They returned to the Widow House, but over the years the building had declined. While in Paris, Greta had hired a man named Poulsen to manage the upkeep. Once a month she mailed a check, enclosed with a note of instruction. “I suppose the gutters need clearing by now,” she’d write. Or, “Please rehinge the shutters.” But Poulsen followed none of the orders, tending to little beyond sweeping the foyer and burning the trash. When Greta and Hans motored into Copenhagen on a morning when the snow was flinging itself against the city’s sills, Poulsen disappeared.
The facade had faded to a pale pink. On the upper floors, gull droppings caked the window frames. A pane of glass was missing in an apartment where a fidgety woman in her nineties had died in the night, strangled by the twist of her bedsheet. And a fine black grime streaked the walls of the stairwell that led to the top floor.
It took Greta a few weeks to ready the apartment for Lili. Hans helped, hiring the crew to paint and the waxer to polish the floors. “Has she ever thought about living on her own?” he asked one day, and Greta, startled, replied, “What? Without me?”
Slowly she eased Lili into the sea of life in Copenhagen. On slushy afternoons, Greta held Lili’s hand and strolled her through the boxhedges, leafless in late winter, of Kongens Have. Lili would shuffle her feet and sink her mouth into the wooly wrap of her muffler; the surgeries had left her with a steady pain that flared up as her morphine wore off. Greta would say, feeling the tap of pulse in Lili’s wrist, “Take your time. Just let me know when you’re ready.” She supposed the day would come when Lili would want to set out into the world by herself. She saw it in Lili’s face, in the way she would study the young women, packages of butter rolls from the bakery in their hands, walking busily across Kongens Nytorv each morning, women young enough for hope to still flicker in their eyes. Greta heard it in Lili’s voice when she would read aloud from the wedding announcements in the newspaper. How Greta dreaded the day; she sometimes wondered whether she would have gone along with everything if she had realized, at the outset, that it would end with Lili departing the Widow House, a slim suitcase in her hand. There were days during their first few months back in Copenhagen when Greta sometimes believed that she and Lili could create a life for themselves on the top floor of the Widow House and neither of them would leave for any longer than an afternoon. Sometimes, when she and Lili were sitting next to the iron stove, she came to think that the past years of upheaval and evolution had come to a close, and now she and Lili could paint and live peacefully, alone but together. And wasn’t that the inexhaustible struggle for Greta? Her perpetual need to be alone but always loved, and in love. “Do you ever think I’ll fall in love?” Lili had begun to ask, as spring returned and the gray seeped out of the harbor, replaced by the blue. “Do you think something like that could happen even to me?”
With the spring of 1931 came the contracting markets and the plummeting currencies and a general black cloud of ruin, economic and otherwise. Americans began to sail away from Europe, Greta read in the newspapers; she saw one booking air-and-sea passage at the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd office, a woman with a beaver collar and a child on her hip. A painting, even a good one, could hang on the wall of a gallery and remain unsold. It was a drab world for Lili to emerge into; it wasn’t the same world.
Each morning Greta would nudge Lili, who sometimes couldn’t wake on her own. Greta would pull a skirt from the hanger, and a blouse with wooden buttons, and a sweater with wrists patterned with snowflakes. She would help Lili dress, and serve her coffee and black bread and smoked salmon sprinkled with dill. Only by mid-morning would Lili become fully alert, her eyes blinking back the morphine, her mouth dry. “I must have been tired,” she would say apologetically, and Greta would nod and answer, “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
When Lili was out on her own-either shopping at the Gammel Strand fish market or at the pottery class Greta enrolled her in-Greta would try to paint. Only six years had passed, but it seemed longer since she had last lived in the apartment with its ghostly smell of herring. Some things were the same: there were the horns of the ferries bound for Sweden and Bornholm, and the afternoon light, which sliced through the windows just before the sun dipped beyond the city, silhouetting the needles of the church spires. Standing at her easel, Greta would think about Einar then and Lili today, and Greta would shut her eyes and hear a tinkling bell of memory in her head but then recognize it as the ping! of the Cantonese laundress who was still calling from the street. She regretted nothing, Greta believed.
The king granted their divorce with a speed that alarmed her. Of course they could no longer live as man and wife, now that they were both women and Einar lay in memory’s coffin. Even so, the officials, who wore black bow ties and whose fingers shook nervously, surprised Greta when they filed the paperwork with an uncharacteristic alacrity. She had expected-even counted on-a bureaucratic delay; she nearly imagined the request lost in an accordion file. Although she didn’t like to admit it, she was like many young women from Pasadena who thought of divorce as a sign of moral flaccidness; or, more specifically, Greta thought of it as a sign of lacking a Western spine. She found herself unusually concerned about what others might think and say about her-as if she were so frivolous and weak-minded that she had simply married the wrong man. No, Greta didn’t like to think of herself that way. She pressed for a death certificate for Einar Wegener, which no one in any position of authority agreed to, although everyone in the bureau knew of the nature of her case. There was one official, whose nose was long and wore the twitch of a white mustache just beneath it, who conceded that it was closest to the truth. “I’m afraid I can’t rewrite the law,” he said, a stack of papers nearly reaching his mustache. “But my husband is dead,” Greta tried, her fists landing on the counters that separated her from the room of bureaucrats, with their sleeve bands and their abaci and their yellow smell of tobacco and pencil shavings. “He should be declared dead,” she tried on her last visit to the government office, her voice softening. Above the room of bureaucrats, watching them, was one of her early paintings: Herr Ole Skram in a black suit, vice-minister in the king’s government for less than a month, noted only for his remarkable and well-witnessed death in the tangled tether of a hot-air balloon. But Greta’s pleas failed. And so Einar Wegener officially disappeared, grave-less and gone.
“She needs to lead her own life,” Hans said one day. “She should get out on her own and make her own friends.”
“I’m not stopping her from doing that.” Greta had run into him at the entrance of the Royal Academy of Arts, under the arch. It was April, and the wind was easterly, chilled and salted from the Baltic. Greta turned up her collar against the wind. Students in sawed-off gloves were passing by. “And you, too,” he said.
Greta said nothing, the chill creeping down her spine. She could see out into Kongens Nytorv. In front of the statue of King Christian V, a boy with a blue scarf dangling to his knees was kissing a girl. The thing about Hans was this: he always reminded her of what she didn’t have; of what she’d convinced herself-when she sat in her reading chair waiting for Lili to return, her heart quickening at every false sound in the stairwell-she could go without. What was she afraid of?
“How about driving up to Helsingør with me tomorrow?” he proposed.
“I don’t think I can get away,” she said. The wind picked up, hurtling through the academy’s portico, where the walls were scraped from lorries too wide to pass. Greta and Hans went inside, into one of the side halls, where the plank floors were unvarnished and the walls painted a soft soap-green and the banister running up the staircase was white.
“When will you realize she’s no longer yours?”
“I never said she was.” And then, “I was talking about my work. It isn’t easy to take even a day off from my work.”
“How would you know?”
She felt a sudden loss, as if the cruelty of progress and time had just then grabbed from her her days as a student at the academy; as if her past had remained hers until today. “Einar’s dead,” she heard herself say.
“But Lili isn’t.” He was right. After all, there was Lili, probably this very minute sweeping the apartment, her face caught in a windowpane of sun. Lili with her pretty bony wrists and her eyes nearly black. Just yesterday she had said, “I was thinking about taking a job.”
“Don’t you see I’m a little sad?” Greta said.
“Don’t you see that I want you to tell me that?”
“Hans,” she said. “Maybe I should go.” It was then that Greta realized they were at the foot of the steps where she and Einar had first kissed, and fell in love. The white balustrades and the plank steps worn from decades of tardy students with incomplete assignments shoved up beneath their arms. The paned windows were hooked against the cold. The hall was quiet; no one was around. Where had all the students gone? Greta heard a door somewhere catch in its latch. Then everything fell silent again, and something imperceptible passed from Hans to her, and out the window, in the courtyard, in the long shadow of the academy, the boy with the blue scarf kissed his girl, again and again, and yet again.
Lili was sitting in the rope-bottom chair, wondering if now was the right time to tell Greta. Lili could see through the window the masts of the herring boats on the canal. Behind her, Greta was painting a portrait of Lili’s back. Greta said nothing as she outlined the painting, and Lili heard only Greta’s bracelets tinkling. Smoldering in the pit of her groin was the leftover pain, so steady that more and more Lili had taught herself to ignore it; the inside of her lip was shredded from biting down. Professor Bolk had promised it would eventually go away.
She thought of the girls at the clinic. The day before Professor Bolk released Lili, they threw her a party in the garden. Two girls pulled a white cast-iron table onto the lawn, a third carried from her room a primrose in a cachepot painted with bunnies. The girls tried to spread a yellow cloth across the table, but the wind was keeping it aloft. Lili sat at the head of the table, on a cold metal chair, watching the cloth fluttering as the girls tried to tie down its corners. The sunlight poured through the yellow cloth, filling Lili’s eyes, the cachepot in her lap.
Frau Krebs gave Lili a box tied with a ribbon. “From the professor,” she said. “He wanted you to have it. He had to go up to Berlin. To St. Norbert Hospital to attend a surgery. He said to tell you goodbye.” The ribbon was tight, and Lili couldn’t pick it open, and so Frau Krebs produced an army knife from her apron and quickly cut through it, which disappointed the girls, because they wanted to weave it through Lili’s hair, which had grown beyond her shoulders during her stay.
The box was large and packed with tissue, and inside Lili found a double-oval silver frame. In one oval was a photograph of Lili lying in the tallgrass on the bank of the Elbe; the photo must have come from Greta, because Lili had never walked down to the river with Professor Bolk. And peering through the second oval was the face of a small man beneath a hat; his eyes were dark and shadowy and his skin so white it was almost glowing, and his neck looked thin in his collar.
From the rope-bottom chair Lili could see the double-portrait frame on the bookshelf. She could hear the scratch of Greta’s pencil against the canvas. Lili’s hair was parted down the middle and fell to both sides of her neck. The amber beads hung around her throat, and she could feel the cold gold of the clasp. Lili had a vision of a stocky woman with hammy legs and callused thumbs who had once worn the beads; Lili of course did not know the woman, but she could see her in rubber and canvas boots in a sphagnum field, the beads slithering down the crevice of her breasts.
