The Exiled (2 page)

‘What shall I do if I find him?’ asked Ernő.

‘Catch him.’

‘How?’ Fear flashed across Ernő’s eyes. Fear and uncertainty.

Anna didn’t answer. This wasn’t the time for a lesson in apprehending a suspect. She took off her high-heeled shoes and jogged off briskly – barefoot and almost silent – down Sumadija utca, past the nursery school, hoping she would be the one to find the man and not Ernő. The darkness thickened around her. Small sharp stones pricked the soles of her feet, but Anna didn’t care. One of the aims of rigorous exercise was to get used to pain, and Anna was a master of that. Be that as it may, she hoped she didn’t step on a broken bottle. Even she had limits.

The sound of the music had died down, or perhaps the band was having a break. Streetlamps were few and far between, and there were no cars in the street. Kőrös looked all but deserted. This area to the north of Kanizsa had once been at the bottom of a lake. Back when the Yugoslav economy was booming, it had been built up into a middle-class residential area with two-and three-storey houses standing tall and silent, each in their own fenced-off garden. The empty, almost ghostlike feeling was heightened by the heavy shutters pulled across the windows, making the buildings look dark and abandoned. What’s more, each building had its own garage, so there were no cars parked out on the street. Nowadays few people could afford to keep these enormous houses heated during the winter months. As the price of imported Russian gas had skyrocketed, the upper floors of these apartment blocks were often left unheated all winter, and in a house with six rooms, people sometimes heated only two: the kitchen and the living room.

At the Szent János crossroads Anna again had to make a snap decision about which direction to take. She listened to the silent streets for the space of a long, deep breath. For no logical reason she decided to run towards the Gong restaurant and took the first left on to Szőlö utca. All of a sudden a metallic gate gave a clatter right next to her, as though something was trying to clamber through it. Anna gave a startled shout, and on the other side of the fence a mongrel with a tangled coat ran alongside her barking wildly.

‘Quiet!’ Anna snapped at the dog, which stood at the corner of
the garden barking after her. Now they’ll know for sure where I am, she sighed, and at the next crossroads slipped into Tvirnicka utca. She jogged up and down the streets. Small, sharp stones cut into her feet, tore a hole in one of her socks and scratched her heel, but still the thief was nowhere to be found.

When she saw Ernő approaching her on Jesenska utca, Anna came to a halt.

‘That bag had my passport and credit cards in it. Everything,
perkele
,’ she said, and noticed she was swearing in Finnish.

‘What about your phone?’ asked Ernő. He was so out of breath he could hardly speak. His cheeks were glowing red and his brow was covered in sweat. You should go for a run more often, Anna found herself thinking meanly.

She tapped her jacket pocket, discovered that her phone was still there and showed it to Ernő with a look of feigned victory on her face.

‘Hah, at least they didn’t get away with everything.’

‘Damn tinkers,’ said Ernő.

‘How do you know that?’ asked Anna, somewhat taken aback. She hadn’t seen anything of the thief but the back of his jacket.

‘Well, the girl looked … you know. It’s obvious.’

‘Looked what?’

‘You know … untidy.’

‘How closely did you get a look at her? I didn’t really see the man at all. Height, one hundred and eighty centimetres; average build; dark jacket; but if someone asked me to describe him, I don’t think I could do it. I guess he’s probably fairly young, thirty at the most.’

‘So you didn’t get a look at him then? I don’t think I’d be able to say anything at all about the girl either.’

‘Height? Age?’

‘She couldn’t be very old because she was quite small. Nothing but a kid. I didn’t really see.’

‘But you said she looked untidy. In what way?’

‘I can’t say really. It must have been her hair. Long and tangled.’

‘And that automatically makes them Romani, does it?’

Ernő couldn’t avoid the irritated tone in Anna’s voice.

‘Come on, you’d recognise them a mile off,’ he said, trying to defend himself.

‘The girl was wearing a red skirt,’ said Anna.

‘Was she?’

