The Winter Horses (11 page)

“How are you both?” she asked.

Temüjin flicked his furry tail and walked quickly around the perimeter of the tank as if he were in a circus ring.

“You don’t like being inside. I know. But don’t forget you can go outside. Just as long as you stay within the perimeter of trees.”

Temüjin nodded patiently and snorted several times as if to say, “Yes, yes, I know, but it doesn’t stop me wanting to run around the steppe at full speed in order to warm up.”

“You’ll have to be patient,” said Kalinka. “It won’t be long now until the Germans are gone, and then you both can run around the steppe as much as you want. Me too, I hope. I bet this place is wonderful in summer. I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

Talking to the Przewalski’s made her feel like she was in the stables at home again, before the war, when she’d spoken to her father’s Vladimir horses every night before she went to bed. The Vladimirs had been three times the size of the Przewalski’s, because it takes a big, heavy horse to haul a cartload of coal; they were also quieter and more patient, and this was just as well, she thought. A Vladimir that had behaved anything like a Przewalski’s could have destroyed the city of Dnepropetrovsk in minutes. Not for nothing had armored knights once ridden these great horses into battle. And yet they were gentle giants: sometimes as a treat, her father had allowed Kalinka to sit on their backs and plait their long manes and tails with blue and white ribbons—which were the colors of Ukraine—that her mother gave her, and she still marveled that those animals could have been so patient and
have allowed her to treat their manes like the hair on her doll.

There was nothing that she could have plaited into the manes and tails of the Przewalski’s. Their manes stood up like the bristles on a toothbrush, while their strangely furry tails resembled
payos
—the long ringlets worn by some of her father’s more devoutly religious friends. That was strange, but nothing to compare with the black-and-white stripes on the back of the legs of the horses, which reminded her of the stripes on a prayer shawl.

“I’m afraid there’s no getting away from it,” she told Börte as she stroked the mare’s white face, “you’re just different from other horses. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But I wonder: Can Max really be right about this? Could you really trace your ancestors back into prehistory?”

She opened the book that Max had brought over from the blue cottage. First she looked at the baron’s bookplate on the inside front cover—a great coat of arms that looked like it belonged on a herald’s flag; and then she found the color plates of the French caves.

“It says here that the paintings at Font-de-Gaume were discovered by a local schoolmaster in 1901,” she told the two cave horses. “It’s believed people first lived in the caves around 25,000 BC. There are forty horse depictions and twenty mammoth depictions. They’re extinct, too. And that makes you two very special. Perhaps the two most special horses anywhere in the world right now.”

Börte let out a snort that might have indicated modesty.

“You know,” she told the cave horses, “I should love to see one of these cave paintings Max was talking about, for real. The ones that Paleolithic men painted.”

Börte whinnied again.

She paused for a moment.

“What’s that you say?”

Kalinka looked at the stone walls of the water tank and almost allowed herself a smile.

“Why not? Yes. What a great idea, Börte. It was clever of you to suggest it. And very thoughtful of you. Max will be glad.”

T
HE MEN OF THE
SS police battalion were pleased to see Max; they were pleased to see anyone who was not in the SS and who spoke their native tongue as well as the old man. Hearing him speak in German made them feel as if they were at home, which, of course, was where they all longed to be. They’d grown tired of Ukraine and the war and the crazy politics that had brought them there, not to mention the killing. Now all they wanted to do was throw away their guns and their uniforms, and go back to Germany, where they could do an honest day’s work and, if such a thing was possible, pretend that none of it had ever happened.

Max understood this. But it still surprised him that men who had murdered so many men, women and children could appear so very normal—that they could laugh and joke and enjoy music like any other men. And he wondered
if this was a characteristic peculiar to Germans—at least until he remembered that this was what the Soviet NKVD had been like, that they, too, had been ordinary men. Max decided that it didn’t say a lot that was good about mankind in general.

“Tell us some more about Baron Falz-Fein and his family, Max,” they said. “Was he really a friend of the Russian tsar?”

“Oh yes,” said Max. “It’s not known if he ever came to stay here with the baron. But they were friends, all right. And quite possibly related.”

“What happened to the tsar?”

“To Nicholas the Second? He and his whole family were shot by the Communists. In July 1918. At a place called Yekaterinburg.”

Talk of shooting whole families brought a short pause to the conversation as one or two reflected on the terrible things that they themselves had done. But finally, someone started the conversation again.

“Yekaterinburg,” he said. “Is that near here?”

“No, it’s a long way east of Dnepropetrovsk.” Max was mentioning Dnepropetrovsk because he wanted to know if any of the men he was with now had been there. “I take it you know where that is?”

“Yes, we know where that is,” said one. “We were there for a while. Carrying out special actions.”

Someone else hushed the man and then offered Max a cigarette, and nervously he took it.

So, it
was
them, Max thought. It was them who had most likely murdered Kalinka’s whole family, not to mention almost twenty thousand others, in the city’s botanical gardens. He shuddered.

“Well,” he said, controlling his revulsion, “Yekaterinburg is about twenty-five hundred kilometers east of Dnepropetrovsk.”

“Twenty-five hundred?” someone gasped.

“This is a very, very big country,” said Max. “So big that it seems to slip off the edge of the earth. A man could walk east all his life and still not reach the sea.”

“We only just worked that out,” a man said bitterly, for the madness of invading a country as large as the Soviet Union could hardly be ignored. “And the baron? What became of him? Was he shot, too?”

Max was still thinking about the horror of what had happened in Dnepropetrovsk and in many other places as well.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Was the baron shot, too?”

