Valya reached for the pocket of her parka and the little sculpture of the wild horse. She ran her fingers along its shape – across its face, forehead, crest, shoulders, back, hindquarters, and four legs – and took reassurance from its presence.
Behind her seat in the truck travelling westward, there were all the other works of the Great Artist. As curator of the commemorative museum in the Great Artist’s home village, Valya and her handyman, Vadym, had packed all the art in bubble wrap and placed it in some five dozen cardboard boxes. She had felt like they were suffocating the paintings, sculptures, drawings and jewelry pieces as they layered on the plastic and secured it with packing tape. Nothing had been spared or left behind.
The little horse – Valya couldn’t bring herself to wrap it up. Rather, she closely carried it in her embroidered handkerchief. It was a piece made of bright blue ceramic pottery – the color that the old houses in the village were still brush-painted by their elderly farmer residents. For the horse’s wavy mane, the Great Artist had in-laid goldleaf. For its eyes, small amber gemstones had been affixed. For its hooves, there were little white pieces of what once might have been a teacup. The sculpture was a marvel of mastery by an artist who was Great now but who had been a seamstress on a collective farm when she had made it.
Why Trump Behaves Like a Mafioso
Did the Great Artist ever see one of the wild horses during her life, Valya had always wondered. The woman had lived in the village through the famine of the 30s and the war of the 40s. It was possible that she had; no one really knew exactly when the wild horses had disappeared from the steppe which was as huge and relentless as the violence that coursed it. But it was also possible that the creation came entirely from the vastness of the Great Artist’s imagination. Valya liked to think that the horse rode on the intricate balance of the intentional and the illusory, of the observed and the oblique, of the conjured past and the captured present.
She looked out the truck’s window. They were now two villages away, but still within range of the enemy’s rain of steel. The truck jolted on a pothole as they drove past a school building that had been hit. A wall had been blown out and Valya noticed kids’ watercolor drawings inside their former classroom. Winter’s snow drifted into the fresh ruin.
“If the orcs don’t get us, these damned roads will,” Vadym said.
He was some 30 years Valya’s senior and had grown up under the hammer-and-sickle not the trident. His breath smelled of cheap cigarettes and the homebrewed “horilka” that he kept in old plastic Coke bottles in the tool shed at the museum. But, like many of the men of his era, he could fix anything and Valya valued him.
’Well, Vadym Stepanovych, your golden hands will now need to steer us to safety,’ Valya said, using the old form of address.
Valya kept trying to visualize what safety looked like. A secure and secret storage facility in the capital city where they would unload their precious contents. Her painter friend’s tasteful flat that was, for now, out of the line of fire. A generous offer from a European NGO to document cultural conservation during wartime. These were the things meant to draw her forward.
Her curator colleagues in the big museums had rallied to the cause of rescuing and protecting the Great Artist’s work. “We each fight on our own front, Valya,” one had said to her. She had heard that a lot since the war had started; it was a rhetorical ritual of their resistance. She would need to call those colleagues now and let them know when the truck was likely to arrive; people were needed to unpack and store the collection. The busy work of sanity and safety. But, as much as she tried and as much as part of her knew that the basics were a blessing, Valya struggled to concentrate on the practical tasks before her. Her logical mind said “look ahead” and her soul steered to memory.
Before the war, students and cultural tourists from their own country and other countries had made the trip to the obscure village to see the Great Artist’s collected works. They could also see loaned pieces in institutions from New York to Munich to Sydney, but many excitedly spoke to Valya of “how authentic” it was to see them where they had been conceived. How the Great Artist’s “naïve” practice was “so heart-warming” in an age of screens and exhausted aesthetics.
“Look, Pani Director. There’s more headed the other way,” Vadym said as he looked at on-coming traffic. “Old T-64s and a BTR with a .50 caliber machine gun.”
A short column of military vehicles clumsily clanked past them. Volunteer citizen soldiers in a patchwork of different camo uniforms – a seeming quilt of resilience – rode atop two tanks and an armored personnel carrier. Their rifles – mostly relics from a forgotten war in a forgotten place – lay across their laps. Around their combat helmets, there was the same blue tape that Valya and Vadym had used to seal up the cardboard boxes. One young soldier held up a three-fingered salute.
Valya rested her fingers on the little horse once more and felt clearer. Some years ago, she had travelled to the sequestered zone of the nuclear accident – the site where her uncle had been a firefighter right after the explosion. She had wanted to see what he must have experienced. As the tour bus made its way through the surrounding forest, untouched by humans for more than 30 years, she had seen them. In a stand of pines stood three mature wild horses and a small pony. Their hides were a dusky blonde and their long-flowing manes lighter in shade. Valya watched them hold their ground and steadily gaze at the approaching vehicle.
They didn’t know to be afraid of humans, Valya had thought to herself then. What was it like to be so purely beautiful and to have no consciousness of it, she wondered.
Now, she saw some more military vehicles approaching about 400 meters up the road.
“Probably the commander’s car and the communications guys,” Vadym said.
“Could you stop them please, Vadym Stepanovych?” Valya suddenly said.
“What? What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“Please.”
She would text and let her friends in the capital know that Vadym would soon meet them. If they could please give him a good meal and a strong drink, she would ask.
There was still some remaining bubble wrap in the bare rooms where only the interpretative signage was left on the walls of the Great Artist’s village museum. There was the metal box Valya had used to collect donations from visitors. There was a spade in Vadym’s tool shed. There was a cherry tree outside the front entrance of the museum that would bloom again come spring.
As the on-coming olive-drab car slowed to stop near her, Valya again touched the little horse in her pocket.
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