The Danish Girl (30 page)

When he returned to the clinic the next day, Professor Bolk was unable to see him. “He will call you,” said Frau Krebs, in the same gray skirt. When he heard this, Einar, on the clinic’s portico beneath the lantern lamp, began to cry. The day was no warmer than the previous night, and he began to shiver as he heard the gravel of the driveway crunch beneath his feet. He had no other business to attend to, so he wandered around the city, both hungry and nauseous.

Altmarkt and its stores were busy in the wind, the aisle of the Hermann Roche pharmacy filled with bank clerks on their lunch hour. The buildings were covered with soot that was darker than the sky, and the awnings were painted with the names of the stores whose bronze-case cash registers were sitting more and more idle with each passing month of recession: CARL SCHNEIDER, MARIEN APOTHEKE, SEIDENHAUS, RENNER KAUFHAUS, and HERMANN ROCHE DROGERIE. Motorcars were parked in the center of the square, and there were two boys in tweed hats and knickers, their shins blue and chapped, parking the cars. A woman with her curls pinned up climbed out of her half-door sedan; she was crammed into a blue stretch dress, the wedge of her stomach testing the strength of the threads holding the buttons to her blouse. The two boys steered her car into a narrow space, and then they began to laugh and waddle, mocking the woman, who was applying lipstick obliviously.

The smaller boy looked up and saw Einar and laughed again. The boys looked like brothers, with sharp-tipped noses and cruel matching laughs. Einar realized the boys were no longer laughing at the fat woman, who was picking her way through the traffic and over the tram tracks to make her way into Hermann Roche, which was having a half-price sale on Odol mouthwash and Schuppen pomade. They were laughing at Einar, whose face was hollow and whose topcoat was flapping against the poles of his legs. Einar watched the fat woman through the plate-glass window fingering the cans of Odol. He wished he could be her, examining the prices on the pyramid of cans, tossing a tin of Schuppen into her basket. Einar imagined the woman driving her sedan home to Loschwitz and placing the toiletries in the cabinet above her husband’s sink.

He continued to walk around the city looking in shop windows. A milliner was having a sale, and there was a line of women out the door. A grocer was setting out a crate of cabbage. And Einar stopped at the window of a kite shop. Inside, a man with glasses on the tip of his nose was bending wood rods at a workbench. All around him were different types of kites. A kite like a butterfly, like a pinwheel. Dragon kites and ones with foil in their wings like flying fish. There was an eagle kite, and a small black kite with bulging yellow eyes like a bat’s.

Einar went to the box office of the Semperoper and bought a ticket to
Fidelio
. He knew that homosexuals gathered at the opera, and he feared that the woman behind the glass, which was smudged with breath, might think he was one of them. She was young and pretty, with green eyes, and refused to look at Einar, cautiously pulling his money through the bowled slot in the window as if she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted it. And once again Einar became exhausted by the world failing to know who he was.

And then Einar climbed the forty-one steps of the Brühlsche Terrace, which overlooked the Elbe and the right bank. The terrace was planted with square-cut trees and bordered by an iron rail against which strollers leaned to examine the endless arc of the Elbe. The wind was running with the river, and Einar turned up his collar. A man with a cart was selling bratwurst in a bun and little glasses of wine. He handed Einar his food and then poured the apple wine. Einar balanced the wine on his knee as he took a bite of the steaming bratwurst, its skin tight and crisp on the end. Then he took a sip of wine and closed his eyes. “You know what they call this?” the peddler said.

“What?”

“The Brühlsche Terrace. You know they call it the balcony of Europe.” The man smiled, a few teeth missing. He was waiting for Einar to finish the wine so he could take back the glass. The terrace looked out across the river to the concave towers of the Japanese Palace and beyond that to the ox-eyed roofs of Neustadt and the villas with their well-wooded gardens and then to all of open-fielded Saxony. From the terrace, it seemed as if the rest of the world lay beneath Einar, waiting.

“How much do I owe you?” Einar asked.

“Fifty pfennig.” The river was gray and choppy, and Einar handed the man the aluminum-bronze coin.

