Drachenerwachen Chapters 17-20: Dragon Refugee

First of all, thank you to everyone who has been donating money to my sponsorship appeals for UNHCR and the Disasters Emergency Committee.  You've probably already had emails reminding you that the week beginning Monday 20th June is UN Refugee Week, but if not, why not click on the link to find out a bit more about it?

Going on with my sponsored reading project: Chapter 17 follows on immediately from 16, as Janka returns with Kurmo once again hidden in the pink suitcase.  She pauses at her own flat only long enough to fetch the rubbish bags and send them down the waste-disposal chute – having a dragon in your life doesn’t mean that ordinary household chores cease to exist.

Meanwhile, Frau Tossilo, returning from work, receives a phone call from a mysterious company called ‘Black West International’.  They want to arrange a date to collect their suitcase from Frau Tossilo and return hers.

Frau Tossilo hastily denies all knowledge – no, she doesn’t have their suitcase, not even the teensiest little bit of a suitcasette, though naturally she very much wants her own suitcase back and will cover their transport costs, etc – and hurriedly switches off her phone. 

Janka comes along and asks her what the call was about and what is wrong, and Frau Tossilo tells her to shut her trap.  Frau Tossilo may be gradually warming to her young neighbours, and relying on their help with looking after Kurmo, but she can’t bring herself to go all the way in trusting them.  This is probably not a good idea, as she certainly isn’t level-headed enough to deal with Black West International on her own.

Of course, Janka isn’t fooled for a moment.  She knows that the caller must have been someone who wanted not just their suitcase, but their dragon.  By the next day at school, she is so anxious that it has given her a stomach-ache, forcing her to sit and rest during a PE lesson (which must itself be a torment for a girl as sporty as Janka), and of course, sitting still means that she has more time to worry.

By the time they reach the last lesson of the day, Discussion Time, she can barely concentrate.  The class sit in a circle and discuss celebrating Christmas by making Julklapp, a Swedish tradition which means roughly ‘giving someone a home-made gift and knocking on their door to leave it anonymously on the doorstep’.  Next, the class organises a discussion on the theme of ‘Do I feel a part of this classroom community?’

Janka, still racking her brain for an idea to save Kurmo, is hauled into the discussion, but all she can think of is that she feels a part of the dragon-community consisting of her, Johann, Kurmo and Frau Tossilo.  Called on to say something, she makes a speech about how wonderful it is to play with a friend in the snow, and how frightening it is to think that he might have to go away, when he is the most important part of the community, without which everything falls apart.

Not surprisingly, the teacher asks her to clarify what she means and whom she’s talking about, and, also not surprisingly, Janka doesn’t feel up to explaining.  So, like Frau Tossilo the day before, she hastily dismisses the question, ‘’Snot important.  I just meant in general terms, you know…’  I don’t know about Janka’s school, but if this had happened at my school when I was eleven, everyone would definitely have assumed that she had a boyfriend, and pestered her endlessly to know who it was.

Fortunately, she is interrupted by a boy called Marlon, ‘the gawky boy… who seldom said anything, and when he did, it was mostly all sorts of weird thoughts.  But Janka liked him in spite of it.’  Personally, as someone who has been an oddball all my life, I am intrigued by Marlon, and hope we see more of him in future chapters.  Lena, who seems to be Janka’s best friend of her own age, hasn’t really been given much characterisation beyond being the girl Janka does gymnastics with and goes trick-or-treating with.

At any rate, Marlon offers his own interpretation of Janka’s speech: the classroom community is like an egg, and breaking off one part splits the egg.  But, he points out to Janka, there can also be a time when splitting can be the catalyst for something better to arise; just as an egg must break for a chick to find its way out, so changes to the classroom dynamic could allow for new friendships, maybe?  I definitely get the impression that he has a crush on Janka.

Janka isn’t thrilled at the idea of being friends with Marlon, but she almost wants to hug him for having given her an idea.  They can just glue the bits of egg back together, and hand it over to Black West as good as new!  Problem solved, eh?

Hmm – I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy.  From the descriptions earlier on, it isn’t clear whether the egg Kurmo hatched from is more like a leathery reptilian egg or a brittle bird’s egg.  But even if it has a brittle, hard structure, are the pieces even thick enough to glue them back together?  And even if they do, isn’t someone who inspects it when it doesn’t hatch likely to see the cracks, or blobs of glue?  Oh well, if they can manage it, they can give Black West its very own home-made Julklapp.

