The Danish Girl (13 page)

With a shiver, he was Lili. Einar was away. Lili would sit for Greta through the morning. She would walk along the quay with Hans, her hand visoring out the August sun. Einar would be only a reference in conversation: “He misses Bluetooth quite a bit,” Lili would say, the world would hear.

Once again there were two. The walnut halved, the oyster shucked open.

Lili returned to the living room. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” Greta said. She spoke to Lili softly, as if she might crack at the sound of a harsh voice. “Sit here,” Greta said, plumping the pillows on the sofa. “Drape one arm over the back of the sofa, and keep your head turned to the screen.”

The session lasted the rest of the morning and through most of the afternoon. Lili, in the corner of the sofa, staring at the scene of abalone shell—a fishing village, a poet in a pagoda by a willow tree—in the Chinese screen. She became hungry but told herself to ignore it. If Greta didn’t stop, neither would she. She was doing this for Greta. It was her gift to Greta, the only thing Lili could give her. She ’d have to be patient. She ’d have to wait for Greta to tell her what to do.

 

 

Later that afternoon, Hans and Lili set out on a stroll through Menton’s streets. They stopped at the stands that sold lemon soap and figurines carved from olive wood and packages of candied figs. They spoke of Jutland, of the slate sky and the hog-trampled earth, of the families who lived on the same land for four hundred years, their children marrying one another, their blood thickening to muck. With his father dead, Hans was now Baron Axgil, although he hated the title. “It’s why I left Denmark,” he said. “The aristocracy was dead. If I’d had a sister, I’m sure my mother would have wanted me to marry her.”

“Are you married now?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But don’t you want to marry?”

“I did, once. There once was a girl I wanted to marry.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died. Drowned in a river.” And then, “Right in front of me.” Hans paid an old woman for a tin of mandarin hand soaps. “But that was quite a while ago. I was practically still a boy.”

Lili could think of nothing to say. There she was, in her housedress, on the street ripe with urine, with Hans.

“Why aren’t you married?” he said. “I would think a girl like you would be married and running a fishery.”

“I wouldn’t want to run a fishery.” She looked up at the sky. How blank and flat it was, cloudless, less blue than Denmark’s. Above Lili and Hans, the sun throbbed. “It’ll be a while before I’m ready to get married. But I want to someday.”

Hans stopped at an open-front store to buy Lili a bottle of orange oil. “But you don’t have forever,” he said. “How old are you?”

How old was Lili? She was younger than Einar, who then was nearly thirty-five. When Lili emerged and Einar withdrew, years were lost: years that had wrinkled the forehead and stooped the shoulders; years that had quieted Einar with resignation. Lili’s posture was the first thing one might notice, its fresh resilience. The second was her soft-voiced curiosity. The third, as Greta reported it, her smell—that of a girl who hadn’t yet soured.

“I really can’t say.”

“You don’t seem like the type of girl who’s too coy to admit her age,” Hans said.

“I’m not,” Lili said. “I’m twenty-four.”

Hans nodded. It was the first fact made up about Lili. As Lili said it, she assumed she’d feel guilty about lying. Instead she felt a bit freer, as if she ’d finally admitted an uncomfortable truth. Lili
was
twenty-four; she certainly wasn’t as old as Einar. Had she said so, Hans would have thought her a strange fraud.

Hans paid the clerk. The bottle was square and brown, its cork stopper no bigger than the tip of Lili’s pinkie. She tried to pull it out, but couldn’t pry it loose. “Help me?” Lili asked.

“You’re not as helpless as all that,” Hans said. “Give it another tug.”

And Lili did, and this time the little cork popped free and the scent of oranges rose to her nostrils. It made her think of Greta.

“Why don’t I remember you from when I was a boy?” Hans asked.

“You left Bluetooth when I was very young.”

“I suppose that’s right. But Einar never said he had such a beautiful baby cousin.”

When she returned to the apartment, Lili found Greta still in the living room. “Thank God you’re back,” she said. “I want to work some more tonight.” Greta led Lili, who was still holding her packages of the soaps and orange oil, to the camelback sofa. She arranged Lili against the pillows and, with her fingers spread across Lili’s skull like a many-pronged clamp, turned her head toward the Chinese screen.

“I’m tired,” Lili said.

