The Winter Horses

by Philip Kerr

  “Maybe not,” said the captain. “But you are.”

  THEY MADE GOOD, STEADY progress, although it wasn’t very long before the insides of Kalinka’s thighs started to ache and she wished she’d had a saddle and some stirrups so that she could have stood up now and then to stretch her legs. But she said nothing to her companions because she was not the type to complain, and besides, the alternative—walking—was infinitely more inconvenient.

  The sun came up, and the sky turned a brilliant shade of bright blue that seemed to tint the snow. The air got much warmer; steam plumed off the horses’ big bodies. From time to time, Kalinka looked around to see how their snow trail was faring, in the hope that it might just melt away, but it was still there, like a tail even longer than the dog’s that she couldn’t get rid of.

  Ahead of the two horses, Taras made the pace like the lead dog in a team of huskies; he didn’t seem to tire, and Kalinka marveled that he was never distracted by an interesting smell on the steppe: a rabbit or a hare. Perhaps there were no rabbits or hares—Max had told her that game was in short supply that winter—but even so, she thought it impressive that any dog could be quite so single-minded. Taras just kept trotting on as if he had an important mission to accomplish, which of course he did: Max had charged him with the survival of the girl, and Taras meant to accomplish this or die in the attempt.

  A couple of hours passed, and the dog and the two horses slowed to a steady walk and, gradually, the gentle motion of the mare and the sun on her head took hold of Kalinka’s sleep-deprived senses. Slowly, she allowed her eyes to close against the bright glare of the snow and, for a blissful moment, she dreamed that she was safe, back home in Dnepropetrovsk with her whole family.

  Her father and brothers were already out on a round, delivering coal, while her mother was making oladushki—buttermilk pancakes—for Kalinka’s breakfast. Served with a selection of sour cream, jam and maple syrup, oladushki were Kalinka’s favorite breakfast. She often made them herself but, try as she might, the ones she cooked never tasted quite as delicious as the ones her mother made.

  “Why is that?” she had asked. “Why don’t my pancakes taste as good as yours, Mama?”

  “Because when I’m cooking them for you, I use an extra ingredient that you don’t,” said her mother.

  Kalinka was cross. “That’s not fair,” she said. “Using a secret ingredient puts me at a real disadvantage when I’m making my own oladushki. A little salt, maybe? A special kind of flour? Tell me.”

  “I didn’t say it was a secret ingredient,” said her mother. “I just said that I used it when I was making oladushki for you, Kalinka. And one day, when you’re cooking for your own family, maybe you’ll see how this is what makes all the difference.”

  “So what is it? Please, I want to know.”

  “It’s something I always use when I’m cooking pancakes for you and your brothers and sisters, or buckwheat kasha for your father. Love. I make everything with love, Kalinka. In my experience, that always makes things taste a lot better.”

  And somehow it was true—the cakes your own mother bakes always taste better than …

  Kalinka awoke with a start. She didn’t know how long she had dozed but it couldn’t have been for very long. Börte had stopped in her tracks and so had Temüjin; it was another moment or two before she saw the reason both horses had pulled up was that Taras had come to an abrupt halt ahead of them. The dog’s long white face was lifted up toward the sun, and she could hear him noisily sampling the air with his shiny black nose.

  In silence, they all waited for the dog’s keen sense of smell and even keener hearing to work to their advantage.

  “What is it, Taras?” she whispered. “Wolves again?”

  Glad of an excuse to dismount, Kalinka jumped down from Börte’s back and approached the big wolfhound.

  “D’you smell danger?”

  Slowly, the dog’s long tail curled between his back legs, and his body started to tremble. Then Taras sat down on the cold, snowy steppe and began to chew the air like it was a solid thing, and to howl. Kalinka might have said that his howl was like a wolf’s except that, having recently heard a wolf’s howl, she recognized that a wolf’s howl sounded much less plaintive than the dog’s. Taras howled as if he was giving voice to some deep and enduring tragedy.

