The First Rule of Swimming

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Rosmarina Island, 1982

T
he letter was written in a girlish hand, the purple letters drifting across the sky blue background of the stationery. It had been folded twice, and at the bottom, beside the picture of a rainbow, the sender had written both the Croatian and American versions of her name—
Katarina/Katherine
—as if to make sure that her younger cousin would not confuse her with another. Or to demonstrate, from the very outset of their correspondence, the advantage of being two people instead of one.

Magdalena had never seen handwriting like her cousin’s. In the island school, pupils were instructed to make their letters slant to the right, not fill the page like soap bubbles. There was something foreign about the rainbow stationery, as well, and the way it had been engraved with her cousin’s American name and Pittsburgh address. Although Magdalena was only eight, she immediately distrusted the feminine loops, the tiny hearts that dotted every
i
and
j
.

The envelope, in a matching shade of blue, had appeared in their mailbox that morning, covered with foreign stamps. It had been clumsily opened and resealed, and a fingerprint too large for a ten-year-old girl’s had been left in the yellow glue, prompting Magdalena’s grandfather to set his mouth in a worried line.

“They’ll open anything,” she overheard him tell her grandmother. “Even a child’s letter.”

It was a surprise to learn that the envelope was addressed to her. Not to her grandparents, nor to her younger sister, Jadranka. It was addressed to Magdalena Babi
ć
of Rosmarina Island, and it was the first time that she had received any letter, let alone one from so far away.

I am your cousin!
it proclaimed, even as Jadranka whined to be allowed to read it as well.
Do you remember me?

In fact, Magdalena could recall nothing at all about the older girl with the light brown hair, the one who had cast her arm around Magdalena’s shoulder in the photograph that sat in her grandmother’s vitrine. Katarina’s family had left when Magdalena was only two, a shadowy period that she tried hard to recall. But she was never sure if the faces she sometimes pictured were real or simply her imagination.

“You cried for days after she left,” her grandmother told her.

You used to carry a little stuffed lamb,
the letter informed her.

It was unsettling to be told these things. To have a virtual stranger remember her before she could remember herself, and she turned the letter over to her grandfather without a word.

He read it intently, like a man decoding a foreign alphabet, and when he looked up, his expression was bemused. “Six years of silence and all we hear about is cats,” he told Magdalena in a tone approaching wonder. “But not a word about your uncle.”

Marin Mori
ć
, his only son, had left the island with Katarina’s family, and Magdalena imagined the four of them living together in America today.

But when Magdalena’s grandfather explained that Katarina’s mother was his younger sister—which made the letter writer his niece—Magdalena frowned. “Does that make Katarina my aunt?” she wanted to know, prompting a laugh from her grandfather, who saw that she was displeased by such generational superiority.

“No,” he assured her. “More like your cousin once removed.”

The family tree did not particularly interest Magdalena. “Why did they go away?” she demanded instead. It was a question that had not previously occurred to her.

His eyes dropped to the letter as if it contained the answer to her question.
I am in the fourth grade,
her cousin had written in stilted Croatian.
We go to the Church of St. Nicholas. My parents own a tailoring shop.

It was only then that Magdalena heard her grandmother, furiously scrubbing something at the kitchen sink. Her grandfather, too, seemed to grow aware of the sound in that moment, and he looked past Magdalena to study his wife’s hunched back. “They couldn’t live here anymore,” he answered shortly. “Especially your uncle.”

Magdalena had not yet reached the age of fitting such puzzle pieces together, although she understood that her grandparents avoided certain people in the village—
informers,
her grandmother sometimes said in a venomous whisper. But she could not fathom why anybody would want to leave Rosmarina.

She was about to ask more on the matter when he put up his hand, telling her more gruffly than was his custom, “Take your sister outside to play.”

