The Winter Horses(70)

In a bakery shop near the central railway station, she found a couple of stale loaves and put them in her forage bag. In another shop, she managed to get a can of condensed milk. Then she went back to the zoo, where the Przewalski’s horses were waiting patiently for her return. She split one of the loaves into two for them, before eating some of the other loaf herself and drinking the condensed milk, which tasted delicious.

Not long after her meal, the sun came out again and she heard the sound of music on a loudspeaker and instantly recognized “The Internationale”—which was a patriotic song the Russians were always playing.

“It sounds like the Red Army is here at last,” she told the horses. “We’d better make you look like good Russian horses.”

So she draped a red flag over each horse, and while Börte, who was used to having the groundsheet on her back, was able to tolerate this, Temüjin was not and kept tugging the flag off with his teeth.

“This is for your own good, you know,” she told him, trying again and then again. “In case someone decides to make you their next meal.”

But Temüjin kept pulling the flag off and dropping it on the ground. Finally, Kalinka decided to hang the flag on their enclosure, which seemed like the best alternative.

Red Army soldiers appeared in the zoo toward the end of the afternoon; they wore brown tunics and blue trousers and were very dirty, and regarded Kalinka with some suspicion.

“What are you doing here, child?” asked one, a Ukrainian.

“Waiting for you,” she said. “My name is Kalyna Shtern, but everyone calls me Kalinka, like the song. I’m from Dnepropetrovsk, where the Germans killed all my family. I’m the only one left.”

“Sorry to hear it,” said the Ukrainian soldier, although he didn’t sound very sorry at all.

One of the other soldiers was laughing and talking in Russian; he was looking at the horses, and although Kalinka couldn’t understand everything he said, he seemed to be suggesting that he could eat a horse and probably would.

“No!” she yelled. “These horses are all the family I have now. They’re very special wild horses from the Soviet People’s Sanctuary Park at Askaniya-Nova. Przewalski’s horses. All of their brothers and sisters were killed by the Germans, too; that means they’re the last of their kind and very probably the rarest horses in the world. They’re the same horses that you can see in cave paintings in France. Look, you’ll understand more when you read this letter and the entry in this encyclopedia.”

“Askaniya-Nova? That’s two hundred kilometers from here,” he said, sneering with skepticism. “Do you expect me to believe you walked all that way with two wild horses?”

“It’s true, I tell you,” she insisted.

“I don’t have time for your fairy stories, girl,” said the Ukrainian soldier, and unslinging his machine gun from around his neck, he walked toward the Przewalski’s horses. “Sorry, but I’ve got hungry men to feed. Those two horses of yours will feed a whole platoon.” He laughed. “Besides, your encyclopedia is no good to me. I can’t read.”

He aimed his machine gun at Temüjin, but Kalinka ran in front of the stallion and held out her arms as if she hoped to shield the horses from the Red Army soldier’s bullets.

“Are you mad, child? Get out of the way before you get hurt.”

“If you shoot them, I swear you’ll have to shoot me first.”

“Move, I tell you. My men’s stomachs are more important than your pet horses.”

“No, they’re not,” she insisted, and as if to emphasize the point, she jumped onto Börte’s back. “Not this time. Don’t you understand? These horses are one of the things you’ve been fighting for. They’re an important part of what makes Ukraine and Mother Russia what they are. You kill them and you’re destroying your own great victory here. I didn’t walk all that way and endure the cold and beat off attacks by wolves, the SS, even cannibals, just so that you could fill your belly with some fresh meat, Comrade.”

Reluctantly, the soldier lowered his weapon.

Impressed by Kalinka’s courage and perhaps a little persuaded by the red flag that she had now draped over her own shoulders, the soldiers decided to fetch an officer to listen to her story and to determine the fate of the two Przewalski’s horses.

The officer was a handsome man—a tall Russian major, wearing several medals on his tunic, who spoke good Ukrainian.

He listened patiently to the whole of Kalinka’s story, glanced over the entry in the encyclopedia and then asked to read the German officer’s letter.