The Winter Horses (7 page)

“They’ll stay. I’m sure of it.”

“You seem to have made friends with them very quickly,” said Max. “All my life I’ve known these horses. And they never followed me anywhere. What’s your secret?”

“No secret,” said Kalinka. “I suppose they trust me the way I guess I trust you. By instinct. And because we had something in common, I imagine. After all, we were all three of us hiding from the Germans.”

Max nodded and smiled as Kalinka finished her hot, sweet tea noisily.

“This is good,” she said.

“Have some more.”

“I won’t say no.” As Max refilled her glass from the samovar and sweetened it with more jam, she asked him to tell her about the waterworks.

Max shook his head. “At one time, I contemplated living there instead of here myself. The place is large and quite dry, and it’s nearby. I’ll take you all there in the morning. No need to decide until then. Ask about your neighbors and then buy the house. That’s what I always say.”

“By the way,” she asked. “Why do you call those horses Temüjin and Börte?”

“Ah. Good question. Well, it’s simple, really. Temüjin has always been the dominant stallion among the Przewalski’s horses, which more recently hail from Mongolia. Genghis Khan was a famous Mongol chief whose birth name was Temüjin, and Börte was his queen. And suddenly that name seems much more appropriate than I ever supposed it would be.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Before Temüjin became the great Genghis Khan, he was hunted by a neighboring hostile tribe and forced into hiding. Here, have some more bread and butter. Poor child, you must be ravenous after all the walking you’ve done. Three hundred and fifty kilometers? It doesn’t bear
thinking of. I’m quite sure Moses himself couldn’t have walked as far.”

Max threw some logs on the fire and boiled a kettle for the hot-water bottle.

“Tell me, Kalinka. When did you last sleep in a bed?”

“Probably it was September.” She shrugged. “There was a department store on Karl Marx Street where, during the day, I hid in a closet for several weeks; at night, I slept on a bed on the shop floor, before the cleaners found me and raised the alarm. But it’s not so bad sleeping outside in summer and autumn.”

“Well, tonight, you can have my bed. I’ll have the chair.”

“I couldn’t take your own bed. No, that wouldn’t be right.”

“Do I look like one of the three bears? Really, I don’t mind. Anyway, an old man like me doesn’t sleep like he used to. So it’s no great hardship. Just as often I fall asleep in the chair and that’s good enough for me. What do I need with a bed?”

Max fetched her some more bread and butter, and for a moment, Kalinka just stared at them gravely.

“I’d forgotten,” she said quietly. She had no words for how she felt anymore. Kalinka’s feelings were buried so deep inside her, she could hardly remember where she’d put them. She could have no more smiled than she could have wept.

Max knelt down beside her and took her softer, smaller
hand in his great, gnarled paw and rubbed some more warmth into it.

“Here, here,” he said. “Cheer up. You’re quite safe now, I can assure you. Now tell me, little Kalinka, what it is that you think you’ve forgotten.”

“Until just now I’d forgotten what it is to have someone be nice to me.”

Max grunted modestly.

“So,” said Kalinka. “I’ve told you my story. I think you should tell me yours.”

“What makes you think I have one?”

“Because yours is an interesting face. As my father used to say, ‘I don’t think you got a face like that singing in a choir.’ At the very least, I should like to know the name of the person who is looking after me.”

“Fair enough,” said the old man. “My name is Maxim Borisovich Melnik.”

“And your story?”

“What story would that be, then?”

“The story of your life, perhaps?”

The old man hesitated. “No one was ever interested in hearing about my life before,” he admitted.

“Well, I am, Maxim Borisovich Melnik.” Kalinka glanced at the window.

“Unless you count the secret police.”

“You see?” said Kalinka. “I knew you had an interesting face. Besides, it’s a perfect night for a story, don’t you think?”

Max nodded. “That it is,” he admitted. “And I daresay mine will do the job right enough if it’s a story for going to sleep that you’re after.”

