The Exiled by Kati Hiekkapelto

with you as possible. I don’t want you to spend the whole of June crawling around in the bushes, investigating something that doesn’t even really concern you. Forget all about it; promise me?’
    Anna hesitated but acquiesced. ‘Okay.’
    ‘Good. Let’s go, it’s getting late,’ said Réka.
    They drove back into town in Réka’s old Zastrava, thick, stinking smoke sputtering from the exhaust pipe. There were always spare parts for these cars and people knew how to repair them without looking things up online. Réka liked that sort of thing. She liked everything to be old-fashioned, collected antiques and old furniture.She wanted to buy an old house that she and József could renovate in the traditional style. Nobody else understood why she would want to do such a thing, but Réka didn’t care. She had always gone her own way – studied journalism in Belgrade and dreamed of working abroad, or as a conflict correspondent at a large newspaper. She’d lived by herself for a long time too. We’ve got a lot in common, thought Anna. And still it feels as though we’ve become strangers to one another.
    Darkness descended quickly, revealing a star-lit sky, the lights of the local farmsteads too few to ruin it. As they approached the town the amount of light increased and the twinkle of the stars faded away. Yet Anna liked the moderate lighting in Kanizsa; it was as though the town respected the night. The Finnish summer nights, when you could sit outside and read a book without the lights on, had a special atmosphere all of their own, but Anna loved the dark, warm summer nights in the south, the chirping of the crickets and the gurgling of the frogs, the thunderstorms that lit up the dark night sky after the heat of the afternoon.
    Réka dropped Anna off at the gate of her mother’s house and sped off in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
    A clamour of loud voices drifted over from the beer garden outside the Gong. Anna delicately pulled her keys out of her bag. This bag, her very own handbag, now hanging on her shoulder as innocent and innocuous as it had before, had only yesterday been with a man who was now dead. The thought made her shudder. She would need to be very careful how she handled it from now on.

JUNE 5th
    ‘ ANYU ! ’ Anna called to her mother, who was busying herself in the kitchen.
    ‘Are you up already, child? Come into the kitchen, I’ve baked a walnut pie.’
    Anna pulled a dressing gown over her nightdress and put on her papucsok , the pair of slippers she’d picked from the basket beneath the coat rail as soon as she’d arrived. She took her mother’s green leather gloves, which she’d used to take her handbag to her room upstairs the previous night, went downstairs, put the gloves back in their place and went into the kitchen.
    Ákos was there. He looked happy, healthy and content. Anna felt an overwhelming sense of joy spreading through her body, the same sensation she’d experienced as a child when Ákos had picked her up from school and her classmates had stared, envious and maybe a little afraid, at her big brother with the Mohican and two safety pins through his cheek. Nobody else had a brother as cool as hers. The riskiest their brothers got was a leather jacket and a pair of army boots, but nobody else had a Mohican or safety pins. Now there were only scars on Ákos’s cheeks. Someone had ripped the safety pins out without opening them. He might even have done it himself.
    ‘Hiya,’ Anna said to her brother in Finnish and gave him a hug. Ákos smelled good.
    ‘Hi there. How’s my little sister doing?’
    ‘You’ve probably already heard.’
    ‘Yes, Mum told me. Shit, that was bad luck. You’ll need to call the consulate about a new passport.’
    ‘No, I’ll have to go to the embassy in Belgrade. A kurva életbe . I was at the police station yesterday.’
    Ákos started to laugh. ‘You can’t help yourself, can you? Even on holiday you can’t keep away.’
    ‘Tell me about