The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  That afternoon, Sari is back at Judit’s, making up a treatment for Lujza’s mother, who has been suffering from severe headaches. Although Judit would never say so directly, she believes that Sari coming to live with her when she did saved her livelihood, if not her life. The war has taken away the young men, and without young men, there’s a distinct lack of babies to deliver. But Sari’s brought with her not only the pig and the few geese she inherited from her father, but the arts of a táltos, and they’ve been far more able to vary their medical repertoire than Judit would otherwise have been.

  Of course, they’ve got to be careful: there’s a difficult line to tread between being seen as effective and being labelled a boszorkány. Over time, Judit has started to trust Sari a little more with the spells and chants she uses in her work, but Sari has always had to swear to keep all she learns secret.

  There’s a knock on the door so violent that Sari drops what she’s holding and curses. From the kitchen Judit yells ‘For God’s sake! Calm down!’ and Sari goes to answer, expecting someone laid low with stomach pains, or with a face pinched with toothache. Instead, it’s Anna.

  ‘Sari, you have to come and look!’

  Sari is already pulling on her boots. This happens semiregularly, as Sari’s known for being hawk-eyed, extremely far sighted, able to discern a face on what to everyone else just looks like a shapeless lump in the distance. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. People, on the plain to the south of the village by the Gazdag house, and they’re … doing something. Bringing something, or building, but we can’t tell. Oh, 52 come on!’

  A tangle of about ten people is clustered by the river, the village clinging to the bank behind them, all peering out into the middle distance, where the plain sweeps away to the north. Anna, clearly feeling somewhat self-important, shoulders her way through the crowd with Sari, and points to a series of dots, maybe a mile away. ‘There. Do you see?’

  Sari shades her eyes against the sun, squinting slightly, and they pop into focus, one by one.

  ‘It’s a group of men,’ she says to Anna, and the news spreads out through the group.

  ‘Men!’

  ‘But all the men are away fighting, surely?’

  ‘Is it anyone familiar?’ someone calls out from the back of the group.

  Sari shakes her head. ‘No. There’s – there’s some in uniforms. The rest – they look like foreigners, actually.’

  ‘Foreign men! But why would they come here?’

  Sari sighs slightly, an exasperated hiss of expelled breath. Honestly, she thinks.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says quietly, in the tone she generally reserves for children, ‘they haven’t chosen to come here.’

  ‘Prisoners?’ Anna asks. Anxiety and excitement fight for precedence on her face, and Sari can understand how she feels. Although she’s glad, as most of the women are glad, that they’re not having to kill and be killed for a set of amorphous ideals, it’s rather frustrating at times to know that something so incomprehensibly enormous is going on, while Falucska is oblivious to it.

  ‘They might be,’ Sari replies.

  Silenced by this, the small knot by the river turns its eyes to the distant shapes on the plain, bobbing back and forth, as industrious as ants. Sari shades her eyes again, and leans forward, intrigued.

  ‘What?’ Anna asks.

  ‘Look. You see the men?’ Anna nods. ‘Look at the one on the right. See what he’s standing next to?’ Anna squints, but shakes her head. She can’t make it out, though she sees it’s far greater in size than any of the men.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a cart, and I think it’s full of – it looks like wood. They’re building something.’

  Sari starts slightly as there’s a movement on the very edge of her vision. ‘And there’s another one!’ she says, barely able to keep the excitement out of her voice. ‘Another two – three carts, and more men. Whatever they’re doing, it’s something big.’

  By nightfall, the flush of activity has died down, but the lazy, circular movement of a guard proves Sari right: prisoners.

  The Gazdag property has been empty since the start of the war. When Ferenc, his father and brother went away to fight, the herds went to Ferenc’s uncle, who has some land not far away, as well as a lame leg and a water-tight excuse not to join the army, and Márta, once it became clear that the war was to be more protracted than the brief skirmish predicted, had gone to stay with her sister in Budapest. The property had been empty for nearly a year and a half; some of the more daring boys (too young to fight, so desperate to prove their worth in other ways) had broken in after a few months, to see if there was anything left there that could be of use to the rest of the village, but they found next to nothing in the vast, empty rooms and no one had bothered going near the house since.

