Lili

by Niels Hoyer

  “‘Yes, so you see, Claude,’ I answered, somewhat uncertainly, and again my mind went back to the conversation which I had recently had with my German friend. ‘I am trying to see whether I can make a start. Almost as soon as you leave I shall be starting on my long journey, and then I should like to take a picture with me to my Professor. My very first picture. He possesses pictures by Andreas, and I should like to see how I really compare with him as a painter. Yesterday evening when you brought me home I had an idea.’

  “‘Yes, but what is your picture intended to represent, Lili, darling?’

  “We were both standing in front of my picture, and he said: ‘Have you not painted a heart?’

  “I was almost ashamed to admit it. ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘it is my heart, which has been left behind in the Women’s Clinic.’ “Claude gazed at me sadly and inquiringly, and I took his hand.

  “‘Don’t take it amiss, Claude; you do not yet understand it. You see, the Women’s Clinic was my peaceful, white nursery. Consequently, Professor Kreutz must have this picture. He won’t be angry with me. Nor will he laugh at the picture. He understands me, and I want nothing more than to see his smile when I give him the picture.

  “‘I am so fond of you, Claude, and I am dreaming already of our being together and living together in the South, in a setting of tropical flowers and palm trees and dazzling sunshine. And you will have a garden. I can see this garden already in my mind’s eye.

  “‘But I am also dreaming of another garden. In this garden there are white flowers and white birch trees. And there I am strolling, white and pure, under a mild and clear sky. Perhaps it is the Garden of Paradise. My dear man, life is still such a new and immense thing for me. I feel so weak under all the strong emotions which I sometimes feel stirring in my heart. I have long since realized that the life of a woman mainly consists of sorrow and yearning. And yet it is so wonderful to be alive.

  “Claude said: ‘Poor little Lili,’ and folded me lightly in his arms as if I were a child. ‘I often think that Nature was in one of her mysterious moods when she packed all that is most feminine on earth in your sensitive little soul; everyone can hurt and wound you because you are so unprotected. It is for this reason I want to take you with me so badly. Won’t you come?’

  “I looked quite calmly at Claude and gave him both my hands: ‘Go in peace, Claude, and wait for me, but don’t ask me any more. I understand all too little of what is stirring within me, and discover something new and unknown in me every day.’

  “Then I wept. We were standing quite close before the picture of my heart.

  “The next day I accompanied Claude to the station.”

  *

  Rain was falling steadily from grey skies. White birch trees were gleaming like silver in front of dark, dripping fir woods. A range of shrouded blue hills swelled on the distant horizon.

  Lili looked at her wrist-watch. Within less than an hour she would be in her beautiful city of the Elbe.

  She let herself be lulled by the soft rocking rhythm of the train. With eyes half opened she sat in her corner by the window, watching the dear, familiar landscape rushing past.

  Frequently her heart beat so violently that she had to clutch her breast, and a current stirred in her blood.

  Then she sank back into a semi-conscious state of dreaming, in which she had lain since she entered the Dresden train at the Berlin station.

  She had deliberately taken the same train as on the occasion, more than a year before, when she had left Berlin for the South in order to find a refuge in the Women’s Clinic.

  It was not early spring as then. It was summer; but something of the fresh young spring and the magic of the imminent ripeness hovered over the rainy day.

  She had closed her eyes and tried to collect her thoughts. The year that had passed wandered through her memory like a hurried, endless pilgrimage, this first and dangerous year of her life through which she had wandered like a sleep-walker on the edge of a precipice and yet always accompanied in a mysterious way by guardian angels. And she thought of her helper, and whether he would be satisfied with her. Was she worthy of all he had done for her? Not until this moment did it dawn upon her that she had been placed at a post which she was not allowed to leave. And she vowed to herself that nothing which had been sown in her personality should lie fallow. Everything in her should sprout and blossom and become fruit, in her life and in her work, in her art, which, as she now knew, was only waiting to be quickened into vigorous life.

  How she had fared up till now she had recorded in her diary. Her confessions were almost completed.

  They were left behind in Copenhagen, in the shape of a bundle of foolscap covered with writing. One day her confessions – and she smiled at this thought – would burst upon mankind as the confessions of the first person who was not born unconsciously through a mother’s travail, but fully conscious through her own pangs.

  She wanted to be a bridge-builder.

  She recalled the phrase of her German friend in Copenhagen and thought that she had perhaps built a slender bridge across that abyss which separates man and woman.

  Like a far-off dream she saw in her mind’s eye the Copenhagen railway station, all the companions and friends of those vanished days and weeks and months she had passed in the northern capital.

  She also saw among them the little schoolgirl Ruth, who had been her pupil. She had taught in order to learn that she too could henceforth paint, and that she was now strong enough to claim that immortal heritage which Andreas had bequeathed to her.

  And she smiled again when she thought of the dark girlish head of her pupil Ruth etched against the bright background, where the palms of the South were waving in a blue spring sky; and these palms and this sky were nothing but a corner of a picture which she possessed from Andreas, her dead brother, and which he had discovered during his last Italian summer, spent in the company of Grete and Feruzzi.

