Chapter 2: The Transylvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility
At breakfast on Monday morning he tells his coworkers about the dragon petting zoo, and they have a good laugh over it. There are two other Senior Assistant Dragon Keepers at the Transylvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility. Slovadan Vasik is local. He had a spotty education, interrupted by book shortages, bread shortages, Floo Powder shortages, and the fall of Communism, but he is a genius with dragons. His family has been in the business for eight generations. Fergal McDiarmuid hales from County Clare, and he speaks with a brogue so thick that it took Charlie two years to learn to understand him. He is lanky, cheerful, and insouciant.
All of the Facility's permanent employees are men except for Antonja, an elderly Squib who rakes out the dragon dung each morning and pots it for export. Most years, there are one or two women among the interns, but they never last long. The Assistant Dragon Keepers, all young men in their twenties and thirties, accept this with a certain fatalism. Slovadan's sister, one of the Facility's hottest prospects, had an unfortunate experience with a Hungarian Horntail, five years back. She left the internship program in her second week and went to work as a law librarian at the Ministry in Bucharest. She still drops by almost every weekend, but she has made it extremely clear that her future career will take place at the Ministry and will not involve fieldwork with dragons.
Slovadan is convinced now that the dragon-keeping gene descends only to boys, not girls.
Everyone else has ruefully acknowledged that the Transylvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility is not a good place to meet females--except, of course, for female dragons. There are lots of beautiful, wild, ferocious female dragons.
Charlie, unlike Hagrid, understands that dragons cannot be domesticated—except in the rare instances in which one runs across a dragon who actually wants to be domesticated. They've got one of those right now, an adorable Ukrainian Ironbelly of five tons or so, named Minnie. They named her after Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank, who is a personal friend of the Director and happened to be visiting the week the dragon came in. Minnie appeared around the end of the war, badly burnt in the chest and lame in the off-fore, and Charlie and Fergal, Slovadan and the Director between them nursed her back to health. When they tried to release her back onto the reservation, she wouldn't go. Now she skulks around the far side of the mountain abutting the Research Facility, strolling into the farmyard occasionally for dragon treats. (Rabbits are her favorite.) They still don't know how she got injured.
After Charlie and Slovadan read through Fergal's weekend log, after the three of them sit through their brief ritual Monday morning meeting with the Director, Fergal departs for his belated weekend leave and Charlie carries his broom out to the courtyard. Slovadan is donning waterproof boots preparatory to wading into the barns that house the sick and injured dragons; Charlie has the morning field survey and Slovadan the afternoon. He kicks off and sails up through the shimmering cool morning air, over the heart-stoppingly lovely jagged green peaks of the Carpathian range. He checks on the Ukrainian Ironbellies, since Fergal won't be doing it this morning, and then he sails over to the northwestern corner of the reservation that shelters the Hungarian Horntails.
The Tranyslvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility is the principal dragon reservation in eastern Europe. It is generally acknowledged to be one of the best dragon reservations in the world. Its barns have sheltered every variety of dragon known to wizard; just last week, a team of Australian handlers brought in a rare Antipodean Opaleye. But the reservation supports only the three species of dragon indigenous to eastern Europe: Romanian Longhorns, which are Slovadan's purview; Ukrainian Ironbellies, which are Fergal's; and Hungarian Horntails, which are Charlie's.
The reservation covers more than two hundred square miles in the wildest, loveliest, most inaccessible section of the Carpathian range. The Muggle inhabitants are few and poor; if they see dragons from time to time, they don't talk about it. All the Dragon Keepers spend a lot of time on their brooms, but Charlie spends the most, partly because he is the most adept flier and partly because the Hungarian Horntails reside in the remotest corner of the reservation.
There is nothing, simply nothing, that can rival the felicity of viewing a healthy, full-grown, spike-tailed, fire-breathing Hungarian Horntail from the air. The vision of sunlight glinting off the metallic grey scales of a six-ton Ukrainian Ironbelly comes close perhaps, but even Ukrainian Ironbellies seem a bit pedestrian compared to the wild majesty of Hungarian Horntails.
At lunch Charlie sits with the visiting mother of one of the interns and tells her, in the pidgin German that he has learned, by trial and error, from Viktor Krum, about the jagged green peaks of the Carpathian range and the strange beauty of Hungarian Horntails.
She does not appear convinced.
