The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  Sari starts to splash for shore. ‘Don’t look!’ she shouts at Marco, voice slightly wild. Obedient, he turns his back, and she stumbles through the shallows, holding out her hands as Anna, who is still giggling to herself, passes her clothes. ‘He’s not looking, is he?’ Sari hisses. Anna shakes her head, as Sari drags on her skirt and bodice over her wet underclothes.

  ‘All right,’ she calls to Marco, ‘you can turn around now!’

  For a moment, no one says anything; the two girls simply gaze at Marco from the opposite side of the river. Then Anna seems to come to her senses. ‘Right, then!’ she says, businesslike. ‘I’ve got to go and do some … things. So, I’ll see you later, Sari!’ and she scrambles up the bank, back towards the village, still emitting occasional spurts of laughter.

  ‘Meet you at the bridge?’ Sari calls to Marco.

  Werner’s shirt, forgotten, drifts elegantly downstream.

  They walk across the plain, not talking about anything very much, and yet Sari is uncomfortable. Despite the heat of the sun, wearing sodden undergarments with heavy clothing on top is not a pleasant experience. But she’s also uncomfortable because she knows what she must look like, mud-smeared and bedraggled, and that makes her even more uncomfortable, because she’s never bothered about how she looks in front of Marco before.

  Marco keeps up a stream of respectful questions about Lujza, how she is, who’s looking after her, and whether she will be all right, but eventually even he seems exhausted by meaningless small talk. They have nearly reached the edge of the woods, the village squatting, dark and low, on the horizon.

  ‘Why did you approach her?’ Sari asks the question that’s been on her mind all day. Much to her annoyance, her heart is hammering, and it feels like her stomach is frosting over. So this is what Anna’s been going on about, she thinks.

  ‘She wasn’t going to hurt anyone. If she’d meant to do any damage, she wouldn’t have drawn so much attention to herself, and she would have armed herself with something more effective than a pair of scissors. She was just – sad.’

  Sari nods. He’s not helping matters, echoing her own thoughts like that. She can’t think of anything else to say, looking fixedly at the ground, until he raises a hand and plucks a damp, slimy twig from her hair, and then she doesn’t know where to look, and so she looks at him.

  Marco swallows. ‘Sari,’ he says, his voice dry and scratchy. She stays silent. ‘You’re too young,’ Marco says.

  ‘I’ll be seventeen this year.’ (What is she saying?)

  ‘I don’t want to – to mess things up for you.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing.’ (No, she doesn’t!)

  This is it, Sari thinks. She can’t shift her eyes from his face, feeling a slightly painful mix of elation and reluctance. He puts a hand under her chin, and raises it.

  ‘I’m only human,’ he says, as if to himself, sounding almost angry about the fact. She doesn’t answer, because by then he is kissing her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Of course, this means nothing,’ Marco says. ‘You know it means nothing.’

  Sari rolls her eyes and expels a hissing sigh. It is the third time that he has said those words in the past two hours, and the repetition is becoming tedious. ‘I know,’ she says, pauses a little, and then adds, slyly, ‘And I know why you keep going on about it, too.’

  ‘Oh, really? Why is that?’

  ‘After the war, you’ll go home, back to your job and your wife, and the last thing that you want is some Magyar peasant girl turning up on your doorstep. Am I right?’

  He has the good grace to look slightly chastened.

  ‘I don’t want you to leave your wife,’ Sari continues. ‘This is just … a holiday.’

  It is October, and the leaves are beginning to curl and bronze. They are in Sari’s father’s old bed, a fact that disturbs her less than it otherwise might. She has a faint suspicion that he might be grudgingly pleased about her latest course of action. He always wanted her to be safe, yes, but that desire always battled with his pleasure in her curiosity, and her stubborn refusal to bend to fit the shape she is supposed to occupy.

