David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

Deep in the night their bedroom was silent except for the horn of the ferry leaving for Bornholm, the Baltic island where her grandmother had first come from. More and more, Greta would lie awake thinking about Lili, about her rural face with the tremblingly bold upper lip and her eyes so brown and watery that Greta couldn’t tell whether or not they were on the verge of tears. About Lili’s fleshy little nose, which somehow made her look like a girl still growing into a woman’s body.

Lili turned out to be even shyer than Einar. Or at least at first. Her head would dip when she spoke, and sometimes she would become too nervous to say anything at all. When asked a question as simple as “Did you hear about the terrible fire on the Royal Greenland Trading Company’s docks?” she would stare at Greta or Anna and then turn away. Lili preferred to write notes and prop them around the apartment, leaving postcards bought from the blind woman outside Tivoli’s iron gates on the pickled-ash wardrobe or on the little ledge of Greta’s easel.

But I won’t know anyone at the ball. Do you really think I should go?

Is it fair to leave Einar behind? Won’t he mind?

And once:

I don’t think I’m pretty enough. Please advise.

Greta returned the notes, standing them against a bowl of pears just before leaving the apartment:

It’s too late. I’ve already told everyone you’re coming. Please don’t worry, everyone thinks Lili is Einar’s cousin from Bluetooth. A few have asked if you would need an escort, but I said it wasn’t necessary. You don’t mind, do you? I didn’t think you were-is this the right word?-ready.

In the evenings Einar and Greta would dine with friends at their favorite café along Nyhavns Kanal. Sometimes he ’d become a little drunk on aquavit and boast childishly of the success of one of his exhibitions. “All the paintings sold!” he’d say, reminding Greta of Carlisle, who would endlessly boast of a good grade in geometry, or a handsome new friend.

But Einar’s talk would embarrass Greta, who tried not to listen whenever money was discussed; after all, what was there to say? Couldn’t they pretend it didn’t matter to either of them? She would glare at Einar across the table, salmon bones bare and oily on the platter. She’d never told Einar about the trust her father had sent her off to Denmark with, to say nothing of the income wired into an account at Landmandsbanken at the end of each orange season-not out of selfishness, but because she was too concerned that all that money would transform her into someone else, someone whose company she herself wouldn’t enjoy. One regrettable day she bought the whole apartment building, the Widow House, but she could never bring herself to tell Einar, who each month delivered the rent check to a clerk at Landmandsbanken with a bit of a grudge in his step. Even Greta knew this had been a mistake, but how could she fix it now?

When Einar became excited he’d knock his fists against the table, his hair falling around his face; the collar of his shirt would split open, revealing his smooth pink chest. He was without any fat on his body, except for his soft breasts, which were as small as dumplings. Greta would pat his wrist, trying to urge him to slow down on the aquavit-the way her mother had done when Greta was a girl drinking Tennis Specials at the Valley Hunt Club. But Einar never seemed to understand her signals, and instead he’d bring the slim glass to his lips and smile around the table, as if seeking approval.

Physically, Einar was an unusual man; this Greta knew. She would think this when his shirt would split open further, and everyone at the table could get a peek of his chest, which was as obscene as the breast of a girl a few days into puberty. With his pretty hair and his chin smooth as a teacup, he could be a confusing sight. He was so beautiful that sometimes old women in Kongens Have would break the law and offer him tulips picked from a public bed. His lips were pinker than any of the sticks of color Greta could buy on the third floor of Magasin du Nord.

“Tell them why you won’t be at the ball,” Greta said one night at dinner. It was warm, and they were eating at a table outside in the light of a torch. Earlier, two boats in the canal had collided, and the night smelled of kerosene and split wood.

“The ball?” Einar asked, tilting his head.

“Greta says your cousin is coming from Jutland,” said Helene Albeck, a secretary at the Royal Greenland Trading Company. She was compact in her little green dress with the low-hanging waist; once, when she was drunk, she took Einar’s hand and pressed it against her lap. Einar resisted instantly, which pleased Greta, who had witnessed the incident through a slat in the kitchen door.

“My cousin?” Einar said, sounding confused. His upper lip became dewy, and he said nothing, as if he’d forgotten how to speak.

This happened more than once. Greta would mention Lili to a friend, even to Anna, and Einar’s face would pinch up, as if he had no idea who Lili was. He and Greta never spoke about it afterwards, about his childlike miscomprehension: Lili who? Oh, yes, Lili. My cousin? Yes, my cousin, Lili. The next day the same thing would occur again. It was as if their little secret were really just Greta’s little secret, as if she were plotting behind Einar’s back. She considered discussing it with him directly but decided against it. Perhaps she feared she would crush him. Or that he would resent her intrusion. Or maybe her greatest fear was that Lili would disappear forever, the detachable white collar fluttering as she fled, leaving Greta alone in the Widow House.

Einar’s father was a failed cereal farmer, an expelled member of the Society for Cultivating the Heath. The first night he ever left his mother’s farmhouse in Bluetooth was when he rode up to Skagen, the fingertip of Denmark, to fetch his bride from a shop that sewed fishing nets. He slept in a bay-inn with a seaweed roof and woke at dawn to marry. The second and last night away from Bluetooth he returned to Skagen with his wife’s body and baby Einar wrapped in a plaid blanket. Because the ground around Skagen was too hard with hoarfrost for gravedigging, they wrapped Einar’s mother in a fishing net picked clean of gills and laid her like an anchor into the icy sea. The week before, a gray wave had washed the bay-inn with the seawood roof into the Kattegat, and so this time Einar’s father slept in the net shop, among the rusted hook-needles and the cord and the faint smell of primrose for which Einar’s mother was known.

His father was tall and weak, a victim of delicate bones. He walked with a knotwood staff, holding on to furniture. When Einar was little, his father was bedridden with maladies the doctor simply called rare. During the day Einar would sneak into his father’s room while he was asleep. Einar would find foam collected on his father’s lips, bubbled with breath. Einar would tiptoe forward, reaching to touch his father’s golden curls. Einar had always wanted hair like that, so thick a silver comb could sit in it as prettily as tinsel on a Christmas tree. But even more lovely than his hair was his illness, the mysterious malady that bled away his energy and caused his egg-shaped eyes to turn milky and soft, his fingers yellow and frail. Einar found his father beautiful-a man lost in a useless, wheezing, slightly rank shell of a body. A man confounded by a body that no longer worked for him.

On some days Einar would climb into the small beechwood bed and slip beneath the eiderdown. His grandmother had patched the holes in the comforter with tiny pellets of peppermint gum, and now the bed smelled fresh and green. Einar would lie with his head sunk into the pillow, and little Edvard II would curl between him and his father, his white tail flicking against the bedclothes. The dog would groan and sigh, and then sneeze. Einar would do the same. He did this because he knew how much his father loved Edvard, and Einar wanted his father to love him just the same.