The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  Now, in Hans’s office, with the clerk busy with his pencil and his ruler, Greta said, “No word from Einar yet.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “He didn’t want me to.”

  Hans stopped, and Greta saw his lips press together; was he feeling sorry for her? How she’d hate it if things had come to that.

  “Not that it upset me,” she said. “Not that I don’t understand why he had to go alone.”

  “Greta,” Hans said.

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you go see him?”

  “He doesn’t want me there.”

  “He was probably too embarrassed to ask for your help.”

  “No, not Einar. He isn’t like that. And besides, why would he be embarrassed? After all this, why would he be embarrassed now?”

  “Think about what he’s going through. This isn’t like anything before.”

  “But then why wouldn’t he have let me go with him? He didn’t want me there. He was clear about that.”

  “He was probably too afraid.”

  She stopped. “Do you think?”

  The clerk lit a cigarette, the match rough on the sandpaper strip along the box. Once again she wanted Hans to hold her, but she wouldn’t let herself move toward his arms. She straightened her back and ran her fingers down the pleats of her skirt. She knew it was old-fashioned, but Greta couldn’t bring herself to slip into his embrace while she was still Einar’s wife.

  “You should go see him,” Hans said. “If you want, I’ll go with you. I’d be happy to go with you.”

  “I can’t go.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “What about my work?”

  “It can wait. Or even better, pack your easel. Take your paints with you.”

  “Do you really think I should?”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said again.

  “No,” she said. “That wouldn’t be any good.”

  “Why not?”

  On the clerk’s desk was a copy of L’Echo de Paris, folded open to a review of her latest exhibition. She hadn’t read it yet, and there was a paragraph that leapt out at her as if underlined: “After so many pictures of the same subject—this strange girl called Lili—Greta Wegener has become tedious. I wish upon her a new model and a new color scheme. Coming from California, why hasn’t she ever turned her eye to the golds and blues of her native land? Paint me a picture of the Pacific and the arroyos!”

  “If I go I’ll have to go by myself,” Greta said.

  “Now you’re sounding like Einar.”

  “I am like him,” she said.

  They were silent for a few minutes, studying the painting and listening to the rain mix with the traffic. Paris was cold, each morning the wet seeping deep beneath her skin, and Greta imagined the only place damper and grayer was Dresden. Going there would be like slipping further into the cave of winter.

  Again Hans said, “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  Once again he moved to her side, and then there was that sensation on Greta’s arm, like a feather on her skin. She could feel him there, through his herringbone suit—his soft pulse of heat. “Greta,” he said.

  “I have to go.”

  “Do you suppose it’s time—”

  “I really must be off,” Greta said.

  “All right then,” Hans said. He helped her with her raincoat, tugging out the shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

  Then the clerk said, his voice hoarse, “Will you be delivering any new paintings, Mrs. Wegener? Should I expect anything sometime soon?”

  “Not for a while,” she said, and when she stepped into the street, with the motorcars swishing through the sleet and the shove of umbrellas on the sidewalk, she knew she’d have to fold up her easel and pack her paints and book a compartment on the next train to Dresden.

  What surprised Greta most about Dresden was the way the people on the street failed to look up from their feet. She wasn’t used to that, eyes refusing to lift to roam her long frame and to greet her. On her first day there she felt as if she had disappeared—deeply tucked into the folds of Europe, hidden from the world. And this caused a little panic in her, as she felt the gravel crunch beneath her feet, stepping toward the front door of the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic; a panic because she suddenly feared that, if no one could find her, maybe she wouldn’t be able to find Einar after all.

  At first there was confusion. “I’m looking for Miss Wegener,” Greta inquired at the front desk, where Frau Krebs was smoking a Hacifa cigarette.

  The name Wegener meant nothing to Frau Krebs. She pursed her lips and shook her head, her exact line of hair slashing against her jaw. Greta tried again. “She’s slim and dark-eyed. Frightfully shy. A little Danish girl?”

