Taras looked at the picture, inclined his head one way, then the other and wagged his tail.
In the flickering firelight, Kalinka decided the painting was pretty good—so good that she started painting another running horse almost immediately.
While she was working, Temüjin came into Kalinka’s water tank to see what she was doing; his sense of another horse like him was so keen that he had felt its presence even though it was only a painting on a stone wall. The stallion stared at the picture for a full two minutes: like a cat looking at a mirror, he was fascinated with this image of himself.
Before long, Kalinka had created not just several horses running around the walls but also a reasonable imitation of a real prehistoric cave. When she compared her own efforts with the pictures in Max’s book, she felt that she had exceeded her own expectations.
“Not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all. Even though I say so myself. Perhaps, deep down, all painting is the same: no one ought to or can teach you how to paint the wall of a cave. It’s something you can or you can’t do.”
Looking at her work now, Kalinka felt she had a new understanding of those ancient cavemen. She thought it was only too easy to imagine that outside her little shelter, on the windblown steppe, it was a primordial world of unimaginable harshness and severity; and in a way, of course, it was just such a world. Perhaps it was worse than that, for even at its harshest, Stone Age life was never as nasty, brutish and short as life on the Russian front. No saber-toothed tiger, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, cave bear or Neanderthal man had ever witnessed the cruelty Kalinka had seen.
But a new thought now presented itself to her inquisitive young mind.
“You know, Taras, I wonder if it was cavemen who painted these pictures at all. Everyone assumes it was them. But why? Why couldn’t it have been cavewomen? After all, it’s usually the women who fix up a place and try to make it look nice. That’s how it was for us back in Dnepropetrovsk. My papa was out working all day, and my mama was the one who stayed home cooking, cleaning, putting up curtains, hanging pictures and making everything neat and tidy. My papa was generally too tired to lift anything but a newspaper or his tea glass when he came home at night. It’s hard to think of his Stone Age equivalent painting pictures on the walls of his cave after a day of hunting mammoth.”
She shrugged.
“Either way, I can’t wait to see what Max thinks of my cave. You know, it’s a pity he’s coming tomorrow morning, because I think these paintings look so much better at night and in the firelight. It’s almost as if the horses are actually moving around the walls. If you half close your eyes, the flames seem to create the illusion that they’re really running. It’s a bit like going to the cinema theater. Except that these moving pictures are in color, of course. I’ve only ever seen movies that are in black and white.”
Temüjin nodded his appreciation and allowed Kalinka to hug his back fondly, which was not something he had allowed before. Neither of them could have known that the girl’s pictures were almost prophetic, and that within a matter of hours, Temüjin and Börte would be running for their lives.
Kalinka’s heart skipped a beat when she heard footsteps outside the jagged stone door of the disused water tank.
“Max? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” he said dully, appearing in the doorway. Bearded and swathed in frosted furs, he didn’t look so very different from a caveman himself.
Kalinka threw her arms around the old man and squealed with delight.
“I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow,” she said.
“I—er—changed my mind.” He held up a coat. “I brought you a coat, which used to belong to my wife. To help keep you warm when you go outside.”
“Thank you,” she said, pressing the fur on the collar to her face. “It’s nice.”
“It’s an Astrakhan coat. I’d almost forgotten that I still had it. It’ll be a bit big, probably. But I expect you’ll grow into it.”
“You smell different,” she observed.
Max winced. “I had a bath, that’s why. Before going to dinner. And it wasn’t even my birthday.”
Kindly, Kalinka didn’t ask him about dinner. Just by looking at his face, she could tell that the old man hadn’t enjoyed it very much. She put the coat down on the floor for a moment and lifted the lantern.
“Look,” she said. “I’ve decorated my cave.”
Max glanced around and felt his own jaw drop with amazement. “Well, I never,” he said. “It’s incredible. They’re the most beautiful paintings I think I’ve ever seen. And that includes the painting in my cottage that used to belong to the baron. It’s wonderful what you’ve done in here, child. Wonderful.”