فصل چهل و دوم

42

HANNIBAL LECTER LOWERED the dirty window of the train, watching, watching as the train wound through tall second growths of linden and pine on both sides of the tracks and then, as he passed at a distance of less than a mile, he saw the towers of Lecter Castle. Two miles further, the train came to a screeching and wheezing halt at the Dubrunst watering station. Some soldiers and a few laborers climbed off to urinate on the roadbed. A sharp word from the conductor made them turn their backs to the passenger cars. Hannibal climbed off with them, his pack on his back. When the conductor went back into the train, Hannibal stepped into the woods. He tore a page of newspaper as he went, in case the second trainman saw him from the top of the tank. He waited in the woods through the chuff, chuff of the steam locomotive laboring away. Now he was alone in the quiet woods. He was tired and gritty.

When Hannibal was six Berndt had carried him up the winding stairs beside the water tank and let him peer over the mossy edge into water that reflected a circle of the sky. There was a ladder down the inside too. Berndt used to swim in the tank with a girl from the village at every opportunity. Berndt was dead, back there, deep in the forest. The girl was probably dead too.

Hannibal took a quick bath in the tank and did his laundry. He thought about Lady Murasaki in the water, thought about swimming with her in the tank.

He hiked back along the railroad, stepping off into the woods once when he heard a handcart coming down the tracks. Two brawny Magyars pumped the handles with their shirts tied around their waists.

A mile from the castle a new Soviet power line crossed the rails. Bulldozers had cleared its path through the woods. Hannibal could feel the static as he passed under the heavy electrical lines and the hair stood up on his arms. He walked far enough from the lines and the rails for the compass on his father’s binoculars to settle down. So there were two ways to the hunting lodge, if it was still there. This power line ran dead straight out of sight. If it continued in that direction it would pass within a few kilometers of the hunting lodge.

He took a U.S. surplus C-ration from his pack, threw the yellowed cigarettes away, and ate the potted meat while he considered. The stairs collapsing on the Cooker, the timbers coming down.

The lodge might not be there at all. If the lodge was there and anything remained at the lodge it was because looters could not move heavy wreckage. To do what the looters could not do, he needed strength. To the castle, then.

Just before nightfall Hannibal approached Lecter Castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; it is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.

Hannibal saw the castle black against the fading light in the west, flat like the cutout pasteboard castle where Mischa’s paper dolls used to live. Her pasteboard castle loomed larger in him than this stone one. Paper dolls curl when they burn. Fire on his mother’s clothes.

From the trees behind the stable he could hear the clatter of supper and the orphans singing “The Internationale.” A fox barked in the woods behind him.

A man in muddy boots left the stable with a spade and pail and walked across the kitchen garden. He sat down on the Ravenstone to take off his boots and went inside to the kitchen.

Cook was sitting on the Ravenstone, Berndt said. Shot for being a Jew, and he spit on the Hiwi that shot him. Berndt never said the Hiwi’s name. “Better you don’t know when I settle it after the war” he said, squeezing his hands together.

Full dark now. The electricity was working in at least part of Lecter Castle. When the light came on up in Headmaster’s office, Hannibal raised his field glasses. He could see through the window that his mother’s Italian ceiling had been covered with Stalinist whitewash to cover the painted figures from the bourgeois religion-myth. Soon Headmaster himself appeared in the window with a glass in his hand. He was heavier, stooped. First Monitor came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. Headmaster turned away from the window and in a few moments the light went out.

Ragged clouds blew across the moon, their shadows scaling the battlements and slipping over the roof. Hannibal waited another half-hour. Then, moving with a cloud shadow, he crossed to the stable. He could hear the big horse snoring in the dark.

Cesar woke and cleared his throat, and his ears turned back to listen as Hannibal came into the stall. Hannibal blew in the horse’s nose and rubbed his neck.

“Wake up, Cesar,” he said in the horse’s ear. Cesar’s ear twitched across Hannibal’s face. Hannibal had to put his finger under his nose to keep from sneezing. He cupped his hand over his flashlight and looked over the horse. Cesar was brushed and his hooves looked good. He would be thirteen now, born when Hannibal was five. “You’ve only put on about a hundred kilos,” Hannibal said. Cesar gave him a friendly bump with his nose and Hannibal had to catch himself against the side of the stall. Hannibal put a bridle and padded collar and a two-strap pulling harness on the horse and tied up the traces. He hung a nosebag and grain on the harness, Cesar turning his head in an attempt to put on the nosebag at once.

Hannibal went to the shed where he had been locked as a child and took a coil of rope, tools and a lantern. No lights showed in the castle. Hannibal led the horse off the gravel and across soft ground, toward the forest and the horns of the moon.

There was no alarm from the castle. Watching from the crenellated top of the west tower, Sergeant Svenka picked up the handset of the field radio he had lugged up two hundred steps.