David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

“Do you suppose she’ll let us in if we ask? To have a look around?”

“Let’s not,” Hans said, his hand falling to the small of her back, where it remained as they returned across the field. The long blades of grass swiped at her shins. And Edvard IV chugged behind.

In the graveyard, there was a wooden cross marked WEGENER. “His father,” Hans said. A grassy grave in the shade of a red alder. The graveyard was next to a whitewashed church, and the ground was uneven, and flinty, and the sun burning the dew off the rye grass made the air smell sweet.

“I have his paintings,” she said.

“Keep them,” Hans said, his hand still on her.

“What was he like then?”

“A little boy with a secret. That’s all. No different from the rest of us.”

The sky was high and cloudless, and the wind ran through the red alder’s leaves. Greta stopped herself from thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Summer in Jutland, no different from the summer days of his youth, the days when Einar certainly was both happy and sad at once. She had returned home without him. Greta Waud, tall in the grass, her shadow lowering itself across the graves, would return home without him.

On the drive back to Copenhagen, Hans said, “What about California? Are we still going?”

The Horch’s twelve cylinders were running powerfully, the vibration shaking her skin. The sun was bright, and the top was down, and there was a strip of paper swirling about Greta’s ankles. “What did you say?” she yelled, holding her hair in her fist.

“Are we going to California together?” And just as the wind was rushing around her, sending her hair and the lap of her dress and the strip of paper whirling, her thoughts began to pass chaotically through her head: her little room in Pasadena with the arched window overlooking the roses; the casita on the lip of the Arroyo Seco, now let to tenants, a family with a baby boy; the blank windows of Teddy Cross’s old ceramics studio on Colorado Street, transformed after the fire into a printer’s press; the members of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society in their felt berets. How could Greta return to that? But there was more in her head, and then Greta thought of the mossy courtyard of the casita, where in the light filtering through the avocado tree she painted her first portrait of Teddy Cross; and the little bungalows Carlisle was building on the streets off California Boulevard, where newlyweds from Illinois were settling; and the acres of orange groves. Greta looked to the sky, to the pale blue that reminded her of the antique plates on the walls of the baroness’s breakfast room. It was June, and in Pasadena the rye grass would have burned out by now, and the palm fronds would be brittle, and by now the maids would have pulled the cots onto the sleeping porches. There was a sleeping porch at the rear of the house; its screens were on hinges, and as a girl she would open them up and stare out, across the Arroyo Seco to the Linda Vista hills, and she would sketch the rolling dry-green sight of Pasadena. She imagined unpacking her paints and screwing together her easel on the sleeping porch and painting that vista now: the gray-brown of the blur of the eucalyptus, the dusty green of the stalks of cypress, the flash of pink stucco of an Italianate mansion peeking through the oleander, the gray of a cement balustrade overlooking the expanse of it all.

“I’m ready to go,” Greta said.

“What’s that?” Hans called, through the wind.

“You’ll love it out there. It will make the rest of the world seem very far away.” She reached over and stroked Hans’s thigh. It had all come to this: she and Hans would return to Pasadena, and she realized no one out there would ever fully understand what had happened to her. The girls from the Valley Hunt Club, now married certainly, with children enrolled in tennis clinics on the club’s courts, would know nothing about her except for the fact the she had returned with a Danish baron. Already Greta could hear the gossip: “Poor Greta Waud. Widowed again. Something mysterious happened to the latest. A painter of some sort. Some sort of mysterious death. In Germany, I think I heard. But not to worry-now she’s back, and this time with a baron. That’s right, little Miss Radical has returned to Pasadena, and as soon as she marries this fellow she, of all people, will become a baroness.”

That was part of what lay ahead for Greta, but she took comfort in the thought of going home. Her hand was on Hans’s thigh and he smiled at her, his knuckles white around the Horch’s wheel as he steered them back to Copenhagen.

A letter from Carlisle waited for her. After she read it, she slipped it into the side pocket of one of the trunks she was packing. So many things to ship home: her brushes and her paints and dozens of notebooks and sketches of Lili. It was just like Carlisle not to send enough news: the operation took longer than Bolk had thought, almost a full day. Lili was resting, sleeping from the morphia injections she still receives. I’ll have to stay in Dresden longer than I planned, Carlisle wrote. Another several weeks. Her recovery will take longer than any of us guessed. Progress has been slow so far. The professor is a kind man. He sends his regards. He says he’s not worried about her. If he’s not worried about her, then I suppose we shouldn’t be either, wouldn’t you agree?

A week later Greta Waud and Hans Axgil boarded the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd for the first leg of their trip to Pasadena. They would fly to Berlin, and then to Southampton; from there they’d sail. The aeroplane, reflecting the fine summer day, was on the tarmac of the Amager aerodrome. Greta stood with Hans and watched the skinny boys load their trunks and crates into the silver belly of the aeroplane. Farther down the tarmac was a cluster of people around a platform, where a man in a top hat was giving a speech. He had a beard, and a little Danish flag on the corner of his lectern was flapping in the wind. Behind him was the Graf Zeppelin , long and stormy gray, like an enormous ribbed bullet. The people in the crowd began to wave little Danish flags. She had read in Politiken that the Graf Zepp was setting out on a Polar flight. Greta watched the crowd cheer, as the zeppelin hovered above the tarmac. “Do you think they’ll make it?” she asked Hans.

He was reaching for his calfskin valise. The aeroplane was ready for them. “Why shouldn’t they?”

The man making the speech was a politician she didn’t recognize. Probably running for parliament. And behind him was the Graf Zepp ’s captain, Franz Josef Land, in a sealskin cap. He wasn’t smiling. His eyebrows were bunched together over his glasses, and he looked concerned.

“It’s time,” Hans said.

She took his elbow, and they found their seats in the aeroplane. She could see the zeppelin through her window, and the crowd, which was moving away from the aircraft. Men in shirtsleeves and suspenders were beginning the untethering. The captain was standing in the doorway of his little cabin, waving farewell.

“He looks as if he wonders if he’ll ever come back,” Greta said, as the aeroplane’s porthole door locked with the turn of a wheel.

The voyage out on the Empress of Britannia was smooth, and the passengers sat in their striped lounge chairs on the teak deck, and Greta thought of the handstand she performed when she was ten. She screwed together her easel, twisting its butterfly bolts through the holes in its legs. She pulled a blank canvas from one of her trunks, nailing it to a frame. And on the ship’s deck, she began to paint from memory: the hills of Pasadena rising out of the Arroyo Seco, dry and brown in early summer, the jacaranda trees having shed their blossoms, and the last day lily folding in the heat. With her eyes closed, she could see it all.