It was about midnight last night when someone sitting close to me at Klaudio’s terrace spotted something funny next to a car parked not far from us on the lower square. It was a bird standing upright and still. I immediately thought of a small owl that has a nest in the dilapidated wall of the Communal Palace a couple of floors above the square. I got up at once and went to it. It did not budge as I was approaching it. It did not budge when I sat crosslegged on the cobblestones right next to it, either. The size of a fist, it stared at me impassively with its huge, yellow eyes. To impress me, it spread its stubby wings as wide as it could. It was clear it was still an adolescent, for its flying feathers were not yet formed. Indeed, its parents flitted about and kept calling it in long, tender whistles.

A small crowd gathered around as I was pointing my index finger at the hapless bird. As I moved my finger to and fro at a safe distance from its crooked beak, it danced about without budging. “Don’t touch it,” warned Vladan Jovanovich as he approached, “for its parents won’t take it back if they can smell anything funny.” He seemed to know what he was talking about. Without much ado, he went to find a cardboard box. He was back soon. “Let’s return it to its nest,” he said and gently covered the owl with the open box. I helped him close the box around it. “Who’s got the key to the second floor?” Vladan asked. Daniel Handjal dashed off to find the key, and in a few minutes the two of them were at the window to the side of which there stood the hole in the wall from which the owl had fallen to the ground. Daniel removed one of the shutters before taking the box from Vladan. After a few attempts, the owl clambered into the hole. Vladan and Daniel returned to the café a minute later. The rescue operation was over.

On my way home I started thinking about all this, and I kept thinking about it much of this morning. Without help, the owl would have fallen prey to street cats. There can hardly be any doubt about it. At best, someone would have picked it up and put it out of the cats’ way—say, on a branch of a tree under the terrace wall. This would be all I would have done, too. For better or worse, I would not have meddled in the owl’s predicament in any other way. Perhaps its parents would have fed it for a while, but it is not very likely that it would have survived. The fall would have been fatal. Although I am kind of relieved that Vladan and Daniel have taken things into their hands, I am still sure that I will let things run their natural course the next time something like this happens. The only conclusion I can come up with after all the thinking is that Vladan, Daniel, and I fall into two very different groups of people. And I can only hope that both groups have a rightful place on earth.