Hannibal Rising

  Swallows started from the towers at the shot.

  Berndt was put to moving furniture for the officers’ billet upstairs. He looked to see if he had wet himself. He could hear the radio operator in a small room under the eaves, both code and voice transmissions in heavy static. The operator ran down the stairs with his pad in his hand and returned moments later to break down his equipment. They were moving east.

  From an upper window Berndt watched the SS unit passing a backpack radio out of the Panzer to the small garrison they were leaving behind. Grutas and his scruffy civilians, issued German weapons now, carried out everything from the kitchen and piled the supplies into the back of a half-track truck with some support personnel. The troops mounted their vehicles. Grutas ran out of the castle to catch up. The unit moved toward Russia, taking Grutas and the other Hiwis. They seemed to have forgotten Berndt.

  A squad of Panzergrenadiers with a machine gun and the radio were left behind at the castle. Berndt waited in the old tower latrine until dark. The small German garrison all ate in the kitchen, with one sentry posted in the courtyard. They had found some schnapps in a kitchen cabinet. Berndt came out of the tower latrine, thankful the stone floors did not creak.

  He looked into the radio room. The radio was on Madame’s dresser, scent bottles pushed off on the floor. Berndt looked at it. He thought about Ernst dead in the kitchen yard and Cook spitting on Grutas with his last breath. Berndt slipped into the room. He felt he should apologize to Madame for the intrusion. He came down the service stairs in his stocking feet carrying his boots and the two packs of the radio and charger and slipped out a sally port. The radio and hand-cranked generator made a heavy load, more than twenty kilos. Berndt humped it into the woods and hid it. He was sorry he could not take the horse.

  Dusk and firelight glowing on the painted timbers of the hunting lodge, shining in the dusty eyes of trophy animals as the family gathered around the fireplace. The animal heads were old, patted bald years ago by generations of children reaching through the banister of the upper landing.

  Nanny had Mischa’s copper bathtub in a corner of the hearth. She added water from a kettle to adjust the temperature, made suds and lowered Mischa into the water. The child batted happily at the foam. Nanny fetched towels to warm before the fire. Hannibal took Mischa’s baby bracelet off her wrist, dipped it in the suds and blew bubbles for her through the bracelet. The bubbles, in their brief flight on the draft, reflected all the bright faces before they burst above the fire. Mischa liked to grab for the bubbles, but wanted her bracelet back, and was not satisfied until it was on her arm again.

  Hannibal’s mother played baroque counterpoint on a small piano.

  Tiny music, the windows covered with blankets as night fell and the black wings of the forest closed around them. Berndt arrived exhausted and the music stopped. Tears stood in Count Lecter’s eyes as he listened to Berndt. Hannibal’s mother took Berndt’s hand and patted it.

  The Germans began at once to refer to Lithuania as Ostland, a German minor colony, which in time could be resettled with Aryans after the lower Slavic life forms were liquidated. German columns were on the roads, German trains on the railways carrying artillery east.

  Russian fighter-bombers bombed and strafed the columns. Big Ilyushin bombers out of Russia pounded the columns through heavy flak from the anti-aircraft guns mounted on the trains.

  The black swans flew as high as they could comfortably go, the four black swans in echelon, their necks extended, trying for the south, the roar of airplanes above them as dawn broke.

  A burst of flak and the lead swan crumpled in mid-stroke and began the long plunge to earth, the other birds turning, calling down the air, losing altitude in great circles. The wounded swan thumped heavily in an open field and did not move. His mate swooped down beside him, poked him with her beak, waddled around him with urgent honks.

  He did not move. A shellburst in the field, and Russian infantry were visible moving in the trees at the edge of the meadow. A German Panzer tank jumped a ditch and came across the meadow, firing its coaxial machine gun into the trees, coming, coming. The swan spread her wings and stood her ground over her mate even though the tank was wider than her wings, its engine loud as her wild heart. The swan stood over her mate hissing, hitting the tank with hard blows of her wings at the last, and the tank rolled over them, oblivious, in its whirring treads a mush of flesh and feathers.

