The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  The curtains were made of a blued eyelet and they hung down and across the floorboards, fanning themselves out like wedding trains. Hans knocked and said, through the door, “I’m down the hall, Greta. If you need anything.” There was something in his voice. Greta could sense his curled knuckle pressed against the paneled door, his other hand gently on the knob. She could imagine him in the hall, lit by a single wall sconce at the top of the stairs. She imagined the point of his forehead pressing the door.

  “Nothing now,” she said. And there was a silence, only the frogs cho rusing on their patches of peat, and the owls in the elms. “All right then,” Hans said, and Greta couldn’t quite hear him retreat to his room, his stockinged feet padding across the runner. Their time would come, she told herself. All in time.

  The next day Greta met Baroness Axgil in the breakfast room. The room looked out toward the bog, which sparkled through the trees. Around the room potted ferns balanced in iron stands, and a collection of blue-and-white porcelain plates was secured to the wall. Baroness Axgil was gaunt and long-limbed, her hands backed with rubbery veins. Her head, also Borreby in size and shape, was held up by a throat tight with tendon. Her silver hair was pulled back snugly, slanting her eyes. The baroness sat at the head of the table, Hans opposite her, Greta in the middle. The houseman served smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs and triangles of buttered bread. Baroness Axgil said only, “I’m afraid I don’t remember an Einar Wegener. W-E-G, did you say? So many boys came through the house. Did he have red hair?”

  “No, it was brown,” Hans said.

  “Yes. Brown,” said the baroness, who had invited Edvard into her lap and was feeding him strips of salmon. “A nice boy, I’m sure. Dead how long?”

  “About a year,” Greta replied, and she looked to one end of the breakfast-room table and then to the other and was reminded of another breakfast room on the other side of the world where a woman not unlike the baroness still reigned.

  Later in the day Hans led her down a path alongside a sphagnum field to a farmhouse. It had a thatched roof and timber eaves, and a puff of smoke was rising from the chimney. Hans and Greta didn’t approach the yard, where there were hens in a coop and three small children scratching the mud with sticks. A woman with yellow hair was in the door, squinting against the sun, watching her children, two boys and a girl. A pony in its pen sneezed, and the children laughed, and old Edvard IV trembled at Greta’s leg. “I’m not sure who they are,” Hans said. “Been there awhile.”

  “Do you suppose she’ll let us in if we ask? To have a look around?”

  “Let’s not,” Hans said, his hand falling to the small of her back, where it remained as they returned across the field. The long blades of grass swiped at her shins. And Edvard IV chugged behind.

  In the graveyard, there was a wooden cross marked WEGENER. “His father,” Hans said. A grassy grave in the shade of a red alder. The graveyard was next to a whitewashed church, and the ground was uneven, and flinty, and the sun burning the dew off the rye grass made the air smell sweet.

  “I have his paintings,” she said.

  “Keep them,” Hans said, his hand still on her.

  “What was he like then?”

  “A little boy with a secret. That’s all. No different from the rest of us.”

  The sky was high and cloudless, and the wind ran through the red alder’s leaves. Greta stopped herself from thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Summer in Jutland, no different from the summer days of his youth, the days when Einar certainly was both happy and sad at once. She had returned home without him. Greta Waud, tall in the grass, her shadow lowering itself across the graves, would return home without him.

  On the drive back to Copenhagen, Hans said, “What about California? Are we still going?”

  The Horch’s twelve cylinders were running powerfully, the vibration shaking her skin. The sun was bright, and the top was down, and there was a strip of paper swirling about Greta’s ankles. “What did you say?” she yelled, holding her hair in her fist.