  And then the prisoners arrived, and now Ferenc’s family house is a hub of activity, the epicentre out of which gossip now swirls. There is initial speculation that the army has appropriated the property without permission, and a clutch of villagers stalk off in high dudgeon to talk to the officers in charge, only to slink back in embarrassment, having had a contract, clearly signed by the Gazdag family, brandished at them like an amulet by a boy barely old enough to grow a beard. It’s clear, then, that Ferenc’s mother is not planning to come back to the village for some time, if ever, and Sari wonders whether Ferenc knows. His attachment to the village is so strong and visceral that it seems strange that his family can forsake it so easily.

  It’s nearly a week by the time word starts moving from house to house that they should get to the church because there’s going to be an official announcement of what’s been going on. Sari catches Lujza’s eye on the way there, and Lujza yawns theatrically, obviously expecting no surprises. Still, she looks bright-eyed and excitable: the fact that the change is being acknowledged makes it all the more real.

  The war has taken its toll on Father István; he’s much thinner and sallower than he was before, and nobody’s quite sure why. In reality, Father István’s decline has little to do with physical hardship. He had assumed that when the war started and the men of the village left, those women who were left behind would need him all the more. For the first few months, he was right; people flocked to the church, including many of those who had excused themselves from regular worship on the grounds of age or illness. Father István had delivered what he knew to be magnificent and moving sermons and more than once he’d been triumphant to hear hollow sobbing from some corner of the church. However, after some time his words seemed to fall on stoney ground, and the faces before him moved from rapt attention to blankness, to rank unconcern. By January his flock was back to pre-war proportions. They would rather go to Judit Fekete with their problems, subjecting themselves to any manner of pagan practices that send a shiver down his spine. Disappointment sits bitterly in Father István’s stomach: what seemed like his big chance, his one opportunity to break through the casual crudity and dismissiveness of his flock, has come to nought.

  He hasn’t told anyone yet, but he’s decided – his sister is in Vienna with her husband, and when the weather is better he’ll join her there. He stopped loving the village when it stopped loving him, and feels little when he looks down from the pulpit. Already he’s wallowing in pleasant fantasies of providing consolation and spiritual solace to the war wounded, who, he hears, are besieging Vienna these days.

  The official statement comes from one of the scrubbed, clean-looking, shiny-buttoned soldiers they’ve all been spying on from afar, and of course it comes as no surprise at all to everyone assembled: the Gazdag family have generously offered their property to be used to house enemy prisoners for the duration of the war, and a volley of knowing glances shoots around the church.

  Adrián Jokai is the first on his feet after the official stops speaking, which is to be expected. Adrián is fourteen, and his two older brothers as well as his father are away, fighting.Adrián stammers and alway
s has, despite the remedies that Judit and, latterly, Sari have made up for him, but this time he manages not to tangle his words around his tongue. He asks the obvious questions – how many, and who, and what about the security – and the answers are comforting: the prisoners are largely Italian officers.

  Lujza manages to catch Sari’s eye, and winks.

  They will be allowed a little more freedom than ordinary soldiers, but they certainly won’t be permitted to wander around unsupervised; while they won’t be kept in confinement all the time, their walks will be limited to areas of countryside away from the village, and they’ll be accompanied by guards all the time. The women of the village have nothing to fear.

  Judit waits on the porch throughout the announcements and subsequent buzz of questions, but grabs Sari’s arm as soon as it’s over, her face twisted into its slightly ferocious grin. Sari can’t help grinning back, though she senses a tinge of connivance in Judit’s expression.

  ‘Why are you looking so cheerful? Did you hear all of that?’

  ‘Of course I did, fool. There’s nothing the matter with my ears.’

  ‘What do you think, then?’

  They are surrounded by a crowd of people, and Judit shakes her head abruptly.

  ‘Not now. Wait until we get home.’

  ‘This is going to be very interesting, Sari. Very interesting,’ Judit says, as soon as they are safe inside the kitchen.

