The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  She’s still certain that she made the right decision not to rush the marriage, though. Ferenc has something to do first, she knows, and whatever it is, it scares her. She’s had dreams from which she’s woken up, her mouth full of her blanket or her hair, to stop herself from screaming. She can never remember the dreams (her father used to burn herbs to help her remember, and then talk her through them, but she’s too shy to ask this of Judit), only a sense of relentless movement, of darkness, of sinking into something and getting stuck. She thinks she is Ferenc in these dreams, and they only strengthen her resolve.

  It’s September when she sees the délibáb.

  Éva Orczy has just her baby, attended by Judit and Sari. Judit tells her it was a straightforward birth, and this horrifies Sari. She’s white and stunned, her mind endlessly replaying Éva’s groans as she sees, over and over again, the way that Éva seemed to cleft in two, the dark, brackish ooze that seemed to flood from her. ‘A beautiful boy,’ Judit had cooed (as best she could), but Sari hadn’t seen it as such. It was stringy and wrinkled, an unnatural shade of pinky-red, and covered in what seemed to be white scales.

  When they left the room, Sari expected a knowing wink from Judit, equal parts pity and glee, an intimation that all was not as it should be with the baby. None came.

  ‘The baby—’ Sari hints at last.

  Judit sighs, unpredictably sentimental. ‘Yes, yes. Lovely boy.’

  ‘But didn’t you notice—’ Sari stops.

  ‘Notice what?’

  ‘Surely he looked a bit—’ Lost for words, Sari grimaces slightly.

  ‘What, the Orczy nose? Yes, poor kid, but that was bound to happen.’ Sari is frustrated. ‘Not the nose! The – the skin, and the colour!’ She breaks off in embarrassment because Judit has stopped dead, cackling.

  ‘Sari! You’re not serious? That was a perfectly normal baby boy. That’s just what they look like when they come out!’ She stops laughing and wheezes slightly, getting her breath. ‘Surely you’ve seen – but no, why should you have? I assure you, Sari,’ she says seriously, ‘you couldn’t hope for a better baby than that one. Count yourself lucky that he didn’t have a rat’s feet and ears, like an üszögösgyermek – or a wolf’s head; they must have got him around Christmas Eve.’

  Automatically, she makes the sign to avert the evil eye. Sari feels slightly sick. She’s never wanted children particularly, but having seen the grim reality, she’s horrified. Never, she says to herself, no matter how much Ferenc – and then Judit catches her arm, and points.

  They’re on the edge of the village, by the river, back from the Orczy house, right where the plain fades off into the smudged horizon, and Judit’s pointing at the délibáb, the mirage that’s sometimes seen on the plain. Usually it’s of water, or houses, something absent but longed for, but this time – ‘

  Oh,’ Sari says, quietly but heavily. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ She is breathless, and Judit turns to her in irritated alarm.

  ‘Sari, what? It’s only the délibáb; you’ve seen it before.’

  ‘No,’ Sari’s voice is light and detached, half-dreaming. ‘Not like this. Not like this!’ and Judit, half panicked, waves her hands in front of Sari’s face. In an instant, her eyes clear and her face relaxes; she turns to Judit, shivering.

  ‘Quick, let’s go home,’ she says.

  ‘What did you see?’ Judit asks a few minutes later, when they’re back home. Sari frowns.

  ‘It’s hard to describe. It was like … I’ve been having these dreams. They feel like movement, having to keep moving forward, towards something bad, and through mud, or something clinging—’ She shudders. ‘What I saw was like that. Men, a line of men, moving forward. They were afraid. They didn’t want to move forward, but they had to. I thought Ferenc would be there, though,’ she adds, puzzled, ‘but I couldn’t see him. I thought that the dreams were about Ferenc.’

  ‘So?’ Judit asks.

  ‘I think something bad is coming.’

  Three weeks later then, when there is a clamour of horses from the north, and a group of officious-looking strangers arriving in Falucska, neither Sari nor Judit are surprised. They hear them at eleven o’clock, as they are preparing the herbs that they’d gathered the day before. Sari gets up to look out of the window and sees the horsemen surging across the plain, the hooves sending up gouts of mud, and when they’re out of sight, she comes and sits wordlessly by Judit at the table, and together they wait.

