The Winter Horses (23 page)

“I just hope you’ve eaten lots of hay,” Kalinka told the horses, “because we have to leave immediately. They’re horrible people. Worse than you could ever imagine. They’re actually planning to eat us. All of us. That’s right, Taras. Me too. They’re cannibals. I’ve heard stories about people like this. But I never really imagined they could be true. I knew that woman was looking at us in a strange way. I just wish I hadn’t given her the last of our sausage and some bread.”

Taras barked his agreement.

“To think I actually felt sorry for her.”

Kalinka jumped up on Börte’s back and rode quickly
out of the barn, with Temüjin and Taras following; in the distance, she could see the woman running after them. She was carrying a samovar on the end of a broom handle that was balanced over her shoulder.

“Wait, wait,” shouted the woman. “You haven’t had your tea.”

Kalinka wheeled the mare around to take another look at the woman; she wanted to see if she and her husband were capable of mounting a pursuit.

“Fortunately for us, they’re so starved that I don’t think they have the strength to chase us,” she said. “If they weren’t so horrible, I might pity them both. A bit.”

T
HEY GALLOPED FOR WHAT
seemed like kilometers, across open fields and through dark forests with trees as tall as the tallest church steeple. After the frightening incident with the cannibals, Kalinka didn’t have much to say to the others; in front of the dog and the horses, she felt ashamed that human beings could behave quite so badly to their own kind.

“I guess there’s no accounting for what makes people do the things that people do,” said Kalinka.

Taras barked in agreement.

The countryside here was badly scarred by war; everywhere there were broken tanks, ruined buildings and shell holes, abandoned artillery and discarded rifles, burning trucks and, on one occasion, a whole village that had been set ablaze.

“I think we must be getting nearer the Russian lines,”
she told her companions. But she neglected to mention to them that they would have to get through the German lines before they could reach their Russian ones; there seemed to be no point in worrying the animals unnecessarily.

Sometimes Kalinka also saw the bodies of dead men—both Russian and German—but she did not avert her gaze as her mother would probably have ordered. After what had happened to her family at the botanical gardens, nothing could have shocked Kalinka—not anymore. Besides, she knew that the dead—while not pleasant to look at—could do her no harm; it was the living you had to watch out for, as had been proved only too well by the cannibal couple of Mayachka.

Farther on, she saw patches of sand on the fields, and a number of times, she thought she could even smell the sea; then near a village called Novooleksiivka, she saw a rusting railway line and a stationary train consisting of what looked like empty boxcars. Thinking that they might rest in one of these—perhaps even travel in one—Kalinka climbed into a boxcar and opened the sliding wooden door so that the dog and the two horses could leap aboard beside her. She closed the door and shared what remained of their provisions with Temüjin and Börte and Taras; and after, she fell asleep.

When she awoke again, the train was moving.

Kalinka groaned, jumped to her feet but relaxed a little
when she saw that the train was clearly moving south; she took a compass reading to make sure, but she hardly needed to, since the railway track was on a bridge over water.

“That’s either the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov,” she told the others. “But I think the Sea of Azov is more probable, since we’ve been heading southeast since we left Askaniya-Nova. It’s the shallowest sea in the world. And the river Don flows into it. I know that, because we did the Sea of Azov in geography, in my last term at school before the Germans arrived.

“Anyway, here’s the plan: we’ll ride this train until it gets dark and then we’ll wait for it to slow down or stop, at which point we’ll get off. We could walk, but why walk when you can ride? That’s what I say.”

Taras barked his agreement; his paws were sore and he was quite happy to lie down and let the train take the strain.

They hadn’t traveled very far when some planes flew over at a very low altitude and they heard a series of deafening explosions. After calming the two horses—who’d never heard anything as loud as a bomb explosion—Kalinka opened the door of the boxcar and leaned out, only to see that the bridge behind them no longer existed; all that remained to indicate that it had once been there was a huge plume of smoke and pieces of wood that were still flying through the air.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “The planes bombed the
bridge. We were on that just a minute or two ago. We could have been killed.”

She found it hard to decide if the bridge had been bombed by the Russians or the Germans, but the bombing of the bridge had the useful effect of making the train go faster. It soon became evident to Kalinka that it wasn’t going to stop again until it reached its final destination.

“I expect the driver is a little nervous about stopping anywhere for very long after something like that,” she said. “And I can’t say I blame him. It seems as if you stand still long enough in this world, someone is sure to drop a bomb on you.”

For a while after that, Kalinka kept a nervous eye on the sky by leaving the door open a crack, but before very long, the rhythmic movement of the train overtook her and she fell asleep again.

This time when she awoke, the train had stopped at a station in Simferopol, and hearing loud voices outside their boxcar and with her heart in her mouth, Kalinka peered through the slightly open door. A horrifying sight met her widening and fearful eyes: on the station platform were hundreds of German soldiers, and what was even worse, they looked as if they were preparing to get on her train.

“It’s the Germans,” she gasped. “What are we going to do?”

Taras licked her hand in a vain attempt to cheer her
up. Temüjin let out a heavy sigh and then flicked his tail irritably. Börte pressed her hot muzzle against Kalinka’s ear and tried to breathe some encouragement into the girl, as if to say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You tried your best.”

