Brother and sister briskly crossing Barkly Street. Fine, handsome pair. Neatly dressed in fashionable black—office skirt & blouse, trousers & double-breasted woollen jacket, hands pocketed the young man.
How they have bloomed, the fetching couple. Well-matched husband and wife an observer might have thought. In some corners of the globe men and women still married within their ethnic group and culture.
Look on after them, as they proceed up Albert Street. Stand and stare. They were unaware of the observation.
Watch all the way, until they have stepped up onto the footpath and passed into the shadow beneath the bridge.
How far they had come. How very far!
How far gone their poor, pitiful mother had been to leave two young children behind like that; to give them no consideration.
The signals and the alarm at the freight crossing at the bottom of their street, immediately adjacent our own, had been introduced because of Neda, one of the two schizophrenics in Bab’s circle. The other, Desanka the Serb, had bloodied our fine chesterfield one day after forgetting her tampon.
Neda had followed the figure of Anna Karenina by the rails, watching the wheels of the wagons and timing her leap.
Their house was one off the Avenue corner, 90-100m from the line. Little more than a minute steady pacing.
Twenty years before, after some rash words from husband Lazar, Bab herself had had that same train in mind.
You don’t find it — the document in her safe-keeping that was urgently needed — nemoj me cekat kuci! Don’t await my return!...
Would the thought of her two small children have given Bab pause? Had the document not finally turned up would she have wildly dashed away like Neda?
We were two houses off Montgomery Corner, the passing trains rattling the windows and their diesel hanging in the air.
Waiting out the arrival of a train was the other factor; the haulage was infrequent along that line.
Our post-war community was over-represented in the Psych ward at the local hospital. We were wild, fierce, reckless people, often in the news. Violent explosions made us notable, our politics unsettling the older Australians. (Disintegration of the country was still decades off.)
Neda and her husband Ivo were either Croats proper, or Dalmatian. Ivo was older, turned lumpy in middle-age. It was an unhappy marriage, Bab knew, but kept mum. In early days she was secretive about all kinds of things. The first half of her former life was a complete mystery then.
Denied their mother’s love this impressive young pair of survivors. Bab had begun minding them a few years before the tragedy and continued later for the widower. Bab’s kindness and loving would have helped some little bit.
At the time, somehow, the event had failed to sufficiently register. Our own earlier tragedies were years in the past. Such catastrophes as Neda’s needed to be warded off, kept from even young adults.
Josko was short for Josip, perhaps, President Tito’s given name. The younger sister was named Marianna, like the spaghetti. Not easily dislodged from buried memory even forty-five years past.
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