SIEBEN
In der Fremde (II)
At first, the only thing Kopa could see was a gray-white mist in front of his eyes, blocking out everything from view. Then, very slowly, the scene around him began to resolve itself: he saw, through blurred vision, shapes identifiable as his mother and relatives, along with two creatures he could not recognize at all. Everything seemed to be rocking back and forth, side to side and in and out of focus as if he were on some sort of raft at sea, where on each passing wave changed the whole world's color and appearance. As the delirious fog continued to lift, he saw, more clearly, that the unidentifiable forms were human beings, something he had only ever seen from a great distance and certainly not from three feet away. Despite his impaired state, he could tell that both of these people were lying down and seemingly asleep, but then suddenly one of them sat up and whispered something to the other.
"Hermann, aufwachen. Dein Patient ist wach."
What was this? It sounded as if the two people were speaking in some otherworldly tongue, nothing at all like the words and phrases he was used to hearing. Kopa's vision continued to clear, and gradually his other senses started to return as well. What began as confusion now became replaced by fear: he could now see, looking down, that his front legs were wounded and seemingly sewn back together, while other areas were entirely covered with some sort of white wrapping. Were these two humans the ones who had tried to kill him? Were they the ones he had been running from, and had they now managed to track him all the way back to wherever he was now? Kopa's eyes darted around looking for an escape route, but in doing so he looked Markos, who was still trying to wake up his friend, directly in the eye.
"Oh…guten Morgen, wie geht's?" asked Markos innocently, not aware that he was now being seen as the would-be killer.
"Aaaaaaaugh!" Kopa's shout woke up everybody in the cave, along with a few who weren't even sleeping inside.
"Markos, what did you do?" Hermann asked frantically, now having been quite effectively woken up.
"Me? I didn't do anything, all I said was 'good morning'!" his friend replied, not at all able to figure out why his simple greeting had caused such a reaction. Kopa had only grown more afraid, having heard two men now speaking in this strange, ominous-sounding language.
"He's going to kill me!" he cried out. "Mom! Mom! What's he saying? He's going to…ow! Ow! Make it stop! Ow! Somebody make it stop!" Much quicker than any of his other senses come back, Kopa's ability to sense pain had returned almost immediately after seeing Markos, and was now making its return unavoidably known. He did not look up and see the look of panic on his mother's face; all he heard was someone say in heightened tone of voice, "Hermann, das Schmerzmittel! Schnell!" followed by a sharp prick in his left shoulder. Surely he was dead now, or so he thought until he realized that nothing at all had changed in the scene around him. The pain was slowly diminishing, and he gathered up the strength to speak in a weak whisper.
"Where am I? Who are they?"
"You're at home, Kopa…safe," Nala replied. "Those two saved your life last night; you've no reason to be afraid of them. Go on," she said, looking toward Markos and Hermann. "Introduce yourselves." Hermann stepped forward and tried to kneel down on his right leg without success.
"My name is Hermann," he said, "Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz. My friend and colleague is…"
"I'm sorry, which is your name, Hermann, or the longer one you said after that?" Nala was completely confused, having never run across a name consisting of more than one word.
"Both are," Hermann replied, "one is my first name, and the other is my full name. You can just call me Hermann, there's no reason to use anything else."
"And where did you say you were from?"
"Germany. Stuttgart, to be exact. And Markos over there is from Dresden. " Markos, hearing his name spoken in an English conversation, smiled and waved. "He speaks almost no English…only German, I'm afraid."
"Is that the language you two were speaking earlier?" Nala asked.
"Yes, that was German," said Hermann. "Both of us speak it as our first language. We're here on vacation from Germany."
Having been thus introduced to everyone, including Kopa, who was beginning to realize that these two men were only there to help him, Markos and Hermann were now peppered with questions. With barely enough time to answer one question before fielding another, Hermann wondered if he wasn't in some sort of all-lion-cast version of "Law and Order".
"What do you do in Germany?"
"We're doctors," Hermann replied. "Our job is to help sick people get better." He knew, of course, that this was a major oversimplification, but he was trying to stay on the side of simplicity. Going into detail about his credentials and courses of study at Universität Stuttgart, how he had graduated at the top of his class and now specialized in internal medicine, would only provide Kopa's family with needless information.
"Why are you walking with that stick?"
"This? That's a cane; I'm handicapped, so it helps me get around. My right leg doesn't work quite as well as it used to, ever since I broke it—twice—playing football in…"
"What's 'football'?"
"That's a game we have back home. I was actually thinking about playing professionally before I got hurt. Anything else?"
"Is Kopa going to…make it?" Hermann recognized this voice as Nala's, even though he still had his head turned in the direction of the lioness who had asked him about his cane.
