Einar’s train entered Germany. It stopped in a brown field, the turned soil silver with frost. Outside, the sun was weak in the January sky, and the birch trees rimming the field huddled against the wind. All he could see was the flat of the fields and the reach of the gray sky. There was nothing else. Nothing but a diesel tractor abandoned in winter, its red metal seat trembling on its spring.
The border patrol checked passports on the train. Einar could hear the officers in the next compartments, their boots heavy on the carpet. They spoke rapidly but they sounded bored. There was the thin whine of a woman explaining her papers, and one of the officers saying, “Nein, nein, nein.”
Two officers arrived at Einar’s compartment, and there was a flutter in his chest, as if indeed he were guilty of something. The officers were young and tall, their shoulders pressed tightly into their uniforms, which looked to Einar uncomfortably starched. Their faces were shiny beneath the beaks of their caps, as shiny as the brass buttons on their cuffs, and Einar suddenly thought that the officers, who were barely out of their youth, were made of brass themselves: all gold and shiny and cold. They had a metallic smell, too, probably a government-supplied shaving cream. One of the officers had chewed his nails to stubs, and his partner’s knuckles were scraped.
Immediately Einar felt as if the officers were disappointed with him-as if, no matter what, he was incapable of causing any trouble. The one with the raw fingernails demanded Einar’s passport; when he saw it was Danish, he became even less interested. He opened it while looking at his partner. Neither of the officers, who were breathing through their mouths, checked the information in Einar’s papers, or held up the photograph, taken so long ago in a musty-smelling photographer’s studio steps from Rundetårn, to compare it to Einar’s face. The officers said nothing. The first one threw the passport into Einar’s lap. The second, whose eyes narrowed in on Einar, slapped his own stomach, the brass buttons on his cuff shaking, and Einar almost expected the dong! of a bell. Then the officers were gone.
Later, the train hauled itself into speed again, and the afternoon fluttered down over the fields of Germany, where in spring rows of rape would erupt with their violent yellow blossoms and their seductive scent of the nearly dead.
The rest of the ride Einar was cold. Greta had asked him if he wanted her to join him. Einar thought he had hurt her when he said no. “But why not?” she had asked. They were in the front room of the casita, and Einar didn’t answer. It was hard for him to say, but he thought that he might not have the courage to go through with it if Greta was with him; she would have reminded him too much of their previous life. They’d been happy, he kept telling himself. Einar and Greta had been in love. If she had come along, Einar feared, he wouldn’t keep his appointment with Professor Bolk; Einar might have instead told Greta they should switch trains in Frankfurt and head south, back to Menton, where the blank sunlight and the sea could make everything seem simple. As he was saying “No, I’ll go alone,” he could almost smell the lemon trees in the park in front of the municipal casino. Or, Einar might have said he was returning to Bluetooth, where now another family lived in the farmhouse next to the sphagnum fields; he might have tried to run away, and taken Greta with him, to the room of his youth where the feather mattress had been crushed thin and needly, and the wall by his bed was scratched with line drawings of Hans and Einar asleep on a rock; where the paint on the legs of the kitchen table was picked away from when Einar would hide under there and listen to his father call to his grandmother, “Bring me more tea before I die.”
Before Einar left Paris, Carlisle had asked him if he knew what he was getting into. “Do you really know what Bolk wants to do to you?” In fact Einar didn’t know the details. He knew Bolk would transform him, but even Einar had a hard time imagining just how. A series of surgeries, he knew. The removal of his sex, which more and more had come to feel parasitically worthless, the color of a wart. “I still think you might want to see Buson instead,” Carlisle had tried. But Einar had chosen Greta’s plan; in the night, when no one was awake in the world but the two of them, when they lay quiet beneath the bedclothes, their pinkies clasped, still there was no one he trusted more.
“Let me come with you,” Greta had tried one last time, drawing his hand to her breast. “You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.”
“But I can only do it if I’m alone. Otherwise…” He paused. “I’ll be too ashamed.”
And so Einar traveled by himself. He could see his reflection in the window of the train. His face was pale and thin around the nose. It made him think of a hermit who hadn’t lifted his face to the window of his hovel in many years.
Lying on the seat across from Einar was a Frankfurter Zeitung, left behind by a woman traveling with an infant. In the paper was an obituary of a man who had made a fortune in cement. There was a photo, and the man looked sad in the mouth. There was something in his face-the baby fat filling his chin.
Einar sat back in the seat and watched his reflection in the window. As the evening moved in quickly, the reflection grew more shadowy and angled, so that by dusk he didn’t recognize his face in the glass. Then the reflection disappeared, and outside lay nothing but the distant twinkle of a pork village, and Einar was sitting in the dark.
They wouldn’t know where to begin with his obituary, he thought. Greta would write a draft and deliver it to the newspaper’s desk herself. Maybe that was where they would begin, the young reporters with the thinning blond hair from Nationaltidende. They would take Greta’s draft and rewrite it, running the obituary and getting it wrong.
Einar felt the train rattle beneath him, and he thought of how his obituary should begin:
He was born on a bog. A little girl born as a boy on the bog. Einar Wegener never told anyone, but his first memory was of sunlight through the eyelet in his grandmother’s summer-solstice dress. The baggy sleeves with the eyelet holes reaching into the crib to hold him, and he could recall thinking-no, not thinking, but feeling-that the white eyelet of summer would surround him forever, as if it were another necessary element: water, light, heat. He was in his christening gown. The lace, woven by his dead mother’s tatting aunts, hung down around him. It hung past his feet, and it would later remind Einar of the lace drapes that hung in the homes of Danish aristocrats; the blued cotton would fall to the baseboard and then fan onto the black-oak planks of a floor polished with beeswax by a bony maid. In the villa where Hans had been born there were drapes like that, and Baroness Axgil would snap her tongue-which was the thinnest tongue Einar had ever seen, and nearly forked-against the roof of her mouth whenever he, the girl born as a boy on the bog, moved to touch them.
The obituary would leave out that part. It would also fail to mention Einar, drunk on Tuborg, pissing into the canal the night he sold his first painting. He was a young man in Copenhagen, his tweed pants bunching up on the waist, his belt pelted with a mallet and a nail to drill another notch. He was at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship for boys from the country; no one expected him to paint seriously, only to learn a trick or two about framing and foreground, and then return to the bogs, where he could paint the eaves of the town halls of northern Jutland with scenes depicting the Norse god Odin. But then, on that early spring afternoon when the air was still crystallizing in his lungs, a man in a cloak stopped by the academy. The students’ paintings were hanging in the hallways, up and down the walls of the open stairwell with the white balustrade where, years later, Greta would take Einar’s head into her hands and fall in love with him. Einar’s little scene of the black bog was up, in a frame of faux gold leaf he paid for with the money he’d earned from submitting to medical experiments at the Kommunehospitalet.