He finished his wine and returned the glass to the peddler, who wiped it clean with the tail of his shirt. “Good luck to you then, sir,” the peddler called, pushing his cart. Einar watched him, the yellow-stone facades and green-copper roofs of Dresden behind him, the great rococo buildings that made it one of the most beautiful cities Einar had ever seen—the Albertinum, the domed Frauenkirche, the Grünes Gewölbe, the elegant plaza in front of the opera house—a handsome backdrop to the little man and his bratwurst cart. Above the city, the sky was pewter and hammered with storm. Einar was cold and tired, and, standing to leave the Brühlsche Terrace, he nearly felt his past shift beneath him.

Two more days passed before Professor Bolk sent word he could meet with Einar, who returned to the Municipal Women’s Clinic on a bright morning, the street curbs wet and shining. In daylight the clinic looked larger, a cream-colored villa with evenly arched windows and a clock in the eaves. It was set in a small park of oak and birch and willow trees and holly bushes.

Frau Krebs admitted him, escorting him down a hall with a mahogany floor black and dull with wax. The hall was lined with doors, and Einar lifted his eyes and felt embarrassed by his curiosity as he looked into each room. On one side of the hall each room was filled with a panel of sunlight, and there were twin beds by the windows, their eiderdowns plumped like sacks of flour.

“The girls are in the
Wintergarten
right now,” Frau Krebs was saying. On the nape of her neck, just beneath her hairline, was a birthmark that looked like the ghost of spilled raspberry jam.

The clinic had thirty-six beds, reported Frau Krebs, one pace ahead of Einar. Upstairs were the departments of surgery, internal medicine, and gynecology. Across a courtyard, she pointed out, was a building with a sign above the door that said PATHOLOGY.

“The pathology building is our latest addition,” Frau Krebs said proudly. “It’s where Professor Bolk keeps his laboratory.” The building was square and built from yellow stucco that made Einar think—and he felt ashamed for doing so—of Greta’s chicken-pox scar.

Einar’s first meeting with Professor Bolk was brief. “I’ve met your wife,” he began.

Einar, who was hot beneath his suit and the starched butterfly-collar shirt that was grabbing at his throat, settled onto the examination table. Frau Krebs entered the room, her black shoes squeaking, and handed the professor a file. He was wearing gold-wire glasses that reflected the overhead light and hid the color of his eyes. He was tall and younger than Einar expected, handsome in the jaw. Einar understood why Greta liked him: he had hands so quick, and an Adam’s apple so light, that when he spoke Einar became almost hypnotized by his birdlike hands moving through the air, landing on the corner of his desk where three wood boxes organized his papers, or by the point of his Adam’s apple punctuating his sentences like the persistent beak of a woodpecker.

Professor Bolk requested Einar to strip and stand on the scale. The stethoscope pressed coldly against his chest. “I understand you’re a painter,” Professor Bolk said, but continued, “You’re awfully thin, Mr. Wegener.”

“I don’t have much of an appetite anymore.”

“Why not?” The professor pulled a pencil from behind his ear and made a note in the file.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you try to eat? Even when you aren’t hungry?”

“Sometimes it’s difficult,” Einar said. He thought of the nausea during the last year; waking in the sunlight of the apartment with a stomach that felt as if it had just the night before succumbed to Hexler’s X ray. And the pail with the bent handle he had begun keeping at the side of his bed, which Greta would empty in the morning with never a word of complaint or pity, only a long hand gently on his forehead.

The examination room had green tiles running halfway up the walls; in the mirror above the hand sink Einar could see the green reflecting in his face, and he suddenly thought he must be the sickest person at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic, because most of the women who came there were not ill, but rather burdened with the results of a single night with a handsome young man whom they would never see again.

“Tell me what you paint,” Professor Bolk said.

“Not much these days.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of Lili,” Einar ventured. Little Lili hadn’t yet worked her way into the conversation, and he wondered what Professor Bolk knew of her; had he heard about the pretty girl with the stemlike throat trying to break out of the dry, sick skin of old Einar?

“Has your wife told you about my plans?” Professor Bolk asked. The green tiles and the harsh overhead light left no olive pall in Professor Bolk’s face; his skin was the fresh color of baking dough. Was it only Einar whose face had turned dimly green? Einar brought his fingertips to his cheeks and felt the sweat.

“Did she tell you how I want to proceed?”

