Drachenerwachen Chapter 7: Birth
Considering her
obsession with shopping and consumerism, it isn’t surprising to discover that
Frau Tossilo works in retail. Every item
of clothing or furniture in her flat is described in terms of colour and
materials, in contrast to the only information about Johann and Janka’s fashion
preferences coming in a few lines of banter in the opening chapter, to introduce the characters:
‘But the
suitcase is pretty, isn’t it? I’d love
to have one like that.’
‘Honestly,
Janka, are you eleven or five? You’re
through with that colour by the time
you’re past first grade.’
‘Well, I’m
not. And at least it is a colour, not like your boring black
jeans and even more boring grey hoodie.’
‘That’s not
boring, that’s style.’
What is
surprising is how effective at being a people person Frau Tossilo can be when
she chooses: customers ‘enjoyed buying from her, even though Frau Tossilo gave
them the feeling that they couldn’t possibly have a happy life without four
pairs of new shoes.’
Today, though,
she is too distracted by thoughts of getting home to her ‘stone’ to concentrate
on work, and customers and colleagues alike are noticing that something is
wrong. Even Frau Tossilo herself is
starting to suspect that the stone has bewitched her (as I had realised four
chapters back) and to recognise that it doesn’t even belong to her and she
ought to give it back (probably, but we don’t actually know that the person in
whose suitcase she found it was the rightful owner to start with).
Since she has
had the ‘stone’ for some time now, why has her obsession with it become
so obtrusive today? Is it just plot
convenience? Well, possibly, but when
you’re about to become the mother of a hatchling, you don’t experience
contractions or your waters breaking, so it helps to have some kind of
supernatural link to give you a premonition that something is going to happen,
to ensure that you hurry home after work.
Of course, Frau
Tossilo doesn’t know what exactly is going to happen. She only knows that, as she enters her flat,
the strange sounds of knocking and scratching have started up again, and are
coming from her bedroom. Frightened but
determined to defend herself, she grabs the nearest weapon available, and creeps
out of the kitchen to confront the intruder with – a frying-pan. Which is a fairly appropriate weapon to
threaten an egg with, but it’s a bit late by now.
At this point,
Frau Tossilo’s phone rings, displaying a foreign number – which she refuses to
answer, in case it is the stone’s owner wanting their property back. Now that she is back in the presence of the ‘stone’,
she has completely forgotten that she was even considering returning it.
And now the egg is starting to show its first Riss – a word which can mean either ‘crack’ or ‘tear’. Since the egg was described in an earlier chapter as ‘not hard… nor soft… somehow elusive: something between a well-filled balloon and perhaps a drop of resin just dried,’ it sounds more like a flexible reptile egg than a hard-shelled bird’s egg, so it would make sense for the occupant to be able to tear it apart with his claws, or with an egg-tooth if he has one. (Recently, when I introduced my brother-in-law to my newest model dragon, Vyrnwy, he was very concerned that Vyrnwy didn’t have an egg-tooth and might therefore be unable ever to escape from his shell.)
However, this
isn’t what happens here. Instead, after
the first few Risse have appeared,
the egg leaps into the air, hovers there for a moment, cracks loudly apart –
and knacken definitely means ‘to
crack’ – falls, and breaks open. Here,
it definitely sounds more like an egg with a hard, brittle shell – and, as we
will see in later chapters, a reasonably thick shell.
Out pours a
viscous black ‘sauce’. All the
dictionary definitions for Soße are
culinary – sauce, gravy, juice, dressing – but the slime inside a dragon’s egg
doesn’t sound at all appetising, especially when it makes the whole room smell ‘alternately
of wood and metal, then of damp grass, and somehow also of petrol’.
I suppose our
human experience doesn’t have the words to explain what a dragon’s egg feels or
smells like, so the descriptions can’t help sounding confusing. And it doesn’t help that Frau Tossilo, like
Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, doesn’t know what the strange little midnight-blue and gold creature ‘like a
slimy lizard or an alligator with its eyes closed’ that crawls out of the egg
might be.
The dragon, on
the other hand, is very clear about who Frau Tossilo is, and repeatedly insists
that she is his mother. After all, he
has probably heard her voice as she answers the phone or just walks around the
flat muttering to herself, and maybe she really has been singing lullabies to
the egg, so he has had plenty of time to imprint on her – and to learn German.
Frau Tossilo is
struggling to get a grip on herself – this thing isn’t real, it must be a
hallucination, she just needs to go into the kitchen, shut the bedroom door,
have a drink and calm down – when the kids from upstairs, who have heard the
strange noises, come ringing on the door to find out what’s going on. For once, Frau Tossilo is relieved to see
anyone who is human and definitely real, even a pair of snooping kids.
Of course,
Johann and Janka, hearing someone yowling piteously from the bedroom at having
been abandoned, rush in to investigate.
And so it eventually dawns on Frau Tossilo that if they can also see and
hear the bizarre little creature, then it probably is real, which means that
she hasn’t gone mad.
Of course, having a hungry dragon in your flat isn’t necessarily actually any less of a problem than being insane would have been. As I keep reminding myself when going through a paranoid phase, if I’m delusional, I have a problem. If I’m right and the world really does work the way I imagine, everyone has a problem.
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