The Exiled Read Free Page A

people.
    ‘Stop! Thief!’ Tibor hollered. It sounded almost like a joke, like something straight out of a cartoon strip.
    Anna rushed after them. She saw someone running. The figure disappeared into the crowd, reappearing a moment later at the edge of the park. The situation had erupted so unexpectedly that nobodyhad time to react. Anna barged past people standing in her way, and when she eventually reached the pathway, she caught a glimpse of two people running in different directions: a man, and a little girl in a red skirt, who swiftly slipped away among the high-rise apartment blocks rising up behind the Orthodox cathedral. The man was running towards the school. Each of them carried a bag.
    For a fraction of a second Anna considered which of them to run after. She chose the man. Ernő, who was in much poorer physical shape than Tibor – he had put on weight and smoked like a chimney – had run off in the same direction, but there was no chance of him catching up with the thief on foot. Tibor was heading down the main road after the girl.
    The man was already running past the school and now disappeared round the side of the building. Anna couldn’t see whether the bag in his hands belonged to her. She increased her pace and sped past Ernő, who by now was gasping for breath, ran round the corner of the darkened school and reached the next road. From there she could see the cathedral and as far down as Kőrös, but the fleeing man had disappeared from sight. Anna came to a halt at the intersection and listened. Normally it would have been easy to follow the echo of footsteps in the otherwise quiet town, but now the boom of music from the park drowned out all other sounds. A barn owl leapt from the cathedral copula and glided into a silent hunting flight. Its pale silhouette disappeared behind the tall chestnut trees. Ernő finally caught up with Anna.
    ‘Where did he go?’ he asked, panting loudly. He rested his hands against his knees and grimaced.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Anna replied. ‘It’s no use standing around wondering about it. I’ll go that way, towards Sumadija utca. Go and check round the church, maybe he’s hiding somewhere, lying low in the rose bushes round the corner.’
    ‘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