  Kalinka put her arms around the dog’s neck and hugged him close for comfort, but this did nothing to stop Taras from howling some more. He howled as if he held the sun itself responsible for a dreadful crime.

  “What is it?” she said, stroking his long, fine head. “I wish I knew what it was that’s upsetting you, boy.”

  Taras kept on howling. Kalinka had never seen an animal cry before, but she had the strong impression that she was looking at this now. The dog was crying as if his heart had been broken. There was something buried under the snow, perhaps, or in the wind, something terrible that Taras knew without seeing it for himself. She’d heard of such things. An animal’s sixth sense was what her father would have called it. And then, instinctively, Kalinka realized exactly what had happened, just as Taras had done several minutes before.

  “It’s Max, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Something dreadful has happened to Max.”

  Taras barked an answer and then began to howl again, and this time Kalinka knew what Taras was doing: he was crying like a baby for his dead master. And she was certain that the dog’s sixth sense could not have been wrong about something like that.

  “Oh no,” she breathed. “They wouldn’t have. Surely. Not to that kind old man.” But of course she knew perfectly well that the SS had murdered him, just as they had murdered her whole family and thousands of families like her own.

  After what had happened in the botanical gardens at Monastyrsky Island, in Dnepropetrovsk, Kalinka had found no time to grieve for the deaths of her parents, her brothers and sisters, her grandparents and great-grandmother, her aunts and uncles and her cousins; the imperatives of her own unlikely survival and the sheer enormity of what had happened to her family—to everyone she knew—were almost too overwhelming. She felt sad for Max and for Taras—terribly sad—but, somehow, she still managed to hold her sadness in check. As always, she knew that if she started crying, she might never stop.

  Kalinka sat down and started to pound the snow with her fists. “No! No! No!” she yelled at the sky. “After everything else, how could you let that happen?”

  For a moment, she caught sight of herself as if from above, and she almost heard Max’s voice inside her head.

  “It’s no good yelling at God,” he would have said. “He had nothing to do with what happened. Don’t blame him. Like you blamed him for what happened before. If you want to blame someone, young lady, then blame me for not getting you away from this place earlier. Blame the Germans for being stupid enough to elect Hitler, and invade Russia and Ukraine. Blame that stupid young captain for being such a fanatic. But don’t go blaming old God.”

  Throughout all this, the two Przewalski’s horses waited patiently for their companions to deal with their feelings; being wild animals, they were made of sterner stuff than the dog and the girl, and while they were capable of becoming depressed—Börte had lost a foal once and spent a whole summer pining for it—they were not creatures of emotion in the same way as a pet dog or an adolescent girl.

  Temüjin allowed a decent interval to elapse before he nudged the girl in the back; it was time to get moving again. While his wild animal’s senses had not registered the old man’s death, they did now feel something else of vital importance. Sniffing the trail that they had left behind in the snow and placing his head close to the ground had alerted him to something that only an animal of a species that had been chased and killed by men for thousands of years until it was almost extinct could have felt in its bones.

  They were being hunted.

  CAPTAIN GRENZMANN BORROWED HIS sergeant’s steel helmet and goggles, and had the man take the horse back to the stables at the
big house while he took the sergeant’s place in the sidecar of the BMW R75 motorcycle. Known as the Type Russia, the machine was more than equal to the task of riding across the snow-covered steppe at speed. During the invasion of Russia and Ukraine starting in June 1941, transport like this had enabled the German army to cover hundreds of kilometers in just a few days. So he was full of confidence about the success of their enterprise. Before they set off, however, he addressed the other three men, in order to impress upon them the importance of their mission.

  “This won’t take very long,” he said. “We’re after two wild Przewalski’s horses and an escaped prisoner. I don’t much care what happens to the dog, but the other three are the enemies of everything we’ve been fighting for since we came to the Soviet Union: a clean, open living space full of new beginnings and the past washed away for good. A place where we Germans can enjoy that which is our right. So we’ve no choice but to go after them. Now, they’ve left an obvious trail southeast of here, and it seems equally clear that they can’t be traveling very quickly. It’s not like these filthy horses can be ridden by anything except the lice and fleas they usually carry on their Gypsy backs. So they’re walking. Which means we should catch up with them in just a few hours, well before we get anywhere near the Russian army lines.”

