The Winter Horses(59)

“I have a little piece of sausage left, if you’d like it?”

The woman looked at Kalinka with a sharp, suspicious glint in her eye, as if she thought Kalinka might be playing a cruel trick on her.

“Go on. You have sausage?”

“Just a bit.”

“Give it to me.”

Kalinka gave the woman the rest of their sausage from the forage bag, which the woman wolfed down in a matter of seconds; she felt hungry just looking at the woman.

Then the woman said, “Strange-looking horses. Are they yours?”

Kalinka thought it best to say that they were and that so was the dog.

“Been a while since we saw any animals, least of all horses around these parts,” said the woman, licking her lips. “Not anymore. No horses, no cattle, no goats, no pigs, no sheep, not even a chicken. People ate what animals they still owned just to stop the Germans from eating them. Then when our animals were gone, we ate anything that moved: pigeons in the trees, rabbits in the field, squirrels, rats and mice, cats and dogs—you name it, we’ve eaten it. We’ve even eaten cockroaches. It’s not a bad meal, a cockroach. Bit crunchy. There’s a lot of protein in a cockroach. But that was a while ago. A long while ago. Since then, times have been hard. Very hard. We’ve been eating stale rice and grass mostly.”

By now Kalinka was aware that the thin woman was looking at Temüjin and Börte in a strange way; Taras sensed it, too, and curled his long tail back between his legs.

“Would you like some bread?” she asked the woman.

“Bread? You have bread?”

Kalinka offered the woman a piece of pumpernickel, and she ate it with her eyes closed, emitting such groans of pleasure and satisfaction that it might have been supposed she was eating some rare delicacy like Russian caviar or boiled lobster.

“Oh,” groaned the woman, “that’s good. I’ve dreamed of eating bread like that again. Real bread, not the stuff we have here. That’s not much better than sawdust. Scratch, we call it, because it’s made from grass and what we can scratch from off the floor and the ground. But your bread was marvelous. Thank you. That was delicious. Almost as delicious as that sausage.”

“I stole it from the Germans,” explained Kalinka.

“Did you, now? You took a risk doing that, girl. Which means I’m taking a risk letting you stay here.” She shrugged. “There was a time when they’d have shot us both just for eating a piece of stolen sausage.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you in any danger.”

“But the Germans have helped themselves to all we have and moved on, to the south—on to the Crimean peninsula—so I suppose it’s probably safe enough now. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want, girl. We’ve got nothing, but you’re welcome to share it. Rest up awhile. You look tired. Eat all the hay that you want. You and your horses.”

The thin woman waved at the barn and fixed a narrow smile on her pinched face.

“What’s your name, child?”

“Kalinka. What’s yours?”

“Suliko.”

But because Suliko was the name of another Russian folk song, Kalinka assumed that the woman was just being sarcastic.

“No, really,” said Kalinka. “It is Kalinka.”

The thin woman sneered as if she didn’t believe her. “Makes no difference to me what you’re called,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t care one way or the other.”

“And this is Taras,” said Kalinka, pointing at the wolfhound, whose ears were all the way back as if he didn’t like the thin woman at all.

“Will you have some tea, child?” she asked Kalinka.

“Yes, please,” said Kalinka. “If you can spare it.”

“Tea is about all we do have.” She nodded. “Well, you wait here and I’ll go and fetch the samovar. There’s no sugar, I’m afraid. Or jam to put in it.” She laughed. “Just a tarnished-looking spoon.”

Then she walked out of the barn, leaving Kalinka with a new dilemma.

“What she says sounds friendly enough, I suppose,” she told Taras. “But there’s something about her face and her manner that doesn’t feel quite right and that I don’t like. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. It’s not that she said anything so strange. The war has been very hard on everyone. But it’s just that she kept looking at you like you were her next meal, Taras.”

Taras lay down and sighed. Was there no end to the savage cruelty that human beings were capable of?

“Look, you three, stay here. I’m going to follow her and see if I can find out if she really means that we should stay. Or if she’s planning to sell us out to the Germans.”