The Angel Makers (15 page)
‘Oh, really? Why is that?’
‘After the war, you’ll go home, back to your job and your wife, and the last thing that you want is some Magyar peasant girl turning up on your doorstep. Am I right?’
He has the good grace to look slightly chastened.
‘I don’t want you to leave your wife,’ Sari continues. ‘This is just … a holiday.’
It is October, and the leaves are beginning to curl and bronze. They are in Sari’s father’s old bed, a fact that disturbs her less than it otherwise might. She has a faint suspicion that he might be grudgingly pleased about her latest course of action. He always wanted her to be safe, yes, but that desire always battled with his pleasure in her curiosity, and her stubborn refusal to bend to fit the shape she is supposed to occupy.
They are naked, but they haven’t had sex, and Sari doesn’t intend for them to. She knows how conservative Ferenc is, knows that he will know whether or not she is a virgin when they marry, and so it is far too big a risk to take. Marco allowed himself some token grumbling about her intransigence, but generally he seems to understand. They don’t talk about love, haven’t mentioned it, but Sari doesn’t mind; not yet, anyway. She’s still preoccupied by how much she’s learning. While she’s understood the basic biological facts behind sex for a long time – they’re rather hard to avoid in her line of work – its subtleties and pleasures have come as a delicious series of surprises.
Marco rolls over onto his side, and in doing so, winces.
‘What?’
He pulls the blanket down to his thighs; two months ago she would have blushed furiously, embarrassed but too proud to turn her face away, but now, she notices with some satisfaction, she can look at even the oddest parts of Marco’s anatomy without minding.
‘Look at this,’ he says, his voice slightly irritable. He’s indicating a large, plummy bruise that’s risen on his left thigh. ‘From climbing in that bloody window.’
The location of the house, on the edge of the village, near the woods, has allowed them to keep their relationship a secret for far longer than would otherwise have been possible, so long as Marco is prepared to wander casually into the woods, as if he is doing nothing more than having a stroll to take the air, circle round to the back of the house, and allow himself to be inelegantly hauled in by Sari through the kitchen window, which is sheltered by trees.
‘I don’t see why we have to keep this up,’ Marco says now, gloomily regarding his purpling leg. ‘What does it matter if people know? We’re not doing anything that half of them aren’t doing, too.’
‘It’s not a question of whether people
know
or not. It’s a question of not flaunting it. Not being obvious,’ she replies.
‘But other people are. Look at Umberto, and Luigi, and Paolo. None of them have to be smuggled in through windows.’
‘Well, none of their …’ It’s always hard for Sari to choose a word for this. ‘None of their
girlfriends
are engaged to the son of the most respected family in the village. And none of them are in a position as … as delicate, socially, as me.’
He sits up and looks at her searchingly. ‘Yes, you keep mentioning this, but you never explain it to me. What do you mean, “socially delicate”?’
Part of her is glad that he asked, as it shows that he’s been paying attention, but all the same, part of her has been dreading the question, and so she sidesteps.
‘It’s hard to explain to a foreigner.’
‘Yes, and so are a lot of the things that I’ve told you about where I’m from. I can tell you’re different, Sari, but I don’t know why, really, or how, or why it matters so much.’
Sari sighs. ‘Well – you know what I said about my father? About how he was like a doctor?’ Marco nods. ‘Well, that’s not exactly right. He treated people’s illnesses, yes, but also he treated their – their other problems. He was what we call a
táltos
, a Wise Man. Do you understand?’
‘I think so. You mean that your father had – or that people believed he had – certain skills, abilities to – to make things happen. Is that right?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s a way to explain it. So – here, men who have these abilities, they are respected, but for women it’s different. We call them
boszorkány
– I don’t know how to say it in German, but it’s like an evil woman, a woman who has special abilities to do bad things to people.’
‘
Strega.
I understand. So people thought that because of your father, you might be one of these – a
strega
.’
‘Partly. Also, my mother died when she was giving birth to me, which is bad luck – and it was worse because my mother was part of Ferenc’s family, and the village respected her a lot. I expect that if I had been pretty, and loveable, and like everyone else, people wouldn’t have thought the things about me that they did, but I’m not like them, I don’t know why, but I’m not, and so it’s easier for people to say bad things about me.’
‘But it’s not like that now, is it? Or not so much. So what changed?’
‘It helped when I started working with Judit. People don’t really
trust
Judit, she’s a bit scary …’
‘Can I meet her?’
‘Maybe,’ Sari says warily. She would have loved to have been able to keep her relationship with Marco a secret from Judit, but Judit has a way of gleaning an enormous amount of information from just a glance and she has been making increasingly unsubtle jibes ever since Sari came home that day in August.
‘Anyway,’ Sari goes on, ‘No matter how people feel about Judit, they need her, and now that I work with her, they need me, too. It’s also partly to do with Ferenc – people don’t feel they can treat me so badly any more, because they don’t want Ferenc to find out. And it’s also partly to do with the war – everyone needs everyone a lot more, now that the men aren’t here. It sounds horrible, but the war really has made things a lot better for me.’