  “Ruth,” she had then said to her pupil, “I owe it to Andreas that I am now able to guide your first steps into your art. So for your first picture you should borrow something from what was perhaps Andreas’ last picture.”

  Lili closed her eyes and continued to smile.

  Then the train slowed down. She opened her eyes and looked out of the window: Neustadt!

  Was it possible?

  In feverish haste she put on her hat and coat. Slowly the train moved again, and was now crossing the great bridge over the Elbe. Suddenly Dresden burst on her vision, her beautiful and beloved city of the Elbe. Domes and towers were reflected in the wide river, her river.

  Trembling violently she glued herself to the carriage window. She clenched her teeth in a frenzied effort to keep back the tears. No, she must not weep now.

  A few minutes later she was sitting in a car which took her to the Women’s Clinic. Chastened but cheerful she entered the portal of the home of her heart. Suddenly she hesitated, looked around her, and for the first time a doubt assailed her. “Why have I come here at all? And what do I want to ask him?” Thus she stood irresolute in the grounds.

  The rain had ceased. The white birch trees lifted their light, bright crowns to the pale, watery sky. A couple of white-clad nurses nodded a greeting. Young doctors in professional attire strode through the park. Pregnant women were strolling there: “Blue crocuses,” she thought, with a smile.

  She remained standing and regarded the young women. Now she knew why she had come.

  A white-clad figure stood at the door which led to the private ward, and with a cry of joy Lili threw herself into the motherly arms of the Matron. One nurse after another came up, and they all rejoiced at the reunion.

  Everything was unchanged.

  Lili took the Matron’s hand. “Come with me just once through the house. I want to see all the corridors again.”

  And the Matron took her through all the corridors.

  When she was tired out, she sat down in one of the large easy chairs in the long corridor through
the great folding-doors of which fell a beam of greenish light. Perhaps she would have to wait a long time.

  She said the words to herself like a childish wish: “Wait a long time, wait a long time.”

  She drank in the smell of ether and formalin as if she were thirsty. And all the familiar noises from the corridors and halls and rooms crowded in upon her.

  She waited. A blissful peace invaded her mind.

  The folding-doors opened. A slender figure in a white overall, with dark hair over the lofty brow, came towards her.

  Like a sleep-walker she let herself be led by the hand into the Professor’s room.

  And she listened fascinated to the strange, muffled voice. She had quite forgotten why she had come. She had forgotten everything she wanted to ask. She could only say: “Yes, Professor.”

  Suddenly Werner Kreutz looked at her sharply. “What do you want to ask me? I can tell from your expression that you want something. Tell me what it is …” Lili roused herself from her stupor. The secret anxiety which she could never banish now gripped her and, looking the while calmly into his eyes, she said:

  “Tell me, Professor, do you think that I am now strong enough for another operation, for I want so much to become a mother.”

  DUSK

  Fragments from Lili Elbe’s letters to her German friend in the period from 14th June to 22nd August, 1931, from Dresden.

  “14th June.

  “After a short examination Professor Kreutz decided to operate upon me again. It will be the last time. Probably the operation will be performed on Tuesday, but promise me that Grete shall hear nothing about it. It would cast a shadow over her happiness. She would be worrying on my account, for which there is no need. I am so pleased to be here in my Women’s Clinic again. The Professor has promised to read my ‘Confessions’ and to help me, should it be necessary, to correct them. He too is of opinion that they ought to appear as a book.

  “For the rest I consider it splendid of him, instead of resting on his laurels, to incur the risk of operating upon me once more, so that I should be quite well and able to take a husband and perhaps also to have children to make me happier still. My helper has taught me to love Germany, as he has taught me to see what greatness dwells in this country.

  “If the worst should befall me (although I cannot believe in this eventuality) I want you to know that I shall die happy, because I shall be allowed to remain until my last breath with him to whom I owe my life.

  “More than ever, then, I am convinced that it is my moral duty to make my ‘Confessions’ public, in order to teach people not to judge.”

  “15th June.

  “Now that I am again in Dresden, which is my home, and you have read the last word of my ‘Confessions’, I want so much to become a mother! I feel impelled to write you, my friend and father-confessor, at very great length. I shall perhaps be somewhat prolix, but have patience with me. I have no time to lose. In two days I shall be operated upon again.

  “You must sympathize with me in my desire for maternity, to have a child, for I want nothing more ardently than to demonstrate that Andreas has been completely obliterated in me – is dead. Through a child I should be able to convince myself in the most unequivocal manner that I have been a woman from the very beginning.

