IN DER FREMDE: EINE NEUES ABENTEUER
Hermann (and his slightly off-kilter friends) and Kopa are back for a second adventure! This part begins directly where the first In der Fremde left off, and as such, won't make a ton of sense unless you're familiar with the first installment. As was the case in the final chapter of part I, the Outlander pride now lives at Pride Rock with Simba's family. I suppose I should disclose that all the characters that are not of my own creation are owned by Disney.
Viel Spaβ(enjoy)!
-As an addendum, the ß symbol, called a double s (in German, eszet) is simply pronounced as a ss would be. Thus, the word Spaß is pronounced 'spass'.
I – EINS
Im Paradies
You can do this, you can do this, Hermann thought over and over again. You know the piece inside and out, you've heard it a million times; the only difference between now and then is that you're the guy with the stick this time.
"You're due to go on now, maestro," a stagehand said from around a corner. Hermann set his water glass down—with any luck, he'd be drinking vintage champagne in two hours or so—got up from his chair, took his cane in one hand and a baton in the other, and walked out the stage door. The house was packed, not an empty seat in the entire building…even the nosebleeds were crammed to capacity, all to see this new H.W. Sterlitz fellow in his orchestral debut. As Hermann stepped out into the floodlights and carefully made his way onto a red-carpeted podium, a roar of applause went up from the audience. It seemed as if these people already knew him from something he'd done before, even though he hadn't directed an orchestra in his life (not counting the times he had enthusiastically waved a loofah-on-a-stick around in the shower when a familiar piece came on the radio). No, this was the first real exposure he'd ever gotten, and still people cheered him and clapped as if he were another Herbert von Karajan.
Hermann made a slight bow, shook the concertmaster's hand, and opened his score to the first page: Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, opus ninety-two. He hadn't been exaggerating to himself earlier about already having heard it time and again; the symphony was one of the works he had grown up with, and it had not taken Hermann long at all to learn all the melodies, entrances, and tempo changes as if he himself had written them. He had heard it live in concert at least five times, and couldn't even begin to count how often the local radio programs had broadcast the same. Still, this night would be the first instance in which he would actually be driving the machine, in the left-hand seat, holding the reins…whatever metaphor he cared to choose for the act of orchestral conducting, and he knew more than a few.
The applause died down. Hermann checked his score one last time and did a quick scan of the orchestra: every pair of eyes was on him, on the tip of the baton in his right hand. One upbeat later, and he was off and running, every last instrumentalist in tune and playing in perfect time; the scene seemed almost too perfect, too dialed in, free of even the slightest point to improve upon—miniscule musical missteps that almost always go unknown to all except the man with the stick—to be real. But Hermann didn't let such thoughts linger for more than a second or two. He never did. When he had rehearsed the piece before, his brain often went into overdrive as the music progressed: meter change into 4/4 here, bring the dynamic up to forte here, make sure to cue the flutes one bar after letter D. In this instance, however, such thoughts were strangely and blessedly absent: one bar progressed into the next, the first movement into the second, with no more effort than it took to breathe.
By the time the last beat arrived, the echoes didn't even have enough time to dissipate, nor did Hermann have the chance to set his baton down, before the house practically detonated in raucous approval. Everything had gone along like a passage out of a textbook…and then a nasty high-pitched shrieking started to overpower the applause. Hermann looked at the first violinist who was shrugged his shoulders in confusion, then at a similarly perplexed oboe player, and finally at his own podium, where a screeching alarm clock had suddenly appeared. In an instant, the symphony hall and orchestra were gone, and Hermann, his handsome conductor's tuxedo transformed back into a moldy old t-shirt and torn shorts, was looking up at the ceiling of a canvas tent. The same alarm clock from before was still blaring away on a bedside table.
At least I got through the whole thing this time, he thought, looking over at the source of the noise to confirm his suspicion.
Six AM…this is going to kill me.
