David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

By early June, Bakersfield had settled into its summer heat; it would reach 100 degrees before nine in the morning. Akiko would fold paper fans for Greta; Teddy brought cold compresses instead of hot. And when Greta became really sick, Akiko served Greta cold green tea from a lacquered cup while Teddy read poetry aloud.

But then one day, while Teddy was down in Pasadena collecting a wheel from his old studio, which he had never closed, the heat and the sickness came to an end. Together, Greta and Akiko, whose hair was as black as a raven’s wing, delivered a blue baby boy, the umbilical cord around his neck like a little tie. Greta baptized him Carlisle. A day later, she and Teddy buried him in the yard of the senior Crosses’ eucalyptus house, in the blowing loam, at the rim of the whispering strawberry fields.

The little cobblestone street that stitched across Copenhagen was dark and safe enough, Lili thought, for the privacy of a secret transaction. The street was too narrow for lamps, a window on one side nearly opening into the window on the opposite. The people who lived there were stingy about the light in their front rooms, and all was now dark except for the few businesses still open. There was a Turkish coffee house where customers sat on velvet pillows in the window. Farther down was a bordello, discreet behind its shutters, its brass doorbell shaped like a nipple. Farther was a basement bar, where, as Greta and Lili passed, a skinny man with a waxed mustache quickly disappeared down the steps to a place where he could meet others like himself.

Lili was in a chiffon dress with a linen sailor’s collar and cuffs. The dress was making a soft noise as she walked, and she kept her mind on the swish-swish, nervously trying not to think of what lay ahead. Greta had lent her the rope of pearls that was twisted three times around her throat, hiding most of it. Lili was also wearing a velvet cap, bought only that morning at Fonnesbech’s, and she had sunk into it the pin of Greta’s yellow-diamond and onyx brooch shaped like a monarch butterfly.

“You’re so beautiful I want to kiss you,” Greta had said when Lili was dressing. Greta was so excited that she took Lili in her arms and waltzed her around the apartment while Edvard IV barked and barked. Lili closed her eyes-so stiff and heavy beneath the caking of powder!-and imagined that Copenhagen was a city where both Lili and Einar could live as one.

The street ended on Rådhuspladsen, the great square across from Tivoli. The fountain with spouting dragons was tinkling, and across from the Palace Hotel was a column capped with a pair of bronze Vikings blowing their lure. The square was active, with people entering the midnight ball, and Norwegian tourists excited about tomorrow’s bicycle race from Copenhagen to Oslo.

Greta didn’t push Lili. She let her stand at the edge of Rådhuspladsen and wait until little Lili had filled up inside Einar, like a hand filling a puppet.

Beneath the Rådhuset’s copper-sheathed spire, the four-dialed clock rising more than three hundred feet above her, Lili felt as if she were carrying the greatest secret in the world-she was about to fool all of Copenhagen. At the same time, another part of her knew that this was the most difficult game she would ever play. It made her think of the summer in Bluetooth, and the crashing submarine kite. Einar Wegener, with his small round face, seemed to be slipping down a tunnel. Lili looked at Greta, in her black dress, and felt grateful for all that lay ahead of her. Out of nowhere had come Lili. Yes, thanks were due to Greta.

The people entering city hall looked smart and happy, lagerøl lifting the color in their cheeks. There were young ladies in candy-colored dresses fanning their chests, asking one another where all the famous painters were. “Which one is Ejnar Nielsen?” one woman said. “Is that Erik Henningsen?” There were young men with wax-tipped mustaches and Sumatran cigars. There were the young industrialists, who, with their money made fast from mass-produced crockery and cooking pans molded by hissing machinery, came to move themselves up through society.

“You won’t leave me?” Lili asked Greta.

“Never.”

Yet already Lili was stirring.

Inside the Rådhuset there was a covered courtyard decorated in the style of the Italian Renaissance. On three sides were open galleries supported by pillars. Above, a canopy of crossing timberbeams. On the stage was an orchestra, and there was a long table with trays of oysters. Hundreds of people were dancing, hands of handsome men on the slender waists of women whose eyelids were painted blue. Two girls on a bench were writing a note to someone, giggling over it. There was a circle of men in tuxedos with their hands in their pockets, their eyes roaming. Lili was stirring. She could hardly take it all in. She felt the wingbeat of panic in her chest, knowing she didn’t belong. She thought about leaving, but it was too late. Lili was at the ball, its smoke and its music already weaving their way through her eyes and ears. If she said she was going to leave, Greta would only tell her to settle down; Greta would tell her not to worry, there was nothing in the world to worry about at all. She’d swat her hands through the air and laugh.

Next to Lili was a tall girl in a strap dress who was smoking a silver cigarette as she talked to a man whose face was so dark he must have been from the South. The woman was slender, her back quilted prettily with muscle, and the man seemed so in love with her that he could only nod and agree and, then, stop her from talking with a long kiss.

“There’s Helene,” Greta said. Across the room was Helene Albeck, her short black hair cut sharply in a way Greta explained was now fashionable in Paris.

“You go talk to her,” Lili said.

“And leave you?”

“I’m not sure I want to talk to anyone just yet.”

Greta crossed through the dancers, her hair down her back. She kissed Helene, who seemed anxious to tell Greta something. At the Royal Greenland Trading Company, Helene managed the paintings, gramo phones, gold-rimmed dinner plates, and other luxuries that were included in the summer shipments that set sail each Tuesday from Copenhagen. For two years Helene had arranged for Einar’s paintings to be crated up and shipped to Godthåb, where an agent would auction them off. The money was slow to return across the North Atlantic, but when it did Einar would proudly present it to Greta in a leather accordion file.

The dancers shifted, and then Greta and Helene were out of sight. Lili was sitting on a mahogany bench carved with mermaids. It was warm in the covered courtyard, and she peeled back her shawl. As she was folding it, a young man came to the bench and said, “May I?” He was tall, and his hair was a yellowy brown with thick corkscrew curls that twirled past his jaw. Out of the corner of her eye Lili watched him check his pocket watch, watched him cross and uncross his legs. He had a faint grainy smell, and his ears were pink with either warmth or nerves.

From her clutch-bag, Lili pulled out the pewter notebook given to Einar by his grandmother, and she started to write notes to herself about the man. He looks like Einar’s father as a young man, she wrote. His father when he was healthy and still working the sphagnum fields. This must be why I’m staring, Lili put down in the little notebook. Why else can’t I stop looking at him? Why can’t I stop looking at his long feet, at the wiry whiskers growing down his cheeks in a half-beard? At the aquiline nose and the full lips. At the thick curly hair.