The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  ‘Please.’

  Sari can read the disapproval on Anna’s face, and has a good idea of what she is thinking. She’s never said as much, but it is clear that Anna has justified her own infidelity by Károly’s vicious behaviour, that Anna has created a moral universe in which betraying a bad man is acceptable, but betraying a decent one is not – a fact that can be overlooked when the decent man in question is far away, but not when he is there. In Anna’s mind, Ferenc is a decent man, and Sari doesn’t have the heart to dispute that, nor is she sure enough herself of who or what Ferenc is any more.

  But Anna capitulates, as Sari knew she would. She’s going down to the camp later to see Giovanni, and Sari gives her a note to pass to Marco. She’s never written in Italian before, but urgency has overcome shyness, though she still blushes at the thought of the terrible mistakes she must have made. And then she waits.

  She’s in Anna’s house early that afternoon and time seems to stretch like honey. He’s not coming; of course he’s not coming, and he’s sensible not to come. Anna was right, it was a stupid plan, stupid and wrong, stupid and wrong and dangerous, and Sari should just give up and go home; she has work to do, after all. She stands up and sits back down, half hoping, then stands again, and has taken one tentative step towards the front door when she hears the light tap on the side door.

  It’s only been a few weeks since she saw him last, but Marco looks older than she remembered, and more worried. He comes into the house quickly and shuts the door behind him.

  ‘Did anyone see you come?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  For a long, tense minute, they seem to have nothing to say to each other, and simply stand gazing at one another; Sari feels oddly combative, almost expecting him to strike at any moment, to accuse her of recklessness and stupidity. You didn’t have to come; she’s already responding mentally to his anticipated attack. Then he smiles, swiftly and suddenly, and her bones melt.

  ‘I missed you,’ he says.

  Inhibitions loosened, she crosses to where he is standing, lifts herself up on tiptoe and kisses him, deceptively chastely, on the lips.

  ‘What are …’ he begins, but she hushes him.

  ‘Don’t talk. We shouldn’t be here, and we shouldn’t be doing this. We won’t get another chance, but I …’ She stops, suddenly shy. ‘I wanted to give you something.’

  Five minutes later, Marco is lying on his back on pile of eiderdowns on the floor – Sari is too protective of Anna’s feelings to use the bed – with Sari rearing up above him, and it occurs to him, briefly, hazily, as she slowly, slowly lowers herself onto him, how few pleasures in life are really complete, how he’s dreamt and hoped for this moment for nearly two years, yet now that it’s happening, he can’t quite let go of the knowledge that the only reason it’s happening is because Sari has been possessed by another man. That is his last coherent thought before the heady spiralling down into sensation begins. Then there is nothing, nothing but Sari, her body, an arc, a bow, hushed breaths lapping against the silence.

  Afterwards, he asks her – diffident as a schoolboy – how it was for her, and, being Sari, she refrains from glib pleasantries, but instead bites her lip, thinking.

  ‘It wasn’t as nice as some of the other things that we’ve done,’ she says after a while, ‘But it was good in a different way. More … more real. More about us.’

  ‘Did Ferenc—’ he starts, but she shakes her head violently, eyes screwed shut, forehead pressed against his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t talk about him,’ she says.

  They lie there in silence, then, until Marco starts to shiver.

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘I should go,’ Sari says, and Marco curses his feeble, warm-blooded body. If he’d just been able to lie there, still, for a little longer …

  ‘You were serious, weren’t you, when you said that this was the last time? This won’t happen again.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Perhaps we were silly to do this; perhaps it’s just going to make things worse – but it all seemed so unfinished, before.’

  He nods. ‘You’ll still be coming down to the camp, 162 though, won’t you?’

  ‘I think so, for the time being.’ The unstated implication being unless Ferenc decides to stop me. ‘There’s no reason to avoid me when I come, though. We were friends before any of this started, and so maybe …’ she shrugs.

