The Winter Horses (26 page)

Kalinka could tell something was wrong as soon as she was back in the aquarium. Taras had not moved from where he lay on the floor, but Temüjin and Börte were both standing beside him and the stallion was trying to move the dog gently with his nose. The dog did not stir, and what was worse, his long pink tongue was hanging out of his mouth.

Kalinka ran to his side, threw away her helmet, lit another candle and pressed her face close to the dog’s chest. But it was too late. Taras was dead.

“Oh no,” she said quietly. “Not you, too, you wonderful old dog. Not you, too.”

She sat with the dog’s noble head in her hands, but still she did not cry. How could she cry for a dog when she had not yet cried for her mother and father, her grandparents, her great-grandmother, her brothers and sisters, her aunts and her uncles, her cousins and her neighbors? How could she cry for Taras when she had not cried for
Max? Where was grief to be found for a wolfhound when there had been none for them? Somehow it would have seemed disrespectful to her family and to the old man to have wept for this brave and faithful dog when she had not yet stopped to weep for them.

Kalinka wrapped her friend’s body in one of the German groundsheets and stitched it up carefully, so as to prevent some animal from eating him; then she dragged Taras to a far corner of the aquarium, where she had lit a special candle, and sat there in silent contemplation of his courage and his devotion.

“I shall miss you, dear Taras,” she whispered. “You were faithful unto death. There never was a better dog than you. Not ever. Dear Max would have been so very proud of you.”

After a moment—and quite unbidden—the two Przewalski’s horses came and stood on either side of the dog’s body and, in spite of the terrible noise of the continuing bombardment, would not leave, like an honor guard for a fallen comrade.

I
T WAS A LITTLE
before dawn when the Russian artillery bombardment finally ended and Kalinka and the cave horses could leave the aquarium and return to ground level and breathe some fresher air. Not that it seemed all that fresh. The lion house was still burning, and Kalinka had the thought that perhaps the bodies of some dead animals were being consumed by the flames; at least, she hoped that they were dead. A thin haze of gray smoke hung over everything like a fog, and pieces of ash were floating through the air like gray snowflakes.

An eerie quiet had descended on the city of Simferopol. After the death of Taras, Kalinka decided that she needed to be on her own for a while and so she left the horses to go and see if she could scavenge some more food. She thought it better that the horses remain at the zoo; she knew that if the bombardment started again,
Temüjin and Börte were intelligent enough to find their way back down to the makeshift shelter that was provided by the aquarium. Besides, there was still plenty of good grazing in the goat enclosure and the horses were hungry.

According to one of the newspapers she’d read, it was April, but things didn’t feel much like spring as it was still very cold—probably because they were so close to the sea. The wind was still arriving from the northeast, with just a bit of sleet to make life hard for everyone.

She walked all the way back to the railway station and found the city deserted; the Germans were gone, but as yet there was no sign of the Russians. The city of Simferopol was ruined: the nearby velodrome was cratered like the surface of the moon, and a green church had a large, unexploded bomb sticking out of a wall. Most of the buildings had collapsed or were in a state of near collapse. With a few of them, whole walls had disappeared, revealing everything inside the houses—furniture, pictures, carpets—as if some careless giant ape had opened them up to look inside. Kalinka had not seen the movie
King Kong
herself, but she knew what it was about.

In a bakery shop near the central railway station, she found a couple of stale loaves and put them in her forage bag. In another shop, she managed to get a can of condensed milk. Then she went back to the zoo, where the Przewalski’s horses were waiting patiently for her return. She split one of the loaves into two for them, before
eating some of the other loaf herself and drinking the condensed milk, which tasted delicious.

Not long after her meal, the sun came out again and she heard the sound of music on a loudspeaker and instantly recognized “The Internationale”—which was a patriotic song the Russians were always playing.

“It sounds like the Red Army is here at last,” she told the horses. “We’d better make you look like good Russian horses.”

So she draped a red flag over each horse, and while Börte, who was used to having the groundsheet on her back, was able to tolerate this, Temüjin was not and kept tugging the flag off with his teeth.

“This is for your own good, you know,” she told him, trying again and then again. “In case someone decides to make you their next meal.”

But Temüjin kept pulling the flag off and dropping it on the ground. Finally, Kalinka decided to hang the flag on their enclosure, which seemed like the best alternative.

Red Army soldiers appeared in the zoo toward the end of the afternoon; they wore brown tunics and blue trousers and were very dirty, and regarded Kalinka with some suspicion.

“What are you doing here, child?” asked one, a Ukrainian.

“Waiting for you,” she said. “My name is Kalyna Shtern, but everyone calls me Kalinka, like the song. I’m
from Dnepropetrovsk, where the Germans killed all my family. I’m the only one left.”

