The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  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.

  And just then—why, she would never know—something told both Lili and Hans to look down at the front of her dress. Growing on the white housedress patterned with conch shells was a round stain of blood, a stain so red it was nearly black. It was seeping outward like the ringed wave of a pebble landing in a pond.

  “Lili? Are you hurt?”

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. But I should be getting home. Back to Greta.” Lili could feel herself shrinking inward, retreating back down the tunnel, back to Lili’s lair.

  “Let me help you. How can I help you?”

  As each second passed Hans felt farther away; his voice sounded as if it were traveling through a dull iron pipe. It was like at the Rådhuset ball: the blo
od was heavy, but she felt nothing. Where it was coming from she had no idea. She was both alarmed and amazed, like a child who has accidentally killed an animal. A little voice in her head shouted, “Hurry!”—a frantic little voice equally panicked and enjoying the small brief drama of an afternoon in Menton in August. Lili left Hans on the steps of the police station, turning three corners immediately, running away from him as the Gypsy children had run off from her, the stain on her dress spreading as persistently, as appallingly, as a disease.

  CHAPTER Ten

  Greta’s new style was to paint with pastel-bright colors, especially yellows and candy pinks and ice blues. She still painted only portraits. She still used the paints that arrived in glass bottles with unreliable stoppers from the firm in Munich. But where her previous paintings were serious and straightforward and official, her new paintings, in their levity and color, looked, as Lili once said, like taffy. The paintings were large and depicted their subject, by now almost always Lili, outdoors, in a field of poppies, in a lemon grove, or against the hills of Provence.

  While she painted, Greta thought of nothing, or what felt to her like nothing: her brain, her thoughts, felt as light as the paints she mixed into her palette. It reminded her of driving into the sun, as if painting were about pressing on blindly but in good faith. On her best days, ecstasy would fill her as she pivoted from her paint box to the canvas, and it was as if there were a white light blocking out everything but her imagination. When her painting was working, when the brush strokes were capturing the exact curve of Lili’s head, or the depth of her dark eyes, Greta would hear a rustling in her head that reminded her of the bamboo prod der knocking oranges from her father’s orange trees. Painting well was like harvesting fruit: the beautiful dense thud of an orange hitting the California loam.

  Even so, Greta was surprised by the reception the Lili paintings received in Copenhagen that fall. Rasmussen offered to hang them in his gallery for two weeks in October. Her original triptych, Lili Thrice, sold outright, after a brief dispute between a Swede in purple pigskin gloves and a young professor from the Royal Academy. Her portrait of Lili sleeping on the camelback sofa fetched more than 250 kroner; it wasn’t as much as Einar’s paintings earned, but closer than ever before.

  “I need to see Lili every day,” Greta said to him. She was beginning to miss Lili when she wasn’t around. Greta had always been an early riser, up well before dawn, before the first ferry call or rattle from the street. That fall, there were mornings when Greta woke even earlier than that, the apartment so black she couldn’t see her hand before her. She would sit up in the bed. There next to her lay Einar, still sleeping, at his feet Edvard IV. She herself was still caught in the hazy foyer of sleep, and Greta would wonder, where was Lili? Greta would quickly climb out of bed and begin searching the apartment. Where had Lili gone to? Greta would ask herself, lifting the tarps in the front room, opening the closet of the pickled-ash wardrobe. And only as she unbolted the front door, her lips repeating the question nervously, would Greta fully emerge from the thick mist of sleep.

  One morning that autumn, Greta and Einar were in their apartment. It was the first time since April they needed a fire. The stove was a triple-decker, three black iron boxes stacked up on four feet. Greta held a match to the peeling paper of the birch logs inside. The flame took, and began to burn away the bark.

  “But Lili can’t come every day,” Einar protested. “I don’t think you understand how hard it is, sending Einar away and asking Lili in. It’s too much to ask every day.” He was dressing Edvard IV in the cable-knit sweater sent up from the fisherman’s wife. “I love it. I love her. But it’s hard.”

  “I need to paint Lili every day,” Greta said. “I need your help.”

  And then Einar did a strange thing: he crossed the studio and kissed Greta’s neck. Einar had—as Greta thought of it—the Danish chill in him; she couldn’t think of the last time her husband had kissed her anywhere but on her mouth, late at night, when all was black and quiet except for the occasional rambling drunkard being dragged to Dr. Møller’s door across the street.

  Einar’s bleeding had returned. He had been fine since the incident in Menton, but then one day recently he pressed a handkerchief to his nose. Greta watched the stain seep through the cotton. It troubled her, and it reminded her of the final months with Teddy Cross.

  But just as it suddenly began, the bleeding ceased, leaving no trace except Einar’s red and raw nostrils.

