Newcomers by Lojze Kovacic

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 andhe 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.
    * You just need to be as diligent as he is, learn to do something that gives you