The Angel Makers (31 page)
Things are calmer these days, and she’s glad. For the first two years after Péter died, there had been a roaring in her head that she couldn’t shut out, and the only way she’d known to cope was to shut herself away, minimising all outside noise until the noise inside her became more bearable. Her family had been kind, if baffled by her behaviour – it’s not so unusual to lose a husband, after all, and women for centuries have been shouldering their burdens and carrying on with things. Lujza’s always been a little unusual, though.
It wasn’t until the village men started coming back from the front that she started seeing Péter. In hindsight, of course, it makes sense that he couldn’t come back from the battlefield until the war was over; he’d always been conscientious, and even death was never going to get in the way of him doing his duty. It was late when she first caught sight of his face outside the window and she moved faster than she had in months, flinging wide the window, staring out into the dusk as if she couldn’t open her eyes wide enough to see all that she wanted to see. Of course, no one had been there, but she realised, when she closed the window and drew the curtains, that the roaring in her head had stopped.
After that, Luzja started to see him everywhere, catching sight of his profile out of the corner of her eye; hearing his steps behind her as she walks through the house, but he’s always gone when she turns around. She knows he’s not real, yet at the same time she knows that he’s as real to her as he ever had been, and soon she stops turning around when she feels him at her elbow, closing her eyes instead and breathing in his presence. She talks to him, too. To start with she holds the conversations inside her head, but before long she starts to forget, finding it harder and harder to distinguish between what she says quietly and what she says out loud.
Sari used to visit her almost every day, back when Lujza refused to leave the house, but these days she comes less and less often. There’s one reason for that, the same reason that everyone else has for giving Lujza a wide berth: that spending time with a woman who walks the border between fantasy and reality can be unsettling for even the most pragmatic of people. But there’s another reason as well. Ever since Péter has come back, Lujza’s become more and more aware of things that other people don’t notice. When Sari comes to visit, now, it’s as if a bell rings in the back of Lujza’s head, telling her to be on her guard, and from the way that Sari looks at her, Lujza knows that she’s sensed her wariness. Sari has always been different – that had always been what Lujza liked about her – but something has changed; Sari vibrates at a different pitch now, a pitch that sets Lujza’s teeth on edge. One morning, when Sari’s just left and Luzja is bent over the potatoes she’s peeling for dinner, she decides to ask Péter:
do you know
? And the answer comes back:
yes
– with a sudden vivid memory of Ferenc’s funeral –
and so do you.
When Sari stopped visiting so often, Lujza felt mingled sorrow and relief – she misses Sari, but is glad to be rid of the way that Sari’s presence raises the hairs on the back of her neck these days. More than Sari, though, she had missed Sari’s child, the red-haired daughter who would sit, silent, on the floor of Lujza’s house while Sari and Lujza made stilted conversation, the little girl whose wild, wide eyes had reminded Lujza of her own. And then one afternoon when Lujza has been dozing over her embroidery, when she opens her eyes there is Sari’s girl, sat at her feet, paper in one hand, pencil in the other, absorbed in her drawing. Lujza barely dares to breathe for fear of disturbing the child, but she can’t help herself from stretching out a hand to touch the bright coil of the girl’s hair. The child looks up into Lujza’s face, and that’s when Lujza catches sight of what she is drawing – and it is Péter.
‘They’ve just pulled
another
body out of the river.’
‘Oh,
honestly
. I keep telling them – don’t throw bodies into the river. Especially at this time of year; the river’s up so high, and you can never tell where they’re going to end up …’
‘We’ve already had one wash up as far downriver as the next village; it’s just luck that they assumed it was a drowning. But if more and more bodies start piling up down there, it’s going to start looking pretty suspicious, isn’t it?’
‘So who was it this time?’
Sari sits down at the table and starts to haul her boots off.
‘Oh, God, that poor Krisztina woman, Orsolya’s cousin. I heard they had a disagreement a week or so ago, something about some jewellery of their grandmother’s – stupid of her, really; no one in their right mind would mess with Orsolya these days – so it’s not too surprising. It’s just Orsolya’s style, too, to toss the body into the river. She was so smug and proud when her mother-in-law was found downriver and was certified drowned; I think she thinks she’s just going to get away with things like this forever.’
Judit shakes her head, snorting dismissively. ‘Stupid woman. She really does think she’s beyond reproach, doesn’t she? Anyway, I suppose we should just give stricter warnings in future. No more bodies in the river – the last thing we need is anyone from outside the village getting caught up in all of this.’
‘Quite.’ Sari turns to the corner where Rózsa sits, slumped, legs splayed, small, wiry body hunched over a drawing. ‘Rózsi, darling, come here and give me a kiss.’
The girl obeys. Nine years old she is, tall and skinny with Sari’s translucently pale skin and a whip of shockingly bright red hair – and those unsettling green eyes; well, unsettling eyes seem to run in the family, Sari thinks, but Sari’s eyes are unsettling because they seem to be cutting right into the heart of you, while Rózsi’s eyes are unsettling because she seems to be looking out at an entirely different world. Sari’s never been able to work out whose child she is. In certain lights the shadow cast by her jaw is reminiscent of Ferenc’s strong face shape, but at other times the quirk of an eyebrow takes Sari’s breath away with memories of Marco. Either way, she’s no one’s as much as she is Sari’s; her father doesn’t matter.