It’s coming into late afternoon now – the shadows in the
woods are stretching, and Marco gives a slight shiver. There’s something eerie about those woods, he thinks, and gets up out of bed to close the curtains. Sari, supine, admires the gentle wedge shape of his body from behind – she’s never seen a grown man totally naked before and wasn’t expecting the elegance of Marco’s muscled back and curved buttocks. She knows that she probably should get back to Judit, and he should certainly get back to camp before too much longer, but she is terribly reluctant to leave. The constant reiterations of
this means nothing
mean little to her; while she knows that what they have is never going to last beyond the war, it doesn’t make it any less real now.
‘Do you really think things have changed that much?’
Marco asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the way people think of you. Do you really think that the war has changed things that much that when it’s over, and people don’t need each other so much any more—’
‘But I’ll be married to Ferenc by then.’
‘And you’re happy for people just to tolerate you because of the person you’ve married?’ He sounds exasperated. ‘I would have expected more of you. It doesn’t bother you that people will be nice to you because of Ferenc, and then go home and think the same things about you that they’ve always thought?’
Sari starts to protest, but then she remembers. ‘Sometimes I believe that people have really changed the way they think about me,’ she says, slowly, her thoughts formulating as she speaks, ‘But sometimes I think – do you know what Anna asked me a few months ago? Before Péter died?’
‘No, what?’
‘She asked whether I could stop Károly – her husband – from coming back from the war. I never would have thought that Anna would believe that I could do something like that.’
Marco looks intrigued. ‘
Do
you know how to do things like that? I mean, it’s not that I believe in it, but –
do
you?’
Sari doesn’t like talking about this sort of thing very much; she’s never quite sure where her own beliefs lie – less superstitious than much of the rest of the village, she knows that she’s far more so than someone like Marco. ‘I know some curses,’ she says shortly. ‘I learnt some from Judit, and some from my father. They would never use them – well, I don’t know so much about Judit, but not my father. He didn’t believe in them, and neither do I, but I would never want to take the risk.’ She’s silent for a moment, and then bursts out: ‘I just wish that I wasn’t so different from everyone else.’
To her annoyance, Marco reacts to this melodramatic statement by bursting out laughing. She swats him halfheartedly with a pillow.
‘You know the problem with you, Sari?’ he says, dodging easily. ‘You take yourself far too seriously.’
‘What’s he saying?’ Judit asks irritably. Although she’s been surrounded by spoken Italian for two years now, she’s never got much further than a few words of random vocabulary and a full repertoire of swear words.
‘He says,’ Sari replies, ‘that it’s all going to be over soon. The war.’
‘How does he know?’
‘They hear things, down at the camp. From the guards down there, and from the new prisoners, the ones who are just back from the front.’
Marco looks impatient throughout this exchange. Two years has done little to improve
his
understanding of Magyar, and standing half-naked in the middle of a kitchen while the woman who is supposed to be fixing his shirt is babbling in that twisting, incomprehensible language can be rather trying.
Nobody is really looking forward to the end of the war. To an outside observer, the village looks perhaps like any other, men and women going about their daily business, but anything more than a cursory glance shows that while the women are Magyar, the men are Italian and still don’t sleep in the village, and there are no children to be seen. Everything has slipped sideways into an approximation of normal life, and unlike a life that has been turned entirely upside down, it has become very hard to remember what things were like before, or to imagine that it could have been much better than the present state of affairs. The few Magyar men who have returned from the front have been easily assimilated, simply because they have been sick, or wounded, or mad, and as such hardly in the position to challenge the new world order that’s sprung up in their absence. But when the great bulk of them return, the ones who aren’t so easily quelled … The thought makes Sari feel uneasy.
‘Well, the Italians will be gone by then, won’t they?’ Lilike said airily when discussing this a few days ago, and although no one said anything at the time – no one really likes to discuss it – they all know that Lilike wouldn’t talk like that if she were married or engaged. After all, her life isn’t going to change as radically when the men come home.
Sari and Marco have slipped into an easy, leisurely familiarity in the past year or two, and Sari can’t quite imagine life without him in it any more; he’s the bright spark at the centre of everything she does these days. They still don’t speak of love, and Sari has pleasantly surprised herself that she still refrains from entertaining fantasies about living happily ever after in Italy with him. But although Marco insists that he would not and will not leave his wife, to Sari’s irritation, as she has never asked it of him, his concern for Sari’s future seems to grow day by day, the closer things are to being all over.
Shirt duly mended, they walk together through the village back towards the camp. The March wind roars past their ears, almost a physical presence; their feet slip and scrabble on the rutted, icy slush, and Marco shivers theatrically.
‘Well it sounds like you won’t have to put up with this climate for too much longer, will you?’
Sari knows she shouldn’t have said that; a look that she has come to recognise immediately appears on his face, and she groans inwardly.
‘I worry about you, Sari,’ he begins, and she cuts him off.
‘I know what you think.’
‘Well, will you consider it?’
He wants her to leave the village when the war is over. She does not even consider the idea, because it is patently absurd. She can’t understand why he wants her to leave when he has specifically said that he has no intention of leaving Benigna, and she doesn’t trust his motives in offering to lend her – give her – money, to set her up somewhere new, but each time she refuses, he looks so sad that she can hardly bear it. ‘Oh, Sari,’ he always says, ‘What you could be, somewhere else.’
