His lips are still moving, his chest still dipping every so often. She keeps reciting the words and they soon become meaningless, like clods of earth falling from her lips, an inarticulate string of sounds. Her voice becomes rough – unused to speaking this much, after speaking to no one but Judit and Ferenc for weeks. Still he breathes. Still.
The window is almost entirely light when he gives a violent jerk and cries out, his face creasing with pain. She is badly shocked after his long silence. Heart hammering, she leans closer to him again, and his eyes shimmer open. They are no longer focused and they roam around the room, but then fasten on her face.
‘Sari,’ he croaks, ‘Please. Please.’
What is he asking? For her to make him better? Impossible, of course, and even he must know that by now. Is it meaningless pleading, brought on by suffering? Or could he be asking for something else, for release? Hardly believing what she is doing, she extends her arm, so that her palm is over his face. His eyes do not move from her face. She puts her hand gently on his face, and still his eyes do not waver. She starts again: ‘Our Father …’ and he closes his eyes. Her palm covers his mouth, forming a tight seal, and with her thumb and index finger she pinches his nose shut. Still he does not struggle; his chest stops moving. Sari looks towards the window, the rays of light stealing over the sill, and she prays, sending empty words out to an empty universe, while Ferenc dies under her hand. He twitches once before the end, but his eyes do not open, and she takes it as a subconscious rejection of death, nothing more. The morning is beautiful, the sky multicoloured, and the light turning the grass into a vivid, glowing green. He’s gone, she feels it, but it’s a long time before she takes her hand away. When she does, it’s as if her soul takes flight as well as his. She feels light, not with relief, but simply with hollowness. It is over. It is done. Her child is safe.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
November is always the grimmest month, in Sari’s opinion, but this year it isn’t affecting her as badly as usual; she’s mainly just relieved that the summer is over. The heat never bothered her much before, but it’s a different matter now, simmering and sweltering through July and August as a pregnant woman. Next time, she thinks, I will plan things better, and then she smiles to herself at the preposterous idea that there could be a next time. It’s not a bitter smile, nor even one of resignation, just simple certainty that this baby is, for her, the first and last.
It will be a January baby, and how she is looking forward to her birth. Yes, it’s a girl – she knew, and Judit confirmed it. Girls sit in the womb differently to boys, anyone who’s dealt with as many pregnant women as Judit has can tell that. It’s been a difficult pregnancy, and Sari can’t wait for it to be over. She’s nearly lost the baby twice already, once from Ferenc’s kick, and once since, from illness, and she is looking forward to it being safely out of her, where she feels she’ll be able to look after it better, dependent more on her brain than her treacherous body.
Judit is always telling her that she needs to rest, that she’s risking bringing the birth on early, but she can’t sit still. Judit tries to give her gentle tasks to keep her busy – mending, embroidery, or preparing medicines – but more often than not she will come back from visiting someone to find the house empty, and Sari off tending to some poor unfortunate.
‘They can wait!’ she scolds Sari, after the second time that it’s happened. ‘They can always wait until I come back! After all we’ve done for this baby, surely you don’t want to risk its life unnecessarily, just because you’re bored?’
To this, Sari just shrugs and smiles self-deprecatingly. She can’t explain to Judit that she knows that this baby will be born, but she does – she feels that she’s carried it this far by will alone, and sheer determination is all that’s needed to keep it alive a little longer.
It’s only in the past couple of months that she’s really started to believe that she’s safe, that she’s got away with it, that she’s not going to be awoken in the middle of the night by an army of policemen at her door denouncing her as a murderess and dragging her away to the hangman’s noose. For the couple of months after Ferenc died, she would regularly wake, sweating and shuddering, from nightmares along these lines, and then lie awake for hours afterwards in morbid contemplation. If she were to be charged with murder and sentenced to death, what would become of her baby? Surely it wouldn’t be condemned also, just because of the acts of its mother? But what would they do? Would she give birth in prison, her newborn whisked away to an orphanage just as swiftly as she would be whisked to the gallows? Or would they – God forbid – would they cut it out of her, to excuse them hanging a pregnant woman? But the knock on the door never came, and Sari has finally understood that they have made it. Things are going to be all right.