The man in the cloak spoke softly, and word spread through the halls of the academy that he was a dealer from Paris. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with a strip of leather, and the students could barely see his eyes. There was a little blond mustache curling down around his mouth, and the faint smell of newsprint falling behind him like exhaust. The acting director of the academy, Herr Rump, who was the less talented descendant of Herr G. Rump, introduced himself to the stranger. Rump escorted the man through the academy halls, where the floors were gray and unvarnished and swept clean by orphan girls not old enough to conceive. Rump tried to halt the stranger in front of the canvases painted by his favorite pupils, the girls with the wavy hair and apple-perky breasts and the boys with the thighs like hams. But the man in the cloak, who was reported to say, although no one could ever confirm it, “I have a tongue for talent,” refused to be swayed by Herr Rump’s suggestions. The stranger nodded in front of the painting of the mouse and the cheese done by Gertrude Grubbe, a girl with eyebrows so yellow and fluffy it was as if a canary had shed two feathers across her face. He also paused by the scene depicting a woman selling a salmon painted by Sophus Brandes, a boy whose father had been murdered on a ferry to Russia, due to a single leer at the murderer’s adolescent bride. And then the man in the cloak stopped in front of Einar’s little painting of the black bog. In the painting it was night, the oaks and willows only shadows, the ground as dark and damp as oil. In the corner, next to the boulder speckled with mica, was a little white dog, asleep in the cold. Only the previous day Herr Rump had declared it “too dark for the Danish school,” and thus had given it a less-than-ideal spot on the wall, next to the closet where the orphan girls stored their hay-brooms and changed into the sleeveless apron-dresses that Herr Rump insisted they wear.
“This one is good,” the man had said, and his hand reached into his cloak and pulled out a billfold made of-again, this was rumored too-lizard leather. “What’s the artist’s name?” he asked.
“Einar Wegener,” said Herr Rump, whose face was filling with the hot bright color of choler. The stranger handed him one hundred kroner. The man in the cloak pulled the painting from the wall, and then everyone at the academy-Herr Rump and the students who had been watching from the cracks in classroom doors and the adminstratrices in their pinned-up blouses and the orphan girls who were secretly plotting a plan, which would later fail, to push Herr Rump from an academy window, and, last of all, Einar Wegener, who was standing on the stairs exactly where Greta would later kiss him-had to blink. For the whole incident was so remarkable that the entire academy blinked in concert, every last member, whether artist or not, and slightly shook its collective head. And when they all opened their eyes, the sun shifted around the spires of Copenhagen and filled the academy’s paned windows and the man in the cloak was gone.
The obituary would miss that day as well. It would also miss that one afternoon in August with Greta. It was before they were married, just after the war had ended. Greta had been back in Copenhagen only a month. She arrived at his office door at the academy wearing a straw hat pinned with dahlias, and when he opened the door she said, “Come on!” They hadn’t seen each other since she’d left for California as the war was breaking out. Einar asked, “What’s new?” and she only shrugged her shoulders and said, “Here or in California?”
She led him out of the academy, into Kongens Nytorv, where the traffic was swirling around the statue of Christian V on horseback. In front of the Royal Theatre was a German soldier missing a leg; his canvas cap was on the sidewalk, catching coins. Greta took Einar’s arm. She said, “Oh.” She left the man money, and asked his name, but the man was so shell-shocked he could not follow her.
“I didn’t realize,” Greta said as she and Einar continued walking. “It all seemed so far away in California.”
They cut through the corner of Kongens Have, where the boxhedges needed a trim and children were running away from their mothers and on the lawn young couples were lying on blankets patterned with plaid and wishing the rest of the world would go away and give them the privacy of two. Greta didn’t say where they were headed, and Einar knew not to ask. The day was bright and warm, and the windows along Kronprinsessegade were open, the summer eyelet curtains fluttering. A delivery wagon passed, and Greta took Einar’s arm. She said, “Don’t say anything.”
But Einar’s heart was pounding, because the young girl who had kissed him on the academy’s stairs had floated back into his life as fast as she had departed five years earlier. And during those five years he’d thought of Greta off and on, the way he would recall a disturbing and fascinating dream. During the war he dreamed of her in California. But the image of her dashing through the academy’s halls, her paintbrushes shoved up under her arm, the metal ferrules reflecting the light, had also stayed with him over the course of the war. She was the busiest student he’d ever known, off to balls and ballets but always ready to work, even if it meant late at night when most others needed an aquavit and sleep. When he thought of the ideal woman, more and more he’d come to think of Greta. Taller than the rest of the world, and faster. He could recall one day lifting his head from his desk in his office at the academy and from his window seeing her run through the honking traffic circling Kongens Nytorv, her blue-gray skirt like a plow through the grills and bumpers of the carriages and the motorcars, whose drivers were squeezing the rubber bulbs of their horns. And how she would wave her hands through the air and say, “Who cares?” For certainly Greta didn’t care about anything but that which made sense to her, and as Einar became more and more silent in his adulthood and lonelier at his canvas and more convinced that he was a man who would never belong, he began to ponder over his ideal version of a woman. And that was Greta.
And then she turned up at his office on that warm August afternoon and now she was leading him through the streets of Copenhagen, beneath the open parlor windows along Kronprinsessegade, where they could hear the squeal of children ready for their summer holiday on the North Sea, and the yelp of lapdogs ready for a stretch of their tiny legs.
When they reached her street Greta said, “Be sure to duck.” He didn’t know what she meant, but she took his hand and they hid behind the parked motorcars as they moved down the street. It had rained the night before, and the curbs were wet, and the sun on the wet pneumatic tires brought the scent of warm rubber to his nose, a scent that he would later think of when he was driving around Paris with Carlisle the summer when they-all of them-were plotting Lili’s future. Greta led them from car to car, as if they were dodging enemy fire. They worked their way down the block like this, down the block in Copenhagen where lived Herr Janssen, proprietor of the glove factory in which a fire had killed forty-seven women hunched at their foot-pedaled machines; down the block where lived Countess Haxen, who at eighty-eight had the largest collection of teacups in all Northern Europe, a collection so vast that even she didn’t mind when a tantrum overcame her and she hurled one of them at the wall; down the block where the Hansens lived with their twin daughters, girls who were so blond and beautiful in duplicate that their parents were in constant fear of kidnapping; down toward the white house with the blue door and the window boxes planted with geraniums that were as red as hen’s blood and that smelled, even from across the street, bitter and full and faintly obscene. It was the house where Greta’s father had lived during the war, and now that it was over, he was returning to Pasadena.
From behind the hood of a Labourdette Skiff, Greta and Einar watched the moving men haul the shipping crates down the steps and into the cargo of their waiting lorry. Einar and Greta could smell the geraniums and the shipping straw, and the sweat of the men as they heaved the crate carrying Greta’s canopy bed. “My father’s leaving,” Greta said.
“Are you?”
“Oh, no. I’m going to stay on my own. Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“At last I’m free.”
But Einar didn’t see, not just then. He didn’t see that Greta would need to be alone in Denmark, relationless in Europe, in order to become the woman she saw herself as. She needed to put an ocean and a continent between herself and her family in order to feel that at last she could breathe. What Einar didn’t understand then was that it was another of Greta’s brazenly American traits, that bubbling need to move away and reinvent. Never before had he imagined himself doing the same.
And this was another part of his life that the obituary written by Nationaltidende would miss. They wouldn’t know where to look for it. And like most newspapermen, the young reporters with the thinning hair wouldn’t be careful enough to check the source. Time was running out. Einar Wegener was slipping away. Only Greta would remember the life he had led.
