Her father and brothers were already out on a round, delivering coal, while her mother was making oladushki—buttermilk pancakes—for Kalinka’s breakfast. Served with a selection of sour cream, jam and maple syrup, oladushki were Kalinka’s favorite breakfast. She often made them herself but, try as she might, the ones she cooked never tasted quite as delicious as the ones her mother made.
“Why is that?” she had asked. “Why don’t my pancakes taste as good as yours, Mama?”
“Because when I’m cooking them for you, I use an extra ingredient that you don’t,” said her mother.
Kalinka was cross. “That’s not fair,” she said. “Using a secret ingredient puts me at a real disadvantage when I’m making my own oladushki. A little salt, maybe? A special kind of flour? Tell me.”
“I didn’t say it was a secret ingredient,” said her mother. “I just said that I used it when I was making oladushki for you, Kalinka. And one day, when you’re cooking for your own family, maybe you’ll see how this is what makes all the difference.”
“So what is it? Please, I want to know.”
“It’s something I always use when I’m cooking pancakes for you and your brothers and sisters, or buckwheat kasha for your father. Love. I make everything with love, Kalinka. In my experience, that always makes things taste a lot better.”
And somehow it was true—the cakes your own mother bakes always taste better than …
Kalinka awoke with a start. She didn’t know how long she had dozed but it couldn’t have been for very long. Börte had stopped in her tracks and so had Temüjin; it was another moment or two before she saw the reason both horses had pulled up was that Taras had come to an abrupt halt ahead of them. The dog’s long white face was lifted up toward the sun, and she could hear him noisily sampling the air with his shiny black nose.
In silence, they all waited for the dog’s keen sense of smell and even keener hearing to work to their advantage.
“What is it, Taras?” she whispered. “Wolves again?”
Glad of an excuse to dismount, Kalinka jumped down from Börte’s back and approached the big wolfhound.
“D’you smell danger?”
Slowly, the dog’s long tail curled between his back legs, and his body started to tremble. Then Taras sat down on the cold, snowy steppe and began to chew the air like it was a solid thing, and to howl. Kalinka might have said that his howl was like a wolf’s except that, having recently heard a wolf’s howl, she recognized that a wolf’s howl sounded much less plaintive than the dog’s. Taras howled as if he was giving voice to some deep and enduring tragedy.
Kalinka put her arms around the dog’s neck and hugged him close for comfort, but this did nothing to stop Taras from howling some more. He howled as if he held the sun itself responsible for a dreadful crime.
“What is it?” she said, stroking his long, fine head. “I wish I knew what it was that’s upsetting you, boy.”
Taras kept on howling. Kalinka had never seen an animal cry before, but she had the strong impression that she was looking at this now. The dog was crying as if his heart had been broken. There was something buried under the snow, perhaps, or in the wind, something terrible that Taras knew without seeing it for himself. She’d heard of such things. An animal’s sixth sense was what her father would have called it. And then, instinctively, Kalinka realized exactly what had happened, just as Taras had done several minutes before.
“It’s Max, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Something dreadful has happened to Max.”
Taras barked an answer and then began to howl again, and this time Kalinka knew what Taras was doing: he was crying like a baby for his dead master. And she was certain that the dog’s sixth sense could not have been wrong about something like that.
“Oh no,” she breathed. “They wouldn’t have. Surely. Not to that kind old man.” But of course she knew perfectly well that the SS had murdered him, just as they had murdered her whole family and thousands of families like her own.
After what had happened in the botanical gardens at Monastyrsky Island, in Dnepropetrovsk, Kalinka had found no time to grieve for the deaths of her parents, her brothers and sisters, her grandparents and great-grandmother, her aunts and uncles and her cousins; the imperatives of her own unlikely survival and the sheer enormity of what had happened to her family—to everyone she knew—were almost too overwhelming. She felt sad for Max and for Taras—terribly sad—but, somehow, she still managed to hold her sadness in check. As always, she knew that if she started crying, she might never stop.