuit in the far-off Arctic, who could find their way through blizzards. “It’s a rare genetic gift,” he had explained to her grandfather.

Magdalena was the only girl involved in his study. She could remember being tested with blindfolds, her boat turned in so many circles that it made her dizzy, and striking out on moonless nights. The scientist had concluded that not everyone on the island possessed the skill—which he termed
innate nautical orientation
—but she belonged squarely to the group that did. As an adult she had looked up the study and found herself referred to simply by her initials: M.B.

It was a pull, she could remember explaining to the scientist when pressed. Like a nail that is dragged across a table by a magnet.

The subject spent one year of childhood on the mainland,
he had written in the study,
although this has not compromised her instincts.

While Jadranka Babi
ć
’s forays had taken her farther and farther from home, her older sister had never flown before the day she left for America, had certainly never stopped to consider the nature of sky she could not see from the ground. While people around her inspected the contents of their seat-back pockets or read newspapers and books, she stared through the window and searched for the plane’s shadow on the runway. But the day was overcast, and she did not think that the ground registered the shape of their ascent.

She was a voracious reader, and so books had already introduced her to the winding alleyways of London and the high passes of the Himalayas. She had stood on the ramparts of barricaded Paris and moved along New York City’s teeming streets.

Although she would not be parted from Rosmarina for long, she had always meant to visit other places, and had even saved her meager teacher’s salary for this purpose. She envisioned returning from those destinations with postcards that she could tack to the bulletin boards of her Rosmarina classroom. The suitcase she checked at Split Airport had lurked in a corner of the attic since her student years, however. She had evicted a family of spiders nesting inside and taken a damp cloth to its exterior, but it still retained a musty odor.

She wore her teacher’s clothes on the journey but left her hair loose. In the harsh fluorescence of the airplane’s toilet, she regarded her reflection dispassionately: small and lithe, her dimensions had not changed appreciably in fifteen years, but tiny fault lines had started at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was still the same dark mass, but there were several long silver threads at the front that she had not considered pulling until that moment. In the end, she left them where they were and returned to her seat for the duration of the flight.

She had not seen Katarina in over twenty years, not since the summer her cousin had spent on the island. She still remembered her as the girl with the piggy eyes, although Jadranka had sent pictures of the family, and Magdalena knew that Katarina’s face had lost its baby fat, that her hair—at one time mousy brown—was now the color of honey.
She’s a big deal,
her sister had written.
Her gallery is always in the newspaper.

The woman in the photographs looked younger than her age. She shared Magdalena’s strong jawline and wore funky silver jewelry. Her smile for the camera was broad.
She has a chip on her shoulder about Rosmarina,
wrote Jadranka.
She got a little drunk one night and told me that the smartest people had been forced to leave the island. That the ones left were mostly gangsters and former Party hacks.

This did not surprise Magdalena, who remembered that, after a year of exchanging postcards and letters, their cousin had arrived on Rosmarina at the age of twelve prepared to find nothing but informers—in the newspaper sellers on the
riva,
and the shopgirls in the market, even among their closest neighbors.

Sunlight struck the airplane’s metal wing, and Magdalena closed her eyes. She imagined Jadranka sitting in a window seat, months earlier, and cloud cover as thick as today obliterating the sea beneath them.

She wondered if Jadranka had the Rosmarina gene. Or, for that matter, if Katarina did.

The American girl who had landed at Split Airport in the summer of 1984 was different from what Magdalena expected, despite the photographs they had exchanged. She was taller, for one thing, with breasts that already stretched the cotton of her T-shirt. Her braces—strange, torturous-looking devices—had been removed and perfect white teeth left in their place. But she was also softer around the middle, a detail her school pictures had hidden, and had an oily complexion that caused tiny white pimples to sprout in the creases of her nose. And while it was impossible for Magdalena to register all these details from the observation deck, watching with her grandfather as her cousin walked across the tarmac, she already sensed that Katarina’s arrival meant trouble.

It might have been her age, and the fact that Katarina threatened to trump Magdalena’s own status as eldest child in their household. Magdalena did not like to think about the years she could not remember, the ones when she had allegedly worshipped her older cousin. At least part of this resistance was territorial. Rosmarina was her island because, after all, the other girl’s family had given it up. They had traded it for ten-speed bikes and colored stationery. In short, they had picked an easier life, and it only seemed fair that they should lose something in that transaction.

Luka had already explained that Katarina was coming alone because her parents would risk arrest by returning. But they wanted her to see the place where she was born and the family that had been denied her in America.

When Katarina emerged from customs, she was clutching a white leather purse. Her expression was uncertain, as if she expected someone to wrest it from her, or as if she were afraid she would be devoured in the crowds of the small airport.

