Prince of Ponies

Rolf growled a little, as if he were cautioning Mira when she stepped away from him and circled the fence to move closer to the horse.

She climbed up the rails and the horse stepped closer to her. Then he craned his elegant neck so that his muzzle was only a metre or two away from Mira’s face. She reached an arm out to him. The horse didn’t shy away from her, but stepped in again, stretching his muzzle to her hand. Mira wished she had a treat to offer him instead of her empty palm.

The horse stepped closer again and now he was standing almost side-on to her. All she needed to do to get on to his back at that moment was to stand up on the fence rail and turn sideways a little and make the leap. If she did so, she would find herself sitting on the horse’s back!

Behind her, she could hear Rolf give a low warning growl, but she didn’t turn to see what the dachshund was grumbling about. Her total focus was locked on the horse that stood there in front of her. She stood up, wobbling a little as she found her balance, perched on the rail on the balls of her feet, her hands still clinging on to the top rail. Her heart was pounding as she shimmied herself along the rail a tiny step or two, so that now she was in the perfect position just next to the horse’s broad, silver-grey back.

As she leapt, two things happened at once. The first was that the horse did not stay still as she’d expected him to do. Instead, he gave a startled snort at the sight of the girl propelling herself through the air, and he bolted. The second, more remarkable thing, was that Mira found herself suspended in mid-air and then abruptly jerked backwards again, so that when the horse disappeared out from under her, she didn’t fall to the ground. She had been grabbed from behind and now she found herself not falling but being held in strong arms and eased down gently to the earth.

And then, in her ear, louder than the sound of her own heart pounding, came the staccato bark of a woman chastising her in furious German. Mira turned round to see that the person who’d taken hold of her was an old woman, and the lady was yelling at her in rapid-fire language, speaking so quickly that Mira couldn’t possibly hope to keep up with the words.

It was hard to believe that this frail, elderly figure in front of her had been the one who’d just pulled her back from her daredevil leap. And yet that seemed to be the case as she was now standing there, arms waving wildly as she gave Mira a piece of her mind!

The old woman was dressed in an ancient flowery silk blouse tucked into faded green tracksuit trousers. She had brown knitted woollen slippers on her feet and her fine white hair was swept up into a loose bun that was twisted and pinned with a wooden clasp at the back. She was still barking away in German but it had at least slowed down from the rapid-fire shouting to a mild yelling. Mira tried to understand her, listening hard to decipher what was being said. Something about a king? No, not a king exactly. An emir! And then the penny dropped and Mira realised: that was his name! The horse – his name was Emir, and the woman was talking about him.

“What did you think you were dealing with here? Some tame riding school pony?” she was asking. “Emir is sensitive, powerful, highly strung. You are lucky that he did not kill you! If I had not got to you in time, this would have ended very badly for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Mira muttered.

“You should be!” the woman snapped. “Now clear off! Get out of here. This is private property, you know. Not the public forest. If you want a riding school, there is one in Grunewald near the Waldsee. Go there instead!”

“I …” Mira was too terrified to respond.

“Go on! What are you still here for?” the woman barked. “Are you simple-minded? I told you to leave!”

“I need … to untie Rolf,” Mira replied. She pointed over the woman’s shoulder to the little dachshund, who was still hitched up to the fence post. Rolf, seemingly unaware of the tension between Mira and the old lady, was standing up on his hind legs rather adorably and, at the sound of his name, he began yipping and wagging his great plume of a tail.

His foolish antics made the old woman lose a little of her bluster. “Yes, well,” she harrumphed in a gentler tone. “Of course. Fetch your dog and go.”

“He’s not my dog,” Mira said.

“What?” the old woman growled.

“Rolf is not mine,” Mira said. “I take care of him for Frau Schmidt. I’m not allowed a dog of my own.”

“Why on earth not?” The old woman frowned.

“A dog is another mouth to feed.” Mira was repeating her mother’s words, the phrase she used whenever Mira had asked for a pet.

“Who cannot afford to feed a mouth this small?” the old woman scoffed. “Typical, though, I suppose. People always think of themselves first, never of the animals who suffer …” Tutting and muttering away, she bent down and patted Rolf. The dachshund, oozing charm now, stood up on his hind legs to meet her and all the anger in the old woman disappeared and she gave a little laugh.

“Do you know, I had a dog like him when I was your age. Well, not really like him. Olaf was a Polish hound, much bigger than a dachshund, but he was a good dog. And he was so loyal, just like lovely little Rolf here …” She looked as if she were about to continue the story, but her eyes turned misty and she trailed off and turned back to Mira instead.

“Your German. It is strange. You speak with an accent. Where are you from?”

“Aleppo,” Mira replied.