  4

  THE LECTER FAMILY survived in the woods for the terrible three and a half years of Hitler’s eastern campaign. The long forest path to the lodge was filled with snow in winter and overgrown in spring, the marshes too soft in summer for tanks.

  The lodge was well stocked with flour and sugar to last through the first winter, but most importantly it had salt in casks. In the second winter they came upon a dead and frozen horse. They were able to cut it up with axes and salt the meat. They salted trout as well, and partridges.

  Sometimes men in civilian clothes came out of the forest in the night, quiet as shadows. Count Lecter and Berndt talked with them in Lithuanian, and once they brought a man with blood soaked through his shirt, who died on a pallet in the corner while Nanny was mopping his face.

  Every day when the snow was too deep to forage, Mr. Jakov gave lessons. He taught English, and very bad French, he taught Roman history with a heavy emphasis on the sieges of Jerusalem, and everyone attended. He made dramatic tales out of historical events, and Old Testament stories, sometimes embellishing them for his audience beyond the strict bounds of scholarship.

  He instructed Hannibal in mathematics privately, as the lessons had reached a level inaccessible to the others.

  Among Mr. Jakov’s books was a copy bound in leather of Christiaan Huyghens’ Treatise on Light, and Hannibal was fascinated with it, with following the movement of Huyghens’ mind, feeling him moving toward discovery. He associated the Treatise on Light with the glare of the snow and the rainbow distortions in the old windowpanes. The elegance of Huyghens’ thought was like the clean and simplified lines of winter, the structure under the leaves. A box opening with a click and inside, a principle that works every time. It was a dependable thrill, and he had been feeling it since he could read.

  Hannibal Lecter could always read, or it seemed that way to Nanny. She read to him for a brief period when he was two, often from a Brothers Grimm illustrated with woodcuts where everyone had pointed toenails. He listened to Nanny reading, his head lolling against her while he looked at the words on the page, and then she found him at it by himself, pressing his forehead to the book and then pushing up to focal distance, reading aloud in Nanny’s accent.

  Hannibal’s father had one salient emotion— curiosity. In his curiosity about his son, Count Lecter had the houseman pull down the heavy dictionaries in the castle library. English, German, and the twenty-three volumes of the Lithuanian dictionary, and then Hannibal was on his own with the books.

  When he was six, three important things happened to him.

  First he discovered Euclid’s Elements, in an old edition with hand-drawn illustrations. He could follow the illustrations with his finger, and put his forehead against them.

  That fall he was presented with a baby sister, Mischa. He thought Mischa looked like a wrinkled red squirrel. He reflected privately that it was a pity she did not get their mother’s looks.

  Usurped on all fronts, he thought how convenient it would be if the eagle that sometimes soared over the castle should gather his little sister up and gently transport her to some happy peasant home in a country far away, where the residents all looked like squirrels and she would fit right in. At the same time, he found he loved her in a way he could not help, and when she was old enough to wonder, he wanted to show her things, he wanted her to have the feeling of discovery.

  Also in the year Hannibal was six, Count Lecter found his son determining the height of the castle towers by the length of their shadows, following instructions which he said came directly
from Euclid himself. Count Lecter improved his tutors then—within six weeks arrived Mr. Jakov, a penniless scholar from Leipzig.

  Count Lecter introduced Mr. Jakov to his pupil in the library and left them. The library in warm weather had a cold-smoked aroma that was ingrained in the castle’s stone.

  “My father says you will teach me many things.”

  “If you wish to learn many things, I can help you.”

  “He tells me you are a great scholar.”

  “I am a student.”

  “He told my mother you were expelled from the university.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am a Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew to be precise.”

  “I see. Are you unhappy?”

  “To be a Jew? No, I’m glad.”

  “I meant are you unhappy to be out of school?”

  “I am glad to be here.”

  “Do you wonder if I am worth your time?”

  “Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him.”

