The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  Sari and Marco still meet at Sari’s father’s house, but she lets him in through the front door now. She had not known what she was waiting for, but she realised as soon as Orsolya Kiss had a lover from the camp (a fact that Sari and Anna laughed about together: you knew that something had become ordinary and expected when even Orsolya was able to attract someone to fuck her) that she was safe to be more open about Marco. Orsolya was not going to tell Ferenc about Marco, for fear of Sari telling her husband about her own indiscretions. They don’t flaunt their relationship, still, unlike some of the women who parade their Italian lovers like they’re the latest fashion from Vienna, but Sari has stopped going to such extreme lengths to hide it. Anyway, everyone’s so caught up in their own little intrigues these days that she would be surprised if they’d attract much attention going at it on the porch of the church.

  March is still freezing, the ground singing like iron when struck, and Marco insists on piling the bed high with embroidered eiderdowns, sheets, even tablecloths – everything that they can find. He’s almost entirely obscured by the massive pile of material, so Sari can pretend to be talking to herself when she says: ‘Do you really think it’ll be over soon?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ he mumbles.

  ‘I had a letter from Ferenc. He seems to think the same.’

  ‘Mm.’ Marco turns his head into the pillow and opens his eyes into the muffled darkness; sighing, his own hot breath heats his face.

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to go home.’

  He doesn’t know that he’s going to say it until it’s out of his mouth.

  Sari’s small, cold hand lands on the back of his neck. ‘Well,’ she says, trying to force some common sense into her voice, ‘We both know that if – when – it’s all over, you’ll go back to your lovely house in Milan, and your beautiful wife, and having your books and things will help you fill the gaps in your memory, so you can go back to your old job. And maybe you’ll have children – maybe two, a girl and a boy.’ With a quiver of laughter in her voice, she adds: ‘You can call the girl Sari.’

  He snorts. ‘Sara.’

  ‘Is that what it is in Italian?’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘After the war? Well, Ferenc will come home, and we’ll get married – oh God, I hope he won’t want anything too fancy, but knowing his family he probably will. And then once all you lot are out of the way, we’ll move back into his house. His parents will stay in Budapest – his father was blinded in the war, did I tell you that? – and he’ll take care of the land and the herds, and I’ll – I suppose I’ll keep doing what I’m doing now.’

  ‘What about children?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sari says doubtfully. She’s eighteen now, a perfectly respectable age to be a mother – her own mother had been fifteen, though the fact that she’d died in childbirth isn’t much of a testament to early motherhood – but thought of a whole miniature human to care for is more frightening than almost anything else she can think of.

  ‘I expect you’ll be able to afford nurses to look after them,’ Marco says, reading her thoughts.

  ‘Probably.’

  For a moment, they are both silent, locked in their own future worlds. Then Marco says, his voice tentative: ‘So, we both know that’s what’s going to happen. But just for a moment, imagine I didn’t go home.’

  ‘All right.’ Sari smiles. Marco’s never spoken like this before and it’s nice to know that she’s not the only one to entertain the occasional flight of fancy. ‘So what happens?

  Do we set up house together here?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! What would we do about Ferenc?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you could be waiting for him with a revolver …’

  Marco shifts onto his side, facing her, and shakes his head impatiently. ‘No, no, no – I don’t want to shoot Ferenc. Anyway, this is a fantasy – we can do whatever we want, which certainly isn’t going to involve living here.’

  ‘Fine, fine. So where?’

  ‘We would need to go to a city, where we’d have no trouble finding jobs, and where it would be hard to find us.

  Not Budapest – it’s too cold, and anyway, my Magyar isn’t good enough—’ Sari interrupts: ‘Your Magyar is non-existent!’

  ‘All right, all right. And my German’s not up to much either. Maybe Rome.’

  ‘No, that’s not fair – if I have to leave my country, you should have to, too.’

  ‘But Rome – ah, there’s no point arguing about it. How about Paris?’

  ‘Do you speak French?’

  ‘Enough that I could get a job there. And you could learn – now that your Italian is good, you’d find it easy. Maybe you could train to be a proper doctor. Would you like that?’

  ‘I think,’ Sari says, ‘maybe I’d like to study for a while – history, and books, and things like that.’

  ‘Well, you’re the right age for it. I could teach history and Italian; we could live in a little apartment on the left bank. You could wear terribly glamorous clothes, and have a small fluffy dog. We would eat in restaurants, and drink champagne.’

  Sari laughs, delighted. ‘I’m glad we’ve got that organised, then,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, it’s a relief to have a plan, isn’t it?’ He draws an enormous sigh, and pulls himself out of bed. ‘I must get back, Sari.’

  She passes him his clothes and watches in silence as he dresses, then pulls on her skirt and bodice to see him to the door. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

  ‘You will.’

  He opens the door and the wind whips it so that it bangs against the side of the house; she leans a hand on the doorframe as he laces his boots.

  ‘Ah, Sari,’ he says, standing – he puts a hand on her cheek in an unusually tender gesture.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You always look so – so resigned.’

