‘Yes,’ she said, after a brief pause. ‘Yes, I suppose I could.’
It got easier through the summer. Ferenc came to see her the day after their initial conversation, and after making sure she could spare an hour or so, he took her for a walk down by the river, behind the backs of the houses, curtain after curtain twitching as they passed. As they walked, he talked about the news of the village, who’d been talking to whom, who’d bought what at the market, the minutiae of village life. She was silent at first, and he noticed her frown at certain names, Orsolya Kiss’s most of all.
‘Do you know what else I saw today?’ he said, that day by the river, deliberately casual.
‘What?’ Sari asked, guarded.
‘I was walking past the square, and there was Orsolya Kiss.’ He saw her stiffen, but went on regardless. ‘She’d bought some potatoes from the Gyulai family. She bought so many, I had to keep watching her, because I couldn’t see how she was going to carry them all.’ She was watching him now, trying not to be obvious about it, but shooting him furtive little glances under her eyelashes. ‘Anyway. She came out of the house – and Tomas Gersek had just passed with his big dog, you know?’ She nodded. ‘And the dog had done its business there, by the square. And there was Orsolya, all puffing and struggling with this enormous mound of potatoes, and not looking where she put her feet – and she trod right in it, and slipped, and fell, and those potatoes went everywhere—’ and he’d done it! She was laughing. ‘That was my reaction, too,’ Ferenc confided. ‘I had to hide in the alley so she wouldn’t see me.’
She looked at him then, and smiled, the first genuine smile he’d seen her give, and such a feeling of happiness and triumph washed over him that he wanted to crow, to scoop her up in his arms and run off into the forest with her.
Instead, he just smiled back.
The next time they walked, Sari talked, too. They went along by the river and Sari paused every few paces to yank some herb or other out of the ground.
‘Anise,’ she would explain, customarily taciturn. ‘Good for coughing.’ Or ‘Chamomile – for digestion.’
‘Careful,’ he attempted a joke. ‘Don’t tell me too much, or I’ll do your dad out of a job.’
She laughed at that. ‘Oh, I’m hardly telling you anything! You have to learn how to prepare them, what to mix them with, which amounts you should use before you can be of any help. There’s other things, too,’ she added vaguely, her face closing up. ‘Things you have to do, to make sure they work.’
‘You’ve learnt a lot from your father,’ Ferenc said, slightly uneasily. While a táltos was respected more than feared, for a boszorkány, the female equivalent, the reverse was true. Sari shrugged, unconcerned.
‘A lot from him, and some from Judit, too.’ Seeing Ferenc’s slight recoil, she snapped, with the swift change of mood he was coming to expect of her, ‘Oh, don’t tell me you’re like the rest of them? There’s nothing Judit does that’s worse than what my father does – in fact some people go to Judit, rather than my father, when they’re ill. Why do people respect my father but not Judit? Because she’s a woman?’ She let out a harsh sigh, and Ferenc reflected that this was perhaps the greatest number of words she’d spoken together in his presence. To his surprise, he found himself agreeing with her. He doubted he would ever feel entirely comfortable in Judit’s presence; she had that disturbing way of looking, but:
‘You’re right,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s not fair.’
On their third walk, she told him about Jane Eyre, in short, straightforward sentences. It didn’t sound like the sort of book that Ferenc would like to read – if he read at all, he would want stories with fighting, and adventure, and maybe pirates – but he was becoming so interested in Sari that he listened attentively, and a glimmer of understanding grew. A woman not the norm, a woman educated … there was bound to be a strong appeal for Sari in a heroine of this type.
‘But this Mister Rock – Roch—’ his tongue tripped over the English name.
‘Rochester,’ Sari supplied.
‘Yes, him. I don’t understand – why does Jane love him? He’s so old, and not handsome, with his daughter, and his wife.’
Sari lifted one shoulder. ‘I think he interests her,’ she said slowly. ‘In some lives, it doesn’t take very much.’
