The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  There’s a pause, wherein Marco’s eyes move and settle deliberately on Lilike, his mouth quirking upwards. Sari struggles with a sudden, wild desire to laugh, uncommonly pleased that her intended double meaning has survived her imperfect German and Marco’s imperfect understanding. Lilike, standing at the end of the bed, picking at the loose threads in her skirt, is oblivious. Umberto mumbles something and Sari looks questioningly at Marco. ‘He says he’s sorry,’ Marco says, ‘and thank you for coming.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’ Now that she’s no longer needed she feels self-conscious, and it’s making her prim. ‘So – I should go.’

  Lilike has sat down on the edge of Umberto’s bed, and is stroking his hair in what’s supposed to be a comforting manner, though Umberto looks far more interested in the clear view he has of her cleavage. When Sari moves to leave, Lilike shoots a pleading look at Gunther, who is slouched in the corner.

  He looks bored, and gives a defeated shrug. ‘Do what you like,’ he mutters.

  Lilike looks pleased. ‘I’ll stay then,’ she says to Sari.

  Sari and Marco walk out of the room in silence. She is suddenly conscious of a need to get out of there, and heads swiftly for the stairs but before she gets there he catches her arm. ‘Wait,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do you know all those things? Who taught you?’

  Sari sighs. How can one explain these things to a foreigner? ‘My father—’ she struggles for a way to phrase it – ‘he was like a doctor. I learnt a lot from him. And now, I work as a – a nurse for babies and—’ She doesn’t know the word for ‘pregnant’, so she mimes it, hand curving sinuously over her belly. He nods as if he understands.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen. You thought I was younger, didn’t you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. You have – you have old eyes.’ He pauses in thought. ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

  ‘I came here on the first day, when all the women came looking for jobs. I think I saw you, out there.’ She points at the courtyard, and a look of recognition spreads over his face.

  ‘Of course! You were with two of the other girls who work in the kitchens now. But you’ve never been back. Why not?’

  ‘I’m busy. People are always getting sick, so we always have enough work to get by.’ A shriek of laughter rings out from the room behind them, and they both jump; evidently Umberto is feeling better already. ‘And also,’ Sari continues, her face pink, ‘I’m not like that.’ She jerks her head in Lilike’s direction.

  ‘Are you married?’ Marco asks, frowning.

  ‘No, but I—’ She doesn’t know how to say ‘engaged’. ‘I will get married when my – my man comes back from the war.’

  ‘I see.’ There is a silence, and then Marco says, abruptly, ‘But you will come back now, won’t you? You can see that we could use someone like you here.’

  He’s looking at her intently, and, furious with herself, she feels herself blushing again.

  ‘I – I’m not sure that I—’

  ‘I get these headaches, myself. From an injury. The doctor here, he’s too busy with the camp for ordinary soldiers, and when he’s here he just gives morphia, nothing else. I hate it. Perhaps you could—’

  She should just walk away, she knows she should, but part of her mind’s already ticking, working out how she could put together some sort of potion for Marco that would best relieve pain.

  ‘No one else would take me seriously. You saw the way they looked at me when I arrived today.’

  He shrugs. ‘Perhaps. But I would take you seriously. So would Umberto. And perhaps the others …’

  ‘Where did you learn German?’ she blurts out in desperation, playing for time. He looks taken aback at her sudden change of subject, but he answers. ‘I’m from the north of Italy, near the border with Austria. There are a lot of people who speak German there. I never learnt it properly; I just picked it up.’

  ‘That’s obvious,’ she says, almost without thinking, but he laughs.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And what did you do – before all this?’

  ‘Before the war? I was a teacher at a university. I taught history.’

  Just like that, her decision is made. Her head buzzing slightly, she says swiftly, ‘I will come back tomorrow, with something for your head,’ and before he can answer, she flees down the steps and into the sunshine.