  “Did they put you in the room with an iron grate over the door?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “It doesn’t lock anymore.”

  “I was pleased to see that.”

  “That’s where they kept Uncle Elgar,” Hannibal said, aligning his pens in a row before him. “It was in the 1880s, before my time. Look at the windowpane in your room. It has a date he scratched with a diamond into the glass. These are his books.”

  A row of immense leather tomes occupied an entire shelf. The last one was charred.

  “The room will have a smoky smell when it rains. The walls were lined with hay bales to muffle his utterances.”

  “Did you say his utterances?”

  “They were about religion, but—do you know the meaning of ‘lewd’ or ‘lewdness’?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not clear on it myself, but I believe it means the sort of thing one wouldn’t say in front of Mother.”

  “That’s my understanding of it as well,” Mr. Jakov said.

  “If you’ll look at the date on the glass, it’s exactly the day direct sunlight reaches his window every year.”

  “He was waiting for the sun.”

  “Yes, and that’s the day he burned up in there. As soon as he got sunlight, he lit the hay with the monocle he wore as he composed these books.”

  Hannibal further acquainted his tutor with Lecter Castle with a tour of the grounds. They passed through the courtyard, with its big block of stone. A hitching ring was in the stone and, in its flat top, the scars of an axe.

  “Your father said you measured the height of the towers.”

  “Yes.”

  “How high are they?”

  “Forty meters, the south one, and the other is a half-meter shorter.”

  “What did you use for a gnomon?”

  “The stone. By measuring the stone’s height and its shadow, and measuring the shadow of the castle at the same hour.”

  “The side of the stone is not exactly vertical.”

  “I used my yo-yo as a plumb.”

  “Could you take both measurements at once?”

  “No, Mr. Jakov.”

  “How much error might you have from the time between the shadow measurements?”

  “A degree every four minutes as the earth turns. It’s called the Ravenstone. Nanny calls it the Rabenstein. She is forbidden to seat me on it.”

  “I see,” Mr. Jakov said. “It has a longer shadow than I thought.”

  They fell into a pattern of having discussions while walking and Hannibal, stumping along beside him, watched his tutor adjust to speaking to someone much shorter. Often Mr. Jakov turned his head to the side and spoke into the air above Hannibal, as though he had forgotten he was talking with a child. Hannibal wondered if he missed walking and talking with someone his own age.

  Hannibal was interested to see how Mr. Jakov got along with the houseman, Lothar, and Berndt the hostler. They were bluff men and shrewd enough, good at their jobs. But theirs was a different order of mind. Hannibal saw that Mr. Jakov made no effort to hide his mind, or to show it off, but he never pointed it directly at anyone. In his free time, he was teaching them how to survey with a makeshift transit. Mr. Jakov took his meals with Cook, from whom he extracted a certain amount of rusty Yiddish, to the surprise of the family.

  The parts of an ancient catapult used by Hannibal the Grim against the Teutonic Knights were stored in a barn on the property, and on Hannibal’s birthday Mr. Jakov, Lothar and Berndt put the catapult together, substituting a stout new timber for the throwing arm. With it they threw a hogshead of water higher than the castle, it falling to burst with a wonderful explosion of water on the far bank of the moat that sent the wading birds flapping away.

  In that week, Hannibal had the keenest single pleasure of his childhood. As a birthday treat Mr. Jakov showed him a non-mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem using tiles and their impression on a bed of sand. Hannibal looked at it, walked around it. Mr. Jakov lifted one of the tiles and raised his eyebrows, asking if Hannibal wanted to see the proof again. And Hannibal got it. He got it with a rush that felt like he was being launched off the catapult.

  Mr. Jakov rarely brought a textbook to their discussions, and rarely referred to one. At the age of eight, Hannibal asked him why.

  “Would you like to remember everything?” Mr. Jakov said.

  “Yes.”

  “To remember is not always a blessing.”

  “I would like to remember everything.”

  “Then you will need a mind palace, to store things in. A palace in your mind.”

  “Does it have to be a palace?”

