The Angel Makers (9 page)
‘God, Anna, you can’t have fallen for one of them already, 70 surely?’
Anna looks affronted. ‘Of course not! And anyway, I’m a married woman!’ Sari waits patiently, and after a few moments, Anna relents, her voice confidentially lowered, ‘There is one man though. Jan.’
‘
Jan?
’ ‘Well, I can’t get my mouth around his real name, can I? Something Italian that just goes on and on – but apparently it’s the same as Jan, which is far easier to say. But anyway, he seems to like me, and – oh, for God’s sake, Sari, he’s just so different from Károly, they all are – it’s just nice to feel—’ Anna stops abruptly, and following her gaze, Sari sees Orsolya Kiss passing by; Anna is reluctant to have her private affairs splashed over the village by evening. Once she’s gone, Anna’s tone is much lower.
‘Sari – are you sure that you don’t want to come and help out? Lots of the men have been wounded, and some of them are sick – they could really use someone like you down there.’
Sari sighs. Suddenly, she really wants to confide in Anna, whose open face is looking at her with interest and concern, seeming eminently trustworthy. ‘I just can’t, Anna.’
‘If you’re worried about what people will say—’ Anna starts, her face angry, and Sari has a brief, treacherous thought that Anna wouldn’t be so brave if Károly were here. She shakes her head.
‘It’s partly that, but mainly … I don’t feel like I can trust myself. Don’t tell anyone I said that,’ she adds hurriedly, and feels her face turning red, wishing vehemently that she’d kept her mouth shut. But Anna’s just smiling.
‘God, Sari, don’t you think I feel the same way myself sometimes? If Jan miraculously decided to offer me a whole new life in Italy, I’d definitely be tempted. Very tempted.’
For a moment, they look at each other silently. Sari is remembering the thin, cowed, silent Anna of two years before, and she feels certain that Anna is seeing within her the bitter, strange, lonely girl that she’d been herself.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it …’ Anna starts, and Sari nods.
‘You won’t mind hearing about it, though?’ Anna asks.
‘Of course not. I need to keep abreast of the gossip, or Judit’ll be furious.’
‘I should really …’ Anna moves to leave.
‘Go on,’ Sari says. ‘I’ll see you later.’
I
‘His name is Umberto, Lilike says. She keeps her head down, scrubbing the sheet that she is holding with uncommon precision and concentration.
His name is Umberto, and he kissed Lilike for the first time at the end of May. They can all tell straight away that something has happened; Lilike’s smile has changed into something silken and secretive. Lilike has never had a proper lover before.
They started letting the men out a few weeks after they first arrived. At first they weren’t allowed past the gates of the camp, but Sari sometimes caught sight of them playing games in the yard, calling to one another in that intoxicating language, syllables running together like bead necklaces. The girls working in the kitchen always cluster by the window when the men are out there, pushing their sweaty hair out of their faces with their forearms. ‘When they get too hot,’ Anna confides to Sari, ‘they play with their shirts off.’
The men know that the girls are watching, and the girls know that the men know; elaborate acrobatic and sporting feats just happen to occur by the kitchen windows. The girls initially tried to avoid being seen, but after a while they stopped caring, and the men stopped pretending that they didn’t know that the girls were watching, waving lazily up at the windows when they catch sight of a flash of blonde or dark hair.
Lilike has always been quiet but determined, and from the time that the prisoners appeared in town, she promised herself that she would have as much fun with them as possible. She works in the kitchens with Anna, and while they all flirt, Anna’s flirting has a slight edge of desperation.
Lilike’s, on the other hand, is cool and controlled. Umberto was not the first to show interest – Lilike is sleek and blonde, the sort of girl to inspire interest in most places – but he’s the first that Lilike chose to encourage; there’s something about his silly, curly hair and his overtly cheeky manner that appeals to her – he’s somehow carefree, in a manner that none of the village men were ever able to be. It’s been a challenge to make any progress without being able to speak, but after a few days of Umberto grinning and winking and gesticulating whenever she passes, she decided to smuggle in a peach, which she wrapped in a handkerchief and pressed into his hand as she passed him on the way to the kitchens.
The following evening when Lilike was on her way home, she’d just reached the gates with Anna and Lujza when she heard someone shouting behind her. All three of them turned, to see Umberto, haring across the lawn, clutching a small, ragged bouquet of daisies and dandelions. He squashed them into her hand, eyes flashing, and she gave a small smile, an even smaller curtsey, and slipped the bouquet deliberately in the top of her bodice.
Anna reported all of this back to Sari as soon as it happened, and so Sari is not surprised by Lilike’s blushes that day in May when they’re next washing clothes at the river, in response to a flippantly crude remark from Lujza.
Seeing Lilike’s reaction, Anna rounds on her abruptly. ‘So?’ she challenges. ‘Has anything else happened?’
‘Yesterday,’ Lilike continues, regaining her composure, ‘He was out walking with some of the others. He saw me washing clothes in the river and …’ She flushes and looks down. ‘He kissed me,’ she mumbles.
‘And what was it like?’ Anna asks breathlessly. None of them are making any pretence at washing any more, and the sheets lie discarded, half in and half out of the river, flapping like ghosts.
Lilike pauses, considering. ‘It was nice,’ she says at last. ‘He was – I think he is well practiced at kissing.’
Lujza gives a short bark of laughter. ‘So?’ she asks. ‘What next?’