Hermann never liked answering these kinds of questions, but he was grateful at least that in this case, his response would be positive. "I think so," he replied, "we managed to stabilize him overnight, but it's still going to be a long road ahead. Those injuries are severe and will take time to heal, so he's going to be in a lot of discomfort for some time. Fortunately, though, we've got most everything we need to treat that, along with anything else that might come up." Kopa had already fallen back asleep on his mother's front paws, and was luckily not listening to this part of the conversation. "I'm just glad I'm not the person who has to do inventory on the supply closet this week," Hermann added in a German aside to Markos.
"Did you happen to see who might have attacked him?"
"I don't know; when we were driving toward here, we saw this skinny lion-looking animal with blood all over itself...I think a piece of its ear was missing. Markos almost tried to shoot it from inside the car."
As soon as Hermann mentioned the mangled ear, the entire cave grew silent as a tomb. There had always been suspicion that a certain former member of the pride had attacked Kopa in revenge for her being exiled some time ago, but Hermann's account of who he had seen—the body shape, the blood on the mouth and paws, and the torn ear most of all—left no doubt as to the attacker's identity. "So it was her," Hermann heard someone whisper from the other side of the cave. "We ought to have killed her when we had the chance!"
"It was who?" asked Hermann, completely in the dark as to what the others were talking about.
"Zira. She once lived here," Nala explained, "until she turned against us and tried to put herself and her crooked friends in power. As punishment, she was sentenced to permanent exile far away from here, but before she left, she swore that she would get revenge on us. We always regarded it as empty threat, until now." It all quickly became clear to Hermann and Markos, the latter listening intently as Hermann translated what he heard into German: this series of events was not an accident or case of mistaken identity—at first, both had entertained the possibility of a big-game hunter setting his crosshairs on the wrong target, or some other large predator mistaking Kopa for a prey animal. What the two men had walked into, and were now playing witness to, was a dictionary-definition vendetta.
"Hermann," Markos said under his breath, "what if she comes back? I mean, she's seen us now in that car, and it's obvious where everyone here is…let's be honest, this place is pretty hard to miss, even from a distance. Sure, she probably thinks she finished the job, but if word gets around that she's only guilty of attempted murder…we're going to have a permanent target on us."
"Hermann, what is he saying?" Nala could tell that Markos's was concerned, even though she could not understand his German.
"He's worried that whoever did this will be back again," Hermann replied. "And he's entirely right." There was a general murmur of discontent among everyone else; as all thoughts had been on Kopa up to this point in time, nobody had considered the possibility of the attacker coming back for a second helping.
Hermann and Markos went back to speaking with each other. "We can't leave," said Markos. "We have to stay put, at least for a few days." Hermann nodded solemnly in agreement.
"But what are we going to do about Zira?" he asked. "If she comes back and brings company along, what have we got...a revolver with five rounds in it? I'm not loving our chances right now."
"Wait, didn't the guy back at the campsite have a rifle?"
"Yes, but how are we going to ask him for it? We stole his car, Markos…I don't think he's going to be thrilled about lending us anything else."
Both Markos and Hermann knew that going back and trying to borrow more things would most likely not go over well, but they had no other option. "Do you remember where the campsite is?" said Hermann.
"Sure, it's only a five-minute drive away, due west of here. You can even see this rock from there."
"Good, then take the car and try to find where we were yesterday. If someone is still there, tell him we're extremely sorry, we had a medical emergency and needed to take his Mercedes with us. That's when you get on your knees and start begging for more stuff."
"But I don't speak English!"
"Just figure it out!"
Markos turned around with a scowl and fished the car keys out of his pocket as he walked outside. A moment later, Hermann heard the engine start up and the car drive away.
"He is going back to get more things; he should be back in a few hours," Hermann explained. "In the meantime, I'll take it from here." He walked back to where Kopa was lying at his mother's side, awakened by the sound of the departing car.
"Where did your friend go?" Kopa looked around for Hermann's companion, only to see that the duo had been reduced by one. "Did he…ooowww…"
"Entspann dich, mein Sohn," Hermann said as he placed a hand on Kopa's bandaged side, "He's just gone to get extra supplies. I'll worry about him; you go back to sleep. All you heard was the car starting up." Kopa had no idea what a car was, but in his exhausted state, all he could was put his head back down and fall asleep as quickly as he had woken up.
"Thanks for that," said Nala once Kopa had closed his eyes again, "you're even better at getting him to sleep than I am!"
"You're welcome, but it wasn't me," Hermann replied. "When I was recovering from the surgeries on my leg, they could have set a bomb off in the next room without waking me up. Sleep is the body's natural reaction to severe injury, after all…the more of it he can get, the better." He walked out of the cave to wait for Markos's return, hopefully in the car and not on foot. I wonder if I still have those flags in the suitcase from the World Cup games, he thought, scanning the horizon for any sign of an approaching car.