فصل اول

Book one

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood.

—PHILIP LARKIN

1

HANNIBAL THE GRIM (1365-1428) built Lecter Castle in five years, using for labor the soldiers he had captured at the Battle of Žalgiris. On the first day his pennant flew from the completed towers, he assembled the prisoners in the kitchen garden and, mounting his gallows to address them, he released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in his service, owing to the quality of his provender.

Five hundred years later Hannibal Lecter, eight years old and eighth of the name, stood in the kitchen garden with his little sister Mischa and threw bread to the black swans on the black water of the moat. Mischa held on to Hannibal’s hand to steady herself and missed the moat entirely on several throws. Big carp stirred the lily pads and sent the dragonflies soaring.

Now the Alpha swan came out of the water, stumping toward the children on his short legs, hissing his challenge. The swan had known Hannibal all his life and still he came, his black wings shutting out part of the sky.

“Ohh, Anniba!” Mischa said and hid behind Hannibal’s leg.

Hannibal raised his arms to shoulder height as his father had taught him to do, his reach augmented with willow branches held in his hands. The swan stopped to consider Hannibal’s greater wingspan, and retired to the water to feed.

“We go through this every day,” Hannibal told the bird. But today was not every day and he wondered where the swans could flee.

Mischa in her excitement dropped her bread on the damp ground. When Hannibal stooped to help her, she was pleased to daub mud on his nose with her little star-shaped hand. He daubed a bit of mud on the end of her nose and they laughed at their reflections in the moat.

The children felt three hard thumps in the ground and the water shivered, blurring their faces. The sound of distant explosions rolled across the fields. Hannibal grabbed up his sister and ran for the castle.

The hunting wagon was in the courtyard, hitched to the great draft horse Cesar. Berndt in his hostler’s apron and the houseman, Lothar, loaded three small trunks into the wagon box. Cook brought out a lunch.

“Master Lecter, Madame wants you in her room,” Cook said.

Hannibal passed Mischa along to Nanny and ran up the hollowed steps.

Hannibal loved his mother’s room with its many scents, the faces carved in the woodwork, its painted ceiling—Madame Lecter was of the Sforza on one side and a Visconti on the other, and she had brought the room with her from Milan.

She was excited now and her bright maroon eyes reflected the light redly in sparks. Hannibal held the casket as his mother pressed the lips of a cherub in the molding and a hidden cabinet opened. She scooped her jewels into the casket, and some bundled letters; there was not room for them all.

Hannibal thought she looked like the cameo portrait of her grandmother that tumbled into the box.

Clouds painted on the ceiling. As a baby nursing he used to open his eyes and see his mother’s bosom blended with the clouds. The feel of the edges of her blouse against his face. The wet nurse too—her gold cross gleamed like sunlight between prodigious clouds and pressed against his cheek when she held him, she rubbing the mark of the cross on his skin to make it go away before Madame might see it.

But his father was in the doorway now, carrying the ledgers.

“Simonetta, we need to go.”

The baby linens were packed in Mischa’s copper bathtub and Madame put the casket among them. She looked around the room, and took a small painting of Venice from its tripod on the sideboard, considered a moment, and gave it to Hannibal.

“Take this to Cook. Take it by the frame.” She smiled at him. “Don’t smudge the back.” Lothar carried the bathtub out to the wagon in the courtyard, where Mischa fretted, uneasy at the stir around her.

Hannibal held Mischa up to pat Cesar’s muzzle. She gave the horse’s nose a few squeezes as well to see if it would honk. Hannibal took grain in his hand and trailed it on the ground in the courtyard to make an “M.” The pigeons flocked to it, making an “M” in living birds on the ground. Hannibal traced the letter in Mischa’s palm—she was approaching three years old and he despaired of her ever learning to read. “’M’ for Mischa!” he said. She ran among the birds laughing and they flew up around her, circling the towers, lighting in the belfry.

Cook, a big man in kitchen whites, came out carrying a lunch. The horse rolled an eye at Cook and followed his progress with a rotating ear—when Cesar was a colt, Cook had run him out of the vegetable garden on a number of occasions, yelling oaths and swatting his rump with a broom.

“I’ll stay and help you load the kitchen,” Mr. Jakov said to Cook.

“Go with the boy,” Cook said.

Count Lecter lifted Mischa into the wagon and Hannibal put his arms around her. Count Lecter cupped Hannibal’s face in his hand. Surprised by the tingle in his father’s hand, Hannibal looked closely into Count Lecter’s face.

“Three planes bombed the rail yards. Colonel Timka says we have at least a week, if they reach here at all, and then the fighting will be along the main roads. We’ll be fine at the lodge.” It was the second day of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s lightning sweep across Eastern Europe into Russia.