The Angel Makers (26 page)

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 they 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.

Sari is neither, though she goes down to the camp with the other woman to say goodbye. She is genuinely fond of some of the men, particularly Bruno, who had been a good friend of Marco’s, and Umberto, despite, or perhaps because of his buoyant idiocy. She feels pleasantly removed from the emotion surrounding her – she’s had her turn, and she’s done what she has to do. But she understands now Judit’s voyeuristic interest in the affairs of others and she can’t deny that she’ll be interested to see what comes next.

Things change so quickly. It’s as if the Italians leave overnight and the village contracts to cover their absence. The Gazdag house stands empty and its emptiness seems to change its entire character. It now squats malignantly on the outskirts of the village, and Sari finds that she can’t bear to look at it at night, as its black windows remind her of the still eyes of corpses.
Too many ghosts
, she thinks, and it’s true that the two ghosts most likely to haunt her both have connections with the place. She has no desire to bump into the insubstantial forms of either Ferenc or Marco.

She’s sure by now that the Gazdags are never going to come back to the village, crammed as it is with memories of Ferenc, and she wonders what they will do instead – sell the house, or install a caretaker? She hopes for the former, for while she could always stay out of the caretaker’s way, she would far prefer that the Gazdag family sever all ties with the village, to leave her and her baby in peace.

The village seems quiet and brittle, almost at a loss without the Italians. Even those few people who never formed personal attachments with any of the prisoners realised the village was enlivened by their presence, and there’s nothing to do now but wait until their own soldiers come home.

And then they come. At first in a trickle and then in a gush, the men come home. Sari and Judit watch it happening, Judit with prurient glee, and Sari with detached curiosity and a modicum of sympathy. The village breathes out as it expands to receive the returning men, and the visual change is immediate and startling. They seem to be everywhere, and the first market day after their return Sari is struck by it.

She hasn’t been to the market for a while, as Judit has insisted that she stay home rather than risk the baby, but Judit relents and lets Sari accompany her this time, to satisfy her curiosity. The change is immediately noticeable, more as a taste in the air than anything more tangible and Sari instantly feels uncomfortable. Looking down, she realises that she and the other women of the village have become used to dressing in a rather more casual way since the men have been gone, and now she feels embarrassed and exposed.

There aren’t many men around, as the market is traditionally the women’s domain, but every now and then she catches sight of a man on a porch, or a glimpse through a window. The main change is in the behaviour of the women. There’s little laughter about, none of the bawdy jokes that have become common currency in the past few years. Everyone is acting like children on their best behaviour. There’s a sense of unsettlement, as if everyone is watching everyone else to see how they are dealing with the change, as if no one is quite sure how this is going to work out yet.

Then Sari catches sight of Anna out of the corner of her eye, and feels suddenly sick. Anna is sporting a series of livid purple bruises down one side of her face, but horrible as that is, it’s not what shocks Sari the most: it’s the change in every other aspect of Anna. Last time Sari saw her, she was tall and straight-backed, and now she seems to have lost inches in height as a result of a frightened hunch, as if her friend is denying her own existence, trying to disappear into herself, swallow herself up. Her hair swings loose and untidy over her face, and her clothing, while neat, is ugly, a dull, oldfashioned dress that Anna hasn’t worn at all since Károly has been away. The eyes of all the other women slide away from her, the way they used to do with Sari. Sari can’t bear to be a part of it.