After lunch Slovadan flies out to look at the Romanian Longhorns. The Director takes one set of interns on a medical round through the barns, and Charlie takes the other set of interns into the lab to look at Hungarian Horntail scales and slivers of Hungarian Horntail dung under a microscope. They compare the scales to Ukrainian Ironbelly scales and the slivers of dung to the slivers of Ukrainian Ironbelly dung they examined last week, and they discuss the Muggle concepts of "genus" and "species." Charlie feels a little sheepish, as he always does when he leads this discussion, because coming from a pureblood family, he never took a Muggle biology class, not even when he was ten years old, and he has only the most tenuous understanding of "genus" and "species."
But of course none of the interns knows anything about it either. And neither does the Director. That's why the Director always foists this lesson on Charlie.
It's spring, and these interns have been here for several months. They don't know a thing about Muggle biology but they do know something, by now, about dragons. As usual, nearly half the class has already left due to injuries, general terror, or the gnawing loneliness of living in a narrow whitewashed bunkhouse on a dragon reservation in Romania. Several more will leave before they qualify for Dragon Keeper certificates. In some years, only one or two of the interns stay through the twenty-two months it takes to qualify.
In the evening, Slovadan kicks off his boots and puts his large, smelly feet up on the low-slung mantle in his bedroom. He tunes the radio to a station emitting noise that sounds like a banshee wailing, and he pulses to the beat as he plays chess against himself with ancient and argumentative pieces that, he insists, a Gypsy relative brought from India. The next room is empty; Fergal isn't back yet. Charlie suspects that he will be sleeping in a Muggle bed tonight. He has worked with Fergal for seven years, and he knows his ways. Charlie retrieves his broomstick from the third bedroom, carries it to the muddy courtyard, and kicks off.
He flies. He skirts the Romanian Longhorns, skims over the Ukrainian Ironbellies, dodges his beloved Hungarian Horntails. He dips between the peaks and flies fleetly into the sunset. To the south he sees the paltry twinkling lights of Bucharest. As night falls, he stops short of Mount Moldoveanu, cuts into a beautiful nosedive, brings himself up short, and zooms back, as if chasing a snitch, towards the Transylvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility.
Sometimes he wonders if he should leave Romania. Life is simple here. In some ways it's dull. In some ways it's barren. There is no longer any intelligence work to do late at night, by flickering lumos spells. There are no longer any strange, dear visitors from home cutting through Transylvania on doomed missions to the giants. There are no regular Quidditch matches; there are no English bookstores. There are no parents, no brothers, no sisters-in-law. No friends from Hogwarts. There are no women who want him, who want to stay with him, who want to marry him and have freckled, red-haired children. There is only the occasional haggardly haunting Croatian witch who will make a date once or twice and then, inevitably, stand him up in a bar, there to be discovered by a wryly amused Viktor Krum.
Charlie is not yet thirty, but his time is running out. The wizarding world is small, the options few. Wizards marry young or not at all. The lucky ones marry their classmates, fresh from Hogwarts. They marry the junior assistants they meet over lunch at the junior assistants' table in the Ministry cafeteria. They marry the Trainee Healers they fall for in the first-year spell damage class at St. Mungo's. They marry their third cousins, their second cousins, sometimes their first cousins. With great consistency, they marry young or not at all. Because the wizarding world is small and closed, and there's nothing to wait for.
There are an extraordinarily large number of bachelors and spinsters in the wizarding world.
Very few of them, however, are Weasleys.
So sometimes he thinks he ought to go home. He thinks how happy Mum would be. He thinks about Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade and playing Quidditch with his brothers in the backyard of the Burrow.
Except they're one short now. And besides, all his brothers are married. They have jobs, they have homes, they have sons.
And the jobs he could get at home aren't very enticing. Because the fact is, Common Welsh Greens are pretty dull when you're accustomed to Hungarian Horntails. And the MacFusty clan has all the Hebridean Black jobs locked up, just as they have for the last five hundred years.
Scandinavia is an option. He's been to Norway a couple times. Norwegian Ridgebacks are all right. He could probably get to like Norwegian Ridgebacks. He knows a fellow at the Lapland Norwegian Ridgeback Reservation, up on the Arctic Circle. Maybe he should send him an owl. Maybe tomorrow, he thinks without enthusiasm. Maybe next week.
The fact is, he's been here nine years, and he's put down roots.
The fact is, he doesn't want to leave Minnie. He doesn't want to leave Slovadan and Fergal. He doesn't want to leave his Hungarian Horntails. He doesn't want to leave Transylvania and the heart-stoppingly lovely jagged green peaks of the Carpathian range.
He just doesn't want to live here alone.