The immediate difficulty, however, is arranging to talk to the definitely brittle Frau Tossilo, who is trying to insist that no, she doesn’t need any help, she just wants to spend some time alone with Kurmo, why don’t the kids just go off and watch a film or something?

She is worried, not just about the prospect of Black West taking Kurmo by force, but of Kurmo wanting to leave if he realises that he actually belongs to someone else and not to her.  Of course, this isn’t going to happen.  Kurmo is a person with a mind of his own, not property.  He thinks that he and Frau Tossilo are very, very lucky to have found each other, and he is determined not to let anyone take him away.

Besides, as Johann warns (while shoving his foot into Frau Tossilo’s doorway so that she can’t get rid of him), Black West International is a huge, powerful and sinister-sounding company, which does something mysterious involving biotechnology and surveillance. 

I can see that invoking a powerful, sinister antagonist makes the story more dramatic, but in some ways this seems too simplistic, dividing the world into good guys and bad guys.  I almost think that it would be more interesting if Kurmo was a tug-of-love child torn between his human mother and his dragon family, or between two different human adoptive families who both wish him well but have different ideas of what is in his best interests.

Still – they need to deal with the problem they actually have.  At last Janka manages to get into the argument between Frau Tossilo and Johann – and Kurmo, whom Frau Tossilo had hoped to shelter from having to learn about Black West – to explain her idea.

Johann points out that this isn’t a long-term solution, as Black West are bound to notice when no dragon hatches out, but that at least it buys them some time.  Frau Tossilo protests that she has already told the caller that she doesn’t have a suitcase.  Johann offers to pose as Frau Tossilo’s son and explain that his ‘mother’ is a bit crazy and easily confused (which isn’t far off the mark, really).

Rather to my surprise, gluing together the splintered bits of the upper half of the eggshell with clear nail-varnish (the other half was reasonably undamaged) actually does work.  What intrigues our heroes more, though, is that there is a pattern in gold on blue, in the inside of the egg, that looks like a map – or even a labyrinth.  Why is it there, in an egg, where it’s too dark to read a map?  Kurmo seems to recognise it, and is moved by it.

Janka wonders whether this is some kind of network that Kurmo had to crawl through before he could be born.  She is mainly intrigued by how reminiscent it seems of the myth of Theseus and the labyrinth, which she remembers Marlon giving a report on at school.  Why should Kurmo be in a labyrinth, when he isn’t a horrible monster like the Minotaur?  But, as Marlon had said, Greek myths aren’t meant to be taken literally, and you need to work out for yourself how to interpret them.

At any rate, they put the egg back in its box, reset the controls, pile the clothes that were in the suitcase back over it, and get in touch with Black West to arrange an exchange.  It all seems very simple and straightforward – too much so for this to be the conclusion to the story.  The clothes covering the box containing the egg might have looked like a random messy jumble, but how do we know that they weren’t a carefully arranged and photographed messy jumble which the people at Black West will check to see whether anyone has tampered with the suitcase’s contents?

Still, our heroes don’t know that the book has nearly two hundred pages of plot still to go.  They’re all relieved to have Kurmo still safely with them, and Frau Tossilo is pleased to be reunited with her suitcase and her dressing-gown and nail-varnish – and rather bemused at being reunited with the random assortment of souvenirs she bought while on holiday, including a splendid new laptop computer which Johann goes into raptures over.  He, in his turn, is flabbergasted when Frau Tossilo casually says he can have it if he wants, as an early Christmas present and/or payment for dragon-sitting.  She then tries to think of something that could be a present for Janka – would Janka like, say, the fruit-dryer?

Janka: No thanks!

Tossilo: What have you got against the fruit-dryer?

Janka: I’ve got nothing against the fruit-dryer!  I just don’t need it.

Tossilo: No, I don’t need it, either.

Janka: Why did you buy it, then?

Tossilo: For the same reason I bought the laptop.

Janka: And that would be?

Tossilo: I don’t know any more.  Actually, I don’t think I knew then.

This is a sweet scene, as Frau Tossilo realises how much her life has changed, and that she has come to learn that the most important things in life are rarely things.  She had been a desperately lonely person whose life filled up with impulse-buying because it didn’t have anything more meaningful.

As far as Johann is concerned, though, having a good computer is at least one of the important things in life.  He vows that he will achieve great things with this one.