  Sari returns home to find a letter from Ferenc. When she opens it, she finds him rhapsodising about the glorious Falucska summer that he’s living through in his head. She’s aghast to find that his lush descriptions bring tears to her eyes, when she hasn’t cried in years.

  Three in the morning, and Sari can’t sleep. Ignoring Judit’s indistinct muttering, she slips out of bed and out of the house. Last night, she managed to evade Judit’s questions and fled to her father’s old house, a sanctuary still, which she visits once or twice a week to make sure that rats or spiders aren’t taking over. Judit’s house is in the centre of the village, the sounds of footsteps and conversation are always just outside, but hardly anyone ever comes near Sari’s father’s house, set back as it is from the main knot of houses by the bend in the river. Last night, Sari went there for privacy, and there she scrawled a ten-page missive to Ferenc, bright and shot through with minute details of village life; she hopes that he won’t notice its slightly frenzied tone, or its redemptive nature. She told herself that she must think of Ferenc, she must hold him in her mind’s eye, but as soon as she got back to Judit’s house, she found herself getting out the herbs needed for a pain-killing draught, and muttering the incantory words meant to ward off harm. That’s not the sort of thing she does for just anyone.

  She’s gone over it all in her head so many times that she feels she’s worn a groove in her brain, and so she rises at three, walks out of the village and onto the plain, as if the wide sweep of land and sky could clear her head. The village is dark from where she sits, the ground still warm from the day’s heat – not a light burning. She tries not to look, but the camp is in darkness, too.

  It’s not about Marco. Well, it is, but it’s not, not like it is with Anna and Giovanni (Sari can’t bring herself to call him Jan, even mentally, and Anna’s finally getting the hang of his real name), or with Lilike and Umberto, or with any of the other couples that have sprouted in the newly permissive attitude of the village. It’s different because she doesn’t feel about Marco the way that Anna feels about Giovanni, or the way that Lilike feels about Umberto. Anna keeps talking about weak knees and beating hearts, while Lilike’s area is more bruised lips and scratched backs and lovebitten breasts, but all Sari feels about Marco is a fierce, crackling interest, nothing to do with either falling in love, or fucking in a forest. She knows that she has been astonishingly lucky to end up with Ferenc, that it would be ungrateful for her to want anything else, given that she now has more than she ever would have thought possible for someone like her.

  But the thrill of the camp is still with her, as if a fresh breeze has blown through the village and through her and into her mind, tickling her there. The questions she’s been avoiding all summer are now jostling for precedence. What are the men like? What do they know? What can they teach her? What happened the day before was like a gift. Anyone who hears of how she dealt with Umberto cannot accuse her of inventing spurious excuses to go to the camp. She wonders, sometimes, why she still sets such stock on what little reputation she has, when other women in the village seem to be flinging theirs to the wind – but that’s it; her reputation is scant, and so she must hoard it carefully, for fear of jeopardising the status she has.

  All her letters to Ferenc have skirted around the existence of the camp. He must know that it exists, as it’s his family who has offered their land for it, but as long as she doesn’t mention it, she thinks he can believe that it’s having minimal impact on village life. Ferenc’s a conservative man, at heart, and Sari knows that he would b
e shocked at the behaviour of some of the women. There’s the worry, then, that any involvement with the camp, however innocent, would taint her, in Ferenc’s mind, with the same sort of behaviour that’s infected so many of the other women.

  And yet she knows that she’s going to go back. If she’d had less success with Umberto, if Marco hadn’t treated her with respect and interest, if he had been anything else but a history teacher from a university, she might have been able to resist. But much as she tries to sit on it, squash it, bite it back, curiosity always has been the strongest motivator in her life, and the chance to learn, to know something outside her own limited sphere is intoxicating.

  She doesn’t want to fuck Marco, she knows that she doesn’t, of course she doesn’t, but she wants to talk to him, and get to know him, and so it’s imperative to set some ground rules. When she goes back to the camp, she decides, she will go to him, and she will ask him to teach her what he knows. That way, there can be no doubt about their relationship, not from the point of view of any of the villagers, nor on his part, nor on hers.

