Hannibal Rising Read Free Page A

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 thenpushing 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, followinginstructions 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