The Angel Makers

by Jessica Gregson

  The doors open. The official who spoke at the church is there, along with another two similarly dressed men. The crowd seems to draw back en masse, as if suddenly nervous, but Lujza steps forward. She’s never been what Sari would describe as pretty; her face is too narrow and her eyes too small, but suddenly her attractiveness is shown by her straight back and her bold stare.

  ‘I brought some people who want to work, like you told me,’ she says.

  The official runs a practiced eye over the rabble. His face is expressionless, and for a moment he is silent, as if displeased. Then he steps back, and motions them into the stable.

  Inside, they have set up a long wooden table, behind which the other officers take seats. Gunther himself sits down in the centre.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ he says in the slightly husky, accented voice that Sari remembers from the church – he is obviously Austrian, and his command of Magyar is shaky. ‘Today, we just need to take your names, and what work you are interested in doing. Then we will organise different groups for different tasks, and if you come back tomorrow, you can start working. Payment will be in food – potatoes and bread mainly, but sometimes meat when we can get it. We need women who are willing to cook, and to clean.’

  As Sari takes her place in the queue that’s formed at the table, women start asking one another what tasks they prefer.Éva Orczy is in front of her, talking to Anna.

  ‘I want to clean,’ she says, ‘I’m happy to clean sheets or clothes, but I don’t want to do anything that means that I would have to be in there, with them.’

  Anna disagrees. ‘Who wants to spend more time down at the river than we already do? I’ll cook, or peel potatoes, or do whatever they want me to do, as long as it’s inside and warm.’

  ‘But it’s nearly summer; you’ll be boiling in the kitchens over the summer.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Anna is obstinate, and holds out her hands, which are badly chapped and bleeding in places. ‘This is what washing does to me. Give me a kitchen any day, even if it is as hot as hell.’

  Éva and Anna reach the front of the queue, and they bend down to give the officials their names. These officials are clearly struggling even more with Magyar than Gunther was, and Sari notices that the one writing down Anna’s name misspells it disastrously. She refrains from pointing it out. The same official has to ask Anna to repeat her choice of job three times; when he finally makes sense of what she’s saying and scribbles it down in his crabbed hand, Anna tosses her head back, and says in a loud, disgusted tone: ‘You would have thought that they could get some Magyar officials to deal with this.’ A small shiver of laughter runs through the room.

  It is Sari’s turn, and she can’t seem to help spelling her last name for the official, as if she’s being helpful, whereas she knows she’s really doing it to make him feel small. Her reward is his contemptuous expression when he looks up at her and asks her what type of work she would like to do. ‘Cooking or cleaning,’ she replies. She has no real preference, and is not even sure that she will be coming back the next day. He writes it down, and on impulse, she adds: ‘I could nurse, too, if you want.’

  The word ‘nurse’ is clearly beyond his meagre knowledge of Magyar, and from the look he shoots her, she realises that she’s making no friends here.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nurse,’ she repeats, slowly, and then, deliberately goading him, ‘Krankenschwester.

  ’ He glares at her with undiluted loathing. ‘We don’t need them,’ he says in angry, faltering Magyar. ‘We have a doctor.’

  Sari shrugs, her mouth quirking slightly, and moves on, finding Anna leaning up against one of the stable walls.

  ‘Idiots, aren’t they?’ Anna says dismissively.

  ‘They must wonder what they’re doing here,’ Sari replies. She feels a stab of unwanted compassion for the officials: what do they know of the wide sweep of the plain, and the people who live there? It must be frightening for them.

  Lujza’s just given her details to the men behind the desk, and as she turns to find Anna and Sari, they see her mouth open slightly, and her eyes go round. Her step quickens.

  ‘What?’ Sari asks, and instead of answering, Lujza takes their shoulders and swings them around, so that the three of them are staring out the window of the stable, into the courtyard beyond.

  Men.

  A great bolt of excitement shoots through Sari, and she feels riveted to the floor, a voice in her head chanting exultantly, strangers, strangers!, even as she notices they don’t look too different from the men she’s always known.