It didn’t bother Lili, what she remembered and what she didn’t. She knew that most of her life, her previous life, was like a book she had read as a small child: it was both familiar and forgotten. She could recall a sphagnum field, muddy in spring and pocked with holes belonging to a family of red fox. She could recall the rusty, flat blade of a hoe slapping into the peat. And the hollow clack! of amber beads swinging around a throat. Lili could remember the silhouette of a tall boy with a large head walking along the ridge of the sphagnum field. She didn’t know who it was, but Lili knew that there had been a time when she was a small frightened child watching that silhouette, black and flat, on the horizon of the field. Something in her chest would swell as the silhouette moved closer, as his silhouette arm pulled on the brim of his hat; this Lili knew. She could recall telling herself that, yes, she was in love.
“You’re blushing,” Greta said from her easel.
“Am I?” Lili felt the heat in her neck, and the quick collection of sweat around the rim of her face. “I don’t know why,” she said.
But that wasn’t true. A few weeks earlier, she had been on her way to Landmandsbanken to lock away in the safe-deposit box the pearl-and-diamond brooch Greta had given her. But before heading to the bank, Lili had stopped in a basement store to buy two bristle brushes for Greta. The clerk, an old man with knuckles that were pink and soft, was reaching up to a shelf of turpentine. He was assisting a customer, a man with corkscrew hair growing past his ears. Lili couldn’t see the customer’s face, and she felt annoyed with him for having asked for the largest tin of turpentine on the highest shelf. “I’m going to fetch a pair of gloves. I’ll be right back,” the customer said to the clerk, who was still balancing on the ladder. The man turned around and passed Lili, saying, “Excuse me, frøken.”
As the man slipped by her, Lili pressed herself against the shelf and held her breath. His hair brushed her cheek, and she smelled a faint scent of grain. “Excuse me,” he said again.
Then Lili knew. She sank her chin into her chest, unsure of what she wanted to happen next. She worried about how she looked, her face probably raw from the wind. On the bottom shelf she stared at children’s sets of watercolors in hinged metal boxes. She knelt to check the price of a red one with a dozen dry pads of colors. She began to pull her hair around her face.
Then Henrik saw her. His hand fell to her shoulder: “Lili? Is it you?”
They stepped outside, the sack holding the tin of turpentine swinging on Henrik’s arm. He was older now, the skin around his eyes thinner and faintly blue. His hair was darker, like stained oak, without much shine. And his throat had thickened, and his wrists. He was no longer pretty; he had become a handsome man.
They went for a coffee around the corner, settling around a table at a café. Henrik told Lili about himself; about his paintings of the sea that sold better in New York than in Denmark; about the automobile accident on Long Island that nearly killed him, the spoke-wheel of his Kissel Gold Bug flying off the running board and into his forehead; about his high-cheeked fiancée from Sutton Place who left him for nothing and no one else, simply because she didn’t love him anymore.
“I forgot,” Lili said suddenly at the café. “I forgot to buy Greta’s brushes.”
He walked her back to the store, only to find it closed. Lili and Henrik were on the street, the store’s sign swaying on its iron arm. “I have some extra ones in my studio,” he said. “We can go get them if you like.” His eyes were tear-shaped, and she had forgotten how short and stubby his eyelashes were. Again there was the scent of grain, like the shuck of wheat.
“It all makes me a little worried,” Lili said, as Henrik’s face moved closer to hers.
“Stop,” Henrik said. “Please don’t worry about me.” The shop’s sign continued to rattle on its arm, and Henrik and Lili set out for his studio on the other side of the Inderhavn, where, later, after Henrik had poured her red wine and fed her strawberries and showed her his paintings of the sea, they kissed.
“You’re blushing even more,” Greta now said. She turned on a lamp and began to rinse her brushes in a jar. “Do you need a pill?” Greta asked. “Are you feeling all right?”
Lili didn’t know how to tell Greta. When they’d moved back to Copenhagen, Lili had said, “Do you really think we should go on living together? Two women in this apartment?”
“Are you worried about what people might say?” Greta said. “Is that it?”
And Lili, who wasn’t entirely sure why she had said it, answered, “No. Not at all. It’s just that… I was thinking of you.”
No, Lili couldn’t tell Greta about Henrik, at least not yet. After all, where would Lili begin? The kiss in the dim light of his studio? The wrap of Henrik’s arm around Lili’s shoulders as he walked her into Kongens Have at dusk just as the governesses were wheeling their prams home for the evening? His hand, which was backed with thick black hair, holding her throat, and then the soft cushion of her breast? The letter from Henrik slipped to Lili the next day via the Cantonese laundress, the folded square of paper smudged with ink professing love and regret. Yes, where would Lili begin? Only three weeks had passed since the meeting at the art supply store, but it felt to Lili as if during that time her life had begun anew. How could she tell Greta that?
“I feel like going out for a walk,” Lili said, standing.
“I’m not done yet,” Greta said. “Sit for just a few more minutes?”
“I feel like going now, before it gets dark.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“All alone?”
Lili nodded, an inexhaustible doubleness welling up inside her: she both loved and resented Greta for caring so much. It was as simple as that.
She opened the wardrobe’s closet for her coat and scarf. Greta began to tidy her paints and her brushes and her easel. Edvard IV started barking at Lili’s ankles. The last angled sunlight shot into the apartment. The horn of the Bornholm ferry called, and while she pulled on a blue felt coat with bamboo-hook buttons, Lili thought about walking to the dock and climbing the gangway and taking a seat in the cabin that looked across the bow toward that little island in the sea.
But she wouldn’t set sail, at least not yet. “I’ll be back,” she heard herself saying.
“Yes, well… good.” And then, “You’re sure you don’t want company?”
“Not tonight.”
“All right then.” Greta hoisted Edvard IV into her arms and stood in the center of the apartment, in a sinking pane of light, as Lili prepared to leave her. Lili felt the need to escape. Henrik had told her he’d be working late in his studio. “Look for the light,” he wrote in a note smuggled into the apartment in the folded laundry.
“Will you be gone long?”
Lili shook her head. “I’m not really sure.” She was ready, buttoned into her coat. She would have to tell Greta about Henrik, but not tonight. “Good night,” she said, feeling something, and when she opened the door she found Hans, his knuckle raised and about to knock.
He came in. Lili remained at the door. He looked tired, his tie loose. He asked them to join him for dinner. Lili said, “I was just on my way out.” Greta said that Lili had become quite busy lately. She sounded angry about it, from the way she told Hans about Lili’s new job at Fonnes bech’s department store, standing behind the perfume counter. “They hired me because I speak French,” Lili explained, still in her coat. The manager at Fonnesbech’s, a woman whose black blouse flattened out her breasts, asked Lili to speak to the customers with an accent. “Speak like a Frenchwoman. Pretend you’re someone else. The store is a stage!” Each day Lili arranged the cut-glass bottles on a silver tray and held her eyes low and quietly asked the passing shoppers if they’d like a dab to the wrist.
“I should be going,” Lili said. She moved to kiss Hans goodbye.
He said he’d like to join her walk, but then Greta said that Lili wanted to be alone. “I’ll come just for a bit,” he said. “Then I’ll be back, Greta, and we’ll have some supper.”
On the street, the night was damp. Across the way a woman was knocking on Dr. Møller’s door. Lili and Hans hesitated outside the Widow House’s door. “Where to?” he said.
“I was headed to Christianshavn. But you don’t have to come with me,” she said. “It’s too far.”
“How’s Greta been lately?”
“You know Greta. Always the same.”
“That’s not true. Is she settling back all right?”
Lili stopped and wondered what he meant. Wasn’t that the frustrat ingly wonderful thing about Greta? That she was always the same-always painting, always planning, always pulling back her hair?
“She’s fine.” And then, “I think she’s angry with me.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes I wonder why she let me go through with all of this in the first place. If she thought everything was going to be the same afterward.”
“She never thought that,” Hans said. “She always knew what it meant.”
The woman, whose arm was in a sling, was admitted to Dr. Møller’s house. Lili heard a shout from the sailor’s window above.
Then Hans asked, “Where are you going, Lili?” He took her hands between his and began rubbing away the cold. Sometimes Lili was surprised that she didn’t simply crumble beneath the touch of a man. She could hardly believe that her flesh and bone could withstand the scrutiny of a man’s fingertips. She felt this even more with Henrik, whose hands had pressed every knuckle of her spine. His hands had cupped her shoulders and she had expected herself to fold up like a piece of paper, but it didn’t happen, and Henrik had continued touching her, kissing her.
“We’ve known each other a long time,” Hans said.
“I think I’ve fallen in love,” Lili began. She told Hans about Henrik, about how they would kiss in his studio in the evening and all Lili could think of was never again returning to the Widow House.
“I thought that might be the case,” Hans said. “Why haven’t you told Greta?”
“She’d be jealous. She’d try to stop it.”
“How do you know?”
“She tried to stop it once before.”
“Wasn’t that a long time ago?”
Lili thought about this. He was right, of course. Even so, he didn’t know Greta the way she did. He hadn’t endured the slanting glare every time she set out from the apartment, or when she returned late at night. What was it Greta once said to Lili? “Obviously I’m not your mother, but just the same I’d like to know where you’re keeping yourself these days.”
“Doesn’t she have a right to know?” Hans asked.
“Greta?” She wasn’t always like that, Lili had to admit. Wasn’t there the time just last week when Greta met Lili at the employees’ entrance of Fonnesbech’s and said, “Sorry to change our plans, but Hans and I are going to have dinner. I’m sure you won’t mind fending for yourself.” Hadn’t Greta said, the other day when they were waking from a nap, “I had a dream about you getting married.”
“Can I walk you to the bridge?” Hans said.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go back up and see Greta.” Then it occurred to her how close he and Greta had become: the shared meals at the long table; the quiet evenings in the Widow House, playing poker until Lili returned; the way Greta had uncharacteristically begun to rely on him, saying more and more often, “Let me check with Hans.”
“Do you want to marry her?” Lili said.
“I haven’t asked her.”
“But you will?”
“If she lets me.”
Lili wasn’t jealous; why should she be? She felt relief, although at the same time she felt the pull of a rushing memory: Hans and Einar playing outside the farmhouse; the apron hanging next to the stovepipe; Greta nearly chasing Einar through the halls of the Royal Academy; Greta trotting down the aisle of St. Alban’s Church on their wedding day, always in a hurry. Lili’s life had flipped itself over, and she was grateful.
“She won’t marry me until she knows that you are settled and living well.”
“She said that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
There was another shout from the sailor above, and the slam of a window. Lili and Hans smiled. In the streetlight Hans looked as young as a boy. His cowlick stood up, his cheeks pink on the point. Lili could see his breath, could see her own breath mixing with his. “You’re a whore!” the sailor yelled, as he always did.
