The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  A woman on a bicycle pedaled by, jittering as she rode against the slick cobblestones. Then Lili tied a scarf over her head and headed down the street. Greta watched her glide away, and very soon Lili was only a blue coat supported by two thin ankles and shoes clickety-clacking in the drizzle.

  Greta followed. Lili apparently wasn’t in a hurry, moving out of the way of other people in the street, stopping to look in the window of a store that sold mops and other cleaning supplies. In the window was a pyramid display of black-and-white Zebralin cans, and a photograph of a woman scouring her stovetop. Lili turned and looked at her watch again; and then her ankles, which from a distance looked no thicker than a child’s, began to step quickly away from Greta. Down Snaregade with its half-timber building and a burned-out streetlamp and toward Gammel Strand. Soon she was walking along Slotsholms Canal, its curved railing tied with the lines of one-man dories. There was a white life preserver looped to the rail, and an abandoned sturgeon hanging heavily on a hook. Light from the Børsen on the other side of the canal fell onto the water, and the Børsen’s twisted-copper spire was bright in the night. Lili continued to walk, looking at the fishing boats secured on the other side of the canal, their black masts creaking.

  Lili stopped, unclasped her purse. It was too dark for Greta to see Lili’s eyes as she rifled through it, pulling out a handkerchief and a coin case and then the little enamel box that held her pills. Lili clicked it open. She put one on her tongue, and Greta thought she could make out Lili cringing as she swallowed the chalky tablet.

  Greta thought about calling out to Lili, but then stopped herself. She watched Lili walk farther into the night toward the Knippelsbro. It was April, and the winds were blowing in from the Baltic. As Lili reached the second bridge, the wind fluttered the tail of her scarf. She stopped to fix the knot at her throat. She stopped to look for traffic, but there was none. The Inderhavn was choppy. Greta could hear the icy water sloshing against the bridge’s double bascule. She heard the Swedish ferry setting out to make its last crossing of the evening.

  Greta didn’t know exactly where Lili was headed in Christianshavn, but she could imagine: an assignation probably, a rendezvous. Into her head popped a piece of an old song: There once was an old man who lived on a bog. She held the cold metal rail of Slotsholms Canal. The rail was bubbling with rust, and it smelled of salt, and Greta wrapped both hands around it as she watched Lili slip across the bridge, across the Inderhavn, the tail of her scarf fluttering like a child’s hand, waving goodbye.

  CHAPTER Twenty-seven

  By late spring the shiny green buds of the willow trees in Ørstedsparken had split open, and the rose beds around Rosenborg Slot were reddening with early leaf. The sky’s long winter canopy had lifted, and the evening began to stretch itself toward midsummer.

  Lili, who had gained even more strength, accepted—the way a child accepts a mother’s kiss—Henrik’s offer of marriage. He proposed the night before sailing to New York on the Albert Herring. He had packed his trunks, with their chipped-leather handles, and crated up his paints and brushes. “To New York!” Henrik kept saying. “To New York!” Lili, who had told the other salesgirls at Fonnesbech’s about Henrik’s imminent departure, lifted her head and said, “Without me?”

  They were in Henrik’s studio in Christianshavn, the scent of the canal coming through the window. The studio was empty except for the trunks and the crate marked with red letters: HENRIK SANDAHL, NEW YORK. The furniture’s removal had shoved snarls of dust and feathers into the corners, the little puffs undulating with the breeze from the window. Henrik, his hair recently sheared down to a fine cap of curls, said, “Of course not.” And then, “I’ve asked you before, and I’ll ask you again. Marry me?”

  Lili had always wanted this. She knew one day she would marry; sometimes, when she thought about it, she felt she could play no greater role in this world than as a man’s wife, Henrik’s wife. Silly thought, even Lili knew, something she would never repeat to Greta, who didn’t think like that at all. But that was how Lili felt. She imagined shopping the second floor of Fonnesbech’s, where the men’s clothing hung on racks, and fingering the material of French-cuff shirts until she found the right one for Henrik. She imagined a net shopping sack bulging with groceries—the slab of salmon, the stone potatoes, the bouquet of parsley—that would become their dinner. She imagined the dark that would fall across their bed, and the way the mattress would dent as Henrik moved toward her.