  There are two of them. One is tall and dark; his back is to them, but they can see the cigarette that’s held awkwardly in his left hand, and the tuft of bandage that sticks up over his right shoulder, the white flag of his injury. He’s gesturing with the cigarette, seemingly in conversation with the other man, who lounges against the wall, a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. He’s smaller than the other man, slimmer, with a sharply angled face under a swatch of fair hair. Despite his relaxed demeanour, he gives an impression of carefully banked energy and watchfulness.

  And then the taller man turns without warning. Lujza swears sharply, and she and Anna duck down below the windowsill to avoid being seen. Sari doesn’t – can’t – move, and suddenly she’s locking eyes with this big foreign man. He smiles slightly, and calls out to his companion in a language that sounds like bubbles blown underwater. As Anna and Lujza cautiously raise their heads, he raises his hand to wave.

  There’s a moment of stillness, and then Lujza is grinning and waving back, and then all three of them are waving for all they’re worth. The tall man is laughing, and his companion, still leaning against the wall, looks wryly amused. Abruptly, there is the sound of a door opening, and a voice barks something indistinct in German; both men’s heads turn toward the sound, and reluctantly, they start to saunter inside. Just before they drop out of view, however, the taller man turns back to the window, smiles broadly, and blows a kiss; his companion slaps his shoulder chidingly, and, raising his eyebrows, sweeps into an elaborate and deeply ironic bow. As he straightens up, Sari sees a flash of fierce intelligence in his dark eyes, and then they’re both gone.

  Anna, Lujza and Sari turn to one another. Lujza is shaking with silent laughter and can’t get any words out, but Anna is grinning broadly.

  ‘This,’ she proclaims, ‘is going to be the best fun we’ve had in ages.’

  Sari feels unable to say anything at all.

  By eight o’clock the next morning Sari’s mind is made up. When Anna thumps on the door, she opens it, looking apologetic.

  ‘I can’t come, Anna, sorry. Judit wants me to do some stuff for her this morning.’

  Anna raises her eyebrows. ‘Well, come along later then. I’m sure they won’t mind.’

  ‘No, Anna, sorry, but I just don’t think I’ll have time for it with everything else going on. We’ve had three people in the past week with terrible sore throats, and Judit’s worried that it’ll spread, and so …’ Her voice runs down, hands gesturing ineffectually. She knows she sounds unconvincing, and Anna looks duly sceptical.

  ‘If you’re sure …’

  ‘I am, Anna. Could you tell them that, please? That I won’t be able to come back?’

  ‘I will. And I’ll be back here later, to tell you all about it!’

  The door slams, and Judit shuffles out of the kitchen, looking curious.

  ‘What is it that I want you to do for me, Sari?’

  Sari flushes. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with Judit’s ears.

  ‘Nothing, Judit. But we really do need some more wild chicory, and I thought that I should …’

  Judit sits down, sighs heavily, and looks at Sari with mock sorrow.

  ‘Ah, Sari, Sari. I never would have taken you for a coward.’

  ‘I’m not!’ Sari is outraged. Cowardice is the one accusation that infuriates Sari more than anything else, after a childhood where her father cons
tantly praised her for her bravery and recklessness.

  ‘Don’t try and fool me, Sari. What is it that you’re so afraid of?’

  ‘I’m not afraid of anything! We have enough to do with – with people getting sick from hunger, and the people from outside the village coming to us – and we don’t need the extra work – and if you’re so enthusiastic about the idea, why don’t you go down there?’

  Judit, infuriatingly enough, is laughing at Sari’s distress.

  ‘Sari, it’s not as if Anna and the rest of them are going down there to act as whores for the prisoners,’ she says. ‘It’s just a bit of cooking and cleaning; where’s the harm?’

  ‘If it’s just a bit of cooking and cleaning, then why are you so keen for me to go?’

