“All I need to do is remove it and refold the—” Lili couldn’t bear the details, and so instead she looked to Greta, whose lap was filled with an open notebook. Greta was sketching Lili at this moment, looking from her to the notebook and back, and when Greta’s eyes met Lili’s, Greta set down her pencil and said, “She’s right. Can’t you hurry up the next operation, Professor Bolk? What’s the wait?”
“I don’t think she’s ready. She isn’t strong enough yet.”
“I think she is,” Greta said.
They continued to argue, while Lili shut her eyes and imagined Einar as a boy on the lichen rock watching Hans return a shot with his tennis racquet. She thought of Henrik’s moist hand in hers at the Artists Ball. And the heat of Carlisle’s eyes on her early that damp morning at the market. And Greta, her eyes narrowing into concentration, as Lili posed on the lacquer trunk. “Do it now,” she said softly.
Professor Bolk and Greta stopped. “What did you say?” he asked.
“Did you say something?” Greta said.
“Please just do it now.”
Outside in the back-park the new girls, whom Lili didn’t recognize, were gathering their books and their blankets and were reentering the clinic for the evening. The willows were sweeping the lawn of the Municipal Women’s Clinic, and beyond the girls a rabbit dashed into a gooseberry shrub. The current of the Elbe held the flat-bottomed freighters, and, across the river, the sun hit the copper roofs of Dresden and the great, almost silver dome of the Frauenkirche.
She shut her eyes and dreamed, somewhere in her future, of crossing the square of Kongens Nytorv, in the shadow of the statue of King Christian V, and the only person in the world who would stop and stare would be the handsome stranger whose heartswell would force him to touch Lili’s hand and profess his love.
When Lili opened her eyes, she saw that Greta and the professor were looking down toward the end of the Wintergarten. A tall man was standing in the door frame. He moved toward them, a silhouette, his coat over his arm. Lili watched Greta watch the man. Greta pushed her hair back over her ears. Her finger brushed at the scar on her cheek. Her hands rubbed together, the bracelets tinkling, and she said, her voice a soft gasp, “Look.” And then, “It’s Hans.”
Part Four
Copenhagen, 1931
CHAPTER Twenty-four
They returned to the Widow House, but over the years the building had declined. While in Paris, Greta had hired a man named Poulsen to manage the upkeep. Once a month she mailed a check, enclosed with a note of instruction. “I suppose the gutters need clearing by now,” she’d write. Or, “Please rehinge the shutters.” But Poulsen followed none of the orders, tending to little beyond sweeping the foyer and burning the trash. When Greta and Hans motored into Copenhagen on a morning when the snow was flinging itself against the city’s sills, Poulsen disappeared.
The facade had faded to a pale pink. On the upper floors, gull droppings caked the window frames. A pane of glass was missing in an apartment where a fidgety woman in her nineties had died in the night, strangled by the twist of her bedsheet. And a fine black grime streaked the walls of the stairwell that led to the top floor.
It took Greta a few weeks to ready the apartment for Lili. Hans helped, hiring the crew to paint and the waxer to polish the floors. “Has she ever thought about living on her own?” he asked one day, and Greta, startled, replied, “What? Without me?”