At her grandparents’ encouragement, she wrote back to her cousin. She told her about the island school, how she and Jadranka went swimming when the weather was warm. She told her about their dog—the way Roki churned her legs in sleep as if she were running—and playing in the abandoned houses beneath the Peak. She knew that Katarina’s father had also been a fisherman, and so she asked what kind of boat he had in America.

For Valentine’s Day, Katarina sent her response on a construction paper heart. This envelope, too, had been opened and resealed, and her grandfather turned it over in his weathered hands. A pink heart had been glued to a larger red heart, and he carefully peeled the two apart. But his face fell when he found nothing inside. “I thought there might be something else,” he told her with a sheepish smile.

The idea of a secret message intrigued Magdalena, and she studied the two hearts, attempting to decipher a pattern in the dried glue. There were two dots and a curve, but these merely formed a smiling face.

“Why doesn’t my uncle write to us?” she demanded.

“Writing would just cause trouble,” her grandfather told her. “It’s different with your cousin because she’s a child.”

Magdalena did not understand the nature of this trouble, and in truth, her uncle was just another photograph to her. A one-dimensional young man, he stood on the top shelf of her grandmother’s vitrine. Since her correspondence with Katarina, even her American cousin had taken on more life than that smiling man. Katarina’s favorite color was purple and she rode a silver bike, but Magdalena’s uncle remained as remote and unknowable as the faces that appeared on postal stamps.

Still, it seemed strange for her cousin not to mention him. “Maybe he’s a tailor like Katarina’s father,” Magdalena suggested.

Her grandfather blinked hard at this. “Perhaps,” he told her.

For several days Magdalena considered the matter, deciding finally that it was unfair for her American cousin to have both her own father as well as Magdalena’s uncle. “My uncle should come back for a visit,” she suggested hopefully. Her mother, after all, worked in Split but came back to the island once or twice a year.

“No,” her grandfather told her. “There’s nothing left for him here.”

Magdalena was stung by this observation, but she forgot it with his next words: “Your mother considered taking you and going with them. But she decided against it in the end.”

This news shocked Magdalena, and for an instant she allowed herself to imagine a world without Rosmarina, without the fruit from her fig trees or the fish from her shallows. The island was as much a part of her as her name or her straight, black hair, but she pictured herself living in Pittsburgh and riding a silver bike like Katarina. The last detail had made her envious, an emotion that now seemed traitorous. “I’m glad,” she told him so forcefully that he smiled.

“I’m glad, too,” he told her, although there was something strange about the way he said this.

The next day he told Magdalena to buy two postcards in the harbor, from one of the tourist stands along the
riva.
“Pick nice pictures,” he told her. “But make sure that the postcards are exactly the same size.”

She chose a picture of the Devil’s Stones and another of an old woman tending her goats. The woman’s face was so wrinkled that the lines appeared like cuts in her face, but the wiry goats reminded Magdalena of the stuffed lamb her cousin had mentioned, a toy that Jadranka had inherited and would not relinquish, although it had lost both eyes.

Her grandfather studied the postcards and finally handed the goats to Magdalena. “Write a message to your cousin,” he told her, touching the top of her head with his hand. “Tell her about the last time we went fishing.”

She was happy with this idea. But when she finished describing the way her grandfather had let her navigate all the way back to Rosmarina, she looked up to find that he was writing his own message on the second postcard. In light, penciled strokes, he filled the entire card, and only after he read through his words did he look up.

“We’ll send our own secret message,” he said.

He found some glue in a kitchen drawer, dotted the substance around the edges of his postcard, and placed his granddaughter’s neatly on top.

For a moment Magdalena was disappointed that the goats had been covered up, but then she realized that it was not the picture her grandfather wanted to hide, but his message. “How will they know?” she asked.

“They’ll know,” he told her. He tested the edge with his fingernail and seemed satisfied when the two cards stayed together. “Let’s just hope that nobody else does.”

Magdalena did not know who these letter openers were. They read other people’s mail before sending it along, days or weeks later, and did not bother to cover up evidence of their trespass: a coffee ring or underlined word had been known to decorate the letter inside. She understood that her grandparents found such behavior shameful but that they saw no point in going to the police.

