The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel Read online

  She had not visited their mother’s apartment in all the time that Jadranka had been staying there, and retrieving the spare key from the ledge above the front door had left her fingertips black with dust. As she washed them at the kitchen sink, she was unable to tell whether the soft groans coming from the next room were human or made by her mother’s mattress, and she scanned the kitchen quickly. There were no empty bottles on the kitchen counter, nor medication boxes in the trash, but she steeled herself nonetheless. With her mother, nothing was ever certain.

  “I don’t know what you expect to find here,” Ana had said defensively the night before, when Magdalena telephoned to say that she was coming. “I’m not hiding your sister under the floorboards. I have no idea where she might have gone.”

  Now, Magdalena lingered in the kitchen, watching bubbles of water rise from the bottom of the pot, slowly at first, then faster and faster. She added powdered coffee and sugar, stirring them slowly, the spoon making a thick sound against the metal side. Removing it from the flame, she waited several minutes longer than necessary, staring at that inky circle as the grounds settled. But when she poured it into a cup and carried it into the next room, her mother saw through the gesture immediately. “Don’t look at me like that.” She eyed the cup with suspicion. “I told you already, I have no idea where she went.”

  Magdalena sat down on the other bed—Jadranka’s old bed—which was covered with clothes and old magazines. She flipped through one so quickly that the pages sounded like cracks from a tiny whip. How to tell if he’s willing to commit, proclaimed one headline. Another: The look for spring is GLITTER.

  The single year that Magdalena and her sister had lived under their mother’s roof had effectively ended all their fantasies of maternal affection. Ana Babić was not the gentle beauty of her wedding photograph but a nervous woman who ingested the contents of various blister packs. Nikola, her second husband, was not the good-natured father figure she had promised her daughters but a violent drunk who once broke Magdalena’s hand by shoving her into a wall. The bone had failed to heal properly, and today there was a knot beneath the skin, which she rubbed in moments of distraction or worry.

  Nikola had finally decamped while Magdalena was in her second year of university, Ana telephoning one evening with news of his departure. He had left her a letter, she said, although she never allowed anyone else to see it. He took almost nothing with him—most of his clothes remained hanging in the closet, and she let his razor sit so long on the lip of the bathroom sink that it permanently scarred the porcelain with rust.

  “Good riddance,” had been Magdalena’s immediate response.

  “You’ve always hated him,” Ana responded acidly before hanging up.

  Her mother could no longer afford her old apartment, and so she moved into a high-rise that was a carbon copy of the twelve that surrounded it. Magdalena disliked it, but she did not have the same sensation of panic every time she crossed its threshold. Inside there were no traces of Nikola, no closets where she had hidden, pushing her sister backward into the gentleness of hanging coats.

  Now, her mother sat on the edge of the bed, her nightgown bunched around her hips. She looked at Magdalena unhappily, as if she had been dreaming something pleasant and found consciousness a disappointment. “I’ll make up a place for you,” she said, but made no move to stand.

  Magdalena shook her head. “I’m not staying,” she said, then rose to open the shades. It felt good to let light into the apartment, to open the window so that fresh air could dislodge the stale smell of cigarettes and cooking oil, but when she turned around, her mother was blinking angrily in the sunlight.

  “Nona sent you figs,” Magdalena said after a moment. “I left them on the kitchen counter.”

  Her mother did not acknowledge this gift, but she rose, finally, put on a pair of pink slippers that were turning gray around the toes, and walked into the kitchen, where Magdalena could hear her shuffling through papers. A moment later she returned with a postcard. “Here,” she said, tossing it onto the table between the beds. “This is all I have.”

  Picking it up, Magdalena tried to picture her sister among the sunbathing women in a place called Coney Island. She turned the postcard over to discover that Jadranka had scrawled a quick note on the reverse. Everything here is fine. I’ll write more later. The postmark was January, a few weeks after her departure.

  “This is it?” she asked, but her mother only returned her stony look. It’s my younger daughter who takes after me, Ana liked to tell people. If things had been different, who knows how far I would have gotten?

  Back in the kitchen Magdalena threw away the old bread. On the counter an ashtray was overflowing, and she emptied that, as well. She had quit smoking several months before, and the sour smell now turned her stomach.