  Marco doesn’t sleep well at the best of times, but since he’s been in the camp he seems to have nearly stopped altogether. It seems odd that he should sleep less well here, where the only nighttime noises come from the birds and animals of the plain and his own sleeping comrades, than when he was lulled by gunshots and shrieking explosions and cries of pain and misery, but it’s the truth. Perhaps it’s the case that external silence just amplifies internal noise. Perhaps it’s at least partly due to the headaches that claw ferociously on the inside of his skull when they come, leaving him limp and panting in their wake. Whatever it is, though, he now goes for days without anything more than a light doze to sustain him, before being abruptly engulfed by exhaustion, the strength of which makes it a challenge to get to his bed before passing out. Twelve or fourteen hours of deep sleep (during which his friends cover for him, making sure that he’s not disturbed), and then the cycle begins again.

  So it is not unusual that he lies awake that night, that at two in the morning he climbs out of bed – the comfortable grunts and snuffles of the men beside him getting too much to bear – and walks quietly out of the dormitory. In another life, in his previous life, he would have gone walking; every nerve in his body remembers the cloaking feel of night air on his skin, and the lush, deep silence. But no matter how relaxed (or negligent) the guards have become, he knows that an attempt to leave the building at this time of night could very easily result in a bullet in the back of his head. Instead, he sits on the wide sill of the landing window, a window that looks out across the plain, now blanketed in indigo darkness. Someone has mercifully left the window open. None of them are used to still, dull heat like this, and without a breeze it feels suffocating.

  On a good day, he’s able to see the humour in his current situation, in the utter impossibility of imagining, this time three years ago, that by summer he would be living on the outskirts of a dead-end village on the Hungarian plain. On a bad day, the sheer level of his rage astounds him, as does the fact that it hasn’t dissipated over time; he’s constantly struck anew by the furious, frustrated awareness that this wasn’t what was meant to happen.

  Marco never meant to be a soldier, was never meant to be a soldier, but is in possession of a particular, perverse type of ego that means he has to do everything he does as well as humanly possible, and as a result he was a damn good soldier. In retrospect, he thinks, that makes the whole experience far more obscene, that he killed people, risked lives (his and those of others) not because of patriotism or martial fervour, but out of pride, and a desire that he could be as good at war as he was at everything else he had ever tried. And all that brought him nowhere but here.

  He thinks of his wife, sometimes – not with the desperate urgency that some of the others do (tinged in many cases by guilt, because there’s hardly a marital vow able to withstand the distance of time and space and experience that now separates husbands and wives), but with a sharp, tangy sorrow. Benigna is his converse, soft curves where he is hard edges. She’s intelligent, of course – he could never have married a stupid woman – but her intelligence is a gentle, gradual throb, while his is a clutching, grasping thing; she has a kernel of contentment at the heart of her, while he is driven. Their house is full of books but pride of place is Benigna’s piano; she would play for hours, while he would pretend to read, but a stiffness or a stillness in his posture always told her that he was listening, and she would always alter her repertoire accordingly, playing the music he liked the best. He misses her, but with a kind of melancholy resignation; he hates himself for it, but more than missing her, he misses the effect she had on him, a kind of cooling and comforting. He has no buffers any more.

  He’d known it was a bad idea at the time – worse than a bad idea, sheer idiocy; their fourth attempt to cross that damn river and reach those mountains and with every failed attempt the Austro-Hungarians had dug in deeper until they were virtually impervious. Winter by now, bitter, driving wind and constant sleet, and not enough artillery on their side, a helpless feeling of being mown down with ease. And then he’d been hit, a flash, a blast and then nothing, a hiatus; then consciousness again, pain, and an unforgettable memory of the fact that, moments before a shell had pockmarked the ground next to him and decorated his skull with shrapnel, Aldo Damasco, who Marco had known since they were children, had exploded in a shower of blood and mud in front of him. Marco was not conscious of much but that, that and the pain, had not cared whether he was living or dead, not cared whether he was with the enemy or with his own men. He did not recognise anyone around him, and their speech was incomprehensible, but he was sensible enough to know that could be a factor of the injury that he’d sustained. Pain, memory and then nothing as he passed into fog again.

