The Winter Horses (25 page)

In the damp shadows ahead of her, something moved and then growled, and Kalinka felt her blood run cold. She caught a faint glimpse of four legs and a whiff of
something pungently musky and very much alive. At first, she thought it was a large dog, but when the animal growled again—a low, rumbling growl that was full of sharp teeth—Kalinka realized that this was not like any growling dog or wolf she’d ever heard before; it was something else. She backed away, retreating down a few of the stairs that led to the basement, as she guessed that the animal was now between her and the front door. She knew that if she made a run for the outside, the animal would certainly attack.

Glancing around for some kind of weapon, Kalinka saw that at the bottom of the stairs was a cone-shaped fire extinguisher. Quickly she turned and ran downstairs, and fetched the extinguisher off the wall. But it was heavy.

In the shadows, the animal growled again, and this time she thought it sounded more like a lion than a dog—a lion that had escaped from its ruined enclosure, perhaps.

Kalinka started slowly up the staircase, and at last, she saw what she was up against. The animal had a short tail and pointed ears, with big padded paws and goldish fur with brown spots, and for a moment, she thought it was a leopard before she recognized that it was actually a very different kind of big cat: it was a lynx. It was over a meter long and at least half a meter high at the shoulder; she estimated that the lynx probably weighed as much as thirty kilograms. It might have been bigger if it hadn’t been so thin; like everything else in that part of the world, the cat was hungry—hungry enough to consider eating Kalinka.

The lynx crept toward the top of the stairs, crouched down as if preparing to spring and then growled again; only this time, the cat showed her its teeth and its claws as if to remind her that it was strong enough to bring down a fully grown deer, which was its normal prey. Kalinka lifted the extinguisher and prepared to hit the plunger, but since it was full of water, it took all of her strength to aim the nozzle at the cat.

She was just about to fire a jet of water at the lynx when she heard a bark. It was Taras, and Kalinka would have cheered if she hadn’t feared for the wolfhound’s chances, because a hungry lynx was a formidable opponent for a dog, even a dog as large as Taras. The lynx turned abruptly and, snarling fiercely, sprang at him.

Kalinka ran up the stairs two at a time to find Taras locked in a vicious battle with the big cat. Taras had a good grip on the lynx’s neck with his strong jaws, but the big cat was clawing his sides fiercely—so fiercely that each rake of its claws tore into the dog’s fur.

Kalinka screamed with anger and leapt to the dog’s defense. “No, you don’t!” she yelled at the lynx.

Now that she wasn’t coming up the stairs, she no longer had to lift the nozzle of the heavy extinguisher so high, and Kalinka had a much better shot. Hoping to drive the big cat off, she fired a jet of water at both the animals, since it was almost impossible to tell them apart.

The cat let go of Taras immediately and twisted away, its face and thick fur dripping with water. The pointed ears looked like little black darts on the lynx’s head. It
stared balefully at the girl and then at Taras as the dog snapped at its heels before it bounded out of the aquarium door, with Taras giving chase to the lynx’s short black tail.

Kalinka went outside and saw the lynx as it ran up a tree and, along the roof of one of the animal enclosures before it disappeared; but much more importantly, she saw Temüjin and Börte, who were standing in front of the door to the aquarium.

“Where did you two get to?” she asked. “I was worried about you both. Did the bombs scare you? I don’t blame you for running away. I’m kind of scared myself. I never heard such an almighty racket.”

Kalinka ran to the horses and stroked them affectionately, but as Taras returned from giving chase to the big cat, there was no time for an extended reunion; already she could hear another shell on the way, and without further delay, the girl led the dog and the horses into the aquarium and down to the basement. The two Przewalski’s clattered down the stairs as if they’d been doing it all their lives.

Temüjin snorted loudly and trotted the length of the aquarium as if keen to inspect his new surroundings; Börte peered through the glass of one of the tanks and licked it experimentally and then kept doing it: the glass was covered in salt, and if there’s one thing of which wild horses are fond, it’s a delicious salt lick.