“Have I done anything wrong?” Lili asked.
“No,” Hans said, releasing her hands, kissing her goodbye on the forehead. “But neither has Greta.”
After thinking about it, Greta abandoned her latest portrait of Lili. The nape of the neck was wrong, too fat at the stump; and Greta had painted her back too wide, the stretch from one shoulder to the other nearly filling the canvas. It was ugly, and Greta folded it up and burned it in the iron-footed stove in the corner, the paint fumes burning her throat.
It wasn’t the first painting that had failed, or the last. She had tried to complete the first group of portraits since returning to Copenhagen, but they continued to turn out misconceived. Lili was either oversized or strangely colored, or the dreamy white light Greta liked to paint into Lili’s cheeks came off as curdy. While Lili was at Fonnesbech’s perfume counter, Greta once tried hiring a model from the Royal Academy. She picked out the smallest boy in the class, a reedy blond with heavy lashes who tucked his sweaters into his trousers. She set out the lacquer trunk in front of the window and asked the boy to stand on it with his hands clasped at the small of his back. “Look at your feet,” Greta instructed, settling behind her easel. The canvas was blank, and its bumpy grain suddenly seemed impossible to sketch over. She penciled in the curve of his head and the line of his flank. But after an hour the portrait began to look cartoonish, with huge, watery eyes and an hourglass waist. She handed the boy ten kroner and sent him home.
There were other models: a handsome woman who was a cook at the Palace Hotel, and a man with a waxed mustache who, when asked to strip to his undershirt, revealed a chest that was a black carpet of hair.
“The market is tightening,” Hans said the night he came to visit, when he returned to the apartment after seeing Lili out. The gallery on Krystalgade was closed, its windows smudged with whitewash. The proprietor had disappeared; some said he fled to Poland with bad debts; others said he was now loading crates of curry on the Asiatic Company’s docks. And he was just one of many. The Henningsen porcelain factory, which had ordered another twenty kilns to produce soup bowls for America, collapsed. Herr Petzholdt’s cement churners went idle. Rumor mixed with the burnt-butter scent spewing out of the Otto Mønsted margarine factory. And the aerodrome, which once had buzzed like a beehive, sat blank and quiet, sending off the few emigrants and receiving only the occasional air freighter on its clean white strip.
“Nobody’s buying anything,” Hans said, holding his chin in his hand, studying the paintings Greta had arranged around the room. “I’d like to wait for things to get better before we take these out. Now’s not the time. Perhaps next year.”
“Next year?” Greta stood back and looked at her work. None were beautiful; none had the glow of light for which she had become known. She’d forgotten how to create it, the backlight that brought Lili’s face to life. The only painting that seemed to have any merit was her portrait of Professor Bolk: tall and large-handed and sturdy in his wool suit with the windowpane plaid. The others didn’t compare, Greta saw; and she saw Hans, with his wrinkled brow, trying to find a way to tell her.
“I was thinking of traveling to America,” Hans said. “To see if there’s any business left there.”
“To New York?”
“And to California.”
“To California?” Greta leaned against the wall, amid her paintings, and thought of Hans removing his felt-brimmed hat for the first time beneath the Pasadena sun.
Carlisle was on his way over to Copenhagen, booking passage via Hamburg. He had written that the winter had been dry in Pasadena, the poppy beds burned out by March. This was in response to Greta’s one-sentence note: “Einar is dead.” And Carlisle wrote in return: “Pasadena is dry, and the Los Angeles River isn’t running, and why don’t you and Lili come for a visit?” And then, “How is Lili? Is she happy?” Greta buttoned away his letter in the pocket of her smock.
On some afternoons, Greta would slip into Fonnesbech’s and watch Lili, across the counters displaying the kid gloves and silk scarves folded into triangles: Lili behind the glass case, her amber beads against the collar of her uniform and her hair falling into her eyes. A customer would pass and Lili would hold up a finger, and the lady would stop and bring a bottle of perfume to her nose. A smile and a sale, and Greta would watch it from across the floor, behind a rack of half-priced umbrellas. Greta spied like this a few times, but the last time was when she left Fonnesbech’s and came home to a cable from Carlisle: “I’m sailing on Saturday.”
And here was Hans, saying he was thinking of traveling to California himself. “I don’t suppose you’d want to go with me?” he said.
“To California?”
“Well, sure,” he said. “And don’t tell me you can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
And Greta didn’t say it, for even she knew it would sound absurd. But who would look after Lili? She thought of Carlisle right then, sunning his leg on a canvas chaise on the deck of the Estonia.
“Greta, I could use your help,” Hans said.
“My help?”
“In America.”
She took a step back from Hans; he seemed so much taller than she: had she never noticed how high he stood? It was getting late, and they hadn’t eaten. Edvard IV was lapping at the water in his bowl. Her husband’s boyhood friend, that was who he was. But Hans didn’t seem like that anymore; as if that part of him-those memories of him-had vanished with Einar.
“Give it some thought,” Hans said.
“I could give you names to look up. I could write letters of introduction, if that’s what you need. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all,” she was saying.
“That’s not it. Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
His hand fell to the small of her back.
“But what about Lili?” she said.
“She’ll be fine on her own,” Hans said.
“I couldn’t leave her,” Greta said. His hand was caressing her hip. It was a spring night and the shutters were shaking in the wind, and Greta thought of the house on the hill in Pasadena where in the summer the Santa Anas flung eucalyptus branches against the screens.
“You’ll have to,” Hans said. He wrapped his arms around her. She could feel his heart beating beneath his shirt, and she could feel her own in her throat.
When he arrived, Carlisle didn’t stay in the spare bedroom. Instead, he took a room at the Palace Hotel, with a view out over Rådhuspladsen and the three-dragon fountain. He said he liked the sound in the square of the trams crossing lines, and the call of the man selling spice biscuits from his cart. Carlisle said he liked looking at the long brick wall of Tivoli, which was reopening for the season, the seats of the Ferris wheel shaking in the sky. He said he liked visiting Lili at the counter at Fonnesbech’s, where she had earned a little lapel pin for being the month’s number-one salesgirl. He said he liked seeing her busy and walking down Strøget, chatting with the other salesgirls as they emerged from the employee entrance in their matching blue suits. Carlisle said to Greta that he thought Lili should live on her own.
“What makes you say that?” Greta answered.
“She’s a grown woman.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Anyway, it’s up to her.”
“Do you mean that?” he said.
“Of course I mean that,” said Greta, who never saw a mirror-image of herself when she looked at her twin.
One night the previous week Greta had been standing in the doorway of a building opposite Fonnesbech’s employee entrance. It was early evening, and she had hurried out of the Widow House so quickly that she’d forgotten to change out of her smock. She held her hands in the pockets, fingering the photographs of Teddy and Einar, the letters from them, their wedding bands. She was pressing herself against the portico of an apartment house with a horsehair doormat.
She waited only a few minutes until the metal door swung open, filling the tiny street with light and the chatter of girls. Their shoes began to clack against the grate in the sidewalk.
Greta waited for Lili to join up with three or four girls headed to the Turkish coffee house where young people lounged on the floor propped up by pillows embroidered with silk thread and little mirrors. “See you tomorrow,” two girls called to the rest. “Good night,” another said. “Have fun,” a fourth said over her shoulder, with a wave. The girls’ cheeks were downy and curved with baby fat, and their ponytails swayed as they walked down the little street and then turned onto Strøget. Lili was still talking with other girls, one with a sack of groceries, another with some sort of brace around her hand. Greta couldn’t hear what they were saying, but then the rest of the girls said, “So long.” And at last Lili was alone in the street. She checked her watch and looked to the low, damp sky.
A woman on a bicycle pedaled by, jittering as she rode against the slick cobblestones. Then Lili tied a scarf over her head and headed down the street. Greta watched her glide away, and very soon Lili was only a blue coat supported by two thin ankles and shoes clickety-clacking in the drizzle.
Greta followed. Lili apparently wasn’t in a hurry, moving out of the way of other people in the street, stopping to look in the window of a store that sold mops and other cleaning supplies. In the window was a pyramid display of black-and-white Zebralin cans, and a photograph of a woman scouring her stovetop. Lili turned and looked at her watch again; and then her ankles, which from a distance looked no thicker than a child’s, began to step quickly away from Greta. Down Snaregade with its half-timber building and a burned-out streetlamp and toward Gammel Strand. Soon she was walking along Slotsholms Canal, its curved railing tied with the lines of one-man dories. There was a white life preserver looped to the rail, and an abandoned sturgeon hanging heavily on a hook. Light from the Børsen on the other side of the canal fell onto the water, and the Børsen’s twisted-copper spire was bright in the night. Lili continued to walk, looking at the fishing boats secured on the other side of the canal, their black masts creaking.
Lili stopped, unclasped her purse. It was too dark for Greta to see Lili’s eyes as she rifled through it, pulling out a handkerchief and a coin case and then the little enamel box that held her pills. Lili clicked it open. She put one on her tongue, and Greta thought she could make out Lili cringing as she swallowed the chalky tablet.
Greta thought about calling out to Lili, but then stopped herself. She watched Lili walk farther into the night toward the Knippelsbro. It was April, and the winds were blowing in from the Baltic. As Lili reached the second bridge, the wind fluttered the tail of her scarf. She stopped to fix the knot at her throat. She stopped to look for traffic, but there was none. The Inderhavn was choppy. Greta could hear the icy water sloshing against the bridge’s double bascule. She heard the Swedish ferry setting out to make its last crossing of the evening.
Greta didn’t know exactly where Lili was headed in Christianshavn, but she could imagine: an assignation probably, a rendezvous. Into her head popped a piece of an old song: There once was an old man who lived on a bog. She held the cold metal rail of Slotsholms Canal. The rail was bubbling with rust, and it smelled of salt, and Greta wrapped both hands around it as she watched Lili slip across the bridge, across the Inderhavn, the tail of her scarf fluttering like a child’s hand, waving goodbye.
By late spring the shiny green buds of the willow trees in Ørstedsparken had split open, and the rose beds around Rosenborg Slot were reddening with early leaf. The sky’s long winter canopy had lifted, and the evening began to stretch itself toward midsummer.
Lili, who had gained even more strength, accepted-the way a child accepts a mother’s kiss-Henrik’s offer of marriage. He proposed the night before sailing to New York on the Albert Herring. He had packed his trunks, with their chipped-leather handles, and crated up his paints and brushes. “To New York!” Henrik kept saying. “To New York!” Lili, who had told the other salesgirls at Fonnesbech’s about Henrik’s imminent departure, lifted her head and said, “Without me?”