  ‘Maybe,’ he echoes. He looks at her, watches her make the deliberate mental shift between being with Marco to being with Ferenc, and he can’t stop himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to talk about him with me, but I have to ask. Is he treating you well? Tell me at least that much.’

  She’s torn between the desire not to lie to him, and the desire not to worry him, because what good would that do, after all? As a compromise, she says, ‘He’s treating me as well as he knows how.’ As soon as she’s said the words she can taste their inadequacy, knowing that all she’s done is imply vague problems, without giving Marco any information at all.

  He seems satisfied with her answer, though, perhaps having expected nothing more from her. She is dressed now, tucking her hair behind her ears with impatience; he tugs on his trousers, and within a couple of minutes he is ready.

  ‘Thank Anna for me,’ he says, as they scout from the back door, checking that no one will see him leave.

  Sari laughs.

  ‘I think she’s horrified at my behaviour, though she didn’t say anything. She’s a good friend, Anna.’ She glances quickly from left to right, and nods. ‘No one’s here. You should go now—’ but he can’t quite bring himself to leave; he takes her face between his palms, and leans in until their foreheads are touching.

  ‘Goodbye, Sari.’

  She tries to laugh: ‘Don’t be so dramatic! You’ll see me,’ but he shakes his head.

  ‘Not like this. Remember this, Sari – will you promise me that? No matter how hard it gets.’

  His words are garbled, but she reaches for the meaning behind them, and grasps something, at least.

  ‘I will. I promise.’

  And he leaves, bounding down the back steps, running across the grass, slowing to a walk when he gets to a safe distance. She watches his every step. He doesn’t turn around.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  That should have been the end of it, and for a week or so, it seems like it is.

  Ferenc is chastened and quiet for the first few days after his accusation of infidelity, and Sari is not quite sure whether he should be coaxed out of the self-castigating mood he’s clearly fallen into, or left to it. She decides on the latter. Although they’re not yet married, Sari realises that how she behaves towards him now can serve as a template for how she behaves towards him for the rest of her life, and she’s seen enough marriages in which the wife caters to the husbands every whim, humouring his foul moods, to know that’s not the sort of marriage that she wants, nor the sort of marriage she could possibly sustain, as her prickly nature is bound to sabotage it sooner or later.

  Sure enough, Ferenc gradually begins to emerge from his slump, and Sari is just beginning to congratulate herself on how well she has dealt with him when he hits her.

  Afterwards, she can never quite remember how it came about. It is evening, he has just finished eating his dinner, and she is washing his plate. They are talking, unusually, just casual conversation about Sari’s work, the people who are ill at the moment, and what Sari has done for them. And then he says something – what? Later, she can never quite remember – something that strikes her as silly, and so she laughs a little and says something back – what, again? – something that implies that he’s said something wrong, and that she knows more than he does on this particular subject. The next thing she knows, her cheek is hot and smarting, and she can taste blood against her teeth, and it takes a moment for her to understand that the reason for the pain and the blood is that he’s struck her a swift back-hander.

  Hand to her f
ace, she just looks at him, astounded, and he stands, staring back, breathing harshly and heavily.

  ‘Don’t be cheeky,’ he says at last, as if drawing the reason from somewhere deep inside him, and then goes upstairs. Sari winces slightly with every loud step, hating herself for her instinctive fear.

  She finishes washing the plate before she does anything else, checking it carefully for marks, drying it and putting it away. She leaves then, shutting the door carefully behind her, and steps out into the dark. Her face burns and pounds, and her mind is working furiously. No one has ever hit her before, not even her father, and the assault on her pride and dignity is intense. She’s angry, yes, but she’s more astonished than anything else, and it’s that sense of shock that dispels her initial intention to sneak into the house and hide from Judit. Instead, she walks straight up the steps, opens the door, and announces to the kitchen at large:

  ‘He hit me.’

  Judit stares at her for a moment, as if preparing to shout or scream, then shakes her head. ‘Sit down,’ she says.