“You’re right,” said Kalinka. “There’s nothing we can do except wait for them to find us here.”

She shook her head and stroked Börte’s muzzle for a moment. In truth, since what had happened in the botanical gardens, Kalinka cared little for her safety; she had no illusions about what became of escaping Jews. But she felt that she had failed to carry out the very important task that Maxim Borisovich Melnik had given her: she had failed to save the last two Przewalski’s horses in the world, because surely the Germans would kill them and eat them as the SS had killed and eaten all the others.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, stroking Börte’s head. “I’ve led you all to disaster, haven’t I? Can you ever forgive me?”

She tried to put her arms around Temüjin’s neck, but he pulled away and walked to the opposite end of the boxcar and stared at the wooden wall as if he couldn’t bear to look at Kalinka. Like Kalinka, he had no illusions about the fate that awaited them all. But then Börte made an impatient snort at him that only a mare could make at a stallion, and remembering his manners, Temüjin turned to face the girl. He walked toward her, and this time he bowed his head in acknowledgment of all the enormous efforts she had made on their behalf.

The next second, the boxcar door was thrown open and the four intrepid travelers were faced with lots of large, red-faced German soldiers, all of them demanding loudly to know who she was and what she was doing on their troop train.

J
OACHIM
S
TAMMER WAS A
captain from the Second Company of the German field police, whose headquarters were on Rosa Luxemburg Street, in a former Soviet NKVD building in the center of Simferopol, a major city on the Crimean peninsula. He was a professional policeman from the city of Bonn, where his parents and his wife still lived in a big house near the university where his father worked.

He was just about to go off duty when he received a telephone call from the local railway station to say that some soldiers had found a girl who had stowed away on a train that was detailed to take troops out of the besieged city to the coastal town of Sevastopol, for evacuation to Germany. The girl was Ukrainian, and there was talk that she might be a partisan fighter or a spy, so Stammer put on his helmet and greatcoat, and walked
to the station, which was only a couple of hundred meters from his office. There was little point in using his car, as the roads were badly bomb-damaged; the city was now under constant attack from the Russian air force and could no longer be defended against the Red Army. Even as he picked his way among the bomb craters, a long-range artillery shell landed just across the Salhir River and exploded with a massive bang that shook the ground underneath Stammer’s jackboots. The capture of the town of Simferopol by the Red Army could only be a matter of a few days now. The sooner the better, thought Stammer, because although he was a German, he was not and never had been a Nazi, and had not wanted to fight a war with Russia; all he wanted now was a chance to get home.

The railway station on Lenin Boulevard had once been an elegant white building that, with its clock tower and low Corinthian-columned arches, had resembled a church more than a railway station; but now it was little better than a ruin. He climbed over a pile of rubble and hurried inside as another artillery shell came whizzing overhead.

Partisans and spies were always shot, and Stammer hoped that the girl would turn out to be something else, as he had no appetite for handing her over to the SS. Even before he laid eyes on Kalinka, he was determined that he would do his best to make sure that this never happened. One way or the other, there had been much
too much killing on the Eastern Front, by both sides, and Captain Stammer was hopeful of getting home without having anything bad on his conscience. Indeed, he now believed it was his mission in life to do one or two good things before the end of the war that might, in a very small way, help atone for some of the terrible things that the Nazis had done in the Soviet Union.

The station manager escorted Stammer to a railway siding where even now a train was being boarded by hundreds of German soldiers anxious to escape the constant artillery fire and falling bombs; near the end of the train was a boxcar guarded by two of his own men.

“The prisoner is in there?” he asked his sergeant.

“Yes, sir. Where we found her. We thought it easier to keep her in there because of the horses.”

“Horses?”

“Yes. The girl has two horses with her. And a dog. She understands some German, I think—I’m not sure. I don’t speak any Ukrainian, so there’s not much I can tell you about her other than the fact that she’s scared. Terrified.”

“That’s all right. I can speak quite reasonable Ukrainian.”

“I also have a rather irate artillery lieutenant who’s anxious to claim this boxcar for his men as soon as possible so that the train can get moving.” The sergeant pointed down the platform, where an officer was now advancing toward them. “That’s him there.”

“All right, I’ll handle him.”

Stammer spoke to the lieutenant and assured him that
he could have the boxcar for his men just as soon as he had spoken to the prisoner.

“How long will that take?”

“A few minutes.”

“This train has to get moving as soon as possible, sir,” said the lieutenant. “It’s a sitting duck for those Russian fighter-bombers as long as it’s waiting in this station.”

“Just let me do my job, Lieutenant.”

Stammer opened the door of the boxcar and saw a frightened-looking girl, about fourteen years old, two nervous horses and an emaciated Russian wolfhound. The wolfhound growled menacingly. As soon as he clapped eyes on them, Captain Stammer realized what the girl was not—she was certainly no partisan fighter and probably not a spy. At the same time, he realized exactly what the horses were: Stammer’s father, Wilhelm, was a doctor of zoology and natural history at the University of Bonn; Wilhelm Stammer was a world expert on freshwater snails and parrot fish. As a boy, Joachim had visited zoos all over Germany with his father, and in Berlin, he had once seen—and never forgotten—the rare Przewalski’s horses.