I was twenty-one, en route to Prague by train. The sun poured through the grimy panes of the old Czechoslovak carriage as travelers pressed their faces to the windows, watching the world roll by and blowing smoke into the air. I traveled solo, still drunk from the night before and weighed down by a mountain of luggage. The compartment carried a fetid scent of beer and Pelinkovac liqueur, the remnants of our celebration for my impending film-school adventure. The farewell gift my friends had bestowed—an identical tattoo etched on my ribs—still burned, but it felt like a rebirth, as though it had buried the shy, awkward girl I had been since grade school. I felt transformed—this new self soaking up the summer light and the hints of a life that might finally be real.
We crossed through Slovenia and Austria, and the train sped across the flat, unvarying plains of Czechoslovakia. The landscape stretched out, the rails grew older, the conductors grew sterner and more insistent. Before I departed, I’d been told that Czechs were amiable and that language wouldn’t be a barrier, since they vacationed on the Adriatic and had a few phrases in our tongue. They were said to admire Croatians—particularly the women. Yet failures in communication didn’t scare me. On the contrary, I thrilled at the idea of becoming a striking foreigner—someone who reeked of the sea and could justify her mood swings by southern temperament.
Somewhere near Brno, the train halted abruptly. I woke with a jolt. For hours my head rested against the cold glass, my back twisted in discomfort, my behind sinking into the dusty seat. The backpack I’d stuffed with toiletries and makeup lurched from the luggage rack and hit me on the head. I stood, steadied the pack, and stretched, glimpsing the foggy, unfamiliar landscape outside. Police lights gnawed at the featureless autumn day. In the neighboring compartment, an older red-haired woman with a tired face and caked pink lipstick stared out the window in the same posture, visibly rattled. I shifted my gaze and saw many other passengers peering through the fog, searching for a reason for the sudden stop.
“What happened?” I asked the red-haired woman in English, but she merely shrugged, stepping back into her compartment with a shake of her head. She spoke in German, but I didn’t understand a word, so I simply stared into the fog and at the scatterings of blue and red clouds.
Modřice read the blue sign above a small, single-story house. I settled again, taking a drink of water. I reached for a pack of almonds, but it was empty—and had been for most of the journey.
People bustled about like headless chickens. The sounds of whistling railway workers, shouting, police sirens, and passengers’ endless questions in every language filled the air. It soon became clear that the Rijeka-to-Prague trip—normally twelve hours—would now take even longer. Half an hour passed before we received any explanation for the delay: an accident on the tracks. The conductor hurried through in choppy English, informing us the train would be halted in Modřice for at least two more hours, until the tracks were cleared and the investigation completed. For those in a hurry or traveling light, she suggested a bus to Brno and from there another train to Prague. Since I carried two enormous suitcases, a tote of books, and two backpacks, the idea of switching trains in time barely crossed my mind. Besides, I was already feeling remarkably at home.
I asked the conductor what kind of accident it was.
“Sebevražda,” she replied with a shrug. Then, noting my confused, almost calf-like face, she added in English, “Suicide.”
Sebevražda—a peculiar word, I thought, sounding to me more like hexing yourself. Studying screenwriting in Czech would be an intriguing detour.
A man had thrown himself in front of the train. Information traveled through strange channels from compartment to compartment, and suddenly people began to understand one another. Language barriers dissolved when death was near. An hour and a half into the wait, I stood and headed toward the bathroom through the now-crowded corridor. The red-haired German-speaking woman stopped me to relay information she’d received from a young woman in the first compartment—a Japanese girl about my age traveling to Berlin with her European boyfriend and two large contrabasses. The suicide had been an older local man, around sixty. Railroad workers had reportedly seen him on an overpass that morning, crying, but no one reacted. The conductor said they’d tried to shoo him away around noon, yet he stayed put, rooted to the spot, waiting for the train, and—boy, did he.
“Goddamn it—why our train?” a fellow passenger from our region muttered as she passed, pulling a crying child by the hand.
I thanked the red-haired woman for the updates and continued to the bathroom. I stared at my dark-yellow urine, careful not to let the backs of my thighs touch the toilet seat, and weighed the odds I’d die of thirst if the train remained stationary for another hour. I’d woken with a monstrous hangover. My body tingled with hunger, and all the food I’d consumed thus far—a bowl of oatmeal, a banana, a cheese sandwich, an apple, a pack of almonds—had dissolved in the acid of alcohol. I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps I’d look thinner on that first day of film school, and the idea kept my hunger at bay.