The obituary that would never be written should have followed with this:
There was a day last summer when Lili woke up in her room in the casita and found herself unbearably hot. It was August. For the first time since they were married, Greta and Einar had decided not to holiday in Menton. Mostly because of his deteriorating health. The bleeding. The weight loss. The eyes sinking deeper into their sockets. And, sometimes, his inability to hold his head up at the table. No one knew what to do. No one knew what Einar wanted to be done. And Lili woke up on that hot morning, when the exhaust from the lorries delivering to the charcuterie on the corner was rising through the open window and dusting her face with grime. She was lying in her bed, wondering if she would rise at all today. And the morning passed, as she stared at the curled plaster in the ceiling, at the white petals in the center around the base of the chandelier.
Then she heard voices in the front room. A man, and a second. Hans and Carlisle. She listened to them talking to Greta, although Greta couldn’t be heard, so it was like hearing two men talk and talk. Their scratchy voices made Lili think of three-day growth on a throat. Lili must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew the sun was coming into the room from a different angle, now from over the green copper roofs across the street, where a hawk had built its nest, but Hans and Carlisle were still talking. And then they were at her door, and then inside the room, where Lili had thought more and more of installing a lock in the door but never came to doing so. She watched them enter, and it seemed more like a memory than something that was actually happening. They were saying, “Come on. Get up.” And then, “Little Lili.” She could feel them pull on her arms; again, the pull was more like memory than an actual tug. One of them brought a cup of milk to her mouth. A second pulled a dress over her head. They led her to the pickled-ash wardrobe to find a pair of shoes, and she stepped into a panel of sun and felt her skin ignite. And yet Hans and Carlisle sensed this, and so they found a parasol, a paper umbrella with bamboo ribs, and quickly opened it.
Somehow they got her to the Tuileries. And there they walked, Lili’s elbow linked with each of theirs. They moved beneath the poplars, in the swaying shadows that, to Lili, looked like large fish about to break the surface of the sea. Hans pulled up three green folding chairs, and they sat together in the afternoon as the children passed and the young lovers strolled and the lonely men with the quick eyes headed over to their side of the park, near L’Orangerie. Lili thought of the last time she was alone in the park; a few weeks earlier she had been out for a walk, and two little boys passed her, and one of them had said, “Lesbienne.” The boys were probably ten or eleven, blond with down on their cheeks, and their shorts showed most of their hairless thighs, and yet these pretty little boys had managed to hurl something so cruel, and wrong.
Lili sat with Hans and Carlisle, and she was hot in the dress they had chosen for her: one of the capped-sleeved dresses printed with conch shells that had come from the rented apartment in Menton. She knew then that her life with Einar was over. The only question that remained was whether she would have a life as Lili. Or would it all be over, and she would rest? Would Einar and Lili exit, hand in hand? Bones buried in the bog.
And Einar knew that his obituary would miss that as well. It would report everything about him except the life he had lived. And then the rhythm of the train’s speed slowed, and he opened his eyes and the porter called down the passageway: “Dresden! Dresden!”
Greta was sitting on the velvet ottoman. Her hair was falling in her face, and Edvard IV was in her lap, shaking. With Einar in Dresden, she suddenly felt incapable of settling down to work. She could think only of Einar in Germany, making his way to Professor Bolk’s laboratory. She had an image of Lili lost on a street, and Einar frightened on the professor’s examination table. Greta had wanted to travel with him, but he wouldn’t let her; he said this was something he had to do on his own. She couldn’t understand that. There was another train to Dresden only three hours after Einar’s, and she’d bought a ticket. She would turn up at the Municipal Women’s Clinic half a day after him, and there would be nothing Einar could do. Lili would want her there, Greta knew. But as she was packing her bags and making plans to leave Edvard IV with Anna, Greta stopped herself. Einar had asked her not to come: she heard his careful words over and over, the way they had caught in his throat.
Greta was older now. When she looked in the mirror there was a faint, handsome line on each side of her mouth, two lines that reminded her of the entrance to a cave-a bit of an exaggeration, she knew, but even so. She had promised herself she wouldn’t care about lines and wrinkles or even the few stray gray hairs that had grown into her temples like fur caught in a broom. But she did, although she had a hard time admitting it. Instead, she let it pick at her, as the months and the years passed and she settled more into her role as American artist abroad, while California receded farther and farther, as if the calamitous earthquake predicted by a doctor of physics on the palm-shaded campus of Cal Tech had already erupted on the Golden State and launched the whole coast into the Pacific; Pasadena slipping farther and farther away, a lost ship, a lost island, now only memory.
Except of course for Carlisle. During the autumn he had shuffled around Paris, the cuffs of his trousers muddying in the rain. The ache in his shin came and went with the clouds that rolled in off the Atlantic; and he and Lili would set out from the casita beneath their umbrellas, Lili wrapped up in her pink rubber coat that looked so heavy Greta worried she might collapse. Greta and Carlisle had had words about Einar’s choice of doctor. He told her plainly that he thought she was doing the wrong thing for Einar: “He could end up regretting this,” Carlisle had said, conceding. It stung her, this criticism, and she continued to feel its blow through the autumn as he changed the compress on Lili’s forehead, or as he sat on Lili’s bed playing poker with her, or as they bundled themselves up to head out for a night at the opera. “Sorry you can’t join us,” Lili would call with her small voice. “Don’t work too much!”
Sometimes Greta would feel burdened by her work, as if she were the only one in the world laboring while the rest were off and out, enjoying themselves. As if everything had come to rest on her shoulders, and should she stop and put down her head, their small, intimate world would implode. She thought of Atlas, who held up the world; and yet that wasn’t right, because not only did she hold it up, she had also created it. Or so she sometimes thought. On some days she was exhausted, and would wish she could tell someone this, but there was no one, and so she spoke to Edvard IV as he ate his bowl of chicken skin and gristle.
No one except Hans.
The day after Einar left for Germany, Hans came to see her. He had just visited his barber, and the hair on the back of his neck was bristly, the skin pink with irritation. He was telling her about a new idea for an exhibition: he wanted to approach the headmistress of a private girls’ school to see about hanging a series of Lili paintings in the halls. Hans was pleased with the idea, from the way he was laughing into his coffee cup.
Over the past couple of years he had seen other women, Greta knew: an actress from London; an heiress to a jam-preserve fortune. Hans was careful not to tell Greta about them, avoiding mentioning whom he’d spent the weekend with in Normandy. But he would tell Einar, and the news would fly back to Greta in Lili’s breathless way: “An actress whose name is up in lights above Cambridge Circus!” Lili would report. “Isn’t it exciting for Hans?”
“That must be very nice,” Greta would reply, “for him.”
“Where’s Einar gotten himself to?” Hans now said.
“He’s gone to Germany to look after his health.”
“To Dresden?”
“Did he mention it to you?” She looked around the apartment, at her easels and her paintings leaning against the wall and the rocker. “Lili went with him as well. It’s quiet here without them.”
“Of course she went with him,” Hans said. Down on one knee, he began to lay out on the floor the most recent paintings of Lili. “He told me about it.”
“About what?”
“About Lili. About the doctor in Dresden.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Greta. Do you really think I don’t know by now?” He lifted his face to hers. “Why have you been afraid to tell me?”
She leaned against the window. Outside the rain was frozen, and it was tapping lightly on the glass. There were a half-dozen new pictures of Lili, a series of her at her toilette, the add-a-pearl necklace Greta had given her around her throat. The paintings showed the pink in Lili’s cheek and the reds in her makeup tray, bright in contrast to the silvery-white of her flesh. In the paintings Lili was wearing a sleeveless dress with a scoop neck, and her hair was curled up under. “Can you really see Einar in them?”
