David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

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.