  At half past eleven, the church bell begins to toll, persistent and insistent. Doors creak and slam all over the village, and a steady stream of people start to flow past Judit’s door towards the church. Sari stands up. She is burning with energy and curiosity, she feels (knows) that something momentous is happening.

  ‘Are we going?’ she asks Judit, peremptorily.

  Judit shrugs. ‘Go ahead. You know how I feel about churches.’

  ‘But – aren’t you curious?’ Sari bursts out, frustrated. ‘This is important! This is something big!’

  ‘You think it’s something to do with your dreams and the délibáb, don’t you?’

  ‘You know it is.’

  Judit relents. ‘Fine. I’ll walk with you. But I’ll stay on the porch; I’m not setting foot inside.’

  As they near the church, electricity seems to whip and crackle through the air. The church is always crowded, built for the village when its population – and its people – were smaller, but today Sari notices people there whom she normally doesn’t see on a Sunday; older relatives of some families, who are generally thought to be too ill to attend, have somehow hauled themselves (or been hauled) out of their beds, and are watching the pulpit with anxious, overbright eyes and silent, working mouths.

  Judit halts, muttering to herself, on the porch, while Sari squeezes through the door, pressed back against the whitewashed walls. She sees Ferenc out of the corner of her eye, on the opposite side of the room, catches his eye and gives him a discreet wave, fluttering her fingers; he smiles (a grim, tight smile) back. Everyone is tense and quiet, exchanging glances but few words. A light mist of fear and anticipation is clouding up the room.

  The priest is a small man, twisted and wizened, an obscenely bulbous nose and a fringe of hair so black that it draws in all the surrounding light. The older people in the village who have known him since he arrived in the village as a young man, twenty years ago, joke amongst themselves that his vocation sprang from the simple awareness that he would never find a woman to marry him, but like most rumours, it’s only part of the truth. Father István has a Voice – a splendid, powerful, rolling voice, which can thunder like a god, or purr silkily like a big cat; that voice is his pride and his vocation, for what better than to use his vanity to praise God?

  ‘We are at war,’ he booms now, his words dropping like boulders.

  Yes, Sari thinks, of course. In the stillness she’s able to slip to the door and stick her head out; she mouths to Judit, did you hear? and Judit nods impatiently.

  Father István gestures to three men standing at the front of the church, military men, gleaming with wealth and privilege and barely disguised disdain.

  ‘They’re looking for strong, brave men,’ Father István explains.

  That afternoon, the market square is filled with men. Watching, Sari doesn’t know quite what she feels, but it’s mainly puzzlement and sadness. These men and boys are people she’s known since childhood; they’re moving towards danger, and despite her uneasy relations with much of the village, she doesn’t wish harm on any of them. At the same time, she’s amazed at their compliance – and she’s sure it is compliance, rather than bravery in most cases. She knows that she certainly wouldn’t be leaping into the breach so eagerly, should she be asked to risk her life for some nebulous idea of a homeland. Mátyás Szabo, whom she knows to be only a year older than she, is puffing up his chest and adopting a studiously mature expression; she knows Ferenc is milling around in the group somewhere. She knows there’s nothing she can
do.

  Ferenc catches her arm as she’s walking out of the church; his eyes are aflame with some strong emotion, but she can’t tell what it is; his face is white and his mouth dry, and he licks his lips before speaking.

  ‘Are you really a witch?’ he whispers. She jerks back involuntarily at his words, but says nothing as he continues to stare at her.

  ‘You knew this was coming. You knew.’

  She is frozen for a moment, before her strength returns in a flood.

  ‘I’m not going to talk to you now,’ she says gently and calmly, removing his hand from her arm, and she walks away.

  The recruiters are not discerning. They take every man who is willing, able being a less pressing requirement. They overlook the doubtful claims of age, and take all that they’re offered. Tomorrow, the men start their march to Város, get the train for Budapest, and from there, no one is quite sure.

