Hannibal Rising (6 page)

“Take her, she’s going to die anyway. Come and play, come and play.”

Singing now, they take her
. “Ein Mannlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm …”

He hangs on to Mischa’s arm, the children dragged toward the door. He will not release his sister and Blue-Eyes slams the heavy barn door on his arm, the bone cracking, opens the door again and comes back to Hannibal swinging a stick of firewood, thud against his head, terrific blows falling on him, flashes of light behind his eyes, banging, Mischa calling “Anniba!”

And the blows became First Monitor’s stick banging on the bed frame and Hannibal screaming in his sleep, “Mischa! Mischa.”

“Shut up! Shut up! Get up you little fuck!” First Monitor ripped the bedclothing off the cot and threw it at him. Outside on the cold ground to the toolshed, prodded with the stick. First Monitor followed him into the shed with a shove. The shed was hung with gardening tools, rope, a few carpenter’s tools. First Monitor set his lantern on a keg and raised his stick. He held up his bandaged hand.

“Time to pay for this.”

Hannibal seemed to cringe away, circling away from the light, feeling nothing he could name. First Monitor read fear and circled after him, drawn away from the light. First Monitor got a good crack on Hannibal’s thigh. The boy was at the lantern now. Hannibal picked up a sickle and blew out the light. He lay down on the floor in the darkness, gripping the sickle in both hands above his head, heard scrambling footfalls past him, swung the sickle hard through the black air, struck nothing, and heard the door close and the rattle of a chain.

“The advantage of beating a mute is he can’t tell on you,” First Monitor said. He and Second Monitor were looking at a Delahaye parked in the gravel courtyard of the castle, a lovely example of French coachwork, horizon blue, with diplomatic flags on its front fenders, Soviet and GDR. The car was exotic in the way of pre-war French cars, voluptuous to eyes accustomed to square tanks and jeeps. First Monitor wanted to scratch “fuck” in the side of the car with his knife, but the driver was big and watchful.

From the stable Hannibal saw the car arrive. He did not run to it. He watched his uncle go into the castle with a Soviet officer.

Hannibal put his hand flat against Cesar’s cheek. The long face turned to him, crunching oats. The Soviet groom was taking good care of him. Hannibal rubbed the horse’s neck and put his face close to the
turning ear, but no sound came out of his mouth. He kissed the horse between the eyes. At the back of the hayloft, hanging in the space between double walls, were his father’s binoculars. He hung them around his neck and crossed the beaten parade ground.

Second Monitor was looking for him from the steps. Hannibal’s few possessions were stuffed in a bag.

WATCHING FROM HEADMASTER’S window, Robert Lecter saw his driver buy a small sausage and a piece of bread from the cook for a pack of cigarettes. Robert Lecter was actually Count Lecter now, with his brother presumed dead. He was already accustomed to the title, having used it illegitimately for years.

Headmaster did not count the money but shoved it into a breast pocket, with a glance at Colonel Timka.

“Count, eh, Comrade Lecter, I just want to tell you I saw two of your paintings at the Catherine Palace before the war, and there were some photos published in
Gorn
. I admire your work enormously.”

Count Lecter nodded. “Thank you, Headmaster. Hannibal’s sister, what do you know?”

“A baby picture is not much help,” Headmaster said.

“We’re circulating it to the orphanages,” Colonel Timka said. He wore the uniform of the Soviet Border Police and his steel-rimmed spectacles winked in concert with his steel dentition. “It takes time. There are so many.”

“And I must tell you, Comrade Lecter, the forest is full of … remains still unidentified,” Headmaster added.

“Hannibal has never said a word?” Count Lecter said.

“Not to me. Physically he is capable of speech— he screams his sister’s name in his sleep. Mischa. Mischa.” Headmaster paused as he thought how to put it. “Comrade Lecter, I would be … careful with Hannibal until you know him better. It might be best if he did not play with other boys until he’s settled. Someone always gets hurt.”

“He’s not a bully?”

