The Winter Horses

by Philip Kerr

  “Even a snowman might feel inclined to come inside on a night like this,” he told Taras, and blew on the ember in the bowl of his pipe only for the comfort of seeing it glow. “Just to catch his breath and warm his toes.”

  Max was thinking he would have to go to bed to get properly warm when the dog lifted his head off the threadbare Persian carpet—a gift from the baron—growled and then walked to the door.

  “What is it, Taras?” asked Max. “Can’t be one of them Germans. They wouldn’t have come all the way out here on a night like this. Even if they and their consciences did want me at their blessed horse-meat supper.”

  Taras barked once and then backed away from the door.

  “A wolf, do you think?” He put down his pipe.

  Taras stayed silent.

  “Not a wolf, then,” said Max, but he fetched his rifle all the same before he kicked the horse blanket away from the door and opened it. Taras advanced bravely onto the porch and barked once again.

  Max peered into the snow-charged darkness with his gun in his hands.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, first in Ukrainian, then in Russian and once more in German. “Speak up. I’m in no mood for practical jokes.”

  There was no answer, but from the dog’s behavior, he knew something was out there, so he brought one of the storm lamps and raised it at arm’s length in front of him. The cyclone of blown snow dropped for a moment, as if stilled by the light, and what the old man saw as the vortex cleared left him breathless and amazed.

  It was a girl, about fourteen or fifteen years old, tall, strong-limbed but very thin, with long, dirty brown hair, and as fearful as a rabbit in a trap. On a night such as this, any visitor—especially a young girl—would have been remarkable, but even more remarkable was the fact that she was accompanied by two Przewalski’s horses, one on each side, so that they shielded the girl with their thick bodies from the worst of the northeast wind. And not just any of the Przewalski’s horses—for although they were covered with snow, Max recognized the lead stallion Temüjin and his best mare, Börte, immediately.

  “What’s this?” the old man breathed, as if he were witnessing a miracle. “I must be seeing things. I don’t believe it.”

  The girl was frightened of the ugly old man, but she was also desperate for his help.

  “Please, sir,” she said timidly. “My name is Kalinka. One of these horses is injured and needs your help.” She pointed at the bloody flank of the mare. “Around these parts, they say no one knows more about the wild tarpan horses than you do.”

  “That’s true, child,” said Max, coming down the steps. “No one does. Not that it did the horses any good, mind, since I wasn’t able to protect them from those blasted Germans. They’ve shot most of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if these two are the last.”

  To his amazement, Börte stood still and allowed him near her. He bent over beside the mare and let the lamplight illuminate a wound in her shoulder.

  “How do you get a name like Kalinka?” he asked the girl gruffly. “It’s the title of a song, not someone’s name.”

  “My real name is Kalyna,” said the girl. “But my father used to call me Kalinka, and after a while, so did everyone else.”

  Max grunted. He didn’t know much about girls, and what they were called or wanted to be called was of no real interest to him.

  “There’s something hard just under the mare’s skin,” he said, touching it gently. Again he marveled that the mare was prepared to tolerate his touch. “I could probably dig it out and patch her up if she’ll let me. But that’s the question. Will she let me? And here’s another: where might you have come from on a night like this?”

  “The woods up by the big lake,” she said. “I’ve been living there since the late summer.”

  “It isn’t summer now, child,” said Max. “You’ll die if you try and see winter out in this part of the world.” He stood up. “I would suggest that you take them both around to the stable at the back of the cottage so that I can fix her up, but I never yet knew one of these horses who’d go where you wanted them to go.”

  “They’ll go with me, I think,” said the girl. “At least, they have until now.”

  Max handed her the lamp. Much to his surprise, the two horses meekly followed the girl around the back of the cottage like a pair of lapdogs.

  “Well, I never,” he said to Taras. “It looks as if I don’t know these horses half as well as I thought I did.”

