Nevena Kesić Orlić is a writer from the central goldfields in Victoria who daydreams of one day seeing her book in Dymocks or Readings shops. A copy-editor/proofreader by day and an avid singer and scribbler by night, Nevena has written a 112,000-word novel, If the Fog Should Stay, the querying of which she’s totally not putting off, pfft, no way. Over the years she has written for Shoot Farken magazine, and in 2010 she was shortlisted as one of the top five finalists in Australia for her short story, Cobwebbed, in the National Youth Week “WriteIT” talent competition (at the time hosted by the federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations).
When my mum and dad met inside a train coupé in 1977, everything and everyone that would one day become—my older brother, me—began right there. Mum had already been admiring Dad from afar: travelling to uni from Karlovac to Zagreb, she and her friends had a Who’s the Best-Looking Railways Pointsman game as they checked out the gentlemen working at the Karlovac Railway Station. My mum declared my dad the winner, hands down. One day he happened to be the train conductor on my mum’s train. A mutual friend of Mum and Dad was with mama’s group and he blurted out, “Hey, Petar, this girl here likes you.” My mum blushed furiously and he said, “Miss, you’re even more beautiful when you blush.” (How’s that for a late-70s pick-up line?)
Trains were an almost quotidian part of my life. I had the distinct pleasure and joy of my dad sporadically taking me to his workplace, so I knew the Karlovac Railway Station like the back of my hand. There was no “Bring Your Daughter to Work” day or anything like that, it was just whenever Dad invited me along or I wasn’t at school. Here’s the thing: I would’ve followed my dad over hot coals to dreary hamlets, so I was always game for what I perceived to be the excitement of his work. I’d clutch his hand as we’d stroll across Platform 1 en route to his office. Chocolate, ice cream and peach nectar juice were usually the order of the day during every visit; always a huge win in my books. I used to beam when Dad’s colleagues would praise his skills or say I was the spitting image of him. I felt important, proud, and as though I was walking alongside a decorated head of state.
Don’t even get me started on the pride and excitement of getting to accompany Dad (and two of his colleagues) on a 1989 business trip to the island town of Mali Lošinj on the Adriatic Coast. I was brimming with euphoria. I hadn’t yet started first grade, so I got to go on a technicality. As a Yugoslav Railways employee, Dad had free train travel all over Yugoslavia (and we, his family, had the perks of heavily subsidised travel). The train journey to the Adriatic is ingrained in my mind. I made sure to be polite, poised, and I totally feigned interest in the meandering grownup convos of Dad and his coworkers. When it was time for me to have a nap, I still remember Dad taking out a clean pillowcase and placing it on one of the velour seats. Mum had packed it for us into a freezer bag so I could put my face down onto something crisp and clean, as opposed to directly onto seats where countless derrières had sat. Dad brushed his palm across my head and forehead as the rat-a-tat of the train lulled me to sleep. Eventually we would arrive at a small cabin amidst the sun-toasted pines, slightly uphill from the beach and its azure sea. During the trip, Dad would routinely brush my hair into a side ponytail—very much the go-to style at the time for girls—and ask, “How’s that, kiddo, is it any good?”
* * *
It’s almost morbidly poetic that the beginning of the end started at the Karlovac Railway Station with a blizzard of shelling on 13 September 1993, after almost two years of senseless civil war, interethnic bigotry (actively incited by leaders) and futile jingoism. It was a shelling campaign intended to stun, one of those “shock and awe” offensives; the worst one we’d seen in my hometown. Dad was at work and lit up a smoke, loitering near the threshold of the railways office entry. He must’ve figured he was protected by the building and the big awning over the train platform. A grenade hit; two cops were on the platform. One got shrapnel in his arm, the other his leg, but Dad had the misfortune of a minuscule piece of shrapnel going through his nostril and into his brain. Grenades don’t give a shit “what” or who you are as they whizz through the air; they don’t give a shit about your hopes and dreams, the loves in your life, the tapestry of warmth you’ve woven; your plans to cross seas.
Dad was discovered immobile on the platform by my godfather (and his close friend and fellow colleague), Dušan, and rushed to a major hospital. After a next-day transfer to Zagreb and neurosurgery, there were a few weeks of limbo… after which came meningitis, a coma, then the crippling, unimaginable anguish of death on 1 November, but in those 46 days there was still hope. And not a skerrick, either, but a lot of it. For me it went beyond even hope—or faith, too, when I prayed to an Almighty I wasn’t sure that, at almost nine, I even believed in—because it simply wasn’t an option that the universe would go on without my magnificent, loving father. Surely such a universe would fold in on itself?
* * *
“All right, you ready?” Dad would smile at me and my brother. “What are all the railway stations between Karlovac and Zagreb, in the exact order? Go!”
For me, there’s a certain mythology about trains, given how they coloured and imbued our life. The Karlovac Railway Station was a nexus of beginnings and endings, and all the treasure of the in-betweens. It seems strange to try and convey what it meant when we’d be returning by train knowing Dad would be waiting on a tower balcony; how we’d open the window on time, wait to spot him, then squeal and flail to his waving, grinning self. It’s a kind of saudade that affirms life. I regarded these returns with a certain kind of reverence and it was a comfort, too, knowing I’d be seeing my dad where he always stood, gleaming in the sun.
© Nevena Kesić Orlić, 2023
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