The Angel Makers (5 page)

The summer gives no sign of ending, until one day, suddenly, the earth coughs and all the yellowed leaves fall off the trees to lie on the ground like shells. Sari feels like she’s waiting for something elusive and indefinable. Fond as she is of Judit, living with her is odd. Judit hasn’t lived with anyone for many, many years – village lore holds that she had a husband, years ago, in her youth, but Sari can’t quite believe this; it seems preposterous that Judit hasn’t always been as she is – and when she bumps into her early in the morning, Judit always seems surprised and a little put out. Sari’s quite aware of the need to adapt, to smooth herself around Judit’s angles and edges, but it’s not always clear how to do so.

Still, Sari thinks that things could hardly be better. She misses her father, of course, both for who he was, and for how he treated her. As far back as she can remember, he treated her as if she was intelligent, involving her in every aspect of his work, and the older she grew, the luckier she realised herself to be, and the more at odds with the other women she knew. When he died, she feared that all that was over, that she would be crammed inexorably into the prefabricated mould out of which most village women seemed to step. Who would teach her things now? Who would care that she could read, let alone that she was at ease in both Magyar and German?

Judit cares, and for that Sari is passionately thankful. Judit embraces her quick mind and is happy to fill it with knowledge, day after day, and Judit welcomes the knowledge that Sari has brought from her father and listens, head cocked, as Sari explains alternative properties of a herb that they’re using, or a more efficient way to prepare it. And Judit trusts Sari, letting her mix medicines and pick herbs, and, she says, Éva Orczy is due any day now, and when the time comes, Sari can accompany Judit to the birth.

Much as she loved her father, Sari always realised that he taught her things in spite of her sex; she’s excited to find that there’s no such sentiment in Judit, but quite the opposite.

‘There’s power,’ Judit says, ‘in here’ – indicating her flaccid breasts – ‘and here’ – waving a hand over her midriff and the darkness enclosed – ‘and especially here!’ She points crudely at her cunt, elaborating with a salacious wink. Sari has dimly sensed the power of these things with Ferenc, but under Judit’s tutelage she begins to get an inkling of what this power can do. Perhaps, she thinks, there are arenas where being female is an asset, not a hindrance.

She knows that Judit doesn’t tell her everything, however. Judit sets far more stock in incantations and mystery than Sari’s father ever did, and there are some parts of her work that she’s seemed reluctant to explain to Sari. Once, only a week or two after Sari had moved in, she’d woken, thirsty, in the middle of the night; stumbling through the unfamiliar house on the way to the jug of water that stood in the kitchen, Sari had been taken aback to find Judit sat at the dining table, lit only by a dim oil lamp, in deep conversation with a pale, tight-faced woman whom Sari didn’t recognise.

When Judit looked up she’d frowned. ‘I’d forgotten about you,’ she said, sounding annoyed, and Sari had hurried to fetch her water and leave as quick as she could.

In the morning, the woman was gone, and Judit had responded to Sari’s queries in even shorter sentences than usual. ‘She’s from the next village,’ she’d said, ‘Nothing you need to worry about.’

Since then, there have been a couple of occasions when Judit has left the house, with a terse shake of her head at Sari if she makes a move to follow, and Sari soon gives up trying to prise information out of Judit’s shut-fast mouth; she’ll tell her when she was good and ready, and not before. Still, sometimes when Sari is lying in bed, hearing Judit moving in the kitchen, speaking low-voiced to herself, Sari wonders quite how much she really wants to know.

And then there’s Ferenc: that’s perhaps the one area where Sari feels most confused. After she refused to marry him immediately, she didn’t see him for days, and this made her unaccountably sad. She’s always surprised to find that she likes him. He’s steady, and she likes that; she sometimes feels as rootless and flexible as the long grasses that flap in the wind on the plain, and she feels that Ferenc may be able to anchor her. And the light of respectability in which he could cast her shouldn’t be underestimated. Sari cannot remember ever being treated better than with mild disdain, or fleeting fear, or faintly patronising pity, and much as she tells herself she doesn’t care, she sometimes feels a wistful longing to be liked. She imagines, maybe, walking through the village with Ferenc, and not having people slide their eyes to look at her, or raise their hands to hide their whispers.

After those few days, Ferenc started to visit again, and she was relieved. But something had changed. While his conversation was as light and friendly as ever, he would now sometimes fall silent, and the cast of his face as he looked at Sari unsettled her. She misses his simplicity, now, which has somehow been shed, but she doesn’t know how to get it back. He doesn’t try to kiss her any more, and she’s not even sure whether they’re properly engaged, as they’ve not performed the traditional ceremony, both drinking from the same cup. But perhaps Ferenc, with his wealthy family, and his frequent trips to Budapest, is beyond that sort of nonsense? In her spare moments, she’s embroidering a handkerchief for him, the sort that engaged men wear, but she’s not sure whether she has the courage to give it to him – not just because of the clumsy unevenness of her stitches, but because she’s not sure what it will mean to him.

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.’