David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

The man leaned over. “Are you a reporter?”

Lili looked up from her lap.

“A poetess, then?”

“Neither.”

“Then what are you writing?”

“Oh, this?” she said, startled that he had spoken to her. “It ’s nothing at all.” Even though she was sitting next to the man, she couldn’t believe he had noticed her. It felt to her as if no one could see her. She hardly felt real.

“Are you an artist?” the man asked.

But Lili gathered her shawl and her clutch-bag and said, “I’m sorry.”

She was too surprised to find herself here to continue speaking with him. By now she was even warmer, and she had a sudden urge to remove her clothes and swim out to sea. She exited the hall through a portal that led to a back-park.

Outside there was a breeze. An old oak canopied the little park, as if protecting it from someone who had climbed the Rådhuset’s spire to spy. There was a smell of roses and turned soil. The patch of lawn was silvery, the color of the wing of a flying fish. Lili took a few steps and then saw the couple from before, the girl in the strap dress and her admirer, kissing behind an oak scrub. The man was holding the woman’s thigh, her dress pushed up to her hip, the clasp of her garter bright in the night.

Startled, Lili turned away and walked right into the man from the bench.

“Do you know what they say about this old oak?” he said.

“No.”

“They say if you eat its acorns you can make a wish and become anyone you want for a day.”

“Why would they say that?”

“Because it’s true.” He took her hand and led her to a bench.

He turned out to be a painter named Henrik Sandahl. Recently he’d exhibited a series of paintings of North Sea fish: square canvases of plaice, dab, turbot, the elusive, sharp-faced witch. Greta had seen the paintings. One day she returned to the apartment, immediately dropping her bag and her keys, her eyes wide. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she told Einar. “You have to go see them for yourself. Who ever thought you could fall in love with the face of a cod?”

“Are you here with someone?” Henrik asked.

“My cousin’s wife.”

“Who’s that?”

Lili told him.

“Einar Wegener?” Henrik said. “I see.”

“Do you know him?” Lili asked.

“No, but he’s a good painter. Better than most people think.” He paused. “I’m sure you know, but many people these days say he ’s old-fashioned.”

It was the first time that Einar sensed how he was turning the world on its head by dressing as Lili. He could eliminate himself by pulling the camisole with the scallop-lace hem over his head. Einar could duck out of society by lifting his elbows and clasping the triple strand of Spanish pearls around his neck. He could comb his long soft hair around his face, and then tilt his head like an eager adolescent girl.

Then Henrik took Lili’s hand. The wiry hairs on his wrist startled her, because the only hand she had ever held was Greta’s.

“Tell me about yourself, Lili,” Henrik said.

“I was named for the flower.”

“Why do girls say silly things like that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“I don’t believe girls when they say they’re like a flower.”

“I’m not sure what else I can tell you.”

“Start with where you come from.”

“Jutland. A little village called Bluetooth, on a bog.” She told Henrik about the lucerne grass fields, about the icy rain that could punch holes in the side of the farmhouse.

“If I were to give you an acorn to eat,” Henrik said, “who would you want to be?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“But make a wish.”

“I can’t.”

“Okay then, don’t make a wish.” And then Henrik began to tell the story of a Polish prince who freed every woman in his country from another day’s labor; that was who Henrik wanted to be.

Before she knew it, it was late, the very middle of the night. The wind had picked up, and the oak tree, with its ear-shaped leaves, was bending as if to overhear Henrik and Lili. The moon had slipped away, and all was dark except the gold light coming through the portals of the Rådhuset. Henrik had taken Lili’s hand, kneading the fleshy base of the thumb, but it felt to Lili as if the hand and thumb belonged to someone else. It was as if someone else were coming to claim her.

“Shouldn’t we have met sooner than tonight?” Henrik said, his fingers trembling, fidgeting with a loose thread on the cuff of his coat.

Lili heard Einar laugh, a bubbly air pocket of a giggle; inside the air pocket was the distantly sour breath of Einar. Einar was chuckling about the clumsiness of another man courting and carrying on. Had he ever said something so ridiculous to Greta? Not likely; Greta would have told him to cut the nonsense. She would have shaken her silver bracelets and said, “Oh, for Pete ’s sake,” her eyes rolling in her head. She would have said she ’d leave the restaurant if Einar didn’t stop treating her like a child. Greta would have abruptly turned to the haddock on her plate and not spoken again until there was nothing left but the hollow head resting in a bed of vinegar. Then she would have kissed Einar and walked him home.

“I need to go look for Greta,” Lili said.

A fog had rolled in from the harbor, and now she was cold. The thought came this way: Lili, with her bare forearms, was feeling the wind, not Einar; she felt the quick damp air run through the nearly invisible vine of hair that grew up the nape of her neck. Deeper, beneath the chiffon and the camisole and finally the woolen drawstring underpants, Einar was becoming cold, too-but only as you become cold by watching a coatless person struggle against the chill. He realized that Lili and he shared something: a pair of oyster-blue lungs; a chugging heart; their eyes, often rimmed pink with fatigue. But in the skull it was almost as if there were two brains, a walnut halved: his and hers.

“Tell Greta I’ll walk you home,” Henrik said.

Lili said, “Only if you promise to leave me around the corner from the Widow House. Einar might be waiting up, and he wouldn’t want to see me alone with a stranger. Then he and Greta would worry whether or not I’m old enough to live in Copenhagen. They’re like that, always wondering what to do with me, wondering if I’m about to stumble across trouble.”

Henrik, whose lips were flat and purple and cracked just down the middle, kissed Lili. His head swooped in, his mouth landed on hers and then pulled away. He did it again, and again, while his hand kneaded the flesh above her elbow, and then the small of her back.

What surprised her most about a man’s kiss was the scratch of the whiskers, and the dense hot weight of a young man’s arm. The tip of his tongue was strangely smooth, as if a scalding tea had burned off the bumpy buds. Lili wanted to push him away and say she couldn’t do this, but it suddenly seemed like an impossible task. As if her hand could never shove away Henrik, whose corkscrew hair was twisting like rope around her throat.

Henrik pulled her from the iron bench. She was worried that he might embrace her and feel through the dress her oddly shaped body, bony and breastless, with a painful, swollen ache tucked between her thighs. He led Lili down a side corridor in the Rådhuset, his hand offered as a tow. His head seemed like a puppet’s, bobbing happily; it was round and cranial, with a touch of Mongol in the forehead. And this was why, perhaps, Einar felt free to grip Henrik’s moist fist and follow: it was a game, part of the game of Lili, and games counted for nearly nothing. Games weren’t art, they weren’t painting; and they certainly weren’t life. Not once before-and not even tonight with Henrik’s hand sweating in his palm-did Einar ever consider himself abnormal, or off the mark. His doctor, when he’d gone to him last year with a question about their inability to produce children, had asked, “Do you ever long for someone other than your wife, Einar? For another man, perhaps?” “No, never. Not at all,” he replied. “Your inkling is wrong.” Einar told the doctor that he, too, became disturbed when he saw the men with the quick, frightened eyes and the excessively pink skin loitering near the toilethouse in Ørstedsparken. Homosexual! How far from the truth!