Drachenerwachen Chapters 27-29: The Bad Guys Haven't Given Up

And now, we get a villain chapter!  A thin-lipped man with ash-blond hair is sitting in ‘einen schwarzen Drehledersessel’, literally ‘a black swivel-leather-chair’, which seems a strange way of putting it – I’d have expected it to be referred to as ‘einen schwarzen ledernen Drehsessel’ for ‘a black leather swivel-chair’.  PDB11 suggested that it might mean a chair made of turned leather, whatever that is, but it seems to be a chair that swivels round and that is made of black leather.  It’s just that the ‘made of leather’ part seems to be what the author wants to emphasise.

At any rate, the man sitting in the chair, in a tower-block in another country, with floor-length windows looking out onto a frozen lake, is talking on the phone to a man called Sherpa Sarvas, assuring him that their colleague is in Berlin sorting out the matter in hand.

I don’t know how I feel about one of the villains apparently being a Tibetan (unless, of course, ‘Sherpa Sarvas’ is just a code-name).  On the one hand, I suppose it is discriminatory to insist that all villains have to be white Europeans in the way that, for example, Drachenreiter draws a sharp distinction between European humans, most of whom pose a threat to fabulous beings, and Asian humans who are reliably sympathetic and welcoming to dragons.  

But at the same time, having Asian villains (or Mexican villains for that matter) on the team makes me feel uneasy – especially as Sarvas seems to be a powerful customer whom the thin-lipped man is trying to placate.  I suppose it’s because, in a book written from the point of view of a white European and where the principal human characters are white Europeans, it feels as though, when some characters come from a different ethnicity, their characterisation is a reflection on their ethnic group in general.

At any rate, the nameless thin-lipped man assures his contact that the box and its contents are undisturbed, and suggests that Sarvas may simply have miscalculated the hatching time and the ‘beast’ may not be due to hatch out for another couple of months yet.  I feel rather disappointed in him for not having left some kind of test (say, a hair glued lightly across the casket) to check whether it really was undisturbed.  Honestly, hasn’t he read any spy novels?  And he can’t be entirely convinced himself, or he wouldn’t have sent another agent to Berlin to investigate in February, after getting the suitcase back in December.

Sarvas evidently isn’t convinced, and seems to have guessed that the dragon will have hatched out and that they must have been tricked with a glued-back-together egg, because the thin-lipped man next has to deal with the question of whether, if the dragon has already hatched, he will have imprinted on the woman by now.  He tries to insist that it isn’t really a problem, because the creature will still be young enough to be malleable.

After ending the phone call, he sits back to reflect that, if the dragon has imprinted on the woman, this could actually be useful because it will make him vulnerable to manipulation.  He sends a message, instructing that the rock enclosure must now be equipped with an unbreakable glass room in the middle, with a bed.

Being a showy sort of villain, he then feels the need to pose in front of a mirror and gloat to himself – ‘Here stands the future.  Black West is the might of tomorrow!’ while miming firing a pistol.  This does not look good – though admittedly, the sort of villains who monologue are usually very good at distracting themselves for long enough for someone to kill them and/or rescue the prisoners.

Meanwhile, back in Berlin, it is the following morning, and Frau Tossilo is worrying about whether she did the right thing or misread the situation and made a fool of herself quite needlessly.  She had started off by assuming that her visitor had come because he was genuinely interested in her, but as he examined every corner of her flat, including claiming that he needed to go to the lavatory as an excuse to sneak into the spare bedroom and examine it, she became suspicious that he had come to search for a dragon, or at least evidence that a dragon lives here.

Fortunately, Frau Tossilo had taken advantage of Kurmo’s absence to clean everything and to paint over Kurmo’s claw-marks earlier that day, so she had been able to show the visitor the whole flat with complete lack of dragon, and had hissed angrily at him, ‘Well, now are you satisfied?’  But now, having driven the man away, she is having third thoughts – what if he really had just come because he wanted to see her, after all?

Janka reassures her that she was right to trust her instincts – after all, no man who brings a bouquet of flowers that massive is trustworthy!

Frau Tossilo suggests that they – she and Kurmo and the children – might go away on a camping holiday to a place which she always loved as a child, a disused quarry in a forest, with a cave where they could sleep.  The children wonder whether the shock of her mysterious visitor has unhinged her – surely, Frau Tossilo isn’t the sort of person who would choose to sleep in a cave?

We seem to be seeing a whole new side to her character.  Her relationships with Kurmo and with Johann and Janka have brought her closer to the child she once was, the sort of person who would find it fun to camp out in a wood full of giant ferns and moss-covered trees.  They agree to go away for the Bank Holiday weekend at the start of May.

Black West have received a message from their spy: ‘The woman is clean.  No dragon far and wide, nor any other clues.’

However, a few weeks later, the Marzahn newspaper reports sightings of a ‘dragon’ in the sky, explaining that this must actually have been a balloon let off by a Chinese organisation preparing for the Longtaitou Festival.

As Frau Tossilo and her neighbours live in a different part of Berlin, they don’t get that newspaper, so don’t know about the report.  I hadn’t realised that Berlin was such a big city that it has different local newspapers for different districts.  However, as reports of dragons start to show up on the internet, Frau Tossilo suggests that Kurmo had better stay in for the time being, until their trip to the quarry.

This is frustrating for Kurmo, who is now much so big that he takes up most of the flat and can barely turn around without knocking things over.  When he does go out, Johann needs to lend him the laptop so that he can space himself out onto the balcony and later back into the flat, because he can no longer get through the door.   When they’ve gone off on their camping trip, I won’t be at all surprised if Kurmo decides he doesn’t want to come back to Berlin, but takes up permanent residence – after all, if a disused quarry which is now a nature reserve isn’t a safe place for a dragon to live, where is?  (Answer: probably nowhere in Europe, so maybe Kurmo should go to the Rim of Heaven?)

Johann is working on a new project which, he says, will give Kurmo the freedom to fly as much as he likes.  But, he says, he can’t tell them anything about it until he has worked it out.  Janka is frustrated at all the secrecy, but Kurmo is sympathetic: as he puts it, ‘Ideas are sometimes sensitive.  If you speak of them too early, you can break their backs.’

In the meantime, Frau Tossilo, whose first name turns out to be Ilona (Johann and Janka are surprised to realise that she even has a first name!), receives a phone call telling her that her mother is dead.  She is devastated, struggling to express her feelings: ‘My mother is dead. She was a terrible old battle-axe, but she was my mother.’

Johann and Janka aren’t sure how to deal with a grown-up crying, and awkwardly leave the flat, but Kurmo gives her a hug, and hums to her to comfort her.  ‘Not only with her ears did she listen, but as a baby in its mother’s womb, that listens with its entire being.’  The role-reversal that began on New Year’s Day, when Kurmo realised that he was now big and strong enough that he could protect his adoptive mother rather than the other way round, is now complete.