‘We’re meeting tomorrow. Same time, same place.’ That was about as much as they’d been able to communicate without a common language.
‘Will you fuck him? You know that’s what he wants, don’t you?’
Lujza’s voice is slightly harsh, but Lilike doesn’t flinch. ‘Of course I will,’ she says to Lujza, her voice cool. ‘What’s the point, otherwise?’
II
II Every night, Anna dreams, and she dreams that Károly is dead. Every morning she wakes up and her stomach swoops in disappointment, and as she dresses she prays for forgiveness, prays for God to make her a more dutiful and grateful wife.
She’s been failing dismally on that score lately.
She never wanted to marry him. She’d barely given marriage any thought at all, and on the occasions when she had, the hulking, loutish son of her neighbours had never crossed her mind – she would have laughed if anyone had suggested it. But when he raped her, she was sixteen – she had been walking in the woods; he had been following her for days, waiting for his chance – and all choice was taken away from her, for she’d conceived a child, and no other man would want her after that. She wonders, sometimes, what would have happened if she’d taken Judit up on her offer to get rid of the child, but although she felt nothing but indifference for the small life curled inside her, she couldn’t bear to even consider Judit’s vague suggestion, which was certainly some sort of wickedness. By the time she miscarried, the wedding was two weeks in the past, and her destiny seemed to have been decided.
The funny thing, she thinks, is that she’s not like Lujza, and she’s not like Sari – both of whom she loves, both of whom scare her sometimes. Anna doesn’t wish for a life outside the village, and had Károly not taken matters into his own hands, she would have been perfectly happy to marry and bear children and live in Falucska forever, living the life of her mother and grandmothers. She knows that she’s not brilliant, and she’s not beautiful, and she’s not talented, but she’s kind, and nice enough looking, and has enough common sense to be a good wife and mother. Since her miscarriage she’s never conceived again, and she’s never been sure whether she’s unable to, or if she just doesn’t want to. Although she has no plans to leave Károly – how could she? – she knows that a child would bind her irrevocably to him, and that’s a thought too horrible to entertain.
Anna’s a good, religious woman and so she’s racked with guilt. Although her prayers are respectful, and standard, asking God to look after her husband and end the war, her heart is rebellious, and along with dreams of Károly’s death comes a defiant sense of gratitude for the war, for taking him away and putting him in danger, and for giving her her life back – or lending her her life; she’s not stupid enough to think that this will be permanent. And now there’s something else that she stubbornly refuses to mention in her prayers, but which she rejoices in all day, and that’s the arrival of the prisoners.
She watched Lilike eyeing them all up, choosing which one she wanted, but it was never like that with her; from the start, she’d always watched Jan – Giovanni – the closest. It’s his smile that she likes – it’s not cheeky, like Umberto’s, or insinuating, or condescending, like so many of the others’ – it’s just open, and friendly, and warm. That smile tells Anna all she needs to know about Jan: that he’s a good, honest, kind man. She’s not looking for excitement, or a bit of fun; she’d never admit it if anyone asked her, but she’s looking for someone to take her away. If Károly comes back from the war, she wants more than anything not to be waiting for him.
Anna’s not like Lilike; she’s in no rush, and feels no need to take charge, because she feels certain that it’s going to happen. While Lilike has been choosing and planning and making gifts of fruit to her intended, Anna and Jan have been communicating with each other through nothing but smiles; huge, dazzling beams whenever they catch sight of one another, and those smiles seem to heat her from the inside. While Lilike is making assignations, Anna is content to wait. It’ll happen.
In the meantime, she decides to speak to Sari in private, and see if she can get something that will make sure she doesn’t get pregnant. After all, there’s no harm in being prepared.
By July, Falucska is suffocating under a blanket of heat and hormones, and Sari feels like she can never quite clear her head. This has always been her favourite time of the year – the village, which can look stark and desolate in winter, is at its best when the crude wooden buildings are smothered in greenery; everything always runs far more slowly at this time of year, and this year is worse than normal.
‘Well, of course it is,’ Judit says, when Sari mentions it. ‘It’s bound to be, with all the distractions around.’
Sari had laid a bet with herself that it would be Lilike, and so was surprised when the first person to approach her, blushing with every inch of her exposed skin, with the whispered request for something to stop her from falling pregnant, was Anna. Lilike was not far behind her, however, followed closely by Fransziska Imanci, much to Sari’s amazement: Franzsiska is half a generation older, married for as long as Sari can remember; she never would have imagined that she’d be the sort of woman to take a lover.
Since then, there has been a steady stream, maybe one or two each week, wanting to make sure that the new freedoms of the prisoners weren’t going to leave any lasting reminders in the village. Every woman who comes to see Sari and Judit holds her head slightly higher than the last; spirits in the village seems to be bubbling irrepressibly upwards, and despite the cynical pose Sari’s come to adopt, she admits that she likes the changes that have been wrought on the village. She likes the pervasive sense of rather frantic excitement; she likes the way that tongues have got looser, and jokes cruder; most of all, she likes the jocular, collusive looks that the women have started to throw each other, as if they’re all part of a secret club. Most of the other women seem to feel the same way, happy to seize an excuse to push the war to the back of their minds. Sari finds that where she used to be asked every couple of days whether there was news of Ferenc, enquiries have slowed almost to a complete stop, and when Lazslo Mecs is sent back from the front, missing half his right arm, jumping and jerking as if he’s still being shot at, he’s met with more embarrassment than admiration.