The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  She knew that Professor Bolk wanted her to gain weight. Frau Krebs would bring her a dish of rice pudding in the afternoons, thoughtfully hiding an almond in it in the Danish way. The first time Lili spooned the clumpy pudding into her mouth and tasted the hard, ribbed seed of the almond, she lifted her eyes and said, in Danish, forgetting where she was, “Tak, tak.”

  On her third day at the clinic, Lili was sitting in the Wintergarten when she noticed the green shoots of crocuses on the other side of the glass wall. They were bright and trough-shaped, and they were huddling in the breeze. They looked bold against the patchy brown lawn, which Lili imagined unfurling into a carpet of green over the next several weeks. The river was flowing the color of oil today, the current slow and carrying a low-sitting freighter whose deck was covered by black tarps pulled tightly with rope.

  “Do you think spring will come early?”

  “I’m sorry?” Lili said.

  “I noticed you were looking at the crocuses.” A girl had somehow taken the metal chair next to Lili, pulling it at an angle so that they could look at each other across the white cast-iron table.

  “They seem early to me,” Lili said.

  “It’s what I would expect for this year,” said the girl, whose woody blond hair fell past her shoulders, whose nose turned up at the end. Her name would turn out to be Ursula, an orphan from Berlin, not yet twenty and landed in Dresden because of the simplest of mistakes. “I thought I loved him,” she would later say.

  The day after they met, the sun was even stronger. Lili and Ursula, wrapped in roll-neck sweaters and fur hats with ear flaps borrowed from Frau Krebs, headed into the park. They walked down the path that led through the field of crocus shoots, which had now spread like a rash. Out there, overlooking the Elbe, in a breeze that was more ferocious than Lili could ever have guessed from inside the Wintergarten, Ursula asked, “And you, Lili? Why are you here?”

  Lili thought about the question, biting her lip and burying her wrists inside her sleeves, and finally said, “I’m ill inside.”

  Ursula, whose mouth naturally pouted up, said, “I see.”

  From then on the two girls took their tea and torte together each afternoon. They would choose chocolates from one of the many boxes Ursula had smuggled out of her last place of employment. “It’s these chocolates that caused all my trouble,” Ursula said, holding up one shaped like a seashell and then pushing it into her mouth. Ursula told Lili about the chocolate shop on Unter den Linden where she had worked, where the richest men in Berlin hurried in at lunch or at five o’clock, their topcoats hanging over their arms, to buy three-layered boxes of chocolates wrapped in gold foil, the packages tied up in a satin ribbon. “You probably think it was one of them who I loved,” Ursula told Lili, setting her teacup into its saucer. “But it wasn’t. It was the mixing boy in the back, the boy who dumped the sacks of walnuts and the tubs of butter and the buckets of milk and the ground cocoa beans into the vats.” Vats big enough for two young lovers to curl up into. His name was Jochen, and he had freckles from head to toe. He was from Cottbus, near the Polish border, in Berlin to make his fortune but now indentured to the stainless-steel vats and the mixing arm whose blade, were he not careful, could catch his bony hand and turn it around a hundred times in less than a minute. It was four months before Ursula and Jochen spoke, the girls in front in their pink button-up uniforms forbidden to speak to the mixers in the back, where the air was hot and smelled of sweat and bittersweet chocolate and filled with language that mostly revolved around the private parts of the girls stationed behind the glass cases at the front of the shop. Then one day Ursula had to go into the back to ask when the next batch of nougat would emerge, and Jochen, who was then just seventeen, pushed his cap back on his head and said, “No more nougat today. Tell the jerk to go home and apologize to his wife instead.” That was when Ursula’s heart filled up.

  The rest Lili could imagine: the first kiss in the back room; the gentle tumble into the bowl of the stainless-steel vat; the passion in the middle of the night when the chocolate house lay still, when all the mixing arms hung motionless; the sobs of love.

  How very sad, Lili thought, sitting in her metal chair as the afternoon sun hit the Elbe. In five fast days she and Ursula had become friends. And despite Ursula’s current predicament, Lili longed for something similar to happen to her. Yes, she told herself. It will be like that with me: instant love; helpless, regrettable passion.

