David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

In the mornings Hans kept to himself in his stateroom, going through his papers and preparing for his arrival in California, where they would marry in the garden of the Waud house. In the late afternoons he would move a deck chair to her side. “We’re off at last,” he would say.

“Homeward bound,” she would say. “I never thought I wanted to go home.”

It had come to this, Greta would think over and over, the moist tip of her brush dipping into the paint. The shift of the past, the sprawl of the future; all of it she had navigated both rashly and cautiously, and it had come to this. Hans was handsome with his legs stretched out on the chaise. He was half in the sun, half out, Edvard IV at his feet. The ship’s engines churned on and on. Its bow pried the ocean in two, splitting the endless dimpled water into halves, cutting what had once seemed interminably one into two. Greta and Hans each continued to work in the slanting light, in the air heavy with salt, through the dusk falling red and flat over the blank, shrinking sea, until the moon rose and the white party lights strung along the ship’s rail came on and the chill of eve would send them to their stateroom, where they would be together at last.

It was late July before Lili was awake long enough during the day to remember anything. For nearly six weeks she had lolled in and out of consciousness, spitting up in her sleep, hemorrhaging between her legs and in her abdomen. Every morning and night Frau Krebs would replace the bandages taped over her pelvis, pulling away the old ones that looked like scraps of royal velvet, so red and bright they were. Lili was aware of Frau Krebs changing the dressing and the gauze, and the welcoming sting of the morphia needle, and, on many days, the pressure of the rubber ether mask. Lili knew that someone was there laying a damp rag across her forehead, changing it when it warmed.

On some nights she would wake and recognize Carlisle asleep in the chair in the corner, his head back against the cushion, his mouth open. She didn’t want to wake him-so kind he was to spend the night at her side. She’d tell herself to let him rest; she’d turn her head in the pillow and look at Carlisle, his face oiled with sleep, and his fingers curled around the loop holding the cushion to the chair’s back. She wanted him to sleep through the night: and she’d watch his chest rise and fall, and think of the day they spent together before this last operation. Carlisle took her to a beach on the Elbe, where they swam in the current, and then sunned themselves on a blanket. “You’ll make quite a mother,” Carlisle said. Lili wondered why it was so easy for him to imagine it, but not Greta. When she closed her eyes Lili sometimes thought she could smell the powdery scent of a bundled infant. She could nearly feel the little dense weight of a child in her arms. She told this to Carlisle, who said, “I can see it too.”

On the riverbank he ran his hand over his arm, pushing off the water. His wet hair was matted around his face, and then he said, “It’s hard for Greta, this part is.”

A tourist steamer was coughing up black exhaust, and Lili braided the fringe of the blanket, weaving in blades of grass. “I’m sure in some ways she misses Einar,” Carlisle said.

“I can understand that.” She filled with that strange feeling she got when Einar was mentioned: like a ghost passing through her, it was. “Do you think she’d come visit me?”

“Here, in Dresden? She might. I don’t see why not.”

Lili turned on her side and watched the black column of exhaust rise and shift. “You’ll write her, then? After the operation?”

A few days after the surgery, when Lili’s fever stabilized, he wrote Greta. But she didn’t reply. He wrote again, and again there was no answer. He telephoned but heard through the static only a tinny, endless ring. A telegram couldn’t be delivered. It took a cable to Landmandsbanken to discover that Greta had returned to California.

Now, in the middle of the night, Lili didn’t want to disturb Carlisle’s sleep, but she could barely remain silent. The pain was returning, and she was gripping the sash of the blanket, shredding it in fear. She concentrated on the bulb in the ceiling, biting her lip, but soon the pain had spread through her body, and she was screaming, begging for a morphia injection. She cried for ether. She whimpered for her pills laced with cocaine. Carlisle began to stir, his face lifting; for an instant he stared at her, his eyelids fluttering, and Lili knew he was trying to figure out where he was. But then he was awake and went to find the night nurse, who herself was asleep at her station. Within a minute the ether mask clamped down around Lili’s nose and mouth and she slipped away for the rest of the night.

“Feeling any better today?” Professor Bolk asked on his morning rounds.

“Maybe a little,” Lili would try.

“The pain down at all?”

“A bit,” Lili would reply, even though it wasn’t true. She’d try to push herself up in her bed. When the professor entered her room she would worry about how she looked; if only he would knock and give her a chance to apply her coral lipstick and her Rouge Fin de Théâtre, which was sitting on the table in its red tin the size of a cookie just beyond her reach. She must be quite a sight, she’d think as the professor, so handsome in his crisp lab coat, scanned down the paperwork on his clipboard.

“Tomorrow we should try to get you to walk,” the professor would say.

“Well, if I’m not ready tomorrow, then I’ll surely be ready the day after,” Lili would say. “Most likely the day after tomorrow I’ll be up to it.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You’ve already done so much,” Lili would say.

Professor Bolk would turn to leave, but then Lili would force herself to ask what she most wanted to know: “Henrik is waiting for me in New York. Do you think I’ll make it to New York by September?”

“Without a doubt.”

The professor’s voice, when he reassured her this way, was like a hand on her shoulder. She would then nod off to sleep, dreaming of nothing in particular but knowing, vaguely, that all would work out.

Sometimes she’d hear the professor and Carlisle talking outside her door. “What can you tell me?” Carlisle would say.

“Not much. She seems pretty much the same today. I’m trying to get her more and more stable.”

“Is there anything we should be doing for her?”

“Just let her sleep. She needs her rest.”

Lili would turn on her side and nod off, wanting more than anything to obey the professor’s orders. If she knew anything at all, she knew he was always right.

One day a voice in the hall woke her up. It was familiar, a woman’s voice from long ago, coppery and large. “What’s he doing for her?” Lili heard Anna ask. “Hasn’t he got any other ideas?”

“Only in the last couple of days did he begin to worry,” Carlisle said. “Only yesterday did he admit that the infection should have cleared up by now.”

“What can we do?”

“I’ve been asking that myself. Bolk says there’s nothing to do.”

“Is she taking anything?”

Then in the hall there was a crash of two carts, and Lili couldn’t hear the voices, just Frau Krebs telling a nurse to be more careful.

“The transplant isn’t working,” Carlisle said. “He’s going to have to remove the uterus.” And then, “How long are you here for?”

“A week. I have two Carmens at the Opernhaus.”