فصل شانزدهم

16

HANNIBAL ROSE EARLY and washed his face at the bowl and pitcher on his nightstand. A little feather floated on the water. He had only a vague and jumbled memory of the night.

Behind him he heard paper sliding over the stone floor, an envelope pushed under his door. A sprig of pussy willow was attached to the note. Hannibal held the note card to his face in his cupped hands before he read it.

Hannibal,

I will be most pleased if you call on me in my drawing room at the Hour of the Goat. (That is 10 a.m. in France.) Murasaki Shikibu

Hannibal Lecter, thirteen, his hair slicked down with water, stood outside the closed door of the drawing room. He heard the lute. It was not the same song he had heard from the bath. He knocked.

“Come.”

He entered a combination workroom and salon, with a frame for needlework near the window and an easel for calligraphy.

Lady Murasaki was seated at a low tea table. Her hair was up, held by ebony hairpins. The sleeves of her kimono whispered as she arranged flowers.

Good manners from every culture mesh, having a common aim. Lady Murasaki acknowledged him with a slow and graceful inclination of her head.

Hannibal inclined from the waist as his father had taught him. He saw a skein of blue incense smoke cross the window like a distant flight of birds, and the blue vein faint in Lady Murasaki’s forearm as she held a flower, the sun pink through her ear. Chiyoh’s lute sounded softly from behind a screen.

Lady Murasaki invited him to sit opposite her. Her voice was a pleasant alto with a few random notes not found in the Western scale. To Hannibal, her speech sounded like accidental music in a wind chime.

“If you do not want French or English or Italian, we could use some Japanese words, like kieuseru. It means ‘disappear.’ ” She placed a stem, raised her eyes from the flowers and looked into him. “My world of Hiroshima was gone in a flash. Your world was torn from you too. Now you and I have the world we make—together. In this moment. In this room.” She picked up other flowers from the mat beside her and placed them on the table beside the vase. Hannibal could hear the leaves rustling together, and the ripple of her sleeve as she offered him flowers.

“Hannibal, where would you put these to best effect? Wherever you like.”

Hannibal looked at the blossoms.

“When you were small, your father sent us your drawings. You have a promising eye. If you prefer to draw the arrangement, use the pad beside you.” Hannibal considered. He picked up two flowers and the knife. He saw the arch of the windows, the curve of the fireplace where the tea vessel hung over the fire. He cut the stems of the flowers off shorter and placed them in the vase, creating a vector harmonious to the arrangement and to the room. He put the cut stems on the table.

Lady Murasaki seemed pleased. “Ahhh. We would call that moribana, the slanting style.” She put the silky weight of a peony in his hand. “But where might you put this? Or would you use it at all?” In the fireplace, the water in the tea vessel seethed and came to a boil. Hannibal heard it, heard the water boiling, looked at the surface of the boiling water and his face changed and the room went away.

Mischa’s bathtub on the stove in the hunting lodge, horned skull of the little deer banging against the tub in the roiling water as though it tried to butt its way out. Bones rattling in the tumbling water.

Back at himself, back in Lady Murasaki’s room, and the head of the peony, bloody now, tumbled onto the tabletop, the knife clattering beside it. Hannibal mastered himself, got to his feet holding his bleeding hand behind him. He bowed to Lady Murasaki and started to leave the room.

“Hannibal.”

He opened the door.

“Hannibal.” She was up and close to him quickly. She held out her hand to him, held his eyes with hers, did not touch him, beckoned with her fingers. She took his bloody hand and her touch registered in his eyes, a small change in the size of his pupils.

“You will need stitches. Serge can drive us to town.”

Hannibal shook his head and pointed with his chin at the needlework frame. Lady Murasaki looked into his face until she was sure.

“Chiyoh, boil a needle and thread.”

At the window, in the good light, Chiyoh brought Lady Murasaki a needle and thread wrapped around an ebony hairpin, steaming from the boiling tea water. Lady Murasaki held his hand steady and sewed up his finger, six neat stitches. Drops of blood fell onto the white silk of her kimono. Hannibal looked at her steadily as she worked. He showed no reaction to the pain. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

He looked at the thread pulled tight, unwound from the hairpin. The arc of the needle’s eye was a function of the diameter of the hairpin, he thought. Pages of Huyghens scattered on the snow, stuck together with brains.