  “Do you mean Lili Elbe?”

  Greta, who just then had a vision of Einar’s face lifting with the sunlight as his train crossed the Elbe on the Marienstrasse bridge, said, “Yes. Is she here?”

  In her room a portable gas stove was flickering. The yellow curtain was drawn, and the blue flames of the little stove were casting a wavy shadow across the bed. Greta was holding the steel piping of the bed’s footrest. Tucked beneath the blanket was Lili, her arms lying flat along her sides. She was sleeping, breath in her nostrils. “Please don’t disturb her,” Frau Krebs whispered from the door. “The operation was hard.”

  “When was it?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “How is she?”

  “That’s not easy to say,” Frau Krebs said, folding her arms across her breasts. The room was warm with the effluvia of sleep, and its silence felt unnatural to Greta. She sat in the chair in the corner, pulling a blanket over her lap. She was cold, and tired from the train, and Frau Krebs left her alone with Lili.

  They slept, Greta and Lili. A few hours later, when Greta woke, at first she thought she was waking from a nap on one of the sleeping porches in Pasadena. Then she saw Lili, whose head was rolling on the pillow. Her papery eyelids began to flutter.

  “Please don’t worry about me,” Lili said.

  At last Greta could see Lili’s eyes, the lids blinking heavily to swat away the dreamy sleep. Still as brown and slick as pelts. The only thing left of her husband, eyes through which Greta could recall his entire life.

  She moved to the bed and began to stroke Lili’s leg through the rough horsehair blanket. Something in the calf muscle felt softer to Greta; or maybe she was just imagining it—the way she thought maybe she was also imagining the swell of breasts beneath the blanket’s sash.

  “Do you know what they’ve done to me?” Lili asked. Her face seemed fuller in the cheek and throat, so full that the blade of her Adam’s apple had disappeared into a little scarf of flesh. Was Greta imagining this, too?

  “Nothing more than we talked about.”

  “Am I now Lili? Have I become Lili Elbe?”

  “You’ve always been Lili.”

  “Yes, but if I were to look down there, what would I see?”

  “Don’t think about it like that,” Greta said. “That’s not the only thing that makes you Lili.”

  “Was it successful, the operation?”

  “Frau Krebs said so.”

  “How do I look? Tell me, Greta—how do I look?”

  “Very pretty.”

  “Am I really a woman now?”

  Part of Greta was numbing over with shock. Her husband was no longer alive. It, the tingling shock of it, felt like his soul passing through her. Once again Greta Waud was a widow, and she thought of Teddy’s coffin, stalks of bird of paradise across its lid, sinking into the earth. But she wouldn’t have to bury Einar. She had settled him into a felt-paneled compartment on a train bound for Germany, and now he was gone—as if his train had simply charged ahead into the icy January fog and disappeared forever. She imagined that if she were to call his name it would echo, again and again
, for the rest of her life.

  She moved even closer to Lili. Once again, Greta was filled with a need to hold her, and she took Lili’s head between her hands. The veins in her temples were throbbing lightly, and Greta sat on the edge of the hospital bed with Lili’s dewy head in her palms. There was a crack in the curtain, and Greta could see through it across a lawn brightening with spring toward the Elbe. The river was running like clouds dashing along the sky. On the other side two boys in sweaters were launching a canoe.

  “Oh, hello,” a voice said from the door. It was a young girl, with a little upturned nose. “You must be Greta.”

  Greta nodded, and the girl entered lightly. She was in her hospital gown and robe, her feet in slippers. Lili had fallen asleep again, and the room was gray. In the corner the gas heater was ticking, click-click-click. “I’m Ursula,” the girl said. “We’ve become friends.” With her chin she pointed to Lili. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “I think so. But Frau Krebs was telling me how hard it’s been on her.”

  “She’s been sleeping most of the time, but the one time I saw her awake she looked happy,” Ursula said.

