1944 (Part II)

Before anything else I gathered up all my savings, and this was not at all a small sum. To the apartment we occupied on the second floor belonged a relatively large garden with a shack that adjoined one of the streets, relatively busy, onto which came out the one, medium sized, as if in a stable, window. 

Before the war this hovel fulfilled the function of a garage for a large motorcycle with a side cab, while during the war it served as a depot for fuel and partially as a stable for three goats apparently held there, whose traces, in the form of already well dried goat droppings, covered the floor. 

For two days, working hard, I outfitted this strange place to my planned out ventures. My mother, not knowing the details, was very glad that finally I was doing something useful, and not wandering off with my buddies, constantly bugging the army. 

When everything was already ready, I bought a liter of vodka, and at some poor country market, because what kind of a market could it be without Jews, I bought a large bag of hay, a twenty five kilogram bag of oats, half a kilogram of very expensive sugar cubes as well as a cheap harness with a webbed belt but no reigns. 

I hauled all of this to the garden and now all that was left for me was to wait. At the end of the third day I saw a stampede of several thousand horses, herded by Asian drivers armed with Schmeissers. As usual the horses with assertion drove through the street adjoining my garden, taking up exactly the entire width. After some time I went out with the vodka into the street, showing the flask to one of the Asians. 

Intrigued he bucked his horse, stopping in his place. 

“I suppose you want something?” he asked in Russian. 

I confirmed it, showing him discretely the opened gate to the garden, almost next to the garage-stable. 

“Go there and wait, I’ll be there soon,” he answered. 

After two minutes he rode up, leading on a relatively fat, professionally tied whip cord a second horse. 

“This is a good horse,” he pulled him by his mane and lifting his head up, looking it in the mouth. 

“Four years in him,” he led him in the direction of the open doors to the stable-garage and sitting on his horse, gave mine a good kick in the rump, until he lightly squat jumped—and was already inside. 

The Asian took the flask, checking still the liquor stamp on the gray seal, and in a gallop returned to his own. I went inside. 

My horse stood politely, he snorted a little, smelled the walls a little, moving his back leg every so often as if kicking the concrete floor. 

You could tell that he had never been nailed down before. I gave him a couple of cubes of sugar, which he liked very much, most likely he was eating sugar for the first time in his life. 

His mane was rather long, as if braided even, very thick, of a gray color and not too high. It was quite possible that the Kalmyk who sold it to me, seeing that he was conducting a transaction with a child, chose some thing approaching its last legs. 

He was relatively gentle, I did not notice in him a tendency to kick, but when he didn’t like something, or if he even thought he wouldn’t like it, then he immediately made a mean face, closed his eyes, pulled his ears back and began to show his teeth. 

Because from early childhood I had been around horses, I knew that in such a situation you had to, open palmed, decidedly and very quickly, so that on the way he didn’t have a chance to catch your hand with his teeth, smack the beast in the face. Evening approached. 

I gave him water from a bucket, because in the neighboring abandoned garden I found a well. He ate some oats, I hung before him also a bundle of hay, the stable-garage I closed on the large padlock, and returned home. 

My mother immediately recognized by the smell that I had been working with horses. Brazenly fibbing, I told her that while I was in the garden some pony wandered up to me and now lived in the garage-stable, but that he had something to eat and to drink.