Chiyoh applied an aloe leaf and Lady Murasaki bandaged his hand. When she returned his hand to him, Hannibal went to the tea table, picked up the peony and trimmed the stem. He added the peony to the vase, completing an elegant arrangement. He faced Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh.

Across his face a movement like the shiver of water and he tried to say “Thank you.” She rewarded the effort with the smallest and best of smiles, but she did not let him try for long.

“Would you come with me, Hannibal? And could you help me bring the flowers?”

Together they climbed the attic stairs.

The attic door had once served elsewhere in the house; a face was carved in it, a Greek comic mask. Lady Murasaki, carrying a candle lamp, led the way far down the vast attic, past a three-hundred-year collection of attic items, trunks, Christmas decorations, lawn ornaments, wicker furniture, Kabuki and Noh Theater costumes and a row of life-size marionettes for festivals hanging from a bar.

Faint light came around the blackout shade of a dormer window far from the door. Her candle lit a small altar, a God shelf opposite the window. On the altar were pictures of her ancestors and of Hannibal’s. About the photographs was a flight of origami paper cranes, many cranes. Here was a picture of Hannibal’s parents on their wedding day. Hannibal looked at his mother and father closely in the candlelight. His mother looked very happy. The only flame was on his candle—her clothes were not on fire.

Hannibal felt a presence looming beside him and above him and he peered into the dark. As Lady Murasaki raised the blind over the dormer window, the morning light rose over Hannibal, and over the dark presence beside him, rose over armored feet, a war fan held in gauntlets, a breastplate and at last the iron mask and horned helmet of a samurai commander. The armor was seated on the raised platform. The samurai’s weapons, the long and short swords, a tanto dagger and a war axe, were on a stand before the armor.

“Let’s put the flowers here, Hannibal,” Lady Murasaki said, clearing a place on the altar before the photos of his parents.

“This is where I pray for you, and I strongly recommend you pray for yourself, that you consult the spirits of your family for wisdom and strength.” Out of courtesy he bowed his head at the altar for a moment, but the pull of the armor was swarming him, he felt it all up his side. He went to the rack to touch the weapons. Lady Murasaki stopped him with an upraised hand.

“This armor stood in the embassy in Paris when my father was ambassador to France before the war. We hid it from the Germans. I only touch it once a year. On my great-great-great-grandfather’s birthday I am honored to clean his armor and his weapons and oil them with camellia oil and oil of cloves, a lovely scent.” She removed the stopper from a vial and offered him a sniff.

There was a scroll on the dais before the armor. It was unrolled only enough to show the first panel, the samurai wearing the armor at a levee of his retainers. As Lady Murasaki arranged the items on the God shelf, Hannibal unrolled the scroll to the next panel, where the figure in armor is presiding at a samurai head presentation, each of the enemy heads tagged with the name of the deceased, the tag attached to the hair, or in the case of baldness, tied to the ear.

Lady Murasaki took the scroll from him gently and rolled it up again to show only her ancestor in his armor.

“This is after the battle for Osaka Castle,” she said. “There are other, more suitable scrolls that will interest you. Hannibal, it would please your uncle and me very much if you became the kind of man your father was, that your uncle is.” Hannibal looked at the armor, a questioning glance.

She read the question in his face. “Like him too? In some ways, but with more compassion”—she glanced at the armor as though it could hear and smiled at Hannibal—“but I wouldn’t say that in front of him in Japanese.” She came closer, the candle lamp in her hand. “Hannibal, you can leave the land of nightmare. You can be anything that you can imagine. Come onto the bridge of dreams. Will you come with me?” She was very different from his mother. She was not his mother, but he felt her in his chest. His intense regard may have unsettled her; she chose to break the mood.

“The bridge of dreams leads everywhere, but first it passes through the doctor’s office, and the schoolroom,” she said. “Will you come?” Hannibal followed her, but first he took the bloodstained peony, lost among the flowers, and placed it on the dais before the armor.