The Winter Horses(28)

Börte let out a snort that might have indicated modesty.

“You know,” she told the cave horses, “I should love to see one of these cave paintings Max was talking about, for real. The ones that Paleolithic men painted.”

Börte whinnied again.

She paused for a moment.

“What’s that you say?”

Kalinka looked at the stone walls of the water tank and almost allowed herself a smile.

“Why not? Yes. What a great idea, Börte. It was clever of you to suggest it. And very thoughtful of you. Max will be glad.”





THE MEN OF THE SS police battalion were pleased to see Max; they were pleased to see anyone who was not in the SS and who spoke their native tongue as well as the old man. Hearing him speak in German made them feel as if they were at home, which, of course, was where they all longed to be. They’d grown tired of Ukraine and the war and the crazy politics that had brought them there, not to mention the killing. Now all they wanted to do was throw away their guns and their uniforms, and go back to Germany, where they could do an honest day’s work and, if such a thing was possible, pretend that none of it had ever happened.

Max understood this. But it still surprised him that men who had murdered so many men, women and children could appear so very normal—that they could laugh and joke and enjoy music like any other men. And he wondered if this was a characteristic peculiar to Germans—at least until he remembered that this was what the Soviet NKVD had been like, that they, too, had been ordinary men. Max decided that it didn’t say a lot that was good about mankind in general.

“Tell us some more about Baron Falz-Fein and his family, Max,” they said. “Was he really a friend of the Russian tsar?”

“Oh yes,” said Max. “It’s not known if he ever came to stay here with the baron. But they were friends, all right. And quite possibly related.”

“What happened to the tsar?”

“To Nicholas the Second? He and his whole family were shot by the Communists. In July 1918. At a place called Yekaterinburg.”

Talk of shooting whole families brought a short pause to the conversation as one or two reflected on the terrible things that they themselves had done. But finally, someone started the conversation again.

“Yekaterinburg,” he said. “Is that near here?”

“No, it’s a long way east of Dnepropetrovsk.” Max was mentioning Dnepropetrovsk because he wanted to know if any of the men he was with now had been there. “I take it you know where that is?”

“Yes, we know where that is,” said one. “We were there for a while. Carrying out special actions.”

Someone else hushed the man and then offered Max a cigarette, and nervously he took it.

So, it was them, Max thought. It was them who had most likely murdered Kalinka’s whole family, not to mention almost twenty thousand others, in the city’s botanical gardens. He shuddered.

“Well,” he said, controlling his revulsion, “Yekaterinburg is about twenty-five hundred kilometers east of Dnepropetrovsk.”

“Twenty-five hundred?” someone gasped.

“This is a very, very big country,” said Max. “So big that it seems to slip off the edge of the earth. A man could walk east all his life and still not reach the sea.”

“We only just worked that out,” a man said bitterly, for the madness of invading a country as large as the Soviet union   could hardly be ignored. “And the baron? What became of him? Was he shot, too?”

Max was still thinking about the horror of what had happened in Dnepropetrovsk and in many other places as well.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Was the baron shot, too?”

“Er, no, just his mother, the dowager baroness. During the Bolshevik Revolution, the baron escaped back to Germany and never returned. I often wonder what became of him and his family, but I don’t suppose I shall ever really know. This is not a place where you can post a letter or receive a telephone call.”

All of the men nodded gloomily; it had been months since any of them had received a letter from home, and they were uncomfortably aware that a hard fight lay ahead of them if ever they were going to break through the Russian lines and get any letters that had been written to them by their families.

But a few of them were of the opinion that they were doomed and deservedly so. At this point, Captain Grenzmann, who was not one of these, spoke up:

“I believe I can answer your question, Max, about what happened to the baron,” he said. “At least in part. You know that I was in the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Well, I was checking through my sporting almanac—I’m afraid it’s the only book I brought from Germany—and I came across a Falz-Fein who was in the 1936 Winter Olympics, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It’s not exactly a common name. And I assume it must be the same family. Would you like to see the book?”