They were in Henrik’s studio in Christianshavn, the scent of the canal coming through the window. The studio was empty except for the trunks and the crate marked with red letters: HENRIK SANDAHL, NEW YORK. The furniture’s removal had shoved snarls of dust and feathers into the corners, the little puffs undulating with the breeze from the window. Henrik, his hair recently sheared down to a fine cap of curls, said, “Of course not.” And then, “I’ve asked you before, and I’ll ask you again. Marry me?”
Lili had always wanted this. She knew one day she would marry; sometimes, when she thought about it, she felt she could play no greater role in this world than as a man’s wife, Henrik’s wife. Silly thought, even Lili knew, something she would never repeat to Greta, who didn’t think like that at all. But that was how Lili felt. She imagined shopping the second floor of Fonnesbech’s, where the men’s clothing hung on racks, and fingering the material of French-cuff shirts until she found the right one for Henrik. She imagined a net shopping sack bulging with groceries-the slab of salmon, the stone potatoes, the bouquet of parsley-that would become their dinner. She imagined the dark that would fall across their bed, and the way the mattress would dent as Henrik moved toward her.
“I want you to know one thing about me,” Lili said. She thought about the evening in Ørstedsparken years ago, when she left him crying her name. “Before we marry.”
“Tell me anything.”
“My name wasn’t Lili Elbe when I was born.”
“I know that already,” he said. “I already told you that I know. I know who you are.”
“No,” Lili said. “You know who I was.” She told him about Professor Bolk, about the stucco clinic along the Elbe, about Frau Krebs nursing her back to health. She’d never told anyone. Lili’s small circle-Greta, Hans, Carlisle, Anna-already knew about her, but she had never handed over the details of her nearly impossible transformation to anyone else. She had never asked anyone to enter that intimate circle, which sometimes felt too cramped to welcome another soul.
“I thought something like this had happened,” Henrik said. Lili could detect no horror in his face. Even now, it was what she sometimes expected: upon hearing the news, the world would turn away in disgust. “I’m not surprised.”
She asked him what he thought of her; do you think I’m a freak of some sort, she asked. For Lili’s notion of herself could flip-flop nearly by the minute: sometimes she looked in the mirror and exhaled and felt the settling peace of gratitude; other times she saw a man-woman, its head peering out of the collar of a dress. Greta and Hans told her not to think like that. But when she was alone, the self-doubt could creep back into her chest.
Henrik told her he didn’t know what else he could say except that he was in love with her. “I’m in love with an extraordinary woman,” he said. Lili used to think she couldn’t return the love of a man who saw her for who she was. She once told herself that she would push away anyone who recognized her as anything less than female. It was why she had first turned her back on Henrik, that evening in the park. Now, she took his hand.
“You can still love me like this?” she said.
“Oh, Lili,” he said, rocking her shoulder. And then, “When will you ever understand?”
“That’s why I can’t go to New York with you right away,” she said. “I need to return to Dresden. One last time.” She told him that Professor Bolk wanted her to return. He wanted to attempt a final metamorphosis. She didn’t want to explain the details to Henrik. He would worry, she thought. He might try to talk her out of it. He might believe it wasn’t possible.
Last year, before she’d left Dresden, Professor Bolk had promised he could do something else for Lili, something that would make her even more of a woman than she already was. Something that Greta said was “crazy even to think about.” Something so magnificent it was like an all-white dream, but was, Professor Bolk promised in his basso voice, more than possible. As she was preparing to leave the clinic, Bolk had told Lili that the ovarian transplants had succeeded. He eventually wanted to try a uterine transplant to make her fruitful. “You mean I could become a mother?” Lili had asked. “Haven’t I done everything I’ve ever promised? And I can do this too,” Bolk had said. But Greta dissuaded her. “Why would you want to do that?” Greta had said, swatting her hands. “And besides, that’s utterly impossible. How on earth could he ever do that?”
In the year since then, Lili had written Professor Bolk often, telling him of her recovery and her afternoons at the perfume counter and Greta’s difficulties painting and of Henrik. Less frequently than Lili wrote, Professor Bolk would reply, on a thin sheet of paper typed by Frau Krebs. “That’s wonderful news,” he’d answer. “If you ever think you’d like to proceed with the last operation, the one we discussed, please let me know right away. I’m even more confident about it than before.”
Now she would go. She hadn’t yet told Greta. But Lili knew more than anything else that she had to return to Dresden to finish what Bolk had started. To prove to the world-no, not to the world but to herself-that indeed she was a woman, and that all her previous life, the little man known as Einar, was simply nature’s gravest mishap, corrected once and for all.
“Then meet me in New York at the end of the summer,” Henrik now said, sitting on his trunk that the next day a deckhand would load onto the ship bound for New York via Hamburg. “It’s settled at last. We’ll marry there.”
A few weeks later, on an early summer morning, Lili was sitting for Greta. She was wearing a white dress with a V collar and an eyelet hem, her hair pinned back. Greta had given Lili a small bouquet of white roses to hold in her lap. She asked Lili to cross her ankles and to lift her chin.
There was so much to tell Greta now-the news of Henrik, and Lili’s determination to return to Dresden. How had she allowed so much to remain unsaid between them? A little secret had grown into a second world that Greta knew nothing about. Lili felt the regret sinking in her bowels: their long intimate life reduced to this.
Greta had been working on the portrait for nearly a week, and it was going well: the light in Lili’s face was alive, and correct; so were her deep-set eyes, and the thin trace of blue in her temples, and the red heat self-consciously burning in Lili’s throat. As she stood at her easel, Greta was telling all this to Lili-how she looked, how the painting was turning out. “This one’s going to be beautiful,” Greta was saying. “At last I’m getting you right. It’s been a while, Lili. I was beginning to wonder.”
Over the past year Lili had watched Greta turn out paintings that looked hurried and poorly planned. One portrait of Lili made her look grotesque, with black oily pupils and hair frizzy with static and swollen shiny lips and the veins in her temples bright and green. Others were weak in resemblance, or bland in color and conception. Not all were bad, but some, and Lili knew that Greta was struggling. It wasn’t like the years in Paris, when everything Greta painted had a shimmering quality, when strangers would look at the portraits of Lili and stroke their chins and say, “Who is this girl?” But even more surprising was Greta’s loss of desire to work. She let more and more days pass when she didn’t paint, strings of days that together would leave Lili wondering, while she was down at Fonnesbech’s, what Greta did to pass the time. “I’m still getting used to being back in Copenhagen,” Greta would sometimes say. “I thought we had left it for good.” Other times she’d say she simply wasn’t in the mood to paint-a sentiment so unlike Greta that Lili would reply, “Is everything all right?”
But on this morning in early summer the most recent portrait looked beautiful. Greta was chatting freely, as she’d done each morning during the week. She was saying, “I don’t suppose I ever told you about the time I asked my mother to sit for a painting. It was when I went back to Pasadena during the war. She was imperious then, managing the household and the garden, searching the grounds for an untrimmed hedge. God save the gardener who left a leaf on the lawn. One day I asked her if I could paint her. She thought about it, and then made me schedule the time with our butler, Mr. Ito. And so I made five appointments to meet her in the breakfast room, where the morning light was good. Teddy Cross and I were seeing each other then, and Mother knew it, but she didn’t want to hear about it. I was eighteen, and about to burst over with love, and all I could think about, let alone talk about, was Teddy. How he spoke about things in his long, slow voice. How his shoulders curved down. How his hair felt to my hand. But my mother didn’t want to hear a single word about Teddy. She’d hold up her hand the moment I began. And so for five mornings I painted her as she sat in the chair at the head of the breakfast-room table, her back to a window with a bougainvillea just outside. It was during an autumn heat wave, and I watched the sweat bubble up on her lip. And all I could do was bite my tongue and say nothing about how I felt.”
“How’d it turn out?” Lili asked.
“The painting? Oh, she hated it. She said it made her look mean. But that isn’t true. It makes her look like a mother who wants to keep her daughter from stepping into something painful but knows she can’t. She knew nothing was going to keep me from Teddy. She knew it, and she pressed her lips together and sat as still as a corpse for five mornings in a row.”
“Where is it?”
“The painting? In Pasadena. In the upstairs hall.”
Then Lili decided it was time to tell Greta. She could no longer keep anything from her. There was a terrible stretch of time in Einar’s life-from the time Hans left Bluetooth until the day he met Greta at the academy-when he lived without anyone to reveal his secrets to. Lili could remember that, the feeling of biting down on one’s thoughts and feelings and storing them up for no one. Then Greta had changed Einar’s life. Lili could remember the feeling of that, too, of realizing, gratefully, that at last the loneliness would fall away. How could she be less than honest with Greta for another minute? “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
Greta murmured. Her eyes focused on the canvas; she tightened the tortoiseshell comb holding back her hair. Her hand was moving quickly, dabbing at the canvas and then circling through the paints poured into the Knabstrup bowls, and then returning to the nearly finished portrait of Lili.
But where to begin? What news should Lili deliver first: Henrik a few weeks ago about to board the Albert Herring, his hand fishing in his coat pocket for the diamond ring; the odd, sweet embarrassment they shared when the ring failed to slip past Lili’s knuckle; the telegram from New York, describing the apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street with the limestone front where they would live; and the most recent letter from Professor Bolk asking Lili when he should expect her, he was anxious to see her again. Yes, where to begin?
“This is very hard for me,” Lili was saying. Lili imagined the shock that would flush into Greta’s face; and the anger curling her fists. Lili wished there were another way. Another way for her and Greta. “I’m not sure where to start,” Lili said.
Greta set down her brush. “Are you in love?”
In the apartment below, there was a slam of the door. A few heavy footsteps. A window flinging open.
Lili sat back in the rope-bottom chair. She couldn’t believe that Greta had guessed. She couldn’t believe Greta had known-for Lili was sure that if Greta had known Lili was in love Greta would have tried to stop it. And it was then that Lili realized how wrong she was about Greta. Once again, Lili had been wrong.
“I am,” Lili said.
“Are you sure?” Greta asked.
“Yes, very.”
“Does he love you?”
“I can’t really believe it, but he does.”
“Well, then, not much else matters, does it?” Sunlight was on her, and Lili thought about all the evenings Greta had brushed out Lili’s hair, Greta’s breasts against Lili’s back. She thought about the bed they shared, and how their pinkies would curl around each other in the night. And how the morning light would fall on Greta’s rested face, and Lili would kiss her cheek thinking, Oh, if only I could be as beautiful as you!