Slowly she eased Lili into the sea of life in Copenhagen. On slushy afternoons, Greta held Lili’s hand and strolled her through the boxhedges, leafless in late winter, of Kongens Have. Lili would shuffle her feet and sink her mouth into the wooly wrap of her muffler; the surgeries had left her with a steady pain that flared up as her morphine wore off. Greta would say, feeling the tap of pulse in Lili’s wrist, “Take your time. Just let me know when you’re ready.” She supposed the day would come when Lili would want to set out into the world by herself. She saw it in Lili’s face, in the way she would study the young women, packages of butter rolls from the bakery in their hands, walking busily across Kongens Nytorv each morning, women young enough for hope to still flicker in their eyes. Greta heard it in Lili’s voice when she would read aloud from the wedding announcements in the newspaper. How Greta dreaded the day; she sometimes wondered whether she would have gone along with everything if she had realized, at the outset, that it would end with Lili departing the Widow House, a slim suitcase in her hand. There were days during their first few months back in Copenhagen when Greta sometimes believed that she and Lili could create a life for themselves on the top floor of the Widow House and neither of them would leave for any longer than an afternoon. Sometimes, when she and Lili were sitting next to the iron stove, she came to think that the past years of upheaval and evolution had come to a close, and now she and Lili could paint and live peacefully, alone but together. And wasn’t that the inexhaustible struggle for Greta? Her perpetual need to be alone but always loved, and in love. “Do you ever think I’ll fall in love?” Lili had begun to ask, as spring returned and the gray seeped out of the harbor, replaced by the blue. “Do you think something like that could happen even to me?”
With the spring of 1931 came the contracting markets and the plummeting currencies and a general black cloud of ruin, economic and otherwise. Americans began to sail away from Europe, Greta read in the newspapers; she saw one booking air-and-sea passage at the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd office, a woman with a beaver collar and a child on her hip. A painting, even a good one, could hang on the wall of a gallery and remain unsold. It was a drab world for Lili to emerge into; it wasn’t the same world.
Each morning Greta would nudge Lili, who sometimes couldn’t wake on her own. Greta would pull a skirt from the hanger, and a blouse with wooden buttons, and a sweater with wrists patterned with snowflakes. She would help Lili dress, and serve her coffee and black bread and smoked salmon sprinkled with dill. Only by mid-morning would Lili become fully alert, her eyes blinking back the morphine, her mouth dry. “I must have been tired,” she would say apologetically, and Greta would nod and answer, “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
When Lili was out on her own—either shopping at the Gammel Strand fish market or at the pottery class Greta enrolled her in—Greta would try to paint. Only six years had passed, but it seemed longer since she had last lived in the apartment with its ghostly smell of herring. Some things were the same: there were the horns of the ferries bound for Sweden and Bornholm, and the afternoon light, which sliced through the windows just before the sun dipped beyond the city, silhouetting the needles of the church spires. Standing at her easel, Greta would think about Einar then and Lili today, and Greta would shut her eyes and hear a tinkling bell of memory in her head but then recognize it as the ping! of the Cantonese laundress who was still calling from the street. She regretted nothing, Greta believed.
The king granted their divorce with a speed that alarmed her. Of course they could no longer live as man and wife, now that they were both women and Einar lay in memory’s coffin. Even so, the officials, who wore black bow ties and whose fingers shook nervously, surprised Greta when they filed the paperwork with an uncharacteristic alacrity. She had expected—even counted on—a bureaucratic delay; she nearly imagined the request lost in an accordion file. Although she didn’t like to admit it, she was like many young women from Pasadena who thought of divorce as a sign of moral flaccidness; or, more specifically, Greta thought of it as a sign of lacking a Western spine. She found herself unusually concerned about what others might think and say about her—as if she were so frivolous and weak-minded that she had simply married the wrong man. No, Greta didn’t like to think of herself that way. She pressed for a death certificate for Einar Wegener, which no one in any position of authority agreed to, although everyone in the bureau knew of the nature of her case. There was one official, whose nose was long and wore the twitch of a white mustache just beneath it, who conceded that it was closest to the truth. “I’m afraid I ca
n’t rewrite the law,” he said, a stack of papers nearly reaching his mustache. “But my husband is dead,” Greta tried, her fists landing on the counters that separated her from the room of bureaucrats, with their sleeve bands and their abaci and their yellow smell of tobacco and pencil shavings. “He should be declared dead,” she tried on her last visit to the government office, her voice softening. Above the room of bureaucrats, watching them, was one of her early paintings: Herr Ole Skram in a black suit, vice-minister in the king’s government for less than a month, noted only for his remarkable and well-witnessed death in the tangled tether of a hot-air balloon. But Greta’s pleas failed. And so Einar Wegener officially disappeared, grave-less and gone.