  She doesn’t know quite what to make of that, but her confusion is wiped out by his next words: ‘I do love you, you know. Whatever happens, remember that.’

  He leaves. His absence rings in her ears like thunder.

  The letter arrives two weeks later, and Sari knows what it says before she reads it, sitting on the worn wooden steps of Judit’s house, strikingly reminded of sitting here with Lujza almost two years ago. She reads it, and then reads it again before putting it down. She is still for a moment, not thinking, just breathing, and then gets up, goes back into the house.

  ‘Ferenc is coming home,’ she says. The words taste curious and bitter in her mouth.

  Dearest Sari,

  I am writing to let you know that I will be home soon. It is not over, but it looks like it is over for me, in any case. A week ago I was shot through the leg, and the doctors say that I will not be able to walk properly for two months or more, and I may always have a limp. I do not really mind. I can be of no further use here, so I am being discharged. I will go first to stay with my parents in Budapest for a week or two, but I do not want to be away from you, and from Falucska, for too long, and so I imagine I will be there in about six weeks. I know that my house is still being used for the war effort, so I will stay in your father’s house.

  I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to seeing you, and the village.

  Your loving

  Ferenc

  Half an hour later, she is translating the words into Italian for Marco, walking through the chilly grounds of the camp – of Ferenc’s house, Sari thinks; she’ll have to get used to associating this place with him again, rather than with Marco.

  Marco is silent initially, biting his lip, hands thrust deeply into his pockets. ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘We knew that it was bound to happen sooner or later.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Sari, ‘Only I was wishing that it could have been … a bit later.’

  ‘He just assumes that it’s all right for him to stay in your father’s house?’

  ‘We’re engaged. Of course he can make that assumption.’
>
  ‘Shit,’ Marco says, sudden and vehement. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘I know.’ She wants to cry. No matter how prepared they have tried to be for this, no matter how resigned she has been, throughout the whole relationship, to its inevitable end, she still feels as if she has been kicked in the gut. Experimentally, she tells herself that she is lucky that Ferenc is still alive, that many women would give anything to be in her position, to be expecting their men to come home from the war, and finds, unsurprised, that it makes no difference at all.

  ‘We have six weeks,’ she says. It is something, after all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ferenc doesn’t look like he did in her recurring dreams, but nor does he look like he did four years ago. He is thinner, he is bearded, and he looks – he looks old, yet not adult. Sari can’t quite work out how this can be so, how he can look so broken, yet still seem childlike, lacking the assurance and maturity of someone like Marco (and God, she has to stop doing that, she has to stop comparing). He is standing by the table of her father’s house; it is May, and the air, clogged with the scent of spring flowers, rings with the sound of birds. He looks like a man in a trance, though whether a pleasant one or otherwise she can’t tell.

  ‘It’s all – it’s unreal,’ he says.

  His voice is louder than she remembers it, and it takes her some time to realise that it’s not her imagination, that he speaks louder now, to compensate for the hearing he has lost from four years of constant shelling and gunshots.

  She can do nothing but stare at him, fighting back a rising tide of gut-deep panic. I cannot marry this man, she thinks. He hasn’t tried to touch her yet, not even to shake her hand or kiss her cheek, and she only prays that she will not cringe when he does. It is not that he is repulsive in himself; he is just not what she wants. All the things that Marco has been saying for the past two years suddenly start battering about inside her skull: the fact of her life if she stays here, if she marries Ferenc, has abruptly become a reality.

  He arrived that morning, putting his dirty, worn rucksack on Judit’s front porch, waiting patiently until she came outside to speak to him. She took him straight to her father’s house; she and Marco have been avoiding it for the past weeks, unsure of when Ferenc would arrive, not wanting to give him any reason to suspect anything. The rest of the village is being similarly circumspect. Ferenc and his family command enough respect that nobody wants to parade anything in front of him, and walking through the village that morning, every woman that they see gives the impression of servile respectability, welcoming Ferenc home; welcomes that he largely ignores.

  Ferenc touches the soft, smooth wood of the kitchen table to ground himself. He’s been away from the front for weeks now, but still he finds the silence frightening; it’s as if his ears have been packed with mud. It wasn’t silent in Budapest, except at night, and he found himself jerking awake again and again from dreams of the battlefield.

  Sari has changed; that is beyond doubt. When he left, four years ago, she was hardly more than a little girl, and he had thought longingly of the woman that she would become. Now she is that woman, and he finds himself thinking longingly of the little girl, his mascot, his imaginary amulet that sustained him through the war. The woman he looks at now is still not beautiful, but there is something different about her, something perhaps better, or rarer – it’s almost an elegance, although he feels ridiculous calling an eighteen-year-old peasant girl with snarled hair elegant. He only realises now that he’s been used to feeling superior to her, but something is stopping him from doing that now. She has confidence, that’s what it is; she’s come to know her body, how to use it, and despite the awkwardness of the situation – and he doesn’t blame her for feeling awkward; it’s only to be expected – in some deeper, more fundamental way, she looks more comfortable than he’s ever seen her, arms lightly crossed, weight on one hip, head cocked to one side. She has always looked at people directly, but he notices the defensiveness that used to barb her gaze has gone. She’s still thinner than he would like, but there is swelling, a roundness under her clothes that wasn’t there when he left, and feels a sudden throb of desire, which does a lot to dispel his panic. At least he still has that. Although, at the moment, he can’t imagine what to do with it.