  Then one night just the week before, as the first frost was collecting on the windowsills, Greta and Einar were quietly eating their supper. She was sketching in her notebook as she brought forkfuls of herring to her mouth. Einar was sitting idly, stirring his coffee with a spoon—daydreaming, as far as Greta could tell. She looked up from her sketch, a study of a new painting of Lili at a maypole. Across the table the color was draining from Einar’s face. His spine became more erect. He excused himself, leaving a little red spot on the chair.

  Over the next two days Greta tried to ask him about the bleeding, about its cause and source, but each time Einar turned away in shame. It was almost as if she were striking him, his cheek jolting from the blow of her question. It was clear to Greta that Einar hoped to hide it from her, cleaning himself with old paint rags he later threw into the canal. But she knew. There was the smell, fresh and peaty. There was his unsettled stomach. There were the bloody rags the next morning clinging to the stone pylon of the canal’s bridge.

  One morning Greta went to the post office to make a telephone call in privacy. When she returned to the studio, Lili was lying on a cherry-red chaise borrowed from the props department at the Royal Theatre. Her nightdress was also borrowed; a retiring soprano, whose throat was old and blue and all leaping tendons, had worn it singing Desdemona. It seemed to Greta that Lili never knew how she looked. If she did, she wouldn’t be lying like this, with her legs open, each foot on the floor, ankles drunkenly turned. With her mouth open and her tongue on her lip, she looked as if she were passed out on morphine. Greta liked the image, although she hadn’t planned it. Einar had been up the previous night with a cramp in his stomach and, Greta feared, the bleeding.

  “I’ve made an appointment for you,” Greta now said to Lili.

  “What kind of appointment?” Lili’s breath began to quicken, her breasts lifting and falling.

  “With a doctor.”

  Lili sat up. She looked alarmed. It was one of the few times Greta could see Einar edging back into Lili’s face: suddenly the dark blush of whiskers burst onto her upper lip. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Lili said.

  “I didn’t say there was.” Greta moved toward the chaise. She tied the satin ribbons on Lili’s sleeve. “But you’ve been sick,” Greta continued, her hands tucking themselves into her smock’s patch pockets, where she stored the gnawed pencils, the picture of Teddy Cross in the waves at Santa Monica beach, a little swatch of the bloody dress Lili had been wearing when she returned to the rented apartment in Menton, crying Hans’s name. “I’m concerned about the bleeding.”

  Greta watched Lili’s face: it seemed to be curling at the edges with shame. But Greta knew she was right to bring it up. “We need to know why it’s happening. If you’re not hurting anything by—” she began. Greta shuddered, a chill crossing her back. What was happening to her marriage, she wondered, picking at the ribbons woven into the collar of the nightdress. She wanted a husband. She wanted Lili. “Oh, Einar.”

  “Einar isn’t here,” Lili said.

  “Please tell him to meet me at Central Station for the 11:04 train to Rungsted,” Greta said. “I’m going to the supply store.”

  She went to the wardrobe, looking for a scarf.

  “What if Einar doesn’t return in time?” Lili asked. “What if I can’t find him by then?”

  “He will.” And then, “Have you seen my scarf? The blue one with the gold fringe?”

  Lili looked into her lap. “I don’t think so.”

 
“It was in my wardrobe. In my drawer. Did you borrow it?”

  “I think I left it at the Café Axel,” Lili said. “I’m sure they have it behind the counter. I’ll go get it now.” And then, “Greta, I’m sorry. I didn’t take anything else. I didn’t touch anything else.”

  Greta felt the pique bunching up in her shoulders. Something is very wrong, she told herself, and then shoved the thought aside. No, she wasn’t going to let a borrowed scarf upset her marriage. Besides, hadn’t Greta told Lili to take anything that she wanted? Didn’t Greta want, more than anything, to please Lili? “You stay here,” Greta said. “But please make sure Einar makes his train.”

  The walls of the Café Axel were yellow from tobacco. Students from the Royal Academy went there for frikadeller and fadøl, which between four and six were half price. When Greta was a student she would take a table by the door and sketch, her pad propped in her lap. When a friend would walk in and ask what she was drawing, she would firmly close her pad and say, “Something for Professor Wegener.”

  Greta asked the bartender about the blue scarf. “My cousin thinks she left it here,” she said.

  “Who’s your cousin?” The bartender rolled his hands in a tea towel.

  “A slight girl. Not as tall as me. Shy.” Greta paused. It was difficult to describe Lili, to think of her floating through the world on her own, with her fluttering white collar and her brown eyes lifting toward handsome strangers. Greta’s nostrils flared.

  “Do you mean Lili?” the bartender asked.

  Greta nodded.

  “Nice girl. Comes in and sits over there, by the door. I’m sure you know this, but the boys fall over themselves trying to get her attention. She ’ll share a beer with one of them and then, when his head is turned, disappear. Yes, she left a scarf.”