“She needs to lead her own life,” Hans said one day. “She should get out on her own and make her own friends.”
“I’m not stopping her from doing that.” Greta had run into him at the entrance of the Royal Academy of Arts, under the arch. It was April, and the wind was easterly, chilled and salted from the Baltic. Greta turned up her collar against the wind. Students in sawed-off gloves were passing by. “And you, too,” he said.
Greta said nothing, the chill creeping down her spine. She could see out into Kongens Nytorv. In front of the statue of King Christian V, a boy with a blue scarf dangling to his knees was kissing a girl. The thing about Hans was this: he always reminded her of what she didn’t have; of what she’d convinced herself—when she sat in her reading chair waiting for Lili to return, her heart quickening at every false sound in the stairwell—she could go without. What was she afraid of?
“How about driving up to Helsingør with me tomorrow?” he proposed.
“I don’t think I can get away,” she said. The wind picked up, hurtling through the academy’s portico, where the walls were scraped from lorries too wide to pass. Greta and Hans went inside, into one of the side halls, where the plank floors were unvarnished and the walls painted a soft soap-green and the banister running up the staircase was white.
“When will you realize she’s no longer yours?”
“I never said she was.” And then, “I was talking about my work. It isn’t easy to take even a day off from my work.”
“How would you know?”
She felt a sudden loss, as if the cruelty of progress and time had just then grabbed from her her days as a student at the academy; as if her past had remained hers until today. “Einar’s dead,” she heard herself say.
“But Lili isn’t.” He was right. After all, there was Lili, probably this very minute sweeping the apartment, her face caught in a windowpane of sun. Lili with her pretty bony wrists and her eyes nearly black. Just yesterday she had said, “I was thinking about taking a job.”
“Don’t you see I’m a little sad?” Greta said.
“Don’t you see that I want you to tell me that?”
“Hans,” she said. “Maybe I should go.” It was then that Greta realized they were at the foot of the steps where she and Einar had first kissed, and fell in love. The white balustrades and the plank steps worn from decades of tardy students with incomplete assignments shoved up beneath their arms. The paned windows were hooked against the cold. The hall was quiet; no one was around. Where had all the students gone? Greta heard a door somewhere catch in its latch. Then everything fell silent again, and something imperceptible passed from Hans to her, and out the window, in the courtyard, in the long shadow of the academy, the boy with the blue scarf kissed his girl, again and again, and yet again.
CHAPTER Twenty-five
Lili was sitting in the rope-bottom chair, wondering if now was the right time to tell Greta. Lili could see through the window the masts of the herring boats on the canal. Behind her, Greta was painting a portrait of Lili’s back. Greta said nothing as she outlined the painting, and Lili heard only Greta’s bracelets tinkling. Smoldering in the pit of her groin was the leftover pain, so steady that more and more Lili had taught herself to ignore it; the inside of her lip was shredded from biting down. Professor Bolk had promised it would eventually go away.
She thought of the girls at the clinic. The day before Professor Bolk released Lili, they threw her a party in the garden. Two girls pulled a white cast-iron table onto the lawn, a third carried from her room a primrose in a cachepot painted with bunnies. The girls tried to spread a yellow cloth across the table, but the wind was keeping it aloft. Lili sat at the head of the table, on a cold metal chair, watching the cloth fluttering as the girls tried to tie down its corners. The sunlight poured through the yellow cloth, filling Lili’s eyes, the cachepot in her lap.
Frau Krebs gave Lili a box tied with a ribbon. “From the professor,” she said. “He wanted you to have it. He had to go up to Berlin. To St. Norbert Hospital to attend a surgery. He said to tell you goodbye.” The ribbon was tight, and Lili couldn’t pick it open, and so Frau Krebs produced an army knife from her apron and quickly cut through it, which disappointed the girls, because they wanted to weave it through Lili’s hair, which had grown beyond her shoulders during her stay.