Anna hadn’t paid the thieves’ ethnic background any attention. And if Ernő hadn’t noticed the girl’s red skirt, how could he possibly have seen whether her hair was untidy? His observation was nothing but prejudiced supposition, thought Anna. Was there a single place on earth where ‘gypsy’ wasn’t a synonym for ‘thief’? She swallowed her desire to give Ernő a piece of her mind. After all, he might be right. To Anna the average Romani looked exactly like the average Serb or Hungarian. Over here the Romani women didn’t wear frilly blouses and black velvet skirts, and the man didn’t wear straight trousers and a jacket like they did in Finland, where they clearly stood out from the crowd. Here they dressed just like everybody else. But still, people here seemed to know just by looking who was a Romani and who wasn’t. As if having a skill like that was in any way important.

‘They live nearby, don’t they?’ asked Anna.

‘I don’t think they were locals.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘This is such a small town, the locals have to go thieving elsewhere. Everybody knows everybody else. Almost.’

‘Shall we go and take a look?’

‘They won’t let us in, and we can hardly batter the door down. They’d shoot us first. And if those two have gone that way, they’ll be well and truly hidden by now. The most sensible thing is to go straight to the police station and report the theft.’

Anna thought about this for a moment. The idea of snooping round the gypsy quarter by night appealed to her, but still she hesitated. Maybe it really would be best to report the theft at the police station. What a great start to her relaxing holiday. Just then the sound of a dog barking could be heard in the distance. Ernő turned his head and listened closely.

‘That’s coming from the gypsy quarter,’ he said.

‘Right, we’re going down there.’

‘The hell we are, in the middle of the night.’

‘Are you afraid?’ asked Anna.

‘No.’

‘Neither am I, so let’s go.’

Anna wiped the sand and grit from her feet and put on her shoes. Her socks were torn to shreds and there was a bleeding cut on the ball of her left foot. She tried not to think about the searing pain that was now running up her calf muscle, or that her high heels weren’t making it any better.

The clack of Anna’s shoes echoed across the deserted street. She was irritated. She’d had to pick these shoes, hadn’t she? And tights and a skirt. It meant something, she thought. She was wearing more make-up, more feminine clothes than in Finland. What exactly was she trying to hide? Or reveal?

The dog had stopped barking. The silence was sultry and oppressive.

The town came to an abrupt end at a large brick factory. The edge of the town looked like it had been measured with a ruler. On the final street before the factory stood a white, roughcast, terraced house. The courtyard was on the side facing the factory; the building’s run-down façade was half the length of the street and completely concealed the view into the courtyard. The windows were all dark.

Anna went up to the locked gate.

‘Is there anyone there?’ she shouted. ‘Open the gate!’

Tethered to a thick chain, a mongrel that resembled a dachshund appeared from around the corner and growled.

Ernő stood further back, agitatedly glancing around.

‘They might have guns,’ he whispered.

‘Nonsense,’ Anna scoffed and rattled the gate. ‘Open up!’

The dog started barking, a window near the gate opened up, and a young-looking woman poked her head out.

‘Who is it?’ she asked.

Anna stepped closer and stood right beneath the window. The
woman’s thick, black hair was tied in a bun. Her skin was dark, and she was very beautiful. Her eyes were large and pitch black. And as she looked down, Anna thought they betrayed a sense of caution. There was something else in her expression too. Maybe pride, maybe contempt.

‘What do you want? You’ll wake up the kids,’ the woman snapped.

‘We’re looking for a young man and a little girl in a red skirt. Have they just come into this house, by any chance?’ Anna asked.

‘Nobody comes in at this hour. We’re all asleep.’

‘Mummy, who’s there?’ came the sound of a sleepy child, a little boy perhaps.

‘Back to bed now, there’s nothing to worry about,’ the woman said gently before turning back to Anna. ‘Has something happened?’ she asked and looked Anna in the eyes.

Anna felt embarrassed. It was as though the woman could see right through her, as though she knew exactly what had happened and who they were looking for. There was also something very defensive about the woman’s demeanour, and Anna couldn’t tell whether this was aimed at her personally or the people she represented. She wasn’t welcome here; that much was clear. She no longer wanted to disturb the peace in their house.

‘We’re probably in the wrong place. Sorry to disturb you,’ said Anna, then turned and nodded to Ernő as if to say it would be best if they left.

They had only walked a few metres when the woman’s voice echoed across the stone walls of the houses.

‘
Tiszavirág
,’ the woman shouted in a voice that made Anna shudder. The flowering of the Tisza – when the river’s long-tailed mayflies all hatched and mated in the space of a few short days.

