The Exiled Read Free

old enough to be my father,’ Anna scoffed.
    The man paid for his wine and began walking towards their table.
    ‘Damn it, he’s coming this way,’ Anna whispered.
    ‘Jó estét kívánok, Remete Mihály vagyok.’ The man stood smiling in front of Anna and held out his hand.
    Anna shook his hand and introduced herself. The man had several thick golden rings on his fingers.
    ‘I know who you are,’ he said ‘I knew your father well. He was a good man.’
    Of course, thought Anna. Everybody had known her father. Back here she would always be her father’s daughter. This defined her position in a society to which she no longer belonged, but to which she was eternally bound. Her grandfather, grandmother and great-grandfather were roots, and her mother and father the trunk from which her own branch grew. She could almost see that branch appearing like a speech bubble in a cartoon as the local man tried to place her in the right bough of the right tree in the arboretum called Kanizsa. A sense of relief flashed across their faces when they found the correct tree, the correct branch. Good. You’re not an outsider. We know you. We know how to treat you.
    How ludicrously wrong they were.
    ‘Are you here on holiday?’ asked Remete Mihály.
    Anna repeated the same things again, answered the same questions, smiled and raised her wine glass when the man decided to make a toast to her father.
    ‘Come and visit me some day,’ he said. ‘I could show you a few photographs of your father from when we were young. You might be surprised. We were a pair of tearaways.’ At that he gave a hollow chuckle, bade the group good evening and went to the next stall to get another glass of wine.
    ‘Nice guy,’ said Ernő. ‘I voted for him last time.’
    Anna could hear Ernő beginning to slur his words. Nóra wanted to take the obligatory selfie with Anna and their glasses of wine and upload it to Facebook straight away. Anna put on a smile and posed for the photo: cheek-to-cheek with Nóra, cheese ; and with our glassesraised, cheese ; now with the guys. The prodigal daughter has returned, Nóra typed and tagged them in the photograph. She giggled at her own inventiveness and wondered out loud why Anna still wasn’t on Facebook. Anna explained – for the umpteenth time – that she simply didn’t want to. Eventually she said she might consider it in order to keep in closer contact with her old friends, but only because Nóra’s effusive Facebook sermon started to make her feel pressured.
    The guys’ conversation had shifted to local politics, a subject about which they both seemed to have trenchant views, while the women chatted about their work and what they had cooked for dinner earlier that day, yesterday, last week. Anna tried to engage in her friends’ conversations but couldn’t get a grip on the rhythms, couldn’t deploy appropriate words at the appropriate moment, and didn’t really know what to say about either subject. After a while she gave up and listened to the buzz of chatter, punctuated with bursts of laughter. Before long she’d given up on that too. She drifted into her own thoughts, sensed the dizzying smell of the hársfa in her nostrils, closed her eyes for a moment and slowly began to relax. Things will be fine, she thought. I can soon go to bed, they’ll understand I’m tired. Tomorrow this will all feel much nicer, much cosier, and I’ll see Réka for the first time in ages. We can go for a walk across the járás .
    Just then Anna felt a violent shove at her back. She was buffeted against the table – so hard that Tibor’s wine glass toppled over. Golden-yellow furmint trickled over the edge of the table on to the ground and splashed on Anna’s trousers. Tibor leapt to his feet and shouted something, and it was then that Anna noticed her handbag had disappeared from the chair next to her.
    ‘My handbag!’ she shouted. ‘Someone’s taken my handbag!’
    Tibor and Ernő dashed into the crowd of