  They are naked, but they haven’t had sex, and Sari doesn’t intend for them to. She knows how conservative Ferenc is, knows that he will know whether or not she is a virgin when they marry, and so it is far too big a risk to take. Marco allowed himself some token grumbling about her intransigence, but generally he seems to understand. They don’t talk about love, haven’t mentioned it, but Sari doesn’t mind; not yet, anyway. She’s still preoccupied by how much she’s learning. While she’s understood the basic biological facts behind sex for a long time – they’re rather hard to avoid in her line of work – its subtleties and pleasures have come as a delicious series of surprises.

  Marco rolls over onto his side, and in doing so, winces.

  ‘What?’

  He pulls the blanket down to his thighs; two months ago she would have blushed furiously, embarrassed but too proud to turn her face away, but now, she notices with some satisfaction, she can look at even the oddest parts of Marco’s anatomy without minding.

  ‘Look at this,’ he says, his voice slightly irritable. He’s indicating a large, plummy bruise that’s risen on his left thigh. ‘From climbing in that bloody window.’

  The location of the house, on the edge of the village, near the woods, has allowed them to keep their relationship a secret for far longer than would otherwise have been possible, so long as Marco is prepared to wander casually into the woods, as if he is doing nothing more than having a stroll to take the air, circle round to the back of the house, and allow himself to be inelegantly hauled in by Sari through the kitchen window, which is sheltered by trees.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to keep this up,’ Marco says now, gloomily regarding his purpling leg. ‘What does it matter if people know? We’re not doing anything that half of them aren’t doing, too.’

  ‘It’s not a question of whether people know or not. It’s a question of not flaunting it. Not being obvious,’ she replies.

  ‘But other people are. Look at Umberto, and Luigi, and Paolo. None of them have to be smuggled in through windows.’

  ‘Well, none of their …’ It’s always hard for Sari to choose a word for this. ‘None of their girlfriends are engaged to the son of the most respected family in the village. And none of them are in a position as … as delicate, socially, as me.’

  He sits up and looks at her searchingly. ‘Yes, you keep mentioning this, but you never explain it to me. What do you mean, “socially delicate”?’

  Part of her is glad that he asked, as it shows that he’s been paying attention, but all the same, part of her has been dreading the question, and so she sidesteps.

  ‘It’s hard to explain to a foreigner.’

  ‘Yes, and so are a lot of the things that I’ve told you about where I’m from. I can tell you’re different, Sari, but I don’t know why, really, or how, or why it matters so much.’

  Sari sighs. ‘Well – you know what I said about my father? About how he was like a doctor?’ Marco nods. ‘Well, that’s not exactly right. He treated people’s illnesses, yes, but also he treated their – their other problems. He was what we call a táltos, a Wise Man. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so. You mean that your father had – or that people believed he had – certain skills, abilities to – to make things happen. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s a way to explain it. So – here, men who have these abilities, they are respected, but for women it’s different. We call them boszorkány – I don’t know how to say it in German, but it’s like an evil woman, a woman who has special abilities to do bad things to people.’

  ‘Strega. I understand. So people thought that because of your father, you might be one of these – a strega.’

  ‘Partly. Also, my mother died when she was giving birth to me, which is bad luck – and it was worse because my mother was part of Ferenc’s family, a
nd the village respected her a lot. I expect that if I had been pretty, and loveable, and like everyone else, people wouldn’t have thought the things about me that they did, but I’m not like them, I don’t know why, but I’m not, and so it’s easier for people to say bad things about me.’

  ‘But it’s not like that now, is it? Or not so much. So what changed?’

  ‘It helped when I started working with Judit. People don’t really trust Judit, she’s a bit scary …’

  ‘Can I meet her?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sari says warily. She would have loved to have been able to keep her relationship with Marco a secret from Judit, but Judit has a way of gleaning an enormous amount of information from just a glance and she has been making increasingly unsubtle jibes ever since Sari came home that day in August.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sari goes on, ‘No matter how people feel about Judit, they need her, and now that I work with her, they need me, too. It’s also partly to do with Ferenc – people don’t feel they can treat me so badly any more, because they don’t want Ferenc to find out. And it’s also partly to do with the war – everyone needs everyone a lot more, now that the men aren’t here. It sounds horrible, but the war really has made things a lot better for me.’