Anna and Ernő stopped and turned around, but the window had already closed behind them. The cut in Anna’s foot was throbbing painfully.

‘What on earth was that about?’ asked Anna.

‘I don’t know, but I know that woman.’

‘Really? Who is she?’

‘Her name’s Judit. She’s an organiser for the local Romani community group. She runs camps for the kids, that sort of stuff.’

‘But that sounds great,’ said Anna.

‘Well, they probably get money from the council for it,’ Ernő replied. ‘Let’s call Tibor. Maybe he caught the girl.’

Ernő took out his phone and exchanged a few quick words with Tibor. He shook his head at Anna. The girl had disappeared. Tibor and the others were going home for the night and didn’t feel like partying any more.

‘Let’s stop by the police station. It’s best to report the theft immediately rather than tomorrow,’ said Ernő after he’d finished his phone call. ‘What a crap start to your holiday. Never mind, we’ll make up for it.’

DZSENIFER CREPT BACK
towards the town. Branches tore at her already tangled hair and her little feet were soaked from the muddy earth, where even the smallest depressions had captured water from the flooding Tisza. She had crouched by the riverbank until it was light, to make sure the monster had disappeared. She had gone down to the water’s edge to take a look at her brother. Then she’d picked up the passport and the credit card, which lay in the mud, and stuffed them in her pocket. She lifted her gaunt face to the sun and tried to forget everything that had happened that night. That’s what she’d done when Mother had died, and it had helped then too. But that was so long ago that Dzsenifer couldn’t really remember what she’d done or thought.

She walked towards the town centre and sat down near the bus station. She felt as though she blended into the group of people loitering around there, people whose skin and hair was as dark as hers. She didn’t know who they were, where they had come from or why. But she knew that her brother had had some dealings with them. Business, he’d always said. For Dzsenifer business meant bread and meat, milk and
burek
. When her brother’s business was doing well, she could eat until her tummy was full, and when business was slow they were hungry. That’s when she snuck round to the neighbours’ house. The tables next door weren’t exactly overflowing with treats either, but Dzsenifer didn’t expect them to be. The neighbours gave her bread and lard. When your stomach was howling with hunger that was a treat above all others.

This summer her brother had had plenty of business, and Dzsenifer couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone hungry. Now she felt a pinch at the bottom of her stomach. She started to cry as the image of her brother lying by the banks of the Tisza forced itself into her mind. Perhaps her brother would wake up and find her later. Maybe he’d just been sleeping more soundly than usual. Maybe the horrible
man who’d attacked him had only appeared in Dzsenifer’s nightmares. She often had nightmares. That’s why she was afraid of going to sleep. That’s what must have happened.

Her brother would come home later.

Dzsenifer knew what to do with the passport and the credit card. She knew where to take them. All those people who had wandered here from places she didn’t know and who spoke strange languages and who seemed to fill every bit of the town, they were in the same place she was going. One of them would buy the passport. Then Dzsenifer would be able to buy lots of bread.

The bus jolted to the stop, its exhaust sputtering. The driver stepped out to smoke a cigarette, looked at the crowd of people and shook his head. Dzsenifer felt like darting into the bus, but she waited until the driver had smoked his cigarette, thrown it to the ground and stamped it beneath his shoe. Then she stepped calmly up to the driver’s booth, bought a ticket and went to sit on the back seat. Neither Dzsenifer nor anyone else paid any attention to the grey-haired man sitting in a car parked in front of the Venezia pizzeria and watching her leave.

A CLATTER COULD BE HEARD
from the kitchen. Anna opened her eyes a fraction. The blinds in the upstairs room were pulled so tight, the light only came through in tiny bright spots, like pinpricks in a black window. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she began to make out the contours of the familiar furniture: the desk beneath the window, the small bookcase in the corner and the armchair with her clothes thrown over the back.

Once Anna had turned eighteen, her mother had returned to their former homeland. This used to be Anna’s room as a girl. The toys had long since been packed away and taken up to the attic, or given to relatives with young children. There were no posters or photographs on the walls, because that phase of Anna’s life had only begun once they arrived in Finland. It hadn’t really taken off there, though; unlike all the other teenage girls at school, Anna had never been head over heels about any particular band or actor. She’d taped a few posters to the wall of her room in Koivuharju, but only so that she didn’t seem like a total freak if one of her classmates visited. She couldn’t even remember which bands they were. She did remember that guests at their house were few and far between.

