The Danish Girl (35 page)

“It seems to be working,” Professor Bolk said one day.

“Why do you say that?” Greta asked.

“Take a look at her. Doesn’t she look well to you?”

“She does, but she’s getting anxious to be done with this,” said Greta, standing to meet Professor Bolk.

“She’s becoming quite a pretty young lady,” he said.

Lili watched them, their legs near her face, making her feel like a child.

“She’s been here over three months,” Greta said. “She’s beginning to think about life outside the clinic. She’s anxious to head out into the—”

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” Lili interrupted. It spilled from her mouth, the angry little interruption, as her food had done during the first druggy days after the operations.

“We weren’t,” Greta said, kneeling. And then, “No, you’re right. How do you feel, Lili? Tell me. How do you feel today?”

“I feel fine except for the pain, but that’s getting better. Frau Krebs and Nurse Hannah both say it’ll ease up and then I can go home.” Lili now sat forward in her wicker wheelchair. She steadied her hands and tried to pull herself up.

“Don’t stand,” Greta said. “Not unless you’re ready.”

Lili tried again, but her arms couldn’t manage. She’d become so hollow, a nearly weightless girl emptied out by both illness and her surgeon’s knife. “I’ll be ready soon,” Lili finally said. “Maybe next week. We’re moving back to Copenhagen, Professor Bolk. Has Greta told you we’re returning to Copenhagen?”

“That’s what I understand.”

“And we’re moving into our old apartment in the Widow House. You’ll have to come visit us. Do you know Copenhagen? We have a marvelous view of the Royal Theatre’s dome, and if you open the window you can smell the harbor.”

“But, Lili,” Greta said, “you won’t be ready to leave next week.”

“If I keep on improving like this, then why not? Tomorrow I’ll take my first steps again. Tomorrow let’s try to walk a little in the park.”

“Don’t you remember, Lili?” the professor said, holding his papers against his chest. “There’s another operation.”

“Another operation?”

“Just one more,” Greta said.

“Whatever for? Haven’t you done everything already?” Lili couldn’t say the words, but she was thinking: But haven’t you already restored my ovaries and removed my gonads? No, she could never say it. How humiliating it was, even with Greta.

“Just one last procedure,” Professor Bolk said. “To remove your—”

And Lili—who was no older and no younger than her present mood, who was the ghost of a girl, both ageless and unaging, with adolescent naïveté erasing the decades of another man’s experience, who each morning cupped her swelling breasts like an overanxious girl praying for her first menstruation—closed her eyes against the shame. Professor Bolk was informing her that down there, beneath the gauze and the brown iodine dressing that looked like the watered-down gravy Einar had endured during the war, just up from her fresh, still-healing wound, lay one last roll of skin that belonged to Einar.

“All I need to do is remove it and refold the—” Lili couldn’t bear the details, and so instead she looked to Greta, whose lap was filled with an open notebook. Greta was sketching Lili at this moment, looking from her to the notebook and back, and when Greta’s eyes met Lili’s, Greta set down her pencil and said, “She’s right. Can’t you hurry up the next operation, Professor Bolk? What’s the wait?”

“I don’t think she’s ready. She isn’t strong enough yet.”

“I think she is,” Greta said.

They continued to argue, while Lili shut her eyes and imagined Einar as a boy on the lichen rock watching Hans return a shot with his tennis racquet. She thought of Henrik’s moist hand in hers at the Artists Ball. And the heat of Carlisle’s eyes on her early that damp morning at the market. And Greta, her eyes narrowing into concentration, as Lili posed on the lacquer trunk. “Do it now,” she said softly.

Professor Bolk and Greta stopped. “What did you say?” he asked.

“Did you say something?” Greta said.

“Please just do it now.”

Outside in the back-park the new girls, whom Lili didn’t recognize, were gathering their books and their blankets and were reentering the clinic for the evening. The willows were sweeping the lawn of the Municipal Women’s Clinic, and beyond the girls a rabbit dashed into a gooseberry shrub. The current of the Elbe held the flat-bottomed freighters, and, across the river, the sun hit the copper roofs of Dresden and the great, almost silver dome of the Frauenkirche.

She shut her eyes and dreamed, somewhere in her future, of crossing the square of Kongens Nytorv, in the shadow of the statue of King Christian V, and the only person in the world who would stop and stare would be the handsome stranger whose heartswell would force him to touch Lili’s hand and profess his love.

When Lili opened her eyes, she saw that Greta and the professor were looking down toward the end of the
Wintergarten
. A tall man was standing in the door frame. He moved toward them, a silhouette, his coat over his arm. Lili watched Greta watch the man. Greta pushed her hair back over her ears. Her finger brushed at the scar on her cheek. Her hands rubbed together, the bracelets tinkling, and she said, her voice a soft gasp, “Look.” And then, “It’s Hans.”

Part Four

Copenhagen, 1931

CHAPTER Twenty-four

They returned to the Widow House, but over the years the building had declined. While in Paris, Greta had hired a man named Poulsen to manage the upkeep. Once a month she mailed a check, enclosed with a note of instruction. “I suppose the gutters need clearing by now,” she’d write. Or, “Please rehinge the shutters.” But Poulsen followed none of the orders, tending to little beyond sweeping the foyer and burning the trash. When Greta and Hans motored into Copenhagen on a morning when the snow was flinging itself against the city’s sills, Poulsen disappeared.

