The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  The ANGEL

  MAKERS

  Copyright © by Jessica Gregson 2011

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gregson, Jessica, 1978–

  The angel makers / Jessica Gregson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56947-979-7

  eISBN 978-1-56947-980-3

  1. Women—Hungary—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3.World War, 1914-1918—Hungary—Fiction. 4. Women murderers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6107.R44493A84 2011

  823’.92—dc23

  2011024928

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my grandmother, Laurette, and in memory of my grandfather, Clem

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1914

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  1916

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  1918

  Chepter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  1920

  Chapter Twenty-One

  1922

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  1925

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  1928

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this book is based on a true story, events have been heavily embellished by the author’s imagination. Names and places have therefore been changed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to all my early readers (you know who you are), especially to Katy Anchânt, Rachel Coldbreath, and Germán Guillot, who provided much needed enthusiasm, encouragement and proofreading early on.

  Thank you to all my friends, especially to Carlie Dawes, Jo Black, Kate Jones, Zavy Gabriel, Yogi Raste, Sophie Mc-Innes, Angela Hughes, Sarah Cook, Leda Glyptis, Anne Pordes, Sarah Moore, Nich Underdown, Mary Macfarlane, Helen Finch, and Judith Logan.

  Thank you to my family, especially to Richard and Julia.

  Thank you, Mark.

  Thank you, mum and dad.

  PROLOGUE

  She never answers, but still, I talk to her all the time. Listen, I tell her. I’ve made mistakes. When it first started, sometimes I would try to pretend that I was helpless in all of it, that I’d been buffeted by fate; that as surely as those eight women are twisting in the wind now, in my way, I’ve been twisting in the wind my whole life. It’s not true, though; it’s just a lie that I told myself when I wasn’t feeling strong enough to face up to what I am, and what I’ve done. In truth, I’ve made my choices, and my hand is strong in all of this. Without me, none of this would have even started.

  I’m twenty-eight, but I look older, and that doesn’t even come close to how old I feel. That’s not so unusual where I come from. In the city, I’ve heard that women are cosseted and coddled, treated like elaborate ornaments or playthings. Here, we carry our parents and our husbands and our children on our backs; we’re the dumping ground for all of life’s shit. Judit taught me that early on, and nothing I’ve gone through since has gone any way towards disproving it. They used to wonder why I was still alive; in the villages, people regularly kill themselves over less than I’ve endured.

  When I was small, maybe eight or nine, Katalin Remény, aged sixteen, drowned herself because she was pregnant without a husband. She was hauled out of the river – at a time when bodies in the river were far rarer than they have been recently – and at her funeral her body was paraded through the streets, surrounded by howling mourners, but of course she had to be buried outside the churchyard because of her sins, and later, Judit and my father went to pour boiling water over her grave, to stop her from stalking the village in death, as suicides are said to do.

  Judit came to speak to me a few days after Katalin was buried, and I remember she was hissing and spitting with fury: she told me that what Katalin had done was pointless and meaningless, that having a baby without a husband was only a sin in the eyes of those people who want to control women, and that, in any case, if a woman ever found herself with a baby that she didn’t want, she could always come to Judit and Judit would take care of it – though, at that age, I only had a vague idea of what ‘taking care of it’ meant.

  Like with most of Judit’s rages, it was born out of a desire to protect me, and it worked. Katalin took up residence in my mind, a symbol of the opposite of everything I was going to be; a mindless, sacrificial lamb, caring more about the opinions of a few stupid villagers than her own life. I knew that I would never give up my own life if there were any alternative left to me in the world, and as it’s happened, I could never be accused of failing to seek out as many alternatives as possible.

  That’s at the root of it all, I explain to her: my survival instinct, my will to live. That’s behind all the choices I’ve made. I could have given myself up at any number of points, and I suppose it would have saved lives. But not my life, and not her life, and that’s all I’m looking out for. I’ve learnt that it’s too painful and dangerous to care about much else.

  Is it odd that I feel like this, given the twenty-eight years I’ve had? Maybe I should have accepted the bitter slice of life I got as something easy to surrender. But once I got it between my teeth, I was never going to let it go without the most violent struggle. What’s good about life? Ask me that when you’re watching a summer moon, bloated and white, floating over the plain. Ask me that when you’re looking into my child’s face. Of course, there are terrible things too, and sometimes – often – they outweigh the good. But you can’t have beauty without a bit of terror.

  1914

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sari is fourteen years old when they carry her father out, carry him through the village lanes, his face bare and blank to the wide sky, carry him through the summer wildflowers that bloom alongside the river, carry him to the cemetery. It is a public end for a private man, infused with the drama that makes village life bearable; a final chance to be the centre of attention, something that Jan Arany had never sought. Sari doesn’t cry, because that isn’t her way; instead, she wraps a cloak of silence around herself, and lets the other village women do the wailing for her. Her silence almost gives the impression of absence. It is misleading.

