David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

Sometimes Greta would feel burdened by her work, as if she were the only one in the world laboring while the rest were off and out, enjoying themselves. As if everything had come to rest on her shoulders, and should she stop and put down her head, their small, intimate world would implode. She thought of Atlas, who held up the world; and yet that wasn’t right, because not only did she hold it up, she had also created it. Or so she sometimes thought. On some days she was exhausted, and would wish she could tell someone this, but there was no one, and so she spoke to Edvard IV as he ate his bowl of chicken skin and gristle.

No one except Hans.

The day after Einar left for Germany, Hans came to see her. He had just visited his barber, and the hair on the back of his neck was bristly, the skin pink with irritation. He was telling her about a new idea for an exhibition: he wanted to approach the headmistress of a private girls’ school to see about hanging a series of Lili paintings in the halls. Hans was pleased with the idea, from the way he was laughing into his coffee cup.

Over the past couple of years he had seen other women, Greta knew: an actress from London; an heiress to a jam-preserve fortune. Hans was careful not to tell Greta about them, avoiding mentioning whom he’d spent the weekend with in Normandy. But he would tell Einar, and the news would fly back to Greta in Lili’s breathless way: “An actress whose name is up in lights above Cambridge Circus!” Lili would report. “Isn’t it exciting for Hans?”

“That must be very nice,” Greta would reply, “for him.”

“Where’s Einar gotten himself to?” Hans now said.

“He’s gone to Germany to look after his health.”

“To Dresden?”

“Did he mention it to you?” She looked around the apartment, at her easels and her paintings leaning against the wall and the rocker. “Lili went with him as well. It’s quiet here without them.”

“Of course she went with him,” Hans said. Down on one knee, he began to lay out on the floor the most recent paintings of Lili. “He told me about it.”

“About what?”

“About Lili. About the doctor in Dresden.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Greta. Do you really think I don’t know by now?” He lifted his face to hers. “Why have you been afraid to tell me?”

She leaned against the window. Outside the rain was frozen, and it was tapping lightly on the glass. There were a half-dozen new pictures of Lili, a series of her at her toilette, the add-a-pearl necklace Greta had given her around her throat. The paintings showed the pink in Lili’s cheek and the reds in her makeup tray, bright in contrast to the silvery-white of her flesh. In the paintings Lili was wearing a sleeveless dress with a scoop neck, and her hair was curled up under. “Can you really see Einar in them?”

“I do now,” Hans said. “He told me this past fall. He was having a hard time deciding what to do, whether to have Dr. Buson treat him or Professor Bolk. He just turned up at the gallery one day, just walked into the back office. It was raining and he was wet, so at first I didn’t see that he’d been crying. He was white, even whiter than Lili in the paintings. I thought he might collapse right then. It seemed he was having a hard time breathing, and I could see his pulse throbbing in his throat. All I had to do was ask what was wrong, and he began to tell me everything.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said it explained a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“About Einar and you.”

“About me?” Greta said.

“Yes, about why you’ve been so defensive all these years, so very private. In some ways you took it on as your secret, not just his.”

“He’s my husband.”

“I’m sure it’s been difficult for you.” Hans stood. The barber had also given him a shave but missed a spot on his cheek.

“Not as hard as it’s been on him.” Greta felt a wave of relief pass through her; at last Hans knew. The subterfuge with Hans could end; she could feel its tide receding. “So what do you think of our secret?”

“It’s who he is, right? How can I blame him for who he is?” He moved to her, took her in his arms. She could smell the menthol of aftershave, and the hair on the back of his neck tickled her wrist.

“Do you think I’ve done the right thing sending him to Bolk?” she said. “You don’t think I’ve made a mistake, do you?”

“No,” he said. “It’s probably his only chance.”

He held Greta at the window, as the traffic sloshed quietly in the wet street below. But she couldn’t let him hold her much longer, she told herself; she was still married to Einar, after all. She’d have to pull away soon, she’d have to send Hans back to the gallery with the pictures. His hand was at the small of her back, the other on her hip. Her head was against his breast, the menthol coming with every breath. Every time she tried to free herself, she felt inert. If she couldn’t be with Einar, then she wanted Hans, and she shut her eyes and nuzzled her nose into his neck, and just as she felt herself relax and sigh and feel the years of loneliness fall away, she heard the scratch of Carlisle’s key turning in the front door.

Einar paid the driver five reichsmark, and then the taxi pulled away. Its headlamps swept past the winter skeleton of an azalea and sloped into the street. Then the circular drive was dark, except for the glow of the lantern lamp hanging above the door. Einar could see his breath, and he felt the cold seeping into his feet. There was a black rubber button beside the door, and Einar waited before pressing it. Moisture was collecting along the letters of the brass plaque. DRESDEN MUNICIPAL WOMEN’S CLINIC. A second plaque listed the clinic’s doctors. Dr. Jürgen Wilder, Dr. Peter Scheunemann, Dr. Karl Scherres, Prof. Dr. Alfred Bolk.

Einar rang the bell and waited. He heard nothing inside. As far as he could tell, the clinic looked more like a villa, set in a neighborhood of linden and birch trees and iron fences with spindles like spears. There was the sound of an animal in the underbrush, a cat or a rat digging against the cold. A curtain of fog was descending, and Einar nearly forgot where he was. He rested his forehead against the brass plaque and closed his eyes.

He rang again. This time he heard a door inside, and a voice, as buried as the animal sound in the shrub.

At last the door opened, and a woman in an efficiently gray skirt, suspenders pressing against her breasts, stared at him. Her hair was silver and cut sharp along the jaw, her eyes also gray. She looked as if she never slept much, as if the pillow of skin in her throat kept her head upright while all the world rested.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m Einar Wegener.”

“Who?”

“I’m here to see Professor Bolk,” Einar said.

The woman pressed her hands against the pleats in her skirt. “Professor Bolk?” she said.

“Is he here?”

“You’ll have to telephone tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He felt something close in around him.

“Do you think your girl is here?” the woman asked. “Is that why you’ve come?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Einar said. He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, on his bag holding Lili’s clothes.

“Do you have a room where I could stay?” Einar heard himself asking.

“But this is a women’s clinic.”

“Yes, I know.”

He turned away and headed into the dark street, where he waited at a corner lit by a cone-shaped lamp hanging above the intersection on a wire. Eventually a taxi stopped, and it was closer to dawn than dusk by the time he settled into the Höritzisch Hotel near the Hauptbahnhof in the Altstadt. The Höritzisch’s walls were papered with a trellis pattern and were thin enough to pass along the transactional rates of the prostitute in the room next door. In the night, Einar lay in his clothes on the eiderdown. He listened to a train pull into the station, its wheels screaming along the track. In the station, a few hours before, beneath the canopy of blackened glass, a woman in a coat with rabbit-fur trim had asked him to take her home, and just thinking of her now made his face burn with shame. Her voice, and the voice of the whore next door, began to fill Einar’s head, and the image of their painted mouths and the slits in their flimsy skirts, and Einar closed his eyes and became frightened for Lili.