  “I want you to know one thing about me,” Lili said. She thought about the evening in Ørstedsparken years ago, when she left him crying her name. “Before we marry.”

  “Tell me anything.”

  “My name wasn’t Lili Elbe when I was born.”

  “I know that already,” he said. “I already told you that I know. I know who you are.”

  “No,” Lili said. “You know who I was.” She told him about Professor Bolk, about the stucco clinic along the Elbe, about Frau Krebs nursing her back to health. She’d never told anyone. Lili’s small circle—Greta, Hans, Carlisle, Anna—already knew about her, but she had never handed over the details of her nearly impossible transformation to anyone else. She had never asked anyone to enter that intimate circle, which sometimes felt too cramped to welcome another soul.

  “I thought something like this had happened,” Henrik said. Lili could detect no horror in his face. Even now, it was what she sometimes expected: upon hearing the news, the world would turn away in disgust. “I’m not surprised.”

  She asked him what he thought of her; do you think I’m a freak of some sort, she asked. For Lili’s notion of herself could flip-flop nearly by the minute: sometimes she looked in the mirror and exhaled and felt the settling peace of gratitude; other times she saw a man-woman, its head peering out of the collar of a dress. Greta and Hans told her not to think like that. But when she was alone, the self-doubt could creep back into her chest.

  Henrik told her he didn’t know what else he could say except that he was in love with her. “I’m in love with an extraordinary woman,” he said. Lili used to think she couldn’t return the love of a man who saw her for who she was. She once told herself that she would push away anyone who recognized her as anything less than female. It was why she had first turned her back on Henrik, that evening in the park. Now, she took his hand.

  “You can still love me like this?” she said.

  “Oh, Lili,” he said, rocking her shoulder. And then, “When will you ever understand?”

  “That’s why I can’t go to New York with you right away,” she said. “I need to return to Dresden. One last time.” She told him that Professor Bolk wanted her to return. He wanted to attempt a final metamorphosis. She didn’t want to explain the details to Henrik. He would worry, she thought. He might try to talk her out of it. He might believe it wasn’t possible.

  Last year, before she’d left Dresden, Professor Bolk had promised he could do something else for Lili, something that would make her even more of a woman than she already was. Something that Greta said was “crazy even to think about.” Something so magnificent it was like an all-white dream, but was, Professor Bolk promised in his basso voice, more than possible. As she was preparing to leave the clinic, Bolk had told Lili that the ovarian transplants had succeeded. He eventually wanted to try a uterine transplant to make her fruitful. “You mean I could become a mother?” Lili had asked. “Haven’t I done everything I’ve ever promised? And I can do this too,” Bolk had said. But Greta dissuaded her. “Why would you want to do that?” Greta had said, swatting her hands. “And besides, that’s utterly impossible. How on earth could he ever do that?”

  In the year since then, Lili had written Professor Bolk often, telling him of her recovery and her afternoons at the perfume counter and Greta’s difficulties painting and of Henrik. Less frequently than Lili wrote, Professor Bolk would reply, on a thin sheet of paper typed by Frau Krebs. “That’s wonderful news,” he’d answer. “If you ever think you�
�d like to proceed with the last operation, the one we discussed, please let me know right away. I’m even more confident about it than before.”

  Now she would go. She hadn’t yet told Greta. But Lili knew more than anything else that she had to return to Dresden to finish what Bolk had started. To prove to the world—no, not to the world but to herself—that indeed she was a woman, and that all her previous life, the little man known as Einar, was simply nature’s gravest mishap, corrected once and for all.

  “Then meet me in New York at the end of the summer,” Henrik now said, sitting on his trunk that the next day a deckhand would load onto the ship bound for New York via Hamburg. “It’s settled at last. We’ll marry there.”

