It is June 1945. WWII ended three weeks ago and under the aegis of the United Nations, 224 concentration camp survivors are transported by ship from Germany to recuperate in temporary hospitals set up across Sweden. Among them is a 25-year-old Hungarian named Miklos who weighs about 30 kilos, has ashen gray skin, warts on his face, no teeth, and regularly coughs up bloody foam. A few weeks after arriving at the Larbro Hospital, Dr Lindholm informs Miklos as gently as possible in choppy Hungarian that he has an advanced case of tuberculosis and only six more months — seven at most — to live.

Miklos doesn’t react to this earth-shattering news, in fact he doesn’t seem to be affected by it at all much to the doctor’s concern. That’s because Miklos is focused on another matter that is even more urgent in his opinion. Miklos wants to marry and to accomplish this he has devised a simple strategy. He will obtain the names of 117 young Hungarian women who are also survivors recovering in Sweden and write to all of them. He is confident that he will find a wife among them. Eighteen women reply to Miklos’s introductory letter, including 18-year-old Lili whose damaged kidney is being treated in a distant hospital. Lili’s best friends are Sara and Judit and she has a craving for green peppers. Miklos knows right away that Lili is the one. “How do you know?” asks his puzzled friend, Harry. “I just do.”

What follows is the incredibly moving story of how two people who have so recently escaped from certain extermination embrace life with a vengeance. Despite illness and red tape that impose restrictions on their movement, the two manage to meet, fall in love, and marry. What makes the telling of the story even more poignant is that it is told by their son, the Hungarian playwright and author Peter Gardos. Gardos has based his novel on the true story of how his parents met and married; and more specifically on the 96 letters they wrote one another while confined to their respective hospital beds. He says that he never knew about the letters until after his father’s death, when his mother handed them over to him in two neat bundles bound with silk ribbon “with hope and uncertainty in her eyes.”

An incredibly moving true story of how two people who escaped death met and got married

Lili clearly wanted her son to share her story with the world; a story that is as much about the power of love as it is about the passion for life. Imagine Miklos when he arrives by train to meet Lili for the first time: still skeletal in appearance, though now fitted with metal teeth, dressed in what is described as the ugliest wool coat imaginable and with newspaper stuffed into one socket of his spectacles in place of the glass which shattered during the train journey when he fell. His eagerness to meet Lili is heartrending; he is well aware of his physical shortcomings but he is convinced that he will win her over. Life owes him that much at least after what he has been through.

Now imagine Lili on the phone with Dr Lindholm when he calls to warn her that Miklos’s advanced illness is likely what is causing him to lose his mind and inducing his flights of fancy concerning romance and marriage. “Look, doctor”, Lili tells him firmly, “I respect your exceptional expertise, your rich experience. The sensational achievements of medical research. The pills you prescribe, your X-rays, your cough mixtures, your syringes … I respect everything. But I implore you to leave us in peace. Leave us to dream. And not worry about science. I beg you on my knees. I pray and beseech you, doctor, let us get better!” While she may have qualms about how quickly their relationship is progressing toward marriage, Lili has absolutely no doubt that it is what they both need to carry on living.

Who can blame her considering that she was literally raised from the dead? She survived the 12-day journey from her home in Hungary to the German concentration camp without any food but by licking the condensation that tended to gather overnight on the wall of the wagon of the freight train. When that camp was finally liberated by Allied soldiers, an emaciated Lili was found lying completely naked on the ground among corpses. Only the slightest flutter of movement alerted the search party that was looking for people who were somehow still alive. Even several days later in the hospital she was unable to recall her name.

“Marta stared at him for such a long time that he was forced to return her gaze. Then the head nurse nodded, as if she had taken note and understood. She stood up, put the X-rays back in the file and the file back in the cabinet. ‘Erik does all he can for you. You are his favourite patient.’‘I always have a fever at dawn: thirty-eight point two.’‘New medicines are becoming available all over the world every week. Who knows what might happen?’Something burst in my father. It happened so swiftly that he didn’t even have time to turn away. It was as sudden as an earthquake. He collapsed to the floor and buried his face in his hands, sobbing.Marta turned away discreetly. ‘You’ve been through terrible things. You survived them. You survive, Miklos. Don’t give up now at the finishing post.’Miklos couldn’t speak. He wasn’t crying any more — the sound he made now was more like the whimpering of a wounded animal. He tried to form intelligent words, but it was as if his voice had abandoned him. At last, he said, ‘I’m not giving up.’”— Excerpt from book

But Lili never told Miklos these details. Just as he never revealed to her that at the camp one of his tasks was to hand out soup and bread to fellow prisoners who were already half-dead. Nor did he tell her that he had witnessed his best friend from Hungary go mad in the camp and eventually drop dead in a filthy puddle. And he certainly could not bring himself to tell her that he was made to burn corpses in the typhoid barracks of the camp.

Not sharing these morbid details does not mean that they are lying to each other — they both know well what it took to survive in a concentration camp — rather they are unified in their effort to focus on the future and not dwell on the past. Lili even admits, hesitantly and ashamedly, a burning desire to change her religion. Miklos is not shocked, instead he tells her understandingly that “it’s quite clear: you want to change your fate.”

Miklos’s resolve to change his own fate with regards to his terminal illness does falter sometimes. He puts up an immensely heroic front, never acknowledging that he may not have long to live but once in a while the most insignificant incident reveals the chinks in his armour. During a quick checkup the doctor listened to his lungs and then unthinkingly shrugged. “Shrugged! Lindholm’s casual gesture had been like a blow to the stomach. It took his breath away. He was going to die! He was going to disappear like Tibor Hirsch. His cupboard would be emptied, his bed stripped. And that would be it.”

Readers will easily fall in love with this love story and some will be curious to know how Miklos and Lili’s marriage fared after such an unforgettable courtship. But their son does not go there; Gardos’s intention is to describe the details of how hard his parents worked to be together, not to elucidate on the details of their marital relationship. He does recall one argument between his parents during which Miklos “hissed” at Lili.

That tidbit alone makes the reader wonder about the state of their union, but it would not be surprising if things between them were not always perfect. Real life is not a fairy tale that concludes neatly at “and they lived happily ever after.” Just as the freshly baked raspberry vanilla biscuits that were distributed among survivors on the ship was a much-needed temporary balm, so the focus on the romantic courtship helps to dull the horror of their recent suffering.

The reviewer is a former Dawn member of staff. Her second book, The Muslimah Who Fell To Earth and other stories will be published in October by Mawenzi House, Toronto.

Fever at Dawn
(NOVEL)
By Peter Gardos
House of Anansi Press, Canada
ISBN:978-1487001056
223pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 18th, 2016