The Angel Makers (20 page)

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 deserves
nothing
.’

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 have 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.

‘You mustn’t,’ she says, ‘because if you do, I will not marry you. And if you hurt me after we’re married, I will leave you.’

He raises his head and gazes at her with amazement, tears forgotten (very quickly forgotten) on his cheeks. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘I can, and I will.’

‘But—’

‘I don’t need you, Ferenc. I don’t need your status and I don’t need your money. If I wasn’t fond of you, and if I didn’t feel that you weren’t yourself when you hit me last night, I would break the engagement now. But I know that things are very difficult for you now, and that the war caused a lot of damage, and I know that you are a good man. So you deserve another chance.’

He frowns, as if unsure whether he should be affronted or grateful; he plumps for the latter.

‘Thank you, Sari. And I am so sorry. I will never lay a hand on you again.’

Does she believe him? She’s not sure, but she believes in herself enough to know that she will keep her word, and that she’s strong enough to leave him if he breaks his promise. That’s enough for now.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Evening is racing in across the plain, and Sari is standing at the stove in her father’s house, heating up Ferenc’s dinner, when everything starts crashing down. She doesn’t really heed the footsteps at first, pounding on the path outside – someone running home for supper, perhaps – but the steps don’t go past the house. Instead, they seem to be approaching, and as Sari carefully puts down the pan she is holding she just knows – not exactly what is going to happen, but she knows that it’s going to be bad. She turns to Ferenc, who is rising from the table, looking alarmed.

‘Who—?’

‘I’ll go and check,’ she says. She’s surprised at how calm she is. Perhaps it’s just Judit, perhaps someone’s fallen ill, perhaps everything is going to be all right after all.

It’s Marco.

He’s standing on the front steps with a wild look in his eyes, and for a moment Sari is paralysed, she can’t move, because surely this is too nightmarish a scenario to be true.

‘Go!’ she hisses, her voice sounding unfamiliar with panic.

Marco’s face doesn’t change, and he doesn’t turn around. Instead, he grabs her wrist.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he says. He’s not shouting but still Sari recoils from the volume of his voice, with Ferenc just inside. ‘I can’t leave you here. Come with me. I won’t be missed for another two hours, we can get far enough away in that time to be safe—’

‘Marco, are you insane?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I won’t leave you here. You know the plain, we can hide out for a couple of days, and then head for Budapest—’ ‘

But Ferenc—’

And Ferenc speaks, from just behind Sari’s shoulder. ‘Sari, who is it?’ and then drops into silence as he looks out the front door and sees a tall, furious-looking Italian officer gripping the wrist of his fiancée, staring at her ardently.

Ferenc’s brain does not move quickly, and just as he is beginning to process this information and draw the obvious conclusions, Marco springs. He has a couple of inches on Ferenc, and the element of surprise; moreover, he’s both fit and furious and then Ferenc is on the floor with an almighty crash, Marco crouching over him, pounding his face again and again with a sound like rotten fruit falling from a tree.

Sari watches, blank, her life dissolving before her eyes until she notices Marco’s raised fist is slick with blood and that wakes her up. She screams for Marco to stop it, unsure whether she’s speaking in Magyar or Italian or neither, she bounds across the room and grabs Marco’s hand, which is just starting its next inexorable downward swing. The force of movement nearly wrenches her arm out of its socket but she hangs on, and Marco turns to look at her, his face frighteningly white and vacant.

Taking a deep breath, Sari says in clear, careful Italian:‘Get up. Get off him.’

For a moment, it looks as if Marco hasn’t heard or understood what she’s said, but slowly some animation returns to his face, and without taking his eyes off Sari he rises to his feet, stepping back from Ferenc’s prone body. With a twitching, hitching movement, Ferenc turns over and clambers to his knees. Blood is pouring from his nose, and his face is already rising in a collection of plum-coloured bruises. Lifting his hand, he opens his mouth and spits out two teeth. Then, silent and expressionless, he turns around and thumps up the stairs.

‘You have to go,’ Sari says, turning to Marco. He is looking down at his bruised and bleeding hands with what seems like incomprehension. ‘You have to go,’ she says again, louder this time, urgent. Things have been shattered, and she doesn’t know what she can do to fix them, but she knows that she can’t do anything with Marco here. And his crazy talk about them leaving together – oh, she’s touched, there’s a warm fluttering in the pit of her stomach despite the awfulness of the evening’s events, but it’s impossible, and he must see that it’s impossible.

She hears Ferenc moving about upstairs, and gives Marco a gentle shove towards the door. ‘Please go. For both of our sakes.’

‘I can’t,’ he says simply.

What happens next happens very quickly. There is a sound like thunder – Ferenc running down the stairs. Sari feels him move behind her, very close, and then pain pours through her head as he grabs her by the hair, winding it roughly around his fist, pulling so tightly that her chin is raised, her neck aching. She sees Marco’s expression change from wariness to horror, and that’s when she becomes aware of the cold, round barrel pressing into her left temple.