  “Are we going to California together?” And just as the wind was rushing around her, sending her hair and the lap of her dress and the strip of paper whirling, her thoughts began to pass chaotically through her head: her little room in Pasadena with the arched window overlooking the roses; the casita on the lip of the Arroyo Seco, now let to tenants, a family with a baby boy; the blank windows of Teddy Cross’s old ceramics studio on Colorado Street, transformed after the fire into a printer’s press; the members of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society in their felt berets. How could Greta return to that? But there was more in her head, and then Greta thought of the mossy courtyard of the casita, where in the light filtering through the avocado tree she painted her first portrait of Teddy Cross; and the little bungalows Carlisle was building on the streets off California Boulevard, where newlyweds from Illinois were settling; and the acres of orange groves. Greta looked to the sky, to the pale blue that reminded her of the antique plates on the walls of the baroness’s breakfast room. It was June, and in Pasadena the rye grass would have burned out by now, and the palm fronds would be brittle, and by now the maids would have pulled the cots onto the sleeping porches. There was a sleeping porch at the rear of the house; its screens were on hinges, and as a girl she would open them up and stare out, across the Arroyo Seco to the Linda Vista hills, and she would sketch the rolling dry-green sight of Pasadena. She imagined unpacking her paints and screwing together her easel on the sleeping porch and painting that vista now: the gray-brown of the blur of the eucalyptus, the dusty green of the stalks of cypress, the flash of pink stucco of an Italianate mansion peeking through the oleander, the gray of a cement balustrade overlooking the expanse of it all.

  “I’m ready to go,” Greta said.

  “What’s that?” Hans called, through the wind.

  “You’ll love it out there. It will make the rest of the world seem very far away.” She reached over and stroked Hans’s thigh. It had all come to this: she and Hans would return to Pasadena, and she realized no one out there would ever fully understand what had happened to her. The girls from the Valley Hunt Club, now married certainly, with children enrolled in tennis clinics on the club’s courts, would know nothing about her except for the fact the she had returned with a Danish baron. Already Greta could hear the gossip: “Poor Greta Waud. Widowed again. Something mysterious happened to the latest. A painter of some sort. Some sort of mysterious death. In Germany, I think I heard. But not to worry—now she’s back, and this time with a baron. That’s right, little Miss Radical has returned to Pasadena, and as soon as she marries this fellow she, of all people, will become a baroness.”

  That was part of what lay ahead for Greta, but she took comfort in the thought of going home. Her hand was on Hans’s thigh and he smiled at her, his knuckles white around the Horch’s wheel as he steered them back to Copenhagen.

  A letter from Carlisle waited for her. After she read it, she slipped it into the side pocket of one of the trunks she was packing. So many things to ship home: her brushes and her paints and dozens of notebooks and sketches of Lili. It was just like Carlisle not to send enough news: the operation took longer than Bolk had thought, almost a full day. Lili was resting, sleeping from the morphia injections she still receives. I’ll have to stay in Dresden longer than I planned, Carlisle wrote. Another several weeks. Her recovery will take longer than any of us guessed. Progress has been slow so far. The professor is a kind man. He sends his regards. He says he’s not worried about her. If he’s not worried about her, then I suppose we shouldn’t be either, wouldn’t you agree?

  A week later Greta Waud and Hans Axgil boarded the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd for the first leg of their trip to Pasadena. They would fly to Berlin, and then to Southampton; from there they’d sail. The aeroplane, reflecting the fine summer day, was on the tarmac of the Amager aerodrome. Greta stood with Hans and watched the skinny boys load their trunks and crates into the silver belly of the aero
plane. Farther down the tarmac was a cluster of people around a platform, where a man in a top hat was giving a speech. He had a beard, and a little Danish flag on the corner of his lectern was flapping in the wind. Behind him was the Graf Zeppelin, long and stormy gray, like an enormous ribbed bullet. The people in the crowd began to wave little Danish flags. She had read in Politiken that the Graf Zepp was setting out on a Polar flight. Greta watched the crowd cheer, as the zeppelin hovered above the tarmac. “Do you think they’ll make it?” she asked Hans.

  He was reaching for his calfskin valise. The aeroplane was ready for them. “Why shouldn’t they?”

  The man making the speech was a politician she didn’t recognize. Probably running for parliament. And behind him was the Graf Zepp’s captain, Franz Josef Land, in a sealskin cap. He wasn’t smiling. His eyebrows were bunched together over his glasses, and he looked concerned.

  “It’s time,” Hans said.