The train remained in place for four more hours. Night fell. A man in the compartment to my left, an Austrian, claimed there was blood everywhere. The wheels had cleaved the man’s torso in two, and investigators and railway workers methodically combed the car to remove every shard of flesh and bone to guarantee a safe continuation. In that interval I sat, pondering why the elderly Czech man might have taken his own life. Was it poverty? A familiar trigger in the arc of suicide history, perhaps, but who could be sure now. Had he suffered a heartbreak? Did he bear post-traumatic stress? I recalled my grandmother telling of her young aunt Margita, who, at sixteen, leapt from a window, a victim of unrequited love. She’d fallen for a married man—in an era when marriage was the expected corrective for women. Wanting the pain to end, she’d hurled herself from the fifth floor and landed in the courtyard, her skull blooming like flowers. Poor Aunt Margita. If she’d lived seventy years later, she’d have boasted about the affair to her friends, not defenestrated. Yet the old Czech man’s story probably differed greatly. For some reason I doubted that someone living in Modřice, of all places, would kill himself over unrequited love. When I pictured him, I kept conjuring a double exposure of Václav Havel and Miloš Forman—the only two Czechs I knew by sight. All Czechs seemed like well-meaning drinkers to me, at least until I would later meet a few of them naked.
I felt moved, as though I’d participated in a person’s death wish. I had been a passenger on a train that ferried the man toward the ultimate stop. I assigned the moment extraordinary significance. It couldn’t have been mere coincidence; there had to be a reason I’d found myself at that exact intersection of place and time. Back then, I didn’t believe in coincidences. I felt the universe maneuvered events so I would end up exactly where I was supposed to be, precisely when I needed to be there.
The man remained anonymous to me, as did his motive for leaping, though I possessed only a half-formed curiosity about it. I cared more for my story, my hypotheses about his life. I reveled in my own projections, which often kept me from seeing people and things as they truly were.
Thirst and hunger fogged my thoughts, intensified by the biting cold on the train, and I thought back to the summer moment that set my departure in motion and explained how I’d landed in this predicament. Two weeks before Prague, my father had celebrated his birthday. It was late July, the heat brutal, as if the sun had hoarded all its energy and unleashed it in one long spell. We were on Krk, and I sat on a bench overlooking the water, watching the procession of guests in white linen: their red noses, sunburned shoulders, salty hair, creased eyes, and protruding paunches. I watched that parade of drunken beauty and let the sea’s rhythm put me into a meditative trance. I longed to escape everything I knew, to meet new people, to discover unfamiliar places, to forget my language and daily routines. I pondered the allure of life by the sea, realizing the Vltava would never equal the vastness of the Kvarner Gulf. That much I understood, though I still ached to feel that sea-born longing, the drought inside you when you live far from a great body of water.
My father, celebrating his fiftieth year, had arranged a grand affair: a boat would ferry us from the city harbor to a restaurant off Krk’s coast, and a hundred liters of wine would be poured for fifty guests—an exuberant display not unfamiliar for him, an anesthesiologist who, surrounded by death, always managed to celebrate life and love. His vocation was to dull the body, to ease suffering, to quiet the body so that death would arrive not as a scream but as a warm, guiding wave that carried you forward. Death’s omnipresence had left him chronically depressed and, to me, often unfathomable. Yet, in some sense, I’d always understood him, with only a few words. He’d been crazy about my mother since the moment they met and believed that love—love for life included—was the center of everything.
He would say things like: “Knowledge grows, life grows shorter. Only fools never die.” Even in elementary school, his lines stirred my fantasies about the power of true love. “It will absolutely shatter you,” he’d say when I asked how you know you’re in love. “You’ll know it.” But I often mocked romance, and I didn’t trust his certainty, choosing instead to invest in becoming a fearless feminist among friends who shared that goal. However you looked at it, waiting to be shattered felt like a major distraction. After the rose-tinted phase my nona called love-struck, came the phase of waist-deep misery, which is why I had no desire to fall in love before finishing college and deciding what I was meant to do with my life.
The birthday celebration kicked off on Saturday morning. By noon, guests across the harbor wore white linen, awaiting the start of the festivities—the moment when they’d ease their senses with chilled drinks. In the first hour, my father mixed and mingled with guests with my mother by his side, a natural host who managed the crowd with ease. She possessed an innate knack for hospitality and child-rearing—a gift, as the catechist noted at my First Communion, for running a home and raising children. For me, it wasn’t so much a talent as a social duty, something my mother carried to the point where femininity and motherhood seemed part of her design. All the guests arrived in pairs.
The women were my mother’s circle, the men my father’s, and they sat in their assigned places: the women upstairs, the men by the downstairs bar. My younger brother, Nino, a medical student and serene, brow-thick bodhisattva, was the only other person besides me without a wedding ring or an ulcer. We moved back and forth between groups, watching the old people, pocketing bottles and cigarettes, and mostly feeling bored.
Among my father’s friends was the hairdresser Srdjan, the man I’d once trusted with my first experience. At seventeen, I’d asked to try blonde, and my mother suggested Srdjan, who ran Rijeka’s best salon at the time. Srdjan wasn’t married, but he had twenty years on me and, as my mother liked to remind me, a gambling problem. One bleaching session followed by three colorations later, achieving the shade I wanted, Srdjan invited me for coffee. It was our final appointment, planned for the day’s end. I was painfully shy around men, yet my eyes sparkled with the foolish, adolescent longing I had no idea how to disguise. I found Srdjan attractive—akin to a peak-era Liam Gallagher. Over coffee, our polite talk simmered into something more charged. He asked if I had a boyfriend, to which I answered that I didn’t want one. I wanted only sex—for something to gossip about with friends the next time we skipped gym class.
