The Winter Horses (12 page)

“Yes, I’ve seen that village.” The captain shrugged. “It’s of no interest to anyone.”

“That’s just how it was in those days, sir. Things got built. Things were abandoned. Things are forgotten. And really, that’s the story of Mother Russia.”

“I wasn’t asking you for a history lesson, Max. I’m a German. We don’t read history; we
make
it. I was asking if you knew what these structures might be. But thank you, I think you’ve answered my question.” He smiled.
“As I knew you would. Now let’s go and eat. I could eat a horse. Which is just as well, perhaps, as that’s what we’re having for dinner.”

Captain Grenzmann thought this was very funny and laughed a great loud laugh that Max realized was curiously like the sound of a horse whinnying.

Max tried to smile back, and then gave it up as a bad job. Whatever appetite he might have had—which wasn’t much, considering what was on the menu—had been lost the moment that he’d realized he was socializing with the very men who’d murdered Kalinka’s family. And now that Grenzmann had asked him about the water pumping station, he felt physically sick.

A
S A LITTLE GIRL
back in Dnepropetrovsk, making paints—with cornstarch, salt, egg yolk and food colorings like cochineal, paprika, betanin, caramel and elderberry juice—had always been as much fun for Kalinka as actually painting a picture.

Her father put it differently: “Making a mess in the kitchen,” he said, “seems to give my daughter more pleasure than almost anything.”

Not that he ever seemed to mind all that much; besides, Kalinka always knew that she could make everything better with him by taking off his black hat—her father always wore some kind of hat, even when he was in the house—and kissing his strange-smelling head.

She didn’t have any food coloring in her new home at Askaniya-Nova, but she had some tea, some egg yolk and some strawberry jam; and most important of all, she had some charcoal from the fire.

“This is going to be fun,” she told Taras as she mixed her paints.

Kalinka didn’t know exactly
how
those prehistoric men had painted the walls of their caves, but she knew that most of their tools had been made of flint; consequently, she imagined—correctly—that instead of brushes and palette knives, they had used their fingers for painting pictures on stone walls.

After a number of experimental palm prints on the wall—open black hands that looked like a warning of something dangerous—Kalinka tried drawing a horse with a knob of charcoal, but it needed several attempts before she got one with which she was really happy.

“The neck of a Przewalski’s is much more curved than a modern horse’s,” she told Taras. “A bit like a hunter’s bow, don’t you think?”

Taras barked.

The success of these smaller paintings prompted Kalinka to be a little bolder and adventurous with her next endeavor, and working on a much larger scale seemed to inspire her to draw the outline of a really excellent horse—one that was easily good enough to color in with a shade of brown made from tea and jam, which was perfect for rendering the dun-colored body of a Przewalski’s horse. This color, mixed with a little charcoal, was just right for the animal’s leg stripes, mane and all-important tail.

When she was at the stage of wondering what else to do to her picture—a work of art is never finished, only
ever abandoned—Kalinka walked to the opposite side of the water tank and, holding up the lamp, tried to judge her own work critically.

“What do you think, Taras?” she asked the dog.

Taras looked at the picture, inclined his head one way, then the other and wagged his tail.

In the flickering firelight, Kalinka decided the painting was pretty good—so good that she started painting another running horse almost immediately.

While she was working, Temüjin came into Kalinka’s water tank to see what she was doing; his sense of another horse like him was so keen that he had felt its presence even though it was only a painting on a stone wall. The stallion stared at the picture for a full two minutes: like a cat looking at a mirror, he was fascinated with this image of himself.

Before long, Kalinka had created not just several horses running around the walls but also a reasonable imitation of a real prehistoric cave. When she compared her own efforts with the pictures in Max’s book, she felt that she had exceeded her own expectations.

“Not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all. Even though I say so myself. Perhaps, deep down, all painting is the same: no one ought to or can teach you how to paint the wall of a cave. It’s something you can or you can’t do.”

Looking at her work now, Kalinka felt she had a new understanding of those ancient cavemen. She thought it was only too easy to imagine that outside her little
shelter, on the windblown steppe, it was a primordial world of unimaginable harshness and severity; and in a way, of course, it was just such a world. Perhaps it was worse than that, for even at its harshest, Stone Age life was never as nasty, brutish and short as life on the Russian front. No saber-toothed tiger, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, cave bear or Neanderthal man had ever witnessed the cruelty Kalinka had seen.

But a new thought now presented itself to her inquisitive young mind.

“You know, Taras, I wonder if it was cavemen who painted these pictures at all. Everyone assumes it was them. But why? Why couldn’t it have been cave
women
? After all, it’s usually the women who fix up a place and try to make it look nice. That’s how it was for us back in Dnepropetrovsk. My papa was out working all day, and my mama was the one who stayed home cooking, cleaning, putting up curtains, hanging pictures and making everything neat and tidy. My papa was generally too tired to lift anything but a newspaper or his tea glass when he came home at night. It’s hard to think of his Stone Age equivalent painting pictures on the walls of his cave after a day of hunting mammoth.”

She shrugged.

“Either way, I can’t wait to see what Max thinks of my cave. You know, it’s a pity he’s coming tomorrow morning, because I think these paintings look so much better at night and in the firelight. It’s almost as if the horses are
actually moving around the walls. If you half close your eyes, the flames seem to create the illusion that they’re really running. It’s a bit like going to the cinema theater. Except that these moving pictures are in color, of course. I’ve only ever seen movies that are in black and white.”

Temüjin nodded his appreciation and allowed Kalinka to hug his back fondly, which was not something he had allowed before. Neither of them could have known that the girl’s pictures were almost prophetic, and that within a matter of hours, Temüjin and Börte would be running for their lives.