  It’s coming into late afternoon now – the shadows in the

  woods are stretching, and Marco gives a slight shiver. There’s something eerie about those woods, he thinks, and gets up out of bed to close the curtains. Sari, supine, admires the gentle wedge shape of his body from behind – she’s never seen a grown man totally naked before and wasn’t expecting the elegance of Marco’s muscled back and curved buttocks. She knows that she probably should get back to Judit, and he should certainly get back to camp before too much longer, but she is terribly reluctant to leave. The constant reiterations of this means nothing mean little to her; while she knows that what they have is never going to last beyond the war, it doesn’t make it any less real now.

  ‘Do you really think things have changed that much?’

  Marco asks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, the way people think of you. Do you really think that the war has changed things that much that when it’s over, and people don’t need each other so much any more—’

  ‘But I’ll be married to Ferenc by then.’

  ‘And you’re happy for people just to tolerate you because of the person you’ve married?’ He sounds exasperated. ‘I would have expected more of you. It doesn’t bother you that people will be nice to you because of Ferenc, and then go home and think the same things about you that they’ve always thought?’

  Sari starts to protest, but then she remembers. ‘Sometimes I believe that people have really changed the way they think about me,’ she says, slowly, her thoughts formulating as she speaks, ‘But sometimes I think – do you know what Anna asked me a few months ago? Before Péter died?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘She asked whether I could stop Károly – her husband – from coming back from the war. I never would have thought that Anna would believe that I could do something like that.’

  Marco looks intrigued. ‘Do you know how to do things like that? I mean, it’s not that I believe in it, but – do you?’

  Sari doesn’t like talking about this sort of thing very much; she’s never quite sure where her own beliefs lie – less superstitious than much of the rest of the village, she knows that she’s far more so than someone like Marco. ‘I know some curses,’ she says shortly. ‘I learnt some from Judit, and some from my father. They would never use them – well, I don’t know so much about Judit, but not my father. He didn’t believe in them, and neither do I, but I would never want to take the risk.’ She’s silent for a moment, and then bursts out: ‘I just wish that I wasn’t so different from everyone else.’

  To her annoyance, Marco reacts to this melodramatic statement by bursting out laughing. She swats him halfheartedly with a pillow.

  ‘You know the problem with you, Sari?’ he says, dodging easily. ‘You take yourself far too seriously.’

  1918

  CHEPTER ELEVEN

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Judit asks irritably. Although she’s been surrounded by spoken Italian for two years now, she’s never got much further than a few words of random vocabulary and a full repertoire of swear words.

  ‘He says,’ Sari replies, ‘that it’s all going to be over soon. The war.’

  ‘How does he know?’

  ‘They hear things, down at the camp. From the guards down there, and from the new prisoners, the ones who are just back from the front.’

  Marco looks impatient throughout this exchange. Two years has done little to improve his understanding of Magyar, and standing half-naked in the middle of a kitchen while the woman who is supposed to be fixing his shirt is babbling in that twisting, incomprehensible language can be rather trying.

  Nobody is really looking forward to the end of the war. To an outside observer, the village looks perhaps like any other, men and women going about their daily business, but anything more than a cursory glance shows that while the women are Magyar, the men are Italian and still don’t sleep in the village, and there are no children to be seen. Everything has slipped sideways into an approximation of normal life, and unlike a life that has been turned entirely upside down, it has become very hard to remember what things were like before, or to imagine that it could have been much better than the present state of affairs. The few Magyar men who have returned from the front have been easily assimilated, simply because they have been sick, or wounded, or mad, and as such hardly in the position to challenge the new world order that’s sprung up in their absence. But when the great bulk of them return, the ones who aren’t so easily quelled … The thought makes Sari feel uneasy.

