Jessica Gregson - The Angel Makers

The ANGEL
MAKERS

Copyright by Jessica Gregson 2011

All rights reserved.

Published by
Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gregson, Jessica, 1978

The angel makers / Jessica Gregson.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-56947-979-7

eISBN 978-1-56947-980-3

1. WomenHungaryFiction. 2. Self-realization in womenFiction. 3.World War, 1914-1918HungaryFiction. 4. Women murderersFiction. I. Title.

PR6107.R44493A84 2011

823.92dc23

2011024928

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my grandmother, Laurette, and in memory of my grandfather, Clem

Contents

Although this book is based on a true story, events have been heavily embellished by the authors imagination. Names and places have therefore been changed.

Thank you to all my early readers (you know who you are), especially to Katy Anchnt, Rachel Coldbreath, and Germn Guillot, who provided much needed enthusiasm, encouragement and proofreading early on.

Thank you to all my friends, especially to Carlie Dawes, Jo Black, Kate Jones, Zavy Gabriel, Yogi Raste, Sophie Mc-Innes, Angela Hughes, Sarah Cook, Leda Glyptis, Anne Pordes, Sarah Moore, Nich Underdown, Mary Macfarlane, Helen Finch, and Judith Logan.

Thank you to my family, especially to Richard and Julia.

Thank you, Mark.

Thank you, mum and dad.

She never answers, but still, I talk to her all the time. Listen, I tell her. Ive made mistakes. When it first started, sometimes I would try to pretend that I was helpless in all of it, that Id been buffeted by fate; that as surely as those eight women are twisting in the wind now, in my way, Ive been twisting in the wind my whole life. Its not true, though; its just a lie that I told myself when I wasnt feeling strong enough to face up to what I am, and what Ive done. In truth, Ive made my choices, and my hand is strong in all of this. Without me, none of this would have even started.

Im twenty-eight, but I look older, and that doesnt even come close to how old I feel. Thats not so unusual where I come from. In the city, Ive heard that women are cosseted and coddled, treated like elaborate ornaments or playthings. Here, we carry our parents and our husbands and our children on our backs; were the dumping ground for all of lifes shit. Judit taught me that early on, and nothing Ive gone through since has gone any way towards disproving it. They used to wonder why I was still alive; in the villages, people regularly kill themselves over less than Ive endured.

When I was small, maybe eight or nine, Katalin Remny, aged sixteen, drowned herself because she was pregnant without a husband. She was hauled out of the river at a time when bodies in the river were far rarer than they have been recently and at her funeral her body was paraded through the streets, surrounded by howling mourners, but of course she had to be buried outside the churchyard because of her sins, and later, Judit and my father went to pour boiling water over her grave, to stop her from stalking the village in death, as suicides are said to do.

Judit came to speak to me a few days after Katalin was buried, and I remember she was hissing and spitting with fury: she told me that what Katalin had done was pointless and meaningless, that having a baby without a husband was only a sin in the eyes of those people who want to control women, and that, in any case, if a woman ever found herself with a baby that she didnt want, she could always come to Judit and Judit would take care of it though, at that age, I only had a vague idea of what taking care of it meant.

Like with most of Judits rages, it was born out of a desire to protect me, and it worked. Katalin took up residence in my mind, a symbol of the opposite of everything I was going to be; a mindless, sacrificial lamb, caring more about the opinions of a few stupid villagers than her own life. I knew that I would never give up my own life if there were any alternative left to me in the world, and as its happened, I could never be accused of failing to seek out as many alternatives as possible.

Thats at the root of it all, I explain to her: my survival instinct, my will to live. Thats behind all the choices Ive made. I could have given myself up at any number of points, and I suppose it would have saved lives. But not my life, and not her life, and thats all Im looking out for. Ive learnt that its too painful and dangerous to care about much else.

Is it odd that I feel like this, given the twenty-eight years Ive had? Maybe I should have accepted the bitter slice of life I got as something easy to surrender. But once I got it between my teeth, I was never going to let it go without the most violent struggle. Whats good about life? Ask me that when youre watching a summer moon, bloated and white, floating over the plain. Ask me that when youre looking into my childs face. Of course, there are terrible things too, and sometimes often they outweigh the good. But you cant have beauty without a bit of terror.

Sari is fourteen years old when they carry her father out, carry him through the village lanes, his face bare and blank to the wide sky, carry him through the summer wildflowers that bloom alongside the river, carry him to the cemetery. It is a public end for a private man, infused with the drama that makes village life bearable; a final chance to be the centre of attention, something that Jan Arany had never sought. Sari doesnt cry, because that isnt her way; instead, she wraps a cloak of silence around herself, and lets the other village women do the wailing for her. Her silence almost gives the impression of absence. It is misleading.

Her father had been a Wise Man, respected, a tltos, and theyd lived for all of Saris life on the outskirts of the village, in a wooden house with steps that creaked, the grass in front of it worn thin by the feet of villagers in search of cures, help or salvation. Her father had been a big man, tall, broadshouldered, light-haired unusual in that place a wide face like the sun, Sari thinks: warm, but remote. The villagers had loved him and feared him in equal measure. They just fear Sari.

As long as she can remember, shes been skirted by whispers wherever she goes. Her father had tried to explain it. Its because they loved your mother, he said, but thats never made sense to Sari. She loves her mother too, a wraithfigure whom shes never met, only heard about, and woven her image out of stories and imagination; a young woman barely older than Sari now who had left her family, smiling, to marry Jan Arany. Still smiling, shed swollen with Sari inside her, and then split open at Saris birth, and died.

I didnt want her to die, Sari would say to her father, after someone or other had hissed witch behind her back.

I know, he said, But they just think its unlucky, thats all.

Thats not all, though, and Sari knows it, though shes always appreciated her fathers kindness to pretend otherwise. Sari understands that she is odd, that theres something in the way she holds herself, in the way she looks at people, in the things she says and the things she knows, that isnt what the rest of the village considers right and proper. She envies the girls she sees walking through the village, arm in arm with easy familiarity, but she cant see how to get from where she is to where they are, how to change her behaviour in order to be liked. The only concession that she makes these days is her silence. Keeping her mouth shut gives the villagers fewer new stories to tell about her, but as with most villages, many of them are all too happy to tell the same stories over and over again.