“They already know, Lena,” her grandfather had tried to explain.

He warned her not to mention the postcards to anybody else, and she understood that it had something to do with politics, just like her cousin’s departure from the island and the reason her uncle could not come back. Just like the neighbor whose son had been sentenced to hard labor because some anonymous snitch overheard him complaining to tourists on the beach about the way things were. But she did not stop to wonder if there would be any consequences to their secret message, even when her grandfather returned white-lipped from the port one evening.

“I hear your American niece rides a silver bicycle,” a man he did not recognize had told him at a newspaper kiosk on the
riva.

But he did not think that they had discovered the secret message. “If they had, we’d know it,” she heard him tell her grandmother.

Magdalena knew that they had all been questioned following her uncle’s escape: her grandfather, her grandmother. The police had kept her mother for several nights.

“What did they ask her?” she wanted to know when she learned this detail.

But her grandfather claimed that her mother never spoke about it.

Months went by without a response from Katarina. When summer came, her grandfather told her glumly, “Best not to get our hopes up, Lena. It’s possible that they just threw the postcard away.”

Magdalena knew that he did not mean her cousin’s family. She imagined the missive, carefully glued to conceal its true purpose, in a trash can somewhere. But she could not truly see it covered with cigarette ashes or somebody’s half-eaten lunch, and so each time she ended by imagining it flying across the Atlantic Ocean, an arrow fired with such expert precision that it was certain to find its mark in America.

She saw her mother infrequently, awkward occasions that were like visits from a stranger, and her own father had drowned at the age of twenty-seven. And so she plunged down the only avenue of fantasy that was available to her. She imagined her uncle prying the postcards apart, and how he would see her grandfather’s message and devise an equally ingenious method of response. All that summer Magdalena pictured what this might be: words written in invisible ink, a coded message, perhaps something as simple as a picture. She had asked Katarina to include a photograph in her next letter, and she imagined that it would show the two of them, perhaps riding bicycles together. She pushed back jealousy at this thought.

She knew that her uncle had fished often with her father, and that he had been her own godfather. She had seen the family photographs to prove it: Marin smiling in his suit, herself a tiny baby. She daydreamed about his return to the island, despite her grandfather’s warning. Perhaps just for a visit, bringing American chocolates, going fishing with them and taking them for walks along the
riva,
the same way that some of her schoolmates’ fathers did. She spent long moments studying the photograph in her grandmother’s vitrine, and with time her uncle’s face took on the dimensions of an actual, living person. She imagined that his skin was still the same nut brown, his arms as wiry as the ones that had pulled fishing nets from Rosmarina’s waters.

She longed to ask her mother about him. But Ana Babi
ć
arrived for her weeklong visit to the island in an even worse mood than usual. “Look at those fingernails,” she muttered within moments of disembarking from the ferry, grabbing one of Magdalena’s hands, so that her daughter merely counted the hours until her departure again.

All that summer, when she was not fishing with her grandfather, Magdalena prowled the deserted hamlets below the Peak. The houses there had stood empty for years. The first waves of emigration had taken place before her grandfather’s birth, and the descendants of the houses’ former inhabitants had their own lives as storekeepers or secretaries in faraway places like Canada and Chile. But although her grandfather cautioned her periodically about crumbling walls and falling roof tiles, she moved among the ruins like a cat.

Hardly anyone lived beneath the Peak anymore, and Magdalena liked the loneliness of those stone houses. They were ideal for games of hide-and-seek, and she often took along Jadranka, who was four years younger. She liked to stand on the stone porches and look out towards the sea as Jadranka played behind her.

Her grandfather had once shown her the house where his own mother had been born, the stark stone building with its caved-in roof and the small carob tree that had sprouted between two slabs of stone. She liked running her hand across the hewn limestone, the occasional carving or Latin inscription like some magical braille.