  “Please understand me: the alienation from Andreas must inevitably crystallize into the resolution to forget a person who, as Andreas, has been a tragic obstacle which prevented me from experiencing all the mysteries and wonders which are part of the life of the girl, the maid, and the woman, in the same way as all other members of my sex. Because I lived a first life encased in a prison, from which I could not get free, my youth as girl and maiden has been stolen from me, has been suppressed. This also explains why then I returned to Denmark from Germany. The atmosphere of Copenhagen felt most repellent. Denmark was the stage on which Andreas made his first appearance; it was his home – for me, on the contrary, it was nothing less than a cast-off snakeskin. Consequently, Copenhagen was a very difficult place for me to return to because I had to fight not only for my future, but against my past, which was really not my past at all, but the past of an alien creature who had also robbed me of my home. Andreas, therefore, appears to me today in the light of a usurper. For the same reason I find it hard to endure the South and West of Europe, because everything there is bound up with Andreas’ past. On the other hand, my love for Germany, for Berlin, and above all for Dresden, is easy to understand; Andreas did not know these cities, these landscapes and the atmosphere of Germany, his acquaintance with them being of the most cursory character when he was in a dying condition. What a boon for me it was to be here, where it is only present and future for me, and where there is no past connected with Andreas! Here I have merely to fight for my future from the basis of the present, unburdened by the painful past of another person.

  “But I must return to Denmark in order to complete my ‘Confessions’, to that atmosphere which is most painful for me because it was there that I felt most sharply the pangs of experience, and it was there that I could avow it the soonest and most faithfully. For the rest: time presses …

  “You, dear friend, in your tender way and the Danes in their coarser and more brutal manner (because they have only eyes for the commonplace and the uncomplicated – they call it ‘common sense’ and the ‘normal’, because it is the most comfortable, and my countrymen are intellectual, and not only intellectual but damnably comfortable), have frequently asked me whether I could remember anything of Andreas’ erotic emotions. In putting this question people touched me on the sorest point of my sensibilities, without their knowing it. If Nature in alliance with the art of my Professor had not come to my assistance, so that I no longer felt anything in my blood of these emotions of Andreas, of the erotic sensations which he had experienced with women, I should have felt defiled and befouled as a woman by this feeling of alien sexual emotions.

  “I am fighting against the prepossession of the Philistine who looks upon me as a phenomenon, as an abnormality. As I am now, I am a perfectly ordinary woman among other women. The scepticism of the Philistine, or rather the easy-going neighbours who only recognize the commonplace as the justification of life, who invest me and my fate with the quality of a sensation, often depresses me so severely that I find myself wanting to die and playing with the idea of suicide.

  “But the will to live is stronger in me than any humiliation which I have experienced from my fellows and which may be in store for me. I have duties towards Grete, who on my account has hazarded her existence in order to liberate me from the Andreas husk – towards my Professor, who allied himself to me with his medical art and created me for what I am, that is, gave me justification as a living creature, made me into a normal woman.

  “Because of all these obligations I must preserve and strengthen my will to live.

  “If I should succumb spiritually and seek suicide, everybody would be right in saying that what had happened to me had been contrary to Nature, an audacious challenge of the unnatural and the artificial to the natural and to Nature; a creature born as an hermaphrodite must remain an hermaphrodite, especially if it has lived as an hermaphrodite for a lifetime. That without the operation performed by the dear Professor I should have died with Andreas more than a year ago does not trouble them. But that I, Lili, am vital and have a right to life I have proved by living for fourteen months. It may be said that fourteen months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life. The price which I have paid seems to me very small.

  “If sooner or later I should succumb physically, I am quite reconciled. I shall at least have known what it is to live.

  “My will to live! On this account I have steeled my strength in recent months, and often forced myself to do many things which Andreas once did or perhaps did – yet I was often displeased when I found that I had done the thing in question not only as well as, but better than, Andreas. I was often vexed to discover this fact, for it reminde
d me of the virile qualities associated with Andreas.

  “Recently, before my departure for Dresden, I looked over all the photographs which had been taken of me in the Women’s Clinic a year ago. What a childishly simple and effeminate expression all the pictures of that time reveal! How imploring and helpless the glance! Then I looked in the mirror to see what I am like now. My face has become smoother, and healthier, and fresher, the whole body more taut and feminine. But my eyes have a self-conscious expression. I am not pleased as this; life has hardened me.

  “Now I have returned once more. Here, where the strong will of another stands between me and the outside world, as my protector and defender, I can cast off the assumed sternness of my character. It is not really sternness, but a very fragile shell around a completely defenceless creature.

  “Here you have, dear friend, the explanation of my character, of my endeavour and my deepest longing; all that I desire is nothing less than the last fulfilment of a real woman; to be protected from life by the sterner being, the husband. I think death would be more welcome to me than, for instance, a life as an artist, even as a great and fêted artist on my own account. For I do not want to be an artist, but a woman. Hence I must shut all artistic creation out of my life – you will remember I insisted on this during our last conversation – because I cannot continue the work of the virile artist who was Andreas.

  “And in contrast to Andreas, who had to create the works of art from inner compulsion, my own life feels deflected from everything that constitutes art. Do I make myself clear? It is not with my brain, not with my eyes, not with my hands that I want to be creative, but with my heart and with my blood. The fervent longing in my woman’s life is to become the mother of a child. Whether this wish can be fulfilled or not, the fact that I can openly acknowledge this desire from the fullness of a pure woman’s heart is an infinite happiness for me. The fact that I may experience this happiness justifies everything that has happened to me here in Dresden.