  The three SS men listened and nodded their approval but kept their thoughts to themselves; none of them dared to ask the captain the question that was on all of their minds: why were they wasting their time and effort going in pursuit of a couple of scruffy horses and a child? The size of the handprint on the wall of the water tank and the half-burned coat made that clear, at any rate. But as they took a closer look at the trail in the snow, another question presented itself to their already skeptical minds: just how was it possible that two wild Przewalski’s horses, which had never been herded or domesticated in thousands of years, were willing to walk in a straight line behind a human being and a dog? Wild animals were wild animals, and none was wilder than those Przewalski’s horses. Something as strange as that just didn’t happen without a reason. It made no sense—at least none that could withstand rational explanation.

  “Sir,” said one of the men, a corporal called Hagen, “I’m not questioning your orders. But as you said yourself, that trail goes southeast, straight toward the Russian lines. Well, suppose the Russky lines are a lot nearer than we think they are? Isn’t it possible that we might run straight into a Russian patrol before we catch up with these horses?”

  The two other SS men nodded their agreement with what Hagen had found the courage to say.

  Captain Grenzmann bit his lip and managed to contain his irritation; he disliked being questioned by his men, just as his own superiors in Berlin always disliked being questioned by a mere captain.

  “I’m glad you’ve asked me that, Corporal Hagen,” lied Grenzmann. “You make a good point. This is why I’ve asked the sergeant to return to the big house and to follow on with more troops and supplies. In case this takes a bit longer than I’ve anticipated. All right? All he has to do is follow our trail just as we are following that of these sub-equine horses.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the corporal.

  “But look here, the sooner we set off after them,” said Grenzmann, “the sooner we’ll catch up with them, and the sooner we can return to the big house and make plans to leave this awful place and go back to Germany. I promise you, men. This time tomorrow, it’s northwest we’ll be headed: toward our lines and the homeland.”

  Grenzmann neglected to mention that they would have to fight their way back to the German lines, of course, not that anyone was under any illusion about this; but anything was better than simply waiting for the Red Army to tighten its encirclement of Askaniya-Nova, and any mention of the word homeland was always guaranteed to bring smiles to everyone’s faces. This was the positive news that they had all been waiting for. So it was with a renewed sense of optimism about their collective future that the Germans started the engines of their big motorcycles and set off after Kalinka and her unlikely trio of animal companions.

  Seated in the sidecar of the lead motorcycle, Captain Grenzmann scanned the horizon eagerly with his sergeant’s binoculars. He calculated that walking at a normal pace of six kilometers per hour, their quarry couldn’t have traveled more than thirty kilometers; even with a sidecar and a heavy machine gun, the Type Russia motorcycle could easily cover that kind of distance in an hour or two. With any luck, they could deal with the child and the horses, and be back at the big house in time for a celebratory dinner of horse meat.

  FINALLY, THEY SEEMED TO be nearing the end of the flat and featureless steppe. Ahead of them, they could see some hills and a few trees and the possibility of shelter from the unforgiving, icy wind.

  “At least we’re going to have somewhere to hide if they catch up with us now,” said Kalinka.

  Taras barked and ran off to scout the way ahead, as was now his habit: he would race away like a bolt of lightning and then return a few minutes later, wagging his tail and grinning if he thought everything looked safe.

  Kalinka pulled gently on Börte’s makeshift bridle. “Whoa, there,” she said. “While Taras is gone, I think I should take a bearing. Just to check we’re headed in the right direction.”

  She jumped down off the horse, stretched her legs for a moment and put her hand in her coat pocket to find the compass, but to her alarm, it wasn’t there.

  “I can’t have lost our compass,” she said, checking the other pocket of the Astrakhan coat. “Can I?” But there was no sign of it in the other pocket either.