  Max went inside, where he lit another oil lamp and fetched a black bag of surgical instruments and a bottle of disinfectant that one of the visiting Soviet state vets had left behind when everyone had fled from the Germans. He also brought a warm blanket for the girl and a piece of chocolate that the Germans had given him, which he’d been saving for a special occasion.

  In the stables, he hung up the lamp and handed the girl the blanket and the chocolate.

  “Here,” he said. “Kalinka, is it? Your name?”

  The girl nodded, wrapped herself in the blanket and started to eat the chocolate hungrily.

  “Strikes me that the mare is not the only thing around here that needs looking after,” said Max. “Where are your mom and dad, girl?”

  “Dead.” Kalinka uttered the word bluntly, without expression, as if she didn’t even want to think about her mama and papa.

  Max broke the ice in the water trough and brought some water in a pail to the horse’s side. “Is there no one else to look after you? Grandparents? An aunt or an uncle?”

  “They’re all dead, too.” Kalinka spoke quietly and calmly about this. She had learned you couldn’t run when you were crying, and you couldn’t stay silent inside a closet if you were weeping. When you couldn’t trust anyone, you had to be able to rely on yourself. She had thought there would come a time for tears, but ever since her escape, this had not happened. She had now concluded that she might never cry again, that something human inside her had died alongside the rest of her family. “Three uncles, three aunts, my brothers, my sisters, my grandparents, my great-grandmother and all my cousins. Everyone had to gather in the botanical gardens in our city. Which is where it happened. I mean, where they and all the others were killed. Not just my family. But every family. At least every family that was Jewish. Fifteen or twenty thousand people. I’m not sure.” She paused and then added: “As we were being marched to the botanical gardens, along Haharina Avenue, a door on the street opened for a moment, and someone just pulled me through and then closed it behind me again. It was a woman I’d never seen before. A woman who wasn’t a Jew. It all happened in a few seconds. She took me to the back door of her building and told me to run away as quickly as possible and not to turn back, no matter what I heard. That my survival depended on running away. So I did. I ran away. And I’ve been running ever since.”

  For a moment, Kalinka remembered the sound of the shots and the screams she had heard as she ran away, and she shuddered, for she felt ashamed that she was alive and everyone in her family was not. How could she have done such a thing? This was the thought that haunted her, day and night.

  Max was silent as he considered what Kalinka had just told him. “I thought it must have been something like that,” he said.

  “Before I escaped, I asked my grandfather why they were picking on the Jews,” said Kalinka. “And he said that being a chosen people is a coin with two sides. Sometimes it’s heads, he said, but just as often it’s tails. He was making a joke, I think. My grandpa was like that. Always making jokes.”

  Max nodded. “I understand.”

  “By the way,” she said, abruptly changing the subject, “thanks for the chocolate. I’d forgotten how good it tastes.”

  Max started to wash the mare’s wound. Again, the horse didn’t shy away when he touched it.

  “And where was this, then? Your home city. You’re not from round these parts, I reckon.”

  “It’s not my home. Not anymore. I don’t have a home. I mean, you can’t, can you? N
ot without a family. It’s family that makes a home, don’t you think?”

  Max shrugged. It had been a long time since he had thought about home in the way that she was describing, but all the same he knew she was right; unless there’s someone or something to care for, the whole idea of home is meaningless. It was fortunate that he remembered Taras, his dog, whom Max cared for a great deal and who he thought must care for him almost as much.

  “All right, I understand that. But where was this? I’d still like to know, Kalinka.”

  “Dnepropetrovsk.”

  “Dnepropetrovsk? Why, that’s almost three hundred and fifty kilometers north of here!” said Max.

  “Is that all?” said Kalinka. “It felt like more.”

  “Good grief, you mean to tell me that you’ve walked all this way? Alone?”

  “Walking is easy when you’ve no place to go.”

  “Aye, there’s a truth, right enough.”

