Taras barked.
“Why is he called Taras?” asked Kalinka.
“I despair.” Max frowned. “What are they teaching you in school these days? Taras is named after the hero of a book by a great Ukrainian writer called Nikolai Gogol—a Cossack named Taras Bulba.”
“Sorry,” said Kalinka. “But I never heard of it.”
Max considered for a moment. “On second thought, maybe that’s not such a good book for you.” He shrugged. “He’s less than kind about Jews, is old Gogol. Anyway, he’s a brave dog, aren’t you, boy?”
Taras barked again.
“Pretty bright, too,” said Kalinka. “Perhaps I’ll teach him to play chess.”
“Now, that’s something I would like to see,” said Max. He patted the dog’s head, and then he patted Kalinka’s head, and then he went away.
Kalinka went back to the fire and set out the chess set once more. She had been joking when she said she’d teach Taras how to play chess. All the same, Taras watched intently as she moved the pieces around. She hadn’t played out positions on the board since she’d left Dnepropetrovsk, but just to have a chess set in front of her felt like a real luxury. Playing chess always calmed her and helped persuade her that, against all the evidence to the contrary, she was in control of her life.
After a while, it started to grow dark, so she lit one of the storm lamps, and with two apples from a wooden box that Max had given her, she went to see the Przewalski’s horses in the other water tank. There was plenty of straw in there and they looked reasonably comfortable, but Kalinka still inquired after their welfare.
“How are you both?” she asked.
Temüjin flicked his furry tail and walked quickly around the perimeter of the tank as if he were in a circus ring.
“You don’t like being inside. I know. But don’t forget you can go outside. Just as long as you stay within the perimeter of trees.”
Temüjin nodded patiently and snorted several times as if to say, “Yes, yes, I know, but it doesn’t stop me wanting to run around the steppe at full speed in order to warm up.”
“You’ll have to be patient,” said Kalinka. “It won’t be long now until the Germans are gone, and then you both can run around the steppe as much as you want. Me too, I hope. I bet this place is wonderful in summer. I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
Talking to the Przewalski’s made her feel like she was in the stables at home again, before the war, when she’d spoken to her father’s Vladimir horses every night before she went to bed. The Vladimirs had been three times the size of the Przewalski’s, because it takes a big, heavy horse to haul a cartload of coal; they were also quieter and more patient, and this was just as well, she thought. A Vladimir that had behaved anything like a Przewalski’s could have destroyed the city of Dnepropetrovsk in minutes. Not for nothing had armored knights once ridden these great horses into battle. And yet they were gentle giants: sometimes as a treat, her father had allowed Kalinka to sit on their backs and plait their long manes and tails with blue and white ribbons—which were the colors of Ukraine—that her mother gave her, and she still marveled that those animals could have been so patient and have allowed her to treat their manes like the hair on her doll.
There was nothing that she could have plaited into the manes and tails of the Przewalski’s. Their manes stood up like the bristles on a toothbrush, while their strangely furry tails resembled payos—the long ringlets worn by some of her father’s more devoutly religious friends. That was strange, but nothing to compare with the black-and-white stripes on the back of the legs of the horses, which reminded her of the stripes on a prayer shawl.
“I’m afraid there’s no getting away from it,” she told Börte as she stroked the mare’s white face, “you’re just different from other horses. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But I wonder: Can Max really be right about this? Could you really trace your ancestors back into prehistory?”
She opened the book that Max had brought over from the blue cottage. First she looked at the baron’s bookplate on the inside front cover—a great coat of arms that looked like it belonged on a herald’s flag; and then she found the color plates of the French caves.
“It says here that the paintings at Font-de-Gaume were discovered by a local schoolmaster in 1901,” she told the two cave horses. “It’s believed people first lived in the caves around 25,000 BC. There are forty horse depictions and twenty mammoth depictions. They’re extinct, too. And that makes you two very special. Perhaps the two most special horses anywhere in the world right now.”