Rózsi is nine years old and she’s never said a word. She just stares with her wide, wild eyes and stays silent. Sari’s used to it now, used to most aspects of her child’s strangeness, but it hasn’t always been the case. She’s mainly stopped blaming herself for it, too, but sometimes it creeps up on her, catching her by the throat in the middle of the night. Is there something wrong with Rózsi’s brain, perhaps, brought on by the kick Sari took in the stomach early in Rózsi’s pre-birth life, or by the fever Sari suffered during pregnancy, or by the abrupt way that Rózsi slithered into the world, in the middle of the night, when Sari was so confused and panicky with pain that she was struck dumb, unable to even call Judit to help? Oh, Rózsi seems intelligent enough. She can read and write and she follows instructions, so presumably she can hear and understand what people say to her. She’s just unable, or unwilling, to speak herself.
Judit adores the child beyond all reason, to the extent that Sari suffers an occasional twinge of jealousy, for surely Judit never doted on Sari to the same extent when she was Rózsi’s age? But Judit is a blessing for Sari, really: she’s Rózsi’s wicked grandmother and father-substitute in one; she takes care of Rózsi’s interests and won’t tolerate Sari’s occasional morbid ramblings on the subject of her child.
‘When I was her age …’ Sari began once, around Rózsi’s sixth birthday, the sight of her silent, delicate child bringing back memories of herself at six, outspoken and prickly and fearless.
But Judit wouldn’t let her continue. ‘No,’ she said. ‘She is not you. She has her own gifts.’
While Sari has always felt this herself, she has never quite shaken the idea that it stems from misplaced maternal pride, so to have Judit back up her suspicions is comforting.
What can Rózsi do, then? Well, she can cook like an angel, something that makes both Judit and Sari laugh – such a conventionally feminine gift for someone in their household to have! Judit can’t cook at all, and Sari’s cooking is passable but uninspired. Rózsi, on the other hand, was found in the kitchen early one morning at the age of seven, mixing up ingredients for what turned out to be the most delicious stew the three of them had ever tasted up until that moment.
Where did she pick it up? Who can tell? It’s true that she spent the first few years of her life clinging to Sari and Judit’s skirts, following them wherever they went, including the market and the kitchen, but neither of them ever dreamt that she was paying attention to what they were doing, watching and learning. She does almost all of the cooking now, without being asked – she will simply trot around the village, buying ingredients where she can, and prepare meals of such delicate, subtle flavours that both Judit and Sari feel that their tongues have not been fully alive until now.
Rózsi is welcome everywhere in the village, a fact that amazes Sari when she remembers the wariness and fear with which she was treated as a child. She’s even befriended Lujza Tabori. Sari can barely bring herself to visit Lujza now, since she has become so strange, but Rózsi loves Lujza and visits her unprompted.
She can also draw. Even when she was a baby she would conjure images from whatever was to hand. Her first sketches were wobbly and uncertain, full of skewed perspective and unearthly shapes, but there was something heart-stilling about them. After looking at a drawing of Rózsi’s, it’s the rest of the world that seems odd, tilted a little on its axis. Rózsi’s drawing is improving as she gets older. Both Sari and Judit have piles of her sketches, and the dry wooden walls of Judit’s house are papered with them. They can’t bear to throw any of them away.
Rózsi’s the centre of Sari’s life, now; she’s a flesh and blood barrier between Sari and what’s going on in the rest of the village. Orsolya was only the first. Her husband (a nice, unassuming man, Sari had always thought, but no matter) had expired after a short, painful illness, and once that was over Sari felt mingled relief and dread – relief, because Orsolya had lost whatever incentive she may have had to report Sari’s activities to her policeman cousin, and dread because she sensed that it was just the start, the ripple of wind that spreads over the grass to signal that a storm is coming.
And so it proved. Word got out – of course it did – that Sari and Judit were doling out death from that little wooden house, and slowly, slowly women started coming. Some of them Sari could countenance – the village may have been small, but there was no shortage of bad husbands, ill husbands, burdensome husbands – and Sari never blamed the women who were hit or abused or disrespected for wanting to find a way out. After all, it was something she’d done herself, and something she’d helped Anna do. But some of them …
The third night that she’d been sick and unable to eat at the thought of some poor blameless man dying, if not by her hand, then with her tacit agreement, Judit had sat her down and had words with her.
‘You have a choice, as always,’ Judit had said. ‘You don’t have to be doing this. You could refuse. You could leave.’
‘But—’
Refusal meant death, Sari knew. Any woman frustrated by her non-compliance could bring the whole enterprise crashing down on everyone’s heads. And leaving was next to impossible. It was barely three months after Rózsi’s birth, and fleeing into the dark plain, in the middle of winter, having not yet fully recovered her strength from the birth, with a tiny infant probably meant death, just as much as refusal did.
Judit shrugged. ‘They’re not good choices, I admit. We’re in a tight spot. But you could be the martyr here, you could put these lives above yours, and you choose not to. Accept that about yourself, Sari, and get on with it, or don’t. Just don’t torture yourself with the results of your choices, because it doesn’t do any of us any good.’
And oddly, Judit’s harsh words had worked. What’s the difference, Sari asks herself now, between one death, and ten, and a hundred? What’s the difference between the death of an abusive husband and a bed-ridden mother-in-law? What’s the difference between a motive of survival, and a motive of greed? The world has just come out of a war in which millions of lives were easily forfeited, and fundamentally meaningless. After a year, Sari stops minding (or stops thinking about it – whichever way, it works), and after two, she’s able to joke with Judit about the ironic little sideline that’s become their main business: one hand giving, and the other taking away. They’ve always been dealers in death to a certain extent; Judit’s never tried to hide her activities as an
angyalcsináló
, an angel maker, an abortionist.