  The next time he woke he realised that he was with the enemy, and this time he did care. His memory is still shaky on that part of his recent past; it’s more a mélange of emotions and pain than anything else, overlaid by the constant presence of people whose language he didn’t understand and who seemed to care very little for his well-being. As he got better, he tried to tune his ear more and more to the language, and eventually memories came back to him of the German he heard while growing up in Como. It was that which sped his recovery more than anything – in the absence of books and companionship, the chance to flex his brain, to coach it through its first tottering steps to recovery made him grip onto life more than any sort of physical improvement.

  And then, when he was well enough to march, he joined the group of Italian officers en route to Falucska.

  His memory is still slippery, still shaky on the events of his own life. His wedding, yes, that’s clear, and the few days after it, but then his mind stutters into blankness, and that’s it, until another memory of Benigna weeping, he thinks because another month had gone past without her becoming pregnant – but when was that: weeks, months or years after the wedding? He doesn’t know, and the thought makes his fists clench. He knows, rationally speaking, that he’s lucky, that there are plenty of men who sustained injuries like his, who now have minds like still, dark water, not only lacking any memories from the past, but any new input is like dropping a stone into that water; ungraspable, it seems to float on the meniscus for a moment, then drops, leaving first ripples, and then nothing. And even they are lucky compared to some of the others, the ones who have become like babies, who cannot talk or eat or even shit like adults. But Marco has built his life and his career around knowledge and learning, and it’s as if his brain, the organ that he’s always subjected to extreme discipline and control, has betrayed him utterly.

  He looks out onto the darkened plain, and sees that the bowl of the night sky has been lifted an inch or two, the sun glimmering on the horizon. Above him, the stars must be fading, but he can’t see them due to the angle of the window. This makes him unaccountably sad; he imagines that the stars out here must blaze. He’s starting to engage wit
h the landscape, which is not beautiful in any way that he can understand, but its vastness is somehow awe-inspiring, and the featureless expanse naturally directs one’s attention to the sky. Brought up with mountains and graceful, elegant towns as his idea of beauty, Marco’s never given the sky much thought, other than as a gap between peaks or buildings, but now its vagaries have started to fascinate him, and when he is allowed outside he watches it almost obsessively. It’s a wide, ever-changing landscape; clouds roll and break like waves. He wishes that he could see it properly at night, wishes it so fervently that sometimes when he’s lying sleepless in bed, staring at the ceiling, it seems to shimmer slightly and become translucent, letting in the dusty, smoky light of the moon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sari is back at the camp by midday, her head roaring with nervousness, her hands shaking so slightly that no one but she would notice. Head up, shoulders squared, she walks past a group of men playing football in the garden, past Gunther (who seems to remember her from yesterday and simply raises a lazy hand,) and finds Marco sitting, legs stretched out, in the shade of a cherry tree near the main house. He gets to his feet when he sees her approaching, his movements oddly precise; she waves at him to sit back down, and sits down next to him.

  ‘I brought you this,’ she says, in careful German, handing him the bottle she had brought. ‘For the headaches. I’m not sure what morphia does, or how this will compare to the things that the doctor here can give you, but it will be good for the pain, and it shouldn’t make you feel ill afterwards.’

  ‘How often should I use it?’

  ‘Take two spoonfuls when the headache starts, and then after that no more until at least four hours later, even if it doesn’t work. It can be dangerous to take too much.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’ He feels awkward. ‘I wish I could pay you, or—’

  Sari shakes her head hurriedly. ‘Oh, no. That’s not important. But, just—’ Now she is the one to look uncomfortable. ‘You said that you were a teacher, back in Italy. History.’