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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Hannibal held his lantern out beside him and went in. The room was partly charred, half-open to the sky. The stairs were broken at the landing and roof timbers lay on top of them. The table was crushed. In the corner the small piano lay on its side, the ivory keyboard toothy in his light. A few words of Russian graffiti were on the walls. FUCK THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN AND CAPTAIN GRENKO HAS A BIG ASSHOLE. Two small animals jumped out the window. The room pressed a hush on Hannibal. Defiant, he made a great clatter with his pry bar, raking off the top of the big stove to set his lantern there. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 The ovens were open and the oven racks were gone, probably taken along with the pots for thieves to use over a campfire. Working by lantern, Hannibal cleared away as much loose debris from around the staircase as he could move. The rest was pinned down by the big roof timbers, a scorched pile of giant pick-up sticks. Dawn came in the empty windows as he worked and the eyes of a singed trophy head on the wall caught the red gleam of sunrise. Hannibal studied the pile of timbers for several minutes, hitched a doubled line around a timber near the middle of the pile and paid out rope as he backed through the door. Hannibal woke Cesar, who was alternately dozing and cropping grass. He walked the horse around for a few minutes to loosen him up. A heavy dew soaked through his trouser legs and sparkled on the grass and stood like cold sweat on the aluminum skin of the dive bomber. In the daylight he could see a vine had gotten an early start in the greenhouse of the Stuka canopy with big leaves and new tendrils now. The pilot was still inside with his gunner behind him and the vine had grown around and through him, curling between his ribs and through his skull. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Hannibal hitched his rope to the harness traces and walked Cesar forward until the big horse's shoulders and chest felt the load. He clicked in Cesar's ear, a sound from his boyhood. Cesar leaned into the load, his muscles bunched and he moved forward. A crash and thud from inside the lodge. Soot and ash puffed out the window and blew into the woods like fleeing darkness. Hannibal patted the horse. Impatient for the dust to settle, he tied a handkerchief over his face and went inside, climbing over the collapsed pile of wreckage, coughing, tugging to free his lines and hitch them again. Two more pulls and the heaviest debris was off the deep layer of rubble where the stairs had collapsed. He left Cesar hitched and with pry bar and shovel he dug into the wreckage, throwing broken pieces of furniture, half-burned cushions, a cork thermos chest. He lifted out of the pile a singed boar's head on a plaque. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 His mother's voice: Pearls before swine. The boar's head rattled when he shook it. Hannibal grasped the boar's tongue and tugged. The tongue came out with its attached stopper. He tilted the head nose-down and his mother's jewelry spilled out onto the stovetop. He did not stop to examine the jewelry, but went back at once to digging. When he saw Mischa's bathtub, the end of the copper tub with its scrolled handle, he stopped and stood up. The room swam for a moment and he held on to the cold edge of the stove, put his forehead against the cold iron. He went outside and returned with yards of flowering vine. He did not look inside the tub, but coiled the line of flowers on top and set it on the stove, could not stand to see it there, and carried it outside to set it on the tank. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 The noise of digging and prying made it easy for Dortlich to advance. He watched from the dark wood, exposing one eye and one barrel of his field glasses, peeping only when he heard the sound of shoveling and prying. Hannibal's shovel hit and scooped up a skeletal hand and then exposed the skull of the cook. Good tidings in the skeleton smile its gold teeth showed looters had not reached this far and then he found, still clutched by arm bones in a sleeve, the cook's leather dispatch case. Hannibal seized it from under the arm, and carried it to the stove. The contents rattled on the iron as he dumped them out: assorted military collar brass, Lithuanian police insignia, Nazi SS lightning brass, Nazi Waffen-SS skull-and-cross-bones cap device, Lithuanian aluminum police eagles, Salvation Army collar brass, and last, six stainless-steel dog tags. The top one was Dortlich's. Cesar took notice of two classes of things in the hands of men: apples and feedbags were the first, and whips and sticks second. He could not be approached with a stick in hand, a consequence of being driven out of the vegetables by an infuriated cook when he was a colt. If Dortlich had not been carrying a leaded riot baton in his hand when he came out of the trees, Cesar might have ignored him. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 As it was, the horse snorted and clopped a few steps further away, trailing his rope down the steps of the lodge, and turned to face the man. Dortlich backed into the trees and disappeared in the woods. He went a hundred meters further from the lodge, among the breast-high ferns wet with dew and out of the view of the empty windows. He took out his pistol and jacked a round into the chamber. A Victorian privy with gingerbread under the eaves was about forty meters behind the lodge, the thyme planted on its narrow path grown wild-and tall, and the hedges that screened it from the lodge were grown together across the path. Dortlich could barely squeeze through, branches and leaves in his collar, brushing his neck, but the hedge was supple and did not crackle. He held his baton before his face and pushed through quietly. Baton ready in one hand and pistol in the other, he advanced two steps toward a side window of the lodge when the edge of a shovel caught him across the spine and his legs went numb. He fired a shot into the ground as his legs crumpled under him and the flat of the shovel clanged against the back of his skull and he was conscious of grass against his face before the dark came down. Birdsong, ortolans flocking and singing in the trees and the morning sunlight yellow on the tall grass, bent over where Hannibal and Cesar had passed. |
著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。
JASRAC許諾番号：9008249113Y38200
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(3061)
Hannibal leaned against the burned-out tank with his eyes closed for about five minutes.