  ‘I think it would be good for you to spend time with people who are not from here. I think that you want to learn about other places, about the rest of the world, and that this would be a good place to start. I don’t like to see you cutting yourself off from things. What happened there, anyway, that’s got you so upset?’

  ‘Nothing, really. We just – we just saw a couple of the men.’ Sari swiftly describes the two prisoners, their appearance and their behaviour. ‘They obviously had ideas about us, and Anna and Lujza just laughed, and so I think that they had … the same sorts of ideas.’

  ‘And what’s so wrong with that? If it’s all right for the two of them, why isn’t it all right for you?’

  Sari’s had enough. Arguing with Judit is like arguing with herself, that rebellious part of her brain that never stops questioning all her actions. Deliberately, she shuts off from Judit, making her face expressionless.

  ‘We really do need some more chicory,’ she says. ‘I’m going to the woods for a couple of hours.’

  Somehow, fate conspires to prove Sari right, and over the next few days she and Judit are busier than they’ve been in months. Jozsua, Éva Orczy’s baby is ill, and Éva is panicking. Sari, who has a slightly baffled fondness for the boy, as the first birth she attended, spends her time running back and forth between the Orczy house and Judit’s house, as remedy after remedy fails to bring down Jozsua’s fever, and so it’s not until three days later that Sari meets Anna in town. Anna is looking enormously cheerful; it’s eleven o’clock and Sari is exhausted, on her way home from the Orczy house where at last an infusion of angelica has broken Jozsua’s fever and sent him into a sweat-drenched sleep.

  ‘Morning, Sari!’ The perky tone of her voice makes the back of Sari’s head prickle.

  ‘Morning, Anna.’

  ‘How’s Jozsua Orczy?’

  ‘Better, I think. He should be all right.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Anna says absently. Her eyes are sparkling in a way that strikes Sari as slightly child-like, and she is suddenly touched, remembering Anna’s life before the war. Surely Anna deserves a bit of excitement, if anyone does.

  Relenting, she asks, ‘So how’s it going, down there?’ She motions in the direction of the Gazdag place.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ Anna’s face belies her noncommittal tone. ‘I’m on my way down there now. I got on the cooking rota in the end, so I’m off to peel potatoes for their lunch; what fun.’ Anna rolls her eyes, but the cynical pose doesn’t suit her in the least.

  ‘Have you met any of the prisoners yet?’

  ‘Well … a few. They come into the kitchen sometimes when we’re working – they have jobs to do down there, too, so they always have an excuse to hang around the kitchens, but you can tell they’re only doing it to get a look at us.’

  ‘And have you spoken to them?’

  Anna shakes her head, regretful. ‘Well, what language would we speak? Some of them speak a little German, but my German’s shaky enough – and of course none of them speak Magyar, and none of us speak Italian.’ Anna pauses, smiling slightly to herself. ‘We still manage to communicate, though. A little.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Sometimes Sari hears words coming out of her mouth that sound like they could have come from a woman twenty years older. She doesn’t like it much.

  ‘You know,’ Anna continues, dreamily, ‘smiling, waving, hand movements …’ she trails off. Sari suddenly has an overly vivid mental image of the possible hand movements involved.

  ‘God, Anna, you can’t have fallen for one of them already, 70 surely?’

  Anna looks affronted. ‘Of course not! And anyway, I’m a married woman!’ Sari waits patiently, and after a few moments, Anna relents, her voice confidentially lowered, ‘There is one man though. Jan.’

  ‘Jan?

  ’ ‘Well, I can’t get my mouth around his real name, can I? Something Italian that just goes on and on – but apparently it’s the same as Jan, which is far easier to say. But anyway, he seems to like me, and – oh, for God’s sake, Sari, he’s just so different from Károly, they all are – it’s just nice to feel—’ Anna stops abruptly, and following her gaze, Sari sees Orsolya Kiss passing by; Anna is reluctant to have her private affairs splashed over the village by evening. Once she’s gone, Anna’s tone is much lower.