‘
Kértek a pálinkát?
’ Anna could hear the creak of the pantry door, the sounds of her mother fussing round the kitchen. Anna looked at her phone. Ten o’clock. That meant it was actually nine o’clock, because her phone hadn’t automatically changed to local time.
Pálinka
at nine in the morning – home-brewed fruit liquor that was stronger than vodka, thought Anna, and smiled. Welcome home.

She changed the time settings on her phone and listened to the agitated chatter from downstairs. She truly didn’t want to get out
of bed yet. It must have something to do with yesterday’s handbag theft, she thought as she gently stroked her stomach. She made out the words ‘gypsy’ and ‘thief ’. Maybe they’d caught up with the culprit. Maybe she wouldn’t have to get up just yet, have a shower, call Ernő and Tibor, go back to the police station and try to establish a chain of events while her friends interpreted. Most of the local police officers were Serbs and Anna’s grasp of the language wasn’t up to scratch. Some of those who had worked in Kanizsa for years spoke Hungarian too, but the young duty officer who had been there the night before had been so monolingual that Anna suspected he might have been from Kosovo. It was ironic that here, in her so-called homeland, she had to rely on her friends’ interpreting skills to deal with the police. The duty officer had sat smoking in his Plexiglas booth, logged the event in his computer and encouraged them to come back in the morning when there would be more staff around.

No police stations on holiday, thank you. No interviews, eye witnesses, uniforms, investigations – Anna didn’t want to remember that such things even existed. She wanted to lie in, drink Turkish coffee with her breakfast, let her mother make a pleasant fuss and wait on her. She wanted to buy warm white bread from the local bakery run by the Albanians, walk along the banks of the Tisza with Réka, talking about everything, sweat in the heat, and eat cherries straight from the tree. She would have time to do all those things before the holiday was over: if the weather remained this warm, the first cherries would ripen at the end of June. But of all the bags to steal, someone had stolen hers. Could she have had any worse luck? Anna thought, rubbing her eyes and stretching her arms.

Réka hadn’t joined them last night. They had messaged back and forth throughout the day and Réka had said she’d been working in Szabadka, the nearest large city on the Serbian side, which in Serbian was called Subotica. Eventually Réka had said she’d felt so ill all day that she didn’t want to drive all the way to Kanizsa. Anna was disappointed because Réka normally joined her as soon as she arrived. Feeling ill sounded like an excuse. Réka has something going on,
something more important than me, Anna thought, almost jealous. But her other friends had been waiting for her at the house, and she’d hardly had time to eat or exchange news with her mother before they rushed her off into town. Then her handbag had been stolen and she’d forgotten all about Réka.

Anna reluctantly swung her legs out of bed and placed her feet on the brown, patterned carpet, the kind that were popular when the house was built in the seventies. It’s so handy not to have to take rugs out and air them, her mother used to say. Nobody thought then of the dust and dirt that became ingrained in them over the years – she wasn’t sure they thought of it nowadays either. In a country where people still smoked indoors, the dirt clinging to fitted carpets wasn’t a particular concern. Anna went into the bathroom and noticed that the voices in the kitchen had fallen silent. An unpleasant sensation pressed down sharply on her chest, the same way a mother feels when she realises the sound of her child playing has stopped: something has happened.

Anna quickly pulled on her clothes, didn’t bother brushing her teeth or combing her hair, and went downstairs.

A man and two women were sitting in the kitchen. As Anna appeared in the doorway, they turned to look at her but didn’t smile or greet her in the normal, cheery fashion.

‘Your bag has been found,’ said her mother.

Anna was puzzled at the subdued atmosphere.

‘That’s great, isn’t it? Let’s drink to that,’ she said. She walked over to the kitchen cabinet, took out a glass, ran water from the tap in a hopeless attempt to cool it, then took a long gulp of lukewarm water and looked at the assembled group of people, none of whom raised their glasses of fruit liquor to their lips.

‘This is Kovács Gábor, his wife and their neighbour, Gulyás Katalin,’ said her mother. ‘You’ve met them before. Gábor was a policeman at the same time as your father, though he’s been retired for a while. How long is it now, Gábor?’