  “How was she before the operation? Was she frightened?”

  “Not really. She adores Professor Bolk. She’d do anything for him.”

  “He’s a good doctor,” Greta heard herself saying.

  Ursula was carrying a little box wrapped in foil printed with UNTER DEN LINDEN in fancy scroll. She handed it to Greta, saying, “Will you give it to her when she wakes up?”

  Greta thanked Ursula, noticing the bloat in her stomach. It distended unusually, high in her abdomen, lumpily. “And how are you?” Greta asked.

  “Oh, me? I’m fine,” Ursula said. “More and more tired every day. But what can I expect?”

  “Are they good to you here?”

  “Frau Krebs is nice. She seems so strict at first, but she’s nice. And the other girls, too. But Lili is my favorite. So very sweet. Concerned about everyone but herself.” And then, “She told me about you. She missed you.”

  For a moment Greta wondered what Ursula meant, but then let it pass. It didn’t matter.

  “You’ll tell her I looked in?” Ursula said. “You’ll give her the chocolates?”

  Greta took a room at the Bellevue. At night, after she had left Lili at the Municipal Women’s Clinic, she would try to paint. Light from the flat-bottomed coal freighters would reach up to her windows. Greta sometimes would open them, and she could hear the chug and swish of a tourist boat’s paddle and the deep grind of the freighters and the clang of a tram out in Theater-Platz.

  She began a painting of Professor Bolk; it was on a large canvas she bought at a shop on Alunstrasse. She had carried the rolled-up canvas under her arm back to the Bellevue, crossing the Augustusbrücke. From the bridge with its half-circle lookout balconies she could see nearly all of Dresden: the Brühlsche Terrace with its benches freshly painted green; the bulbous sandstone dome of the Frauenkirche blackened with soot from the motorcars and the smelting works in Plauenscher Grund; the long line of silvery windows of the Zwinger Palace. A wind from the river came along and knocked the rolled-up canvas from beneath Greta’s arm, and she caught it just as it unfurled like a sail on the bridge. It was flapping over the grooved-stone half-wall, and Greta was struggling to roll it back up when a hand landed on her shoulder and a familiar voice said, “May I help?”

  “I was just on my way back to the hotel,” Greta said as Professor Bolk took one end of the canvas and rolled it up like a window shade.

  “You must be planning quite a large painting,” he said.

  But that wasn’t the case. At that moment Greta didn’t know what she wanted to paint next; it didn’t seem the right time to paint Lili.

  “Can you walk me back to my hotel?” Greta said, pointing to the park of chestnut trees in front of the Bellevue, which sat like a squarely built lifeguard in his stilted chair cockily surveying the beach of the Elbe.

  “I’d like to hear about the operation,” she said. “About Lili’s prospects.” Over the past few days she’d begun to sense that Professor Bolk had been avoiding her; two days she’d been in Dresden, and he still hadn’t replied to the inquiries she left at Frau Krebs’s desk. She even mentioned to Ursula that she wanted Professor Bolk to phone. But he never came to see her. Now she led him to her suite at the Bellevue. They settled into the chairs by the window, drinking coffee brought by a maid with a strip of lace pinned to her hair.

  “The first operation was a success,” Professor Bolk began. “It was rather simple. The incision is healing as it should.” He told Greta about the surgery in the operating amphitheater, where before dawn one morning Einar had become Lili. He explained that the systematic tests—the blood counts and the urinalysis and the hourly monitoring of Lili’s temperature—were all showing signs of proper healing. The Listerian antisepsis was protecting Lili from infection. “The biggest concern right now is the pain,” Professor Bolk said.

  “What are you doing about that?”

  “A daily morphia injection.”

  “Is there any risk to that?”

  “Very little,” he said. “We’ll wean her off it over the next several weeks. But right now she needs it.”

  “I see.” Now that she had Bolk at her side, her concern about him faded. He was no different from most busy, important men: impossible to track down, but once you had him his full attention was yours.