  ‘Well, the Italians will be gone by then, won’t they?’ Lilike said airily when discussing this a few days ago, and although no one said anything at the time – no one really likes to discuss it – they all know that Lilike wouldn’t talk like that if she were married or engaged. After all, her life isn’t going to change as radically when the men come home.

  Sari and Marco have slipped into an easy, leisurely familiarity in the past year or two, and Sari can’t quite imagine life without him in it any more; he’s the bright spark at the centre of everything she does these days. They still don’t speak of love, and Sari has pleasantly surprised herself that she still refrains from entertaining fantasies about living happily ever after in Italy with him. But although Marco insists that he would not and will not leave his wife, to Sari’s irritation, as she has never asked it of him, his concern for Sari’s future seems to grow day by day, the closer things are to being all over.

  Shirt duly mended, they walk together through the village back towards the camp. The March wind roars past their ears, almost a physical presence; their feet slip and scrabble on the rutted, icy slush, and Marco shivers theatrically.

  ‘Well it sounds like you won’t have to put up with this climate for too much longer, will you?’

  Sari knows she shouldn’t have said that; a look that she has come to recognise immediately appears on his face, and she groans inwardly.

  ‘I worry about you, Sari,’ he begins, and she cuts him off.

  ‘I know what you think.’

  ‘Well, will you consider it?’

  He wants her to leave the village when the war is over. She does not even consider the idea, because it is patently absurd. She can’t understand why he wants her to leave when he has specifically said that he has no intention of leaving Benigna, and she doesn’t trust his motives in offering to lend her – give her – money, to set her up somewhere new, but each time she refuses, he looks so sad that she can hardly bear it. ‘Oh, Sari,’ he always says, ‘What you could be, somewhere else.’

  These are thoughts she can’t afford to entertain. Ferenc is a good man and she will have a good life with him, and anyway, she can’t possibly leave Judit – and, what on earth could
she do outside the village? There’s no point even thinking about it.

  ‘He thinks it will be over soon, then?’ Judit asks that evening, while Sari is writing to Ferenc and trying very hard not to think about anything at all. She shrugs.

  ‘That’s what he says – but how many times have people been saying that since the whole thing started? I don’t know how they can tell whether it’s true this time or not.’

  She’s had dreams, though. Ferenc slid out of her dreams two years before, around the same time as she met Marco and he started to fuel her subconscious with Roman myths and stories of the ocean – but in the past month or so Ferenc has made a startling reappearance in nightmares that leave her gasping and sweating. She wasn’t initially sure that it was him, because he looked so different, ten years older rather than four, but as soon as he opened his mouth it was clear it was.

  Nothing much happens in the dreams, certainly nothing that would justify the extreme reaction Sari has to them: she is standing on the plain, and around her is nothing but silence, silence so full and intense that she feels that she could touch it. The first snow of the year has settled, and the wide whiteness tugs her breath into gasps. Someone is walking towards her from very far away, and she watches the figure in the distance, hunched, tiny as an insect, looking at it with no more than faint curiosity, but as the figure approaches the curiosity changes into dread as the face she has come to recognise as Ferenc’s swims into focus and he says, ‘Sari’, just that, just her name, just ‘Sari’ but that is enough to blast her so far out of sleep that it is driven away for the rest of the night.

  She still gets letters regularly, though they have changed their tone slightly – more of the war has seeped into them. Before, the letters could have been written from anywhere – a business trip to Paris or London; a holiday on Lake Balaton – but now, with a mixture of bitterness and elation, Ferenc has started to write about his surroundings. Nothing specific, of course, that wouldn’t be allowed, but he talks of failure, of being driven back, and through the words, ringing with anger that a man as proud as Ferenc is bound to feel when encountering failure, burns a bright, blazing hope: that it will be over soon, and that he will come home. She’s almost touched at how clear is his assumption that when he comes home everything will be the same, that the past four years will be easily excised from both of their memories.