The Winter Horses(12)

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.”