“I do now,” Hans said. “He told me this past fall. He was having a hard time deciding what to do, whether to have Dr. Buson treat him or Professor Bolk. He just turned up at the gallery one day, just walked into the back office. It was raining and he was wet, so at first I didn’t see that he’d been crying. He was white, even whiter than Lili in the paintings. I thought he might collapse right then. It seemed he was having a hard time breathing, and I could see his pulse throbbing in his throat. All I had to do was ask what was wrong, and he began to tell me everything.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said it explained a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“About Einar and you.”
“About me?” Greta said.
“Yes, about why you’ve been so defensive all these years, so very private. In some ways you took it on as your secret, not just his.”
“He’s my husband.”
“I’m sure it’s been difficult for you.” Hans stood. The barber had also given him a shave but missed a spot on his cheek.
“Not as hard as it’s been on him.” Greta felt a wave of relief pass through her; at last Hans knew. The subterfuge with Hans could end; she could feel its tide receding. “So what do you think of our secret?”
“It’s who he is, right? How can I blame him for who he is?” He moved to her, took her in his arms. She could smell the menthol of aftershave, and the hair on the back of his neck tickled her wrist.
“Do you think I’ve done the right thing sending him to Bolk?” she said. “You don’t think I’ve made a mistake, do you?”
“No,” he said. “It’s probably his only chance.”
He held Greta at the window, as the traffic sloshed quietly in the wet street below. But she couldn’t let him hold her much longer, she told herself; she was still married to Einar, after all. She’d have to pull away soon, she’d have to send Hans back to the gallery with the pictures. His hand was at the small of her back, the other on her hip. Her head was against his breast, the menthol coming with every breath. Every time she tried to free herself, she felt inert. If she couldn’t be with Einar, then she wanted Hans, and she shut her eyes and nuzzled her nose into his neck, and just as she felt herself relax and sigh and feel the years of loneliness fall away, she heard the scratch of Carlisle’s key turning in the front door.
Einar paid the driver five reichsmark, and then the taxi pulled away. Its headlamps swept past the winter skeleton of an azalea and sloped into the street. Then the circular drive was dark, except for the glow of the lantern lamp hanging above the door. Einar could see his breath, and he felt the cold seeping into his feet. There was a black rubber button beside the door, and Einar waited before pressing it. Moisture was collecting along the letters of the brass plaque. DRESDEN MUNICIPAL WOMEN’S CLINIC. A second plaque listed the clinic’s doctors. Dr. Jürgen Wilder, Dr. Peter Scheunemann, Dr. Karl Scherres, Prof. Dr. Alfred Bolk.
Einar rang the bell and waited. He heard nothing inside. As far as he could tell, the clinic looked more like a villa, set in a neighborhood of linden and birch trees and iron fences with spindles like spears. There was the sound of an animal in the underbrush, a cat or a rat digging against the cold. A curtain of fog was descending, and Einar nearly forgot where he was. He rested his forehead against the brass plaque and closed his eyes.
He rang again. This time he heard a door inside, and a voice, as buried as the animal sound in the shrub.
At last the door opened, and a woman in an efficiently gray skirt, suspenders pressing against her breasts, stared at him. Her hair was silver and cut sharp along the jaw, her eyes also gray. She looked as if she never slept much, as if the pillow of skin in her throat kept her head upright while all the world rested.
“Yes?” she said.
“I’m Einar Wegener.”
“Who?”
“I’m here to see Professor Bolk,” Einar said.
The woman pressed her hands against the pleats in her skirt. “Professor Bolk?” she said.
“Is he here?”
“You’ll have to telephone tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” He felt something close in around him.
“Do you think your girl is here?” the woman asked. “Is that why you’ve come?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Einar said. He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, on his bag holding Lili’s clothes.
“Do you have a room where I could stay?” Einar heard himself asking.
“But this is a women’s clinic.”
“Yes, I know.”
He turned away and headed into the dark street, where he waited at a corner lit by a cone-shaped lamp hanging above the intersection on a wire. Eventually a taxi stopped, and it was closer to dawn than dusk by the time he settled into the Höritzisch Hotel near the Hauptbahnhof in the Altstadt. The Höritzisch’s walls were papered with a trellis pattern and were thin enough to pass along the transactional rates of the prostitute in the room next door. In the night, Einar lay in his clothes on the eiderdown. He listened to a train pull into the station, its wheels screaming along the track. In the station, a few hours before, beneath the canopy of blackened glass, a woman in a coat with rabbit-fur trim had asked him to take her home, and just thinking of her now made his face burn with shame. Her voice, and the voice of the whore next door, began to fill Einar’s head, and the image of their painted mouths and the slits in their flimsy skirts, and Einar closed his eyes and became frightened for Lili.
When he returned to the clinic the next day, Professor Bolk was unable to see him. “He will call you,” said Frau Krebs, in the same gray skirt. When he heard this, Einar, on the clinic’s portico beneath the lantern lamp, began to cry. The day was no warmer than the previous night, and he began to shiver as he heard the gravel of the driveway crunch beneath his feet. He had no other business to attend to, so he wandered around the city, both hungry and nauseous.
Altmarkt and its stores were busy in the wind, the aisle of the Hermann Roche pharmacy filled with bank clerks on their lunch hour. The buildings were covered with soot that was darker than the sky, and the awnings were painted with the names of the stores whose bronze-case cash registers were sitting more and more idle with each passing month of recession: CARL SCHNEIDER, MARIEN APOTHEKE, SEIDENHAUS, RENNER KAUFHAUS, and HERMANN ROCHE DROGERIE. Motorcars were parked in the center of the square, and there were two boys in tweed hats and knickers, their shins blue and chapped, parking the cars. A woman with her curls pinned up climbed out of her half-door sedan; she was crammed into a blue stretch dress, the wedge of her stomach testing the strength of the threads holding the buttons to her blouse. The two boys steered her car into a narrow space, and then they began to laugh and waddle, mocking the woman, who was applying lipstick obliviously.
The smaller boy looked up and saw Einar and laughed again. The boys looked like brothers, with sharp-tipped noses and cruel matching laughs. Einar realized the boys were no longer laughing at the fat woman, who was picking her way through the traffic and over the tram tracks to make her way into Hermann Roche, which was having a half-price sale on Odol mouthwash and Schuppen pomade. They were laughing at Einar, whose face was hollow and whose topcoat was flapping against the poles of his legs. Einar watched the fat woman through the plate-glass window fingering the cans of Odol. He wished he could be her, examining the prices on the pyramid of cans, tossing a tin of Schuppen into her basket. Einar imagined the woman driving her sedan home to Loschwitz and placing the toiletries in the cabinet above her husband’s sink.
He continued to walk around the city looking in shop windows. A milliner was having a sale, and there was a line of women out the door. A grocer was setting out a crate of cabbage. And Einar stopped at the window of a kite shop. Inside, a man with glasses on the tip of his nose was bending wood rods at a workbench. All around him were different types of kites. A kite like a butterfly, like a pinwheel. Dragon kites and ones with foil in their wings like flying fish. There was an eagle kite, and a small black kite with bulging yellow eyes like a bat’s.