It was surprisingly easy, all things considered. The morning that Ferenc died she walked to Judit’s to tell her the news – the village was just starting to wake up and move about, but nobody spoke to her and nobody approached her, and she only realised once Judit opened the door to her and stared hard at her that she was weeping steadily, tears coursing down her face. When she thinks of that now, she laughs a little – the only two times that she can remember crying in her adult life, and both for the sake of men! There’ll be no more of that, absolutely not.
As news spread through the village that day, Sari braced herself for the whispering, and maybe outright accusations to begin, but there was nothing, and to her amazement, still nothing over the next few days. She stayed with Judit during that time, and Judit tried to reassure her: Sari had been convinced that it was only a matter of time before fingers started to be pointed at her, but Judit insisted that there was no reason for suspicion. Some malicious minds might wish to spread rumours, yes, but in Judit’s view Sari had done herself an enormous favour by weeping that morning: it had softened the hearts of everyone who saw her, and made them less inclined to listen to vicious whispers.
‘It couldn’t have been better,’ Judit had said gleefully, ‘if you’d done it on purpose.’
The village taken care of – for the time being, at least – Sari’s main worry remained Ferenc’s parents. She telegraphed them the morning of his death, and heard nothing back from them until they appeared in the village a few days later in time for the funeral. They looked lost and baffled when the unknown priest, brought in from the next village for the occasion, mouthed impersonal platitudes, and Sari couldn’t help her heart aching a little for them. To lose an oldest son is a tragedy, even more so when the younger one, now the heir, was still away fighting, his safety uncertain. Sari had expected to be met with caution or coldness or even downright hostility, but what actually happened was almost worse. Months later, Sari still blanches at the way that Ferenc’s mother flung her arms around her neck, sobbing into her shoulder, telling Sari again and again how fond Ferenc had been of her, and how unbearable it was that he was gone, and gradually, Sari had begun to realise that, far from being suspicious of her, they were grateful to her for nursing him through the throes of his final illness. She had to fight back a hysterical burst of laughter. The poor bastards, she thought.
But their potential suspicion was only the first hurdle, the second being the issue of the baby. Sari had decided that by no means must they know about her pregnancy. If they found out, they would assume that the baby was Ferenc’s, and Sari couldn’t bear the thought of them taking an interest in it, trying to control the way that she brought it up, or – worst of all, but a definite possibility – insisting that Sari, as a single woman in a poor and isolated village, was unable to give the baby the upbringing befitting it, and instead they should take it back with them to Budapest.
The obvious solution would be simply to tell them that the baby was not Ferenc’s, but that would risk their extreme displeasure, and also lay open a motive for his murder – also an impossible course of action. So Sari decided that the best option was to hide it – they hadn’t seen her in four years, after all, and so th
ey could believe that the barely perceptible swell in the centre of her body was down to her growing up, rather than anything else. The whole time that they were in the village, Sari was terrified of giving herself away and having the baby taken from her, but the Gazdags’ eyes were so misted over with grief that they were not inclined to look at her too closely.
She’d managed it all so well that she could barely believe it, and then fate, or stress, or whatever it was intervened and helped her a little more, in a rather backhanded way. As soon as the funeral was over, and the Gazdags had left the village, Sari started feeling very peculiar, light headed and nauseous, in a deeper, more wrenching way than she had felt throughout her pregnancy. By the next day she was delirious with fever and Judit was frantic, sponging her sweating forehead and forcing medicines and potions down her that seemed to have progressively less and less effect.
‘We didn’t work so damn hard so that you could die on me now,’ Sari remembers Judit saying, teeth clenched, grimfaced, as another hour passed without Sari’s fever breaking, but she remembers little else from that time, other than her own voice, every time Judit held a cup to her lips, insisting, ‘Nothing that will harm the baby – please, Judit.’