“Are you happy for me?”
Greta said she was. Then she asked who he was, and Lili held her breath and then told Greta it was Henrik.
“Henrik,” Greta said. Lili studied Greta’s face for a reaction. She wondered if Greta would remember him; or if the fact that it was he would make it even harder on Greta. But her face held still, nothing moving except an almost imperceptible puff on her lips.
“He always loved you, didn’t he?”
Lili nodded. She almost felt ashamed. She thought of the scar on Henrik’s forehead, from the automobile accident, and she welled up with relief that very soon she would begin a life in which she could kiss that crosshatched line every night. “We’re getting married at the end of the summer.”
Greta said softly, “Married.”
“It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
Greta was corking her bottles of paint. “It’s all good news,” she said. She wasn’t looking at Lili as she wiped the lip of each bottle with the hem of her smock and then pushed the cork in. She moved across the room and knelt to roll a blank canvas. “There are still times when I see you, and I think to myself, Not so long ago we were married. You and me, we were married and we lived in that small dark space between two people where a marriage exists.”
“It was you and Einar.”
“I know it was Einar. But really, it was you and me.”
Lili understood. She could remember what it felt like to fall in love with Greta. She could recall what it was like to wonder idly about when Greta would next show up at the door. She could remember the small delicate weight of a photograph of Greta in the breast pocket of Einar’s shirt.
“I’m doing my best to get used to everything,” Greta said. She was speaking so quietly that Lili could barely hear her. The horn of a motorcar blared from the street, and then there was the screech of brakes, then a silence. An accident must have been avoided, a near miss on the street outside the Widow House, two chrome bumpers shining at each other beneath the Copenhagen sun, which was rising and rising and would hold itself aloft until late in the night.
“Where will you marry?” Greta asked.
“In New York.”
“New York?” Greta was at the sink, scrubbing the paint from her fingernails with a little wire brush. She said, “I see.”
Downstairs, the sailor began calling for his wife. “I’m home!” he yelled.
“But there’s something I want to do first,” Lili said. As the morning moved on, the heat was rising in the apartment. The bun of her hair was beginning to feel heavy, the V collar of the white dress sticking to her chest. Nationaltidende had predicted record heat, and something in Lili both welcomed it and despised it at the same time.
“I want to return to Dresden,” Lili said.
“What for?”
“For the last operation.”
Now she could see it in Greta’s face: the fast flaring of the nostrils, the eyelids sealing with pique, the anger flushing her cheeks and nearly boiling over. “You know I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“But I do.”
“But, Lili… Professor Bolk, he ’s… yes, he’s a good doctor, but even he can’t do that. Nobody can do that. I thought we settled this last year.”
“I’ve made up my mind,” Lili said. “Greta, can’t you understand? I want to have children with my husband.”
The sun was now reflecting off the Royal Theatre’s dome. Lili Elbe and Greta Waud, as she had begun calling herself again, alone in the apartment. Their dog, Edvard IV, asleep at the foot of the wardrobe, his body arthritic and unreliable. Recently Lili had suggested that maybe it was time to put old Edvard down, but Greta had nearly cried in protest.
“Professor Bolk knows what he’s doing,” Lili said.
“I don’t believe him.”
“But I do.”
“Nobody can make a man pregnant. That’s what he’s promising to do. It’ll never happen. Not to you or to anyone. Something like that was never meant to be.”
It stung, Greta’s protest, and Lili’s eyes became moist. “Nobody believed a man could be turned into a woman. Isn’t that right? Who would’ve believed that? No one but you and me. We believed it, and now look at me. It happened because we knew it could.” Lili was crying. More than anything else, she hated Greta for taking an opposite side.
“Will you think it over, Lili? For a little bit?”
“I already have.”
“No, take some time. Think it through.”
Lili said nothing, her face at the window. Downstairs, more boot stomping, then the screech of a phonograph.
“It worries me,” Greta said. “I’m worried about you.”
As the sunlight moved across the floorboards, and another horn from the street blared, and the sailor below shouted at his wife, Lili felt something in her shift. Greta could no longer tell her what to do.
The painting was complete, and Greta now turned it to show Lili. The eyelet hem was gauzy against her legs, and the bouquet of roses looked like something mysterious blossoming from her lap. If only I were half as beautiful as that, Lili thought to herself. And then she thought she should send the painting to Henrik as a wedding gift.
“He’s expecting me next week,” Lili said. “Professor Bolk.”
The pain was returning, and Lili looked at her watch. Had it been eight hours since she swallowed her last pill? She began to check her purse for the enamel pillbox. “He and Frau Krebs already know I’m coming. They have my room waiting,” she said, opening drawers in the kitchen, hunting for the little case. It frightened her how quickly the pain could return; from nothing to violent ache in only a few minutes. Like the return of an evil spirit, it was.
“Have you seen my pillbox?” Lili asked. “I think it was in my purse. Or maybe on the windowsill. Have you seen it, Greta?” With the heat and the pain, Lili’s breath quickened. She said, “Do you know where it is?” And then, tacked on like a gentle touch to the wrist, “I’d like you to come to Dresden with me. To help me recover. The professor said you should probably come. He said I’ll need someone there afterwards. You wouldn’t mind, Greta, would you? You’ll come with me, won’t you, Greta? This one last time?”
“You realize, don’t you,” Greta said, “that this is it?”
“What do you mean?” The pain was opening so quickly that Lili was having trouble seeing. She sat down, bending over. As soon as she found the pills the relief would come in a few minutes, less than five. But right now it felt as if a knife were cutting through her abdomen. She thought of her ovaries-alive, Professor Bolk had promised. It was as if she could feel them inside her, swollen and throbbing, still healing nearly a year after the operation. Where had she left her pill case, and what did Greta mean: This is it. She looked across the room, to where Greta was unbuttoning her smock, hanging it on the hook next to the slatted door to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” Greta said. “I can’t.”
“You can’t find my pills?” Lili said, blinking back the tears. “Try the wardrobe. Maybe I put them in there.” All at once Lili felt as if she was about to pass out: the heat and the missing pills and the fiery anguish inside and Greta walking around the apartment saying I can’t, I won’t.
Then Greta’s hand sank deep into the bottom drawer of the pickled-ash wardrobe. She pulled out the little enamel box and brought it to Lili and said, her own voice shaky with tears, “I’m sorry, but I can’t take you. I don’t want you to go, and I’m not going to take you.” Her shrug turned into a shiver. “You’ll have to go to Dresden alone.”
“If Greta won’t take you,” Carlisle said, “then I will.” He had come to Copenhagen for the summer, and in the evenings, after her shift at Fon nesbech’s, Lili would sometimes visit him at the Palace Hotel. They would sit at the open window and watch the shadows creep across the bricks of Rådhuspladsen, and the young men and women in their thin summer clothes meeting up on their way to the jazz clubs in Nørrevold. “Greta always did what she wanted,” Carlisle would say. Lili would correct him and say, “Not always. She’s changed.”
They began to prepare for the trip. They booked passage on the ferry to Danzig, and Lili, one day on her break, bought two new dressing robes in the ladies’ department of Fonnesbech’s. She told her boss, whose arms folded up the moment Lili began to speak, that she’d be leaving in a week. “Will you be back?” demanded the woman, whose black blouse made her look like a rock of coal.
“No,” Lili said. “From there, I’m leaving for New York.”
And that was what added to the difficulty of the trip to Dresden. Professor Bolk told her she should expect to stay a month. “We’ll operate right away,” he cabled. “But your recovery will take time.” Lili showed the telegrams to Carlisle, who read them much as his sister had read them-with the paper pushed away from his face, his head tilted. But Carlisle didn’t argue; he didn’t advise otherwise. He read through the correspondence and said, when he was done, “What exactly is Bolk going to do?”
“He knows I want to become a mother,” Lili said.
Carlisle nodded, made a little frown. “But how?”
Lili looked at him, and suddenly feared that he might try to interfere. “The same way he made me out of Einar.”
His glance ran up and down Lili; she could feel his eyes on her ankles, which were crossed, to her lap to her small breasts, to her throat, which rose like a stem from the ring of amber beads. Carlisle stood: “It’s all very exciting for you. It’s what I suppose you’ve always wanted.”
“Since I was little.”
“Yes,” Carlisle said. “What little girl doesn’t want that?” It was true, and Lili was relieved that Carlisle had agreed to travel with her. For a few days she had begged Greta to change her mind. Greta had held Lili in her arms, Lili’s face in Greta’s shoulder, and said, “I think it’s a mistake. I’m not going to help you make a mistake.” Lili packed her suitcase and picked up the ferry tickets with a light sense of dread, and she wrapped her sheer summer shawl around her shoulders as if fighting a chill.
She told herself to think of it as an adventure: the ferry to Danzig, the night train to Dresden, the month-long stay at the Municipal Women’s Clinic. From there she would travel to New York. She had sent word to Henrik that she would arrive by the first of September. She began to think of herself as a voyager, embarking for a world only she could imagine. When she shut her eyes, she could see it: the living room of a New York apartment, with a police whistle rising from the street, and a baby bouncing in her lap. She imagined a little table with a doily across its surface and the silver double-oval frame holding two photographs, one of Henrik and her on their wedding day, the second of their first child in his long, eyelet-hemmed christening gown.
Lili needed to sort through her belongings to make sure everything was crated up so that when she sent for them, all would be ready. There were the clothes: the capped-sleeve dresses from that summer in Menton; and the dresses with the beaded embroidery from her days in Paris, before she became sick; and the rabbit-fur coat with the hood. Most of it, she realized, she wouldn’t want in New York. They now seemed cheap, as if someone else had bought them, as if another woman’s body had worn them thin.
Late one afternoon, as Lili was packing up the crates and sinking nails through their lids, Greta said, “What about Einar’s paintings?”
“His paintings?”
“Some are left. Stacked in my studio,” Greta said. “I thought you might want them.”
Lili didn’t know what to think. His paintings no longer hung in the apartment, and now for some reason she couldn’t quite imagine what they looked like: small gold frames, scenes of the frozen earth, but what else?
“Can I see them?” Greta brought her the canvases, rolled up inside out, their edges fringed with a heavy waxy thread. She opened them across the floorboards, and it felt to Lili as if she had never seen them before. Most were of a bog: one was in winter, with hoarfrost and a dingy sky; one was in summer, with peat moss and a late-night sun; another was simply of the soil, blue-gray from the morainic clays mixed with lime. They were small and beautiful, and Greta continued to unroll them across the floor, ten, then twenty, then more, like a carpet of field flowers blossoming beneath the eye. “Did he really paint them all?”