  They look at each other for a long time, and Sari is the one who speaks first.

  ‘Welcome home, Ferenc,’ she says, relieved to find that her voice sounds passably sincere and, steeling herself, steps forward and gives him a kiss on the cheek. It’s not the trial that she expected it to be; that’s a start, she thinks, and after all, we have time to get things right.

  ‘I missed you, Sari,’ he says, huskily. ‘I missed you so much.’

  ‘You must be exhausted,’ she replies. ‘I’ve made up the bed upstairs. You should sleep.’

  ‘Will you stay?’

  ‘I – I can’t. I have work to do – I’ve been doing some nursing down at the prison camp.’ She thinks it’s best to tell him this straight away, but he doesn’t react.

  ‘Please, Sari. I won’t do anything, I promise. Only … just stay until I fall asleep, will you?’

  She feels a surge of contempt at his display of weakness, and instantly hates herself for it. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay until you fall asleep, but after that I really do have work to do. And this evening I’ll cook at Judit’s house. You should come around six.’

  He looks disappointed. ‘Can’t we eat here?’ he asks, but she shakes her head.

  ‘You know that wouldn’t be right,’ she says, taking unusual refuge in propriety. ‘Now, go upstairs to bed. I’ll be down here if you need anything, and I’ll check on you before I leave.’

  It’s like walking through water. Sari makes her way to Judit’s house with an almost total unawareness of her body; it seems stupid, on some level, to be so badly shocked and affected by something that she has always known to be inevitable, but nevertheless, nevertheless …

  She’s hardly got her foot on Judit’s front step before Anna is at her shoulder. ‘Sari,’ she says, her voice low and breathless, ‘I just heard that Ferenc is back. Are you – are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, come inside,’ Sari replies, weary. ‘I don’t want to tell you things and then have to repeat them straight away for that gossip-fiend in there.’

  She’s expected a barrage of questions, and so is surprised that, once inside, both Judit and Anna just sit, silent and expectant, waiting for her to speak. She realises gradually that this is not down to any sort of reticence on their part (Judit and Anna reticent? The very idea is absurd), but due to their complete uncertainty as to her mood. Her confusion and distress about Ferenc’s homecoming has been roaring so loudly inside her that it seems incredible that it isn’t obvious to everyone around her, but her natural reserve, her constant mouthing of dutiful words about how lucky and grateful she is to be engaged to Ferenc, and that he’s coming back from the war, these things have fooled people, she realises. It’s astonishing, but Judit and Anna are genuinely unsure as to whether she is happy or sad, rejoicing or despairing.

  ‘How – how is he?’ Anna asks, tentative.

  ‘I can’t really tell, to be honest. He seems … all right, I suppose. His leg is healing quite well, but he’s shocked, I think, to be back here, after four years of fighting. I don’t think he quite knows what to do with himself. I feel – I feel sorry for him, more than anything else.’ She pauses for a moment, but concludes that there’s no easy or pleasant way to say it. ‘I don’t remember, but – was he always so ordinary?’

  Anna and Judit exchange glances, but don’t answer – who can comment on the ordinariness, or otherwise, of someone’s fiancè? And Sari knows that any answer would be meaningless; she’s already condemned him in her own heart. She shrugs, self-deprecating.

  ‘I knew that I should never have gone down to that camp,’ she says. ‘It was always going to end like this, with me being dissatisfied with things here. I knew that. I
just thought – oh, this just couldn’t be worse, could it? I thought that the war would be over, and Marco and all of the others would go home, and I would have time to adapt, to get used to the idea of Ferenc, without Marco in the way, before he came home. And now – God, I just saw Marco yesterday.’

  She doesn’t say it, but Anna and Judit exchange glances again, and Sari knows that they understand Ferenc’s inadequacy, at least from Sari’s point of view, in comparison to Marco.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Anna asks.

  Sari laughs, a dry, brittle sound. ‘What can I do? I am engaged. Marco is married. From what I hear, the war will be over soon. Marco will be going home to his wife, and I will be left here with Ferenc. I have to make the best of things. Ferenc is a good man, and he will be a good husband. I just need to get used to the idea again.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Sleeping. He looked tired. I’ll go back to see him when I get back from the camp.’

  Anna’s eyebrows shoot up so high that they are nearly lost in her hair. ‘You’re going to the camp?’ she asks, shrilly.

  Sari is impatient. ‘Well, yes. Not to see Marco, but, you know, Paolo still has that fever, and Umberto that rash, and I’m not going to stop going down there just because Ferenc’s come back. I’m not doing anything improper.’

  Judit gives a disbelieving laugh, and Sari turns on her.