The First Rule of Swimming (9 page)

“It’s a terrible place,” Katarina explained that night in the dark. “Not a thing grows there. There are only rocks as sharp as fangs and heat so terrible that people catch fire.”

Magdalena snorted at this, even as her younger sister asked in a small voice: “They catch fire?”

“Just like paper” was their cousin’s knowledgeable reply. “The hair goes first, and then the face. And there are dogs that will eat you if you don’t do exactly what the prison guards say. And the guards—”

“How do you know?” Magdalena demanded. “Have you ever been there?”

“No,” Katarina admitted in a satisfied voice, as if she had been anticipating this very question. “But your Uncle Marin was.”

It could not be true. As far as Magdalena was concerned, it was just one more thing her cousin had made up. She had it under good authority that her uncle had been one of Rosmarina’s best fishermen. He was not a criminal.

“I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it,” her cousin told her in wondering tones.

“You’re making it up,” Magdalena accused.

“Am not,” Katarina told her. “Ask your grandfather.”

But Magdalena could not bring herself to do this.

To Magdalena’s relief, Katarina did not entirely take to life on Rosmarina. She liked to sunbathe on the rocks, but she feared the sharp black urchins in the shallows. She liked to accompany the family to their fishing camp on the Devil’s Stones, but she did not care for fishing, or for boats. Instead she played with Jadranka or drew in her sketchbooks, pictures that Magdalena thought only marginally resembled their subjects. Or she listened to her Walkman, lying on a towel and looking up at the sky, occasionally singing aloud in English.

She liked to prowl around the Peak with Magdalena, but became easily spooked. Magdalena realized this one day when she hid from Katarina behind a crumbling stone wall, watching smugly as her cousin looked for her, the annoyance on her face turning quickly into fear.

“That’s not funny,” she said, pushing Magdalena when she jumped out to startle her.

Magdalena landed on her bottom in the dust, and Katarina did not speak to her for several hours. “Your sister is mean,” she told Jadranka, who relayed this message to Magdalena.

“It’s true,” Jadranka added matter-of-factly to her sister. “You were mean.”

Katarina claimed that the noise of Pittsburgh’s city streets did not bother her, but the crowing of roosters did. She missed her friends at home and her bedroom. She griped about the island’s dearth of television channels, brands of chocolate, jungle gyms.

In her comparisons, America always won out against Rosmarina, and she did not limit reporting this conclusion to her two cousins. One day in the port, she regaled a group of children with stories about cinemas that were as big as cities. “It’s not like here,” she said with a wrinkled nose, gesturing in the direction of the summer
kino.
“It’s a real movie theater, not just a painted wall.”

“You should go back, then,” one of the older boys told her. “My father says this country knows what to do with
govno
like you.”

“Shut up,” Magdalena told him, surprised by the venom in her voice. “Everybody knows that your father’s a drunk!”

The boy’s face turned purple with rage. “Well, your mother—”

But Magdalena swung at him before he could get the word out. Although smaller, she had the advantage of surprise, and he held the side of his face in stupefaction as a circle of children formed. A woman from one of the nearby shops had been watching them. She hurried out and took both Magdalena and the boy by the ear, before the fight could go any further, and ordered them home.

That night in bed, Katarina was quieter than usual. “In America, you can say whatever you want,” she informed them in a whisper. “It’s not like here.”

Magdalena could hear Jadranka’s even breathing, and she pretended to be asleep, as well. But her cousin continued bitterly. “My father says this country is nothing but a giant prison.”

Magdalena’s mother made one trip to Rosmarina after Katarina’s arrival, cooing over the perfume that the American girl presented. “That’s very nice, little cousin,” she said after spraying it on her wrist and sniffing appreciatively. “I imagine that America smells just like that.”

This won a smile from Katarina, but Magdalena merely watched them from a careful distance.

Katarina found it strange that her cousins did not live with their mother, and she was fascinated that nobody ever spoke about their dead father.

“Do you remember him?” she asked Magdalena.

“A little.”

