The Winter Horses

by Philip Kerr

  “I don’t know what we’d have done without you,” she said quietly. “And I sort of feel that it was you who gave me the idea while I was asleep. Either way, I’ll never forget you. Not if I live to be a hundred.”

  After that, Kalinka was obliged to ride again, for which Temüjin, at least, was grateful, as he didn’t much care for the chariot harness. Running in a straight line and without accelerating ahead of Börte was as much discipline as he could endure for one day.

  But before mounting Börte again, Kalinka put a folded groundsheet over the mare’s back to cushion her against the girl’s own weight, not that there was much of this; she was still very thin, much thinner than she’d been when living at home with her mother and father, when food was plentiful.

  Kalinka remembered how she had always refused to eat her mother’s borscht—she’d always hated beets.

  “What wouldn’t I give for a bowl of hot borscht now?” she muttered. “I’ll never turn my nose up at food again—no matter what it is.”

  Kalinka took a reading with the SS compass, although now that they were on a road, it was easier to find their way, especially as the Germans had erected a helpful sign that said SOUTH and SIMFEROPOL.

  “I suppose it will be all right to travel on the road,” she said, “just as long as we get off it again if we hear any traffic coming. It wouldn’t do to run into a German patrol. Or anyone else, if it comes down to it—experience has taught me not to trust any of the people in this part of the world. Some of them are just as bad as the Germans, and we can’t trust them to do anything but let us down. Most of them would betray us for a bowl of soup.”

  And this reminded Kalinka of something else her grandfather had often said: “Dear God, protect and keep our neighbors … well away from us.”

  Farther south, the winter snows had melted but the ground was still hard with frost, and the trees were full of little sparrows that Kalinka felt obliged to feed with crumbs of bread and tiny bits of fat from the German sausage, of which she knew they were fond. To her delight, some of the sparrows flew down from the trees and sat on the Przewalski’s and pecked the ticks from their coats. They made an odd little party on the road to Simferopol: Kalinka in her silver-streaked Astrakhan coat, Taras, the two horses and a flock of small but noisy sparrows.

  The birds were not the only things that were airborne in the blue Ukrainian skies. Once, they saw a lot of planes flying overhead like geese in formation, and she decided that they were probably bombers, but they were too high for Kalinka to make out if they were German or Russian. Not that it seemed to matter all that much one way or the other to her, and she found herself uttering another one of her dear grandfather’s sayings: “If they’re dropping bombs on top of you, what’s the difference?”

  “I seem to be thinking of Grandfather a lot today,” she told Taras. “I suppose it’s because I miss him so much.”

  Near a deserted village called Mayachka, Taras found an old barn for them to sleep in, where the sparrows finally flew away. There was plenty of hay for the horses to eat and a trough of water, although Kalinka had to break the ice on the surface for them to drink from it. They spent a quiet and comfortable night but slept too long, as she had intended to be up before dawn so that they could slip away before anyone discovered them. They were exhausted after their long journey however, and by the time they were all awake, the sun was halfway up the sky and a thin woman with a dark, pinched face was standing in the doorway of the barn.

  The woman wore a white head scarf, a thick, gray flannel blouse, a high-waisted skirt, a loose coat and tall boots, but none of these fitted her very well, as she was as thin as a beanpole.

  “Who are you?” snarled the woman.

  “Is this your barn?” asked Kalinka.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “What do you want here?”

  “Then I’m sorry to intrude. I meant no harm. I thought the place was deserted. I can pay you for the hay that my horses have eaten, if you like. They were hungry.”

  “It’s as good as deserted,” said the woman. “Most of the men have run away. Or been killed. And the Germans have killed all our livestock for food, so you’re welcome to the hay, as there are no animals to eat it anyway.”

  “You look pretty hungry yourself,” said Kalinka.