As early an hour as it was, Hermann was still always the last person to wake up and start his daily routine. The other researchers—a group of three men and two women—were always awake and alert well before he was. Days were long and hot, and nights were short and often just as warm; the canvas tents made sure of that. The pressing hours and frequent lack of rest would have taken a toll on just about anybody, and Hermann certainly noticed the effects on himself, but his colleagues seemed strangely unaffected. Almost every day, it was "wake up, Hermann, let's go already", or "get moving, Hermann, these patients aren't going to treat themselves." Most often, he wondered silently about who in their right mind would be waiting outside for medical treatment before the sun had even had a chance to come up, but he was never one to complain, at least not out loud. The others, all of them older than he was, would not think well of him for it…and even with an early wake up time, who could possibly argue with the location? Once the fog of the previous night's delirium had worn off and Hermann had stepped outside, he always thought the exact same thing, without the slightest hint of sarcasm or insincerity: another day in paradise.
"Get up, Hermann! There's not going to be any breakfast left!"
"All right, I'm coming! Give me a break, no pun intended…I've got a right leg that's nothing but dead weight."
"It was alive enough yesterday when you were using those trees as goalposts and taking penalty shots with my backpack."
"I'll pretend I didn't hear that."
It was a Friday when Hermann was startled from his concert hall dream, a November morning on the African savannah about as antithetical to the frigid German winter as it was possible to get. Most days were more or less the same: get up, fix breakfast, and spend the whole day tending to the locals and compiling data on their ailments and courses of treatment. From time to time, when Hermann and the other research fellows had finished all their work and fancied something to eat or drink apart from the usual fare, someone might pull a bottle of this or that out of 'the pit', an improvised cooling cellar dug into the ground for those precious (alcoholic) comestibles requiring steadily cooler temperatures. Other times, a group of two or three would go out hunting, with Hermann in the lead toting a weathered Remington rifle. His marksmanship skills were always the talk of the campsite after hours; had the ammunition not been in such short supply, he might have spent more time putting on trick shot exhibitions and less time doing his actual job. Even though he resisted the trend, Hermann's uncanny ability to put a lead bullet on target became something of a new law of nature amongst the others: the sun comes up in the morning and sets at night, the Earth rotates on its axis twenty-three degrees relative to the ecliptic, and Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz never misses a shot. But Fridays, unlike the other days of the week, left no time for messing about with rifles…not for Hermann, at least. The first part of the day differed little from any other—the six o'clock wake up, breakfast with the rest of the group, and then each doctor going off to his own tasks—but once the working hours had wound down and his colleagues began to pack in and prepare the evening meal, Hermann would invariably pick up his cane and meander over to a rather curious piece of equipment sitting a short distance from his bed. This object was his only real mode of transport, seeing as his legs weren't much good for anything except short distances; Piper Cubs, however, only required enough leg strength to work the rudder pedals. Hermann was not the first researcher to ever fly his way into Africa, but he was the only one in his group who couldn't get around well enough under his own power. Still, Hermann's disability was rather superfluous in the broader context: not a man on Earth, given the choice between hiking and flying, would have elected to walk had he actually known where the airplane was flying to at the start of each weekend.
In truth, nobody could really fault Hermann for taking advantage of his pilot's license in a part of the world where even roads seemed nonexistent: all around the camp, as far as any of the doctors could see, was a limitless expanse of unspoiled grassland free of contamination from buildings or other so-called human 'improvements'. Save for the tents he and his research colleagues slept in at night, nothing else resembled or evoked civilization as Hermann knew it…except for one distant grouping of rocks on the northern horizon, its top just barely visible in when the light was good and the haze in the air was at a minimum. In the minds of all except one man, the rocks were a simple artifact of nature, nothing more than a curiously-shaped monolith, a sideways-lying L in an otherwise flat landscape. To Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz, however, that L had special significance: he, and only he, knew it as der Rudelfelsen, a word of another colleague's invention meaning 'the rock where the lion pride lives', while the land surrounding it carried the German appellation of der Königreich Priderländer. The inhabitants of that particular spot knew Hermann as well. He had an official title with the locals, 'Executive Commandant Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz', although he never went by it. He didn't even like to be called 'Herr Sterlitz' or 'Doctor Sterlitz', both of which would have been more than proper; to everyone he knew, including his work associates, he was Hermann. Just Hermann. But those select few who knew of his special salutation did not think of Hermann as a work associate, nor as a military figure as his rank might have implied. To everyone, especially the youngest generation, who lived in the kingdom starting just over the creek next to the tents, Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz, MD was family.