The Angel Makers (25 page)

Judit has come by every day since the day of Ferenc’s fit, to keep up appearances – it wouldn’t do to have him die without having been properly attended in the days leading up to it, and Ferenc has been obediently swallowing the potions that Sari and Judit have been pressing upon him. They do no more good than unpleasant tasting water, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s unconscious much of the time, and those times that he is conscious he seems to be in terrible pain, so it’s always a relief when he lapses into insensibility again.

Sari has stopped thinking about it as much as she can, going about her daily rituals much as she would if he weren’t ill. She is often struck by the absurdity of it, when she finds herself assiduously mending his old socks or torn shirts; she can’t seem to stop herself, but every time she leaves the room, she hopes that he will be dead the next time she returns. It never happens. She considered starting to sleep downstairs, to give him more room and comfort in the bed (and, in theory, to give her a good night’s sleep, although she knows that she would jerk awake every five minutes and scurry up the stairs to check on him), but he still turns to her for comfort – a blind, infantile kind of comfort that is not linked to her, but to any nearby warm body – and she can’t quite bear to leave him whimpering alone. Instead, she sits up for much of the night, often on the edge of the bed next to him – she can’t bring herself to get under the blankets with him, no matter how pathetic he seems – and sometimes at the kitchen table downstairs, where she drinks cup after cup of coffee and stares at the black panes of the windows, her nightgown a dim white smudge in the gloom.

Night fourteen. The room is heavy with the feel of death, and Sari’s sure that this is it. He seems worse than he has ever been, talking nonsense between groans of pain. He vomits regularly, and shits himself more regularly still, and Sari deals with this with the stoicism of a nurse, but she can’t help shuddering slightly at the indignity of death. Something else distresses her more than all the foul-smelling unpleasantness, and that’s the fact that his hair is coming out in handfuls. Every time he moves his head on the sweat-sodden pillow, he leaves behind a dark smear of sticky hair. On some parts of his head, the white scalp is already shining through. She cleans him and changes the sheets as often as she needs to, and puts cold cloths on his head and prays for him to die, begs the God that she doesn’t believe in just to intercede and take him now. She wants this, she’s asked for it, of course – but the process is so hard. She cannot bring herself to weep; the closest she gets is when she realises that one of the cloths she is using to wipe his brow is the old handkerchief that she had started to embroider for him before he’d gone to war, unfinished and untouched for four years.

At about am, he lapses into silence, and Sari tenses with apprehension. Is
this
it? He’s become terribly still, but no, he’s still breathing. Soon, though, surely? Gently, disturbing the bed as little as possible, she leans down to look into his face. It’s white and clammy, his lips have become shockingly pale, but his eyes are still twitching beneath the veined lids.

She wants to sob with exhaustion, tears pricking behind her eyes – she just wants it to be over. A sudden pain in her palms makes her look down, and she realises that she’s balled her hands into such tights fists that her fingernails have cut into her. She takes a couple of deep breaths and forces herself to relax. Soon, soon. This can’t go on forever. But what if it does? The letter is already on its way to his parents; supposing he lingers like this for weeks? There would be time enough for them to take action; to come to Falucska perhaps, to demand that the doctor in Város comes to visit him. And what then? Would he know what she’s been doing? It is unbearable –
unbearable
.

Two hours later she jerks awake. She had managed to fall into a doze, despite her racing mind, and some evil, threatening dream has woken her. Immediately she looks towards Ferenc – still, he hasn’t moved, but his chest is still rising and falling, though erratically. It takes a moment for her to notice what has changed: his eyes are open.

‘Ferenc?’ she asks softly. His head does not move, but his eyes swivel towards her.

‘Sari,’ he whispers, and then something else, but the words seem to stick on his dry lips. She leans closer in order to hear him. His mouth moves convulsively in a pattern that she almost recognises, but it seems as if his breath has left him; he is soundless.

‘What do you need, Ferenc? Can I get you water? Anything?’

His head moves minutely from right to left: no. His lips are still moving, and she leans still closer, her ear only inches from his mouth. At first, nothing, and then on an exhaled breath: ‘… who art in heaven …’

He is praying.

She’s not religious, has never been religious, but what can she do? She may be a murderess but she’s not unnecessarily cruel, and she has no desire to withhold from Ferenc one of the last comforts that is within her power to give. She grips his hand, which is so cold it chills her, between two of hers, and says in a voice that she keeps deliberately quiet and steady: ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name …’

Is she imagining it, or does a flicker of animation pass over his face? He is still inaudible, but the patterns made by his soundless lips change to fit in with the words coming from hers. He closes his eyes, and she prays on, repeating the only words that she knows. She wishes she knew more prayers, anything else that would give him solace, that would enable him to let go of life with comfort and let it end – but he breathes on. The window by the bed starts to glow dull yellow: dawn is breaking, another day, and Sari’s heart sinks. Not another! Let it end!

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.