  “Hungry?” The woman uttered a contemptuous sort of laugh. “Starving is what we are, girl. Starving. But the Germans don’t care one bit. Nobody cares if we eat or what we eat. I used to be a schoolteacher. Can you imagine? Me. I used to read books. Now I’d probably try to eat a book if you gave it to me. Many’s the night I’ve fancied eating a good cookbook. See this coat? This coat used to have buttons on it, but I took off all the buttons because they were made of bone and boiled them all to make soup. That’s how hungry we are, child.” The woman looked away and sighed. “There are so many such things we’ve had to do because we are hungry that it would make a statue weep with pity.”

  “I have a little piece of sausage left, if you’d like it?”

  The woman looked at Kalinka with a sharp, suspicious glint in her eye, as if she thought Kalinka might be playing a cruel trick on her.

  “Go on. You have sausage?”

  “Just a bit.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Kalinka gave the woman the rest of their sausage from the forage bag, which the woman wolfed down in a matter of seconds; she felt hungry just looking at the woman.

  Then the woman said, “Strange-looking horses. Are they yours?”

  Kalinka thought it best to say that they were and that so was the dog.

  “Been a while since we saw any animals, least of all horses around these parts,” said the woman, licking her lips. “Not anymore. No horses, no cattle, no goats, no pigs, no sheep, not even a chicken. People ate what animals they still owned just to stop the Germans from eating them. Then when our animals were gone, we ate anything that moved: pigeons in the trees, rabbits in the field, squirrels, rats and mice, cats and dogs—you name it, we’ve eaten it. We’ve even eaten cockroaches. It’s not a bad meal, a cockroach. Bit crunchy. There’s a lot of protein in a cockroach. But that was a while ago. A long while ago. Since then, times have been hard. Very hard. We’ve been eating stale rice and grass mostly.”

  By now Kalinka was aware that the thin woman was looking at Temüjin and Börte in a strange way; Taras sensed it, too, and curled his long tail back between his legs.

  “Would you like some bread?” she asked the woman.

  “Bread? You have bread?”

  Kalinka offered the woman a piece of pumpernickel, and she ate it with her eyes closed, emitting such groans of pleasure and satisfaction that it might have been supposed she was eating some rare delicacy like Russian caviar or boiled lobster.

  “Oh,” groaned the woman, “that’s good. I’ve dreamed of eating bread like that again. Real bread, not the stuff we have here. That’s not much better than sawdust. Scratch, we call it, because it’s made from grass and what we can scratch from off the floor and the ground. But your bread was marvelous. Thank you. That was delicious. Almost as delicious as that sausage.”

  “I stole it from the Germans,” explained Kalinka.

  “Did you, now? You took a risk doing that, girl. Which means I’m taking a risk letting you stay here.” She shrugged. “There was a time when they’d have shot us both just for eating a piece of stolen sausage.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you in any danger.”

  “But the Germans have helped themselves to all we have and moved on, to the south—on to the Crimean peninsula—so I suppose it’s probably safe enough now. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want, girl. We’ve got nothing, but you’re welcome to share it. Rest up awhile. You look tired. Eat all the hay that you want. You and your horses.”

  The thin woman waved at the barn and fixed a narrow smile on her pinched face.

  “What’s your name, child?”

  “Kalinka. What’s yours?”

>   “Suliko.”

  But because Suliko was the name of another Russian folk song, Kalinka assumed that the woman was just being sarcastic.

  “No, really,” said Kalinka. “It is Kalinka.”

  The thin woman sneered as if she didn’t believe her. “Makes no difference to me what you’re called,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t care one way or the other.”

  “And this is Taras,” said Kalinka, pointing at the wolfhound, whose ears were all the way back as if he didn’t like the thin woman at all.

  “Will you have some tea, child?” she asked Kalinka.

  “Yes, please,” said Kalinka. “If you can spare it.”

  “Tea is about all we do have.” She nodded. “Well, you wait here and I’ll go and fetch the samovar. There’s no sugar, I’m afraid. Or jam to put in it.” She laughed. “Just a tarnished-looking spoon.”

