The Angel Makers (6 page)
She is frozen for a moment, before her strength returns in a flood.
‘I’m not going to talk to you now,’ she says gently and calmly, removing his hand from her arm, and she walks away.
The recruiters are not discerning. They take every man who is willing, able being a less pressing requirement. They overlook the doubtful claims of age, and take all that they’re offered. Tomorrow, the men start their march to Város, get the train for Budapest, and from there, no one is quite sure.
That night, Sari goes to her father’s house to wait for Ferenc, knowing he won’t come to Judit’s. Sure enough, scant moments after she sits down at the table, there’s a tread on the steps and a knock on the door and there he is. He is pale and obviously agitated, but Sari is glad to see that he’s less wild-eyed than he was outside the church.
‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he says stiffly.
‘That’s all right.’
They sit quietly. Night is falling, and the darkness in the room heaves and swells. Ferenc’s face is gloomily shadowed.
‘I’m going tomorrow,’ he offers, finally.
‘I thought you would.’
‘I just wanted to say goodbye. And to apologise. I understand now why you wouldn’t – you know. It’s good that we didn’t. It makes sense.’
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘Yes.’ He swallows hard. ‘Sari, is it going to be all right?’
She’s taken aback at his question. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know – the war. Us. Me. Is it … will it …?’ He stops, seeing her shaking her head.
‘Ferenc, I don’t know any more than anyone else. I can’t just summon up the answers for you.’
For a moment she thinks he’s going to get angry again, but he doesn’t. Instead, he asks, half pleadingly, ‘After this is over, will we—’
He needs something to hang on to, Sari realises, something he can take with him. She nods decisively. ‘I made a promise to you, and to my father. I’m not going to go back on that.’
‘All right.’ His relief is palpable. They sit in silence for a few moments longer before he stands to leave.
‘Well, then. This … I mean, I—’ he looks down, discomfited. Impulsively, Sari gets to her feet, slips her arms around his neck, and kisses his cheek.
‘Goodbye, Ferenc,’ she says, and then adds quietly, ‘I think it will be all right. I mean, I think
you
will be all right.’ She doesn’t know if she’s telling the truth, but he deserves a little reassurance. It’s the only farewell gift she can give him.
He doesn’t speak when she releases him. Instead, he gives a curt nod, and doesn’t look at her as he leaves.
Judit and Sari watch them leave from the door of Judit’s house. As they disappear into the stillness of the plain, Mátyás Szabo’s mother bursts from her house and flops to the ground, like a dead crow, like a fallen cloud. The sound of her keening thickens the air, and Judit turns away. ‘Well,’ she says.
That night, the wind is strong. Sari is wide-eyed in the darkness.
Rounding the corner, Sari hefts the dishevelled pile of material in her arms and sees that a hint of spring has cracked the ice on the river, the first day of the year that the women haven’t had to do it themselves. She is glad: the winter this year has been harsh and unforgiving, and food has been scarce.
Picking her way delicately through the mud and snow and rocks down to the river, Anna Csillag appears beside her, arms also full, jostling her with a friendly shoulder. ‘Morning, Sari.’
‘Morning, Anna.’
A slow smile creeps across Sari’s face. This is what has kept her buoyant through the winter, the reason that she can shrug off so easily the recent hardships. War and its deprivations have brought about an outbreak of camaraderie in the village: feuds dissolving, frostiness melting due to the simple fact that people need each other more than ever before – and for the first time in her life, Sari has found herself with friends, found herself able to walk through town without her specially-prepared face of slightly pitying disdain, ready to deflect insults, because now no one – or almost no one – is shouting, or whispering, or trying to trip her up. It feels like she can breathe more easily, after years of not even knowing that her breathing was restricted.
Anna has been a revelation. She is twenty-two, tall and broad-shouldered, with wide cheekbones and a dark riot of hair, and Sari feels like she’s only just met her, although she’s lived in the same village all her life. She knows that this is due to the fact that Anna’s husband, Károly, is gone. When she tries, she can remember Anna’s old incarnation, but it’s hard to connect that silent, cowed woman who skulked around the village trying to hide her bruises, with the expansive, explosive Anna who’s appeared: humorous, lewd, goodspirited in the face of anything.
Lujza’s down by the river, and Lilike, and they greet Anna and Sari with grim cheerfulness. ‘How’s the water?’ Anna asks, grinning, and laughs as Lujza holds up red, chapped hands with a grimace.
‘Goddamned freezing, like always.’
They hunker down together. Sari doesn’t say much herself, but these days the women’s conversation hums around her rather than stopping dead, which is good enough for her. There’s little gossip these days – what gossip can there be without men? Lujza sniffs dismissively – so the conversation is banal, but friendly. Talk turns inevitably to sex, and Anna laughs to herself as Lujza describes in vivid detail quite how much she’s been missing it. Lujza was married barely six months when Péter went away, and the way she tells it, they’d been fucking like rabbits all that time – ‘And now,’ she says heavily, ‘nothing. Nothing for nearly a year and a half.’ She shudders theatrically. ‘The way I feel,’ she adds, grinning sharply at Sari, who’s beside her, ‘I’m going to start going after you lot, soon.’
Sari smiles, but can’t help blushing, and she looks away. She wishes sometimes that she could join in these sorts of frank discussions; sometimes, an image of Ferenc floats in her head, looking at her the last time they saw each other alone, and it had been as if she could see right inside him, into his heart and his groin, feel how badly he wanted her at that moment, to fuck her in defiance of the danger he was going into. Still, if she listens closely enough to the women’s conversations, she might learn enough to make it good for him one day; he deserves that, at least, for when he comes home.