  “But a geography lesson, I don’t need. Please, look to the mare, will you? I don’t want to talk about this anymore. There’s no point in it, you see. What good would it do? It certainly won’t bring any of them back, will it?”

  All of her timidity was gone now; Max put the change in her down to the chocolate.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  Having washed and disinfected the wound, Max did the same with his forceps. At the same time, he was carefully watching Temüjin, the stallion, who was watching him. The horse met his eye with an attentive intelligence he found slightly unnerving.

  “There’s a bullet in Börte’s shoulder,” said Max. “Just under the skin. It was more or less spent when it hit her, which explains why it’s not any deeper in the flesh, but it’s still going to hurt when I dig it out.” It felt like he was explaining himself to the stallion as much as to the girl.

  “My father used to say that if you can’t endure the bad, then you won’t live to see the good,” said Kalinka.

  Max let that one go; it seemed rude to point out to the girl the obvious irony in her father’s words. But she was there ahead of him.

  “Not that he did, of course,” she muttered. “Live to see the good, I mean.” She shrugged. “But that doesn’t stop it from being true, though.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Even now Max hesitated to probe Börte’s wound for the bullet.

  “Go on,” said Kalinka. “What are you waiting for? She can take the pain. These tarpan horses are tough.” Max glanced at Kalinka and considered that, given all she had been through, the girl might just be as tough as the horse.

  “That’s true,” he said. “But what’s also true is that I’ve had too many bites and kicks from these horses not to be in a hurry to get more of the same.” He frowned. “Strictly speaking, they’re not tarpans at all. I know that’s what the locals call them. Tarpan, or takhi. But they’re actually Przewalski’s horses.”

  “It’s a vet she needs, not a zoologist.”

  “Yes. All right. You’re very impatient, aren’t you?”

  “Do you want me to hold her head?” asked Kalinka, ignoring his zoologist’s explanation.

  “I should like to see you try,” said Max.

  Kalinka shrugged and put her arms around the mare’s neck. “Hey,” she told the mare. “It’s going to hurt for a moment, but then it will be all right.” She caught Max’s eye. “Go on. She’s as ready as she’ll ever be.”

  “You live long enough, you see everything,” said Max, and pushed his forceps into the hole in the horse’s shoulder.

  Temüjin snorted and turned away as if he couldn’t bear to look and drank some of the water in the trough. In truth, he was rather squeamish for a wild horse and didn’t care for the sight of blood at all.

  Börte lifted one hoof and began to pace at the floor; if Max hadn’t known better, he might have said that Börte was counting through her pain—almost as if she was trying to distract herself from what was happening with the forceps.

  Finally, Max lifted the forceps nearer the light to reveal a piece of metal smeared with the mare’s blood. He showed it to Kalinka, who simply nodded.

  He disinfected the wound again and inspected it. “That’s all done.”

  “Aren’t you going to put anything on that?” asked Kalinka. “Stitch it, maybe? That’s what my mama would have done.”

  “These horses heal better the natural way. Now that the bullet is out, she’ll mend soon enough, I reckon. As long as we keep the wound clean, it should be all right. It’s not likely she’ll be rolling in any dirt for a while. With God’s help, she’ll be fine, I think.”

  “God,” said Kalinka, and made a snorting noise that had the stallion turning around to look at her curiously. “If he lived on earth, I think people would smash his windows. I know I would.”

  “I bet that’s not something your grandfather said,” said Max, washing his hands in the freezing pail of water.

  Kalinka shivered under her blanket and did not reply.

  “There’s no point in trying to understand God,” said Max. “If we did, he wouldn’t be God, I think.”

  Max fetched the two horses some rice and some oats in a couple of pails from a big bag in the loft and watched them eat for a moment, simply taking pleasure that there was a pair of the horses that had escaped Captain Grenzmann and his men. With a pair, you could breed again.

  “Any more of them alive, do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “The Germans killed almost all of them, I think. They’re good at that.”