“Sorry to hear it,” said the Ukrainian soldier, although he didn’t sound very sorry at all.

One of the other soldiers was laughing and talking in Russian; he was looking at the horses, and although Kalinka couldn’t understand everything he said, he seemed to be suggesting that he could eat a horse and probably would.

“No!” she yelled. “These horses are all the family I have now. They’re very special wild horses from the Soviet People’s Sanctuary Park at Askaniya-Nova. Przewalski’s horses. All of their brothers and sisters were killed by the Germans, too; that means they’re the last of their kind and very probably the rarest horses in the world. They’re the same horses that you can see in cave paintings in France. Look, you’ll understand more when you read this letter and the entry in this encyclopedia.”

“Askaniya-Nova? That’s two hundred kilometers from here,” he said, sneering with skepticism. “Do you expect me to believe you walked all that way with two wild horses?”

“It’s true, I tell you,” she insisted.

“I don’t have time for your fairy stories, girl,” said the Ukrainian soldier, and unslinging his machine gun from around his neck, he walked toward the Przewalski’s horses. “Sorry, but I’ve got hungry men to feed. Those two horses of yours will feed a whole platoon.” He
laughed. “Besides, your encyclopedia is no good to me. I can’t read.”

He aimed his machine gun at Temüjin, but Kalinka ran in front of the stallion and held out her arms as if she hoped to shield the horses from the Red Army soldier’s bullets.

“Are you mad, child? Get out of the way before you get hurt.”

“If you shoot them, I swear you’ll have to shoot me first.”

“Move, I tell you. My men’s stomachs are more important than your pet horses.”

“No, they’re not,” she insisted, and as if to emphasize the point, she jumped onto Börte’s back. “Not this time. Don’t you understand? These horses are one of the things you’ve been fighting for. They’re an important part of what makes Ukraine and Mother Russia what they are. You kill them and you’re destroying your own great victory here. I didn’t walk all that way and endure the cold and beat off attacks by wolves, the SS, even cannibals, just so that you could fill your belly with some fresh meat, Comrade.”

Reluctantly, the soldier lowered his weapon.

Impressed by Kalinka’s courage and perhaps a little persuaded by the red flag that she had now draped over her own shoulders, the soldiers decided to fetch an officer to listen to her story and to determine the fate of the two Przewalski’s horses.

The officer was a handsome man—a tall Russian major, wearing several medals on his tunic, who spoke good Ukrainian.

He listened patiently to the whole of Kalinka’s story, glanced over the entry in the encyclopedia and then asked to read the German officer’s letter.

She handed him the letter, which he took and read with more than a little curiosity; it was the first time since the start of the great patriotic war that he had ever had any communication with a German. Much to his surprise, the German’s Russian was as courteous as it was good, and the letter affected him more than he could have explained.

The Russian major read the letter again and swallowed a lump in his throat, for he was very moved by the German captain’s honest words.

Meanwhile, more and more Russian soldiers were arriving in the zoo, and Kalinka noticed that a few were carrying not just guns but balalaikas and accordions. Russian soldiers often took musical instruments with them when they were fighting. It was, she thought, a good sign when soldiers were carrying musical instruments.

“This German captain,” the Russian major said to Kalinka. “What was he like?”

“Handsome, sir. Perhaps a bit like you, but younger. And kind, sir. Very kind. He risked his life to bring us
here to safety. He wasn’t the same as other Germans I’ve met. And I like to think there are more like him, somewhere.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was evacuated to Sevastopol,” she answered. “Although to be honest with you, Major, he didn’t seem to think much of his chances for survival.”

The Russian major nodded. “No. Nor do I. It’s going to be bad there, too. But I’ll say this for him: he writes a good letter. Don’t worry, Kalinka. I will make sure that nothing happens to these Przewalski’s horses. I give you my word on this. They’re both quite safe now. I will assign them a personal bodyguard this very minute and make sure they are properly fed.”

He reached up and lifted Kalinka down from the horse’s back and stroked her cheek. Then he spoke to his sergeant.

“These horses are to be guarded night and day,” he said. “Under no account are they to be harmed. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You look as if you could use a good meal yourself, not to mention a bath and a proper bed.”

Kalinka nodded, and for no reason that she could think of, she started to cry. All of the emotion that had been bottled up inside the girl for months came spilling out; it was almost as if she had needed to feel safe before she could do this properly. And Kalinka wept like
the Dnieper River would have if the Zaporizhia Dam had been destroyed. She wept as if the ground needed the moisture from her tears. She wept for her family, and she wept for Max, and she wept for Taras, and she wept that perhaps at last her sufferings were over.