  A few weeks later, on an early summer morning, Lili was sitting for Greta. She was wearing a white dress with a V collar and an eyelet hem, her hair pinned back. Greta had given Lili a small bouquet of white roses to hold in her lap. She asked Lili to cross her ankles and to lift her chin.

  There was so much to tell Greta now—the news of Henrik, and Lili’s determination to return to Dresden. How had she allowed so much to remain unsaid between them? A little secret had grown into a second world that Greta knew nothing about. Lili felt the regret sinking in her bowels: their long intimate life reduced to this.

  Greta had been working on the portrait for nearly a week, and it was going well: the light in Lili’s face was alive, and correct; so were her deep-set eyes, and the thin trace of blue in her temples, and the red heat self-consciously burning in Lili’s throat. As she stood at her easel, Greta was telling all this to Lili—how she looked, how the painting was turning out. “This one’s going to be beautiful,” Greta was saying. “At last I’m getting you right. It’s been a while, Lili. I was beginning to wonder.”

  Over the past year Lili had watched Greta turn out paintings that looked hurried and poorly planned. One portrait of Lili made her look grotesque, with black oily pupils and hair frizzy with static and swollen shiny lips and the veins in her temples bright and green. Others were weak in resemblance, or bland in color and conception. Not all were bad, but some, and Lili knew that Greta was struggling. It wasn’t like the years in Paris, when everything Greta painted had a shimmering quality, when strangers would look at the portraits of Lili and stroke their chins and say, “Who is this girl?” But even more surprising was Greta’s loss of desire to work. She let more and more days pass when she didn’t paint, strings of days that together would leave Lili wondering, while she was down at Fonnesbech’s, what Greta did to pass the time. “I’m still getting used to being back in Copenhagen,” Greta would sometimes say. “I thought we had left it for good.” Other times she’d say she simply wasn’t in the mood to paint—a sentiment so unlike Greta that Lili would reply, “Is everything all right?”

  But on this morning in early summer the most recent portrait looked beautiful. Greta was chatting freely, as she’d done each morning during the week. She was saying, “I don’t suppose I ever told you about the time I asked my mother to sit for a painting. It was when I went back to Pasadena during the war. She was imperious then, managing the household and the garden, searching the grounds for an untrimmed hedge. God save the gardener who left a leaf on the lawn. One day I asked her if I could paint her. She thought about it, and then made me schedule the time with our butler, Mr. Ito. And so I made five appointments to meet her in the breakfast room, where the morning light was good. Teddy Cross and I were seeing each other then, and Mother knew it, but she didn’t want to hear about it. I was eighteen, and about to burst over with love, and all I could think about, let alone talk about, was Teddy. How he spoke about things in his long, slow voice. How his shoulders curved down. How his hair felt to my hand. But my mother didn’t want to hear a single word about Teddy. She’d hold up her hand the moment I began. And so for five mornings I painted her as she sat in the chair at the head of the breakfast-room table, her back to a window with a bougainvillea just outside. It was during an autumn heat wave, and I watched the sweat bubble up on her lip. And all I could do was bite my tongue and say nothing about how I felt.”

  “How’d it turn out?” Lili asked.

  “The painting? Oh, she hated it. She said it made her look mean. But that isn’t true. It makes her look like a mother who wants to keep her daughter from stepping into something painful but knows she can’t. She knew nothing was going to keep me from Teddy. She knew it, and she pressed her lips together and sat as still as a corpse for five mornings in a row.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The painting? In Pasadena. In the upstairs hall.”

  Then Lili decided it was time to tell Greta. She could no longer keep anything from her. There was a terrible stretch of time in Einar’s life—from the time Hans left Bluetooth until the day he met Greta at the academy—when he lived without anyone to reveal his secrets to. Lili could remember that, the feeling of biting down on one’s thoughts and feelings and storing them up for no one. Then Greta had changed Einar’s life. Lili could remember the feeling of that, too, of realizing, gratefully, that at last the loneliness would fall away. How could she be less than honest with Greta for another minute? “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  Greta murmured. Her eyes focused on the canvas; she tightened the tortoiseshell comb holding back her hair. Her hand was moving quickly, dabbing at the canvas and then circling through the paints poured into the Knabstrup bowls, and then returning to the nearly finished portrait of Lili.