Einar went to the box office of the Semperoper and bought a ticket to Fidelio. He knew that homosexuals gathered at the opera, and he feared that the woman behind the glass, which was smudged with breath, might think he was one of them. She was young and pretty, with green eyes, and refused to look at Einar, cautiously pulling his money through the bowled slot in the window as if she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted it. And once again Einar became exhausted by the world failing to know who he was.
And then Einar climbed the forty-one steps of the Brühlsche Terrace, which overlooked the Elbe and the right bank. The terrace was planted with square-cut trees and bordered by an iron rail against which strollers leaned to examine the endless arc of the Elbe. The wind was running with the river, and Einar turned up his collar. A man with a cart was selling bratwurst in a bun and little glasses of wine. He handed Einar his food and then poured the apple wine. Einar balanced the wine on his knee as he took a bite of the steaming bratwurst, its skin tight and crisp on the end. Then he took a sip of wine and closed his eyes. “You know what they call this?” the peddler said.
“What?”
“The Brühlsche Terrace. You know they call it the balcony of Europe.” The man smiled, a few teeth missing. He was waiting for Einar to finish the wine so he could take back the glass. The terrace looked out across the river to the concave towers of the Japanese Palace and beyond that to the ox-eyed roofs of Neustadt and the villas with their well-wooded gardens and then to all of open-fielded Saxony. From the terrace, it seemed as if the rest of the world lay beneath Einar, waiting.
“How much do I owe you?” Einar asked.
“Fifty pfennig.” The river was gray and choppy, and Einar handed the man the aluminum-bronze coin.
He finished his wine and returned the glass to the peddler, who wiped it clean with the tail of his shirt. “Good luck to you then, sir,” the peddler called, pushing his cart. Einar watched him, the yellow-stone facades and green-copper roofs of Dresden behind him, the great rococo buildings that made it one of the most beautiful cities Einar had ever seen-the Albertinum, the domed Frauenkirche, the Grünes Gewölbe, the elegant plaza in front of the opera house-a handsome backdrop to the little man and his bratwurst cart. Above the city, the sky was pewter and hammered with storm. Einar was cold and tired, and, standing to leave the Brühlsche Terrace, he nearly felt his past shift beneath him.
Two more days passed before Professor Bolk sent word he could meet with Einar, who returned to the Municipal Women’s Clinic on a bright morning, the street curbs wet and shining. In daylight the clinic looked larger, a cream-colored villa with evenly arched windows and a clock in the eaves. It was set in a small park of oak and birch and willow trees and holly bushes.
Frau Krebs admitted him, escorting him down a hall with a mahogany floor black and dull with wax. The hall was lined with doors, and Einar lifted his eyes and felt embarrassed by his curiosity as he looked into each room. On one side of the hall each room was filled with a panel of sunlight, and there were twin beds by the windows, their eiderdowns plumped like sacks of flour.
“The girls are in the Wintergarten right now,” Frau Krebs was saying. On the nape of her neck, just beneath her hairline, was a birthmark that looked like the ghost of spilled raspberry jam.
The clinic had thirty-six beds, reported Frau Krebs, one pace ahead of Einar. Upstairs were the departments of surgery, internal medicine, and gynecology. Across a courtyard, she pointed out, was a building with a sign above the door that said PATHOLOGY.
“The pathology building is our latest addition,” Frau Krebs said proudly. “It’s where Professor Bolk keeps his laboratory.” The building was square and built from yellow stucco that made Einar think-and he felt ashamed for doing so-of Greta’s chicken-pox scar.
Einar’s first meeting with Professor Bolk was brief. “I’ve met your wife,” he began.
Einar, who was hot beneath his suit and the starched butterfly-collar shirt that was grabbing at his throat, settled onto the examination table. Frau Krebs entered the room, her black shoes squeaking, and handed the professor a file. He was wearing gold-wire glasses that reflected the overhead light and hid the color of his eyes. He was tall and younger than Einar expected, handsome in the jaw. Einar understood why Greta liked him: he had hands so quick, and an Adam’s apple so light, that when he spoke Einar became almost hypnotized by his birdlike hands moving through the air, landing on the corner of his desk where three wood boxes organized his papers, or by the point of his Adam’s apple punctuating his sentences like the persistent beak of a woodpecker.
Professor Bolk requested Einar to strip and stand on the scale. The stethoscope pressed coldly against his chest. “I understand you’re a painter,” Professor Bolk said, but continued, “You’re awfully thin, Mr. Wegener.”
“I don’t have much of an appetite anymore.”
“Why not?” The professor pulled a pencil from behind his ear and made a note in the file.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you try to eat? Even when you aren’t hungry?”
“Sometimes it’s difficult,” Einar said. He thought of the nausea during the last year; waking in the sunlight of the apartment with a stomach that felt as if it had just the night before succumbed to Hexler’s X ray. And the pail with the bent handle he had begun keeping at the side of his bed, which Greta would empty in the morning with never a word of complaint or pity, only a long hand gently on his forehead.
The examination room had green tiles running halfway up the walls; in the mirror above the hand sink Einar could see the green reflecting in his face, and he suddenly thought he must be the sickest person at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic, because most of the women who came there were not ill, but rather burdened with the results of a single night with a handsome young man whom they would never see again.
“Tell me what you paint,” Professor Bolk said.
“Not much these days.”
“Why is that?”
“Because of Lili,” Einar ventured. Little Lili hadn’t yet worked her way into the conversation, and he wondered what Professor Bolk knew of her; had he heard about the pretty girl with the stemlike throat trying to break out of the dry, sick skin of old Einar?
“Has your wife told you about my plans?” Professor Bolk asked. The green tiles and the harsh overhead light left no olive pall in Professor Bolk’s face; his skin was the fresh color of baking dough. Was it only Einar whose face had turned dimly green? Einar brought his fingertips to his cheeks and felt the sweat.
“Did she tell you how I want to proceed?”
Einar nodded. “She told me you were going to turn me into Lili once and for all.” That wasn’t all Greta had told him. She had also said, “This is it, Einar. This is our only chance.”
“Can you join me tonight for dinner at the Belvedere?” Professor Bolk said. “Do you know where it is? On the other side of the Elbe? By the Brühlsche Terrace?”
“I know where it is.”
Professor Bolk’s hand, the palm of which was surprisingly damp, fell on Einar’s shoulder as he was saying, “Einar, I want you to listen to me. I understand. I understand what you want.”
They met for dinner at the Belvedere. The hall of the restaurant was white and gold, and through the colonnade, outside, the evening fog was deepening to a rich blue on the Elbe and the distant heights of Loschwitz. There were potted palms in cachepots at each of the waiter stands. On a stage an orchestra was playing the overtures of Wagner.
A waiter in tails brought a bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket. “This isn’t a celebration,” Professor Bolk said as the waiter pushed the mushroom cork from the bottle. A pop! filled their circle of the dining room, and women at neighboring tables turned their necks, buried in winter velvet, to see.
“Maybe it should be,” Einar said, his voice mixing with the light clang of the flat-bladed fish knives the waiter was placing on the table. Einar thought of Lili, whom he had considered sending to dinner at the Belvedere in his place.
With his fish knife Professor Bolk picked apart his trout. Einar watched the blade, hooked at the tip, peel away the flimsy skin, baring the pink flesh. “To tell the truth,” Professor Bolk was saying, “the first time I met someone like you, I was a little unsure of what to say. At first I didn’t think anything could be done.”
Einar nearly gasped. “You mean you’ve met someone else like me?”