  “I was concerned about her bleeding,” Professor Bolk continued. “She shouldn’t have been hemorrhaging like that. It made me think something was wrong with one of her abdominal organs.”

  “Like what?”

  “I didn’t know. A crushed spleen. A hole in the lining of the intestine. Anything was possible.” He crossed his legs. Greta could feel her heart quicken as she became frightened for Lili.

  “She’s all right, isn’t she? I shouldn’t be worried about her, should I?”

  “I opened her up,” Bolk said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I opened up her abdomen. I knew something was wrong. I’d been in enough abdominal cavities to know something was wrong.”

  For an instant Greta shut her eyes, and she saw, on the backs of her lids, a scalpel drawing a line of blood across Lili’s belly. She had to stop herself from imagining Professor Bolk’s hands, with the help of Frau Krebs, pulling apart the incision.

  “It’s true that Einar was indeed female. Or at least part female.”

  “But I already knew that,” Greta said.

  “No. I don’t think you understand.” He snatched a star-shaped sugar cookie from the tray brought by the maid. “It’s something else. Something rather remarkable.” His eyes were bright with interest, and Greta could tell he was the type of doctor who wanted something—a disease, a surgical procedure—named after him.

  “In his abdomen,” Bolk continued, “tangled in with his intestine, I found something.” Dr. Bolk folded his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “I found a pair of ovaries. Underdeveloped, of course. Small, of course. But they were there.”

  Greta decided at that moment that she should paint Professor Bolk: the square line of his shoulders; his hanging arms; the long neck emerging from a starched collar; the skin around his eyes crinkled and tender. She sat back in her chair. An opera singer was staying in the suite next door, and Greta could hear her singing Erda from Siegfried: the rolling middle register; the voice swooping through the air like a hunting hawk. The voice sounded like Anna’s, but that was impossible, because Anna was in Copenhagen, singing at the Royal Theatre again for the first time in years. When Lili was feeling better, Greta thought, she would like to take her to the opera, and she imagined them holding hands in the dark of the Semperoper while Siegfried made his way to Brünnhilde’s fire-rimmed mountaintop.

  “What does it mean for her?” Greta finally asked. “Are these ovaries real?”

  “It means I’m even more certain that this will w
ork.” And then, “We’re doing the right thing.”

  “You really think this explains the hemorrhaging, then?”

  “Probably,” he said, his voice rising. “It explains almost everything.”

  No, Greta thought; she knew the ovaries couldn’t explain everything.

  “There’s a grafting process I want to try,” Professor Bolk went on. “From a healthy pair of ovaries. It’s been done with testicles but never with the female organs. But there have been results.

  “I’d like to harvest some tissue from a healthy pair of ovaries and layer it over Lili’s,” he said. “But it’s a matter of timing. A matter of finding the right pair.”

  “How long will that take?” And then, “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “Not so long. I have a girl in mind.”

  “From the clinic?”

  “There’s a young girl from Berlin. We thought she was pregnant when she arrived. But it turns out a tumor has taken over her stomach.” He stood to leave. “She doesn’t know, of course. What would be the point of telling her now? But she might be the one. It might be only a month or so.” He shook Greta’s hand. When he was gone, Greta opened her double-lid paint box and began to set out the bottles and lay down a tarp, and then, through the walls, came the opera singer’s voice, slow and dark and climbing the notes alone.

  Several weeks later Greta and Lili were sitting in the clinic’s garden. The birch trees and the willows were shiny with buds. The hedges were still patchy, but dandelions had sprung up in the brick path. Two gardeners were digging holes for a row of cherry trees, burlap bags bundling their roots. The gooseberry shrubs were beginning to leaf.

  A circle of pregnant girls was on the lawn, on a tartan blanket, weaving blades of grass. Their white hospital gowns, loose in the shoulders, were trembling in the wind. The clock in the clinic’s eaves was striking noon.