“He once was a very busy man,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“You don’t recognize the bog?”
“I don’t think so.” It troubled her, for she knew she should know the place: it had the familiarity of a face lost in the past.
“You don’t remember it at all?”
“Only vaguely.” Downstairs, the phonograph came on, an accordion polka, mixed with horn.
“The Bluetooth bog,” Greta said.
“Where Einar was born?”
“Yes. Einar and Hans.”
“Have you ever been there?” Lili asked.
“No, but I’ve seen so many paintings and heard so much about it that when I shut my eyes it’s as if I can see it.”
Lili studied the paintings, the bog surrounded by hazel bushes and linden trees, and a great oak seemingly growing around a boulder. She had a memory, although it wasn’t her own, of following Hans down a trail, the muck sucking her boots as she stepped. She remembered throwing things stolen from her grandmother’s kitchen into the bog and watching them sink forever: a dinner plate, a pewter bowl, an apron with cottongrass strings. There was the work of cutting the peat into bricks, and the hoeing in the sphagnum field. And Edvard I, a runt of a dog, one day slipping off a lichen rock and drowning in the black water.
Greta continued to lay out the paintings, holding down their corners with her bottles of paint and saucers from the kitchen. “It’s where he was from,” she said, on her hands and knees, her hair falling into her face. Methodically she unrolled each painting and anchored its corners and then aligned it into the grid she was creating of dozens and dozens of the little pictures that made up much of Einar’s work.
Lili watched her, the way Greta’s eyes focused in on the tip of her nose. Her bracelets rattled around her wrists as she worked. The front room of the Widow House, with its windows facing north, south, and west, filled with the quiet colors of Einar’s paintings: the grays and the whites and the muted yellows and the brown of mud and the deep black of a bog at night. “He used to work and work, through the day, and the next day again,” Greta said, her voice soft and careful and unfamiliar.
“Can you sell them?” Lili said.
Greta stopped. The floor was nearly covered, and she stood and looked for a place to step. She had cornered herself against the wall, by the iron-footed stove. “You mean you don’t want them?”
Something in Lili knew she was making a mistake, but she said it anyway: “I don’t know how much room we’ll have,” she said. “I’m not sure Henrik would like them. What with his own paintings. He prefers things more modern. After all,” Lili said, “it’s New York.”
Greta said, “It’s just that I thought you might want them. At least some of them?”
When Lili shut her eyes, she too saw the bog, and the family of white dogs, and a grandmother guarding her stove, and Hans, sprawled over the curve of a mica-flecked rock, and then, strangely, young Greta in the soap-green hallway of the Royal Academy of Art, a fresh pack of red-sable brushes in her fist. “I found the art supply store,” Greta was saying, in that lost memory.
“It’s not that I don’t want them,” Lili heard herself saying, this day, one of her last in the Widow House, already slipping away into memory. But whose memory? “I just can’t take them with me,” and she shuddered, for suddenly it felt as if everything around her belonged to someone else.
The day after Lili and Carlisle left for Dresden, there was a summer storm. Greta was in the apartment, in the front room, watering the ivy in the pot on the Empire side table. The room was gray without the sun, and Edvard IV was asleep next to her trunk. The sailor below was out at sea, probably caught in the roll of the storm that very minute, and there was a clap of thunder, and then the giggle of the sailor’s wife.
It was funny, Greta thought. How the years had passed, the endless repetition of the flat sunrises over Denmark and, across the globe, the sunset crashing against the Arroyo Seco and the San Gabriel Mountains. Years in California and Copenhagen, years in Paris, years married and not, and now here she was, in the emptied Widow House, trunks loaded and locked. Lili and Carlisle would arrive in Dresden later that day, if the rain hadn’t delayed them. Yesterday she and Lili had said goodbye at the ferry dock. People around them, heaving luggage, dogs in arms, a team wheeling their bicycles up the plank. Hans was there, and Carlisle, and Greta and Lili, and hundreds of others, all saying so long. A pack of schoolchildren herded by their headmistress. Thin young men hunting employment. A countess headed for a month of mineral baths in Baden-Baden. And Greta and Lili, next to each other, holding hands and forgetting about the rest of the world around them. One last time Greta shoved away the rest of the world, and everything she knew and felt shrank down to the tiny circle of intimacy where Greta and Lili stood, her arm now around Lili’s waist. They promised to write each other. Lili promised she would take care of herself. Lili said, her voice nearly inaudible, they would see each other in America. Yes, Greta said, having trouble imagining it. But she said, Yes, indeed. When she thought about it, a horrible shiver ran up her spine, her Western spine, because it felt-this departure at the dock-as if she had somehow failed.
Greta was now waiting for Hans’s horn from the street. Outside, the spires and the gables and the slate roofs were black in the storm, the Royal Theatre’s dome as dull as old pewter. Then came Hans’s call, and Greta scooped Edvard IV into her arms and shut out the lights, the bolt of the lock turning heavily.
The storm continued, and the drive out of the city was slippery. The apartment houses were stained with rain. Puddles were swallowing the curbs. Greta and Hans witnessed a plump woman on a bicycle, her body battened down in a slicker, crash into the rear ramp of a mason’s lorry. Greta pressed her hands to her mouth as she watched the woman’s eyes shut with fear.
Once they were beyond the city limits, the gold Horch, with its white cabriolet top buckled closed, began to roll across the fields. Meadows of Italian rye grass and timothy and fescue and cocksfoot were damp and dented in the rain. Red and white clover, lucerne grass, and trefoil lined the road, bent and dripping. And beyond the fields the kettle-hole lakes, dimpled and deep.
The ferry ride to Århus was choppy, and Hans and Greta sat in the front seat of the Horch during the crossing. The car smelled of Edvard’s wet coat, curled by the damp. Hans and Greta didn’t speak, and she could feel the churn of the ferry’s engines when she set her hand on the dash. Hans asked her if she needed a coffee, and she said yes. He took Edvard IV with him, and when she was alone in the car she thought of the journey Lili and Carlisle were on; in a few hours they’d probably be settling into the room at the clinic with the view over the willows in the back-park down to the Elbe. Greta thought of Professor Bolk, whose likeness she had captured in a painting that had never sold; it sat rolled up behind the wardrobe. And when she returned to Copenhagen in a few days, when she finished sorting through her furniture and her clothes and her paintings, she would send it on to him, Greta told herself. It could hang behind Frau Krebs’s reception desk, in a gray wood frame. Or in his office, above the sofa, where, in a few years, other desperate women like Lili would surely come in pilgrimage.
It was night when they arrived in Bluetooth. The brick villa was dark, the baroness already retired to her apartment on the third floor. A houseman with a few tufts of white hair and a snub nose led Greta to a room with a bed covered in a slip of lace. He turned on the lamps, his snub-nosed face bent forward, and lifted the windows. “Not afraid of frogs?” he said. Already she could hear them croaking in the bog. When the houseman left, Greta opened the windows some more. The night was clear, with a half-cut moon low in the sky, and Greta could see the bog through an opening in the ash and elm trees. It looked almost like a damp field, or a great lawn in Pasadena soaked after a January rain. She thought of the earthworms that were driven from the ground after a winter downpour, the way they writhed on the flagstone paths trying to save themselves from drowning. Had she really been the type of child who would cut them in two with a butter knife thieved from her mother’s pantry and then present them to Carlisle on a plate, beneath a silver warming bell?
The curtains were made of a blued eyelet and they hung down and across the floorboards, fanning themselves out like wedding trains. Hans knocked and said, through the door, “I’m down the hall, Greta. If you need anything.” There was something in his voice. Greta could sense his curled knuckle pressed against the paneled door, his other hand gently on the knob. She could imagine him in the hall, lit by a single wall sconce at the top of the stairs. She imagined the point of his forehead pressing the door.
“Nothing now,” she said. And there was a silence, only the frogs cho rusing on their patches of peat, and the owls in the elms. “All right then,” Hans said, and Greta couldn’t quite hear him retreat to his room, his stockinged feet padding across the runner. Their time would come, she told herself. All in time.
The next day Greta met Baroness Axgil in the breakfast room. The room looked out toward the bog, which sparkled through the trees. Around the room potted ferns balanced in iron stands, and a collection of blue-and-white porcelain plates was secured to the wall. Baroness Axgil was gaunt and long-limbed, her hands backed with rubbery veins. Her head, also Borreby in size and shape, was held up by a throat tight with tendon. Her silver hair was pulled back snugly, slanting her eyes. The baroness sat at the head of the table, Hans opposite her, Greta in the middle. The houseman served smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs and triangles of buttered bread. Baroness Axgil said only, “I’m afraid I don’t remember an Einar Wegener. W-E-G, did you say? So many boys came through the house. Did he have red hair?”
“No, it was brown,” Hans said.
“Yes. Brown,” said the baroness, who had invited Edvard into her lap and was feeding him strips of salmon. “A nice boy, I’m sure. Dead how long?”
“About a year,” Greta replied, and she looked to one end of the breakfast-room table and then to the other and was reminded of another breakfast room on the other side of the world where a woman not unlike the baroness still reigned.
Later in the day Hans led her down a path alongside a sphagnum field to a farmhouse. It had a thatched roof and timber eaves, and a puff of smoke was rising from the chimney. Hans and Greta didn’t approach the yard, where there were hens in a coop and three small children scratching the mud with sticks. A woman with yellow hair was in the door, squinting against the sun, watching her children, two boys and a girl. A pony in its pen sneezed, and the children laughed, and old Edvard IV trembled at Greta’s leg. “I’m not sure who they are,” Hans said. “Been there awhile.”
“Do you suppose she’ll let us in if we ask? To have a look around?”
“Let’s not,” Hans said, his hand falling to the small of her back, where it remained as they returned across the field. The long blades of grass swiped at her shins. And Edvard IV chugged behind.
In the graveyard, there was a wooden cross marked WEGENER. “His father,” Hans said. A grassy grave in the shade of a red alder. The graveyard was next to a whitewashed church, and the ground was uneven, and flinty, and the sun burning the dew off the rye grass made the air smell sweet.
“I have his paintings,” she said.
“Keep them,” Hans said, his hand still on her.
“What was he like then?”
“A little boy with a secret. That’s all. No different from the rest of us.”