“Didn’t Greta tell you about my experience with another man”-and here he leaned in over his plate-“in your position?”
“No,” Einar said. “She told me nothing of it.”
“There was one man I wanted to help,” Professor Bolk said. “But he ran away just before I was to begin. Too scared to go through with it. Which I understand.”
And Einar sat in his chair and thought, To go through with what? Einar could tell that Professor Bolk believed Einar knew more than he actually did. Professor Bolk talked about the previous patient. The man was so convinced that he was a woman that he had taken to calling himself Sieglinde Tannenhaus, even when he was dressed as a man. He was a conductor on a train route between Wölfnitz and Klotzsche and insisted everyone call him Fräulein. Not one of the passengers understood what he meant. They’d only stare blankly at him in his blue uniform and black tie.
“But then on the morning of the first surgery, the man disappeared,” Professor Bolk explained. “He slipped out of his room in the clinic, somehow getting by Frau Krebs. Then he was gone. Eventually he returned to his job on the tram, now wearing the female version of the conductor’s uniform, a dark blue skirt with a canvas belt.”
The waiter returned to pour wine. Einar could guess what the professor was promising. The hooked blade of the fish knife winked with light from the candelabrum on the banquette behind them. Einar supposed it would be a swapping of sorts. He would exchange the spongy flesh that hung between his legs for something else.
Outside, the Elbe was flowing blackly, and a paddlewheel ship bright with lights passed beneath the Augustusbrücke. Professor Bolk said, “I’d like to begin next week.”
“Next week? Can’t you start any sooner?”
“It’ll have to be next week. I want you to move into the clinic and rest there, gain some weight. I’ll need you to be as rested as possible. We can’t risk an infection.”
“An infection of what?” Einar asked, but then the waiter arrived at their table and his vein-backed hands cleared the dishes and the fish knives and then swept away the breadcrumbs with a little silver brush.
Einar returned in a cab to the Höritzisch. The prostitute next door was out, and so he slept soundly, only turning onto his side when a train screeched into the Bahnhof. When he rose at dawn, he bathed down the hall in the unheated closet with the slatted door. Then he put on a brown skirt and the white blouse with the needlepoint collar and a coarse-wool cardigan and a little hat that sat on his head at an angle. His breath was visible in the mirror, his face pale. He would enter the clinic as Lili, and she was who would exit the clinic later in the spring. It wasn’t a decision, just a natural progression of events. In the bathroom of the Höritzisch Hotel, with the shrill scrape of arriving trains screaming through the slats in the door, Einar Wegener closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was Lili.
When she arrived at the clinic Frau Krebs admitted her, ordering Lili into one of the clinic’s white gowns that tied around the waist with a cabled cord.
Frau Krebs, whose face was rosy with blooms of burst capillaries, led Lili to the room at the back of the clinic where she would rest for the week. There was a bed with a steel-pipe footrest. Frau Krebs pulled back the window’s yellow curtain. The room looked out over a little park sloping down to a field at the edge of the Elbe. The river was steely blue in winter, and Lili could see sailors on the deck of a freighter huddling in their coats. “You’ll be happy here,” Frau Krebs said. There were shifting clouds in the sky, and one pulled away from the others, and a hole opened up. A column of light fell upon the Elbe, hammering a circle of water in front of the freighter as gold as the necklace around Lili’s throat.
Frau Krebs cleared her throat. “Professor Bolk told me you’d be coming,” she said. “But he failed to give me your name. So typical of him.”
“It’s Lili.”
“Lili what?”
And outside another cloud shifted, opening a larger pale-blue hole in the sky, and the river brightened and the sailors in their coats looked heavenward, and Lili thought and held her breath and then said, “Elbe. Lili Elbe.”
That afternoon she went downstairs to take her tea in the Wintergarten. She found a metal chair off by itself, and soon Lili felt the sun on her face through the glass. The day had opened up, and now the sky was blue. The sun had warmed the solarium enough to fill the air with the showery smell of the curling-arm ferns and the ivy climbing strings tacked to the walls. The Wintergarten looked down to the Elbe, and the wind that had swept away all the clouds was whitecapping the river. The whitecaps reminded Lili of the Kattegat in Denmark, and the paintings that Einar had done of the winter sea. Years ago, Lili used to sit in the rope-bottom chair in the Widow House and stare at Einar’s paintings; she would look at them with a sense of detachment, as if they had been painted by an ancestor of whom she was vaguely proud.
During that week, Lili slept late in the mornings; it was as if the more rest she got, the more tired she became. In the afternoons she’d take her tea and torte in the Wintergarten. She would sit there in the metal chair, her teacup balanced on her knee, nodding shyly at the other girls who came down for gossip. Occasionally one of them would laugh so loudly that she would draw Lili’s eye: a circle of girls, young girls, with longish hair and healthy throats, each swelling at her own pace beneath the regulation gown with the cabled cord-belt. Most of the residents were at the clinic for that reason, Lili knew; and out of the corner of her eye she would watch them not with scorn or pity but with interest and longing, for the girls all seemed to know one another and none of them-from the way their high-pitched laughs would shoot around the Wintergarten at such a force that Lili thought for sure those silver-ball peals would shatter the glass walls-seemed to care in the least that they were living in the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic for the next several months. The clinic seemed like a society, one that had not yet inducted her. Maybe one day, she told herself, feeling the sun on her knees and on her wrists, which she overturned so that the undersides could feel the warmth that had begun to seep into the rest of her.
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.
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-Einar 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.”
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 work.” 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.
A cloud shifted, and the lawn turned nearly black beneath the shadow. The cherry trees blew over, and a figure emerged from the clinic’s glass door. Greta couldn’t tell who it was. He was wearing a white lab coat, which was flapping like the pennants strung along the tourist cruiser that was plying the Elbe.
“Look,” Lili said. “It’s the professor.”
He moved in their direction, and the cloud shifted again, and Professor Bolk’s face lit up, the sun on his spectacles. When he reached them he knelt down and said, “It’s going to be tomorrow.”
“What is?” Lili asked.
“Your next operation.”
“But why all of a sudden?” Lili asked.
“Because we’re ready with the graft tissue. We should operate tomorrow.” Greta had told Lili about the next procedure, about the ovarian tissue that Professor Bolk would lay into her abdomen.
“I expect everything to go as planned,” the professor said. In the sunlight the skin in Bolk’s face was thin, the sea-color of his veins showing through. Greta wished Hans had traveled to Dresden with her. She’d talk it over with him; she’d like his counsel-the way he’d tent his fingers together in front of his mouth as he thought through a situation. Greta suddenly felt exhausted.
“What if it doesn’t go as planned?” she asked.
“We’ll wait. I want to work with tissue from a young girl.”
“All of this is hard to believe,” Lili said. She wasn’t looking at Greta or Bolk. Her face was turned to the circle of girls, who were lying on their sides.
When Professor Bolk was gone, Lili shook her head. “I still can’t believe it,” she said, her eyes still on the girls. “He’s doing it, Greta. Just as you said he would. He’s turning me into a little girl.” Lili’s face was still, the tip of her nose red. She was whispering. “I think he might be a man capable of miracles.”