On walk number four, he kissed her. He’d tensed himself for a slap, or a kick, or even a rake of her nails down his cheek, but she’d been swarming through his dreams like never before, and he found that he couldn’t not touch her any more. And to his surprise and delight, after a couple of secondswhere she stood rigid, she started to kiss him back. He’d kissed other girls, of course – furtive gropes on summer holidays – but this was palpably different. Sari couldn’t have had any experience of this, he knew; how would she have got the chance in Falucska? He couldn’t think of any local boys who would have dared to try, but she was somehow a natural; the way she shifted her body to accommodate his, the slight tilt of her head, and when he raised his hand to touch her cheek he found it shockingly hot. It didn’t last for long, and when they broke apart his head and heart was pounding; he could practically feel the violent push of blood through his body. She looked maddeningly cool, eyes cast down, a faint colour on her bone pale cheeks the only indication that something unusual had occurred.
‘Sari,’ he said throatily, just to taste her name, not that he had anything to say to her.
She looked up at him and grinned. ‘I have to go,’ she said.
Walk number five was to have been the day after Jan died, so was cancelled.
It is several days after Jan’s funeral before Ferenc’s able to speak to Sari. He’s desperate to talk to her, to find out if she’s all right, and more, to find out what she’s planning to do. Without him noticing, over the summer, the idea of marriage to her has gone from something that he was considering to something that he’s taking for granted will come to pass. Sari’s only fourteen, it’s true – but she’ll be fifteen in November, and that’s young, but not too young to marry. When Jan was alive, that was one thing, Ferenc could have waited then, but he’s decided that he wants her, now, wants nothing so much, and he’s ready for marriage, he knows. And what’s she going to do, otherwise? Live alone in her father’s house on the edge of the village, and take care of herself? Instead, she could move into the Gazdag household, and be taken care of, absorbed into a family that she is almost a part of already, living the sort of life that no one else in the village could aspire to. And maybe, maybe it would normalise her somewhat, smooth off a few of those rough edges; by eighteen it might be too late. He loves her as she is, of course – or if it isn’t quite love yet, it’s something rather like it – but it wouldn’t really hurt, he thinks, if she were just a little more like everyone else.
He’s wanted to speak to her since the funeral but she’s been with Judit Fekete so much of the time – and despite what Ferenc said to Sari about Judit, she still scares him a little. She’s so small that it seems ridiculous that she could intimidate him, until he remembers her fierce, malevolent black eyes. But after four days of watching Sari from afar, he sees her leave Judit’s house one morning – alone! – and head off, skirting the village, towards her father’s house where it stands, crouching low by the edge of the woods. He follows her at a slightly shameful distance, loitering at the point where her path becomes grass as he watches her mount the steps, testing each one carefully with her foot for rot or damp. He finds himself unaccountably afraid of approaching her and he dithers, stepping forward and back, until the door opens again and Sari stands on the step, shading her eyes.
‘Ferenc,’ she calls, and his feet start to move, almost independently of his will, elated but at the same time irritated by his immediate obedience.
By the time he’s in the house she’s no longer waiting at the door, and he finds her on her knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor violently.
‘This house,’ she pant ‘The dust – it gets dirty so quickly.’
> Ferenc doesn’t know what to say, shifting his weight from one foot to another. ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurts at last, delving in his trouser pockets. ‘Look – Sari – I brought you this.’
He holds his hand out to her, the book he is gripping shaking slightly. She rears back on her knees and looks at him silently for a moment before wiping her damp hand thoughtlessly on her skirt and taking it.
‘I don’t know if you’ve read it,’ he blunders on, ‘but I thought you might—’
She turns the book over. ‘Wuthering Heights,’ she says to herself.
‘It – it’s by the same person who wrote—’
‘No, it’s not, it’s her sister,’ she interrupts, then smiles faintly at his crestfallen face. ‘I haven’t read it,’ she says, her voice unusually gentle, ‘but I’ve heard about it. Thank you. Where did you—’
‘Oh, Mama had it round the house,’ he spouts his prepared line, not wishing to let her know of the over-eager journey to Város the other day to buy it.
‘Won’t she miss it?’
‘She doesn’t read much.’
Sari gets up then, places the book carefully on the table, and sits down. ‘Sit,’ she waves at the chair opposite.