‘Let’s go,’ Ferenc says through clenched teeth. Sari feels the puff of his breath on her cheek, and of course Marco doesn’t understand, but when Ferenc roars ‘Move!’ his meaning becomes clearer. An awkward, four-legged beast, Sari and Ferenc shuffle towards the door, Marco ahead of them, casting desperate glances back in Sari’s direction. They stumble down the stairs and over the silvery grass, wet with dew, towards the forest.

This is it
, Sari thinks. She’s surprised to find that she’s not afraid. She wonders where Ferenc got the gun. She wonders whether death will be painful, and whether Ferenc will kill her or Marco first. She looks up at the moon, bobbing white and serene over the treetops, and is comforted by the thought that other people are looking at that moon, other people who are oblivious to the sordid little drama being played out in Sari’s corner of the world.

‘Stop,’ Ferenc commands, and they lurch to a halt. They’re not so deep in the woods that Sari can’t see the faint glimmer of lights from the village through the trees, but they’re far enough away that they won’t be disturbed, she’s sure of that. She knows every inch of these woods, every gnarled stump and skein of bracken, and the familiarity is steadying – but whenever she looks at Marco, it’s as if she’s seeing the woods through his eyes, the inexplicable tangles of blackness, the tilted unevenness of the ground, the eerie noises that surround them.
Oh, Marco
, she thinks,
what a frightening and alien place to die
.

Ferenc unwinds her hair a couple of times so that he’s still holding her, but she’s not pressed so tightly against him, and as she moves away she catches sight of his face – bone white in the moonlight and still swimming with blood. His eyes look as flat and expressionless as pieces of silver, and his mouth is twisted into a strange expression as if he’s forgotten to remove an earlier smile. She realises then how stupid she was to think that it was possible to reason with him, to believe any promise that he made; she realises that the essential Ferenc has gone, the disintegration starting during the war and ending in these last, deceptively calm few weeks.Yet, despite the circumstances she feels a brief flare of pity for him.

‘You’ve been fucking my fiancée,’ Ferenc says to Marco. His tone is mild and almost friendly. Marco looks quickly between Sari and Ferenc, frowning in incomprehension, and Sari fights back the temptation to translate for him; what good would it do, anyhow? The moon glints off the barrel as Ferenc moves the gun until it’s pointing at Marco. His hand is steady.

‘Run,’ he says to Marco. Marco doesn’t understand, and looks imploringly at Sari. Ferenc tugs roughly on her hair. ‘Tell him,’ he orders.

‘He wants you to run,’ Sari says to Marco in Italian. Her voice is barely above a whisper and her lips feel numb. Marco’s brow creases; it’s as if, even now, he can’t quite believe the ridiculousness of the situation. Nothing in his ordered, civilised background has prepared him for the rough and ready way that things work out here. Spreading his hands, head on one side, he takes a step towards Ferenc, like this is just a misunderstanding over a game of cards that can be easily worked out with a bit of sensible discussion.

Ferenc shrugs. ‘Suit yourself,’ he says, and smiles, black gaps glaring from his bloodstained mouth.

Sari sees Marco fall. For a split second she thinks he must have tripped, and then she hears the shot – a dry crack, like someone stepping on a twig, only louder – and notices the dark smear in the centre of Marco’s forehead. She feels nothing, dimly realises that she must be in shock, and is thankful for it. Thankful still when Ferenc pushes her roughly down into the sodden leaves on the ground, pushes her skirt up, and fucks her, hard, unyieldingly, and yet she’s only faintly aware of the pain, the burning, the wet smell of the leaves, the slimy feel of them on her back and he slaps her once, twice, turning her face from side to side and then he is spent, panting like a dog on top of her as she stares at an unrecognisable shape she only later realises is Marco’s lifeless legs.

She’s suddenly cold as Ferenc lifts himself off her but she doesn’t move.

‘Get up,’ he says, but she still doesn’t move. ‘Get up,’ he says again, accompanied this time by a kick to her ribs.

She gets up. She feels nothing, though a dozen emotions occur to her (anger? grief? humiliation?) – she just can’t be bothered to deal with any of them right now.

‘Come on,’ Ferenc says. He’s let go of her hair now, and is gripping her wrist instead. They move away from Marco’s body and the shadows close in on it behind them, but Sari is unconcerned; whatever it is that made Marco is gone, and what’s left is just a husk. She wonders half-heartedly where Ferenc is taking her, and why he doesn’t just kill her there, with Marco, but then realises that he is leading her out of the woods – not back towards the village, no, nor towards her father’s house, but in a wide, sweeping arc across the plain. They are heading for the camp, for his old house.