  Above the trash can a calendar showed a picture of Our Lady of Sinj, her dark face gentle beneath her crown of gold. No one in their family was religious except for her grandmother, and Magdalena assumed that it was a gift from her. It was open to the new year, and someone had filled one of the squares with a perfect star in blue ink. Her sister’s day of departure, Magdalena realized, because the blocks before it had each been marked by a deliberate slash, and she could see by the dust-covered surfaces and newspaper stacks that time in the apartment had ground to a halt on that day.

  Her mother shuffled by in the hallway without a word, and a moment later Magdalena heard water running in the shower.

  She took the calendar from the wall and sat down with it at the kitchen table. There were no marks on any of the other pages, and so she returned to January and the blue star. Above it, the Madonna’s face had turned inscrutable, the soft curve of her lips mocking.

  Because Ana refused to visit the island and because Magdalena went to extraordinary lengths to avoid her mother, they rarely discussed that lost year of her childhood. On the rare occasions that they saw one another, they argued about Rosmarina instead.

  It had never been clear to Magdalena how someone who had taken her first breaths on the island could regard it with such disdain, but Ana only held up an impatient hand whenever her daughter began to talk of the sea, the silence at night, the sound of the cicadas. Magdalena liked to think that her words stabbed at some tender, hidden place, but her mother was always dismissive. “What use are those things to me?” she would ask.

  For her part, Magdalena bristled at her mother’s complaints about the island’s scorching heat, its narrowness, its wine that could anesthetize a horse. “How,” Ana demanded, “can you be satisfied with the smallness of that place?” With winters that were nothing but a killing season, with one small town on the entire island and no doctor to speak of ? There was nothing, she railed, but stone houses and electricity that died daily and water that collected in cisterns so that there was never enough for the humans and the animals to drink and a proper bath besides, never stopping to listen to her daughter’s protests that there had been water from the mainland since the late seventies.

  “I left,” Ana would tell anyone who asked, “because I knew that Rosmarina would destroy me as well.”

  It was conventional wisdom that islanders should marry people from other islands, but a marriage to someone from the mainland was sure to end in disaster. Magdalena’s father was from Šibenik, a metropolis in comparison with Rosmarina. “Your father wasn’t used to how quiet the winters were,” Ana would say. “That’s why he killed himself.”

  But Magdalena’s grandfather grew apoplectic at this charge. “Your father drowned,” he insisted. “And more than that we’ll never know.”

  Since leaving for the mainland after Goran’s death—which the local police ruled an accident—her mother had scorned anything that was from the island. Not for her the old wives’ remedies, the herbs that could cure headaches or lessen arthritis, the lavender or rosemary oil that eased tension and shrank lesions. She embraced the city’s noise and dirt. Her second husband, everyone readily told Magdal
ena, bore no resemblance to her first. And Nikola hated the island. “A backwater,” he used to taunt Magdalena. “An inbred shithole.”

  “It’s strange, I suppose,” Magdalena’s grandmother once told her. “There was a time when your mother loved Rosmarina, but she was a different person then. She was a good mother, too. She used to rock you and sing to you—”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true,” her grandmother insisted. “But that was before.”

  Jadranka had not slipped anything into the books that she kept on a small shelf beside her bed. She had not even dog-eared pages to mark her place, though it was clear she had read each of them because their spines were cracked. Magdalena’s eyes fell on The Silk, the Shears, a memoir by the poet Irena Vrkljan, which lay horizontally across several other books. Its positioning seemed somehow significant, and Magdalena opened it to read The biographies of others. Splinters in our body. She closed it abruptly and replaced it on the shelf.

  Some of Jadranka’s clothes still hung in the closet, and sweaters were folded in a plastic crate. Magdalena pulled a gauzy scarf from a hook on the closet door and wrapped it once around her own neck. It still smelled like her sister, a mixture of soap, peppermints, and cigarettes, although they had both quit smoking together, making the pact on the night before Jadranka’s departure.

  When she dragged a chair over to look on the upper shelves, she found everything neatly organized, their mother’s chaos not having reached there yet. A few shoeboxes were stacked, one upon another, and she took them down and sat on the floor, spreading them out around her.

  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.

  Chapter 4

  The 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.