Drachenerwachen Chapters 34-35: the Journey

When they are sure that everyone is asleep, Kurmo and the children set off.  Janka has found a web of material that she bought years ago at a circus flea-market (not to be confused with a flea-circus market) to wrap around Kurmo’s neck and forequarters so that she can hold onto the loops.  Johann decides to ride in Kurmo’s luggage compartment instead, as it’s quite bad enough knowing what a long drop there is from a flying dragon, without having to see it with your own eyes.  Longing for adventures was all very well in the days when they only happened on computer screens, before he met Kurmo and his life changed forever.

As they set off, Kurmo warns them that it is a long journey and that the children had better get some sleep.  Johann agrees, and asks, ‘Kannst du vielleicht das Dach mal draufmachen?  Der, äh, Mond blendet.’

This stopped me for a moment, because I knew that aufmachen meant ‘open’, so was Johann asking Kurmo to open the ‘roof’ of skin over his cavity?  Surely not, if Johann didn’t want to be able to look down.  Then I realised that draufmachen here meant ‘make on it’ as in ‘Please can you make a roof on it?’  This makes sense followed by Johann complaining that the moon is too dazzling (to avoid admitting that he’s scared of heights).

Janka has no intention of sleeping and wasting such a fantastic experience as flying on a dragon by night.  As they fly, she realises that she can actually feel Kurmo’s sensations: the pull drawing him towards Frau Tossilo, and the immense grief in his heart at having lost her.  She wonders how on earth she, so small and weak by comparison with the dragon, can comfort him.

Then she hears Kurmo communicating telepathically with her, urging her to look up.  She has difficulty lifting her head, because she is so immersed in Kurmo’s sorrow, but she finally manages to look up at the bright full moon ‘like a gigantic scoop of vanilla ice-cream’, which seems to calm her – and perhaps, if Kurmo can feel Janka’s emotions as well as the other way round, it calms him, too.

Then she experiences further ‘mist-words’ – but this time, not exactly a message from Kurmo as ancient wisdom in something that both is, and is not, Kurmo’s voice:

 

Mond ist nicht Sonne.
Sein Licht is nicht seines.
Es kommt von der Wonne
Die aus allem macht Eines.

Du kannst mich sehen
Durch diesen Spiegel des Lichts.
Doch bleibe du stehen
Sonst wird das Viele zu Nichts.

 

I don’t know how I would translate this if I was trying to translate the book: whether to go for the literal sense or try to keep the rhyme scheme.  I think the literal sense of the first four lines is something like

 

Moon is not sun.
His light is not his.
It comes from the bliss
That makes all one.

 

So, conveniently, this still (almost) rhymes, even if it’s ABBA instead of ABAB.  But what about the second stanza?

 

You can see me
Through this mirror of light.
But stop,
Otherwise the many will become nothing.

 

I think I might write something that gave a similar level of ominous warning:

 

You see my clear light.
Now cease your quest
Or consign the rest
To endless night.

 

At least, this looks good enough for now.  But if I was actually translating this novel, I suppose I would need to have read the series in order to know what the prophecy means, and therefore what would be an appropriate translation.

Janka is more deeply bonded with Kurmo than ever.  She can feel his suffering and yet is able to bear it, and at the same time she feels his joy in flying as if she were herself flying.

The next chapter brings us to Frau Tossilo, who (as you have undoubtedly guessed) has been kidnapped by agents of Black West.  We aren’t told exactly how she was captured.  If she was snatched from, say, the supermarket car-park, on a busy holiday weekend when the supermarket is teeming with people stocking up on supplies for a trip away, you’d think she’d have been able to shout for help. 

Or maybe someone managed to jab her with a needle of sedative that made her appear drunk, and witnesses just assumed, ‘Middle-aged woman drowning her sorrows after losing her job,’ and felt relieved when people claiming to be her ‘friends’ offered to see her safely home?  But there is no reference to her having been drugged.

I hope this doesn’t sound like victim-blaming, and I know that there could have been any number of reasons why a woman who knew that she was being stalked by a sinister and ruthless organisation might have been captured in broad daylight in a busy public place without having a chance to defend herself or call for help.  I’m just saying that the book doesn’t describe what happens, but cuts to several hours after the abduction. 

By now, after being bundled into a car and driven for several hours, Frau Tossilo is feeling carsick, but otherwise not too bad.  She reflects that she has spent her whole life dreading that something terrible will happen, so that now that it has, it’s almost a relief.

The halitosis-ridden thugs who have captured her now force her into a helicopter, where she meets a mysterious, pale-faced woman in black who admits that she knows all about the dragon:

Frau Tossilo: Could you take these bindings off my wrists?  I can hardly run away when we’re in the air!

Woman In Black: Run away, no.  But perhaps he has already come, before we reach the place.  In that case, it’s better if you look a little helpless.  After all, we don’t want to crash.

Tossilo: What’s that supposed to mean?  “Before we reach the place”?  And who might already be there now?

WIB: I mean your little protégé.  Or more accurately, our little protégé.  After all, you unlawfully appropriated the beast.

Tossilo: I have absolutely not appropriated anyone!  And if you’re talking about Kurmo, then I forbid you to call him a beast!

Well, after that, it’s pretty pointless denying anything.

As the helicopter lurches, Frau Tossilo notices that for a moment, the Woman In Black goes translucent, like a pale projection.  However, much as she feels like punching the mocking woman, she doesn’t dare actually do so, so we aren’t told for certain whether this is a hologrammatic image of someone elsewhere, interacting with Frau Tossilo in real time.  If so, it’s impressive technology, but in a story where a thirteen-year-old invents teleportation (and more), we shouldn’t be surprised.

Frau Tossilo tries to send a mental message to Kurmo, urging him to stay safe and not come to search for her when she is being used as bait.  She doesn’t know, of course, that he actually can sense her thoughts and feelings at a distance, and that the urgency of them just makes him more determined to rescue her.

By morning, she wakes to find herself on the ‘campus’ of Black West, in a paved square surrounded by buildings, and decorated by neatly clipped trees and flags displaying Black West’s logo.  As a young Black West employee does his best to charm her, offering her a drink, she does her best to be assertive (demanding black coffee in the hope that it will make her seem tougher than if she takes milk and sugar).

The man escorts her to the quarters that they have prepared.  In the middle of a rocky enclosure evidently designed to be suitable for a dragon, there is a glass prison  – furnished to look like Frau Tossilo’s flat, complete with a fluffy carpet, a rubber-tree plant, a glass cabinet full of bottles of different colours of nail-varnish, and a bed with violet sheets.  The incongruity of it all reminds me of the scene in Drop the Dead Donkey where Damien is kept as a pet/prisoner by the isolated tribe he had contacted, who burn his video camera but then, seeing that he is distressed by its loss, try to comfort him by making a model of it out of twigs.

The young man from Black West wishes Frau Tossilo a pleasant stay in her prison, assuring her that as soon as the dragon comes to take over from her, she can go home, and that obviously she will be compensated for her lost working time.

I don’t know yet whether this man is intended to be (or intending to be) Affably Evil (amiable villain) or Faux Affably Evil (genuinely malevolent villain who pretends to be nice).  At any rate, he certainly doesn’t seem to understand that someone who is emotionally close to a dragon isn’t likely to consider that financial compensation could ever make up for her friend’s imprisonment.