Kalinka’s heart skipped a beat when she heard footsteps outside the jagged stone door of the disused water tank.

“Max? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” he said dully, appearing in the doorway. Bearded and swathed in frosted furs, he didn’t look so very different from a caveman himself.

Kalinka threw her arms around the old man and squealed with delight.

“I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow,” she said.

“I—er—changed my mind.” He held up a coat. “I brought you a coat, which used to belong to my wife. To help keep you warm when you go outside.”

“Thank you,” she said, pressing the fur on the collar to her face. “It’s nice.”

“It’s an Astrakhan coat. I’d almost forgotten that I still
had it. It’ll be a bit big, probably. But I expect you’ll grow into it.”

“You smell different,” she observed.

Max winced. “I had a bath, that’s why. Before going to dinner. And it wasn’t even my birthday.”

Kindly, Kalinka didn’t ask him about dinner. Just by looking at his face, she could tell that the old man hadn’t enjoyed it very much. She put the coat down on the floor for a moment and lifted the lantern.

“Look,” she said. “I’ve decorated my cave.”

Max glanced around and felt his own jaw drop with amazement. “Well, I never,” he said. “It’s incredible. They’re the most beautiful paintings I think I’ve ever seen. And that includes the painting in my cottage that used to belong to the baron. It’s wonderful what you’ve done in here, child. Wonderful.”

He walked around the water tank, nodding his appreciation and muttering kind words of admiration. Finally, Max let out a loud laugh of delight.

“I feel just like one of those ancient cavemen seventeen thousand years ago. Whatever prompted you to do such a wonderful thing, child?”

“These old walls were a bit gray,” she said. “I never liked gray all that much. And I like it a lot less since the Germans came to Ukraine. I thought that if I was going be hiding in here for a while, then it would be nice to make things a little more bright and colorful.”

“Well, you’ve certainly done that,” said Max. “You’re
full of surprises.” The old man tried to make his smile last awhile longer, but knowing what he knew now, this was proving to be difficult.

Mistaking his melting smile for a lack of genuine enthusiasm, Kalinka said, “I know they’re a little crude. But I’ll get better, and when I paint the walls of the other water tank—which is the important one—then I’m sure I’ll get it just right.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Max. “I think you’ve done a marvelous job.”

“No, this was an experiment,” said Kalinka. “To work out my technique. The other cave is where I’m going to do the proper work. You see, I really want to make Temüjin and Börte feel like they are outside on the steppe, with all their old friends—the horses who were shot. I might even try a few bison, too. Just like in the books you lent me.”

“Well, that’s very kind and thoughtful of you, Kalinka.”

Temüjin nodded his affirmation of this project. He hadn’t seen a lot of art, but he knew what he liked. He put his nose in Kalinka’s hand for a moment, breathed warmly on the palm of her hand and then went next door to check on Börte.

Max picked up a piece of wood, dropped it onto the fire and then sat down on the floor with a heavy sigh.

“What is it, Max?” said Kalinka, sitting down beside him. “Did something awful happen when you went to see Captain Grenzmann?”

“Yes,” he said. “You could say that.”

“And here was I, chattering away about my stupid paintings. I should have remembered that you’d be feeling bad after—well, after, you know.”

“No, it’s not that,” said Max. “Although that was quite bad enough. I don’t think I’ve ever had to eat anything quite as bad as—”

Gradually, Max explained some of what had happened in the baron’s old study at the big house. He did not mention that the SS men at the house were probably the same men who had killed her family.

“But what does it mean?” she asked.

“It means that bloody Captain Grenzmann won’t be satisfied until he’s found this place and satisfied his own curiosity that it is what I told him it was,” said Max. “A ruin of no importance. It means that he might well come here as soon as tomorrow morning, when he’s out riding. And I think we can guess what will happen if he finds you here. It means, my dear, dear girl, and my only true friend, that you will have to leave this place tonight. Right now. You have to go away somewhere safe. To our own Red Army lines, southeast of here.”

Kalinka winced as if Temüjin had bitten her backside.

“Oh, Max,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure. And I sincerely wish I wasn’t.”

“I see,” Kalinka said sadly. She’d been so happy in her little cave.

“Since you’re without parents and without identity
papers, Kalinka, Captain Grenzmann will assume you’ve escaped from a camp or another special action group, and possibly shoot you at the same time as he shoots Temüjin and Börte.” He sighed. “It’s too bad, but there it is.”

Kalinka nodded. In all other circumstances, she might have cried, but she could see Max was right and there was no point in moaning about it. Escape was now her only option.

“All right,” she agreed. “Of course, I can see the sense in what you’re saying. I’ll go tonight.” She frowned. “But look here. There’s no point in me leaving here on my own. Why don’t I take Temüjin and Börte with me? You said yourself, he’ll shoot them if he finds them here.”

He nodded. “Yes, he will.”

“Think about it, Max. If they don’t come with me, the breed will be extinct.”

“I can’t argue with that, Kalinka. But all the same, your plan is founded on the assumption that the horses will do what you say. That they’ll follow you. Will they follow you? They’re wild animals, after all.”

“If I ask them, I think they’ll come,” she said. “I seem to have developed a bond with them. I’m not exactly sure why. But as I said before, I think it’s because we have something in common. We’re all refugees.”

“Perhaps it’s that, yes.” Max nodded. “But I think they sense something unique in you, Kalinka. And so do I. It’s a very wise head you have on very young shoulders.”

“You’re wiser.”

“It might seem that way, Kalinka, but no, I’m not. Wisdom is found inside the head, not in the silver beard.” Max turned away. “Now, I’d better go and get some things for your journey. You stay here and see if you can work your magic with those horses and persuade them that they have to leave with you. All right?”