One

MY FATHER, Miklós, sailed to Sweden on a rainy summer’s day three weeks after the Second World War ended. He was twenty-five years old. An angry north wind lashed the Baltic Sea into a three-metre swell, and he lay on the lower deck while the ship plunged and bucked. Around him, passengers clung desperately to their straw mattresses.

They had been at sea for less than an hour when Miklós was taken ill. He began to cough up bloody foam, and then he started to wheeze so loudly that he almost drowned out the waves pounding the hull. He was one of the more serious cases, parked in the first row right next to the swing door. Two sailors picked up his skeletal body and carried him into a nearby cabin.

The doctor didn’t hesitate. There was no time for painkillers. Relying on luck to hit the right spot between two ribs, he stuck a large needle into my father’s chest. Half a litre of fluid drained from his lungs. When the aspirator arrived, the doctor swapped the needle for a plastic tube and siphoned off another litre and a half of mucus.

Miklós felt better.

When the captain learned that the doctor had saved a passenger’s life, he granted the sick man a special favour: he had him wrapped in a thick blanket and taken out to sit on the deck. Heavy clouds were gathering over the granite water. The captain, impeccable in his uniform, stood beside Miklós’s deckchair.

‘Do you speak German?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Congratulations on your survival.’

In different circumstances, this conversation might have led somewhere. But Miklós was in no state to chat. It was all he could do to acknowledge the situation.

‘I’m alive.’

The captain looked him up and down. My father’s ashen skin was stretched over his skull, and there were ugly warts on his face. His pupils were magnified by his glasses, and his mouth was a dark yawning void. He virtually hadn’t a tooth to call his own. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe three burly louts had beaten his scrawny frame to a pulp in an air-raid shelter lit by a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling. Maybe one of these thugs had grabbed a flat iron and used it over and over to bash Miklós in the face. According to the official version, which was rather short on detail, most of his teeth had been knocked out in the prison on Margit Street in Budapest in 1944, when he was arrested as a deserter from a Jewish forced-labour unit.

But now he was alive. And despite the slight whistle when he took a breath his lungs were dutifully processing the crisp salty air.

The captain peered through his telescope. ‘We’re docking in Malmö for five minutes.’

This didn’t really mean anything to Miklós. He was one of 224 concentration-camp survivors who were being shipped from Lübeck in Germany to Stockholm. Some of them were in such bad shape that they wanted nothing more than to survive the journey. A few minutes in Malmö was neither here nor there. The captain, however, continued to explain the decision, as if to a superior. ‘The order came over the radio. This stop wasn’t part of my itinerary.’

The ship’s horn sounded as the docks of Malmö harbor became visible in the mist. A flock of seagulls circled.

The ship moored at the end of the pier. Two sailors disembarked and started jogging along the pier. Between them they carried a big empty basket—the kind washerwomen use to haul wet laundry up to the attic to hang out.

A crowd of women on bicycles was waiting at the approach to the pier. There must have been fifty of them, motionless and silent, gripping their handlebars. Many wore black headscarves. They looked like ravens perched on a branch. It was only when the sailors reached the barrier that Miklós noticed the parcels and baskets hanging from the handlebars.

He felt the captain’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Some mad rabbi by the name of Kronheim dreamed this up,’ the captain explained. ‘He placed an ad in the papers saying that you people were arriving on this ship. He even managed to arrange for us to dock here.’

Each of the women dropped her parcel into the big laundry basket. One standing slightly back let go of her handlebars and her bicycle fell over. From where he sat on deck, Miklós heard the clang of the metal on the cobblestones. Given the length of the pier, this is quite inconceivable, yet whenever my father told this story he always included the clang.

Once they had collected all the packages, the sailors jogged back to the ship. This scene remained fixed in Miklós’s mind: an improbably empty pier, the sailors running with the basket, and in the background the strange motionless army of women and their bicycles.

The parcels contained biscuits that these nameless women had baked to celebrate the arrival of the survivors in Sweden. As my father tasted the soft, buttery pastry in his toothless mouth, he could detect vanilla and raspberry, fl avours so unfamiliar after years of camp food that he almost had to relearn them.

‘Sweden welcomes you,’ grunted the captain, as he turned away to give orders. The ship was already heading out to sea.

Miklós sat savouring his biscuits. High among the clouds, a biplane drew away, dipping its wings in salute. When he saw it, my father began to feel he was truly alive.

~

By the end of the first week in July 1945, Miklós was in a crowded sixteen-bed hospital ward, a barracks-like wooden hut in a remote village called Lärbro on the island of Gotland. Propped up against a pillow, he was writing a letter. Sunlight poured through the window and nurses in crisply starched blouses, white bonnets and long linen skirts darted between the beds.

He had beautiful handwriting: shapely letters, elegant loops and just a hair’s breadth between each word. When he finished his letter he put it in an envelope, sealed it and leaned it against the jug of water on his bedside table. Two hours later a nurse called Katrin picked it up and dropped it in the postbox with the other patients’ mail.

