The Winter Horses(62)

This time when she awoke, the train had stopped at a station in Simferopol, and hearing loud voices outside their boxcar and with her heart in her mouth, Kalinka peered through the slightly open door. A horrifying sight met her widening and fearful eyes: on the station platform were hundreds of German soldiers, and what was even worse, they looked as if they were preparing to get on her train.

“It’s the Germans,” she gasped. “What are we going to do?”

Taras licked her hand in a vain attempt to cheer her up. Temüjin let out a heavy sigh and then flicked his tail irritably. Börte pressed her hot muzzle against Kalinka’s ear and tried to breathe some encouragement into the girl, as if to say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You tried your best.”

“You’re right,” said Kalinka. “There’s nothing we can do except wait for them to find us here.”

She shook her head and stroked Börte’s muzzle for a moment. In truth, since what had happened in the botanical gardens, Kalinka cared little for her safety; she had no illusions about what became of escaping Jews. But she felt that she had failed to carry out the very important task that Maxim Borisovich Melnik had given her: she had failed to save the last two Przewalski’s horses in the world, because surely the Germans would kill them and eat them as the SS had killed and eaten all the others.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, stroking Börte’s head. “I’ve led you all to disaster, haven’t I? Can you ever forgive me?”

She tried to put her arms around Temüjin’s neck, but he pulled away and walked to the opposite end of the boxcar and stared at the wooden wall as if he couldn’t bear to look at Kalinka. Like Kalinka, he had no illusions about the fate that awaited them all. But then Börte made an impatient snort at him that only a mare could make at a stallion, and remembering his manners, Temüjin turned to face the girl. He walked toward her, and this time he bowed his head in acknowledgment of all the enormous efforts she had made on their behalf.

The next second, the boxcar door was thrown open and the four intrepid travelers were faced with lots of large, red-faced German soldiers, all of them demanding loudly to know who she was and what she was doing on their troop train.





JOACHIM STAMMER WAS A captain from the Second Company of the German field police, whose headquarters were on Rosa Luxemburg Street, in a former Soviet NKVD building in the center of Simferopol, a major city on the Crimean peninsula. He was a professional policeman from the city of Bonn, where his parents and his wife still lived in a big house near the university where his father worked.

He was just about to go off duty when he received a telephone call from the local railway station to say that some soldiers had found a girl who had stowed away on a train that was detailed to take troops out of the besieged city to the coastal town of Sevastopol, for evacuation to Germany. The girl was Ukrainian, and there was talk that she might be a partisan fighter or a spy, so Stammer put on his helmet and greatcoat, and walked to the station, which was only a couple of hundred meters from his office. There was little point in using his car, as the roads were badly bomb-damaged; the city was now under constant attack from the Russian air force and could no longer be defended against the Red Army. Even as he picked his way among the bomb craters, a long-range artillery shell landed just across the Salhir River and exploded with a massive bang that shook the ground underneath Stammer’s jackboots. The capture of the town of Simferopol by the Red Army could only be a matter of a few days now. The sooner the better, thought Stammer, because although he was a German, he was not and never had been a Nazi, and had not wanted to fight a war with Russia; all he wanted now was a chance to get home.

The railway station on Lenin Boulevard had once been an elegant white building that, with its clock tower and low Corinthian-columned arches, had resembled a church more than a railway station; but now it was little better than a ruin. He climbed over a pile of rubble and hurried inside as another artillery shell came whizzing overhead.

Partisans and spies were always shot, and Stammer hoped that the girl would turn out to be something else, as he had no appetite for handing her over to the SS. Even before he laid eyes on Kalinka, he was determined that he would do his best to make sure that this never happened. One way or the other, there had been much too much killing on the Eastern Front, by both sides, and Captain Stammer was hopeful of getting home without having anything bad on his conscience. Indeed, he now believed it was his mission in life to do one or two good things before the end of the war that might, in a very small way, help atone for some of the terrible things that the Nazis had done in the Soviet union  .