  That night, Sari goes to her father’s house to wait for Ferenc, knowing he won’t come to Judit’s. Sure enough, scant moments after she sits down at the table, there’s a tread on the steps and a knock on the door and there he is. He is pale and obviously agitated, but Sari is glad to see that he’s less wild-eyed than he was outside the church.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he says stiffly.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  They sit quietly. Night is falling, and the darkness in the room heaves and swells. Ferenc’s face is gloomily shadowed.

  ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ he offers, finally.

  ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘I just wanted to say goodbye. And to apologise. I understand now why you wouldn’t – you know. It’s good that we didn’t. It makes sense.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘Yes.’ He swallows hard. ‘Sari, is it going to be all right?’

  She’s taken aback at his question. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know – the war. Us. Me. Is it … will it …?’ He stops, seeing her shaking her head.

  ‘Ferenc, I don’t know any more than anyone else. I can’t just summon up the answers for you.’

  For a moment she thinks he’s going to get angry again, but he doesn’t. Instead, he asks, half pleadingly, ‘After this is over, will we—’

  He needs something to hang on to, Sari realises, something he can take with him. She nods decisively. ‘I made a promise to you, and to my father. I’m not going to go back on that.’

  ‘All right.’ His relief is palpable. They sit in silence for a few moments longer before he stands to leave.

  ‘Well, then. This … I mean, I—’ he looks down, discomfited. Impulsively, Sari gets to her feet, slips her arms around his neck, and kisses his cheek.

  ‘Goodbye, Ferenc,’ she says, and then adds quietly, ‘I think it will be all right. I mean, I think you will be all right.’ She doesn’t know if she’s telling the truth, but he deserves a little reassurance. It’s the only farewell gift she can give him.

  He doesn’t speak when she releases him. Instead, he gives a curt nod, and doesn’t look at her as he leaves.

  Judit and Sari watch them leave from the door of Judit’s house. As they disappear into the stillness of the plain, Mátyás Szabo’s mother bursts from her house and flops to the ground, like a dead crow, like a fallen cloud. The sound of her keening thickens the air, and Judit turns away. ‘Well,’ she says.

  That night, the wind is strong. Sari is wide-eyed in the darkness.

  1916

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rounding the corner, Sari hefts the dishevelled pile of material in her arms and sees that a hint of spring has cracked the ice on the river, the first day of the year that the women haven’t had to do it themselves. She is glad: the winter this year has been harsh and unforgiving, and food has been scarce.

  Picking her way delicately through the mud and snow and rocks down to the river, Anna Csillag appears beside her, arms also full, jostling her with a friendly shoulder. ‘Morning, Sari.’

  ‘Morning, Anna.’

  A slow smile creeps across Sari’s face. This is what has kept her buoyant through the winter, the reason that she can shrug off so easily the recent hardships. War and its deprivations have brought about an outbreak of camaraderie in the village: feuds dissolving, frostiness melting due to the simple fact that people need each other more than ever before – and for the first time in her life, Sari has found herself with friends, found herself able to walk through town without her specially-prepared face of slightly pitying disdain, ready to deflect insults, because now no one – or almost no one – is shouting, or whispering, or trying to trip her up. It feels like she can breathe more easily, after years of not even knowing that her breathing was restricted.

  Anna has been a revelation. She is twenty-two, tall and broad-shouldered, with wide cheekbones and a dark riot of hair, and Sari feels like she’s only just met her, although she’s lived in the same village all her life. She knows that this is due to the fact that Anna’s husband, Károly, is gone. When she tries, she can remember Anna’s old incarnation, but it’s hard to connect that silent, cowed woman who skulked around the village trying to hide her bruises, with the expansive, explosive Anna who’s appeared: humorous, lewd, goodspirited in the face of anything.

  Lujza’s down by the river, and Lilike, and they greet Anna and Sari with grim cheerfulness. ‘How’s the water?’ Anna asks, grinning, and laughs as Lujza holds up red, chapped hands with a grimace.

