The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  But Einar’s heart was pounding, because the young girl who had kissed him on the academy’s stairs had floated back into his life as fast as she had departed five years earlier. And during those five years he’d thought of Greta off and on, the way he would recall a disturbing and fascinating dream. During the war he dreamed of her in California. But the image of her dashing through the academy’s halls, her paintbrushes shoved up under her arm, the metal ferrules reflecting the light, had also stayed with him over the course of the war. She was the busiest student he’d ever known, off to balls and ballets but always ready to work, even if it meant late at night when most others needed an aquavit and sleep. When he thought of the ideal woman, more and more he’d come to think of Greta. Taller than the rest of the world, and faster. He could recall one day lifting his head from his desk in his office at the academy and from his window seeing her run through the honking traffic circling Kongens Nytorv, her blue-gray skirt like a plow through the grills and bumpers of the carriages and the motorcars, whose drivers were squeezing the rubber bulbs of their horns. And how she would wave her hands through the air and say, “Who cares?” For certainly Greta didn’t care about anything but that which made sense to her, and as Einar became more and more silent in his adulthood and lonelier at his canvas and more convinced that he was a man who would never belong, he began to ponder over his ideal version of a woman. And that was Greta.

  And then she turned up at his office on that warm August afternoon and now she was leading him through the streets of Copenhagen, beneath the open parlor windows along Kronprinsessegade, where they could hear the squeal of children ready for their summer holiday on the North Sea, and the yelp of lapdogs ready for a stretch of their tiny legs.

  When they reached her street Greta said, “Be sure to duck.” He didn’t know what she meant, but she took his hand and they hid behind the parked motorcars as they moved down the street. It had rained the night before, and the curbs were wet, and the sun on the wet pneumatic tires brought the scent of warm rubber to his nose, a scent that he would later think of when he was driving around Paris with Carlisle the summer when they—all of them—were plotting Lili’s future. Greta led them from car to car, as if they were dodging enemy fire. They worked their way down the block like this, down the block in Copenhagen where lived Herr Janssen, proprietor of the glove factory in which a fire had killed forty-seven women hunched at their foot-pedaled machines; down the block where lived Countess Haxen, who at eighty-eight had the largest collection of teacups in all Northern Europe, a collection so vast that even she didn’t mind when a tantrum overcame her and she hurled one of them at the wall; down the block where the Hansens lived with their twin daughters, girls who were so blond and beautiful in duplicate that their parents were in constant fear of kidnapping; down toward the white house with the blue door and the window boxes planted with geraniums that were as red as hen’s blood and that smelled, even from across the street, bitter and full and faintly obscene. It was the house where Greta’s father had lived during the war, and now that it was over, he was returning to Pasadena.

  From behind the hood of a Labourdette Skiff, Greta and Einar watched the moving men haul the shipping crates down the steps and into the cargo of their waiting lorry. Einar and Greta could smell the geraniums and the shipping straw, and the sweat of the men as they heaved the crate carrying Greta’s canopy bed. “My father’s leaving,” Greta said.

  “Are you?”

  “Oh, no. I’m going to stay on my own. Don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “At last I’m free.”

  But Einar didn’t see, not just then. He didn’t see that Greta would need to be alone in Denmark, relationless in Europe, in order to become the woman she saw herself as. She needed to put an ocean and a continent between herself and her family in order to feel that at last she could breathe. What Einar didn’t understand then was that it was another of Greta’s brazenly American traits, that bubbling need to move away and reinvent. Never before had he imagined himself doing the same.

  And this was another part of his life that the obituary written by Nationaltidende would miss. They wouldn’t know where to look for it. And like most newspapermen, the young reporters with the thinning hair wouldn’t be careful enough to check the source. Time was running out. Einar Wegener was slipping away. Only Greta would remember the life he had led.

  The obituary that would never be written should have followed with this:

  There was a day last summer when Lili woke up in her room in the casita and found herself unbearably hot. It was August. For the first time since they were married, Greta and Einar had decided not to holiday in Menton. Mostly because of his deteriorating health. The bleeding. The weight loss. The eyes sinking deeper into their sockets. And, sometimes, his inability to hold his head up at the table. No one knew what to do. No one knew what Einar wanted to be done. And Lili woke up on that hot morning, when the exhaust from the lorries delivering to the charcuterie on the corner was rising through the open window and dusting her face with grime. She was lying in her bed, wondering if she would rise at all today. And the morning passed, as she stared at the curled plaster in the ceiling, at the white petals in the center around the base of the chandelier.

  Then she heard voices in the front room. A man, and a second. Hans and Carlisle. She listened to them talking to Greta, although Greta couldn’t be heard, so it was like hearing two men talk and talk. Their scratchy voices made Lili think of three-day growth on a throat. Lili must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew the sun was coming into the room from a different angle, now from over the green copper roofs across the street, where a hawk had built its nest, but Hans and Carlisle were still talking. And then they were at her door, and then inside the room, where Lili had thought more and more of installing a lock in the door but never came to doing so. She watched them enter, and it seemed more like a memory than something that was actually happening. They were saying, “Come on. Get up.” And then, “Little Lili.” She could feel them pull on her arms; again, the pull was more like memory than an actual tug. One of them brought a cup of milk to her mouth. A second pulled a dress over her head. They led her to the pickled-ash wardrobe to find a pair of shoes, and she stepped into a panel of sun and felt her skin ignite. And yet Hans and Carlisle sensed this, and so they found a parasol, a paper umbrella with bamboo ribs, and quickly opened it.

