The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr Page A

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.”
    “Yes, I’ve seen that village.” The captain shrugged. “It’s of no interest to anyone.”
    “That’s just how it was in those days, sir. Things got built. Things were abandoned. Things are forgotten. And really, that’s the story of Mother Russia.”
    “I wasn’t asking you for a history lesson, Max. I’m a German. We don’t read history; we
make
it. I was asking if you knew what these structures might be. But thank you, I think you’ve answered my question.” He smiled.“As I knew you would. Now let’s go and eat. I could eat a horse. Which is just as well, perhaps, as that’s what we’re having for dinner.”
    Captain Grenzmann thought this was very funny and laughed a great loud laugh that Max realized was curiously like the sound of a horse whinnying.
    Max tried to smile back, and then gave it up as a bad job. Whatever appetite he might have had—which wasn’t much, considering what was on the menu—had been lost the moment that he’d realized he was socializing with the very men who’d murdered Kalinka’s family. And now that Grenzmann had asked him about the water pumping station, he felt physically sick.

A S A LITTLE GIRL back in Dnepropetrovsk, making paints—with cornstarch, salt, egg yolk and food colorings like cochineal, paprika, betanin, caramel and elderberry juice—had always been as much fun for Kalinka as actually painting a picture.
    Her father put it differently: “Making a mess in the kitchen,” he said, “seems to give my daughter more pleasure than almost anything.”
    Not that he ever seemed to mind all that much; besides, Kalinka always knew that she could make everything better with him by taking off his black hat—her father always wore some kind of hat, even when he was in the house—and kissing his strange-smelling head.
    She didn’t have any food coloring in her new home at Askaniya-Nova, but she had some tea, some egg yolk and some strawberry jam; and most important of all, she had some charcoal from the fire.
    “This is going to be fun,” she told Taras as she mixed her paints.
    Kalinka didn’t know exactly
how
those prehistoric men had painted the walls of their caves, but she knew that most of their tools had been made of flint; consequently, she imagined—correctly—that instead of brushes and palette knives, they had used their fingers for painting pictures on stone walls.
    After a number of experimental palm prints on the wall—open black hands that looked like a warning of something dangerous—Kalinka tried drawing a horse with a knob of charcoal, but it needed several attempts before she got one with which she was really happy.
    “The neck of a Przewalski’s is much more curved than a modern horse’s,” she told Taras. “A bit like a hunter’s bow, don’t you think?”
    Taras barked.
    The success of these smaller paintings prompted Kalinka to be a little bolder and adventurous with her next endeavor, and working on a much larger scale seemed to inspire