  The next morning Professor Bolk appeared in the door of her room. “Please don’t eat anything today,” he said. “Not even cream with your tea. Nothing at all.” Then he added, “Tomorrow’s the day.”

  “Are you sure?” Lili asked. “You won’t change your mind?”

  “The amphitheater is scheduled. The nurses’ shifts have been assigned. You’ve gained some weight. Yes, I’m sure. Tomorrow is your day, Lili.” Then he was gone.

  She went to breakfast in the hall with the arched windows and the pine-plank floor and the side table laid with plates of rolled meats and baskets of caraway-seed rolls and an urn of coffee. Lili took her coffee to a table in the corner and sat alone. She ran a butter knife under the seal of a tissuey blue envelope and opened a letter from Greta.

  Dear Lili,

  I wonder how you’re liking Dresden? And Professor Bolk, whom I assume you have met by now. His reputation is very impressive. He is nearly famous, and maybe after all of this he most certainly will be.

  No real news from Paris. My work has slowed down since you left. You are the perfect subject to paint, and when you’re gone it is difficult to find anyone quite as beautiful. Hans visited yesterday. He’s worried about the art market. He says the money is drying up, not just here but all over Europe. But that doesn’t concern me. It never has, but you know that. I told him this, and he said it was easy for me to say because between Einar and me we would always have something to sell. I’m not sure why he said this, but I suppose it would be true if Einar still painted. Lili, have you ever thought of painting? Maybe you could buy yourself a little tin of watercolors and a sketch pad to help pass the time, which must move slowly there. Despite what they say, Dresden isn’t Paris, I am sure.

  I hope you are comfortable. That’s what worries me the most. I wish you had let me come with you but I understand. Some things you must do alone. Lili, don’t you just sometimes stop and think about what it will be like when it’s all over? The freedom! That’s how I think of it. Is that how you think of it? I hope so. I hope you think of it that way because that is what it should feel like to you. It does to me, at least.

  Send word as soon as you can. Edvard IV and I miss you terribly. He’s sleeping on your daybed. Me, I’m hardly sleeping at all.

  If you want me, just send word. I can arrive overnight.

  With love,

  Greta

  Lili thought of her life in the casita: Einar’s former workroom, tidy and untouched; the morning light that poured into Greta’s studio; the ottoman quilted with velvet and dented beneath the handsome weight of Carlisle; Greta in her smock, hardened with a dozen smears of paint, her hair running like icewater down her back; Hans honking his horn from the streets below, calling Lili’s name. Lili wanted to go back, but that would have been impossible now.

  In the afternoon she met Ursula again, who was red in the cheek from running down the stairs. “There’s a letter from him!” she said, waving an envelope. “It’s from Jochen.”

  “How’d he know where to find you?”

  “I wrote him. I couldn’t help it, Lili. I broke down and wrote him and told him how much I loved him and it wasn’t too late.” Her hair was pulled into a tail, and she looked even younger today, with cheeks that were full and dimpled twice. “What do you think he wants to say?”

  “Find out,” said Lili. Ursula opened the envelope and her eyes began to move across the letter. Her smile started to fall almost imperceptibly, and by the time she turned over the page her mouth was a tight little frown. Then she
ran the back of her hand beneath her nose and said, “He might come to visit me. If he can save enough money and get time off from the chocolate shop.”

  “Do you want him to come?”

  “I suppose so.” And then, “I mustn’t get my hopes up, though. It might be hard for him to get the time off from the shop. But he says he’ll come if he has the time.”

  They said nothing for several minutes. Then Ursula cleared her throat. “I understand there’s going to be an operation.”

  Lili said yes; she picked at the lint in her lap.

  “What are they going to do to you? Are you going to be all right? Will you be just the same when they’re through?”

  “I’ll be better,” Lili said. “Professor Bolk is going to make me better.”

  “Oh, creepy old Bolk. I hope he doesn’t do anything wrong to you. Bolk the Blade—that’s what they call him, you know. Always ready to open a girl up with his knife.”