A breeze pushed Greta’s hair over her shoulder, and she looked to the shaded windows of Professor Bolk’s laboratory-the stucco walls, the glassed-in corridor connecting it to the rest of the clinic. It was off limits to her, but Greta imagined the tiered operating amphitheater and the steel ambulances cold to the touch and a shelf of jars filled with formaldehyde. One of the window shades was lifted, and for a minute Greta could see the silhouette of someone working in the laboratory, his head bent over his task; and then a second person-all black shadow-drew the shade again, and the stucco building was yellow in the sunlight and as lifeless as before.
“So,” she said. “Tomorrow it is,” and she lowered Lili’s head into her lap, and they closed their eyes and received the weak heat of the sun. They listened to the muted squeals of the girls on the lawn, and the far-away splash of a paddlewheel on the Elbe. Greta thought of Teddy Cross, whom she had also once thought of as capable of miracles. There was that time with Carlisle’s leg. Greta and Teddy had been married only a few months, and they were living in the Spanish house in Bakersfield, and the first hot winds were beginning to blow through the eucalyptus groves.
Greta was pregnant with baby Carlisle and sick on the sofa from Gump’s. One day Carlisle drove over the Ridge Route in his yellow- fendered Detroiter to visit them and to investigate potential oilfields.
The strawberry fields were a carpet of green that spring, edged by the buttery gold of the poppies in the foothills. Men from Los Angeles and San Francisco had begun descending on Bakersfield as word got out that there might be oil beneath the land. The farmer to the south of Teddy Cross’s parents had sunk a well with his hoe-ax and struck oil. Teddy was sure his parents could hit oil too, and Greta secretly wondered if Teddy felt the need to become rich in a strange effort to match her. In the late afternoons, after tending to Greta, he would drive out the rutted road to the Cross land and drill in the long shadow of an old oak. He used a tool with a gyre blade that could be extended with attachments; and with the sun glinting off the silvery underside of the strawberry leaves, Teddy would grind the drill through the loam.
And then Carlisle drove into Bakersfield. He was still lame then, on a pair of hand-cast crutches that came to his elbows, their grooved handles made of carved ivory. He had a second pair cast in sterling silver, which Mrs. Waud requested him to use on formal occasions. On his first night at the Spanish house, while Greta was sleeping, she would later learn, Teddy drove Carlisle out to the Cross land and showed him his well. “I’m worried about disappointing them,” Teddy said of his parents, who were huddled in their little house, the wall planks separated with gaps wide enough for the wind. The hole in the ground was about as wide around as a thigh and surrounded by a wood platform. Teddy pulled up a sample of dirt with a cup attached to the rope. They examined it, the mouths of both young men open. Teddy looked to Carlisle, as if he expected him, just because he was up at Stanford, to be able to discern something from the cup of black soil. “Do you think there’s oil down there?” Teddy asked.
Looking over to the knotted oak at the edge of the strawberry field and then up to the purpling sky, Carlisle said, “I’m not really sure.”
They were out there a half hour, standing in the sunset, as the wind kicked up the dust and hurled it at their ankles. The bowl of the sky was dimming, and the stars were beginning to glitter. “Let’s get going,” Teddy said, and Carlisle, who never once blamed Teddy Cross for all that had happened to Greta, said, “All right.”
Teddy moved to the truck, and Carlisle followed, except the cap of his crutch caught between the boards of the platform, and the next thing he knew his leg, the bad one, slipped down the well like a snake. He would have laughed at how quickly he found himself splayed on the platform, except that his leg had come back to life with pain. Teddy heard his cry and ran back to the dry well, saying, “Are you okay? Can you get up?”
Carlisle couldn’t get up, his leg jammed into the hole. Teddy began to peel away the planks with a crowbar, the boards coming loose with a creak that howled across the fields. The coyotes in the foothills were howling too, and the still black of the Bakersfield night was brought to life with Carlisle crying softly into his own shoulder. An hour passed before he was pried free, exposing the leg broken in the shin. There was no blood, but the skin was turning darker than a plum. Teddy helped Carlisle into the truck, and then drove him west through the night, across the width of the valley, the fields changing from strawberry to red leaf lettuce to vineyards and finally to pecan orchards, and then over the mountains and into Santa Barbara. It was nearly midnight when a doctor with a monocle set Carlisle’s leg, while a night nurse with a rusty red bob dipped strips of gauze into a tub of plaster. Then, much later, almost at dawn, Teddy and Carlisle pulled into the bamboo-shaded drive of the Spanish house. They were exhausted and, finally, home.
Greta was still sleeping. “Asleep since you left,” said Akiko, whose eyes were as black as the bruised skin on Carlisle’s shin. And when Greta woke, she was too drowsy with nausea to notice the plaster cast on Carlisle’s leg; the cast was so chalky that it left little patches of dust wherever Carlisle dragged it. The dust Greta noticed, wondering with half-interest-as she always did with housework-where it had come from, swiping it from the cushion of the ottoman. She knew Carlisle had been injured, but it hardly registered with her at all. “Oh, I’m fine,” Carlisle reported, and Greta left it at that, because the only way to describe how she felt was as if she had been poisoned. She looked at the cast and rolled her eyes back into her head. And when the summer descended and the mercury in the thermometers capped out at 110 degrees and Greta finally gave birth, the cast was sawed off Carlisle’s leg. The baby was dead, but Carlisle’s leg was healthier than it had ever been since that day when Greta and he were six. There was still a bit of a drag in the foot, but Carlisle no longer needed the crutches, and he could stride right into the Spanish house’s step-down living room without holding the rail.
“The only good thing to come of Bakersfield,” Greta would sometimes say.
Then, for the rest of their marriage, she thought of Teddy Cross as a man capable of miracles-once, when she saw his lips pressed together in concentration, it seemed to Greta that he could do anything at all. But when Lili said the same of Professor Bolk, Greta looked down to the Elbe and counted the boats and then counted the girls on the lawn, and said, “We will see.”
Lili woke herself up screaming. She didn’t know how long she’d been sleeping, but she could feel the cap of morphine laced across her brain, her eyelids too heavy to lift.
Her shrieks were high and glassy and, even Lili knew, sliced through the corridors of the Municipal Women’s Clinic, erupting a pimpling chill on the spines of the nurses and on the skin stretched across the bellies of the pregnant girls. There was an inflamed pain in the lower half of her body. If she’d had the strength, Lili would have lifted her head and looked down to her own middle to see if a bonfire burned there, baking the bones in her pelvis.
She dreamily felt as if she’d risen above her bed and was now looking down: little Lili, her body carved into existence by Professor Bolk, lay strapped beneath the blanket, her arms spread out, the underside of her wrists pale green and exposed. Ropes braided from Italian hemp crossed her legs, sandbags hanging from them, dangling heavily next to the bed. There were four on each side, each bag hooked to a thick rope that ran over Lili’s shins, holding them down against the spasms.
A nurse Lili didn’t recognize ran into the room. She was full-breasted and mustached, and cried, “What can I get you?” She pushed Lili back against the stack of pillows.
It was as if the screaming belonged to someone else. For a moment Lili thought maybe it was Einar who was screaming: perhaps his ghost was rising inside her. It was a terrible thought, and she sank her head into the pillows and sealed her eyes. But she was still screaming-she couldn’t help herself-her lips chapped and crusted in the corner and her tongue a thin dry strip.
