The Angel Makers (8 page)

‘Ah, no. Ferenc’s different from his parents. They’ve spent so much of their lives away, but he’s always lived here, and he loves this place – the devil knows why. He’d never leave.’

Sari sets her mouth. ‘Well, and that’s all right, too. This is my home; of course I’d be happy to stay here. ‘There’s no point in thinking about other things that I could have done, or other things out there. This is my life, here, and that’s all right.’

She’s not going to the camp, Sari decides, definitely not. She doesn’t need the work, she probably doesn’t have time for the work, and so there’s no point wasting time on something that’s pointless. And she’d only really be going to gawp, anyway, which is horrible – she, of all people, should know what it’s like to be stared at like some sort of performing animal, and she doesn’t want to do that to the prisoners: they might well be the enemy, but they’re still people. No, she’ll leave it to the others, and instead, she’ll set out early to go into the woods and gather some wild chicory – which they need; they’ve nearly used up their supply – so that even if Anna or Lilike or Lujza come to try and drag her down there, she won’t be here to be dragged. She’s not going, definitely, certainly not.

She oversleeps.

Lujza and Anna are banging on the door as Sari is frantically pulling on her boots and eyeing up escape out of the kitchen window. If Anna’s decided to go, she knows that she’ll be no match for their combined persuasive skills, and it’s with grim resignation (smothering a bright bubble of anticipation) that she trudges down the road on the way to what used to be Ferenc’s family house. Women are converging from all over the village, not just the young ones but the older ones too, married and respectable, and Sari finds that comforting; it means that it really is about work, rather than ogling men. It’s just before eight when they assemble outside the stable doors, and the sky is exploding with glorious spring light, about twenty women in all, murmuring in knots of two or three, some looking apprehensive, some eager, some – Éva Orczy among them, Sari sees – looking on the verge of desperation.

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 constantly 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.