  For a second Lili became frightened.

  “I’m sorry,” Ursula said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. You know how girls can talk. They don’t know anything.”

  “It’s all right,” Lili said.

  Later, in her room, Lili prepared for bed. Frau Krebs had given her a small chalky pill. “To help you sleep,” Frau Krebs had said, biting her lip. And Lili washed her face at the sink with the rose-colored washcloth. The makeup—the muted orange of her powder, the pink of her lipstick, the brown of the wax she used on her eyebrows—ran down the sink with the water. When she would hold the eyebrow pencil with the waxy tip, her fingers poised to draw, a strange feeling would fill her chest, as if she were reliving something. Einar had been an artist, and she wondered if that feeling, the tight flutter just beneath the ribs, was what he experienced as the slick tip of his brush moved into the rough blank expanse of a new canvas. Lili shuddered, and a taste of something not unlike regret rose in her throat, and she had to swallow hard to hold down the sleeping pill.

  The next morning she felt dreamy and dull. A knock on the door. A nurse with upturned hair shifting Lili out from beneath the sheets. A transporting ambulance, smelling like alcohol and steel, waiting at the side of her bed to take her away. The distant sight of Professor Bolk’s face, asking, “Is she all right? Let’s make sure she’s all right.” But not much else registered with Lili. She knew it was still early, and she was wheeled down the hall of the clinic before the sun lifted over the rape fields east of Dresden; she knew the swinging doors with the porthole windows closed on her before the dawn light hit the cornerstones of the Brühlsche Terrace, where she had looked out over the Elbe and the city and all of Europe and where she had convinced herself she would never again look back.

  When she woke up, she saw a yellow felt curtain pulled against a window. Opposite sat a single-door wardrobe with a mirror and a key laced with a blue-thread tassel; at first she thought it was the pickled-ash wardrobe, and then she recalled, although it had happened to someone else, the afternoon when Einar’s father found him in the closet of his mother’s wardrobe with a yellow scarf on his head.

  She was lying in a bed with a steel-pipe footrest; she was looking at the room through the footrest, and it was like staring out a barred window. The room was wallpapered in a pink-and-red pattern of nosegays. In the corner there was a chair draped with a blanket. Beside the bed a mahogany table covered with a piece of lace and a cup of violets. The table had a single drawer, and she wondered if her belongings were in it. On the floor was a dust-colored carpet, the nap worn bald in spots.

  She tried to lift herself, but a heavy pain spread through the middle of her body, and she fell back onto the pillow, which was hard and spiny with feathers. Her eyes rolled up into her head until the room went black. She thought of Greta, and she wondered if Greta was now in this room, in the corner opposite the window where Lili didn’t have the strength to turn her head to peer. Lili didn’t know what had happened to her, not just then, not with the chloroform still swirling in her nostrils. She knew she was ill, and at first she thought she was a child with a ruptured appendix in the provincial Jutland hospital with its rubber-floored halls; she was ten years old, Hans would soon arrive at the door with a fistful of Queen Anne’s lace. But this couldn’t make sense, because Lili was also thinking about Greta, who was Einar’s wife. It caused her to ask herself, nearly aloud: Where is Einar?

  She thought of them all: Greta and Hans and then Carlisle, whose flat, persistent voice was good at sorting things out; she thought of frightened Einar, lost in his baggy suit, separated from the rest of them, somehow away—permanently away. She lifted her eyelids. On the ceiling was a lightbulb set in a box of reflecting silver. There was a long string attached, and she saw that the string ran down to her bedside, its tail capped with a little brown bead. The bead was lying on the green blanket, and for a very long time she thought about releasing her hand from beneath the clamp of the blanket and pulling the brown bead and turning off the light. She focused on it, the brown bead a piece of carved wood like what ran along the wire of an abacus. Finally, when she moved to free her hand, the effort and the pain of shifting her body exploded in her like a crash of hot light. Her head pushed back into the pillow—the feathers matting against her skull—and she closed her eyes. Only hours before, in the black of morning, at the hands of Professor Alfred Bolk, Einar Wegener had passed from man into woman, two testicles scooped from the pruned hammock of his scrotum, and now Lili Elbe slipped into unconsciousness for three days and nights.