‘You’ll be no good to that damn baby if you’re dead.’ Judit would retort, and now that she’s herself again Sari knows that the fever that she ran for four days in the end was probably more risk to the baby’s health than any of the foul-tasting liquids that Judit forced down her throat. Nothing she can do about it now, though, and she takes comfort from the fact that the baby is one of the most active that she’s ever heard of – kicking and squirming non-stop, to the extent that Sari is sometimes exhausted and fractious, but simultaneously pleased: at least the child is full of energy. At least she’s alive.
When Sari first ventured out of doors after her illness, pale and shaky still, she was overwhelmed by the response of almost everyone she met. People seemed to go out of their way to offer her a few kind words, and she realised that her illness had served the useful purpose of making Ferenc’s death even more convincing. She’s still not sure, when she looks people in the eyes, that they don’t have an inkling that some sort of foul play was involved, but even so, the general consensus seems to be that Sari has suffered enough for now.
That was when she finally started to relax, when the spectre of prison and execution stopped haunting her nightmares. It doesn’t matter whether they believe her or not, deep down – they believe her enough to keep her safe. Neither she nor Judit knows what caused the illness, but Sari suspects that it was some sort of purging. She’s not naturally superstitious, no more so than anyone else in the village, at least, but the fact that the illness struck her after she’d just committed great evil seemed to be a little more than a coincidence.
She feels lighter after her illness, at times almost too light, as if she’s barely anchored to the earth any more, and she feels no more grief for Ferenc, other than a removed sort of regret. He could have been a good man, she thinks sometimes. He could have been so much more than he was. Marco, she tries not to think about at all, and most of the time it’s not that difficult to shut him out of her mind; already, when she thinks of him, it seems like scenes from someone else’s life, and in a way that’s what it was. In the weak days after her illness, she allowed herself a brief fantasy of what it would have been like if she had fled with Marco that night, managing to evade Ferenc and cross the plain, but she’s practical enough to know that it would never have worked between them; anywhere else, her naïveté would have irritated him, and she would have found his learnedness unremarkable. She has a clear, sharp image of them sitting together in an anonymous city somewhere, bored with one another, nothing at all to say.
There’s a knock on the door. It’s probably Anna, she thinks, though it’s a little early for her. Since she’s come out of her Ferenc-imposed exile, Sari has re-established some friendships, and since Sari is largely housebound in the latest stages of her pregnancy, Anna comes around to visit every day. Sometimes Lilike comes too, but Lujza rarely leaves the house these days, and Sari is resigned to not seeing her until after she’s given birth.
Sari’s never sure quite how much any of them know. Anna’s never said anything out of line, never dared to suggest that Ferenc’s death might have been anything less or more than the result of a tragic illness – but sometimes she looks at Sari in such a way that makes Sari wonder. She doesn’t want Anna to suspect, but it seems possible that those few people who know the extent of her relationship with Marco might suspect something, and she trusts that Anna would never do anything to give her away.
There’s also the fact of the delicate scar that laces the outside of Sari’s eye, the result of a well-placed blow from Ferenc, a scar that no one else has commented on, but Anna asked about it the first time she saw Sari after Ferenc died. Sari made up some glib excuse at the time – opening a window into her own face, ha ha, how silly of her to be so clumsy – but she noticed something flickering in Anna’s face at that. She thinks perhaps that women who have been treated badly by their husbands or sweethearts have an unspoken understanding, some sort of code that enables them to slice through the lies that convince others.
Sari moves towards the door, thinking fondly of the days when she could do this lightly, easily, not like the lumbering beast of burden that she has become. She’s not resentful of the way that her baby has commandeered her body, but she misses having a body that is easy and enjoyable to control. It is Anna at the door, but as soon as she sees her face, Sari’s prepared smile shrinks and shrivels. Anna is bone white and gasping.
