David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

Einar looked up at the pigeons, as if he were in Central Station for the first time. He shyly asked a young girl in a pinafore for the time.

Something in Greta settled down. She went to Einar and kissed him. She straightened his lapel. “Here’s your ticket,” she said. “Inside is the address of the doctor I want you to see.”

“First I want you to tell me something,” Einar said. “I want you to agree that there’s nothing wrong with me.” He was rocking on his heels.

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with you,” Greta said, swatting her hands through the air. “But I still want you to see the doctor.”

“Why?”

“Because of Lili.”

“Poor little girl,” he said.

“If you want Lili to stay-with us, I mean-then I think a doctor should know about her.” Afternoon shoppers, mostly women, were nudging by them, their net bags bulky with cheese and herring.

Greta wondered why she continued to speak of Lili as if she were a third person. It would crush Einar-she could imagine his fine bones crumpling into a heap-were she to admit, aloud at least, that Lili was no more than her husband in a dress. Really, but it was the truth.

“Why are you doing this now?” Einar asked. The red rim of his eyelids nearly made Greta turn the other way.

“I love Lili as much as you do, more than-” but she stopped herself. “The doctor can help her.”

“How? How can anyone but you and me help Lili?”

“Let ’s see what the doctor says.”

Einar tried one last time. “I don’t want to go. Lili wouldn’t want me to go.”

Greta straightened her back, her head lifting. “But I want you to go,” she said. “I’m your wife, Einar.” She pointed him toward track 8 and sent him on his way, her hand falling on the small of his back. “Go on,” she said as he shuffled across the floor, past the news-candy boy, through the trail of paper wrappers, his body slipping into the crowd of shoppers, his head becoming one of a hundred, mostly women, who were busy with Copenhagen errands and fat with children, whose breasts were falling just as Einar’s were lifting, who would one day-Greta knew even then-look at Einar in a crowd and see only themselves.

Einar sat by the window, the noon sun curled in his lap. The train was passing houses with red tile roofs, laundry and children waving in the yards. An old woman was opposite him, her hands around her purse handle. She offered a mint from a foil roll. “Going to Helsingør?”

“To Rungsted,” he said.

“Me too.” A square of open-knit lace was holding up her white hair. Her eyes were snow blue, her earlobes fatty and loose. “You have a friend there?”

“An appointment.”

“A medical appointment?”

Einar nodded, and the old woman said, “I see.” She tugged on her cardigan. “At the radium institute?”

“I believe so,” he said. “My wife made the appointment.” He opened the envelope Greta had given him. Inside was an ecru card with a note Lili had written to Greta last week: Sometimes I feel trapped. Do you ever feel that way? Is it me? Is it Copenhagen? Kisses-

“Your card says Dr. Hexler,” the old woman said. “On the back is Dr. Hexler’s address. It’s on my way. I’ll be happy to take you. Some say he runs the best radium institute in Denmark.” The woman hugged her purse against her breasts. “Some say he can cure almost anything.”

Einar thanked the old woman and then sat back in his seat. Through the window the sun was warm. He had considered skipping the appointment. When she told him to meet her at Central Station, a furious flash of an image ran through his head: that of Greta, her chin high above the crowd, waiting at the station for him to arrive. He thought about defying her and never showing up. He thought about her chin slowly falling as the minutes and hours passed and it became more and more evident that he would not come. She would shuffle home. She would open the door to the apartment in the Widow House and find him waiting for her at the table. Einar would say, “I don’t want to see the doctor.” And she would pause, and then say, “All right.”

“We ’re here,” the old woman on the train said. “Get your things.”

Red waxy cones from the yew trees were lying along Rungsted’s streets. It had rained in the morning, leaving a damp, evergreen smell. The old woman inhaled deeply. She walked quickly, her hips squirming in her skirt. “Don’t be nervous,” she said.

“I’m not nervous.”

“There ’s nothing wrong with being nervous.” They turned onto a street of houses behind low walls with white iron gates. An open-air motorcar drove past them, its engine snapping. The driver, a man in a leather golf hat, waved at the old woman. “Here we are,” the woman said on a corner across from the harbor, at a blue building so indistinguishable it could have been a bakery. She squeezed Einar’s arm, just under the pit. Then she hooked up her collar and headed toward the sea.

Einar had to wait in Dr. Hexler’s examination room for almost an hour. Half the room looked like a parlor, with a carpet and a cabinet-sofa and bookshelves and a spider plant in a stand. The other half had a rubber floor, a padded table, glass jars of clear liquids, and an oversized lamp on casters.

Dr. Hexler entered, saying, “Didn’t the nurse ask you to remove your clothes?” His chin was long and extended with a cleft deep enough to sink a slot. His hair was silver, and when he sat in the chair opposite Einar he revealed a pair of Scottish argyle socks. The woman from the train had said he was equally known for his rose garden, which, outside the clinic’s window, was cropped for the winter.

“Trouble in the marriage?” he said. “Is that what I understand?”

“Not exactly trouble.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Six years,” Einar said. He recalled their wedding in St. Alban’s Church in the park; the young deacon was English and, that morning, nicked by his razor. He had said, in a voice as light as the air floating through the pink-glass windows and into the laps of their wedding guests, “This is a special wedding. I see something special here. In ten years the two of you will be extraordinary people.”

“Any children?” Dr. Hexler asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not really sure.”

“You do conduct intercourse, is that right?” Dr. Hexler’s face was stony, and Einar could imagine him in his rose garden with that same face, discovering with grave disappointment a petal-eating mite. “There is regular copulation?”

By now Einar had stripped down to his underpants. The pile of clothes on the chair looked sad, the white shirtsleeves reaching limply from the waist of his trousers. Dr. Hexler waved him to sit on the cabinet-sofa. Through a hose with a funnel on the end he ordered his nurse to bring in coffee and a dish of candied almonds.

“Is there ejaculation?” he continued.

Around Einar, bricks of indignity were being laid. Each insult, from Greta, and now from Dr. Hexler, was a red brick of hurt stacking with the others to build a wall. “Sometimes,” Einar answered.

“Good enough.” Dr. Hexler flipped a page in his notepad. And then, “Your wife tells me you like to dress as a woman.”

“Is that what she said?” Then the nurse entered, a woman with frizzy red hair. She set down the coffee and the almonds. “Sugar?” she asked.

“Mrs. Wegener told me about a girl,” Dr. Hexler continued. “A girl named Lili.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Wegener?” the nurse asked. “Sugar?”