“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.”
MAX 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.”