  Somehow they got her to the Tuileries. And there they walked, Lili’s elbow linked with each of theirs. They moved beneath the poplars, in the swaying shadows that, to Lili, looked like large fish about to break the surface of the sea. Hans pulled up three green folding chairs, and they sat together in the afternoon as the children passed and the young lovers strolled and the lonely men with the quick eyes headed over to their side of the park, near L’Orangerie. Lili thought of the last time she was alone in the park; a few weeks earlier she had been out for a walk, and two little boys passed her, and one of them had said, “Lesbienne.” The boys were probably ten or eleven, blond with down on their cheeks, and their shorts showed most of their hairless thighs, and yet these pretty little boys had managed to hurl something so cruel, and wrong.

  Lili sat with Hans and Carlisle, and she was hot in the dress they had chosen for her: one of the capped-sleeved dresses printed with conch shells that had come from the rented apartment in Menton. She knew then that her life with Einar was over. The only question that remained was whether she would have a life as Lili. Or would it all be over, and she would rest? Would Einar and Lili exit, hand in hand? Bones buried in the bog.

  And Einar knew that his obituary would miss that as well. It would report everything about him except the life he had lived. And then the rhythm of the train’s speed slowed, and he opened his eyes and the porter called down the passageway: “Dresden! Dresden!”

  CHAPTER Twenty

  Greta was sitting on the velvet ottoman. Her hair was falling in her face, and Edvard IV was in her la
p, shaking. With Einar in Dresden, she suddenly felt incapable of settling down to work. She could think only of Einar in Germany, making his way to Professor Bolk’s laboratory. She had an image of Lili lost on a street, and Einar frightened on the professor’s examination table. Greta had wanted to travel with him, but he wouldn’t let her; he said this was something he had to do on his own. She couldn’t understand that. There was another train to Dresden only three hours after Einar’s, and she’d bought a ticket. She would turn up at the Municipal Women’s Clinic half a day after him, and there would be nothing Einar could do. Lili would want her there, Greta knew. But as she was packing her bags and making plans to leave Edvard IV with Anna, Greta stopped herself. Einar had asked her not to come: she heard his careful words over and over, the way they had caught in his throat.

  Greta was older now. When she looked in the mirror there was a faint, handsome line on each side of her mouth, two lines that reminded her of the entrance to a cave—a bit of an exaggeration, she knew, but even so. She had promised herself she wouldn’t care about lines and wrinkles or even the few stray gray hairs that had grown into her temples like fur caught in a broom. But she did, although she had a hard time admitting it. Instead, she let it pick at her, as the months and the years passed and she settled more into her role as American artist abroad, while California receded farther and farther, as if the calamitous earthquake predicted by a doctor of physics on the palm-shaded campus of Cal Tech had already erupted on the Golden State and launched the whole coast into the Pacific; Pasadena slipping farther and farther away, a lost ship, a lost island, now only memory.

  Except of course for Carlisle. During the autumn he had shuffled around Paris, the cuffs of his trousers muddying in the rain. The ache in his shin came and went with the clouds that rolled in off the Atlantic; and he and Lili would set out from the casita beneath their umbrellas, Lili wrapped up in her pink rubber coat that looked so heavy Greta worried she might collapse. Greta and Carlisle had had words about Einar’s choice of doctor. He told her plainly that he thought she was doing the wrong thing for Einar: “He could end up regretting this,” Carlisle had said, conceding. It stung her, this criticism, and she continued to feel its blow through the autumn as he changed the compress on Lili’s forehead, or as he sat on Lili’s bed playing poker with her, or as they bundled themselves up to head out for a night at the opera. “Sorry you can’t join us,” Lili would call with her small voice. “Don’t work too much!”

  Sometimes Greta would feel burdened by her work, as if she were the only one in the world laboring while the rest were off and out, enjoying themselves. As if everything had come to rest on her shoulders, and should she stop and put down her head, their small, intimate world would implode. She thought of Atlas, who held up the world; and yet that wasn’t right, because not only did she hold it up, she had also created it. Or so she sometimes thought. On some days she was exhausted, and would wish she could tell someone this, but there was no one, and so she spoke to Edvard IV as he ate his bowl of chicken skin and gristle.

  No one except Hans.

  The day after Einar left for Germany, Hans came to see her. He had just visited his barber, and the hair on the back of his neck was bristly, the skin pink with irritation. He was telling her about a new idea for an exhibition: he wanted to approach the headmistress of a private girls’ school to see about hanging a series of Lili paintings in the halls. Hans was pleased with the idea, from the way he was laughing into his coffee cup.

