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.
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.
“We were supposed to get these skulls,” he said. “Maybe the maggots can find one in your face.” He shot the major in the chest. The man let go of Grutas’ pants leg and looked at his own bare wrist as though curious about the time of his death.
The half-track truck bounced across the field, its tracks mushing bodies, and as it reached the woods, the canvas lifted on the back and Grentz threw the body out.
From above, a screaming Stuka dive bomber came after the Russian tank, cannon blazing. Under the cover of the forest canopy, buttoned up in the tank, the crew heard a bomb go off in the trees and splinters and shrapnel rang on the armored hull.
“DO YOU KNOW what today is?” Hannibal asked over his breakfast gruel at the lodge. “It’s the day the sun reaches Uncle Elgar’s window.”
“What time will it appear?” Mr. Jakov asked, as though he didn’t know.
“It will peep around the tower at ten-thirty,” Hannibal said.
“That was in 1941,” Mr. Jakov said. “Do you mean to say the moment of arrival will be the same?”
“Yes.”
“But the year is more than 365 days long.”
“But, Mr. Jakov, this is the year after leap year. So was l941, the last time we watched.”
“Then does the calendar adjust perfectly or do we live by gross corrections?”
A thorn popped in the fire.
“I think those are separate questions,” Hannibal said.
Mr. Jakov was pleased, but his response was just another question: “Will the year 2000 be a leap year?”
“No—yes, yes, it will be a leap year.”
“But it is divisible by one hundred,” Mr. Jakov said.
“It’s also divisible by four hundred,” Hannibal said.
“Exactly so,” Mr. Jakov said. “It will be the first time the Gregorian rule is applied. Perhaps, on that day, surviving all gross corrections, you will remember our talk. In this strange place.” He raised his cup. “Next year in Lecter Castle.”
Lothar heard it first as he drew water, the roar of an engine in low gear and cracking of branches. He left the bucket on the well and in his haste he came into the lodge without wiping his feet.
A Soviet tank, a T-34 in winter camouflage of snow and straw, crashed up the horse trail and into the clearing. Painted on the turret in Russian were AVENGE OUR SOVIET GIRLS AND WIPE OUT THE FASCIST VERMIN. Two soldiers in white rode on the back over the radiators. The turret swiveled to point the tank’s cannon at the house. A hatch opened and a gunner in hooded winter white stood behind a machine gun. The tank commander stood in the other hatch with a megaphone. He repeated his message
in Russian and in German, barking over the diesel clatter of the tank engine.
“We want water, we will not harm you or take your food unless a shot comes from the house. If we are fired on, every one of you will die. Now come outside. Gunner, lock and load. If you don’t see faces by the count of ten, fire.” A loud clack as the machine gun’s bolt went back.
Count Lecter stepped outside, standing straight in the sunshine, his hands visible. “Take the water. We are no harm to you.”
The tank commander put his megaphone aside. “Everyone outside where I can see you.”
The count and the tank commander looked at each other for a long moment. The tank commander showed his palms. The count showed his palms.
The count turned to the house. “Come.”
When the commander saw the family he said, “The children can stay inside where it’s warm.” And to his gunner and crew, “Cover them. Watch the upstairs windows. Start the pump. You can smoke.”
The machine gunner pushed up his goggles and lit a cigarette. He was no more than a boy, the skin of his face paler around his eyes. He saw Mischa peeping around the door facing and smiled at her.
Among the fuel and water drums lashed to the tank was a small petrol-powered pump with a rope starter.
The tank driver snaked a hose with a screen filter down the well and after many pulls on the rope the pump clattered, squealed, and primed itself.