‘Seven years since I left the force,’ the man replied in a low,
pleasant voice. The hair across his brow was grey and silvered, he wore a thick moustache, and his eyes were brown and alert.

‘Is it so long?’ said her mother, almost to herself, and shook her head.

‘Where did they find my bag?’ asked Anna.

Only once she’d spoken did she realise that she hadn’t rolled out the usual formal greetings and pleasantries. One of the women, the policeman’s wife, seemed to turn her nose up. She probably thought Anna was an impolite brat. Anna had felt this same awkwardness countless times before, particularly around older women – the barely hidden rejection that began to seep from them like frost from an opened freezer the minute Anna forgot to use the right words in just the right way. She would never be a
hölgy
, never be considered an
úriasszony
, a lady, a woman who understood the rules of etiquette, her family life in impeccable shape and her cupboards in order. This fact she had to face every time she met her mother and her mother’s friends.

‘Some way along the banks of the river, down towards Törökkanizsa,’ said Kovács Gábor.

‘Was my wallet still there?’

‘Yes. But we’ll have to establish whether anything’s been taken from it. Do you have a credit card?’

‘Yes, a Visa card.’

‘Well, that wasn’t there.’

‘I cancelled it last night, so it’ll be no use to anyone.’

‘Good. Did you have much cash with you?’

‘A few thousand dinars. I only arrived yesterday, so I hadn’t had time to change any more.’

‘There were only a few coins in your wallet. The notes had been taken.’

‘Of course. What about my passport?’

‘Gone, I’m afraid.’

‘Brilliant,’ Anna said, disappointed. The loss of her passport meant she’d have to contact the embassy in Belgrade and fill out who knows how much paperwork. Fucking hell, she cursed to herself.

‘Isn’t it just bushes down that way?’ she asked. ‘Do you know how the bag ended up there? Did you catch the thief?’

‘We’ve got the thief,’ said Kovács Gábor.

‘Who is he?’

Her mother cast a worried look at the elderly policeman, and he nodded at her almost imperceptibly.

‘
Was
he…’ her mother said quietly. ‘He was lying next to your bag. Dead.’

‘What?’ Anna gasped.

‘We don’t know who he was,’ Gábor explained. ‘But he wasn’t from round here. He’d drowned. It appears he stumbled into the water and got himself caught on some tree roots spreading out into the river; they stopped him from being washed away with the current. Your bag was on the shore right next to him.’

‘
Úr Isten!
’

‘The man might have gone into the bushes to clean out the bag and slipped into the river – the ground round there is muddy and slippery, and the bank is quite steep. Naturally, the police will conduct a thorough investigation. You’ll have to come down to the station as soon as you can and tell us everything that happened last night. We’d like to speak to your friends too. The police will need witness statements from everyone who was present at the time of the theft; even the smallest detail might be of use in the investigation.’

‘I know,’ said Anna and looked out of the window. The morning sun shone enticingly, promising another scorching day. ‘I’m a criminal investigator too, in the Violent Crimes Unit.’

‘Your mother told us. As you see, I still help out at the department. I can’t seem to keep away.’

‘Were you there when they found the thief?’

‘No. I leave crawling around in the undergrowth to the younger ones. But I went to the station as soon as I heard the news. And we all agreed it’s a good idea to have a Hungarian officer helping you sort this out. Our younger colleagues are almost all Serbs.’

Helping me
: Anna repeated Gábor’s words to herself. Sounds as if I’ll have to spend my holiday assisting the police. Great.

‘That’s kind,’ she said out loud.

‘I’m sure we don’t have the same kind of resources as the Finnish police, but you can be sure we do our job as well as we can. I imagine you’ll be fascinated to see how we work round here. You’re your father’s daughter,’ said Gábor.

‘You look just like him,’ the policeman’s wife added and attempted a smile.

I guess I do, and I suppose I am, thought Anna. And my holiday is ruined.

‘Voi vittu perkele,’
she swore in Finnish and smiled.

‘What does that mean?’ Gábor’s wife asked, suddenly curious. Anna’s mother shot her a look that was sharper than a dagger.

‘“How interesting”,’ Anna replied and headed for the shower.