‘Come in,’ Sari urges, and Anna pushes past her, collapsing on one of the rickety wooden chairs by the table. Sari eases herself down opposite her, while Anna regards her with an expectant eye.
‘Well?’ asks Sari, hearing an echo of Judit in her slightly impatient tone. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s over,’ Anna says.
For a moment, Sari can’t quite figure out what she means. ‘Over?’ she repeats.
‘The war,’ Anna says, a hitching sob in her voice. ‘It’s over.’
‘Who—?’ Sari knows that this is a stupid question; they have been hearing reports of their imminent defeat for months, but nevertheless …
‘We lost,’ Anna says, as if this is a side issue, something that matters little in the great scheme of things – and for her, it’s true. Sari feels a tiny stab of regret that Marco can’t be here to see the end of it, his side victorious, and that Ferenc is missing it too; not that he would be gracious in defeat, but she has a sense that the war was enough of a nightmare that part of him would always celebrate its end, regardless of the outcome.
‘So they’re going,’ Anna says, evidently tired of waiting for Sari to catch on. ‘The prisoners. They’re going back to Italy. And our men are coming home. What I mean is, Giovanni is going back to Italy, and Károly is coming back here.’ With that, she puts her head on her folded arms and sobs.
Sari puts her arm around her. It’s an odd thing, she realises, but pregnancy has made her better able to deal with physical affection. She’s achieved the ultimate intimacy, a human being residing inside her, and next to that everything is easy. She waits patiently until Anna quietens. It doesn’t take long – Anna’s never been one for public displays of emotion – and within a couple of minutes she is upright again, face hectically flushed and damp, but dabbing her eyes with great dignity.
‘Sorry,’ she says to Sari, shamefaced.
‘Don’t be,’ Sari replies. She is feeling a little emotional herself. She’s a step removed from the immediacy of the situation, but she still cares, in an abstract way – cares about the Italian men who are leaving, many of whom she has dealt with intimately as a nurse, and cares about the men of the village who will be returning, many of them maimed and distressed, to a village that has stopped having much use for them.
‘Have you spoken to Giovanni yet?’ Sari asks, and Anna shakes her
head.
‘Not yet. I know what he wants – we’ve spoken about it, and he wants me to come back to Italy with him. You know that he has no wife, and he wants to marry me.’ Despite her distress, Anna can’t help swelling a little with pride as she says this – a man, a foreign man, wanting to marry her! ‘But of course I can’t go back with him now, the army will deal with that. I would have to make my own way, and you know,’ she shrugs helplessly, ‘I have no money. I have nothing that isn’t Károly’s. All our valuables have been with his cousin in Város since he’s been away, that’s how much he trusts me.’
‘And when—?’
‘Nobody knows. We just have to wait until people get orders from the army. It’s not as if we’re important,’ she adds, with ill-fitting sarcasm. ‘Not as if we’re people who need to know anything.’
The camp disbands amid much confusion, mixed joy and regret. In general, the prisoners who have been there the least time are the most excited about going back to Italy, whereas the long term residents regard the notion of home with emotions ranging between trepidation and outright reluctance. They don’t know home any more, they don’t know how it may have changed in their absence, and in the meantime they have adapted to a routine that is familiar enough and comfortable enough to be pleasant. The more thoughtful of the men are anxious for other reasons – they have seen the way that the war has affected some of the women in the village, and who’s to say that their own wives and sweethearts might not be similarly affected? Will they go home to find cuckoos in their nests, the stains of other men in their beds? Perhaps it’s best not to wonder, and not to find out.
There’s barely a man who hasn’t formed an attachment to one or more of the villagers, and so the camp, in its final days, is surrounded by weeping women. Some are genuinely distraught – Anna, for one, who is dreading the return of Károly, and being enveloped back into her old life, but doesn’t know what she can do about it, in the absence of funds – while others are simply nostalgic, appreciating the past two years as a pleasant diversion from normality, but not denouncing its return.
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