Srdjan was drunk, and I cried out in pain as it finally happened. Not long after, I let my natural hair color grow back in.
We greeted each other briefly on the boat, a kind of post-appointment exchange among hairdressers who meet clients outside the salon. The thought of flirting or signaling anything to him never crossed my mind. I preferred dreaming instead.
The boat was halfway to Krk when Srdjan and the other men began leaping into the water, relieved to let the suppressed adolescent within them surface, at least for an hour. The women remained on deck, sipping their drinks, their figures concealed beneath clothes they no longer liked but wore out of habit. Beige shirts had become almost a uniform, making the women look alike: mothers to the grown men who splashed around the sea. I remembered how painful it seemed to live with such self-control. No wonder autoimmune issues, rashes, allergies, and the dark rings under their eyes persisted. All women started resembling each other as time passed. Perhaps because they rarely heard their own names. In my mind, I imagined a universe beyond the four letters of my name—a space of boundless freedom, where no mistakes or consequences weighed you down, where there is no gravity or Newton’s third law. A place where silence didn’t keep you from staying afloat.
The party soon moved from the boat to Krk’s northern harbor. In minutes the seaside fish restaurant transformed into an outdoor nightclub. Welcome drinks greeted arrivals, signaling that the celebration was just beginning, despite the heat and tepid wine. We gathered in a section my father had reserved. Two of his friends took to the makeshift stage. A band formed, nostalgia filling the room with old tunes. Though my father had aged beneath the sun, when he was inebriated he sang as if performing in a stadium. He would glance at me now and then, inviting me to join him, but I left him to perform solo. Dancing in public, especially in front of Srdjan, was beyond me.
Dinner offered a respite from the drinking, and the crowd roared back to life. Three of my father’s friends unbuttoned their sweat-drenched shirts, baring chests that horrified the visiting women. Nino and I placed bets on who’d collapse first. Passersby stretched, peering toward the stage where my father’s closest friend, Julio, stood with a microphone. When they were kids, my father and Julio had met at the playground by the number 2 bus terminus in Pećine. They were both five, already scheming to run away from home. Julio, skilled with wood and stone, built a raft with his help, while my father crafted the plan. After weeks forging a raft from boards dug from the Rječina River, the two set off on a modern Frank and Huck Finn adventure—though it ended quickly, the raft sinking as soon as they left shore. Julio’s mother found them in tears, wet and shivering on the riverbank, and forbade them from playing together again. Forty-five years later, the two remained friends, still without a boat or the courage to attempt an escape again.
Julio was telling this raft story when a young Englishwoman suddenly ran up, yanking the microphone from his hand. She cried out that a doctor was urgently needed. Confused, everyone looked toward the point she indicated. My mother was convinced it was some cruel prank played on my old man. Yet the Englishwoman trembled, and two women by a docked boat cried out in alarm. My father sprinted toward the boat. Nino followed. Just then, a waiter rolled out with a colossal birthday cake on a cart. A wave of unease rolled over the restaurant. The band stopped. At the edge of the quay—where the fishing boats lined up along the water—one fisherman had collapsed from the heat. A heart attack. My father and Nino hopped onto the boat, where the fisherman lay motionless. My father began resuscitation, while Nino massaged the man’s chest. An ambulance arrived, and two young paramedics hurried over. My father seized adrenaline shots from their kit and injected them into the man’s neck, a few minutes apart. This was also the moment to note that the cake resembled a syringe used for anesthesia.
Nino pressed on, massaging the man’s chest as my father breathed into him. From a distance, we watched, lined up like seagulls along the pier. Fueled by adrenaline, Nino followed my father’s instructions to mirror his movements. A new bond between father and son appeared, almost tangible—an invisible umbilical cord tying Nino to the man he called father.
The fisherman died. His wife and teenage daughter cried beside his body on the waterfront. A bright summer scarf on his wife’s head turned to a mourning black veil. A black dog barked nearby, scratching at the pale wood of the boat.
We returned to the restaurant in silence. Nino sat beside me, dry-mouthed and tremoring. My mother hugged him, telling him to wash the sweat from his face. Julio signaled the band to resume the birthday program. The waiter brought the now-melted cake. My mother scanned the scene for my father, who stood on the shore, comforting the grieving widow. He then descended to the boat and covered the body with a sheet. The coroners arrived, and my father rejoined the others in the restaurant. He drank a double cognac and cut into the cake, drawing my mother into a tight embrace.
They danced to a Sinatra ballad. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto my mother’s shoulders, and she held him as though she would never let go.
The train finally lurched forward again. They’d cleared the old Czech man from the tracks, and the journey hurtled toward my future.
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Extracted from Dogs by Dora Šustić, translated by Ena Selimović. With the publisher’s permission, Sandorf Passage. © 2026.