  Her father had been a Wise Man, respected, a táltos, and they’d lived for all of Sari’s life on the outskirts of the village, in a wooden house with steps that creaked, the grass in front of it worn thin by the feet of villagers in search of cures, help or salvation. Her father had been a big man, tall, broadshouldered, light-haired – unusual in that place – a wide face like the sun, Sari thinks: warm, but remote. The villagers had loved him and feared him in equal measure. They just fear Sari.

  As long as she can remember, she’s been skirted by whispers wherever she goes. Her father had tried to explain it. ‘It’s because they loved your mother,’ he said, but that�
�s never made sense to Sari. She loves her mother too, a wraithfigure whom she’s never met, only heard about, and woven her image out of stories and imagination; a young woman – barely older than Sari now – who had left her family, smiling, to marry Jan Arany. Still smiling, she’d swollen with Sari inside her, and then split open at Sari’s birth, and died.

  ‘I didn’t want her to die,’ Sari would say to her father, after someone or other had hissed witch behind her back.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘But they just think it’s unlucky, that’s all.’

  That’s not all, though, and Sari knows it, though she’s always appreciated her father’s kindness to pretend otherwise. Sari understands that she is odd, that there’s something in the way she holds herself, in the way she looks at people, in the things she says and the things she knows, that isn’t what the rest of the village considers right and proper. She envies the girls she sees walking through the village, arm in arm with easy familiarity, but she can’t see how to get from where she is to where they are, how to change her behaviour in order to be liked. The only concession that she makes these days is her silence. Keeping her mouth shut gives the villagers fewer new stories to tell about her, but as with most villages, many of them are all too happy to tell the same stories over and over again.

  It happened the day her father died, too. It was morning, and Sari was at the door of the Mecs house in the noisechoked heart of the village, buying a bottle of czerenznye from Dorthya Mecs. As she reached out her hand to take it, she heard the voices – distinct, clear, dominated by Orsolya Kiss’s high, nasal drawl. Hearing her name, Sari moved her eyes without turning her head, and saw Orsolya, one hefty buttock hoisted onto the edge of the Gersek porch, leaning and grinning, surrounded by three or four other women. Two, Sari saw, were Orsolya’s best friends, Jakova Gersek and Matild Nagy, flanking her like bodyguards; one of them she didn’t recognise, but the shape of her face recalled Orsolya’s, and Sari remembered hearing that Orsolya’s cousin from Város was visiting. Well-practiced at avoiding notice, Sari softened her body slightly, fitting herself easily into the swoops and shadows of the narrow, slanted lane.

  ‘She’s never quite been right,’ Orsolya was saying, the mock sorrow in her voice unable to hide the underlying glee at being the bearer of a good story. ‘A terrible trial for her father, who’s a good man. And her mother—’ Orsolya paused to raise her eyes piously to heaven, the other three following suit, ‘– Monika was a good woman. Her death was tragic, so young, but, forgive me, sometimes I thank God that she never had to live to see what her daughter is.’

  ‘What does she do?’ Orsolya’s cousin whispered, in the hushed, excited tones of the consummate gossip.

  The exchange was wearyingly familiar to Sari, a ritual song of call and response. She realised she was frozen, one hand holding the bottle of alcohol, as she met the eyes of Dorthya, who raised her eyebrows and gave a slight sympathetic shrug. Sari withdrew her arm, but remained rooted to the spot, listening, still. Which one will it be, Orsolya? she asked silently. The one where I drive the dog mad because it won’t stop shitting in front of our house? The one where I put the curse on Éva Orczy’s baby because I think she looks at me oddly? The one about me having a birthmark in the shape of an inverted cross on my back? Or maybe something new that you’ve dreamt up? Come on, Orsolya, Sari challenged. Surprise me.

  ‘Well, I saw this one with my own eyes,’ Orsolya said, and Sari relaxed slightly. She’d heard this one, and it was almost comforting to hear it repeated; it had taken on the soothing quality of a fairy tale. ‘She must have been four or five,’ Orsolya continued comfortably. ‘It was Sunday, and we were in church. It was summer, maybe late July, or August, and you know what the flies are like then – anyway, there was a big old dongó buzzing around Sari, and she was swiping and swatting at it, like children do, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. So finally, she sat up straight, and just stared at it – this fly – and that was it. It fell onto the floor, dead.’

  The breathless silence following Orsolya’s declaration cleverly conjured the dull plop of the fly dropping to the ground. In another life, Orsolya could have been a performer, but here, her repertoire is limited, and Sari knew this particular piece off by heart. It was that silence that she had been waiting for. Whatever she did, they were going to believe what they wanted to believe, and so she was allowed a little fun, surely? She paid Dorthya, her hands perfectly steady, and turned to face the group of women. Deliberately, she took a deep breath, pulled herself up as if the top of her head was anchored to the sky and, with a gesture loaded with intent, flicked her hair back and hit first Orsolya, then her cousin, then her vapid, giggling friends with the stare she knew had come to scare people. She watched, gratified, as the smug smiles slid from their faces (like shit off a shovel, she thought), then turned, hoisting the bottle in her arms, and walked home.