Miklós rarely got out of his hospital bed, but two weeks after writing his letter he was allowed to sit out in the corridor. Each morning the post was handed out, and one day a letter came for him—straight from the Swedish Office for Refugees. It contained the names and addresses of 117 women, all of them young Hungarians whom nurses and doctors were trying to bring back to life in various temporary hospitals across Sweden. Miklós transcribed their details into a thin exercise book with square-ruled paper he had found somewhere.

By this time he had recovered from the dramatic pronouncement he had received a few days earlier.

~

Pressed against the X-ray machine, Miklós had done his best not to move. Dr. Lindholm shouted at him from the other room. The doctor was a gangling figure, at least six foot six tall, and he spoke a funny sort of Hungarian. All his long vowels sounded the same, as if he were blowing up a balloon. He had run the Lärbro hospital—now temporarily enlarged to accommodate the intake of camp survivors—for the last dozen years. His wife, Márta, a tiny woman whom Miklós reckoned couldn’t be more than four foot six, was a nurse and worked in the hospital too; she was Hungarian, which explained why the doctor tackled the language with such bravado.

‘You hold breath! No frisking!’ he bellowed.

A click and a hum—the X-ray was ready. Miklós relaxed his shoulders.

Dr. Lindholm walked over and stood beside him, gazing with compassion at a point slightly above his head. Miklós was slumped, his sunken chest naked against the machine, as if he never wanted to get dressed again. His glasses had steamed up.

‘What you say you occupied with, Miklós?’ the doctor asked.

‘I was a journalist. And poet.’

‘Ah! Engineer of the soul. Very good.’

Miklós shifted from one foot to the other. He was cold.

‘Dress. Why you stand around?’

Miklós shuffl ed over to the corner of the room and pulled on his pyjama jacket. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked the doctor.

Lindholm still didn’t look at him. He started walking towards his offi ce, waving at Miklós to follow him. He was muttering, almost to himself, ‘Is a problem.’

Erik Lindholm’s office looked onto the garden. On these warm midsummer evenings the island glittered in a bronze light that bathed the countryside. The dark furniture radiated comfort and safety.

Miklós sat in a leather armchair. Opposite him, on the other side of the desk, sat Dr. Lindholm. He had changed into a smart waistcoat. He was flicking anxiously through Miklós’s medical reports. He switched on the sea-green glass desk lamp, though there was no real need for it.

‘How much you weigh now, Miklós?’

‘Forty-seven kilos.’

‘You see. It works like a clock.’

As a result of Dr. Lindholm’s strict diet, Miklós had gained eighteen kilos in only a few weeks. My father kept buttoning and unbuttoning his pyjama jacket, which was far too big for him.

‘What temperature you have this morning?’

‘Thirty-eight point two.’

Dr. Lindholm put the reports down on his desk. ‘I won’t beat away the bush any longer. Is that what they say? You are quite strong now to face facts.’

Miklós smiled. Almost all his teeth were made of a palladium based metal alloy that was acid-resistant, cheap and ugly. The day after he’d arrived in Lärbro, a dentist had come to see him. He took molds of his mouth and warned him that the temporary plate he was getting would be more practical than aesthetic. In a trice the dentist had fi tted the metal into his mouth.

Although Miklós’s smile was anything but heart-warming, Dr. Lindholm forced himself to look directly at him.

‘I come straight at the point,’ he said. ‘It is easier. Six months. You have six months to live, Miklós.’ He picked up an X-ray and held it to the light. ‘Look. Come closer.’

Miklós obligingly stood up and hunched over the desk. Dr. Lindholm’s slender fingers roamed over the contoured landscape of the X-ray.

‘Here, here, here and here. You see, Miklós? See these patches? This is your tuberculosis. Permanent damage. Nothing to be done about them, I’m afraid. Terrible thing, I have to say. In everyday words, the illness … gobbles the lungs. Can one say “gobble” in Hungarian?’

They stared at the X-ray. Miklós held himself up against the desk. He wasn’t feeling very strong, but he managed a nod, thus confirming that the doctor had found a way through the tangle of his language. ‘Gobble’ was accurate enough to show what the future had in store for him; he didn’t need technical terminology. After all, his father had owned a bookshop in Debrecen before the war. It was housed in Gambrinus Court in the Bishop’s Palace, under the arcades, a few minutes’ walk from the main square. The shop was named Gambrinus Booksellers and consisted of three narrow, high-ceilinged rooms. In one room you could also buy stationery, and there was a lending library too. As a teenager Miklós would perch on top of the high wooden ladder and read books from all over the world—so he could certainly appreciate Lindholm’s poetic turn of phrase.

Dr. Lindholm continued to stare into my father’s eyes. ‘As matters stand,’ he explained, ‘medical science says that you are too gone to come back. There will be good days. And bad ones. I will always be next to you. But I don’t want to lead you up the path. You have six months. Seven at most. My heart is heavy, but that is the truth.’

Miklós straightened up, smiling, and then flopped back into the roomy armchair. He seemed almost cheerful. The doctor wasn’t quite sure that he had understood or even heard the diagnosis. But Miklós was thinking of things far more important than his health.