“It’s the bullies who get injured. Hannibal does not observe the pecking order. They’re always bigger and he hurts them very quickly and sometimes severely. Hannibal can be dangerous to persons larger than himself. He’s fine with the little ones. Lets them tease him a little. Some of them think he’s deaf as well as mute and say in front of him that he’s crazy. He gives them his treats, on the rare occasions there are any treats.”

Colonel Timka looked at his watch. “We need to go. Shall I meet you in the car, Comrade Lecter?”

Colonel Timka waited until Count Lecter was out of the room. He held out his hand. Headmaster sighed and handed over the money.

With a wink of his spectacles and a flash of his teeth, Colonel Timka licked his thumb and began to count.

A SHOWER OF RAIN settled the dust as they covered the last miles to the chateau, wet gravel pinging underneath the muddy Delahaye, and the smell of herbs and turned earth blew through the car. Then the rain stopped and the evening light had an orange cast.

The chateau was more graceful than grand in this strange orange light. The mullions in its many windows were curved like spiderwebs weighted with dew. To Hannibal, casting for omens, the curving loggia of the chateau unwound from the entrance like Huyghens’ volute.

Four draft horses, steaming after the rain, were hitched to a defunct German tank protruding from the foyer. Big horses like Cesar. Hannibal was glad to see them, hoped they were his totem. The tank was jacked up on rollers. Little by little the horses pulled
it out of the entryway as though they were extracting a tooth, the driver leading the horses, their ears moving when he spoke to them.

“The Germans blew out the doorway with their cannon and backed the tank inside to get away from the airplanes,” the count told Hannibal as the car came to a stop. He had become accustomed to speaking to the boy without a reply. “They left it here in the retreat. We couldn’t move it, so we decorated the damned thing with window boxes and walked around it for five years. Now I can sell my ‘subversive’ pictures again and we can pay to get it hauled away. Come, Hannibal.”

A houseman had watched for the car and he and the housekeeper came to meet the count with umbrellas if they should need them. A mastiff came with them.

Hannibal liked his uncle for making the introductions in the driveway, courteously facing the staff, instead of rushing toward the house and talking over his shoulder.

“This is my nephew, Hannibal. He’s ours now and we’re glad to have him. Madame Brigitte, my housekeeper. And Pascal, who’s in charge of making things work.”

Madame Brigitte was once a good-looking upstairs maid. She was a quick study and she read Hannibal by his bearing.

The mastiff greeted the count with enthusiasm and reserved judgment on Hannibal. The dog blew some air out of her cheeks. Hannibal opened his
hand to her and, sniffing, she looked up at him from under her brows.

“We’ll need to find him some clothes,” the count told Madame Brigitte. “Look in my old school trunks in the attic to start and we’ll improve him as we go along.”

“And the little girl, sir?”

“Not yet, Brigitte,” he said, and closed the subject with a shake of his head.

Images as Hannibal approached the house: gleam of the wet cobblestones in the courtyard, the gloss of the horses’ coats after the shower, gloss of a handsome crow drinking from the rainspout at the corner of the roof; the movement of a curtain in a high window: the gloss of Lady Murasaki’s hair, then her silhouette.

Lady Murasaki opened the casement. The evening light touched her face and Hannibal, out of the wastes of nightmare, took his first step on the bridge of dreams …

To move from barracks into a private home is sweet relief. The furniture throughout the chateau was odd and welcoming, a mix of periods retrieved from the attic by Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki after the looting Nazis were driven out. During the occupation, all the major furniture left France for Germany on a train.

Hermann Goering and the Führer himself had long coveted the work of Robert Lecter and other major artists in France. After the Nazi takeover, one of Goering’s first acts was to arrest Robert Lecter as
a “subversive Slavic artist,” and seize as many of the “decadent” paintings as he could find in order to “protect the public” from them. The paintings were sequestered in Goering’s and Hitler’s private collections.