“Then go to sleep,” Greta said, her smock smudged with oily pinks and silvers. “Just lay your head against your arm. I’m going to keep painting a little more.”

The next afternoon, Hans met Lili at the gate of the apartment. Again they walked through the narrow streets that swirled around St-Michel’s hill, then down to the harbor to watch two fishermen sort through their haul of sea urchins. In late August, Menton was hot, the air humid and still. So much warmer than the hottest summer day in Copenhagen, Lili thought. And because Lili had never known such heat—this, after all, was her first trip out of Denmark—she found the weather exhausting. She could feel the housedress sticking to her back as she stood next to Hans, watching the wet net bulging with urchins, Hans’s body so close to her own that she thought perhaps she could feel his hand on her arm, which was burning in the sun. Was it his hand, or something else? Simply a hot breeze?

Two Gypsy children, a boy and a girl, approached Lili and Hans, trying to sell them a little carved elephant. “Real ivory,” they said, pointing at the elephant’s tusk. “A deal for you.” The kids were small and dark around the eyes, and they stared at Lili in a way that made her feel unsafe.

“Let’s go,” she said to Hans, who laid his hand on the warm wet small of her back, steering her away. “I think I need to lie down.”

But when Lili returned home, Greta was waiting for her. She posed Lili in front of her easel, settling her on the sofa. “Sit still,” Greta said. “I’m not done.”

The next day Hans drove Lili up the corniche to Villefranche, his Targa Florio’s spoke-wheels shooting shellrocks down to the sea. “Next time don’t leave Einar up in Denmark!” he yelled, his voice as pebbly as it was when he was a boy. “Even good old Einar should have a holiday!” The wind was warm in Lili’s face, and by the late afternoon again she was feeling weak in the stomach. Hans had to rent a room at the Hôtel de l’Univers for Lili to rest in. “I’ll be just downstairs having a coffee and an anisette,” he said, tipping his hat. Later, when she emerged from the narrow room, Lili found Hans off the lobby in the Restaurant de la Ré gence. She was barely out of her dreamy state and only said, “Sometimes I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

On another day-trip Hans and Lili drove to Nice to shop for paintings in the antique stalls. “Why doesn’t Greta ever want to come along with us?” Hans inquired. “Too busy painting, I guess,” Lili said. “She works harder than anyone I know. Harder than Einar. One day she’s going to be famous. You’ll see.” Lili could feel Hans’s eyes on her as she said this, and she found it remarkable that such a man as Hans would pay any attention to her opinions at all. In one of the stalls, tended by a woman with soft white fuzz on her chin, Lili found an oval burial portrait of a young man, his cheeks oddly colored and his eyes closed. She bought it for fifteen francs, and Hans promptly bought it from her for thirty. And he asked, “Are you feeling all right today?”

Each day, before her outings with Hans, Lili would pose for Greta on the sofa. She ’d hold a book about French birds, or Edvard IV, in her lap, because her hands when empty would twitch nervously. Except for noise from the street, the apartment was quiet and the mantel clock would tick so slowly that at least once each afternoon Lili would rise to make sure it was properly wound. Then she would stick her head over the rail of the terrace, waiting for the hour when Hans would call at the gate. He’d taken to yelling up from the street: “Lili! Hurry up and come down!” and she would run down the seven flights of tiled stairs, too impatient to wait for the caged elevator.

But before he arrived, Greta would clap her hands together and say, “That’s it! Hold your face just like that—that ’s what I want. Lili waiting, waiting for Hans.”

One day Lili and Hans were at an outdoor café at the foot of St-Michel’s steps. Five or six Gypsy children, their clothes dirty, came to their table selling postcards, the photographs of the Côte ’s beaches hand-tinted with colored pencils. Hans bought a set for Lili.

The air was thick, the sun hot on Lili’s neck. The beer in her glass was turning brown. The week of afternoons with Hans had begun to fill Lili with expectations, and she now wondered what Hans thought of her. He had taken a stroll on the promenade with Lili; he had linked her arm through the curve of his elbow; Hans, with his dark chuckle and his billowing linen shirts, with his brown skin deepening in the August sun, with his long-lost nickname Valnød, had come to know Lili, but not Einar. Hans hadn’t seen Einar since they were boys. It was Lili and not Einar who had felt the rough tips of Hans’s fingers on her skin.

“I’m very glad I’ve met you,” she said.

