The Winter Horses(61)

“Wait, wait,” shouted the woman. “You haven’t had your tea.”

Kalinka wheeled the mare around to take another look at the woman; she wanted to see if she and her husband were capable of mounting a pursuit.

“Fortunately for us, they’re so starved that I don’t think they have the strength to chase us,” she said. “If they weren’t so horrible, I might pity them both. A bit.”





THEY GALLOPED FOR WHAT seemed like kilometers, across open fields and through dark forests with trees as tall as the tallest church steeple. After the frightening incident with the cannibals, Kalinka didn’t have much to say to the others; in front of the dog and the horses, she felt ashamed that human beings could behave quite so badly to their own kind.

“I guess there’s no accounting for what makes people do the things that people do,” said Kalinka.

Taras barked in agreement.

The countryside here was badly scarred by war; everywhere there were broken tanks, ruined buildings and shell holes, abandoned artillery and discarded rifles, burning trucks and, on one occasion, a whole village that had been set ablaze.

“I think we must be getting nearer the Russian lines,” she told her companions. But she neglected to mention to them that they would have to get through the German lines before they could reach their Russian ones; there seemed to be no point in worrying the animals unnecessarily.

Sometimes Kalinka also saw the bodies of dead men—both Russian and German—but she did not avert her gaze as her mother would probably have ordered. After what had happened to her family at the botanical gardens, nothing could have shocked Kalinka—not anymore. Besides, she knew that the dead—while not pleasant to look at—could do her no harm; it was the living you had to watch out for, as had been proved only too well by the cannibal couple of Mayachka.

Farther on, she saw patches of sand on the fields, and a number of times, she thought she could even smell the sea; then near a village called Novooleksiivka, she saw a rusting railway line and a stationary train consisting of what looked like empty boxcars. Thinking that they might rest in one of these—perhaps even travel in one—Kalinka climbed into a boxcar and opened the sliding wooden door so that the dog and the two horses could leap aboard beside her. She closed the door and shared what remained of their provisions with Temüjin and Börte and Taras; and after, she fell asleep.

When she awoke again, the train was moving.

Kalinka groaned, jumped to her feet but relaxed a little when she saw that the train was clearly moving south; she took a compass reading to make sure, but she hardly needed to, since the railway track was on a bridge over water.

“That’s either the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov,” she told the others. “But I think the Sea of Azov is more probable, since we’ve been heading southeast since we left Askaniya-Nova. It’s the shallowest sea in the world. And the river Don flows into it. I know that, because we did the Sea of Azov in geography, in my last term at school before the Germans arrived.

“Anyway, here’s the plan: we’ll ride this train until it gets dark and then we’ll wait for it to slow down or stop, at which point we’ll get off. We could walk, but why walk when you can ride? That’s what I say.”

Taras barked his agreement; his paws were sore and he was quite happy to lie down and let the train take the strain.

They hadn’t traveled very far when some planes flew over at a very low altitude and they heard a series of deafening explosions. After calming the two horses—who’d never heard anything as loud as a bomb explosion—Kalinka opened the door of the boxcar and leaned out, only to see that the bridge behind them no longer existed; all that remained to indicate that it had once been there was a huge plume of smoke and pieces of wood that were still flying through the air.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “The planes bombed the bridge. We were on that just a minute or two ago. We could have been killed.”

She found it hard to decide if the bridge had been bombed by the Russians or the Germans, but the bombing of the bridge had the useful effect of making the train go faster. It soon became evident to Kalinka that it wasn’t going to stop again until it reached its final destination.

“I expect the driver is a little nervous about stopping anywhere for very long after something like that,” she said. “And I can’t say I blame him. It seems as if you stand still long enough in this world, someone is sure to drop a bomb on you.”

For a while after that, Kalinka kept a nervous eye on the sky by leaving the door open a crack, but before very long, the rhythmic movement of the train overtook her and she fell asleep again.