“That was close,” she said. “Any closer and I’d have been strawberry jam.”
She put the helmet back on, tightened the chin strap as much as she could—it was too big for her, of course—and carried on to the ticket office.
There she found the door and one of the walls standing and not much else. Fortunately, the wall that was still standing was the one with the first aid kit on it. Kalinka opened it up and inspected the contents; there was iodine, bandages, surgical dressings, scissors, tape—there was even a needle and some suture thread.
“Yes!” she said triumphantly. “This is just what I need.”
She lifted the box off the wall and ran back to the aquarium. Kalinka had seen her mother stitch her father’s arm once, after he’d fallen off the coal cart, and thought she could probably do the same with the dog’s wounds; she’d have to trim some of his fur and then cover the wound with iodine, which would sting, of course, but she felt Taras was brave enough to deal with that. In fact, she was sure she’d never met a more courageous animal than him.
Kalinka could tell something was wrong as soon as she was back in the aquarium. Taras had not moved from where he lay on the floor, but Temüjin and Börte were both standing beside him and the stallion was trying to move the dog gently with his nose. The dog did not stir, and what was worse, his long pink tongue was hanging out of his mouth.
Kalinka ran to his side, threw away her helmet, lit another candle and pressed her face close to the dog’s chest. But it was too late. Taras was dead.
“Oh no,” she said quietly. “Not you, too, you wonderful old dog. Not you, too.”
She sat with the dog’s noble head in her hands, but still she did not cry. How could she cry for a dog when she had not yet cried for her mother and father, her grandparents, her great-grandmother, her brothers and sisters, her aunts and her uncles, her cousins and her neighbors? How could she cry for Taras when she had not cried for Max? Where was grief to be found for a wolfhound when there had been none for them? Somehow it would have seemed disrespectful to her family and to the old man to have wept for this brave and faithful dog when she had not yet stopped to weep for them.
Kalinka wrapped her friend’s body in one of the German groundsheets and stitched it up carefully, so as to prevent some animal from eating him; then she dragged Taras to a far corner of the aquarium, where she had lit a special candle, and sat there in silent contemplation of his courage and his devotion.
“I shall miss you, dear Taras,” she whispered. “You were faithful unto death. There never was a better dog than you. Not ever. Dear Max would have been so very proud of you.”
After a moment—and quite unbidden—the two Przewalski’s horses came and stood on either side of the dog’s body and, in spite of the terrible noise of the continuing bombardment, would not leave, like an honor guard for a fallen comrade.
IT WAS A LITTLE before dawn when the Russian artillery bombardment finally ended and Kalinka and the cave horses could leave the aquarium and return to ground level and breathe some fresher air. Not that it seemed all that fresh. The lion house was still burning, and Kalinka had the thought that perhaps the bodies of some dead animals were being consumed by the flames; at least, she hoped that they were dead. A thin haze of gray smoke hung over everything like a fog, and pieces of ash were floating through the air like gray snowflakes.
An eerie quiet had descended on the city of Simferopol. After the death of Taras, Kalinka decided that she needed to be on her own for a while and so she left the horses to go and see if she could scavenge some more food. She thought it better that the horses remain at the zoo; she knew that if the bombardment started again, Temüjin and Börte were intelligent enough to find their way back down to the makeshift shelter that was provided by the aquarium. Besides, there was still plenty of good grazing in the goat enclosure and the horses were hungry.
According to one of the newspapers she’d read, it was April, but things didn’t feel much like spring as it was still very cold—probably because they were so close to the sea. The wind was still arriving from the northeast, with just a bit of sleet to make life hard for everyone.
She walked all the way back to the railway station and found the city deserted; the Germans were gone, but as yet there was no sign of the Russians. The city of Simferopol was ruined: the nearby velodrome was cratered like the surface of the moon, and a green church had a large, unexploded bomb sticking out of a wall. Most of the buildings had collapsed or were in a state of near collapse. With a few of them, whole walls had disappeared, revealing everything inside the houses—furniture, pictures, carpets—as if some careless giant ape had opened them up to look inside. Kalinka had not seen the movie King Kong herself, but she knew what it was about.