Lujza’s stopped laughing now, and slaps wet cloth onto the wooden boards with vigorous distraction. ‘I just wish—’ she bursts out at last, then falters.
‘Wish what?’ Anna asks. ‘Wish you could find someone to give you a good seeing to?’
Lujza doesn’t laugh. ‘I wish I knew how he was,’ she says quietly. ‘He can’t write, and I can’t read, so I get no letters. And he’s too proud to get someone to write for him, the stupid bastard. All I know is he’s alive, because I haven’t heard he isn’t. But I wish I had some idea of what it’s like, where they are.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Anna replies, ‘Károly doesn’t write, either. I get letters from my cousin Lajos sometimes, but they’re always the same – hope you’re well, hope the family’s well, I am well, the weather is good. Or sometimes he says the weather is bad; that’s it. And Lilike’s brother can’t write, either, can he?’ Lilike shakes her head, and Anna pauses for a moment. ‘Sari, you must hear from Ferenc, though, don’t you?’
Sari nods awkwardly. ‘I do. But—’ How can she explain? ‘He doesn’t say much, either.’
He doesn’t need to. She dreams about him once a month – but no, that’s wrong. She dreams
inside
him; she smells the blood and the mud, and wakes up rocking to the beats of gunshots, tasting his acrid fear on the back of her tongue. She can’t explain this to them, though.
‘He must give you
some
idea, surely?’ Lilike asks, but she’s wrong, he doesn’t. Ferenc’s letters are long and wrought through with a desperate thread of need and longing, but he glosses over his present surroundings in a couple of anodyne sentences, leading to lengthy, discursive passages detailing the many ways in which he misses Falucska. His most recent letter, which Sari received the week before, followed his wandering imagination through the first twitches of spring in the plain, speculating which flowers would be blooming when, and when certain birds would start reappearing. These letters always make Sari ineffably sad, but she writes back, describing the minutiae of the village as lyrically as she can, because she senses that’s what he wants more than anything.
Ferenc’s head is full of death, and sometimes he longs to share it with Sari, to unburden himself by cataloguing the men he’s seen with heads blown off, limbs blown off, limbs he’s seen unattached to bodies, men he’s seen dying in agony, raving in lunacy. He still cannot comprehend the ease with which someone can simply cease to exist, and maybe Sari, with all of her oddness, her familiarity with death, might have something to say about that. But Sari’s become his talisman in this place; when things get bad he conjures her up, fixes her image so hard in his mind’s eye that he can sometimes physically see her, shimmering above the battlefield in a bubble of light and silence. He has to keep her separate from this, keep her suspended above the mud and the shit and the corpses. His letters become memory trails; Sari allows him to access the bright parts of his mind, and guides him through them. He clutches the thought of her convulsively.
That afternoon, Sari is back at Judit’s, making up a treatment for Lujza’s mother, who has been suffering from severe headaches. Although Judit would never say so directly, she believes that Sari coming to live with her when she did saved her livelihood, if not her life. The war has taken away the young men, and without young men, there’s a distinct lack of babies to deliver. But Sari’s brought with her not only the pig and the few geese she inherited from her father, but the arts of a
táltos
, and they’ve been far more able to vary their medical repertoire than Judit would otherwise have been.
Of course, they’ve got to be careful: there’s a difficult line to tread between being seen as effective and being labelled a
boszorkány
. Over time, Judit has started to trust Sari a little more with the spells and chants she uses in her work, but Sari has always had to swear to keep all she learns secret.
There’s a knock on the door so violent that Sari drops what she’s holding and curses. From the kitchen Judit yells ‘For God’s sake! Calm down!’ and Sari goes to answer, expecting someone laid low with stomach pains, or with a face pinched with toothache. Instead, it’s Anna.
‘Sari, you have to come and look!’
Sari is already pulling on her boots. This happens semiregularly, as Sari’s known for being hawk-eyed, extremely far sighted, able to discern a face on what to everyone else just looks like a shapeless lump in the distance. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. People, on the plain to the south of the village by the Gazdag house, and they’re … doing something. Bringing something, or building, but we can’t tell. Oh, 52 come on!’
A tangle of about ten people is clustered by the river, the village clinging to the bank behind them, all peering out into the middle distance, where the plain sweeps away to the north. Anna, clearly feeling somewhat self-important, shoulders her way through the crowd with Sari, and points to a series of dots, maybe a mile away. ‘There. Do you see?’
Sari shades her eyes against the sun, squinting slightly, and they pop into focus, one by one.
‘It’s a group of men,’ she says to Anna, and the news spreads out through the group.
‘Men!’
‘But all the men are away fighting, surely?’
‘Is it anyone familiar?’ someone calls out from the back of the group.
Sari shakes her head. ‘No. There’s – there’s some in uniforms. The rest – they look like foreigners, actually.’
‘Foreign men! But why would they come here?’
Sari sighs slightly, an exasperated hiss of expelled breath.
Honestly
, she thinks.
‘Perhaps,’ she says quietly, in the tone she generally reserves for children, ‘they haven’t
chosen
to come here.’
‘Prisoners?’ Anna asks. Anxiety and excitement fight for precedence on her face, and Sari can understand how she feels. Although she’s glad, as most of the women are glad, that they’re not having to kill and be killed for a set of amorphous ideals, it’s rather frustrating at times to know that something so incomprehensibly enormous is going on, while Falucska is oblivious to it.