The sky was high and cloudless, and the wind ran through the red alder’s leaves. Greta stopped herself from thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Summer in Jutland, no different from the summer days of his youth, the days when Einar certainly was both happy and sad at once. She had returned home without him. Greta Waud, tall in the grass, her shadow lowering itself across the graves, would return home without him.
On the drive back to Copenhagen, Hans said, “What about California? Are we still going?”
The Horch’s twelve cylinders were running powerfully, the vibration shaking her skin. The sun was bright, and the top was down, and there was a strip of paper swirling about Greta’s ankles. “What did you say?” she yelled, holding her hair in her fist.
“Are we going to California together?” And just as the wind was rushing around her, sending her hair and the lap of her dress and the strip of paper whirling, her thoughts began to pass chaotically through her head: her little room in Pasadena with the arched window overlooking the roses; the casita on the lip of the Arroyo Seco, now let to tenants, a family with a baby boy; the blank windows of Teddy Cross’s old ceramics studio on Colorado Street, transformed after the fire into a printer’s press; the members of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society in their felt berets. How could Greta return to that? But there was more in her head, and then Greta thought of the mossy courtyard of the casita, where in the light filtering through the avocado tree she painted her first portrait of Teddy Cross; and the little bungalows Carlisle was building on the streets off California Boulevard, where newlyweds from Illinois were settling; and the acres of orange groves. Greta looked to the sky, to the pale blue that reminded her of the antique plates on the walls of the baroness’s breakfast room. It was June, and in Pasadena the rye grass would have burned out by now, and the palm fronds would be brittle, and by now the maids would have pulled the cots onto the sleeping porches. There was a sleeping porch at the rear of the house; its screens were on hinges, and as a girl she would open them up and stare out, across the Arroyo Seco to the Linda Vista hills, and she would sketch the rolling dry-green sight of Pasadena. She imagined unpacking her paints and screwing together her easel on the sleeping porch and painting that vista now: the gray-brown of the blur of the eucalyptus, the dusty green of the stalks of cypress, the flash of pink stucco of an Italianate mansion peeking through the oleander, the gray of a cement balustrade overlooking the expanse of it all.
“I’m ready to go,” Greta said.
“What’s that?” Hans called, through the wind.
“You’ll love it out there. It will make the rest of the world seem very far away.” She reached over and stroked Hans’s thigh. It had all come to this: she and Hans would return to Pasadena, and she realized no one out there would ever fully understand what had happened to her. The girls from the Valley Hunt Club, now married certainly, with children enrolled in tennis clinics on the club’s courts, would know nothing about her except for the fact the she had returned with a Danish baron. Already Greta could hear the gossip: “Poor Greta Waud. Widowed again. Something mysterious happened to the latest. A painter of some sort. Some sort of mysterious death. In Germany, I think I heard. But not to worry-now she’s back, and this time with a baron. That’s right, little Miss Radical has returned to Pasadena, and as soon as she marries this fellow she, of all people, will become a baroness.”
That was part of what lay ahead for Greta, but she took comfort in the thought of going home. Her hand was on Hans’s thigh and he smiled at her, his knuckles white around the Horch’s wheel as he steered them back to Copenhagen.
A letter from Carlisle waited for her. After she read it, she slipped it into the side pocket of one of the trunks she was packing. So many things to ship home: her brushes and her paints and dozens of notebooks and sketches of Lili. It was just like Carlisle not to send enough news: the operation took longer than Bolk had thought, almost a full day. Lili was resting, sleeping from the morphia injections she still receives. I’ll have to stay in Dresden longer than I planned, Carlisle wrote. Another several weeks. Her recovery will take longer than any of us guessed. Progress has been slow so far. The professor is a kind man. He sends his regards. He says he’s not worried about her. If he’s not worried about her, then I suppose we shouldn’t be either, wouldn’t you agree?
A week later Greta Waud and Hans Axgil boarded the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd for the first leg of their trip to Pasadena. They would fly to Berlin, and then to Southampton; from there they’d sail. The aeroplane, reflecting the fine summer day, was on the tarmac of the Amager aerodrome. Greta stood with Hans and watched the skinny boys load their trunks and crates into the silver belly of the aeroplane. Farther down the tarmac was a cluster of people around a platform, where a man in a top hat was giving a speech. He had a beard, and a little Danish flag on the corner of his lectern was flapping in the wind. Behind him was the Graf Zeppelin, long and stormy gray, like an enormous ribbed bullet. The people in the crowd began to wave little Danish flags. She had read in Politiken that the Graf Zepp was setting out on a Polar flight. Greta watched the crowd cheer, as the zeppelin hovered above the tarmac. “Do you think they’ll make it?” she asked Hans.
He was reaching for his calfskin valise. The aeroplane was ready for them. “Why shouldn’t they?”
The man making the speech was a politician she didn’t recognize. Probably running for parliament. And behind him was the Graf Zepp’s captain, Franz Josef Land, in a sealskin cap. He wasn’t smiling. His eyebrows were bunched together over his glasses, and he looked concerned.
“It’s time,” Hans said.
She took his elbow, and they found their seats in the aeroplane. She could see the zeppelin through her window, and the crowd, which was moving away from the aircraft. Men in shirtsleeves and suspenders were beginning the untethering. The captain was standing in the doorway of his little cabin, waving farewell.
“He looks as if he wonders if he’ll ever come back,” Greta said, as the aeroplane’s porthole door locked with the turn of a wheel.
The voyage out on the Empress of Britannia was smooth, and the passengers sat in their striped lounge chairs on the teak deck, and Greta thought of the handstand she performed when she was ten. She screwed together her easel, twisting its butterfly bolts through the holes in its legs. She pulled a blank canvas from one of her trunks, nailing it to a frame. And on the ship’s deck, she began to paint from memory: the hills of Pasadena rising out of the Arroyo Seco, dry and brown in early summer, the jacaranda trees having shed their blossoms, and the last day lily folding in the heat. With her eyes closed, she could see it all.
In the mornings Hans kept to himself in his stateroom, going through his papers and preparing for his arrival in California, where they would marry in the garden of the Waud house. In the late afternoons he would move a deck chair to her side. “We’re off at last,” he would say.
“Homeward bound,” she would say. “I never thought I wanted to go home.”
It had come to this, Greta would think over and over, the moist tip of her brush dipping into the paint. The shift of the past, the sprawl of the future; all of it she had navigated both rashly and cautiously, and it had come to this. Hans was handsome with his legs stretched out on the chaise. He was half in the sun, half out, Edvard IV at his feet. The ship’s engines churned on and on. Its bow pried the ocean in two, splitting the endless dimpled water into halves, cutting what had once seemed interminably one into two. Greta and Hans each continued to work in the slanting light, in the air heavy with salt, through the dusk falling red and flat over the blank, shrinking sea, until the moon rose and the white party lights strung along the ship’s rail came on and the chill of eve would send them to their stateroom, where they would be together at last.
It was late July before Lili was awake long enough during the day to remember anything. For nearly six weeks she had lolled in and out of consciousness, spitting up in her sleep, hemorrhaging between her legs and in her abdomen. Every morning and night Frau Krebs would replace the bandages taped over her pelvis, pulling away the old ones that looked like scraps of royal velvet, so red and bright they were. Lili was aware of Frau Krebs changing the dressing and the gauze, and the welcoming sting of the morphia needle, and, on many days, the pressure of the rubber ether mask. Lili knew that someone was there laying a damp rag across her forehead, changing it when it warmed.
On some nights she would wake and recognize Carlisle asleep in the chair in the corner, his head back against the cushion, his mouth open. She didn’t want to wake him-so kind he was to spend the night at her side. She’d tell herself to let him rest; she’d turn her head in the pillow and look at Carlisle, his face oiled with sleep, and his fingers curled around the loop holding the cushion to the chair’s back. She wanted him to sleep through the night: and she’d watch his chest rise and fall, and think of the day they spent together before this last operation. Carlisle took her to a beach on the Elbe, where they swam in the current, and then sunned themselves on a blanket. “You’ll make quite a mother,” Carlisle said. Lili wondered why it was so easy for him to imagine it, but not Greta. When she closed her eyes Lili sometimes thought she could smell the powdery scent of a bundled infant. She could nearly feel the little dense weight of a child in her arms. She told this to Carlisle, who said, “I can see it too.”
On the riverbank he ran his hand over his arm, pushing off the water. His wet hair was matted around his face, and then he said, “It’s hard for Greta, this part is.”
A tourist steamer was coughing up black exhaust, and Lili braided the fringe of the blanket, weaving in blades of grass. “I’m sure in some ways she misses Einar,” Carlisle said.
“I can understand that.” She filled with that strange feeling she got when Einar was mentioned: like a ghost passing through her, it was. “Do you think she’d come visit me?”
“Here, in Dresden? She might. I don’t see why not.”
Lili turned on her side and watched the black column of exhaust rise and shift. “You’ll write her, then? After the operation?”
A few days after the surgery, when Lili’s fever stabilized, he wrote Greta. But she didn’t reply. He wrote again, and again there was no answer. He telephoned but heard through the static only a tinny, endless ring. A telegram couldn’t be delivered. It took a cable to Landmandsbanken to discover that Greta had returned to California.
Now, in the middle of the night, Lili didn’t want to disturb Carlisle’s sleep, but she could barely remain silent. The pain was returning, and she was gripping the sash of the blanket, shredding it in fear. She concentrated on the bulb in the ceiling, biting her lip, but soon the pain had spread through her body, and she was screaming, begging for a morphia injection. She cried for ether. She whimpered for her pills laced with cocaine. Carlisle began to stir, his face lifting; for an instant he stared at her, his eyelids fluttering, and Lili knew he was trying to figure out where he was. But then he was awake and went to find the night nurse, who herself was asleep at her station. Within a minute the ether mask clamped down around Lili’s nose and mouth and she slipped away for the rest of the night.
“Feeling any better today?” Professor Bolk asked on his morning rounds.
“Maybe a little,” Lili would try.
“The pain down at all?”
“A bit,” Lili would reply, even though it wasn’t true. She’d try to push herself up in her bed. When the professor entered her room she would worry about how she looked; if only he would knock and give her a chance to apply her coral lipstick and her Rouge Fin de Théâtre, which was sitting on the table in its red tin the size of a cookie just beyond her reach. She must be quite a sight, she’d think as the professor, so handsome in his crisp lab coat, scanned down the paperwork on his clipboard.
“Tomorrow we should try to get you to walk,” the professor would say.
