The Winter Horses(5)

They were a little peculiar to look at, however. The mare who had first befriended Kalinka was no more than one and a half meters high at the withers and had a thick, short neck and a low-slung belly. The head and the curved, almost semicircular neck were darker than the horse’s body, and a dorsal stripe ran from the stiff, brushlike mane along the broad back to the tail. She possessed no forelock. Her muzzle was pale and the strong legs striped like a zebra’s, but the most striking difference from the domestic horse that Kalinka noticed was the short-haired, almost furry tail, which was more like a fox’s brush or a sable’s pelt. Kalinka soon formed the opinion that this strangely furry tail helped explain the wild horse’s demonstrable cunning.





TIME PASSED, BUT THE Germans stayed and, like everyone else, Maxim Borisovich Melnik learned after all to fear them. They shot many of the estate’s deer, goats, ducks and geese—even some of the llamas and camels—and ate them, but that was not the reason why Max learned to fear the soldiers. He feared the Germans because from time to time they would receive orders to perform “special police actions” and a group of them would drive grimly away from Askaniya-Nova, returning a few days later, falling-down drunk, with a crazy look in their blue eyes, sometimes hysterically laughing and trembling with adrenaline, their weapons still warm to the touch and always spattered with blood.

On the rare occasions Max went to one of the villages on the estate and spoke to the peasants who lived there—these days they feared the Germans more than they feared the Soviet secret police, the dreaded NKVD, and hence they no longer felt inclined to shun Max—he heard stories of the unspeakable things that the SS captain and his men had done, of thousands of people murdered and then buried in mass graves, and of whole towns put to the torch, and he shuddered that he would have to go back to Askaniya-Nova and be near such inhuman monsters.

The villagers urged Max to flee Askaniya-Nova, but always he went back because he feared for the animals. And for this reason, it was Max who pointed out the weakest deer and fowl for the soldiers to shoot for their pot. As for the llamas, he’d never been that keen on them: llamas spit. It’s one thing being bitten by an animal; it’s quite another to be spat upon. Max had never gotten used to that, just as he could not get used to the idea that Captain Grenzmann could allow his men to behave with such callous barbarism when he himself was a man of some refinement. As well as being a captain and an Olympic equestrian, Grenzmann was an artist of considerable skill; his pen-and-ink drawings of the Hanoverian horses in the stables were among the finest pictures of horses that Max had ever seen. Oddly, however, the Hanoverians were the only subject that Grenzmann seemed inclined to draw. One day, while helping the captain mount Molnija for his morning ride, Max summoned up his courage and asked him about this.

“Why don’t you draw one of our other animals, sir?” he asked. “The European bison are very interesting, I think. Or perhaps the Przewalski’s horses. I’d be interested to see what such a skilled artist as yourself might make of them.”

Grenzmann gave Max a withering look—which was even more withering from the back of such a tall horse as Molnija.

“I’m not in the least interested in any of the other animals,” he told Max. “Especially not your mongrel sub-horses. In fact, I’m still wondering what we’re going to do about those slitty-eyed beasts. Before we leave.”

“Are you leaving, sir?”

“We’ll have to before very long. The war isn’t going well for us in this part of the world. Your Red Army is less than a hundred kilometers away. And we risk being encircled if we stay here. Chances are we’ll have to fall back on Kiev before very long.”

Max did his best to contain his delight at this latest news.

Soon after this conversation, Grenzmann gave Max one of his better drawings as a present, and every time the old man looked at it, he marveled that an artist of such great sensitivity should be capable of such diabolical cruelty. More importantly, he worried over just what the captain had meant when he had spoken of “doing something” about the Przewalski’s horses.

The snow came early that year, cooling everything into a frigid silence. All of the lakes froze solid, each turning a different color: one was green, one was violet, one was silver, but the largest lake was black, with ice as thick and hard as a piece of pig iron, and almost as soon as Max broke through to the dark water with a hammer and chisel, it became ice again. Covered with a perfect blanket of thick snow, the endless steppe reflected the azure blue sky so that it resembled a petrified ocean on which no boat sailed. Forests of fir and birch froze as silver as Max’s beard, and everything—Max most of all—seemed to hold its wintry breath. The old man sensed that something bad was going to happen at Askaniya-Nova and that it was going to be up to him to stop it somehow but, at the same time, he knew he was just one man against many; while he was a crack shot with a rifle, he could not resist a whole battalion of German soldiers. So he hoped and he prayed, and meanwhile he bowed and scraped before the handsome young captain and, every morning, saddled the big stallion as usual.