“That’s her,” Luka told Magdalena, who was already taking the other girl’s measure. “She looks exactly like her mother.”

He called out in welcome and walked forward to embrace her.

There was something about his familiarity, about Katarina’s smile of recognition and the arms she threw around his waist, that troubled Magdalena. This was
her
grandfather, she thought stubbornly from behind them, and for a moment she was afraid that Katarina might not leave at the end of the summer as she was supposed to. That she would stay with them forever.

Katarina had not been questioned about her parents at the airport. She seemed surprised by this fact, and Magdalena made a face in the backseat of her grandfather’s car, wondering if her cousin had expected to end up in jail. It seemed a silly kind of fear to her when everyone knew that this only happened to adults.

They had not even opened her suitcase for an inspection, and for the entire ferry trip Katarina babbled about the things she had brought: chewing gum, vegetable peelers for Aunt Ružica, tape cassettes for Jadranka and Magdalena. She crowed as if she had succeeded in smuggling stolen jewels into the country.

“We have chewing gum,” Magdalena told her, so that the other girl’s face fell.

But her cousin’s response a moment later was confident. “American chewing gum tastes better.”

Jadranka had been running a low fever that morning, and so she was waiting for them on the island. But Magdalena already disliked the way her younger sister talked nonstop about their American cousin. “Will she have pompoms?” she had asked just this morning, having seen these somewhere on a television show.

Now, studying the way Katarina kept the white purse in her lap, winding the strap around her hand, Magdalena realized that her cousin was anxious. It was the first time she had ever been away from her parents, she explained, a revelation that drew understanding grunts from Luka but a stony silence from his granddaughter.

“I brought perfume for Cousin Ana,” she told them.

“Magdalena’s mother lives on the mainland,” Luka told his niece. “But she’ll come for a visit in a few weeks and you can give it to her then.”

Katarina’s bright eyes took in her cousin, who had turned to watch a ferry approaching from the opposite direction. Long after the conversation moved on to other subjects, Magdalena could still feel the American girl studying her, considering this information she had been given.

Katarina’s suitcase did indeed contain many marvels. There were Hershey bars and dozens of packs of chewing gum, which she shared generously with her younger cousins. There were white lace bras and a bag of sanitary napkins, and several books in English about a young red-haired woman who solved mysteries, an idea that enchanted Jadranka so much that she demanded to be told the plots to each of them. There was a Walkman, a rectangle of black plastic that Magdalena secretly coveted. And there was a box of colored pencils such as they had never seen, with a dozen different shades for every color.

“I take art lessons after school,” Katarina told them. “My teacher says that I’m one of her best students.”

At night, when the three girls shared a double bed, Katarina spoke of Croatian picnics in Pittsburgh and the better-looking boys who played soccer there. She performed in a folk-dancing troupe, she told them, demonstrating some of the steps as Jadranka sat up in bed and clapped her hands in time to imaginary music. An authentic Croatian dance, Katarina insisted, although Magdalena stated her suspicion that it had been made up by someone in America.

Her cousin could claim anything, she realized. Katarina’s distance from home meant that she was no longer constrained by the truth. Gems had been sewn onto the hem of her confirmation dress, she told them, and she lived in a mansion.

“She’s making it all up,” Magdalena complained to her grandfather.

“Things, Lena,” he only told her sadly. “Give her that one small satisfaction.”

Katarina hardly remembered her older cousin, Marin Mori
ć
,but she told Luka and Ružica what little she knew about their vanished son. Seated self-importantly at the kitchen table across from them, she explained in a breathless voice that he had lived with them during their first year in America. He had taught her how to tie her shoelaces, but there had been no sign of him in the six years since then.

Magdalena eavesdropped on this conversation. Sitting in the kitchen doorway, she kept her back to where they sat and her bare feet in the sun. She studied a curious lizard that had darted between her legs and waited in the coolness of her shadow.

Marin and her father had fought, Katarina admitted, lowering her voice officiously, sending glances at Magdalena’s back that the other girl could not see but sensed nonetheless. “It had something to do with Barren Island.”

“Barren Island?” Luka asked sharply.

Magdalena continued to watch the lizard. He had gone completely still, but something pulsed in his throat. His heartbeat, perhaps. Or his breath. Behind her, Katarina repeated the words.
Barren Island.
Magdalena had never heard of it, but she could tell by her grandfather’s voice that it upset him.

“And he hasn’t contacted us in all the years since then.” Katarina’s voice was now adult in its indignation.

Magdalena rose at this and brushed off the seat of her shorts, then turned to find that her cousin was watching her.

“That’s unlike him,” her grandmother was saying in a bewildered voice.

Magdalena had never heard of Barren Island. She imagined it like a dead pine tree that had lost all its needles and was nothing but a brittle piece of timber.