Peter and Andrej were two tenacious cartridges filled up to their snotty little noses with Falconry … Their mother had Falcon outfits sewn for them that were appropriate for their age. Proper uniforms: red shirts with high collars … a jacket that had braided cords hanging from the left shoulder … a tall cap with a falcon feather … Two regular little Lilliputians that looked like they’d jumped out of their big brother’s pocket. Every day a funeral procession went down Bohorič Street toward Holy Cross at least once and occasionally several times … The black processions would turn off the little street that ran perpendicular to the Hams’s entry gate … They would drag on, bristling with heads … as many as there were dead people in the cemetery … First a policeman would appear in the intersection to stop the horse rigs, bicyclists, the occasional car … Judging from the policeman Peter and Andrej could quickly guess whether a Falcon or an Eagle had died. If the deceased was a red, they would stand on the sidewalk outside the gate, take off their caps and wait at attention for the tall black carriage drawn by two horses with plumes and the first small group of mourners to go past … if they determined from the constable that an Eagle had died, they went up to the fence and spat through the laths and the leaves onto the sidewalk, shouting “Boo! Hiss!” Because I felt sorry for dead people, I deliberately went out to stand on the sidewalk and quietly wait for the whole funeral procession to pass … not just the tall carriage with the little black angels in the patched pillars, but also the last couples, usually dressed in everyday street clothes, as they strolled here and there in the direction of Holy Cross … This was the cause of countless fights between the twins and me. “You’re an Owl! An Owl!” they railed at me … I wasn’t an Eagle … actually, I didn’t feel like I belonged to any group, which was the worst and most desolate feeling in the world … except that now and then I may have felt I belonged to God … or rather, to the conversations I had with him in the air around me, not that he ever answered or filled the emptiness with his presence …
The twins weren’t appropriate company for me … that didn’t exist anywhere on Bohorič Street … except for a few little girls and boys who were even smaller runts than they were. There wasn’t a single house whose front door you’d see a boy or at least a girl my age, ten, if not already eleven, coming out of … Bojadamič’s son, a stuck-up giant, was already in high school … I had nothing in common with him … he led a different kind of life … out in his magnificent yard with its flowers and trellises he had everything, a set of parallel bars, colored rings, model airplanes … I also didn’t have any connection with the people up there … in the tar paper shacks behind the fences, where temporary workers lived among heaps of old metal mixed in with jobless people, beggars and Gypsies, so I didn’t take a step in that inhospitable direction … Around “Mexico” … I would go there to read the newspapers posted on the bulletin board, so I could tell Vati the news from the Spanish or Abyssinian fronts … riding around the building on bicycles or kicking a ball in the yard were the children of better parents, who were a little too self-satisfied and conceited for my taste … Living in the houses and villas with gardens nearby there were just mamma’s boys carrying pails and shovels … So I had to go down Bohorič in the opposite direction … toward the military hospital to flush out anybody who was to my liking at all … I was hanging around some dreary houses when one afternoon I heard the voice of a boy humming an aria from the opera Carmen coming out of the vestibule of a house standing where the street narrows … This was Zdravko, three years older than me … a real athlete and, judging from his speech and his build, already a young man … We sort of became friends. What bothered me about him was his thick neck, which suggested a kind of coarseness and brute force … He confided in me that he planned to become an opera singer when he grew up … nothing less than a singer, a soloist — the lead soloist in a major opera company … He told me about various opera stars, about Caruso … his great successes … his voyages across the Atlantic to America … the beautiful women who chased after him … He would practice in vestibules and hallways where there was a good echo … and I even tried it myself, I let him teach me, if only I could have had a little bit more time with him … Unfortunately we weren’t able to forge a more durable friendship, because he was older and didn’t have time, because every day when he wasn’t in school or helping his father, the driver of a brewery hitch, he was taking voice lessons with a teacher in town … That hitch of his father’s frequently bolted, spooked by wood-burning trucks, and went racing down Bohorič, the reins flying in the air, as the stacks of barrels fell off the wagon and exploded with a bang on the pavement … while his father, a powerful, ruddy-cheeked man in a leather apron down to his ankles, whip in hand, raced after them … Sometimes when he was coming home from school or his voice lesson, he would sit down beside me by the fence for five or ten minutes … “So brav müsstest du sein, wie er, etwas lernen, was dir Freude macht,”
* mother would set him up as an example for me … Once when we were sitting like that, a boy wearing the lace- and embroidery-adorned clothes of a knight suddenly appeared on the sidewalk, looking so brilliant it nearly blinded me. He was wearing a high ruffled collar around his neck and shoulders, and the cross of the Knights Templar showed black on his chest. I got up and followed him, both Zdravko and I went, because that was on the way home for him … He was a regular White Prince from the Beautiful Adventures. He wore a wide-brimmed hat on his head with a plume that bobbled and he had low-cut shoes on his feet and gloves on his hands that went up to the elbow, like the ones for hunting with eagles … Besides all that, he was carrying a spear with a split flag that also had the Templars’ cross embroidered on it in silver … And his trousers! All threads, hems, patches, and braids … “That’s a crusader,” Zdravko explained to me unphased … “Ant vehr do zey ket zose krate univorms?” I asked him, beside myself. “From the Franciscans …” “You chust ko zehr ant zey kiff you a speer ant ze cloze?” … “No, you have to apply, attend mass a lot, distribute literature door to door …” Zdravko ran off home, but I followed the crusader to the end of the street, followed him to the train tracks … the military hospital … across the bridge … all the way to some ugly building that he entered like a ghost from another world. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Something like that really existed? I wanted to become a crusader like that … They also had shields, Zdravko explained to me, and they carry swords in processions … That was something! To change your clothes and yourself! That’s what I wanted! It was like becoming Tarzan, Robin Hood, a gangster … If only I could bring myself to go there, to the Triple Bridge and the Franciscan brothers.