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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 last one was charred. "The room will have a smoky smell when it rains. The walls were lined with hay bales to muffle his utterances." "Did you say his utterances?" "They were about religion, but-do you know the meaning of 'lewd' or 'lewdness'?" "Yes " "I'm not clear on it myself, but I believe it means the sort of thing one wouldn't say in front of Mother." "That's my understanding of it as well," Mr. Jakov said. "If you'll look at the date on the glass, it's exactly the day direct sunlight reaches his window every year." "He was waiting for the sun." "Yes, and that's the day he burned up in there. As soon as he got sunlight, he lit the hay with the monocle he wore as he composed these books." |
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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 further acquainted his tutor with Lecter Castle with a tour of the grounds. They passed through the courtyard, with its big block of stone. A hitching ring was in the stone and, in its flat top, the scars of an axe. "Your father said you measured the height of the towers." "Yes." "How high are they?" "Forty meters, the south one, and the other is a half-meter shorter." "What did you use for a gnomon?" "The stone. By measuring the stone's height and its shadow, and measuring the shadow of the castle at the same hour." "The side of the stone is not exactly vertical." |
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ハンニバル・ライジングのみの公開となります。 "I used my yo-yo as a plumb." "Could you take both measurements at once?" "No, Mr. Jakov." "How much error might you have from the time between the shadow measurements?" "A degree every four minutes as the earth turns. It's called the Ravenstone. Nanny calls it the Rabenstein. She is forbidden to seat me on it." "I see," Mr. Jakov said. "It has a longer shadow than I thought." They fell into a pattern of having discussions while walking and Hannibal, stumping along beside him, watched his tutor adjust to speaking to someone much shorter. Often Mr. Jakov turned his head to the side and spoke into the air above Hannibal, as though he had forgotten he was talking with a child. Hannibal wondered if he missed walking and talking with someone his own age. |
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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 was interested to see how Mr. Jakov got along with the houseman, Lothar, and Berndt the hostler. They were bluff men and shrewd enough, good at their jobs. But theirs was a different order of mind. Hannibal saw that Mr. Jakov made no effort to hide his mind, or to show it off, but he never pointed it directly at anyone. In his free time, he was teaching them how to survey with a makeshift transit. Mr. Jakov took his meals with Cook, from whom he extracted a certain amount of rusty Yiddish, to the surprise of the family. The parts of an ancient catapult used by Hannibal the Grim against the Teutonic Knights were stored in a barn on the property, and on Hannibal's birthday Mr. Jakov, Lothar and Berndt put the catapult together, substituting a stout new timber for the throwing arm. With it they threw a hogshead of water higher than the castle, it falling to burst with a wonderful explosion of water on the far bank of the moat that sent the wading birds flapping away. In that week, Hannibal had the keenest single pleasure of his childhood. As a birthday treat Mr. Jakov showed him a non-mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem using tiles and their impression on a bed of sand. Hannibal looked at it, walked around it. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Mr. Jakov lifted one of the tiles and raised his eyebrows, asking if Hannibal wanted to see the proof again. And Hannibal got it. He got it with a rush that felt like he was being launched off the catapult. Mr. Jakov rarely brought a textbook to their discussions, and rarely referred to one. At the age of eight, Hannibal asked him why. "Would you like to remember everything?" Mr. Jakov said. "Yes." "To remember is not always a blessing." "I would like to remember everything." "Then you will need a mind palace, to store things in. A palace in your mind." "Does it have to be a palace?" |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 "It will grow to be enormous like a palace," Mr. Jakov said. "So it might as well be beautiful. What is the most beautiful room you know, a place you know very well?" "My mother's room," Hannibal said. "Then that's where we will begin," Mr. Jakov said. Twice Hannibal and Mr. Jakov watched the sun touch Uncle Elgar's window in the spring, but by the third year they were hiding in the woods. Winter ,1944-45 WHEN THE EASTERN FRONT collapsed, the Russian Army rolled like lava across Eastern Europe, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ashes, peopled by the starving and the dead. From the east and from the south the Russians came, up toward the Baltic Sea from the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts, driving ahead of them broken and retreating units of the Waffen-SS, desperate to reach the coast where they hoped to be evacuated by boat to Denmark. It was the end of the Hiwis' ambitions. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 After they had faithfully killed and pillaged for their Nazi masters, shot Jews and Gypsies, none of them got to be SS. They were called Osttruppen, and were barely considered as soldiers. Thousands were put in slave labor battalions and worked to death. But a few deserted and went into business for themselves … A handsome Lithuanian estate house near the Polish border, open like a dollhouse on one side where an artillery shell had blown the wall away. The family, flushed from the basement by the first shellburst and killed by the second, were dead in the ground-floor kitchen. Dead soldiers, German and Russian, lay in the garden. A German staff car was on its side, blown half in two by a shell. An SS major was propped on a divan in front of the living room fireplace, blood frozen on the legs of his trousers. His sergeant pulled a blanket off a bed and put it over him and got a fire going, but the room was open to the sky. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 He got the major's boot off and his toes were black. The sergeant heard a noise outside. He unslung his carbine and went to the window. A half-track ambulance, a Russian-made ZiS-44 but with International Red Cross markings, rumbled up the gravel drive. Grutas got out of the ambulance first with a white cloth. "We are Swiss. You have wounded? How many are you?" The sergeant looked over his shoulder. "Medics, Major. Will you go with them, sir?" The major nodded. Grutas and Dortlich, a head taller, pulled a stretcher out of the half-track. |
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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 sergeant came out to speak to them. "Easy with him, he's hit in the legs. His toes are frozen. Maybe frostbite gangrene. You have a field hospital?" "Yes, of course, but I can operate here," Grutas told the sergeant and shot him twice in the chest, dust flying off the uniform. The man's legs collapsed and Grutas stepped over him through the doorway and shot the major through the blanket. Milko, Kolnas, and Grentz piled out of the back of the half-track. They wore a mix of uniforms-Lithuanian police, Lithuanian medics, Estonian medical corps, International Red Cross but all wore large medical insignia on their armbands. There is much bending involved in stripping the dead; the looters grunted and bitched at the effort, scattering papers and wallet photos. The major still lived, and he raised his hand to Milko. Milko took the wounded man's watch and stuffed it into his pocket. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Grutas and Dortlich carried a rolled tapestry out of the house and threw it into their half-track truck. They put the canvas stretcher on the ground and tossed onto it watches, gold eyeglasses, rings. A tank came out of the woods, a Russian T-34 in winter camouflage, its cannon traversing the field, the machine gunner standing up in the hatch. A man hiding in a shed behind the farmhouse broke from cover and ran across the field toward the trees, carrying in his arms an ormolu clock, leaping over bodies. The tank's machine gun stuttered and the running looter pitched forward, tumbling to fall beside the clock, his face smashed and the clock's face smashed too; his heart and the clock beat once and stopped. "Grab a body!" Grutas said. They threw a corpse on top of the loot on the stretcher. The tank's turret turned toward them. Grutas waved a white flag and pointed to the medical insignia on the truck. The tank moved on. |