  “I have lost it,” she muttered. “How could I be so stupid?”

  Temüjin snorted with what sounded like irritation.

  Kalinka shook her head. “I haven’t taken a bearing—well, since I mounted Börte. I guess it must have fallen out of my pocket when I jumped up on your back.”

  Börte flicked her furry tail as if there was nothing to be done about it now. Kalinka ran her hand along the mare’s short mane with affection; against her palm, it felt oddly comforting. Börte seemed to like it, too.

  Kalinka looked back at the trail. In spite of the sun’s now setting to one side of them—its warmth had melted only a little of the snow—their trail was still clearly visible. But there could be no possibility of retracing their steps to look for the compass. That was just asking for trouble.

  Fortunately, she had not lost the bread and the cheese and the money Max had given her, which amounted to ten karbovanets and six rubles, but of course none of this was going to help them travel in the right direction. “Max said that I could always navigate by the sun—which sets in the west, so I suppose east is that way.” She pointed to their left. “And with the trail behind us, from what I imagine must be the northwest, I calculate the southeasterly direction must be this one.”

  Kalinka nodded ahead of them, in roughly the same direction from whence even now Taras was returning. He came toward her, licked her hand and wagged his tail, which everyone found reassuring. Even Temüjin, who wagged his tail back at the dog.

  It seemed like the proper moment to eat. Kalinka would have shared the bread and cheese with the horses but for the fact that she knew they weren’t supposed to eat bread or cheese—it wasn’t good for them. But she gave some of the cheese to Taras, which he appeared to enjoy, so she assumed it was good for him. Some crows appeared as if from nowhere and set about collecting the few crumbs that she and the wolfhound dropped onto the ground. Life was hard for everyone on the steppe in winter, even crows.

  While Kalinka and the dog—and the crows—consumed the food Max had given them, they helped the horses clear snow from some grass so that they could eat, too. But Temüjin’s mind was not on his stomach; he kept lifting his shoe box-sized head and looking back the way they had come, as if searching for a glimpse of their pursuers.

  Kalinka could tell he was anxious about it, which seemed to suggest that the SS were getting closer.

  “Ho
w far behind do you think they are, Temüjin?” she asked him.

  Temüjin shook his head.

  “Motorcycles?”

  The horse nodded.

  “How many?”

  He tapped his hoof on the ground twice.

  “Not that it really matters how many, since they have guns. We might just outrun a German on a motorcycle, but we can’t outrun their bullets.”

  She thought for a moment. “You know, if we do catch sight of them, then it might make sense for us all to scatter in four directions. There’s no way they can come after us all. And once we get to those trees, they might easily lose one of us, or more.”

  This made sense, of course, although to the three animals, it seemed pointless answering her until necessity demanded it. Taras had already concluded he would defend the girl to the death, as he was certain Max had already done; the throat of a man seated in a motorcycle sidecar would be easy to catch in his powerful jaws. It would be a sweet and perhaps even tasty revenge.

  “Especially once it starts to get dark,” she added. “Which won’t be long now.” She glanced up at the sky. “I just realized. We’ve been walking all day. Max would be proud of us, don’t you think? That we managed to get this far.”

  Taras barked his agreement.

  Kalinka waited for Börte to stop eating cold grass and then mounted her again.

  They set off along the track that Taras had already made, and before long they were over the brow of a strange-looking hill that was studded with a circle of odd standing stones, which had been there since the beginning of civilization and looked like rotten, jagged teeth sticking out of the gums of the ground. The stones were marked with curious designs that must have signified something to the people who made them but meant nothing to Kalinka. Her father had been a very smart man, but she figured even he couldn’t have told her what the designs were supposed to represent.

  “What was it he used to tell us?” she murmured as they walked through the stone circle. “ ‘The older I get, the less I know.’ ” She shook her head. “I never knew what that meant until now. I guess it just means that there’s so much in the world we can’t hope to understand but that it’s all right not to understand it, just as long as you realize that no one could hope to understand everything. I know I don’t. But frankly, the older I get, the less I even care.”