  “It will grow to be enormous like a palace,” Mr. Jakov said. “So it might as well be beautiful. What is the most beautiful room you know, a place you know very well?”

  “My mother’s room,” Hannibal said.

  “Then that’s where we will begin,” Mr. Jakov said.

  Twice Hannibal and Mr. Jakov watched the sun touch Uncle Elgar’s window in the spring, but by the third year they were hiding in the woods.

  5

  Winter, 1944-45

  WHEN THE EASTERN FRONT collapsed, the Russian Army rolled like lava across Eastern Europe, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ashes, peopled by the starving and the dead.

  From the east and from the south the Russians came, up toward the Baltic Sea from the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts, driving ahead of them broken and retreating units of the Waffen-SS, desperate to reach the coast where they hoped to be evacuated by boat to Denmark.

  It was the end of the Hiwis’ ambitions. After they had faithfully killed and pillaged for their Nazi masters, shot Jews and Gypsies, none of them got to be SS. They were called Osttruppen, and were barely considered as soldiers. Thousands were put in slave labor battalions and worked to death.

  But a few deserted and went into business for themselves….

  A handsome Lithuanian estate house near the Polish border, open like a dollhouse on one side where an artillery shell had blown the wall away. The family flushed from the basement by the first shellburst and killed by the second, were dead in the ground-floor kitchen. Dead soldiers, German and Russian, lay in the garden. A German staff car was on its side, blown half in two by a shell.

  An SS major was propped on a divan in front of the living room fireplace, blood frozen on the legs of his trousers. His sergeant pulled a blanket off a bed and put it over him and got a fire going, but the room was open to the sky. He got the major’s boot off and his toes were black. The sergeant heard a noise outside. He unslung his carbine and went to the window.

  A half-track ambulance, a Russian-made ZiS-44 but with International Red Cross markings, rumbled up the gravel drive.

  Grutas got out of the ambulance first with a white cloth.

  “We are Swiss. You have wounded? How many are you?”

>   The sergeant looked over his shoulder. “Medics, Major. Will you go with them, sir?” The major nodded.

  Grutas and Dortlich, a head taller, pulled a stretcher out of the half-track.

  The sergeant came out to speak to them. “Easy with him, he’s hit in the legs. His toes are frozen. Maybe frostbite gangrene. You have a field hospital?”

  “Yes, of course, but I can operate here,” Grutas told the sergeant and shot him twice in the chest, dust flying off the uniform. The man’s legs collapsed and Grutas stepped over him through the doorway and shot the major through the blanket.

  Milko, Kolnas, and Grentz piled out of the back of the half-track. They wore a mix of uniforms— Lithuanian police, Lithuanian medics, Estonian medical corps, International Red Cross—but all wore large medical insignia on their armbands.

  There is much bending involved in stripping the dead; the looters grunted and bitched at the effort, scattering papers and wallet photos. The major still lived, and he raised his hand to Milko. Milko took the wounded man’s watch and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Grutas and Dortlich carried a rolled tapestry out of the house and threw it into their half-track truck.

  They put the canvas stretcher on the ground and tossed onto it watches, gold eyeglasses, rings.

  A tank came out of the woods, a Russian T-34 in winter camouflage, its cannon traversing the field, the machine gunner standing up in the hatch.

  A man hiding in a shed behind the farmhouse broke from cover and ran across the field toward the trees, carrying in his arms an ormolu clock, leaping over bodies.

  The tank’s machine gun stuttered and the running looter pitched forward, tumbling to fall beside the clock, his face smashed and the clock’s face smashed too; his heart and the clock beat once and stopped.

  “Grab a body!” Grutas said.

  They threw a corpse on top of the loot on the stretcher. The tank’s turret turned toward them. Grutas waved a white flag and pointed to the medical insignia on the truck. The tank moved on.

  A last look around the house. The major was still alive. He gripped Grutas’ pants leg as he passed. He got his arms around Grutas’ leg and would not let go. Grutas bent to him, seized the insignia on his collar.