When the count was freed from prison by the advancing Allies, he and Lady Murasaki put things back as well as they could and the staff worked for subsistence until Count Lecter was back at his easel.

Robert Lecter saw his nephew settled in his room. Generous in size and light, the bedroom had been prepared for Hannibal with hangings and posters to enliven the stone. A kendo mask and crossed bamboo swords were mounted high on the wall. Had he been speaking, Hannibal would have asked after Madame.

HANNIBAL WAS LEFT alone for less than a minute before he heard a knock at the door.

Lady Murasaki’s attendant, Chiyoh, stood there, a Japanese girl of about Hannibal’s age, with hair bobbed at her ears. Chiyoh appraised him for an instant, then a veil slid across her eyes like the nictitating goggles of a hawk.

“Lady Murasaki sends greetings and welcome,” she said. “If you will come with me …” Dutiful and severe, Chiyoh led him to the bathhouse in the former wine-pressing room in a dependency of the chateau.

To please his wife, Count Lecter had converted the winepress into a Japanese bath, the pressing vat now filled with water heated by a Rube Goldberg water heater fashioned from a copper cognac distillery. The room smelled of wood smoke and rosemary.
Silver candelabra, buried in the garden during the war, were set about the vat. Chiyoh did not light the candles. An electric bulb would do for Hannibal until his position was clarified.

Chiyoh handed him towels and a robe and pointed to a shower in the corner. “Bathe there first, scrub vigorously before submerging yourself,” she said. “Chef will have an omelet for you after your bath, and then you must rest.” She gave him a grimace that might have been a smile, threw an orange into the bathwater and waited outside the bathhouse for his clothing. When he handed it out the door, she took the items gingerly between two fingers, draped them over a stick in her other hand and disappeared with them.

It was evening when Hannibal came awake all at once, the way he woke in barracks. Only his eyes moved until he saw where he was. He felt clean in his clean bed. Through the casement glowed the last of the long French twilight. A cotton kimono was on the chair beside him. He put it on. The stone floor of the corridor was pleasantly cool underfoot, the stone stairs worn hollow like those of Lecter Castle. Outside, under the violet sky, he could hear noises from the kitchen, preparations for dinner.

The mastiff saw him and thumped her tail twice without getting up.

From the bathhouse came the sound of a Japanese
lute. Hannibal went to the music. A dusty window glowed with candlelight from within. Hannibal looked in. Chiyoh sat beside the bath plucking the strings of a long and elegant koto. She had lit the candles this time. The water heater chuckled. The fire beneath it crackled and the sparks flew upward. Lady Murasaki was in the water. In the water was Lady Murasaki, like the water flowers on the moat where the swans swam and did not sing. Hannibal watched, silent as the swans, and spread his arms like wings.

He backed from the window and returned through the gloaming to his room, a curious heaviness on him, and found his bed again.

Enough coals remain in the master bedroom to glow on the ceiling. Count Lecter, in the semi-darkness, quickens to Lady Murasaki’s touch and to her voice.

“Missing you, I felt as I did when you were in prison,” she said. “I remembered the poem of an ancestor, Ono no Komachi, from a thousand years ago.” “Ummm.”

“She was very passionate.” “I’m anxious to know what she said.” “A poem:
Hito ni awan tsuki no naki yo wa/omoiokite/mune hashiribi ni/kokoro yaki ori
. Can you hear the music in it?”

Robert Lecter’s Western ear could not hear the
music in it but, knowing where the music lay, he was enthusiastic: “Oh my, yes. Tell me the meaning.”

“No way to see him/on this moonless night/I lie awake longing, burning/breasts racing fire, heart in flames.”

“My God, Sheba.”

She took exquisite care to spare him exertion.

In the hall of the chateau, the tall clock tells the lateness of the hour, soft bongs down the stone corridors. The mastiff bitch in her kennel stirs, and with thirteen short howls she makes her answer to the clock. Hannibal in his own clean bed turns over in his sleep. And dreams.

“Mischa, Mischa!”