  Sari does, falling heavily into a chair by the table. Judit brings a cloth and water, and cleans her up as best she can. The side of her mouth is split and bleeding, one entire side of her face is blooming with bruises, but when Judit instructs her to run her tongue along her teeth she’s pleased to find that they’re all still sound.

  ‘That’s something, then,’ Judit says, her tone grim. Sari is waiting for the lecture she knows to be inevitable, but Judit stays silent until she’s finished tending Sari’s cuts and bruises, and then sits down opposite her.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  Sari feels panicky, drawn by a thousand contradictory impulses – to protect her pride, to rail against Ferenc’s behaviour, to protect Ferenc (surprisingly), to break down and wail. She lifts her shoulders with a desperate hitching motion.

  ‘I don’t know. We were talking – I thought everything was fine. He’s been depressed this week, quiet, and today he seemed much better, he was talking and everything – and I said something, I don’t really remember what – and he hit me.’

  She pauses, and then looks at Judit with genuine bewilderment. ‘He said I was being cheeky.’

  A man hitting a woman, a husband hitting a wife – that’s nothing new and unusual, they both know that; Sari has stark memories of Anna, ashamed, trying to hide her injuries before Károly went away, and Judit’s long experience has included several evenings tending women who have been punched and kicked and otherwise abused; she’s learnt what men will do, and the few things that women can do to stop them. But Sari – this wasn’t supposed to happen to Sari, they both know that, too.

  ‘Break the engagement,’ Judit says abruptly. It’s what Sari is thinking herself. Breaking the engagement could be social disaster; her chances of marrying someone else in the village are slim, slimmer still now that she’s no longer a virgin, and for a woman for whom marriage and children were of utmost importance, it would be unthinkable. But those things have never been desperately important to Sari, other than a vague assumption that they would be part of her future; financially, she is as close to being an independent woman as is possible in that place, and she knows that as long as Judit is alive, she can go on working with her. And after that – well, she could take on Judit’s role, or, if life in the village after having jilted the son of the most important family there proved unbearable, she could always leave.

  But then there’s Ferenc. The war has wrought terrible changes in him but perhaps the real Ferenc, happy and cleareyed and hopeful as he had been four years ago, is still there somewhere. Sari remembers how determined he was to marry her and to take care of her, despite the risk to his reputation and standing in the village, and the thought of giving up on him now gives her a lurch of shame. It’s not as if he’s changed without reason, and beyond recognition – four years of suffering can break a person, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be fixed.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you what to do,’ Judit says, breaking Sari’s freewheeling thoughts, ‘But I will tell you one thing that I know, from seeing this happen to women over and over again. A man will never do this just once. The first time, women always say oh, he’s never done it before, it’s not like him, it won’t happen again – but it always happens again.Always.’

  Sari nods. She cannot – will not – live like that, sneaking around the village hiding her bruises as if she’s the one doing something wrong. Not for anyone will she embrace that life and yet she wants to give Ferenc a chance.

  ‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow, and tell him that I won’t marry him if he ever does it again,’ Sari says.

  Judit frowns, looking dubious. ‘Sari—’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I promise – because I really will break the engagement if it happens again; I’m not scared of the consequences. I just want to give him a chance. You know, a week ago, when we had sex – before that, he shouted at me and broke a plate, and then for the next few days he was very quiet and sad, very apologetic. I think he’ll be like that again tomorrow. I think he’ll listen to me.’

  The next morning, the bruising isn’t as bad as Sari feared; certainly not very noticeable as long as she keeps her head down and nobody looks at her too closely. She considers going over to speak to Ferenc straight away, but decides to give him a little longer to cool down, and instead gathers together some supplies of arnica for Luigi’s ankle, and heads down to the camp.

  Luigi greets her cheerfully; the swelling seems to have gone down a little, and she rebandages it and gives him something for the pain. He doesn’t comment on the marks on her face, and Sari mentally thanks Judit for her swift work last night – the last thing that she could bear would be people looking at her with concern and pity. Just as she’s about to leave, she’s approached by Umberto, who is concerned about some insect bites on his arm; she reassures him as best she can that it’s nothing to be worried about, and is halfway down the stairs on the way out before she sees Marco.

