The First Rule of Swimming (6 page)

The last time Jadranka had visited the island, she brought their grandmother a photograph of herself. “This way you can keep an eye on all of us together,” she told her, already planning her escape.

Magdalena alone had caught the look of despair that crossed the older woman’s face. “You shouldn’t have said that,” she chided Jadranka later.

They had driven for the rest of that January night, Jadranka remembering the way they used to ride Magdalena’s scooter around the island as teenagers. In the first year of the war there had been blackouts, and Magdalena had taken the bulb out of the scooter’s headlight, so that they had flown through the dark. “I’d look up at all those stars,” Jadranka said in a dreamy voice, “and you’d be going so fast that they’d start shooting.”

Magdalena remembered her sister’s arms clasped around her waist and the way she would sometimes sing, the wind distorting her voice, her hair so long that it lashed Magdalena’s cheeks like little sparks. They had not worn helmets in those days—nobody did—and they had traveled the roads so quickly that the tires barely made contact with the island.

“I remember,” she told her. “It’s a wonder we’re alive to tell the tale.”

At this, Jadranka turned to look out the passenger window. She studied something, some feature of the dark sea that was invisible to Magdalena’s eyes.

“That’s the problem,” Jadranka told the window. “You remember too much.”

Her words stung Magdalena. After all, it was Jadranka who had started these reminiscences. She gripped the steering wheel more tightly and concentrated on the road in front of them.

“Lena?”

But Magdalena refused to turn her head.

“I know you hate to talk about it—”

The tiny door that Magdalena had left open in the presence of her sister now slammed promptly shut.

“—but you’ve been alone for ten years. Not even widows wait this long.”

They were climbing a hill, and the car heaved as Magdalena shifted into a lower gear.

“Not even Mama waited this long.”

Silence.

“And I hate leaving you like this.”

“You’re not leaving me,” Magdalena said, at last. “You’re going. There’s a difference.” She shifted gears again, satisfied by the car’s violent lurch.

“Because the truth is that I may not be coming back.”

Magdalena looked sharply at her sister, remembering how she had ignored the American’s question about how long she would stay. But Jadranka had turned to look out the window again. “Don’t be dramatic,” Magdalena told the back of her head. This time there were lights on the dark sea. A ferry, perhaps, or a night fisherman with a death wish. They flickered for a moment before disappearing into the black.

She told none of this to Katarina, who insisted that Jadranka had been happy, that she had put on a bit of weight, a vast improvement from the pale, skinny girl who had arrived in January, poorly equipped for the harsh New York winter with her paper-thin coat. She had gotten on well with the children, playing with Christopher in the park and standing for hours in the bathroom with Tabitha as she experimented with her mother’s lipsticks and eye shadows.

She adored her studio, though she had only shown Katarina a little of her work, preferring to keep the rest under lock and key.

“Was it locked when she left?” Magdalena asked.

Katarina hesitated. “Yes. We had to break in because she took the key with her.”

Magdalena considered this.

“We hoped it was a sign that she’d be back, but…”

Magdalena waited.

“I think someone had better break the news to your mother.”

And so the next morning Magdalena took the ferry to the mainland. The fires had been extinguished during the night, but smoke still hung above some sections of the island. The wind had died, and there was something eerie about those unmoving clouds. Magdalena sat on deck and watched the island retreat, those gray patches of sky visible long after Rosmarina itself had disappeared.

When she arrived at their mother’s apartment in Split several hours later, she found the shades still down and the air so still that a cold sweat broke out on her skin. In the kitchen a fly flew in drunken circles over three slices of stale bread, and she watched it make several revolutions while she waited for water to boil.

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 Babi
ć
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 Magdalena, 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.