The Danish Girl

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.

CHAPTER Twenty-one

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. Jurgen 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 Horitzisch Hotel near the Hauptbahnhof in the Altstadt. The Horitzisch’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.

When he returned to the clinic the next day, Professor Bolk was unable to see him. “He will call you,” said Frau Krebs, in the same gray skirt. When he heard this, Einar, on the clinic’s portico beneath the lantern lamp, began to cry. The day was no warmer than the previous night, and he began to shiver as he heard the gravel of the driveway crunch beneath his feet. He had no other business to attend to, so he wandered around the city, both hungry and nauseous.

Altmarkt and its stores were busy in the wind, the aisle of the Hermann Roche pharmacy filled with bank clerks on their lunch hour. The buildings were covered with soot that was darker than the sky, and the awnings were painted with the names of the stores whose bronze-case cash registers were sitting more and more idle with each passing month of recession: CARL SCHNEIDER, MARIEN APOTHEKE, SEIDENHAUS, RENNER KAUFHAUS, and HERMANN ROCHE DROGERIE. Motorcars were parked in the center of the square, and there were two boys in tweed hats and knickers, their shins blue and chapped, parking the cars. A woman with her curls pinned up climbed out of her half-door sedan; she was crammed into a blue stretch dress, the wedge of her stomach testing the strength of the threads holding the buttons to her blouse. The two boys steered her car into a narrow space, and then they began to laugh and waddle, mocking the woman, who was applying lipstick obliviously.

The smaller boy looked up and saw Einar and laughed again. The boys looked like brothers, with sharp-tipped noses and cruel matching laughs. Einar realized the boys were no longer laughing at the fat woman, who was picking her way through the traffic and over the tram tracks to make her way into Hermann Roche, which was having a half-price sale on Odol mouthwash and Schuppen pomade. They were laughing at Einar, whose face was hollow and whose topcoat was flapping against the poles of his legs. Einar watched the fat woman through the plate-glass window fingering the cans of Odol. He wished he could be her, examining the prices on the pyramid of cans, tossing a tin of Schuppen into her basket. Einar imagined the woman driving her sedan home to Loschwitz and placing the toiletries in the cabinet above her husband’s sink.

He continued to walk around the city looking in shop windows. A milliner was having a sale, and there was a line of women out the door. A grocer was setting out a crate of cabbage. And Einar stopped at the window of a kite shop. Inside, a man with glasses on the tip of his nose was bending wood rods at a workbench. All around him were different types of kites. A kite like a butterfly, like a pinwheel. Dragon kites and ones with foil in their wings like flying fish. There was an eagle kite, and a small black kite with bulging yellow eyes like a bat’s.

Einar went to the box office of the Semperoper and bought a ticket to Fidelio. He knew that homosexuals gathered at the opera, and he feared that the woman behind the glass, which was smudged with breath, might think he was one of them. She was young and pretty, with green eyes, and refused to look at Einar, cautiously pulling his money through the bowled slot in the window as if she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted it. And once again Einar became exhausted by the world failing to know who he was.

And then Einar climbed the forty-one steps of the Bruhlsche Terrace, which overlooked the Elbe and the right bank. The terrace was planted with square-cut trees and bordered by an iron rail against which strollers leaned to examine the endless arc of the Elbe. The wind was running with the river, and Einar turned up his collar. A man with a cart was selling bratwurst in a bun and little glasses of wine. He handed Einar his food and then poured the apple wine. Einar balanced the wine on his knee as he took a bite of the steaming bratwurst, its skin tight and crisp on the end. Then he took a sip of wine and closed his eyes. “You know what they call this?” the peddler said.

“What?”

“The Bruhlsche Terrace. You know they call it the balcony of Europe.” The man smiled, a few teeth missing. He was waiting for Einar to finish the wine so he could take back the glass. The terrace looked out across the river to the concave towers of the Japanese Palace and beyond that to the ox-eyed roofs of Neustadt and the villas with their well-wooded gardens and then to all of open-fielded Saxony. From the terrace, it seemed as if the rest of the world lay beneath Einar, waiting.

“How much do I owe you?” Einar asked.

“Fifty pfennig.” The river was gray and choppy, and Einar handed the man the aluminum-bronze coin.

He finished his wine and returned the glass to the peddler, who wiped it clean with the tail of his shirt. “Good luck to you then, sir,” the peddler called, pushing his cart. Einar watched him, the yellow-stone facades and green- copper roofs of Dresden behind him, the great rococo buildings that made it one of the most beautiful cities Einar had ever seen-the Albertinum, the domed Frauenkirche, the Grunes Gewolbe, the elegant plaza in front of the opera house-a handsome backdrop to the little man and his bratwurst cart. Above the city, the sky was pewter and hammered with storm. Einar was cold and tired, and, standing to leave the Bruhlsche Terrace, he nearly felt his past shift beneath him.

Two more days passed before Professor Bolk sent word he could meet with Einar, who returned to the