“All right,” Kalinka told them. “You three stay down
here. I’m going back up to the birdhouse to fetch our supplies. You too, Taras.”

Taras barked, and lying down on the floor, he began to lick himself. For a dog, there’s almost nothing that tastes better than that.

She patted the dog fondly on the head, briefly inspecting him for signs of damage: one of his ears looked a bit ragged, but otherwise he appeared to be unscathed. Just then another bomb outside rocked the building they were in, showering them with dust and causing Kalinka to cover her own head and ears.

“That sounded too close for comfort,” said Kalinka. “But I think we’ll be safe enough down here.”

U
NDER CONSTANT BOMBARDMENT FROM
the Soviet Red Army, Kalinka and the cave horses and Taras the dog spent a nerve-wracking night down in the abandoned aquarium of Simferopol. There was little chance of anyone sleeping. Kalinka lit one of the candles Captain Stammer had given her and let it burn all night; she decided that if she was going to be killed by Russian bombs, she preferred that it should happen in the light than in the dark. Temüjin and Börte lay on one of the SS groundsheets and did their best to ignore the terrifying noise. Kalinka lay on another groundsheet and did the same. But it wasn’t just the noise that kept them awake; it was hard to breathe, too. Each time a shell or a bomb landed on the ground above, the impact sent clouds of dust into the fetid air of the aquarium, and sometimes pieces of cement and mosaic fell onto their heads. On more than one
occasion, there was so much dust falling off the ceiling that it extinguished the candle; once, the glass of one of the fish tanks cracked loudly, and it was fortunate there was no water in it, or otherwise the floor would have been inundated. Several times, Kalinka screamed out loud with fright and covered her ears against the blasts, which did nothing to settle the nerves of Temüjin and Börte. The two horses lay close together, with the stallion’s head laid protectively over the mare’s neck, like two fond lovers, and if they all hadn’t been subject to a harrowing ordeal, Kalinka would have felt more touched by the sight. But as things were, she was terrified—more terrified than she had ever been in her life. Even the arrival of the SS in Dnepropetrovsk had been less terrifying than the constant bombardment. She wrapped herself in the blanket, and for a while, she tried to read one of the newspapers, but mostly she just covered her ears against the terrible noise. Kalinka thought that it was like being inside an enormous metal box that someone was hitting with a sledgehammer again and again and again.

After some time, she tried to steel her nerve by counting the explosions, but she gave up when she reached a hundred.

“They have to stop soon,” she shouted. “Surely they’ll run out of shells.”

But they didn’t.

Kalinka couldn’t have known it, but the Russians were firing Katyusha rockets at Simferopol; nicknamed
“Stalin’s organ pipes,” the rocket launchers were mounted on trucks and could fire four rockets a time and from a distance of more than five kilometers. The effect on the city was devastating.

Only Taras seemed able to tolerate the noise. He lay quietly next to Kalinka as if not in the least bit concerned about anything; she badly wanted to hug him to her for comfort, but she didn’t, forbidding herself this selfish comfort in the hope that the brave wolfhound might get some much-needed sleep. Börte even came over and had a look and a sniff at Taras, as if envious of the wolfhound’s extraordinary ability to relax.

At least that’s what Kalinka thought.

“Shh,” said Kalinka. “Don’t wake him, Börte. He’s tired. We’re all exhausted. But him especially. You should have seen him fighting that lynx. You would have thought that the poor cat was a German officer, he was so fierce in attack.”

But a little later on, she noticed that Taras was breathing strangely, as if he was nervous after all, and when she stroked the dog in an effort to calm him, she discovered that he was covered in something sticky.

“Hey,” she said, “what have you been rolling in, you silly dog?”

Kalinka brought the candle close to the wolfhound to see what was on his coat and learned, to her horror, that Taras was covered with blood. And when she lifted the candle over him to inspect the dog more closely, she
found that he was lying in a pool of his own blood. During the fight with the lynx, the wolfhound’s sides had apparently been raked to the bone by the cat’s powerful claws and he was now in danger of bleeding to death.

