Drachenerwachen Chapters 21-23: New Year

The story resumes a few days later, on New Year’s Eve, with Johann and Janka playing quietly in their room.  Johann, playing on his new laptop, invents teleportation.  As you do, when you’re thirteen and need to kill some time until nightfall and the New Year’s fireworks.  Somehow, I need a much stronger rope to suspend my disbelief over this than over finding a dragon’s egg.

It works like the cut and paste functions on a Word document, apparently, only with physical objects.  The computer stores the data of a physical object (say, a bundle of quilts), and deletes the object from one place to paste it somewhere else.  Johann decides to call the procedure Raumen, which I think I will translate ‘spacing’ in this blog.  This possibly isn’t the best translation, since in the science fiction adventures I sometimes read, this usually refers to throwing someone out of airlock without the benefit of a space-suit.

At any rate, I get the impression that spacing is going to be an important plot point in this story.  Perhaps they will need to space Kurmo to a distant country, in order to shake off whoever might be looking for him in Berlin?  Or even space him into a computer game (the converse of Johann’s invented story in earlier chapters about downloading monsters from games) to set him free in a world where dragons belong? 

I really, really hope they can be cautious about this.  After all, so far Johann hasn’t done more than move some quilts around the room, and joke about spacing their father from sitting on the loo into the bedroom. 

Personally, I think the logical next step after spacing inanimate objects would be to try spacing a small living creature (say, a spider) to see if it arrives alive and unharmed, and then perhaps to space a more intelligent animal (say, a mouse that has learned how to navigate a particular maze) to see whether it arrives with its memories intact.  I realise that experimenting on animals who can’t give their consent is ethically dubious, but so is trying it out on a sapient person (whether human or dragon) before you can be sure that it’s safe.

While Johann is rehearsing his advertising spiel on spacing as the newest, most efficient way to travel, Frau Tossilo is practising her own sales talk on Kurmo – about Kurmo himself.  Kurmo, like many adolescents, is starting to experience the embarrassment of his body changing in ways that he can’t control.  Now that he can breathe flame, he has accidentally melted a mirror – and while Frau Tossilo insists that it was a horrible mirror and she never liked it, Kurmo suspects that she is only saying this to spare his feelings, and that this probably won’t be the last accident that he causes.

So, to comfort him, Frau Tossilo tells him how much his body warmth has saved her on heating bills, and how, being fuelled by vegetables, he is a much more environmentally friendly way to heat the flat than burning fossil fuels, and, most importantly, how he has freed her from loneliness.  Her speech rises to a climax:

‘So, do you want a dragon?  Then get ready to fight!  Because even if he is a mirror-melter, his mother isn’t going to hand him over under any circumstances!’

Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to be this simple.  I hope Frau Tossilo, Johann and Janka can protect Kurmo from the mysterious Black West, but they can’t go on keeping him in a city flat forever.  It isn’t safe, and it isn’t kind to a growing dragon who needs to be able to fly – and nobody knows how big he might grow.  I suspect (probably because I’ve been watching the 2016 version of Pete’s Dragon, not to mention reading Dragon Rider) that this is probably going to end with Kurmo flying off to distant mountains far from human civilisation, perhaps to be reunited with his dragon family, and his human friends only being able to come to visit him from time to time.

In the meantime, Frau Tossilo shows Kurmo how to tell fortunes in molten lead, making a wish as you do so.  Kurmo, holding the spoon containing the molten lead in his tail-tip (I hadn’t known that dragons had prehensile tails, but it’s useful if your paws aren’t very dextrous) is full of wishes: not to break any more things, and to fly, and to be free, and to find his place in the world, and never to be parted from Janka and Johann and Frau Tossilo.  And the shape that the molten lead forms looks like – a laptop.  It looks as though the author is confirming that Johann’s invention of spacing will be important in arranging for all these different desires to be possible together.

As New Year’s Day dawns, Kurmo is transformed, both physically and mentally.  He sheds his skin to emerge into adult shape (or possibly just the next phase of adolescence) as a silver-grey dragon instead of midnight-blue with gold.  (This explains why the dragon on the front cover doesn’t look like baby Kurmo – though admittedly, Annabelle von Sperber’s illustrations show many different interpretations of dragons, from snake-like to crocodile-like to bipedal dinosaur.)  Even his eyes are changed, now almond-shaped with slit pupils.

I don’t think I’ve come across another book that describes dragons metamorphosing – but why not?  Dragonflies do, after all.  In one of the later How to Train Your Dragon books, we are told that Hiccup’s riding-dragon, the Windwalker, who has grown a lot since Hiccup first bought him, will soon be ready to metamorphose, but there is no explanation of what his adult form will look like.

At any rate, Kurmo is now suddenly much bigger and stronger – enough so that, far from needing Frau Tossilo to protect him, he is able to protect her.  He is now able to speak in complete sentences.  More than that, he has his memories back – millions of years of memories, of darkness and emptiness; of flying through the wind into the sunrises – of a triple sun? – of  being lost in a verschlungenen Steingarten (which I don’t understand as it seems to mean ‘a swallowed-up stone garden’ but the dictionary says that verschlingen can also mean to twist thread, so I’ll assume it’s something like a twisting stone labyrinth); of clanging swords and thrusting battle and screaming; of being severely wounded in battle, and having healed and restored himself by morning: ‘Again become healthy, become whole, become new.  Light.’ 

(So okay, I’m probably wrong about Kurmo originating in our world and having dragon family here.  After all, who needs biological parents if you are endlessly self-renewing, like a phoenix?)

And now, he is waking up in a strange place, and once more ‘Again become healthy, become whole, become new.  Light.’  It takes him a moment to interpret the puzzling fabric and wood around him as Frau Tossilo’s curtains and bed, and to remember that in this incarnation he is Kurmo, and that Frau Tossilo is his heart-person.  With his new maturity comes premonition: that the new year brings a greater battle for him than he has faced in all his lives, and that he is ready to face it.