Drachenerwachen Chapters 30-32: Dragon-Sitting with Spies

Of course, the death of her mother forces Ilona Tossilo out of the way for a few days, as she has to go to her late mother’s home area to put her affairs in order, organise the funeral, and so on.  In the meantime, Johann and Janka are responsible for looking after Kurmo.  Janka even takes time off from circus skills practice to keep the dragon company while Johann goes out to buy food for him – and after all, she can always practise her agility by climbing on Kurmo!

I don’t get the impression that Black West arranged to assassinate Frau Tossilo’s mother, but they are still spying on the block where she lives, and her absence creates an opportunity for them.  Johann, returning with four large boxes of cabbages and waiting for Janka to bring the Pink Prince to lug the vegetables up to Frau Tossilo’s flat on the eighth floor, catches sight of the mysterious ‘Blanket-Peter’, Frau Tossilo’s sinister visitor from the other day, approaching, talking on his phone about placing something by Frau Tossilo’s flat and in the lift.

Johann texts Janka to warn her not to open the door, but Janka is already standing in the corridor with a highly recognisable pink suitcase – and the agents from Black West are already coming.  If she doesn’t want them to know that she is connected with the pink suitcase and therefore with Frau Tossilo and the dragon, she needs a hiding-place.

Back in Chapter 17, we saw Janka posting rubbish-bags down the waste-disposal chute set into the walls of the building.  Now, we discover that the rubbish-chute was a Chekhov’s Gun - and that Janka’s circus skills are a Chekhov’s Skill.  As she wriggles in through the opening flap, bracing herself against the walls to stop herself from plummeting down, the narrator reminds readers that ‘For other children it would perhaps have been fatal to climb into this rubbish-shaft, but for someone who every week in a circus cupola practised gymnastics and did tricks, it was just dangerous.’  In other words, Don’t Try This At Home!  

From her hiding-place, Janka overhears the Black West agents discussing what the suitcase outside the door means, and whether Frau Tossilo is already returned.  Janka manages to clamber up the chute to emerge on her own floor, from which she can quite safely walk back down the stairs.  After all, the men don’t know her and hadn’t seen her by the suitcase, and if they just see her walking down from the floor above, they have no reason to connect her with Frau Tossilo.  Able to observe, she sees the two men, dressed inconspicuously in workmen’s overalls, spraying with a can of paint to mark a spot outside Frau Tossilo’s flat, evidently as a sign for another member of the team.

Johann joins her, and the two of them watch as the Black West team attach tiny hidden cameras to the frame of the door to Frau Tossilo’s flat, and the lift.  When the coast is clear, they move the cameras (with Janka’s gymnastic skills coming into play again, when she needs to stand on Johann’s shoulders to reach one of them) and use chewing-gum to attach one to a room at the top of the building, and the one from Frau Tossilo’s door to a door on the tenth floor.  (As Johann explains, it has to be two storeys up because ‘In this building, the walls on the even-numbered floors are puddle-coloured, but on the odd-numbered floors they’re vomit-green.’)  For verisimilitude, they leave the pink suitcase in view of the camera on the tenth floor.  Johann feels pleased at having had an adventure – even if it wasn’t quite as exciting an adventure as driving the enemies off with a sword.

I suspect that moving the cameras is not going to fool Black West for long.  After all, whoever lives in the flat on the tenth floor is bound to come along and open the door, probably kicking the suitcase out of the way, and the people watching the footage are bound to realise that their cameras have been tampered with.  But, as with the reconstructed egg, it buys time.

The first time I read this section, I didn’t quite follow the plot, and thought that there were only two hidden cameras.  In fact, there were three: the one monitoring Frau Tossilo’s door, the one in the staircase (which was the one Janka needed to stand on her brother’s shoulders to reach) and the one in the lift (which they hadn’t had time to move before the time when filming would start).  So they text Frau Tossilo to warn her that when she comes home, she needs to take the stairs rather than the life.

As Kurmo explains to Frau Tossilo later, the most frustrating aspect had been that they still needed to get all thirty-six cabbages upstairs, which was a tiring job without a lift, and so Johann had resorted to using his laptop to space the boxes of vegetables up the stairs to save carrying them.  As spacing is quite noisy (moving something out of one space creates a vacuum, into which the surrounding air molecules all rush and collide with each other), the noise had summoned the caretaker, who was startled to see a boy with a computer teleporting a box of cabbages, but Johann just explained that it was a school project.

PDB11 pointed out that it was worth including a link to Randall Munroe’s discussion of what happens if a glass is literally half-empty, and why it is vitally important to specify which half is empty.

Although Frau Tossilo wasn’t there, she seems to be the one most shaken by the intruders’ visit, coming so quickly after her mother’s death, and the realisation that she and her mother had barely known each other and that now it is too late.  That night, she has uneasy dreams: being lost in a stone labyrinth; being told she should be ashamed to keep a dragon in her flat instead of a boyfriend like any normal woman (somehow, I expected the sentence to end, ‘instead of letting him fly free’!); and of having to defend Kurmo with a sword that is much too heavy for her to lift.  Waking from her nightmare, she needs to snuggle under Kurmo’s wing for comfort to be able to sleep in peace.

These could be just anxiety dreams, of course.  But with what we have been told about someone building a rocky enclosure for Kurmo, they look suspiciously like prophecies.