  CHAPTER Twenty-two

  Greta couldn’t stand it. She would button up her smock and clip her hair back with the tortoiseshell comb and mix her paints in the Knabstrup bowls and stand in front of a half-finished portrait of Lili and fail to understand how to complete it. The painting—with Lili’s upper body complete and the lower half only a pencil outline—looked to Greta as if it were someone else’s work. She would stare at the canvas, the edges taut from the nails she hammered in herself, only to find it impossible to concentrate. Anything at all could disrupt her. There was a solicitation at the door for a subscription library. There was Edvard IV lapping sloppily in his water bowl. There was the open door to Einar’s studio, revealing his daybed tidy with the pink-and-red kilim laid across, and the neatness and emptiness of a room where no one lived anymore. A dresser with empty drawers; a wardrobe with nothing inside but a single hanger on the lead pipe. She felt a throb in her chest, and the only thing she could think of was Einar rattling across Europe in a railcar, arriving in Dresden, at night, an icy dew dampening the tips of his hair, the clinic’s address tight in his fist.

  There was another exhibition of her paintings in Hans’s gallery, and for the first time she didn’t attend the opening. Something in her felt sick of it all, though she was careful not to repeat such a sentiment to Hans. How ungrateful it would sound. How petulant. Greta, who five years ago didn’t have a reputation and who just this morning sat for an interview with a handsome journalist from Nice with hooded eyes who would interrupt her and say, “When did you first know you were great?” Yes, all of that, and more, in five years; but even so Greta would sit back and think, Yes, I’ve done something with myself—but what did it matter? She was alone, and her husband and Lili were in Dresden, alone.

  More than a week after Einar left for Dresden, on a day slick with rain and screechy with skidding motorcars, Greta had met Hans at his gallery. He was in his back office, and there was a clerk at a desk making entries into an account book. “They didn’t all sell,” Hans said of the paintings at the exhibition. One of Greta’s paintings—Lili in a cabana at the Bains du Pont-Solférino—was on the floor, leaning against the desk where the clerk was pushing his pencil against his lined paper. “I wish you had come to the opening,” Hans was saying. “Is something wrong?” And then, “Have you met my new assistant? This is Monsieur Le Gal.”

  The clerk was narrow-faced, and there was something in his soft brown eyes that made Greta think of Einar. She thought of him—Ei
nar cautiously boarding a tram in Dresden, his eyes lowered and his hands folded shyly in his lap—and shuddered. She thought to herself, although not in so many words, What have I done to my husband?

  “Is there anything I can do?” Hans asked. He moved toward Greta. The clerk was keeping his eyeglasses and his pencil close to his task. And Hans came to Greta’s side. They did not touch, but Greta could feel him there, as she stared down at the painting: Lili’s smile stretched back from the pull of her tight bathing cap; Lili’s eyes, dark and alive—bottomless, they seemed. Greta felt something on her arm, but when she looked there was nothing, and Hans was now standing by the clerk’s desk, his hands in his pockets. Did he want to tell her something?

  Carlisle had found them in their embrace, that afternoon with the freezing rain, when Hans’s neck was pink from the barber. She hadn’t heard the scratch of his key until it was too late, and there was an awkwardly long instant when both Greta and Carlisle froze—she with her head against Hans’s chest, Carlisle, a scarf around his throat, with his hand dangling back to the doorknob. “I didn’t know anyone was—” he began. She pulled away from Hans, who held up his hands and started to say, “It’s not what you’re thinking. . . .” “I can come back,” Carlisle had said. “I’ll be back in a bit.” He was gone before Greta could say anything else.

  Later that night, she had sat at the foot of his bed and rubbed his leg through the blankets, and said, “Sometimes I think Hans is my only friend.” And Carlisle, with his nightshirt split open at the collar, said, “I can understand that.” And then, “Greta. No one’s blaming you for any of this, if that’s what you’re thinking.”