“It isn’t,” said Kalinka. “Tell me about yourself. How did you come here? And when? And why? Please, Max. It’s been a long time since anyone told me a story at bedtime.”

M
AX LIT HIS PIPE
and looked into the distance for a moment as he tried to recollect the details of his life and how he first came to work for the baron.

“The reserve at Askaniya-Nova owes its existence to a German,” said Max.

Kalinka pulled a face. “If it has Germans in it, I don’t think I’m going to like your story,” she said.

“Believe me, not all Germans are like the SS,” said Max. “Even today, I’m sure that back in Germany, there are good Germans. The baron—the baron Friedrich Falz-Fein—was just such a German, for he was a wonderful man. It was he who created this place back in 1889. In its day, this was the largest private zoo in Europe, with over two hundred species of birds and more than fifty species of animals with hooves, such as bison, camels, deer, antelope, llamas and zebras. And, as well as a wide
variety of birds that commonly make their home in this part of the world, there are cranes and pelicans from Africa and even a few ostriches. You should see the eggs they lay for breakfast. Enormous!” Max laughed, then continued.

“I was just twenty when I came to Askaniya-Nova from my hometown of Sevastopol, in 1897, as a groom for Baron Falz-Fein’s Hanoverian horses, a breed that is one of the finest in the world. But it was 1902 before the first Przewalski’s horses joined us here, and 1904 before a stallion arrived—a gift from Tsar Nicholas the Second—enabling the baron to begin a breeding program on his nature reserve, where the conditions for Przewalski’s are more or less ideal. And together he and I oversaw a substantial increase in the number of Przewalski’s horses, which is to say the numbers of these horses at Askaniya-Nova more than doubled in less than ten years.

“Even today, it’s for the Przewalski’s horses that the nature reserve is best known. These prehistoric horses are thought to have diverged from the modern horse about a hundred and sixty thousand years ago. Easily recognizable on ancient cave paintings found all over Europe and Asia, the Przewalski’s horse is the rarest horse in the world. Until an explorer saw the horse in 1881 on a trip to central Asia, it was thought to be as extinct as the dodo.”

“That’s a bird, isn’t it? From the island of Mauritius.”

“Aye, that’s right. Sailors killed them all for food. They
reckon the last dodo was seen in 1681. Curious-looking creature. Can’t say I think much of it. It’s no wonder you don’t see any cave paintings of dodos, in my opinion.”

The old man puffed his pipe for a moment, which seemed to stimulate a memory of something. “Here,” he said. “I’ve got some pictures of those cave paintings. If I can find those books the baron gave me.”

He began to search the cottage, and while he was opening a cupboard, some old newspapers fell on his head.

“Well, don’t stop telling me your story,” insisted Kalinka. “You can keep telling it while you look for them, can’t you, Max?”

“Yes,” said the old man, brushing the dust off himself. “I daresay you’re right. Well, where was I?”

“You were saying how you and the baron doubled the number of Przewalski’s horses in ten years.”

“So I was. This is where my story gets interesting, I suppose. That’s another way of saying that life has a funny habit of playing tricks on anyone who happens to be enjoying it, as I was. The same way I daresay lots of people were enjoying their lives in this part of the world. Fifty years of history has been very hard on Ukraine. And on the poor Falz-Feins, as you’ll hear.

“Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Communists confiscated Askaniya-Nova from the Falz-Fein family. Luckily for him, he was back in Germany when the revolution happened. But his aged mother, the baroness
Sofia-Louise, wasn’t so fortunate. She was living in her house in the nearby port of Khorly. The Bolsheviks—that’s what people used to call the Communists—they ordered her to leave Ukraine and return to her native Germany. But she was a stubborn old girl and she refused. She also refused to surrender her estates, including Askaniya-Nova, and for this act of resistance, that brave old lady was shot by Communist guardsmen.”

“How awful,” said Kalinka.

“Yes, it was. But the Communists weren’t finished. Like I said, I’m from Sevastopol, in the Crimea. So I’m not German myself, but I had learned the German language from the baron and the old lady, and when the Communists took over the reserve—this must have been 1919—they suspected me of being a German spy. I was arrested by the NKVD—the Communist secret police—who put me in prison and tortured me.”