  ‘Goddamned freezing, like always.’

  They hunker down together. Sari doesn’t say much herself, but these days the women’s conversation hums around her rather than stopping dead, which is good enough for her. There’s little gossip these days – what gossip can there be without men? Lujza sniffs dismissively – so the conversation is banal, but friendly. Talk turns inevitably to sex, and Anna laughs to herself as Lujza describes in vivid detail quite how much she’s been missing it. Lujza was married barely six months when Péter went away, and the way she tells it, they’d been fucking like rabbits all that time – ‘And now,’ she says heavily, ‘nothing. Nothing for nearly a year and a half.’ She shudders theatrically. ‘The way I feel,’ she adds, grinning sharply at Sari, who’s beside her, ‘I’m going to start going after you lot, soon.’

  Sari smiles, but can’t help blushing, and she looks away. She wishes sometimes that she could join in these sorts of frank discussions; sometimes, an image of Ferenc floats in her head, looking at her the last time they saw each other alone, and it had been as if she could see right inside him, into his heart and his groin, feel how badly he wanted her at that moment, to fuck her in defiance of the danger he was going into. Still, if she listens closely enough to the women’s conversations, she might learn enough to make it good for him one day; he deserves that, at least, for when he comes home.

  Lujza’s stopped laughing now, and slaps wet cloth onto the wooden boards with vigorous distraction. ‘I just wish—’ she bursts out at last, then falters.

  ‘Wish what?’ Anna asks. ‘Wish you could find someone to give you a good seeing to?’

  Lujza doesn’t laugh. ‘I wish I knew how he was,’ she says quietly. ‘He can’t write, and I can’t read, so I get no letters. And he’s too proud to get someone to write for him, the stupid bastard. All I know is he’s alive, because I haven’t heard he isn’t. But I wish I had some idea of what it’s like, where they are.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Anna replies, ‘Károly doesn’t write, either. I get letters from my cousin Lajos sometimes, but they’re always the same – hope you’re well, hope the family’s well, I am well, the weather is good. Or sometimes he says the weather is bad; that’s it. And Lilike’s brother can’t write, either, can he?’ Lilike shakes her head, and Anna pauses for a moment. ‘Sari, you must hear from Ferenc, though, don’t you?’

  Sari nods awkwardly. ‘I do. But—’ How can she explain? ‘He doesn’t say much, either.’

  He doesn’t need to. She dreams about him once
a month – but no, that’s wrong. She dreams inside him; she smells the blood and the mud, and wakes up rocking to the beats of gunshots, tasting his acrid fear on the back of her tongue. She can’t explain this to them, though.

  ‘He must give you some idea, surely?’ Lilike asks, but she’s wrong, he doesn’t. Ferenc’s letters are long and wrought through with a desperate thread of need and longing, but he glosses over his present surroundings in a couple of anodyne sentences, leading to lengthy, discursive passages detailing the many ways in which he misses Falucska. His most recent letter, which Sari received the week before, followed his wandering imagination through the first twitches of spring in the plain, speculating which flowers would be blooming when, and when certain birds would start reappearing. These letters always make Sari ineffably sad, but she writes back, describing the minutiae of the village as lyrically as she can, because she senses that’s what he wants more than anything.

  Ferenc’s head is full of death, and sometimes he longs to share it with Sari, to unburden himself by cataloguing the men he’s seen with heads blown off, limbs blown off, limbs he’s seen unattached to bodies, men he’s seen dying in agony, raving in lunacy. He still cannot comprehend the ease with which someone can simply cease to exist, and maybe Sari, with all of her oddness, her familiarity with death, might have something to say about that. But Sari’s become his talisman in this place; when things get bad he conjures her up, fixes her image so hard in his mind’s eye that he can sometimes physically see her, shimmering above the battlefield in a bubble of light and silence. He has to keep her separate from this, keep her suspended above the mud and the shit and the corpses. His letters become memory trails; Sari allows him to access the bright parts of his mind, and guides him through them. He clutches the thought of her convulsively.