  “True,” said Max. “Look, you’d better come into the cottage and get warm.”

  “What about the horses?”

  “They’ll be all right in here,” he said. “I don’t think anyone will come out here on a night like this. All the same, we’ll move them somewhere safer in the morning. I’ll leave them the light so they can finish their oats in comfort, although I suspect their vision is pretty good in the dark.”

  The sound of horses feeding greedily filled the stable.

  “They are hungry, aren’t they?” said Kalinka.

  He smiled. “You look as though you could use some feeding yourself, Kalinka.”

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  But then she fainted, and it was clear to Max she wasn’t all right at all. He scooped her up in his strong arms and carried her into the little blue cottage.

  KALINKA HAD FAINTED BECAUSE she was starving; the four squares of dark chocolate given to her by the old man had reminded her of just how hungry she was. It had been three days since she’d last eaten something. But in front of his roaring log fire, swaddled in blankets, and with the old man’s wolfhound lying on her feet, she quickly regained consciousness and drank a glass of hot sweet Russian tea from the samovar Max always kept lit when he was at home, and ate a piece of black bread and butter.

  “Feeling better?” he asked her.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Please don’t mention it. I haven’t much in the way of company these days, so you’ll have to excuse my housekeeping. Sometimes, there’s a German SS officer who stops by to water his horse in my stable and to give him some oats and rice—that’s why there’s a bag of feed in there—but he wouldn’t ever dream of coming in here. Which is just as well. The Germans make me nervous.” He shrugged. “Well, I suppose they make everyone nervous. For all the reasons you mentioned earlier.”

  Kalinka nodded, thinking she understood what the old man was too ashamed to come right out and say to her face.

  “It’s all right. I’ll be on my way in just a minute, just as soon as I’ve finished this lovely tea. I wouldn’t like to get you in any trouble.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Max. “You can’t go anywhere on a night like this. You’d die of exposure.”

  “You really mean it? I can stay the night? Here? With you?”

  “Stay the night and as long as you want, my girl. You’re very welcome here.”

  “But I
thought—what I mean is—well, everyone else I’ve been to for help since I left Dnepropetrovsk has told me to go away. And not as politely as that. They all said it was too dangerous for me to stay and drove me off with stones. Even when I was just sleeping in their barns or in their hayricks. Some of the local villagers set their dogs on me. Fortunately, I’ve always been good with dogs, so they didn’t bite me.”

  She leaned down and patted Taras, who turned and licked Kalinka’s hand as if he recognized someone who needed to feel some affection.

  “You mean the villagers around here?”

  Kalinka nodded. Before the old man had given her the chocolate, it had been months—perhaps longer—since anyone had shown her kindness.

  Max sighed and shook his head. “It’s true. And I know to my own cost that when people are afraid, they can be very cruel.”

  “The Germans bring that out in people,” she said. “You are taking a risk, having me here; you know that, don’t you? It might cost you very dearly.”

  “You let me be the judge of that, Kalinka.” Max shrugged as best as he was able, with his neck the way it was. “Besides, if charity cost nothing, the world would be full of philanthropists.” He poured her some more tea—only this time, he put an extra teaspoonful of jam in it.

  “That’s what my grandfather used to say, too.”

  “I like the sound of him,” said Max.

  Kalinka was quiet for a moment, and Max could see that he’d upset her by the mention of her grandfather again, so he quickly changed the subject.

  “Look here, it seems obvious to me that you should live here at Askaniya-Nova,” said Max. “For as long as you want. My wife disappeared or ran away a long time ago—I’m never quite certain which—and we never had a daughter of our own, although she should have liked one. Since you no longer have a father, or even a grandfather, it seems to me you’re quite free to choose a replacement. I know I’m not much to look at, Kalinka. But looks aren’t everything, they say. I should be more than honored if you were to live with me. For a spell, at least. Until you decide what you want to do.”