  ‘Really?’ Sari is casual, and Judit responds by growing snappish.

  ‘Think about it, idiot child. This is the first time – as long as I’ve been alive, at least – that so many new people have come here. New men, too, and when so many of our men are away. What do you think’s going to happen?’

  Sari shrugs. ‘You heard what they said. They won’t be coming anywhere near the village. What difference is it going to make that they’re here, if we’re not going to see them?’

  ‘Oh, Sari,’ Judit laughs. ‘You can’t put people so close together without things starting to happen. Maybe they’ll relax their system after a while, and the men will start coming closer to the village. Or maybe the women will start going up there – after all, they’ll need things, washing, and cooking, and,’ she grins suggestively, ‘and maybe medical care. They can’t live in isolation, you know. Well, maybe they could closer to the town, but all the way out here – they’re going to need us.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. I still don’t understand why you find it all so funny, though.’

  Judit raises a ragged eyebrow. ‘When you’ve been alive as long as me, you know that nothing’s going to happen to you anymore, so you become more interested in what happens to other people. And when you’ve been alive as long as I have, you realise how pointless everything is, how little any of this matters. So you start either laughing at nothing, or laughing at everything. And it’s a lot more agreeable to laugh at everything.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Irritating as Judit often is, with her tendency to present herself as grand provider of wisdom, Sari has to admit that she’s got a habit of getting things right. Within a week, when Sari meets Anna and Lujza down by the church, and Anna says, good-humoured, ‘God, Sari, you should hear what this one’s been up to,’ Sari is remarkably unsurprised when Lujza gives a conspiratorial smile, and says:

  ‘I went down to the Gazdag house yesterday.’

  Anna laughs, and Sari can’t help but roll her eyes. Lujza looks slightly put out.

  ‘What are you looking like that for?’

  ‘Nothing, really. Just that – Judit was saying just the other day how she thinks that, no matter what the officers said about keeping the officers apart from the village, something was bound to happen. I should have known that you—’ She breaks off because Anna is laughing again, and so, rather reluctantly, is Lujza.

  ‘Well, I’m glad not to disappoint you. Now, do you want to hear what happened or not?’

  Sari grins and shrugs; Lujza’s obviously going to tell her story, no matter whether anyone else is listening or not. Anna’s calling over Lilike to listen as well; for a split second, over Anna’s beckoning arm, Sari catches the eye of Orsolya Kiss, and quickly looks away.

  ‘I was thinking about the prisoners,’ says Lujza, ‘and I thought about all the things that they would need in that camp. They need to wash their sheets and clothes, and they need food – maybe not every meal, but at least bread, and things like that. I heard that at the big camp near Város they have enough staff to take care of those things, but all the way out here, I thought they might be having problems. And so I thought well, times are hard, we all need a bit more of everything at the moment, so what would it hurt to ask whether they had any use for me?’ Lujza pauses, frowning slightly, as Anna and Lilike guffaw, and Sari smiles. ‘Not that kind of use, you filthy women! I mean, mending, or washing, or cooking. I spoke to that man, you know, the one who came to talk in the church, and he seemed very pleased that I had come—’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Lilike murmurs, as Lujza ploughs on regardless.

  ‘– and he said that they were hoping that some of the women from the village would want to come and help with those sorts of things, and in exchange they could offer us food, and fuel, wood and coal, and material, things like that – or, if we were prepared to accept it, some of the men could come and do some work for us – the officers don’t have to work, he said, not like the ordinary soldiers in the other camps, but it must be boring for them, stuck in there, and so they might be able to give us a hand with, you know, the sort of jobs that men do …’

  Anna snorts at this, and Lujza stops, looking genuinely disgruntled. ‘What? Look, I know you all think that I’m just interested in picking up some sort of – I don’t know, some sort of playmate – but I’m not. This is work, this is a chance to get something better than the shit that we’ve got to deal with at the moment; this isn’t about fucking foreigners. In case you’d forgotten, I’m married, and what’s more, I actually like my husband.’