“Er, no, just his mother, the dowager baroness. During the Bolshevik Revolution, the baron escaped back to Germany and never returned. I often wonder what became of him and his family, but I don’t suppose I shall ever really know. This is not a place where you can post a letter or receive a telephone call.”

All of the men nodded gloomily; it had been months since any of them had received a letter from home, and
they were uncomfortably aware that a hard fight lay ahead of them if ever they were going to break through the Russian lines and get any letters that had been written to them by their families.

But a few of them were of the opinion that they were doomed and deservedly so. At this point, Captain Grenzmann, who was not one of these, spoke up:

“I believe I can answer your question, Max, about what happened to the baron,” he said. “At least in part. You know that I was in the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Well, I was checking through my sporting almanac—I’m afraid it’s the only book I brought from Germany—and I came across a Falz-Fein who was in the 1936 Winter Olympics, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It’s not exactly a common name. And I assume it must be the same family. Would you like to see the book?”

“Very much,” said Max.

Captain Grenzmann took Max into the baron’s old study and showed him the almanac—a great, thick book as big as a family Bible—and found the entry.

“Here we are,” said the captain. “Eduard Falz-Fein.”

“What? I don’t believe it.”

“I can assure you, it’s perfectly true.”

“But Eduard was born here,” Max whispered, his voice choked with emotion. “September fourteen, 1912. Friedrich’s first son. I remember it well.”

“It seems that he was on the Liechtenstein two-man bobsled team. He’d have been, what, twenty-four? Look.
They finished in eighteenth position. Too bad. Germany in fifth and sixth, I see. Something we didn’t win that year.”

Max studied the entry in the book beside the captain’s finger for a moment and then wiped a tear from his eye. “Good,” he said finally. “I’m glad he’s all right. The child born here has become a grown man. But where is Liechtenstein? And what exactly is a two-man bobsled?”

Grenzmann explained that Liechtenstein is a German-speaking country bordered by Switzerland and Austria.

“It’s a principality with a constitutional monarchy,” he added, “and full of people with plenty of money. Your baron must still be quite a rich fellow if his family has been living there all this time. I went skiing once in Liechtenstein. Very pretty.”

Grenzmann closed the heavy book. “And a bobsled is just a large sled, only much faster than the kind of sled that children use. As well as being a rich fellow, this Eduard must be a very brave one and, to that extent at least, a typical German. Believe me, it takes a lot of guts to catapult yourself down one of these courses on one of those sleds. I did the Cresta Run on a sled at Saint Moritz once, in 1938, and I don’t mind telling you, Max, it scared the living daylights out of me. Yes, I bet he and I would be great friends.”

Max didn’t contradict the captain but he rather doubted this: anyone who was capable of shooting a herd of almost extinct horses was not someone that any Falz-Fein could ever have called a friend.

“You know, I’m glad you came tonight, Max,” said Grenzmann.

He shrugged. “Thank you for asking me,” he said politely. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“As I think I told you before, it’s possible we may have to defend this place against the Red Army. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, I should like to know the complete lay of the land. That’s just good soldiering, Max. Anyway, as a result of that, I’ve been meaning to ask you a question.”

Grenzmann beckoned Max to join him at the framed map of Askaniya-Nova on the wall of the baron’s study.

“When I first arrived, you were kind enough to show me the boundaries of the reserve on this map.”

“Yes, I remember.”

Max went over to the map and waited patiently for the captain to explain himself.

Grenzmann grinned and pointed to a name at the bottom of the map. “Bruno Hassenstein. You can tell it was a German who made this map. It’s very detailed: a scale, contours, features—a beautiful piece of work. Nevertheless, there are one or two features of this map that puzzle me.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“Well, here of course is the big house, where we are now,” said Grenzmann. “Here are the lakes and the local villages—even the highest point on the steppe is neatly marked. This, I think, must be your famous blue cottage. Yes, even that appears on this map. But these features
here are a mystery to me. They appear to be a collection of man-made structures—you see the little squares and the two little circles?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea what these are?”

Max shook his head. “I’m not very good at reading maps, sir.”

“But it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

“If you say so, sir.”

Grenzmann tapped the glass covering the map with his finger. “I’ve looked for these structures when I’ve been out riding, but with no luck. Naturally, I’m reluctant to remove this map from the frame and take it with me.” He shrugged. “I suppose I could make a copy. But I thought it might just be easier to ask you.”

“My memory is not what it was, sir.”

“And yet you had no problem remembering the date that Eduard Falz-Fein was born. That’s curious, too, don’t you think?”

“To be fair, the birth of a child is an important date, sir. At least it was in this house.”

Max leaned toward the map and took a closer look, for form’s sake. He could tell that Grenzmann was not going to let this go. The German was like a terrier with a rat when there was something on his mind. And his piercing blue eyes always seemed to hint that he knew much more than he was letting on; it was, thought Max, very unnerving.

“Now I come to think about this,” he said, “I suppose it could be the ruins of an old pumping station. For water. I seem to remember that the baron made some efforts to irrigate the eastern part of the reserve. This is years ago, mind. Sorry, I’d completely forgotten about it.”

“A pumping station,” said Grenzmann. “That’s interesting.”

“Is there something wrong with the water supply in the house, sir?”

“No, Max. The water from the well here is good. In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s excellent. Like I said, this was a soldier’s inquiry. Please tell me more about this old pumping station.”

“Let me see now, sir. It was badly damaged during the earthquake of 1927, and like a lot of things around here, it hasn’t worked since. You know, there’s a whole village on this map where everyone died during the great famine of 1932. You can still see it. But no one lives there.” Max pointed at a place on the map. “It was here, I think.”