  She took his elbow, and they found their seats in the aeroplane. She could see the zeppelin through her window, and the crowd, which was moving away from the aircraft. Men in shirtsleeves and suspenders were beginning the untethering. The captain was standing in the doorway of his little cabin, waving farewell.

  “He looks as if he wonders if he’ll ever come back,” Greta said, as the aeroplane’s porthole door locked with the turn of a wheel.

  The voyage out on the Empress of Britannia was smooth, and the passengers sat in their striped lounge chairs on the teak deck, and Greta thought of the handstand she performed when she was ten. She screwed together her easel, twisting its butterfly bolts through the holes in its legs. She pulled a blank canvas from one of her trunks, nailing it to a frame. And on the ship’s deck, she began to paint from memory: the hills of Pasadena rising out of the Arroyo Seco, dry and brown in early summer, the jacaranda trees having shed their blossoms, and the last day lily folding in the heat. With her eyes closed, she could see it all.

  In the mornings Hans kept to himself in his stateroom, going through his papers and preparing for his arrival in California, where they would marry in the garden of the Waud house. In the late afternoons he would move a deck chair to her side. “We’re off at last,” he would say.

  “Homeward bound,” she would say. “I never thought I wanted to go home.”

  It had come to this, Greta would think over and over, the moist tip of her brush dipping into the paint. The shift of the past, the sprawl of the future; all of it she had navigated both rashly and cautiously, and it had come to this. Hans was handsome with his legs stretched out on the chaise. He was half in the sun, half out, Edvard IV at his feet. The ship’s engines churned on and on. Its bow pried the ocean in two, splitting the endless dimpled water into halves, cutting what had once seemed interminably one into two. Greta and Hans each continued to work in the slanting light, in the air heavy with salt, through the dusk falling red and flat over the blank, shrinking sea, until the moon rose and the white party lights strung along the ship’s rail came on and the chill of eve would send them to their stateroom, where they would be together at last.

  CHAPTER Twenty-nine

  It was late July before Lili was awake long enough during the day to remember anything. For nearly six weeks she had lolled in and out of consciousness, spitting up in her sleep, hemorrhaging between her legs and in her abdomen. Every morning and night Frau Krebs would replace the bandages taped over her pelvis, pulling away the old ones that looked like scraps of royal velvet, so red and bright they were. Lili was aware of Frau Krebs changing the dressing and the gauze, and the welcoming sting of the morphia needle, and, on many days, the pressure of the rubber ether mask. Lili knew that someone was there laying a damp rag across her forehead, changing it when it warmed.

  On some nights she would wake and recognize Carlisle asleep in the chair in the corner, his head back against the cushion, his mouth open. She didn’t want to wake him—so kind he was to spend the night at her side. She’d tell herself to let him rest; she’d turn her head in the pillow and look at Carlisle, his face oiled with sleep, and his fingers curled around the loop holding the cushion to the chair’s back. She wanted him to sleep through the night: and she’d watch his chest rise and fall, and think of the day they spent together before this last operation. Carlisle took her to a beach on the Elbe, where they swam in the current, and then sunned themselves on a blanket. “You’ll make quite a mother,” Carlisle said. Lili wondered why it was so easy for him to imagine it, but not Greta. When she closed her eyes Lili sometimes thought she could smell the powdery scent of a bundled infant. She could nearly feel the little dense weight of a child in her arms. She told this to Carlisle, who said, “I can see it too.”

  On the riverbank he ran his hand over his arm, pushing off the water. His wet hair was matted around his face, and then he said, “It’s hard for Greta, this part is.”

  A tourist steamer was coughing up black exhaust, and Lili braided the fringe of the blanket, weaving in blades of grass. “I’m sure in some ways she misses Einar,” Carlisle said.

  “I can understand that.” She filled with that strange feeling she got when Einar was mentioned: like a ghost passing through her, it was. “Do you think she’d come visit me?”

  “Here, in Dresden? She might. I don’t see why not.”

  Lili turned on her side and watched the black column of exhaust rise and shift. “You’ll write her, then? After the operation?”

  A few days after the surgery, when Lili’s fever stabilized, he wrote Greta. But she didn’t reply. He wrote again, and again there was no answer. He telephoned but heard through the static only a tinny, endless ring. A telegram couldn’t be delivered. It took a cable to Landmandsbanken to discover that Greta had returned to California.