  Then she walked out of the barn, leaving Kalinka with a new dilemma.

  “What she says sounds friendly enough, I suppose,” she told Taras. “But there’s something about her face and her manner that doesn’t feel quite right and that I don’t like. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. It’s not that she said anything so strange. The war has been very hard on everyone. But it’s just that she kept looking at you like you were her next meal, Taras.”

  Taras lay down and sighed. Was there no end to the savage cruelty that human beings were capable of?

  “Look, you three, stay here. I’m going to follow her and see if I can find out if she really means that we should stay. Or if she’s planning to sell us out to the Germans.”

  Kalinka peeked out of the barn and watched the woman crossing an empty field; she appeared to be in a hurry. The girl quickly followed her to a row of low wooden houses with thatched roofs that had seen many better days. Given what the thin woman had said, Kalinka wondered if she and her family might even have eaten some of the thatch. She crept up to the grimy window and looked inside. The walls of the house were almost as thin as the windows and Kalinka could hear everything that was said in the bare little room.

  A bearded man wrapped in animal skins was sitting in front of a meager fire. The thin woman prodded him roughly and fetched a large cooking pot down from a hook on the ceiling.

  “Here, Ivan Ivanovich, you’d better stir yourself,” said the woman. “We’ve got guests.”

  “Guests? Here? What do you mean? Have the Germans returned?”

  “No, thank goodness. We’ve seen the last of them, I think.”

  She drew open a drawer and handed the man a long knife, a hatchet and a sharpening stone.

  “Now listen, I want that knife and that hatchet sharpened as quickly as possible.”

  “Why?” The man laughed a horrible sort of laugh. “Are you thinking of doing away with yourself, Anfisa Petrovna?”

  “I knew her name wasn’t Suliko,” Kalinka whispered to herself.

  “Very funny,” said the thin woman. “Didn’t you hear what I said, you miserable old goat? We’ve got guests. I just went into our barn and found more fresh food walking around in there than this whole village has seen in years: two horses, a dog and a girl—they’re all hiding in there.”

  “You’re seeing things,” said the man in the chair. “Hunger does that to you. You imagine things that aren’t there. I swear, if you stare at this fire long enough, you’ll see a side of beef on a spit.”

  “No, I’m not seeing things. They’re there, all right. What’s more, they’re all in reasonable condition. The girl is thin, but there’s still some meat on her bones. If we kill them all now, we can make enough sausage to last us right through until the summer.”

  The man stood up. If anything, he was even thinner than the woman—not much more than a living skeleton. “If you’re not seeing things, then you’re joking,” he growled. “It’s not possible. All of the fresh meat around here is gone.”

  “No, it’s true, as I’m standing here now.”

  “Honest?”

  “Real meat that’s still breathing in our barn. All we have to do now is to butcher it.”

  “Then we’re saved.”

  “Yes. We’re saved.”

  “Horse is good,” said the man. “Dog is better. But a girl is best. Just like pork, so they are.”

  He started to sharpen his hatchet, as ordered.

  The woman laughed cruelly. “I told them they could stay as long as they want, but I think the girl was a bit suspicious of me. So we’d better do it tonight. When they’re asleep.”

  “How will you cook them?”

  “I’ll use the horses for sausage meat, like I said. The dog should make a nice roast. Several nice roasts. It’s a big dog. And the girl—I was thinking—a tasty stew.”

  “Stew,” said the man, and grinned horribly.

  “What meat we don’t use we can dry and use to make salted bresaola—so we can chew on something when the fancy takes us. Thank goodness there’s still plenty of salt. From all the tears I’ve shed, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Kalinka had heard enough; she sprinted back to the barn, grabbed her forage bag and slung it over her shoulder.

  “Come on. We’re getting out of here.”

  Temüjin and Börte both climbed to their feet.

  “I thought the Germans were bad,” muttered Kalinka. “But these people are much worse. I suppose that this is what war does to people. It turns them into evil monsters.”

  Taras put down his chew and stood up.

