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They passed into an adjoining room, where a big easel stood with a pad of blank newsprint, charcoal and some tubes of color.
“I have made a space here for you, your own studio,” the count said. “You can find relief here, Hannibal. When you feel that you may explode, draw instead! Paint! Big arm motions, lots of color. Don’t try to aim it or finesse it when you draw. You will get enough finesse from Sheba.” He looked beyond the trees to the river. “I’ll see you at lunch. Ask Madame Brigitte to find you a hat. We’ll row in the late afternoon, after your lessons.”
After the count left him, Hannibal did not at once go to his easel; he wandered about the studio looking at the count’s works in progress. He put his hand on the chaise, touched the kimono on its peg and held it to his face. He stood before the draped easel and raised the cloth. The count was painting Lady Murasaki nude on the chaise. The picture came into Hannibal’s wide eyes, points of light danced in his pupils, fireflies glowed in his night.
Fall approached and Lady Murasaki organized lawn suppers where they could view the harvest moon and hear the fall insects. They waited for the moon-rise, Chiyoh playing the lute in the dark when the crickets faltered. With only the rustle of silk and a fragrance to guide him, Hannibal always knew exactly where Lady Murasaki was.
The French crickets were no match for the superb bell cricket of Japan, the suzumushi, the count explained to him, but they would do. The count had sent to Japan a number of times before the war to try to obtain suzumushi crickets for Lady Murasaki but none had survived the trip and he never told her.
On still evenings, when the air was damp after a rain, they played the Aroma Identification Game, Hannibal burning a variety of barks and incense on a mica chip for Chiyoh to identify. Lady Murasaki played the koto on these occasions so Chiyoh could concentrate, her teacher sometimes providing musical hints from a repertoire Hannibal could not follow.
He was sent to monitor classes in the village school, and was an object of curiosity because he could not recite. On his second day a lout from an upper form spit in the hair of a small first-grader and Hannibal broke the spitter’s coccyx and his nose. He was sent home, his expression never changing throughout.
He attended Chiyoh’s lessons at home instead. Chiyoh had been engaged for years to the son of a diplomatic family in Japan and now, at thirteen, she was learning from Lady Murasaki the skills she would need.
The instruction was very different from that of Mr. Jakov, but the subjects had a peculiar beauty, like Mr. Jakov’s mathematics, and Hannibal found them fascinating.
Standing near the good light from the windows in her salon, Lady Murasaki taught calligraphy, painting on sheets of the daily newspaper, and could achieve remarkably delicate effects with a large brush. Here was the symbol for eternity, a triangular shape pleasing to contemplate. Beneath this graceful symbol, the headline on the newspaper sheet read DOCTORS INDICTED AT NUREMBERG.
“This exercise is called Eternity in Eight Strokes,” she said. “Try it.”
At the end of class, Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh each folded an origami crane, which they would later put on the altar in the attic.
Hannibal picked up a piece of origami paper to make a crane. Chiyoh’s questioning glance at Lady Murasaki made him feel like an outsider for a moment. Lady Murasaki handed him a scissors. (Later she would correct Chiyoh for the lapse, which could not be permitted in a diplomatic setting.)
“Chiyoh has a cousin in Hiroshima named Sadako,” Lady Murasaki explained. “She is dying of radiation poisoning. Sadako believes that if she folds one thousand paper cranes she will survive. Her strength is limited, and we help her each day by making paper cranes. Whether the cranes are curative or not, as we make them she is in our thoughts, along with others everywhere poisoned by the war. You would fold cranes for us, Hannibal, and we would fold them for you. Let us make cranes together for Sadako.”
19
ON THURSDAYS the village had a good market under umbrellas around the fountain and statue of Marshal Foch. There was a briny vinegar on the wind from the pickle merchant and the fish and shellfish on beds of seaweed brought the smell of the ocean.
A few radios played rival tunes. The organ grinder and his monkey released after breakfast from their frequent accommodation in the jail, ground out “Sous les Ponts de Paris” relentlessly until someone gave them a glass of wine and a piece of peanut brittle, respectively. The organ grinder drank all the wine at once and confiscated half the peanut brittle for himself, the monkey noting with his wise little eyes which pocket his master put the candy in. Two gendarmes gave the musician the usual futile admonitions and found the pastry stall.
Lady Murasaki’s objective was Legumes Bulot, the premier vegetable booth, to obtain fiddlehead ferns. Fiddleheads were a great favorite of the count, and they sold out early.
Hannibal trailed behind her carrying a basket. He paused to watch as a cheese merchant oiled a length of piano wire and used it to cut a great wheel of Grana. The merchant gave him a bite and asked him to recommend it to Madame.
Lady Murasaki did not see any fiddleheads on display and before she had the chance to ask, Bulot of the Vegetables brought a basket of the coiled ferns from under his counter. “Madame, these are so superlative I would not allow the sun to touch them. Awaiting your arrival, I covered them with this cloth, dampened not with water, but with actual garden dew.”
Across the aisle from the greengrocer, Paul Momund sat in his bloody apron at a butcher-block table cleaning fowl, throwing the offal into a bucket, and dividing gizzards and livers between two bowls. The butcher was a big, beefy man with a tattoo on his forearm—a cherry with the legend Void la Mienne, où est la Tienne? The red of the cherry had faded paler than the blood on his hands. Paul the Butcher’s brother, more suited to dealing with the public, worked the counter under the banner of Momund’s Fine Meats.
Paul’s brother brought him a goose to draw. Paul had a drink from the bottle of marc beside him and wiped his face with his bloody hand, leaving blood and feathers on his cheeks.
“Take it easy, Paul,” his brother said. “We have a long day.”
“Why don?
??t you pluck the fucking thing? I think you’d rather pluck than fuck,” Paul the Butcher said, to his own intense amusement.
Hannibal was looking at a pig’s head in a display case when he heard Paul’s voice.
“Hey Japonnaise!”
And the voice of Bulot of the Vegetables: “Please, Monsieur! That is unacceptable.”
And Paul again: “Hey Japonnaise, tell me, is it true that your pussy runs crossways? With a little puff of straight hairs like an explosion?”
Hannibal saw Paul then, his face smeared with blood and feathers, like the Blue-Eyed One, like the Blue-Eyed One gnawing a birdskin.