The silence is fathomless.
‘How are you?’ Ferenc asks at last.
‘Oh, fine. Sad. But fine. I’d been expecting it.’
‘You must be worried about what you’re going to do,’ he ventures, and she raises an eyebrow at him.
‘Must I?’
‘Well, you’re on your own, and you must – you can’t live on your own here, and I – I mean, I haven’t spoken to my parents about it yet, but I’m sure … and I know Jan said we shouldn’t until … but it seems to make sense now.’ He trails into silence, having cunningly said nothing concrete, but framed his intentions clearly in unfinished sentences.
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I thought you might be thinking about that.’
‘So …?’
‘No.’
He feels as if the breath has been knocked out of him, as she sighs a little, suddenly seeming a lot older.
‘Ferenc, I like you. I’m surprised at how much I like you. And I’m happy to marry you when I turn eighteen, if you’re happy. But not yet. I promised my father, not yet.’
‘But what will you—? I mean, you can’t—’ He can’t bear the idea of her living alone in this old house; it’s bound to only exacerbate her strangeness, both in the eyes of the village and in reality.
‘I’m not going to stay here all the time. Judit says I can live with her, and I’ll become her apprentice.’
‘Judit!’ he exclaims. He is hot, angry and humiliated, but he can’t quite say why. He just wants her, that’s all, and he thought he was going to have her, and now she’s going back out of reach, and how on earth could she prefer the idea – She puts her hand on his.
‘I’m sorry, Ferenc. I can see that this disappoints you. But you must just be patient, that’s all. I don’t want to break a promise that I made to my father. And I just – I’m not—’ she falters, which is rare, Ferenc thinks. Normally her short, unelaborate sentences drop out of her mouth fully formed, seeming to reflect a complete certainty of opinion.
‘I’m not ready,’ she says at last. ‘And I feel that this is a bad time.’
‘A bad time for what? For whom?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel that it would be wrong to do it now.’
Ferenc feels suddenly, frighteningly, that he is going to weep with frustration, and for a moment he hates her. Whenever he’s around Sari, it’s as if he’s unravelling: he’s less and less what he thinks of as himself, and though he has no particularly exalted opinion of himself, reliability, steadiness, predictability – these are qualities that he usually feels secure in possessing. Over the past few months he’s been like a horse maddened by a horsefly, wallowing in disproportionate bliss when the irritation is taken away. Sari has amazed him by making him feel more intense excitement than he thought existed, but, he realises, sometimes he doesn’t like himself much around her. Twice since getting to know her he’d been woken from eerie dreams of the szépasszony, the fair ladies – and while he knows that Sari’s nothing but a girl, he sometimes finds himself wary of her.
‘You should go,’ she says suddenly, and he looks down in surprise to see his hands gripping the edge of the table in a vicious, rictus-like grip. Later, he will find long, ridged bruises on the palms of his hands. He’s vaguely conscious that, as far as marriage proposals go, this one has been far from an unqualified success.
‘Yes,’ he says, unmoving. She gets up instead, and moves towards the door, opening it for him.
‘Goodbye, Ferenc,’ she says quietly. ‘Come and see me when you’re feeling better.’
He leaves.
CHAPTER THREE
The summer gives no sign of ending, until one day, suddenly, the earth coughs and all the yellowed leaves fall off the trees to lie on the ground like shells. Sari feels like she’s waiting for something elusive and indefinable. Fond as she is of Judit, living with her is odd. Judit hasn’t lived with anyone for many, many years – village lore holds that she had a husband, years ago, in her youth, but Sari can’t quite believe this; it seems preposterous that Judit hasn’t always been as she is – and when she bumps into her early in the morning, Judit always seems surprised and a little put out. Sari’s quite aware of the need to adapt, to smooth herself around Judit’s angles and edges, but it’s not always clear how to do so.
Still, Sari thinks that things could hardly be better. She misses her father, of course, both for who he was, and for how he treated her. As far back as she can remember, he treated her as if she was intelligent, involving her in every aspect of his work, and the older she grew, the luckier she realised herself to be, and the more at odds with the other women she knew. When he died, she feared that all that was over, that she would be crammed inexorably into the prefabricated mould out of which most village women seemed to step. Who would teach her things now? Who would care that she could read, let alone that she was at ease in both Magyar and German?