The box was large and packed with tissue, and inside Lili found a double-oval silver frame. In one oval was a photograph of Lili lying in the tallgrass on the bank of the Elbe; the photo must have come from Greta, because Lili had never walked down to the river with Professor Bolk. And peering through the second oval was the face of a small man beneath a hat; his eyes were dark and shadowy and his skin so white it was almost glowing, and his neck looked thin in his collar.
From the rope-bottom chair Lili could see the double-portrait frame on the bookshelf. She could hear the scratch of Greta’s pencil against the canvas. Lili’s hair was parted down the middle and fell to both sides of her neck. The amber beads hung around her throat, and she could feel the cold gold of the clasp. Lili had a vision of a stocky woman with hammy legs and callused thumbs who had once worn the beads; Lili of course did not know the woman, but she could see her in rubber and canvas boots in a sphagnum field, the beads slithering down the crevice of her breasts.
It didn’t bother Lili, what she remembered and what she didn’t. She knew that most of her life, her previous life, was like a book she had read as a small child: it was both familiar and forgotten. She could recall a sphagnum field, muddy in spring and pocked with holes belonging to a family of red fox. She could recall the rusty, flat blade of a hoe slapping into the peat. And the hollow clack! of amber beads swinging around a throat. Lili could remember the silhouette of a tall boy with a large head walking along the ridge of the sphagnum field. She didn’t know who it was, but Lili knew that there had been a time when she was a small frightened child watching that silhouette, black and flat, on the horizon of the field. Something in her chest would swell as the silhouette moved closer, as his silhouette arm pulled on the brim of his hat; this Lili knew. She could recall telling herself that, yes, she was in love.
“You’re blushing,” Greta said from her easel.
“Am I?” Lili felt the heat in her neck, and the quick collection of sweat around the rim of her face. “I don’t know why,” she said.
But that wasn’t true. A few weeks earlier, she had been on her way to Landmandsbanken to lock away in the safe-deposit box the pearl-and-diamond brooch Greta had given her. But before heading to the bank, Lili had stopped in a basement store to buy two bristle brushes for Greta. The clerk, an old man with knuckles that were pink and soft, was reaching up to a shelf of turpentine. He was assisting a customer, a man with corkscrew hair growing past his ears. Lili couldn’t see the customer’s face, and she felt annoyed with him for having asked for the largest tin of turpentine on the highest shelf. “I’m going to fetch a pair of gloves. I’ll be right back,” the customer said to the clerk, who was still balancing on the ladder. The man turned around and passed Lili, saying, “Excuse me, frøken.”
As the man slipped by her, Lili pressed herself against the shelf and held her breath. His hair brushed her cheek, and she smelled a faint scent of grain. “Excuse me,” he said again.
Then Henrik saw her. His hand fell to her shoulder: “Lili? Is it you?”
They stepped outside, the sack holding the tin of turpentine swinging on Henrik’s arm. He was older now, the skin around his eyes thinner and faintly blue. His hair was darker, like stained oak, without much shine. And his throat had thickened, and his wrists. He was no longer pretty; he had become a handsome man.
They went for a coffee around the corner, settling around a table at a café. Henrik told Lili about himself; about his paintings of the sea that sold better in New York than in Denmark; about the automobile accident on Long Island that nearly killed him, the spoke-wheel of his Kissel Gold Bug flying off the running board and into his forehead; about his high-cheeked fiancée from Sutton Place who left him for nothing and no one else, simply because she didn’t love him anymore.
“I forgot,” Lili said suddenly at the café. “I forgot to buy Greta’s brushes.”
He walked her back to the store, only to find it closed. Lili and Henrik were on the street, the store’s sign swaying on its iron arm. “I have some extra ones in my studio,” he said. “We can go get them if you like.” His eyes were tear-shaped, and she had forgotten how short and stubby his eyelashes were. Again there was the scent of grain, like the shuck of wheat.
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