Drachenerwachen Chapters 13-16: How to Walk Your Dragon

Autumn is drawing on, with wild stormy weather, and Kurmo Silfur is growing up.  Even if he isn’t yet ready to cope with being on his own for more than a couple of hours, he is mature enough to want to go out and have adventures – and not yet mature enough to listen to reason.  In effect, he is an adolescent in a toddler’s body, with the (semi-conscious) memories of an adult who has lived countless lives before.  So Johann, as an actual adolescent, has to try to be the responsible, parental figure:

Kurmo: Want to go out.

Johann: Yeah, looks cool.  But we can’t go out there.  I can hardly wander round the streets with a dragon!

Kurmo: Not wander.  Want to fly.

And, if all else fails – Kurmo knows that no human can withstand sad puppy-dragon eyes welling with tears. 

Johann gives in, and agrees to smuggle Kurmo out in the ersatz Pink Prince for an evening trip to the park.  Which is awkward enough in itself – for a start, he needs to catch the U-bahn to get to the park, and while going out to take your dragon for a walk is quite cool, trundling a pink wheeled suitcase with a glittery handle definitely isn’t cool when you’re a thirteen-year-old boy.

At any rate, Kurmo is overjoyed by the park, with the strong, lively wind in his nostrils, the smell of wet leaves, the damp grass tickling his paws, the mud squelching under his weight… I can’t help suspecting that, unless they come home in time to clean thoroughly before Frau Tossilo comes home from work, it’s going to be hard to explain to explain why Kurmo (and the inside of the suitcase) are covered in mud, grass and dead leaves.  At least, as Johann comments, dogs aren’t allowed in this park, so he and Kurmo don’t have to worry about treading in dog-muck. 

As an aside, I have no idea about Kurmo’s own sanitation arrangements.  He isn’t an ethereal being who lives on moonlight, like Cornelia Funke’s dragons, but a creature who works his way through considerable quantities of vegetables.  But we don’t hear anything about Frau Tossilo worrying about accidents on her fluffy carpets, or Kurmo trying to fly up to perch on the loo-seat because he feels that he’s too grown-up to use a litter-tray or newspapers any longer.  Oh well, they must have worked something out – and hopefully Kurmo has enough sense to realise that it’s best not to leave droppings in public places, if he doesn’t want people to wonder what sort of strange animal produced them.

At any rate, Kurmo is having a wonderful time eating nettles and racing around in the playground, and Johann is just about to film him on his phone and send the video to Janka (who is out at circus skills practice – let’s hope she doesn’t watch the video until she’s in a private place), when he realises that, even on a dark, wet November evening, a boy and his dragon can’t be sure of being alone in a park.  Two other lads, slightly older than Johann, have come here for an illicit smoke.

Johann tries to distract their attention, or preferably annoy them into leaving altogether, by pestering them to give him a cigarette (desperately hoping that they don’t actually offer him one).  It’s no good – they’ve noticed Kurmo, and, unlike Frau Tossilo, they definitely know a dragon when they see one.

So, what does Johann do?  With audacity worthy of Miles Vorkosigan, points his phone at Kurmo, and sighs, ‘Damn!  The battery’s gone flat!’  Kurmo, who has watched Johann trying to play computer games on a clunky old computer, takes the hint and ‘crashes’. 

By now, the older boys are really intrigued, but Johann is in control of their curiosity now, and airily remarks, ‘You mean you don’t know the Stealing Creatures app?  I got this one from World of Dragonfights…’ and so on, into a long spiel about the app for stealing monsters from computer games, downloading them and printing them out with a 3D printer, how it’s best to wait for the next edition of HeavenHell where you can get a really cool Megadragon instead of this wimpy little dragon that doesn’t work properly… and by this time, the older boys have gone off wondering if it’s really true that there’s a gaming shop with a printer big enough.

PDB11 pointed out that, considering that the book was published in 2018, ‘the Stealing Creatures app’ just has to be a reference to Pokémon Go.  He then drew my attention to this cartoon.

In the meantime, inevitably, Frau Tossilo arrives home to see – no sign of Johann’s coat or his trainers in the entrance to her flat (and with all those fluffy carpets, she is definitely the sort of homeowner who insists on all shoes being removed at the front door).  Johann can’t have taken Kurmo up to his own flat, because this is one of the afternoons when his father finishes work early.  She tells herself that they must be playing hide-and-seek with her, and obligingly exclaims ‘Where can they be?’ before beginning a thorough search.  No sign of a boy or a dragon.  By the time she has searched every possible and impossible hiding-place, she’s starting to get worried.

Reading this in a foreign language, I don’t always catch the nuances of language, and I had to stop and think about the sentence »Frau Tossilo rieselte ein Schauer über den Rücken.«

Literally, this means ‘A shower trickled over Frau Tossilo’s back.’  But does this mean that she literally went and had a shower while she thought about what to do next, or that she felt as though a trickle of ice-cold water was running down her back?  Schauer generally means a shower of rain; the sort of shower that you wash in is eine Dusche.  Schauer also means shudder, schauerlich means horrific or spine-chilling, and a Schauergeschichte or Schauermärchen is a horror story – and somehow I don’t think this is all because of the Bates Motel.

Still, I need to read on and get an idea of context.  We are told that Frau Tossilo doing whatever she is doing now, »sich in irgendwelche Schauergedanken hineinzusteigern,« (getting worked up in such shower-thoughts/shudder-thoughts) is something that doesn’t often happen now that Kurmo and the children are part of her life, partly because she doesn’t have time, but mainly because she doesn’t want to, when there are happier things to think about, like discovering that Johann and Janka aren’t actually too bad, even if she doesn’t want to admit that she is enjoying getting to know them, and certainly won’t allow herself to laugh when Janka laughs.

So, while having an attention-hungry and spinach-hungry baby dragon to look after would certainly cut down on the amount of time you can spend in the bathroom, it sounds as though we are hearing about an emotional rather than literal shower.  Otherwise, instead of Frau Tossilo’s internal monologue about her feelings for her new friends, we would probably get a description of her favourite flavours and colours of shampoo and shower-gel, and the annoyance of her favourite bathrobe still being absent.

At any rate, by the time Johann and Kurmo return, she is too relieved at seeing them again that she forgets to scold them – and is even amused by Johann’s story of how he tricked the two boys he met.  And next time, she wants to be the one to go out for a walk with Kurmo.

So, of course, in the next chapter we get a scene of Janka being the next one to play outside with Kurmo – this time not under cover of darkness, but in broad daylight, playing in the snow on the roof-terrace of their block of flats.  Janka is overjoyed both at the snow and at being able to share the experience with Kurmo.  Kurmo himself, however, watching Janka’s snowballs fly off the edge of the roof, is longing to be old enough to fly for real.  

Somehow, the pace and structure of this book – not least the fact that we are less than a third of the way in – suggests that there is trouble brewing.  How long can it be before someone spots Kurmo who isn’t so easily fooled?