“So am I.”

“And that we ’re able to get to know each other, in this way.”

Hans nodded. He was looking through the set of postcards, holding up his favorites—of the municipal casino, of a citrus grove at the foot of a hill—for Lili to inspect. “Yes, you’re a terrific girl, Lili. You’ll make some lad very happy one day.”

Then Hans must have realized what Lili was feeling, because he set down his cigarette and the postcards and said, “Oh, Lili? Did you think that maybe . . . with us? Then I’m very sorry. But it’s just that I’m too old for you, Lili. I’ve become too much of a grouch for someone like you.”

Hans began to tell Lili about the girl he loved and lost. He said his mother had asked him never to return to Bluetooth when Ingrid—it was years ago, all of this—became pregnant. They settled in Paris, across from the Panthéon, in a wallpapered flat. She was skinny, except for her growing stomach, with long freckled arms. They went swimming on an August afternoon, not unlike today, Hans added, nodding toward the sky. At a river with a bed of white rocks and sprinkled with yellowing leaves. Ingrid waded into the water, her arms out for balance. Hans watched from the shore, eating a piece of ham. And then Ingrid’s ankle turned and she cried out, and a current pulled her under. “I couldn’t get to her in time,” Hans said.

Apart from that tragedy, his life had been good. “Because I left Denmark,” he said. “Life there is too neat and orderly for me. Too cozy.” Greta would sometimes say that as well, when she couldn’t paint and friends invited them to another smorgasbord. “Too cozy to work,” she ’d say, her silver bracelets shaking. “Too cozy to be free.”

“And now I’ve been on my own so long I’m not sure I could ever get married. Too stuck in my old ways, I am.”

“Don’t you think marriage is the one single thing we all should hope for most in life? Doesn’t it make you more whole than living all alone?”

“Not always.”

“I think it does. Marriage is like a third person,” Lili said. “It creates someone else, more than just the two of you.”

“Yes, but not always for the best,” Hans said. “Anyway, how would you know anything about all of this?”

Just then something told Lili to check her purse. Her hand felt the empty iron of the chair’s back. “It’s gone,” she said so softly that Hans’s forehead lifted and he murmured, “What?” Again, “My purse is gone.”

“The Gypsies,” Hans said, jumping to his feet. The café was in a small square with six alleyways running into it. Hans ran a few feet down one alley and realized the Gypsies weren’t there, and then ran into the next, his face reddening.

“Let’s go to the police,” he finally said, leaving francs on the table. He warned another woman whose pull-string satchel was hanging from her chair. He pulled Lili’s hand. He must have seen the white in her cheek, because he kissed it, gently.

The only thing in the purse was a little wad of money and a lipstick. The purse was Greta’s, a cream kid bag with loop handles. Other than the lipstick and a few dresses and two pairs of shoes and her camisoles and underwear, Lili owned nothing. She was free of possessions, and that was part of the appeal in those early days of Lili—that she came and went, and there was nothing more to concern her than the wind lifting her hem.

The police station was on a
place
with orange trees growing in a little center park. The evening sun reflected in the station’s front windows, and Lili could hear the clatter of the shop owners closing their shutters. Lili realized her sunglasses were also in the purse, a funny pair with flip-up lenses Greta’s father had sent from California. Greta would be angry that they were gone, that Lili had failed to pay attention to who or what was around her; and just then, just as Hans and Lili reached the steps of the police station, where a family of dingy white cats was rolling on its backs, just then Lili realized that she couldn’t report the stolen purse. She stopped on the steps.

Lili had no identification, she had no passport; why—and it had never occurred to her, nor had anyone ever bothered to ask—she didn’t even have a family name.

“Let’s not make a fuss about this,” she said. “It’s just a silly old purse.”

“Then you’ll never get it back.”

“But it isn’t worth the trouble,” she said. “And Greta is waiting. I just realized I’m late. I’m sure she ’s waiting for me. She wanted to paint this evening.”

“She’ll understand.”

“Something tells me she wants to see me right now,” Lili said. “I just have this funny feeling.”

“Come on now. Let’s go inside.” Hans took Lili’s wrist. A pull up the first step. He was still being playful, in a fatherly sort of way. He tugged again, and this time the pressure on her wrist hurt a little more, although it was no more painful than an aggressive handshake.