  He starts to smile when he sees her, and then suddenly his smile falls away; Sari feels her heart drop into the pit of her stomach. She goes to push past him but he grabs her shoulder and turns her around to face him. One hand gripping her to stop her bolting, he pushes her hair back from her face, and lifts her chin, staring at her hard. She should have known, she thinks miserably, if anyone was going to look at her intently it was going to be Marco.

  ‘Did he hit you?’ he asks. His voice is low but shaking; Marco is quick tempered but she has never seen him angry like this, cold and controlled.

  ‘Marco—’

  ‘Sari. Did he hit you?’

  Think, she tells herself. She considers and discards all sorts of implausible excuses – she walked into a door, she fell down and hit her head on the table, she opened a window too vigorously – it would do Marco no good to have him know the truth. But the pause she has left is already a fraction too long, and she sees his eyes change as her silence confirms his suspicions. His lips draw back from his teeth in an unconscious snarl, and in a low hiss he expels a string of vicious curses. All she can do now is try to limit the damage.

  ‘Marco, listen to me,’ she says, but he is still cursing. She takes his shoulder and gives him a little shake. ‘Listen.’

  He looks at her again, eyes narrowed.

  ‘He hit me last night for the first time. I won’t stand for it. I’m going to speak to him today, and tell him that if he ever does it again that I will break the engagement.’

  He’s already shaking his head. ‘No. No, no, no. You must leave him now. He won’t listen to you.’

  ‘I think he will. He was a good man before the war, Marco, and he deserves another chance.’

  Marco gives a harsh, bitter bark of laughter. ‘He deservesnothing.’

  At that, Sari feels her temper snap. The last thing she needs at this moment is to be pampering another man’s thwarted, frustrated ego.

  ‘You listen to me,’ she says coldly. ‘You ha
ve no right to talk to me about my life here, no right to tell me what to do – none. You have made it clear from the start that at the end of the war you will go back to your beautiful, virtuous wife, and so you’ve renounced any right to make judgements on what I do here. I have to make a life for myself without you as a consideration, and I’m doing that.’

  She takes a deep breath; Marco looks so astonished at her outburst that she softens her tone somewhat in sympathy. ‘It’s kind of you to be concerned, and thank you for that. But this is the way that it’s always been between us, just a holiday from real life. I don’t tell you what you and Benigna should do when you get home, and you need to trust me to make the right choices in my own life. You know me, and you know that I’m not the sort of person who will stand to be treated like this by Ferenc. But you don’t know Ferenc, and I do, so you have to leave me to handle this in my own way.’

  He lets go of her and drops his head, rubbing his face in despair and weariness. ‘I love you, Sari,’ he says helplessly. ‘I never meant for this to happen.’

  She doesn’t know quite what he means by that, but it doesn’t matter; she takes his hand in one of hers and kisses it. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘We’ll be all right.’

  Marco thought the war was bad, he thought his injury was bad, and the long months after that, with the pain and the memory-loss and the confusion, but he was wrong, he would laugh at that now. He didn’t know what bad meant. This is the worst, he thought; this impotence, sitting uselessly on the edge of his bed, clenching and unclenching his hands, unable to think about anything but Sari, Sari and Ferenc, whether right now he is hitting her again, beating her perhaps, beating her and raping her. An image of her face is constantly before him, as if it’s been burnt onto his eyes – her expression, angry and humiliated and defiant all at once, and he buries the heels of his hands in his eyes to try and drive it away.

  Sari is right: Ferenc’s in a pliable, repentant mood when she visits him that afternoon. He looks at her with sad, watery eyes, and when, her voice stern, she says: ‘I have to talk to you,’ he dissolves, head in his hands, sobbing piteously, promising that he will never hurt her again.