“Even though you were only two?” she pressed with a doubtful smile, reminding Magdalena of a spider that sets a sticky trap.

The truth was that Magdalena knew very little about her father, and still less about his death. She knew that the man who had found her father’s boat adrift had occasionally fished the Devil’s Stones with him, and that he had returned to port that day to raise the alarm in the village that Goran Babi
ć
was gone.

She could not remember him opening the gate or walking rapidly through the courtyard, where she had been chasing lizards along the stone wall. But she thought she remembered being lifted into someone’s arms while her mother screamed the word
dead
from inside the house, repeating it so many times that after the first moments it sounded more like the cries of an angry seagull than any human voice.

To this day, Pero Radi
ć
—the man who had delivered the news of her father’s death—always made a point to stop and talk to her, to inquire after her mother and her grandparents’ health. She knew that it was not affection that prompted his concern but the simple fact that he had been the one to find the empty boat with Rosmarina markings turning towards the channel. “A strange sight,” she had heard him tell others.

Magdalena clung to snatches of information about her father the way other girls filled jewelry boxes with seed pearls and gold. She was more curious about him than Jadranka, who was born after his death.

“You look exactly like him,” Katarina told her, having already scoured Ružica’s photograph album for his picture, and even examined the pages of the family Bible where births and deaths were recorded. Her cousin’s words swelled Magdalena with silent pride, although she refused to acknowledge them.

Jadranka was less fascinated by Katarina than she was fascinated by Katarina’s enormous box of colored pencils. Before bedtime, she would sit at the table in the room the girls shared and pull them out, one by one.

“Look,” she demanded of Magdalena, who could not see anything out of the ordinary in the blue-gray color that Jadranka waved in front of her, nor about the red. But her younger sister spent hours organizing them in careful piles, divisions of color that made little sense to anybody else.

“It’s okay to look at them,” Katarina told her. “Just be careful. They were expensive.”

On the day she discovered their points dulled, she knew exactly where to find the culprit. “They’re
mine,
” she told Jadranka, small lights flaring in her eyes.

Observing the way that her younger sister’s lower lip trembled, Magdalena grabbed the box in one sudden movement and emptied it on their bed. She picked up one and snapped it in half, then picked up a second as if she meant to do the same.

Katarina only looked at her in shock before turning on her heel and running down the stairs. But when Jadranka dove for the broken pencil—a sunny shade of yellow—Magdalena was surprised to see that her sister was crying. She sat on the floor, trying to refit the two halves.

She looked up at Magdalena. “It was beautiful,” she told her. “And now it’s ruined.”

Within half an hour, Luka Mori
ć
had remedied the situation. The pencils were Katarina’s, and Jadranka was to leave them alone. But he found a box of colored chalk and gave this to his granddaughter instead.

He did not remember where the chalk had come from, but it bore the unmistakable scent of the mainland—a sharp and slightly chemical odor with no trace of mildew. On Rosmarina, damp inhabited every room. It softened bread and rendered paper as pliable as cloth, and like other island fishermen, Luka brought it ashore in his nets and sodden trouser cuffs. But the cardboard box was exotic in its stiffness, and Jadranka was immediately captivated by the crisp edges of the chalk inside.

He watched in satisfaction as she left a flurry of handprints on the stone walls of the house, likening the pastel sticks to a type of candy sold by Rosmarina’s only shop. When she placed the chalk on her tongue, however, she observed with disappointment that the taste was not at all like the candies.

“That isn’t for eating,” he told her in amusement, selecting one of the pieces from the box and leading all three girls through the courtyard to the lane. The tarmac had lightened beneath the Adriatic sun, and he knelt before them to draw the rough outline of a boat, giving it a tall mast and triangular sail. He drew an island beside it, pleased when they immediately identified its crescent shape as Rosmarina.

“Now me!” Jadranka begged, so that he handed her a few pieces of chalk, then did the same with Magdalena and Katarina.

He watched as they set to work a short distance from each other, intent on their stick figures and lemon suns.