“I’m such an idiot,” said Kalinka. “I should have taken a closer look at you after your fight with the lynx. Do you forgive me, Taras?”

Weakly, the wolfhound lifted his head for a moment, and with a faint wag of his curved tail, he licked the girl’s face fondly.

“I have to do something,” she told herself. “But what?” Desperate to help the stricken dog, she rummaged through her forage bag for something that might help, but there was nothing that seemed likely to do the job of fixing up an injured dog. What Taras needed most was a vet, but finding one in Simferopol was out of the question. Kalinka thought for a minute; she knew she’d seen a medical kit somewhere in the zoo, but where?

“Yes, I remember now. There was a first aid kit on the wall of the ticket office, wasn’t there? Look, hold on, Taras. I’m going to fetch that kit. I’ll be as quick as I can, all right?”

She grabbed her helmet and went up the stairs, where she peered cautiously out of the front door. Already the zoo looked very different from even a few hours before—the birdhouse was completely destroyed, and the dead elephant’s enclosure was missing two of the walls. Even the dead elephant had disappeared. She had to look hard
before she could even make out where the ticket office had been. Finally she saw the place and started to run.

The air was thick with the smell of cordite, burning wood and blasted stone; the monkey house was on fire, and it was fortunate that there were no monkeys in it. She could actually taste explosives on her tongue as she made her way through the bomb-damaged zoo. At any moment, a shell might have landed and blown her to pieces, but Kalinka’s fear for the dog was greater than her fear for herself.

Close to the ticket office, she paused briefly beside an open cage with a sign hanging upside down on one screw that identified the enclosure as that of a Eurasian lynx (
Lynx lynx
).

“Well, that explains that,” she muttered. “We were in his territory, I guess.”

The sign also pointed the way to the lion house; somewhere, at the back of her mind, she hoped a small hope that the lynx was gone and that there would not be a lion loose in the zoo as well, but all that really mattered now was quickly finding that first aid kit and helping Taras.

This brief pause in front of the lynx enclosure almost certainly saved Kalinka’s life.

She never heard the Katyusha rocket that hit the nearby lion enclosure, and she didn’t hear anything for several minutes after that; all she knew was that she was lying down on the ground and staring up at the stars.

“Oh, I never realized,” she heard someone whisper. “I
never realized how beautiful the stars are in the Crimea. There’s the North Star, just where it ought to be. And look at that purple sky. It must be that we’re so near the Black Sea.”

It was a minute or two before Kalinka realized that the voice she could hear above the whistle in her ears was her own.

She swept some rubble off her chest, picked herself up and, feeling a little faint, knelt again for another minute until her head had properly cleared. Tasting blood, she spat and then wiped her mouth; her lip was cut, but that seemed to be her only injury. Her coal scuttle-shaped helmet now felt different against her head, and taking it off for a moment, she saw that there was now an enormous dent in the gray metal, as if something hard had hit it. Realizing just what a narrow escape she had experienced, Kalinka whistled with wonder.

“That was close,” she said. “Any closer and I’d have been strawberry jam.”

She put the helmet back on, tightened the chin strap as much as she could—it was too big for her, of course—and carried on to the ticket office.

There she found the door and one of the walls standing and not much else. Fortunately, the wall that was still standing was the one with the first aid kit on it. Kalinka opened it up and inspected the contents; there was iodine, bandages, surgical dressings, scissors, tape—there was even a needle and some suture thread.

“Yes!” she said triumphantly. “This is just what I need.”

She lifted the box off the wall and ran back to the aquarium. Kalinka had seen her mother stitch her father’s arm once, after he’d fallen off the coal cart, and thought she could probably do the same with the dog’s wounds; she’d have to trim some of his fur and then cover the wound with iodine, which would sting, of course, but she felt Taras was brave enough to deal with that. In fact, she was sure she’d never met a more courageous animal than him.