  She’d only just arrived, and was peeling the potatoes for the midday meal when she heard it: a thick, heavy thump from upstairs (for a moment she thought instinctively of Orsolya’s fictitious fly hitting the ground), and she knew straight away what had happened. Her face didn’t change. First, she finished peeling the potatoes. Then, she got to her feet, shaking the water off her hands, wiping them on her skirt, before slowly, slowly climbing the stairs. At the top, she entered her father’s bedroom, and there he was, on the floor, slumped and crumpled like she’d known he would be. She moved over to him, knelt down beside him and smoothed her hand over his face, closing his eyes. Of course he was dead: there was something in the timbre of the sound he made when he fell that just couldn’t belong to something living.

  For five minutes she was motionless, kneeling by her father, not weeping, not speaking, not praying (though later, she thought, she might tell people she prayed), just feeling her heart banging inside her chest, her blood thrumming at her wrists, soaking in the impossibility that she could still be living while her father was dead. She stayed there until she became conscious of the absence in the room, until she could feel that the corpse on the floor had ceased being her father and become a thing. It was all right for her to leave him then.

  Sari is best known in Falucska for her unnerving silence and stillness, and at the funeral she embraces this image, gathering it around her like a comfortable old blanket. She seems unmoved as the priest speaks of her father, unaffected by the weeping of the women surrounding her. All the village is there, and all eyes are on Sari. While many genuinely mourn Jan’s death, there’s no doubt that Sari’s presence at the funeral is a supplementary attraction. If she were to do something even slightly shocking, like laughing during the eulogy, it would enliven the funeral enormously, and give the village something to talk about for days. It’s not outright malice in most people, Sari realises: it’s the crushing boredom of life in a small village becalmed in the middle of the plain. While they’d never admit it, there are some in the village who are grateful to Sari for shaking things up a little. If it weren’t for her, they’d be discussing crops and pregnancies and the weather all the damn time.

  Sari can feel them watching, and resolves not to give them the satisfaction of behaving in the way that they expect. This is not my father, she says calmly to herself, and promptly sends her mind away – the ability to detach from any given situation is one she’s fostered for years. Only when the first clump of earth hits the coffin is she brought back to the present: she has a brief, horrifying image of her father, wormridden, covered in soil, and that’s it. She flinches as violently as if she’s been stung – and the villagers are on tenterhooks, placing internal bets about what she’s going to do: she’s going to throw herself into the grave; she’s going to start screaming; oh, she’ll attack the priest, for sure. But all she does is turn and walk away, back towards the clutter of houses; Father István continues his droning after only the briefest of pauses, and a great sense of anti-climax settles over the crowd.

  A twitch of movement at the edge of the knot of people, and Ferenc Ga
zdag, nineteen and desperately earnest-looking, makes a move to follow Sari, but his mother’s hand on his shoulder stops him.

  ‘Leave her,’ she hisses. Márta Gazdag is the sister of Sari’s late mother, and although she has very little liking for Sari (because, honestly, how can you be fond of someone who is so odd?), there’s something in the straightness of Sari’s back, the pagan swatch of black hair, that sometimes reminds Márta of her sister. Her sister, whose grave is only a few feet away. The eyes are still on Sari, following her as she walks away, watching to see where she’s going, although they suspect her destination already. Sure enough, at the crossroads she heads left, instead of right; she climbs the steps leading to the midwife’s door and lets herself in.

  ‘Aunt Judit?’

  Sari’s never been sure whether Aunt Judit really is her aunt. She’s always referred to her as such, but then so does the rest of the village, even the few people who are older than Judit herself. It’s the only thing that ties Judit to respectability; the adopted kinship is the only thing that stops small boys throwing stones at her windows when they pass by the house (and they still do, sometimes), and the kinship has been necessary to adopt, because the village needs her, no matter what they may feel about her. Judit’s the only midwife in town, and, more, the only person within several miles with any medical knowledge at all. You may be high and mighty enough to take your son to Város for his regular check-ups, or to have your teeth looked at there, but woe betide you when you’re up puking in the middle of the night, woe betide you if Aunt Judit isn’t on your side, cause that’s who you’ll be shouting for.

  But Judit’s always been Sari’s second favourite person in the world, after her father. And now, she thinks, probably her favourite person altogether: not only has Judit never minded Sari’s oddness, but she seems actually to revel in it, perhaps because she’s no stranger to being an outsider herself. Judit fits everybody’s definition of a crone. Thin as a whip, white hair that she tries to tame in a bun but ends up rebelling and sticking out crazily from her head. Coal pits for eyes, a hooked nose, and a black hole of a mouth, missing all but a few teeth.