“Well, if I’m not ready tomorrow, then I’ll surely be ready the day after,” Lili would say. “Most likely the day after tomorrow I’ll be up to it.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“You’ve already done so much,” Lili would say.
Professor Bolk would turn to leave, but then Lili would force herself to ask what she most wanted to know: “Henrik is waiting for me in New York. Do you think I’ll make it to New York by September?”
“Without a doubt.”
The professor’s voice, when he reassured her this way, was like a hand on her shoulder. She would then nod off to sleep, dreaming of nothing in particular but knowing, vaguely, that all would work out.
Sometimes she’d hear the professor and Carlisle talking outside her door. “What can you tell me?” Carlisle would say.
“Not much. She seems pretty much the same today. I’m trying to get her more and more stable.”
“Is there anything we should be doing for her?”
“Just let her sleep. She needs her rest.”
Lili would turn on her side and nod off, wanting more than anything to obey the professor’s orders. If she knew anything at all, she knew he was always right.
One day a voice in the hall woke her up. It was familiar, a woman’s voice from long ago, coppery and large. “What’s he doing for her?” Lili heard Anna ask. “Hasn’t he got any other ideas?”
“Only in the last couple of days did he begin to worry,” Carlisle said. “Only yesterday did he admit that the infection should have cleared up by now.”
“What can we do?”
“I’ve been asking that myself. Bolk says there’s nothing to do.”
“Is she taking anything?”
Then in the hall there was a crash of two carts, and Lili couldn’t hear the voices, just Frau Krebs telling a nurse to be more careful.
“The transplant isn’t working,” Carlisle said. “He’s going to have to remove the uterus.” And then, “How long are you here for?”
“A week. I have two Carmens at the Opernhaus.”
“Yes, I know. Before the operation, Lili and I were out and she saw the poster. She knew you would be coming at the end of the summer. She’s had that to look forward to.”
“And her marriage.”
“You heard from Greta?” Carlisle said.
“She wrote me. She’s probably in Pasadena by now. Settled. You know about her and Hans?”
“I was supposed to be returning now myself,” Carlisle said.
Lili couldn’t hear what Anna said next. She wondered why Anna hadn’t come into the room yet. She could picture Anna bursting through the door and throwing back the yellow curtain. She’d be wearing a green silk tunic beaded in the collar, a matching turban swirling up from her head. Her lips would be as bright as blood, and Lili could imagine the mark they’d leave on her cheek. Lili thought about calling out, “Anna!” Crying, “Anna, are you going to come in and say hello?” But Lili’s throat was dry, and she felt incapable of prying her mouth open to say anything at all. It was all she could do to turn her head to look to the door.
“Is it grave?” Anna said in the hall.
“I’m afraid Bolk hasn’t really let on about what’s likely to come next.” Then they said nothing, and Lili was left to lie in her bed, motionless, except for the slow dull thump of her heart. Where had Carlisle and Anna gone?
“Is she sleeping now?” Anna finally said.
“Yes. She’s in between morphia shots in the early afternoons. Can you come by tomorrow after lunch?” Carlisle said. “But poke your head in now and have a look. So I can tell her you’ve been here.”
Lili heard the door crack open. She could feel another person enter the room-that subtle reshifting of air, the nearly imperceptible change in temperature. Anna’s perfume drifted to Lili’s bed. She recognized it from the counter at Fonnesbech’s. It came in a short little bottle with a gold-mesh tassel, but Lili couldn’t think of the name. Eau-de-Provence, or something like that. Or was it La Fille du Provence? She didn’t know, and she couldn’t open her eyes to greet Anna. She couldn’t speak, and she couldn’t see anything, and she couldn’t raise her hand to wave hello. And Lili then knew that Carlisle and Anna were standing at the side of her bed and there was nothing she could do to tell them that she knew they were there.
The next day, after lunch, Carlisle and Anna bundled Lili into her wicker wheelchair. “It’s too beautiful not to be outside,” he was saying as he tucked the blanket around her. Anna wrapped Lili’s head in a long magenta scarf, building a turban on her head that matched her own. Then they pushed Lili into the clinic’s back-park, settling her against a gooseberry shrub. “Do you like the sun, Lili?” Anna asked. “Do you like it out here?”
Other girls were on the lawn. It was Sunday, and some had visitors who brought them magazines and boxes of chocolate. There was a woman in a pleated polka-dot dress who gave a girl chocolates wrapped in the gold foil from the shop on Unter den Linden.
Lili could see Frau Krebs in the Wintergarten, surveying the lawn and the girls and the curve of the Elbe below. She looked small from this far, as small as a child. Then she disappeared. It was her afternoon off, and all the girls liked to gossip about what Frau Krebs did in her spare time, even though the truth was that she headed into her garden with a hoe.
“Should we go for a walk?” Carlisle said, releasing the hand brake and pushing Lili across the rocky grass. There were rabbit holes in which the wheels bounced, and although the rocking rattled her with pain, Lili couldn’t help thinking how glad she was to be outside the clinic with Carlisle and Anna. “Are we going down to the Elbe?” Lili asked when she saw that Carlisle was steering her away from the dirt path that led to the river.
“We’ll get there,” Anna said, and they pushed Lili through a curtain of willows. They were moving fast, and Lili held the chair’s arms as it hit tree roots and rocks. “I thought I’d take you out for a bit,” Carlisle said.
“But I’m not allowed,” Lili said. “It’s against the rules. What would Frau Krebs say?”
“No one will know,” Anna said. “Besides, you’re a grown woman. Why shouldn’t you leave if you want to?” Soon they were beyond the clinic’s gate and out into the street. Carlisle and Anna pushed her through the neighborhood, past the villas set back behind brick walls spiked with iron cupolas. The sun was warm but a breeze was running up the street, revealing the underside of the elm leaves. In the distance Lili heard the bell of a tram.
“Do you think they’ll miss me?” she said.
“So what if they do,” and Carlisle-the way his face was tight with focus, the way he swatted his hand through the air-again reminded Lili of Greta. It was almost as if Lili could hear the tinkle of silver jewelry. She had a memory-as if it were a story once told to her-of Greta sneaking down Kronprinsessegade with Einar in tow. Lili could remember the heat of Greta’s hand in her own, the brush of a silver bangle against her fingers.
Soon Lili and Carlisle and Anna were crossing the Augustusbrücke. In front of Lili lay all of Dresden: the Opernhaus, the Catholic Hof kirche, the Italian-styled Academy of Art, and the seemingly floating dome of the Frauenkirche. They came to Schlossplatz and the foot of the Brühlsche Terrace. A man with a cart was selling bratwurst in a bun and pouring glasses of apple wine. Business was good for him, a line of eight or ten people waiting, their faces pinking in the sun. “Doesn’t that smell good, Lili?” Carlisle said, as he pushed her to the stairs.
Forty-one steps led to the terrace, where Sunday strollers were out, leaning against the rail. The steps were adorned by the Schilling bronzes of Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night. There was a fine grit on the steps, and from the base Lili watched the long yellow skirt of a woman and the disc of her straw hat climb the stairs, her arm looped through a man’s. “But how will we get up?” Lili asked.
“Not to worry,” Carlisle said, turning her chair around. He gave it a pull up the first step.
“But your leg,” Lili said.
“I’ll be all right,” Carlisle said.
“And what about your back?”
“Didn’t Greta ever tell you about our famous Western spines?”
And with that, Carlisle, who never once, as far as Lili knew, blamed Greta for his dented leg, began to lug Lili up the stairs. With each bounce came a horrible jolt of pain, and Anna gave Lili her hand to squeeze.
The terrace looked out across the Elbe to the Japanese Palace and the right bank. Traffic in the river was heavy, with the paddlewheelers and the coal freighters and the dragon-fronted gondolas and the rent-a-day rowboats. Carlisle locked the brake of Lili’s chair in the space between two benches, beneath one of the square-trimmed poplars, at the terrace’s rail. Carlisle stood next to her, Anna on her other side. Lili could sense their hands on the back of her chair. Young couples were on the terrace, holding hands, boys buying girls sacks of grape-flavored candy from a vendor with a cart. On the grassy beach on the other side of the Elbe, four little boys were flying a white rag-tail kite.
“Look how high their kite is!” Anna pointed to the boys. “Higher than the city, it seems.”
“Do you think they’ll lose it?” Lili said.
“Would you like a kite, Lili?” Anna said. “Tomorrow we’ll get you one if you like.”
“What do they call this place?” Carlisle said. “The balcony of Europe?”
They said nothing for a while, and then Carlisle said, “I think I’ll go buy a bratwurst from that little man. Are you hungry, Lili? Can I get you anything?”
She wasn’t; she no longer ate much at all, which of course Carlisle knew. Lili tried to say “No, thank you,” but couldn’t form the words.
“Do you mind if we go off for a few minutes to find that man?” Anna said. “We won’t be gone more than a minute or two.”
Lili nodded, and Carlisle’s and Anna’s shoes ground through the gravel, drifting away. Lili shut her eyes. The balcony of the whole world, she thought. Of my whole world. She could feel the sun on her eyelids. She heard a couple one bench over crunching on their candy. And beyond that the slap of water on the side of a boat. A tram called, and then the bell of the cathedral. And for once Lili stopped thinking about the misty, double-sided past and the promise of the future. It didn’t matter who she once was, or who she’d become. She was Fräulein Lili Elbe. A Danish girl in Dresden. A young woman out in the afternoon with a pair of friends. A young woman whose dearest friend was off in California, leaving Lili, it suddenly felt, alone. She thought of each of them-Henrik, Anna, Carlisle, Hans, Greta. Each, in his own way, partially responsible for the birth of Lili Elbe. Now she knew what Greta had meant: the rest Lili would have to undergo alone.
When she opened her eyes, Lili saw that Carlisle and Anna hadn’t yet returned. She wasn’t worried; they’d come back for her. They would find her in her chair. Across the river the boys were running and pointing to the sky. Their kite was lifting higher than the willows, higher than even the Augustusbrücke. It was flying up over the Elbe, a white diamond of bedsheet reaching, bright from the sun, tugging on the boys’ spool-rolled string. Then the line snapped, and the kite sailed free. Lili thought she heard the overly excited shrieks of little boys buried in the breeze, but that would have been impossible; they were too far away. But she had heard a muffled shriek somewhere; where had it come from? The boys were jumping up and down in the grass. The boy with the spool received a punch from one of his pals. And above them, the kite was trembling in the wind, swooping like an albino bat, like a ghost, up and up, and then down, rising again, crossing the Elbe, coming for her.