With a machine pistol slung around his neck, the driver walked solemnly toward him, lit a cigarette and smiled.
“Hey, Max, you want to be careful wandering around in that old brown fur coat of yours,” said the man, whom Max had talked to before. “We almost mistook you for one of the horses and shot you, too.”
“I wish you had.”
“Don’t say that. Look, Max, none of us wanted to do it—to shoot your horses. But orders are orders, eh? It’s war. What can you do? The captain says jump, and we jump. That’s how it’s got to be.” He offered Max the cigarette, but the old man declined with a shake of the head. “For what it’s worth, none of the horses suffered. You get hit with a bullet from Hitler’s buzz saw and it’s over in just a few seconds.”
Max nodded. “Did many horses escape?” he asked hopefully.
“A few. But we’ll catch up with them later. We’ll let them regroup and go after them again tomorrow, probably.”
Feeling quite sick, Max wiped the tears off his old face and walked away without another word.
JUST AS HORRIFIED BY what had happened to the wild horses of Askaniya-Nova was poor Kalinka, for after living with them for several weeks, she had grown very close to these animals. Indeed, since her own family was now no more, Kalinka regarded the horses as a sort of substitute for brothers and sisters. And while she was astonished that anyone should have tried to exterminate a whole herd of harmless wild animals, she was hardly surprised that the authors of this crime should have been wearing the same gray field uniforms as the men who had killed almost everyone she knew in her hometown of Dnepropetrovsk.
Hiding in a thick grove of trees near the old man’s blue cottage, she watched with horror as the Germans on their big, powerful motorcycles and sidecars chased the horses across the steppe, firing their machine guns and laughing like they were on some kind of macabre holiday. What was so funny about killing something, or someone? It had been the same back in Dnepropetrovsk, where the SS had gone about their bloody business with great good humor; indeed, it had seemed to Kalinka that many of them had been quite drunk, and she suspected the same was probably true of these men on the motorcycles.
Of course, Kalinka wanted to run out in front of them and tell the Germans to stop, but she knew they would not have listened to her. Back in Dnepropetrovsk, several girls not much older than Kalinka—including her elder sister Miriam’s best friend, Louise, who was generally held to be the most beautiful girl in the city—had actually knelt down in the streets and begged the laughing Germans to stop what they were doing. They had been shot without mercy. So Kalinka stayed hidden and, with her stomach knotted, waited for the massacre to end.
Her hopes rose a little when the old man from the blue cottage arrived on the steppe, waving his arms and shouting loudly at the Germans. She hoped they would pay attention to him, if only out of respect for his silver beard, but they ignored him and carried on shooting. Kalinka almost hoped he might unsling the rifle he carried and shoot a few of them instead, although she could easily see how useless that would have been. The Germans had no more respect for old age than they did for youth; hadn’t her own great-grandmother been shot—a woman aged ninety-five? But still, she admired the old man’s courage, for it was plain that they could have shot him just for the pleasure of it and because killing was all they seemed to know.
When finally the shooting stopped and the Germans drove back to the big house, where they were all staying, Kalinka waited for the old man to leave, too, before she quit her hiding place in the trees. She had learned to avoid all people, much as the horses did. Besides, the old man looked rather frightening.
Venturing out onto the steppe to see if she could help any of the horses who had been shot, she could soon see plainly that her mission was pointless. The Germans had done their job with predictably brutal efficiency, for the wild horses were quite beyond anything that even a veterinary surgeon could have done. A horse in motion is a beautiful, almost fluid thing, but now their ragged brown bodies lay on the pinkish snow like untidy heaps of solid, upturned earth. Nothing ever looks quite as dead as a dead horse. It was a heartbreaking sight.
To Kalinka’s relief, there was no sign of the mare who had first befriended her, nor the stallion who was her mate; of course, this was no guarantee that they were still alive. The steppe is a vast plain and it was not unlikely that their dead bodies lay several kilometers on the other side of the horizon, where they might have been chased by the relentless SS motorcycles. But she hoped for the best, and it was with a tremendous sense of relief that when she returned to her hiding place, she found the stallion and the mare hiding there.