ハンニバルは、黒焦けの戦車にもたれて、五分ほど目を閉じていた。
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(3062)
He turned to the bathtub, and moved the vine with his finger enough to see Mischa's remains.
それからバスタブのほうを向くと、指先で蔦を分けてミーシャの遺骸を見た。
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(3063)
It was oddly comforting to him to see she had all her baby teeth-one awful vision dispelled.
乳歯は残らず揃っている。 それが確認できたときは奇妙に気持ちが落ち着いた。 一つのおぞましい映像が駆逐されたからだった。
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(3064)
He plucked a bay leaf out of the tub and threw it away.
乾いた一枚の月桂樹の葉をバスタブからつまみ取って、放り捨てた。
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(3065)
From the jewelry on the stove he chose a brooch he remembered seeing on his mother's breast, a line of diamonds turned into a Mobius tape.
ストーブの上に散らばった宝石類の中から、かつて母親の胸を飾っていたことを覚えているブローチを彼は選んだ。 一列のダイヤがメビウスの輪に仕立てられたデザインのものだった。
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(3066)
He took a ribbon from a cameo and fastened the brooch where Mischa had worn a ribbon in her hair.
一つのカメオからリボンだけ抜き取り、それをブローチに繋いで、あの頃ミーシャの髪にリボンが付いていた位置に、取り付けた。
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(3067)
On a pleasant east-facing slope above the lodge he dug a grave and lined it with all the wildflowers he could find.
ロッジを見下ろす東向きの、見晴らしの良い傾斜地に墓を掘ると、目に付く限りの野生の花を摘んで、その縁を飾った。
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(3068)
He put the tub into the grave and covered it with roof tiles.
バスタブを墓の中に下ろすと、その上を屋根の瓦で覆った。
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(3069)
He stood at the head of the grave.
すべてが終わると、ハンニバルは墓の頭部に立った。
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(3070)
At the sound of Hannibal's voice, Cesar raised his head from cropping.
彼の声を聞いて、それまで草を喰んでいたシーザーが顔を上げた。
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 "Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in a Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day." Hannibal filled in the grave and patted down the dirt with his hands. He covered the grave with pine needles, leaves and twigs until it looked like the rest of the forest floor. In a small clearing at some distance from the grave, Dortlich sat gagged and bound to a tree. Hannibal and Cesar joined him. Settling himself on the ground, Hannibal examined the contents of Dortlich's pack. A map and car keys, an army can opener, a sandwich in an oilskin pouch, an apple, a change of socks, and a wallet. From the wallet he took an ID card and compared it to the dog tags from the lodge. "Herr … Dortlich. On behalf of myself and my late family, I want to thank you for coming today. It means a great deal to us, and to me personally, having you here. I'm glad to have this chance to talk seriously with you about eating my sister." He pulled out the gag and Dortlich was talking at once. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 "I am a policeman from the town, the horse was reported stolen," Dortlich said. "That's all I want here, just say you'll return the horse and we'll forget it." Hannibal shook his head. "I remember your face. I have seen it many times. And your hand on us with the webs between your fingers, feeling who was fattest. Do you remember that bathtub bubbling on the stove?" "No. From the war I only remember being cold." "Did you plan to eat me today, Herr Dortlich? You have your lunch right here." Hannibal exam-ined the contents of the sandwich. "So much mayonnaise, Herr Dortlich!" "They'll come looking for me very soon," Dortlich said. "You felt our arms." |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Hannibal felt Dortlich's arm. "You felt our cheeks, Herr Dortlich," he said, tweaking Dortlich's cheek. "I call you 'Herr' but you aren't German, are you, or Lithuanian, or Russian or anything, are you? You are your own citizen -a citizen of Dortlich. Do you know where the others are? Do you keep in touch?" "All dead, all dead in the war." Hannibal smiled at him and untied the bundle of his own handkerchief. It was full of mushrooms. "Morels are one hundred francs a centigram in Paris, and these were growing on a stump!" He got up and went to the horse. Dortlich writhed in his bonds for the moment when Hannibal's attention was elsewhere. There was a coil of rope on Cesar's broad back. Hannibal attached the free end to the traces of the harness. |