Judit cares, and for that Sari is passionately thankful. Judit embraces her quick mind and is happy to fill it with knowledge, day after day, and Judit welcomes the knowledge that Sari has brought from her father and listens, head cocked, as Sari explains alternative properties of a herb that they’re using, or a more efficient way to prepare it. And Judit trusts Sari, letting her mix medicines and pick herbs, and, she says, Éva Orczy is due any day now, and when the time comes, Sari can accompany Judit to the birth.
Much as she loved her father, Sari always realised that he taught her things in spite of her sex; she’s excited to find that there’s no such sentiment in Judit, but quite the opposite.
‘There’s power,’ Judit says, ‘in here’ – indicating her flaccid breasts – ‘and here’ – waving a hand over her midriff and the darkness enclosed – ‘and especially here!’ She points crudely at her cunt, elaborating with a salacious wink. Sari has dimly sensed the power of these things with Ferenc, but under Judit’s tutelage she begins to get an inkling of what this power can do. Perhaps, she thinks, there are arenas where being female is an asset, not a hindrance.
She knows that Judit doesn’t tell her everything, however. Judit sets far more stock in incantations and mystery than Sari’s father ever did, and there are some parts of her work that she’s seemed reluctant to explain to Sari. Once, only a week or two after Sari had moved in, she’d woken, thirsty, in the middle of the night; stumbling through the unfamiliar house on the way to the jug of water that stood in the kitchen, Sari had been taken aback to find Judit sat at the dining table, lit only by a dim oil lamp, in deep conversation with a pale, tight-faced woman whom Sari didn’t recognise.
When Judit looked up she’d frowned. ‘I’d forgotten about you,’ she said, sounding annoyed, and Sari had hurried to fetch her water and leave as quick as she could.
In the morning, the woman
was gone, and Judit had responded to Sari’s queries in even shorter sentences than usual. ‘She’s from the next village,’ she’d said, ‘Nothing you need to worry about.’
Since then, there have been a couple of occasions when Judit has left the house, with a terse shake of her head at Sari if she makes a move to follow, and Sari soon gives up trying to prise information out of Judit’s shut-fast mouth; she’ll tell her when she was good and ready, and not before. Still, sometimes when Sari is lying in bed, hearing Judit moving in the kitchen, speaking low-voiced to herself, Sari wonders quite how much she really wants to know.
And then there’s Ferenc: that’s perhaps the one area where Sari feels most confused. After she refused to marry him immediately, she didn’t see him for days, and this made her unaccountably sad. She’s always surprised to find that she likes him. He’s steady, and she likes that; she sometimes feels as rootless and flexible as the long grasses that flap in the wind on the plain, and she feels that Ferenc may be able to anchor her. And the light of respectability in which he could cast her shouldn’t be underestimated. Sari cannot remember ever being treated better than with mild disdain, or fleeting fear, or faintly patronising pity, and much as she tells herself she doesn’t care, she sometimes feels a wistful longing to be liked. She imagines, maybe, walking through the village with Ferenc, and not having people slide their eyes to look at her, or raise their hands to hide their whispers.
After those few days, Ferenc started to visit again, and she was relieved. But something had changed. While his conversation was as light and friendly as ever, he would now sometimes fall silent, and the cast of his face as he looked at Sari unsettled her. She misses his simplicity, now, which has somehow been shed, but she doesn’t know how to get it back. He doesn’t try to kiss her any more, and she’s not even sure whether they’re properly engaged, as they’ve not performed the traditional ceremony, both drinking from the same cup. But perhaps Ferenc, with his wealthy family, and his frequent trips to Budapest, is beyond that sort of nonsense? In her spare moments, she’s embroidering a handkerchief for him, the sort that engaged men wear, but she’s not sure whether she has the courage to give it to him – not just because of the clumsy unevenness of her stitches, but because she’s not sure what it will mean to him.
The Angel Makers Page 3