Einar nodded. “She told me you were going to turn me into Lili once and for all.” That wasn’t all Greta had told him. She had also said, “This is it, Einar. This is our only chance.”

“Can you join me tonight for dinner at the Belvedere?” Professor Bolk said. “Do you know where it is? On the other side of the Elbe? By the Brühlsche Terrace?”

“I know where it is.”

Professor Bolk’s hand, the palm of which was surprisingly damp, fell on Einar’s shoulder as he was saying, “Einar, I want you to listen to me. I understand. I understand what you want.”

They met for dinner at the Belvedere. The hall of the restaurant was white and gold, and through the colonnade, outside, the evening fog was deepening to a rich blue on the Elbe and the distant heights of Loschwitz. There were potted palms in cachepots at each of the waiter stands. On a stage an orchestra was playing the overtures of Wagner.

A waiter in tails brought a bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket. “This isn’t a celebration,” Professor Bolk said as the waiter pushed the mushroom cork from the bottle. A
pop!
filled their circle of the dining room, and women at neighboring tables turned their necks, buried in winter velvet, to see.

“Maybe it should be,” Einar said, his voice mixing with the light clang of the flat-bladed fish knives the waiter was placing on the table. Einar thought of Lili, whom he had considered sending to dinner at the Belvedere in his place.

With his fish knife Professor Bolk picked apart his trout. Einar watched the blade, hooked at the tip, peel away the flimsy skin, baring the pink flesh. “To tell the truth,” Professor Bolk was saying, “the first time I met someone like you, I was a little unsure of what to say. At first I didn’t think anything could be done.”

Einar nearly gasped. “You mean you’ve met someone else like me?”

“Didn’t Greta tell you about my experience with another man”—and here he leaned in over his plate—“in your position?”

“No,” Einar said. “She told me nothing of it.”

“There was one man I wanted to help,” Professor Bolk said. “But he ran away just before I was to begin. Too scared to go through with it. Which I understand.”

And Einar sat in his chair and thought, To go through with what? Einar could tell that Professor Bolk believed Einar knew more than he actually did. Professor Bolk talked about the previous patient. The man was so convinced that he was a woman that he had taken to calling himself Sieglinde Tannenhaus, even when he was dressed as a man. He was a conductor on a train route between Wölfnitz and Klotzsche and insisted everyone call him Fräulein. Not one of the passengers understood what he meant. They’d only stare blankly at him in his blue uniform and black tie.

“But then on the morning of the first surgery, the man disappeared,” Professor Bolk explained. “He slipped out of his room in the clinic, somehow getting by Frau Krebs. Then he was gone. Eventually he returned to his job on the tram, now wearing the female version of the conductor’s uniform, a dark blue skirt with a canvas belt.”

The waiter returned to pour wine. Einar could guess what the professor was promising. The hooked blade of the fish knife winked with light from the candelabrum on the banquette behind them. Einar supposed it would be a swapping of sorts. He would exchange the spongy flesh that hung between his legs for something else.

Outside, the Elbe was flowing blackly, and a paddlewheel ship bright with lights passed beneath the Augustusbrücke. Professor Bolk said, “I’d like to begin next week.”

“Next week? Can’t you start any sooner?”

“It’ll have to be next week. I want you to move into the clinic and rest there, gain some weight. I’ll need you to be as rested as possible. We can’t risk an infection.”

“An infection of what?” Einar asked, but then the waiter arrived at their table and his vein-backed hands cleared the dishes and the fish knives and then swept away the breadcrumbs with a little silver brush.

Einar returned in a cab to the Höritzisch. The prostitute next door was out, and so he slept soundly, only turning onto his side when a train screeched into the Bahnhof. When he rose at dawn, he bathed down the hall in the unheated closet with the slatted door. Then he put on a brown skirt and the white blouse with the needlepoint collar and a coarse-wool cardigan and a little hat that sat on his head at an angle. His breath was visible in the mirror, his face pale. He would enter the clinic as Lili, and she was who would exit the clinic later in the spring. It wasn’t a decision, just a natural progression of events. In the bathroom of the Höritzisch Hotel, with the shrill scrape of arriving trains screaming through the slats in the door, Einar Wegener closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was Lili.