  But where to begin? What news should Lili deliver first: Henrik a few weeks ago about to board the Albert Herring, his hand fishing in his coat pocket for the diamond ring; the odd, sweet embarrassment they shared when the ring failed to slip past Lili’s knuckle; the telegram from New York, describing the apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street with the limestone front where they would live; and the most recent letter from Professor Bolk asking Lili when he should expect her, he was anxious to see her again. Yes, where to begin?

  “This is very hard for me,” Lili was saying. Lili imagined the shock that would flush into Greta’s face; and the anger curling her fists. Lili wished there were another way. Another way for her and Greta. “I’m not sure where to start,” Lili said.

  Greta set down her brush. “Are you in love?”

  In the apartment below, there was a slam of the door. A few heavy footsteps. A window flinging open.

  Lili sat back in the rope-bottom chair. She couldn’t believe that Greta had guessed. She couldn’t believe Greta had known—for Lili was sure that if Greta had known Lili was in love Greta would have tried to stop it. And it was then that Lili realized how wrong she was about Greta. Once again, Lili had been wrong.

  “I am,” Lili said.

  “Are you sure?” Greta asked.

  “Yes, very.”

  “Does he love you?”

  “I can’t really believe it, but he does.”

  “Well, then, not much else matters, does it?” Sunlight was on her, and Lili thought about all the evenings Greta had brushed out Lili’s hair, Greta’s breasts against Lili’s back. She thought about the bed they shared, and how their pinkies would curl around each other in the night. And how the morning light would fall on Greta’s rested face, and Lili would kiss her cheek thinking, Oh, if only I could be as beautiful as you!

  “Are you happy for me?”

  Greta said she was. Then she asked who he was, and Lili held her breath and then told Greta it was Henrik.

  “Henrik,” Greta said. Lili studied Greta’s face for a reaction. She wondered if Greta would remember him; or if the fact that it was he would make it even harder on Greta. But her face held still, nothing moving except an almost imperceptible puff on her lips.

  “He always loved you, didn’t he?”

  Lili nodded. She almost felt ashamed. She thought of the scar on Henrik’s forehead, from the automobile accident, and she welled up with relief that very soon she would begin a life in which she could kiss that cross
hatched line every night. “We’re getting married at the end of the summer.”

  Greta said softly, “Married.”

  “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  Greta was corking her bottles of paint. “It’s all good news,” she said. She wasn’t looking at Lili as she wiped the lip of each bottle with the hem of her smock and then pushed the cork in. She moved across the room and knelt to roll a blank canvas. “There are still times when I see you, and I think to myself, Not so long ago we were married. You and me, we were married and we lived in that small dark space between two people where a marriage exists.”

  “It was you and Einar.”

  “I know it was Einar. But really, it was you and me.”

  Lili understood. She could remember what it felt like to fall in love with Greta. She could recall what it was like to wonder idly about when Greta would next show up at the door. She could remember the small delicate weight of a photograph of Greta in the breast pocket of Einar’s shirt.

  “I’m doing my best to get used to everything,” Greta said. She was speaking so quietly that Lili could barely hear her. The horn of a motorcar blared from the street, and then there was the screech of brakes, then a silence. An accident must have been avoided, a near miss on the street outside the Widow House, two chrome bumpers shining at each other beneath the Copenhagen sun, which was rising and rising and would hold itself aloft until late in the night.

  “Where will you marry?” Greta asked.

  “In New York.”

  “New York?” Greta was at the sink, scrubbing the paint from her fingernails with a little wire brush. She said, “I see.”

  Downstairs, the sailor began calling for his wife. “I’m home!” he yelled.

  “But there’s something I want to do first,” Lili said. As the morning moved on, the heat was rising in the apartment. The bun of her hair was beginning to feel heavy, the V collar of the white dress sticking to her chest. Nationaltidende had predicted record heat, and something in Lili both welcomed it and despised it at the same time.