  She shoots a pointed glance at Anna as she says this, who flushes slightly; Sari feels for her. ‘Anyway. Gunther – the one who was talking in church, you know – he said I should tell my friends about the offer, and if anyone’s interested – in work, not men – we should come along tomorrow morning and meet him outside the stables. He’ll be able to tell us how many of us he needs, and what we can do, and what we can get in return. I’ve already told my mother; she’s going to be coming along, and so will some of the other older women, and so we’ll be quite safe.’

  Recovering quickly, Anna raises an arch eyebrow. ‘But will the men be safe from you?’ she asks.

  Lujza sighs deeply. ‘Fine. If none of you are interested, I’m off to find someone who is.’ Lujza stalks off, eyes scanning for someone else to tell. Behind her, Anna puts on a stage whisper:

  ‘I give it a month at most before she’s fucking one of them.’

  Judit cackles when Sari gives her the news later.

  ‘You see? See? This is how it starts. And how typical of Lujza to start it!’ Judit has a soft spot for Lujza; with her crude talk and open humour, she’s sufficiently unlike the conventional woman to please Judit’s eccentric ways.

  ‘So are you going to go along?’ Judit asks.

  Sari sighs. ‘I – I don’t know, Judit. I mean, we’re doing all right, aren’t we? We’re doing better than a lot of other people here. Some people – like the Orczy family – they’re really desperate. Maybe I should leave the work for people who really need it.’

  Judit grunts derisively. ‘Nice words, Sari; very publicspirited. What’s the real reason you don’t want to go?’

  ‘I don’t not want to go, necessarily. I might. It just feels – it just feels odd, that’s all.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Judit says craftily, ‘sometimes I wonder whether you really should have become engaged to Ferenc. He’s a nice boy and all, but you – oh, you had so many options, and now you’re tied to the village.’

  Sometimes, Sari wonders wheth
er Judit can read minds. ‘Ferenc’s not tied to the village,’ she snaps back. ‘Look at his mother – off to Budapest as soon as the war started, and she hasn’t even been back to look at their property. And now they’re letting prisoners live in it. I don’t think they’re ever planning to come back. Ferenc and I might go and live in Budapest.’ A fierce hope blossoms as she says this, a hope she had only vaguely thought she had, even as Judit’s shaking her head.

  ‘Ah, no. Ferenc’s different from his parents. They’ve spent so much of their lives away, but he’s always lived here, and he loves this place – the devil knows why. He’d never leave.’

  Sari sets her mouth. ‘Well, and that’s all right, too. This is my home; of course I’d be happy to stay here. ‘There’s no point in thinking about other things that I could have done, or other things out there. This is my life, here, and that’s all right.’

  She’s not going to the camp, Sari decides, definitely not. She doesn’t need the work, she probably doesn’t have time for the work, and so there’s no point wasting time on something that’s pointless. And she’d only really be going to gawp, anyway, which is horrible – she, of all people, should know what it’s like to be stared at like some sort of performing animal, and she doesn’t want to do that to the prisoners: they might well be the enemy, but they’re still people. No, she’ll leave it to the others, and instead, she’ll set out early to go into the woods and gather some wild chicory – which they need; they’ve nearly used up their supply – so that even if Anna or Lilike or Lujza come to try and drag her down there, she won’t be here to be dragged. She’s not going, definitely, certainly not.

  She oversleeps.

  Lujza and Anna are banging on the door as Sari is frantically pulling on her boots and eyeing up escape out of the kitchen window. If Anna’s decided to go, she knows that she’ll be no match for their combined persuasive skills, and it’s with grim resignation (smothering a bright bubble of anticipation) that she trudges down the road on the way to what used to be Ferenc’s family house. Women are converging from all over the village, not just the young ones but the older ones too, married and respectable, and Sari finds that comforting; it means that it really is about work, rather than ogling men. It’s just before eight when they assemble outside the stable doors, and the sky is exploding with glorious spring light, about twenty women in all, murmuring in knots of two or three, some looking apprehensive, some eager, some – Éva Orczy among them, Sari sees – looking on the verge of desperation.