“What’s wrong?” the nurse kept asking. She seemed only partially concerned, as if she had seen this before. She was young, with a glass-bead necklace that cut into her throat. Lili looked at the nurse, at the throat so padded with flesh that it nearly hid the necklace, and thought maybe she had seen the nurse before. The line of fine hairs above her lip-that was familiar-and the breasts stretching the bib of her apron. “You mustn’t move,” the nurse was saying. “It’ll only make it worse. Try to be very still.”
The nurse brought a green rubber mask to Lili’s face; out of the corner of her eye Lili could see the nurse turn the nozzle of the tank and release the ether. And this was when Lili realized she had met the nurse before. She had a weak memory of waking herself up by screaming; and then the nurse rushing in, her breasts, caught in the apron’s bib, swinging over Lili as she took Lili’s temperature. There was the readjustment of the ropes across Lili’s shins, and the glass stick of the thermometer slipped beneath her tongue. All this had happened before. Especially the cone of the green rubber mask, which fit snugly over Lili’s mouth and nose, as if one of the factories up the Elbe whose flame-rimmed smoke-stacks belched the black effluvium of poured plastic and rubber had molded it especially for her.
It was several weeks before Lili began to emerge from the pain, but eventually Professor Bolk eliminated the doses of ether. The nurse, whose name was Hannah, unhooked the sandbags, freeing Lili’s legs. They were too thin and blue for her to be able to walk down the corridor, but she could sit up again, for an hour or two each morning, before the daily morphia injection that would sink into her arm with the deep sting of a wasp.
Nurse Hannah would wheel Lili down to the Wintergarten. There she would leave Lili to rest, parking the wheelchair next to a window and a potted fern. It was May, and outside the rhododendrons were puckered and full. Along the wall of Bolk’s laboratory, in the bed of soil and compost, tulips were reaching toward the sun.
On the lawn, with its litter of dandelions, Lili watched the pregnant girls gossip. The sun was bright against their white necks. Since the end of winter, there were new girls. There would always be new girls, Lili thought, sipping her tea, pulling the blanket over her lap, which beneath the blue hospital gown and the pads of gauze and the iodine dressing was open and weepy and raw. Ursula was no longer at the clinic, and this confused Lili. But she was too tired and too softened with drug to consider it further. She had once asked Frau Krebs about Ursula, and she had rearranged Lili’s pillows and said, “Don’t worry about her. Everything is fine now.”
Greta could visit only a few hours each afternoon. A rule, instituted by Professor Bolk and enforced by the metallic voice of Frau Krebs, banned visitors in the mornings and evenings. These were the times when the girls of the clinic were to be alone but together, as if their condition and trouble were a seal of camaraderie that outsiders couldn’t share. And so each day Greta would visit from just after lunch, when Lili’s lip would still hold a spot of potato soup, until late afternoon, when the shadows grew long and Lili’s head would loll into her chest.
Lili looked forward to the sight of Greta entering the glassed-in Wintergarten. Often a large bouquet of flowers-first jonquils, then, as the spring progressed, snapdragons, and finally pink peonies-would hide Greta’s face as she appeared in the door. Lili would wait patiently in her wicker wheelchair, listening to the clack of Greta’s shoes on the tile floor. Often the other girls would whisper about Greta (“Who’s the tall American with the gorgeous long hair?”), and that talk-the airy voices of the girls whose breasts were filling daily with milk-pleased Lili.
“As soon as we get you out of here,” Greta would say, settling into a recliner, her legs up on the long white cushion, “I’m going to take you straight back to Copenhagen and let you have a look around.”
Greta had been promising this since she arrived from Paris: the train and ferry back to Denmark; reopening the apartment in the Widow House, which had remained shuttered for years; a spree in the private dressing room of Fonnesbech’s department store.
“But why can’t we go now?” Lili would ask. Not once in five years had she or Greta returned to Copenhagen. Lili had a vague memory of Einar instructing the shippers, with their sleeves rolled to their elbows, to handle carefully the crate that held his unframed canvases. She remembered watching Greta empty the drawers of the pickled-ash wardrobe into a little trunk with leather hinges that Lili never saw again.
“You’re not quite finished here,” Greta would remind Lili.
“Why not?”
“Only a little more time. Then we can go home.” How pretty Greta was, in her paneled skirt and her high-heel boots, resting next to Lili. Greta had never loved anyone more than her, Lili knew. Now-now that even her government papers claimed she was Lili Elbe-she felt certain Greta wouldn’t change. It was what got Lili through it, through the lonely nights in the hospital room beneath the heavy blanket, through the bouts of pain that sneaked up and mugged her like a thief. Lili was always changing, but not Greta, never Greta.
Professor Bolk would sometimes join Lili and Greta, standing over them, Greta’s legs stretched out on the recliner, Lili in her chair. “Won’t you sit with us?” Greta would ask, repeating her request three or four times, but the professor never stopped long enough to take the cup of tea that Lili always poured for him.
“It seems to be working,” Professor Bolk said one day.
“Why do you say that?” Greta asked.
“Take a look at her. Doesn’t she look well to you?”
“She does, but she’s getting anxious to be done with this,” said Greta, standing to meet Professor Bolk.
“She’s becoming quite a pretty young lady,” he said.
Lili watched them, their legs near her face, making her feel like a child.
“She’s been here over three months,” Greta said. “She’s beginning to think about life outside the clinic. She’s anxious to head out into the-”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” Lili interrupted. It spilled from her mouth, the angry little interruption, as her food had done during the first druggy days after the operations.
“We weren’t,” Greta said, kneeling. And then, “No, you’re right. How do you feel, Lili? Tell me. How do you feel today?”
“I feel fine except for the pain, but that’s getting better. Frau Krebs and Nurse Hannah both say it’ll ease up and then I can go home.” Lili now sat forward in her wicker wheelchair. She steadied her hands and tried to pull herself up.
“Don’t stand,” Greta said. “Not unless you’re ready.”
Lili tried again, but her arms couldn’t manage. She’d become so hollow, a nearly weightless girl emptied out by both illness and her surgeon’s knife. “I’ll be ready soon,” Lili finally said. “Maybe next week. We’re moving back to Copenhagen, Professor Bolk. Has Greta told you we’re returning to Copenhagen?”
“That’s what I understand.”
“And we’re moving into our old apartment in the Widow House. You’ll have to come visit us. Do you know Copenhagen? We have a marvelous view of the Royal Theatre’s dome, and if you open the window you can smell the harbor.”
“But, Lili,” Greta said, “you won’t be ready to leave next week.”
“If I keep on improving like this, then why not? Tomorrow I’ll take my first steps again. Tomorrow let’s try to walk a little in the park.”
“Don’t you remember, Lili?” the professor said, holding his papers against his chest. “There’s another operation.”
“Another operation?”
“Just one more,” Greta said.
“Whatever for? Haven’t you done everything already?” Lili couldn’t say the words, but she was thinking: But haven’t you already restored my ovaries and removed my gonads? No, she could never say it. How humiliating it was, even with Greta.
“Just one last procedure,” Professor Bolk said. “To remove your-”
And Lili-who was no older and no younger than her present mood, who was the ghost of a girl, both ageless and unaging, with adolescent naïveté erasing the decades of another man’s experience, who each morning cupped her swelling breasts like an overanxious girl praying for her first menstruation-closed her eyes against the shame. Professor Bolk was informing her that down there, beneath the gauze and the brown iodine dressing that looked like the watered-down gravy Einar had endured during the war, just up from her fresh, still-healing wound, lay one last roll of skin that belonged to Einar.
“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.”