It was not long before Magdalena tired of this new game, however. She threw down the chalk and announced that she wanted to go for a walk. Katarina, still miffed, turned her back at this suggestion, and Jadranka was too intent on her drawing to even lift her face.

“Jadranka,” Magdalena said, but her sister gave no indication that she had heard her name, and Luka studied the younger girl’s expression of rapt concentration. This temporary deafness descended on Jadranka from time to time. Lost in a game or chore, she claimed not to hear when she was being called. Just a few weeks before, the house had been in a state of panic when Ružica discovered the cistern in the courtyard uncovered and Jadranka nowhere to be found. They had called for her and shone flashlights into the darkness of the well, relieved to see their unbroken reflections looking back from the bottom. A short time later Magdalena found her reading a picture book beneath the bed they shared, oblivious of the commotion.

Now Luka studied Jadranka’s bowed head, the way her red hair fell forward to reveal the delicate swells of her vertebrae. There had always been something salamander-like about her long limbs, and the back of her thin neck looked in those moments uncannily like the decomposed lizards her sister sometimes produced from the garden, their spines like chain links of bone.

“Jadranka,” he echoed, his voice soft, the way he would address a sleepwalker.

Her back was curved like a bow. Her hand made an arcing movement, but she gave no indication that she had heard him. Nor did she seem to sense Katarina, who had raised her head to stare at her younger cousin, nor Magdalena, who was approaching from behind. But as Luka watched, Magdalena faltered, eyes darkening at something on the pavement.

He thought that she must have seen a scorpion, and so he rushed towards them. The animal’s venom would not kill a healthy adult but could sicken a child, and he had taught them to be wary of those small, dark bodies. The creatures ordinarily kept to the shade, but there seemed to be a greater number of them that year, emerging from beneath stones in the courtyard, on one occasion traversing the kitchen’s whitewashed ceiling, so that his wife’s shriek had brought him running.

“Where?” he barked at Magdalena, but she only pointed at the ground, where nothing moved except for Jadranka’s arm. Looking for the telltale pincers and curved tail, he realized belatedly that it was Jadranka herself who had caused her sister’s alarm, and he, too, stopped short, taking in the pictures that were flying fully formed from her hand: birds that lifted from the ground with wings in perfect proportion to their bodies, and fish that swam across pavement made to look like water.

Magdalena’s expression had turned to one of wonder, as if witnessing an act of alchemy, but Luka felt uneasy as he took in his younger granddaughter’s trancelike state. He crouched beside her, placing a hand softly on her shoulder. “Did your cousin teach you that, little one?” he asked, and it was only then that she looked up with a smile of recognition and shook her head.

Later, he watched her demonstrate this newfound ability for her sister, moving Magdalena’s hand in her own as Katarina watched. He could tell by Magdalena’s pleased expression that for those few seconds she was certain that she understood—that she believed it would be like riding a bicycle or tying a shoelace, a skill she had taught Jadranka just the year before. It was a code that needed only to be cracked, a secret language that practice might improve. But without her sister’s guidance the code was impenetrable, and she invariably produced graceless stick figures and rhomboid houses. After a few attempts, she gave up and watched Jadranka draw the house behind them in startling detail, never once turning to study her subject.

By that afternoon a small crowd of neighborhood children and curious adults had gathered, and although Luka retreated to the house, he heard someone mention a musical prodigy who had composed an entire symphony by the time he was four. Through the kitchen’s open windows, he thought he could also detect tones of envy and even of suspicion. A neighbor sniffed that her young son could solve complicated arithmetic problems and that this, surely, was more useful than drawing pictures that the rain would only wash away.

“That’s good,” he heard Katarina concede. “But it’s my turn now.”

In the weeks that followed, it became apparent that Magdalena possessed no artistic inclinations of her own. Rather than envying Jadranka’s talent, however, she took it upon herself all that summer to scout suitable locations for her sister’s drawings. Katarina was a halfhearted participant in these endeavors.

“I prefer pencil,” she told her cousins. “Or paint.”