  ‘Sari – are you sure that you don’t want to come and help out? Lots of the men have been wounded, and some of them are sick – they could really use someone like you down there.’

  Sari sighs. Suddenly, she really wants to confide in Anna, whose open face is looking at her with interest and concern, seeming eminently trustworthy. ‘I just can’t, Anna.’

  ‘If you’re worried about what people will say—’ Anna starts, her face angry, and Sari has a brief, treacherous thought that Anna wouldn’t be so brave if Károly were here. She shakes her head.

  ‘It’s partly that, but mainly … I don’t feel like I can trust myself. Don’t tell anyone I said that,’ she adds hurriedly, and feels her face turning red, wishing vehemently that she’d kept her mouth shut. But Anna’s just smiling.

  ‘God, Sari, don’t you think I feel the same way myself sometimes? If Jan miraculously decided to offer me a whole new life in Italy, I’d definitely be tempted. Very tempted.’

  For a moment, they look at each other silently. Sari is remembering the thin, cowed, silent Anna of two years before, and she feels certain that Anna is seeing within her the bitter, strange, lonely girl that she’d been herself.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it …’ Anna starts, and Sari nods.

  ‘You won’t mind hearing about it, though?’ Anna asks.

  ‘Of course not. I need to keep abreast of the gossip, or Judit’ll be furious.’

  ‘I should really …’ Anna moves to leave.

  ‘Go on,’ Sari says. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  I

  ‘His name is Umberto, Lilike says. She keeps her head down, scrubbing the sheet that she is holding with uncommon precision and concentration.

  His name is Umberto, and he kissed Lilike for the first time at the end of May. They can all tell straight away that something has happened; Lilike’s smile has changed into something silken and secretive. Lilike has never had a proper lover before.

  They started letting the men out a few weeks after they first arrived. At first they weren’t allowed past the gates of the camp, but Sari sometimes caught sight of them playing games in the yard, calling to one another in that intoxicating language, syllables running together like bead necklaces. The girls working in the kitchen always cluster by the window when the men are out there, pushing their sweaty hair out of their faces with their forearms. ‘When they get too hot,’ Anna confides to Sari, ‘they play with their shirts off.’

  The men know that the girls are watching, and the girls know that the men know; elaborate acrobatic and sporting feats just happen to occur by the kitchen windows. The girls initially tried to avoid being seen, but after a while they stopped caring, and the men stopped pretending that they didn’t know that the girls were watching, waving lazily up at the windows when they catch sight of a flash of blonde or dark hair.

  Lilike has always bee
n quiet but determined, and from the time that the prisoners appeared in town, she promised herself that she would have as much fun with them as possible. She works in the kitchens with Anna, and while they all flirt, Anna’s flirting has a slight edge of desperation.

  Lilike’s, on the other hand, is cool and controlled. Umberto was not the first to show interest – Lilike is sleek and blonde, the sort of girl to inspire interest in most places – but he’s the first that Lilike chose to encourage; there’s something about his silly, curly hair and his overtly cheeky manner that appeals to her – he’s somehow carefree, in a manner that none of the village men were ever able to be. It’s been a challenge to make any progress without being able to speak, but after a few days of Umberto grinning and winking and gesticulating whenever she passes, she decided to smuggle in a peach, which she wrapped in a handkerchief and pressed into his hand as she passed him on the way to the kitchens.

  The following evening when Lilike was on her way home, she’d just reached the gates with Anna and Lujza when she heard someone shouting behind her. All three of them turned, to see Umberto, haring across the lawn, clutching a small, ragged bouquet of daisies and dandelions. He squashed them into her hand, eyes flashing, and she gave a small smile, an even smaller curtsey, and slipped the bouquet deliberately in the top of her bodice.

  Anna reported all of this back to Sari as soon as it happened, and so Sari is not surprised by Lilike’s blushes that day in May when they’re next washing clothes at the river, in response to a flippantly crude remark from Lujza.