  Over the past couple of years he had seen other women, Greta knew: an actress from London; an heiress to a jam-preserve fortune. Hans was careful not to tell Greta about them, avoiding mentioning whom he’d spent the weekend with in Normandy. But he would tell Einar, and the news would fly back to Greta in Lili’s breathless way: “An actress whose name is up in lights above Cambridge Circus!” Lili would report. “Isn’t it exciting for Hans?”

  “That must be very nice,” Greta would reply, “for him.”

  “Where’s Einar gotten himself to?” Hans now said.

  “He’s gone to Germany to look after his health.”

  “To Dresden?”

  “Did he mention it to you?” She looked around the apartment, at her easels and her paintings leaning against the wall and the rocker. “Lili went with him as well. It’s quiet here without them.”

  “Of course she went with him,” Hans said. Down on one knee, he began to lay out on the floor the most recent paintings of Lili. “He told me about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About Lili. About the doctor in Dresden.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Greta. Do you really think I don’t know by now?” He lifted his face to hers. “Why have you been afraid to tell me?”

  She leaned against the window. Outside the rain was frozen, and it was tapping lightly on the glass. There were a half-dozen new pictures of Lili, a series of her at her toilette, the add-a-pearl necklace Greta had given her around her throat. The paintings showed the pink in Lili’s cheek and the reds in her makeup tray, bright in contrast to the silvery-white of her flesh. In the paintings Lili was wearing a sleeveless dress with a scoop neck, and her hair was curled up under. “Can you really see Einar in them?”

  “I do now,” Hans said. “He told me this past fall. He was having a hard time deciding what to do, whether to have Dr. Buson treat him or Professor Bolk. He just turned up at the gallery one day, just walked into the back office. It was raining and he was wet, so at first I didn’t see that he’d been crying. He was white, even whiter than Lili in the paintings. I thought he might collapse right then. It seemed he was having a hard time breathing, and I could see his pulse throbbing in his throat. All I had to do was ask what was wrong, and he began to tell me everything.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I said it explained a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “About Einar and you.”

  “About me?” Greta said.

  “Yes, about why you’ve been so defensive all these years, so very private. In some ways you took it on as your secret, not just his.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “I’m sure it’s been difficult for you.” Hans stood. The barber had also given him a shave but missed a spot on his cheek.

  “Not as hard as it’s been on him.” Greta felt a wave of relief pass through her; at last Hans knew. The subterfuge with Hans could end; she could feel its tide receding. “So what do you think of our secret?”

  “It’s who he is, right? How can I blame him for who he is?” He moved to her, took her in his arms. She could smell the menthol of aftershave, and the hair on the back of his neck tickled her wrist.

  “Do you think I’ve done the right thing sending him to Bolk?” she said. “You don’t think I’ve made a mistake, do you?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s probably his only chance.”

  He held Greta at the window, as the traffic sloshed quietly in the wet street below. But she couldn’t let him hold her much longer, she told herself; she was still married to Einar, after all. She’d have to pull away soon, she’d have to send Hans back to the gallery with the pictures. His hand was at the small of her back, the other on her hip. Her head was against his breast, the menthol coming with every breath. Every time she tried to free herself, she felt inert. If she couldn’t be with Einar, then she wanted Hans, and she shut her eyes and nuzzled her nose into his neck, and just as she felt herself relax and sigh and feel the years of loneliness fall away, she heard the scratch of Carlisle’s key turning in the front door.

  CHAPTER Twenty-one

  Einar paid the driver five reichsmark, and then the taxi pulled away. Its headlamps swept past the winter skeleton of an azalea and sloped into the street. Then the circular drive was dark, except for the glow of the lantern lamp hanging above the door. Einar could see his breath, and he felt the cold seeping into his feet. There was a black rubber button
beside the door, and Einar waited before pressing it. Moisture was collecting along the letters of the brass plaque. DRESDEN MUNICIPAL WOMEN’S CLINIC. A second plaque listed the clinic’s doctors. Dr. Jürgen Wilder, Dr. Peter Scheunemann, Dr. Karl Scherres, Prof. Dr. Alfred Bolk.

  Einar rang the bell and waited. He heard nothing inside. As far as he could tell, the clinic looked more like a villa, set in a neighborhood of linden and birch trees and iron fences with spindles like spears. There was the sound of an animal in the underbrush, a cat or a rat digging against the cold. A curtain of fog was descending, and Einar nearly forgot where he was. He rested his forehead against the brass plaque and closed his eyes.

  He rang again. This time he heard a door inside, and a voice, as buried as the animal sound in the shrub.

  At last the door opened, and a woman in an efficiently gray skirt, suspenders pressing against her breasts, stared at him. Her hair was silver and cut sharp along the jaw, her eyes also gray. She looked as if she never slept much, as if the pillow of skin in her throat kept her head upright while all the world rested.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m Einar Wegener.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m here to see Professor Bolk,” Einar said.

  The woman pressed her hands against the pleats in her skirt. “Professor Bolk?” she said.

  “Is he here?”

  “You’ll have to telephone tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” He felt something close in around him.