The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr Page B

her to draw the outline of a really excellent horse—one that was easily good enough to color in with a shade of brown made from tea and jam, which was perfect for rendering the dun-colored body of a Przewalski’s horse. This color, mixed with a little charcoal, was just right for the animal’s leg stripes, mane and all-important tail.
    When she was at the stage of wondering what else to do to her picture—a work of art is never finished, onlyever abandoned—Kalinka walked to the opposite side of the water tank and, holding up the lamp, tried to judge her own work critically.
    “What do you think, Taras?” she asked the dog.
    Taras looked at the picture, inclined his head one way, then the other and wagged his tail.
    In the flickering firelight, Kalinka decided the painting was pretty good—so good that she started painting another running horse almost immediately.
    While she was working, Temüjin came into Kalinka’s water tank to see what she was doing; his sense of another horse like him was so keen that he had felt its presence even though it was only a painting on a stone wall. The stallion stared at the picture for a full two minutes: like a cat looking at a mirror, he was fascinated with this image of himself.
    Before long, Kalinka had created not just several horses running around the walls but also a reasonable imitation of a real prehistoric cave. When she compared her own efforts with the pictures in Max’s book, she felt that she had exceeded her own expectations.
    “Not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all. Even though I say so myself. Perhaps, deep down, all painting is the same: no one ought to or can teach you how to paint the wall of a cave. It’s something you can or you can’t do.”
    Looking at her work now, Kalinka felt she had a new understanding of those ancient cavemen. She thought it was only too easy to imagine that outside her littleshelter, on the windblown steppe, it was a primordial world of unimaginable harshness and severity; and in a way, of course, it was just such a world. Perhaps it was worse than that, for even at its harshest, Stone Age life was never as nasty, brutish and short as life on the Russian front. No saber-toothed tiger, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, cave bear or Neanderthal man had ever witnessed the cruelty Kalinka had seen.
    But a new thought now presented itself to her inquisitive young mind.
    “You know, Taras, I wonder if it was cavemen who painted these pictures at all. Everyone assumes it was them. But why? Why couldn’t it have been cave
women
? After all, it’s usually the women who fix up a place and try to make it look nice. That’s how it was for us back in Dnepropetrovsk. My papa was out working all day, and my mama was the one who stayed home cooking, cleaning, putting up curtains, hanging pictures and making everything neat and tidy. My papa was generally too tired to lift anything but a newspaper or his tea glass when he came home at night. It’s hard to think of his Stone Age equivalent painting pictures on the walls of his cave after a day of hunting mammoth.”
    She shrugged.
    “Either way, I can’t wait to see what Max thinks of my cave. You know, it’s a pity he’s coming tomorrow morning, because I think these paintings look so much better at night and in the firelight. It’s almost as if the horses areactually moving around the walls. If you half close your eyes, the flames seem to create the illusion that they’re really running. It’s a bit like going to the cinema theater. Except that these moving pictures are in color, of course. I’ve only ever seen movies that are in black and white.”
    Temüjin nodded his appreciation and allowed Kalinka to hug his back fondly, which was not something he had allowed before. Neither of them could have known that the girl’s pictures were almost prophetic, and that within a matter of hours, Temüjin and Börte would be running for their lives.
    Kalinka’s heart skipped a beat when she heard