  Now, in the middle of the night, Lili didn’t want to disturb Carlisle’s sleep, but she could barely remain silent. The pain was returning, and she was gripping the sash of the blanket, shredding it in fear. She concentrated on the bulb in the ceiling, biting her lip, but soon the pain had spread through her body, and she was screaming, begging for a morphia injection. She cried for ether. She whimpered for her pills laced with cocaine. Carlisle began to stir, his face lifting; for an instant he stared at her, his eyelids fluttering, and Lili knew he was trying to figure out where he was. But then he was awake and went to find the night nurse, who herself was asleep at her station. Within a minute the ether mask clamped down around Lili’s nose and mouth and she slipped away for the rest of the night.

  “Feeling any better today?” Professor Bolk asked on his morning rounds.

  “Maybe a little,” Lili would try.

  “The pain down at all?”

  “A bit,” Lili would reply, even though it wasn’t true. She’d try to push herself up in her bed. When the professor entered her room she would worry about how she looked; if only he would knock and give her a chance to apply her coral lipstick and her Rouge Fin de Théâtre, which was sitting on the table in its red tin the size of a cookie just beyond her reach. She must be quite a sight, she’d think as the professor, so handsome in his crisp lab coat, scanned down the paperwork on his clipboard.

  “Tomorrow we should try to get you to walk,” the professor would say.

  “Well, if I’m not ready tomorrow, then I’ll surely be ready the day after,” Lili would say. “Most likely the day after tomorrow I’ll be up to it.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “You’ve already done so much,” Lili would say.

  Professor Bolk would turn to leave, but then Lili would force herself to ask what she most wanted to know: “Henrik is waiting for me in New York. Do you think I’ll make it to New York by September?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  The professor’s voice, when he reassured her this way, was like a hand on her shoulder. She would then nod off to sleep, dreaming of nothing in particular but knowing, vaguely, that all would work out.

  Sometimes she’d hear the professor and Carlisl
e talking outside her door. “What can you tell me?” Carlisle would say.

  “Not much. She seems pretty much the same today. I’m trying to get her more and more stable.”

  “Is there anything we should be doing for her?”

  “Just let her sleep. She needs her rest.”

  Lili would turn on her side and nod off, wanting more than anything to obey the professor’s orders. If she knew anything at all, she knew he was always right.

  One day a voice in the hall woke her up. It was familiar, a woman’s voice from long ago, coppery and large. “What’s he doing for her?” Lili heard Anna ask. “Hasn’t he got any other ideas?”

  “Only in the last couple of days did he begin to worry,” Carlisle said. “Only yesterday did he admit that the infection should have cleared up by now.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I’ve been asking that myself. Bolk says there’s nothing to do.”

  “Is she taking anything?”

  Then in the hall there was a crash of two carts, and Lili couldn’t hear the voices, just Frau Krebs telling a nurse to be more careful.

  “The transplant isn’t working,” Carlisle said. “He’s going to have to remove the uterus.” And then, “How long are you here for?”

  “A week. I have two Carmens at the Opernhaus.”

  “Yes, I know. Before the operation, Lili and I were out and she saw the poster. She knew you would be coming at the end of the summer. She’s had that to look forward to.”

  “And her marriage.”

  “You heard from Greta?” Carlisle said.

  “She wrote me. She’s probably in Pasadena by now. Settled. You know about her and Hans?”

  “I was supposed to be returning now myself,” Carlisle said.

  Lili couldn’t hear what Anna said next. She wondered why Anna hadn’t come into the room yet. She could picture Anna bursting through the door and throwing back the yellow curtain. She’d be wearing a green silk tunic beaded in the collar, a matching turban swirling up from her head. Her lips would be as bright as blood, and Lili could imagine the mark they’d leave on her cheek. Lili thought about calling out, “Anna!” Crying, “Anna, are you going to come in and say hello?” But Lili’s throat was dry, and she felt incapable of prying her mouth open to say anything at all. It was all she could do to turn her head to look to the door.