Drachenerwachen Chapter 7: Birth

So, we finally meet a dragon!  But not before we have encountered Frau Tossilo at work, where, in contrast to her irritability with her young neighbours and her flustered response to unexpected callers, she is ‘friendliness personified’ and five times winner of the Salesperson of the Year award.

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.