“And I thought it was just the Germans who could treat people so horribly,” said Kalinka.

“Would that were true,” said Max. He was looking under the bed for the books now. “But what happened to me was nothing. A terrible famine in Ukraine, deliberately caused by the Communists about ten years ago, resulted in the deaths of at least fourteen million people.”

“How could they do something like that deliberately?” asked Kalinka.

“Because the leader of the Communists is a terrible man called Stalin, who decided that all of the food
produced by the people of Ukraine should be fed to workers in factories in order to produce steel for tanks and guns. He thought steel was more important than people, see? Which ought not to be a surprise to anyone, given that’s what his name means.
Stalin:
‘man of steel.’ Anyway, I may have been tortured, but at least I’m still alive, which is more than those poor folk can say.”

“So they let you go eventually?” asked Kalinka.

“Yes. After some months, the NKVD decided I wasn’t a spy after all and I was cleared of all charges. Meanwhile, Askaniya-Nova was taken into state ownership and declared a People’s Sanctuary Park in 1921, and so I returned to live here and look after the animals. Matter of fact, I think that’s why they dropped the spying charges—so that I could come back here and be of some use to them. But I didn’t mind. I love this place. I love the animals.” Max laughed a hollow laugh. “I’d work here for nothing, which is just as well, as that’s more or less what they paid me.

“At first, we did all right. At least with the breeding program. The Communists didn’t really care about the reserve that much, but the horses were a different story; being as rare as they are, they’re also worth a lot of money, and what the Communists wanted was to breed them so we could sell them to foreign zoos all over the world for hard currency. Which we did. Berlin, Warsaw, London. Just to give you some idea of how rare they are, Kalinka, before the Germans invaded in June 1941, there were just
thirty-one Przewalski’s horses living at Askaniya-Nova, which accounted for as much as half of the world’s entire population of Przewalski’s.”

Finally, Max found the books he was looking for under a chessboard and a pile of old blankets.

“Aha,” he cried. “Here they are.”

Max brought the books over to Kalinka and laid one of them on her lap, where he opened it carefully and showed her some color pictures of ancient horses that were painted on the walls of caves.

“These pictures were taken in caves at a place called Font-de-Gaume, in France,” said Max, “where there are paintings of more than forty prehistoric horses. It is plain to see why zoologists all over the world were so excited by the rediscovery of the Przewalski’s horses, for they are identical to the horses in the paintings made by French cavemen more than seventeen thousand years ago.”

“But why,” asked Kalinka, “are they called Przewalski’s horses?”

“That was the name of the man who rediscovered them, of course. Nikolai Przewalski was a Russian explorer.”

“I see.” Kalinka nodded. “Yes, I can see why people like your baron got so excited. The horses on the reserve—they’re exactly like the ones in these cave paintings.”

“They’re a living fossil, is what they are,” explained Max. “It was like finding a Neanderthal man or a saber-toothed tiger. You see, little Kalinka, there’s so much in
our world that changes very quickly. Quicker than seems comfortable, sometimes. But whenever I see a Przewalski’s horse, I think of one of these cave paintings and I know I’m seeing exactly what our ancient forebears saw.” He shrugged. “I like the way that makes me feel small. Like I don’t matter very much in the scheme of things. I suppose that’s why I’m so fond of these little cave horses.”

He shook his head.

“Not that I always was,” he admitted. “At first, I cared not a bit for them. For one thing, they kick and bite like the very devil. And I suppose I much preferred the more obvious breeding and beauty of the big Hanoverian horses that enjoyed lives of enormous privilege and comfort—better than many peasants—in the baron Falz-Fein’s well-appointed stables. A bit like the baron himself, if the truth be told. But as I listened to and learned from the baron—who had read every book and paper about the wild horses, ever since Colonel Przewalski had rediscovered them—I found myself becoming as enthusiastic about the cave horses as he was.”