The facade had faded to a pale pink. On the upper floors, gull droppings caked the window frames. A pane of glass was missing in an apartment where a fidgety woman in her nineties had died in the night, strangled by the twist of her bedsheet. And a fine black grime streaked the walls of the stairwell that led to the top floor.

It took Greta a few weeks to ready the apartment for Lili. Hans helped, hiring the crew to paint and the waxer to polish the floors. “Has she ever thought about living on her own?” he asked one day, and Greta, startled, replied, “What? Without me?”

Slowly she eased Lili into the sea of life in Copenhagen. On slushy afternoons, Greta held Lili’s hand and strolled her through the boxhedges, leafless in late winter, of Kongens Have. Lili would shuffle her feet and sink her mouth into the wooly wrap of her muffler; the surgeries had left her with a steady pain that flared up as her morphine wore off. Greta would say, feeling the tap of pulse in Lili’s wrist, “Take your time. Just let me know when you’re ready.” She supposed the day would come when Lili would want to set out into the world by herself. She saw it in Lili’s face, in the way she would study the young women, packages of butter rolls from the bakery in their hands, walking busily across Kongens Nytorv each morning, women young enough for hope to still flicker in their eyes. Greta heard it in Lili’s voice when she would read aloud from the wedding announcements in the newspaper. How Greta dreaded the day; she sometimes wondered whether she would have gone along with everything if she had realized, at the outset, that it would end with Lili departing the Widow House, a slim suitcase in her hand. There were days during their first few months back in Copenhagen when Greta sometimes believed that she and Lili could create a life for themselves on the top floor of the Widow House and neither of them would leave for any longer than an afternoon. Sometimes, when she and Lili were sitting next to the iron stove, she came to think that the past years of upheaval and evolution had come to a close, and now she and Lili could paint and live peacefully, alone but together. And wasn’t that the inexhaustible struggle for Greta? Her perpetual need to be alone but always loved, and in love. “Do you ever think I’ll fall in love?” Lili had begun to ask, as spring returned and the gray seeped out of the harbor, replaced by the blue. “Do you think something like that could happen even to me?”

With the spring of 1931 came the contracting markets and the plummeting currencies and a general black cloud of ruin, economic and otherwise. Americans began to sail away from Europe, Greta read in the newspapers; she saw one booking air-and-sea passage at the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd office, a woman with a beaver collar and a child on her hip. A painting, even a good one, could hang on the wall of a gallery and remain unsold. It was a drab world for Lili to emerge into; it wasn’t the same world.

Each morning Greta would nudge Lili, who sometimes couldn’t wake on her own. Greta would pull a skirt from the hanger, and a blouse with wooden buttons, and a sweater with wrists patterned with snowflakes. She would help Lili dress, and serve her coffee and black bread and smoked salmon sprinkled with dill. Only by mid-morning would Lili become fully alert, her eyes blinking back the morphine, her mouth dry. “I must have been tired,” she would say apologetically, and Greta would nod and answer, “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

When Lili was out on her own—either shopping at the Gammel Strand fish market or at the pottery class Greta enrolled her in—Greta would try to paint. Only six years had passed, but it seemed longer since she had last lived in the apartment with its ghostly smell of herring. Some things were the same: there were the horns of the ferries bound for Sweden and Bornholm, and the afternoon light, which sliced through the windows just before the sun dipped beyond the city, silhouetting the needles of the church spires. Standing at her easel, Greta would think about Einar then and Lili today, and Greta would shut her eyes and hear a tinkling bell of memory in her head but then recognize it as the
ping!
of the Cantonese laundress who was still calling from the street. She regretted nothing, Greta believed.

The king granted their divorce with a speed that alarmed her. Of course they could no longer live as man and wife, now that they were both women and Einar lay in memory’s coffin. Even so, the officials, who wore black bow ties and whose fingers shook nervously, surprised Greta when they filed the paperwork with an uncharacteristic alacrity. She had expected—even counted on—a bureaucratic delay; she nearly imagined the request lost in an accordion file. Although she didn’t like to admit it, she was like many young women from Pasadena who thought of divorce as a sign of moral flaccidness; or, more specifically, Greta thought of it as a sign of lacking a Western spine. She found herself unusually concerned about what others might think and say about her—as if she were so frivolous and weak-minded that she had simply married the wrong man. No, Greta didn’t like to think of herself that way. She pressed for a death certificate for Einar Wegener, which no one in any position of authority agreed to, although everyone in the bureau knew of the nature of her case. There was one official, whose nose was long and wore the twitch of a white mustache just beneath it, who conceded that it was closest to the truth. “I’m afraid I can’t rewrite the law,” he said, a stack of papers nearly reaching his mustache. “But my husband is dead,” Greta tried, her fists landing on the counters that separated her from the room of bureaucrats, with their sleeve bands and their abaci and their yellow smell of tobacco and pencil shavings. “He should be declared dead,” she tried on her last visit to the government office, her voice softening. Above the room of bureaucrats, watching them, was one of her early paintings: Herr Ole Skram in a black suit, vice-minister in the king’s government for less than a month, noted only for his remarkable and well-witnessed death in the tangled tether of a hot-air balloon. But Greta’s pleas failed. And so Einar Wegener officially disappeared, grave-less and gone.

“She needs to lead her own life,” Hans said one day. “She should get out on her own and make her own friends.”