But before mounting Börte again, Kalinka put a folded groundsheet over the mare’s back to cushion her against the girl’s own weight, not that there was much of this; she was still very thin, much thinner than she’d been when living at home with her mother and father, when food was plentiful.
Kalinka remembered how she had always refused to eat her mother’s borscht—she’d always hated beets.
“What wouldn’t I give for a bowl of hot borscht now?” she muttered. “I’ll never turn my nose up at food again—no matter what it is.”
Kalinka took a reading with the SS compass, although now that they were on a road, it was easier to find their way, especially as the Germans had erected a helpful sign that said SOUTH and SIMFEROPOL.
“I suppose it will be all right to travel on the road,” she said, “just as long as we get off it again if we hear any traffic coming. It wouldn’t do to run into a German patrol. Or anyone else, if it comes down to it—experience has taught me not to trust any of the people in this part of the world. Some of them are just as bad as the Germans, and we can’t trust them to do anything but let us down. Most of them would betray us for a bowl of soup.”
And this reminded Kalinka of something else her grandfather had often said: “Dear God, protect and keep our neighbors … well away from us.”
Farther south, the winter snows had melted but the ground was still hard with frost, and the trees were full of little sparrows that Kalinka felt obliged to feed with crumbs of bread and tiny bits of fat from the German sausage, of which she knew they were fond. To her delight, some of the sparrows flew down from the trees and sat on the Przewalski’s and pecked the ticks from their coats. They made an odd little party on the road to Simferopol: Kalinka in her silver-streaked Astrakhan coat, Taras, the two horses and a flock of small but noisy sparrows.
The birds were not the only things that were airborne in the blue Ukrainian skies. Once, they saw a lot of planes flying overhead like geese in formation, and she decided that they were probably bombers, but they were too high for Kalinka to make out if they were German or Russian. Not that it seemed to matter all that much one way or the other to her, and she found herself uttering another one of her dear grandfather’s sayings: “If they’re dropping bombs on top of you, what’s the difference?”
“I seem to be thinking of Grandfather a lot today,” she told Taras. “I suppose it’s because I miss him so much.”
Near a deserted village called Mayachka, Taras found an old barn for them to sleep in, where the sparrows finally flew away. There was plenty of hay for the horses to eat and a trough of water, although Kalinka had to break the ice on the surface for them to drink from it. They spent a quiet and comfortable night but slept too long, as she had intended to be up before dawn so that they could slip away before anyone discovered them. They were exhausted after their long journey however, and by the time they were all awake, the sun was halfway up the sky and a thin woman with a dark, pinched face was standing in the doorway of the barn.
The woman wore a white head scarf, a thick, gray flannel blouse, a high-waisted skirt, a loose coat and tall boots, but none of these fitted her very well, as she was as thin as a beanpole.
“Who are you?” snarled the woman.
“Is this your barn?” asked Kalinka.
“Yes,” said the woman. “What do you want here?”
“Then I’m sorry to intrude. I meant no harm. I thought the place was deserted. I can pay you for the hay that my horses have eaten, if you like. They were hungry.”
“It’s as good as deserted,” said the woman. “Most of the men have run away. Or been killed. And the Germans have killed all our livestock for food, so you’re welcome to the hay, as there are no animals to eat it anyway.”
“You look pretty hungry yourself,” said Kalinka.
“Hungry?” The woman uttered a contemptuous sort of laugh. “Starving is what we are, girl. Starving. But the Germans don’t care one bit. Nobody cares if we eat or what we eat. I used to be a schoolteacher. Can you imagine? Me. I used to read books. Now I’d probably try to eat a book if you gave it to me. Many’s the night I’ve fancied eating a good cookbook. See this coat? This coat used to have buttons on it, but I took off all the buttons because they were made of bone and boiled them all to make soup. That’s how hungry we are, child.” The woman looked away and sighed. “There are so many such things we’ve had to do because we are hungry that it would make a statue weep with pity.”