  “I just hope you’ve eaten lots of hay,” Kalinka told the horses, “because we have to leave immediately. They’re horrible people. Worse than you could ever imagine. They’re actually planning to eat us. All of us. That’s right, Taras. Me too. They’re cannibals. I’ve heard stories about people like this. But I never really imagined they could be true. I knew that woman was looking at us in a strange way. I just wish I hadn’t given her the last of our sausage and some bread.”

  Taras barked his agreement.

  “To think I actually felt sorry for her.”

  Kalinka jumped up on Börte’s back and rode quickly out of the barn, with Temüjin and Taras following; in the distance, she could see the woman running after them. She was carrying a samovar on the end of a broom handle that was balanced over her shoulder.

  “Wait, wait,” shouted the woman. “You haven’t had your tea.”

  Kalinka wheeled the mare around to take another look at the woman; she wanted to see if she and her husband were capable of mounting a pursuit.

  “Fortunately for us, they’re so starved that I don’t think they have the strength to chase us,” she said. “If they weren’t so horrible, I might pity them both. A bit.”

  THEY GALLOPED FOR WHAT seemed like kilometers, across open fields and through dark forests with trees as tall as the tallest church steeple. After the frightening incident with the cannibals, Kalinka didn’t have much to say to the others; in front of the dog and the horses, she felt ashamed that human beings could behave quite so badly to their own kind.

  “I guess there’s no accounting for what makes people do the things that people do,” said Kalinka.

  Taras barked in agreement.

  The countryside here was badly scarred by war; everywhere there were broken tanks, ruined buildings and shell holes, abandoned artillery and discarded rifles, burning trucks and, on one occasion, a whole village that had been set ablaze.

  “I think we must be getting nearer the Russian lines,” she told her companions. But she neglected to mention to them that they would have to get through the German lines before they could reach their Russian ones; there seemed to be no point in worrying the animals unnecessarily.

  Sometimes Kalinka also saw the bodies of dead men—both Russian and German—but she did not avert her gaze as her mother would probably have ordered. After what had happened to her family at the botanical gardens, nothing could have shocked Kalinka—not anymore. Besides, she knew that the dead—while not pleasant to look at—could do her no harm; i
t was the living you had to watch out for, as had been proved only too well by the cannibal couple of Mayachka.

  Farther on, she saw patches of sand on the fields, and a number of times, she thought she could even smell the sea; then near a village called Novooleksiivka, she saw a rusting railway line and a stationary train consisting of what looked like empty boxcars. Thinking that they might rest in one of these—perhaps even travel in one—Kalinka climbed into a boxcar and opened the sliding wooden door so that the dog and the two horses could leap aboard beside her. She closed the door and shared what remained of their provisions with Temüjin and Börte and Taras; and after, she fell asleep.

  When she awoke again, the train was moving.

  Kalinka groaned, jumped to her feet but relaxed a little when she saw that the train was clearly moving south; she took a compass reading to make sure, but she hardly needed to, since the railway track was on a bridge over water.

  “That’s either the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov,” she told the others. “But I think the Sea of Azov is more probable, since we’ve been heading southeast since we left Askaniya-Nova. It’s the shallowest sea in the world. And the river Don flows into it. I know that, because we did the Sea of Azov in geography, in my last term at school before the Germans arrived.

  “Anyway, here’s the plan: we’ll ride this train until it gets dark and then we’ll wait for it to slow down or stop, at which point we’ll get off. We could walk, but why walk when you can ride? That’s what I say.”

  Taras barked his agreement; his paws were sore and he was quite happy to lie down and let the train take the strain.

  They hadn’t traveled very far when some planes flew over at a very low altitude and they heard a series of deafening explosions. After calming the two horses—who’d never heard anything as loud as a bomb explosion—Kalinka opened the door of the boxcar and leaned out, only to see that the bridge behind them no longer existed; all that remained to indicate that it had once been there was a huge plume of smoke and pieces of wood that were still flying through the air.