Free The Exiled by Kati Hiekkapelto Page A

have looked as though the bushes had swallowed them up.
    Anna allowed her eyes to wander across the clayey earth covered with last autumn’s leaves. If the thief had slipped on the verge, there should be marks leading down towards the water; the weight of his body would have left a deep furrow in the mud, she thought. But there was no such furrow in sight. Instead the ground looked badly trampled and full of large footprints. The police officers must have disturbed the scene when they collected the body. It would be interesting to see the technicians’ report.
    ‘Was the water level particularly high that evening?’ Anna asked.
    ‘What do you mean?’ the fisherman asked, puzzled once again.
    ‘You said the body was partly on the verge when you found it…’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Could his head have been under the water earlier in the evening, before the water level fell?’
    ‘It’s possibly, in theory, I suppose, but now that the worst of the floods have passed the water level doesn’t change very much. So, no, I don’t think so. As far as I can remember the river has been at this height for about a week.’
    ‘Would you say it’s normal for someone who has drowned in the Tisza to end up on the shore like that?’
    The man thought about this for a moment, spat into the water and cleared his throat. ‘He drowned, did he?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, the bodies I’ve come across in the past have generally been in the water for some time – they’re swollen and the fish have eaten away at them. But it never occurred to me that this man might have drowned. The body looked too normal somehow.’
    ‘The police told me the man had slipped into the water and drowned, that he’d become caught in some tree roots under the water.’
    ‘Well, in that case the tree must have hands of its own, because it would have had to lift him up on to the verge again. There are no trees like that round here, and if there is one, it would probably be able to make itself disappear too.’ Nagy Béla chuckled at his own wit.
    ‘So, even if the man had drowned, slipped in, the way the police said, or fallen from a boat, there’s no way he could have ended up in the position and location in which you found him?’
    ‘It would be strange if he had,’ said the fisherman, then threw his cigarette, which he’d smoked down to the filter, into the water and lit up another.
    ‘Are you certain you’ve remembered these details correctly?’
    Nagy Béla didn’t answer. ‘We have to leave now,’ he said instead.
    ‘Is it possible to get here on foot?’
    ‘Yes, but the path is covered in thicket.’
    ‘Can you show me the way?’
    ‘I only ever come down here by river,’ said the fisherman. ‘And now we have to leave.’
    Anna tried to ask for more details about the body, but Nagy Béla wasn’t talking any longer. He was entirely focussed on powering the boat as fast as he could back to the quayside at Békavár.
    Once they had docked, he began loudly explaining to the men sitting by the quay that the Tisza would soon come into flower as long as the water level kept low and the air temperature remained this warm, taking pains to point out that he rarely went up and down the river without his nets and fishing gear for the fun of it, but that it was nice for a change. Anna didn’t hear the slightest hint of fear in Béla’s voice, though his reasons for all the explanations were obvious.So as not to attract any further attention to herself and their suspicious trip down the river, she quickly thanked the fisherman and headed back to town, dozens of strange and unpleasant questions darting back and forth through her mind.

 
     
    THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE in the brick factory and in the surrounding woods. To Dzsenifer it seemed like there were millions of them. At school they had counted up to numbers their teacher had said were called millions. On paper they didn’t look all that big, but Dzsenifer understood that, if you had a