“Aleppo?” the old woman grunted. “Where is that?”

“Syria.”

“A refugee, are you? I’m sure they do not have horses where you are from, so you know nothing and think that you can come along like that and just throw yourself on to his back?”

“We have horses,” Mira objected. “And I know how to ride. I rode in Syria. There was a stable in the city. I went every week on a Wednesday.”

“Well, that makes it even worse! You should know better than to try to mount a strange horse like that!” the old woman shot back. “And just because you rode some donkey back in the desert, don’t think that makes you a rider.”

“It wasn’t a donkey, they were good horses,” Mira insisted. “I do know how to ride. I had proper lessons.”

The old woman screwed up her face. “Perhaps you have ridden a little. But nothing you have ridden in the past could have prepared you for him.” She gave a whistle and the stallion, who had been standing at a distance on the far side of the arena, pricked his ears and stepped obediently towards her. The old woman waited for him to get closer and then she waved one hand in the air above her head and made a clucking sound with her tongue. Suddenly the stallion rocked back on his hocks and pivoted round so that he was facing the far side of the arena and in one swift powerful bound he accelerated forward and leapt up into a trot. His head and his tail were both held high and his front hooves seemed to flick out in front of him, as if he were dancing across the sand.

“Do you see that trot?” The old woman watched him proudly. “So expressive, the way he covers the ground. He is an amazing mover and the power of his paces is far too much for all except the very best of riders. If you had managed to climb on to his back, he would have put you on the floor in an instant. You are not prepared for a horse like Emir.”

Mira watched, entranced by the movement of the horse. “He must be valuable.”

“He is priceless,” the old woman replied. “His bloodlines are the very best in the world. An Arabian from Poland – like me.”

“You’re Arabian?”

This made the old woman chuckle. “I’m Polish, child. And you are Syrian. So it seems the only one of us here who is a true German is Rolf.”

She cocked an eyebrow at Mira.

“You speak German very well for a refugee. Tell me, can you write it too?”

“Yes,” Mira said. “Yes, at school they say my writing is very good.”

“Then,” the old woman said, “you had better come inside. We will have some tea, I think. I’ve baked some angel wings, and you may have some if you like? Do you like sweets? Bring the dog. He will want some too.”

And without turning to look back to see if Mira was following her, she set off across the yard towards the door to her house, shuffling in her slippers, with Rolf bounding at her heels.

***

The house was divided from the stables by an archway. Turn one way and there were three looseboxes and a hay barn, turn the other and you were almost immediately inside the old lady’s living room. This was where Mira found herself now, staring at a room that was decorated with needlepoint tapestries all over the walls. It was furnished with old wooden furniture and armchairs that seemed to be covered in a floral print similar to the old woman’s shirt, so that when she’d made the tea and put the angel wing biscuits on the table and sat down, she almost disappeared into the upholstery.

“Do you read?” she asked Mira as she passed her the plate of biscuits and tossed one on to the floor for Rolf.

“Yes,” Mira said. “I love books.” And she realised as she said the words that this was what was bothering her when she looked around the room. There were bookshelves on the far wall but they were covered in ornaments. No books. She couldn’t see a single book in the whole house. Mira didn’t have many books of her own. She mostly read what she could from the school library, but she did have a few copies on her little bookshelf in her room, and she loved them. They were her most prized possessions.

“Hmmm.” The old lady seemed pleased with the reply. “Reading is good. I should like to be able to do it myself. But I can’t.” She looked at Mira. “Oh, yes, I tried! And I went to a very good school, so my education wasn’t lacking. My parents expected that I should be clever. My father was a professor and my mother had been a teacher. All my uncles and cousins were very intellectual, but … for me … it was never possible. From the very beginning, the words bounced around on the page and would not behave. My mother couldn’t understand it, because she had always read to me. We had a library full of books! They decided I must be stupid. I wasn’t, of course. It was dyslexia. These days people know all about it. It is a condition that means you get the letters jumbled up in your eyes and your brain and to decipher them becomes impossible. But back then, no one knew this. And so I was just the half-witted girl who couldn’t read. And I guess that was what they always thought of me …”

The old woman trailed off and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief that she took from her sleeve. “Anyway. It is not reading I wish to do. It is writing.”

She put the handkerchief down and threw Rolf another angel wing, although she did not offer another biscuit to Mira.

“I am dying,” she said.

Mira looked shocked, until the old woman added, “We are all dying, of course, but I am old, very old – I’m eighty-nine, if you can believe it, so I am closer to death than you. One day I will die from old age, and it might not be that long. And before I do, I have a story – one that I would like to see recorded so that it might be told. It is important, I think. I lived in remarkable times.”