No real news from Paris. My work has slowed down since you left. You are the perfect subject to paint, and when you’re gone it is difficult to find anyone quite as beautiful. Hans visited yesterday. He’s worried about the art market. He says the money is drying up, not just here but all over Europe. But that doesn’t concern me. It never has, but you know that. I told him this, and he said it was easy for me to say because between Einar and me we would always have something to sell. I’m not sure why he said this, but I suppose it would be true if Einar still painted. Lili, have you ever thought of painting? Maybe you could buy yourself a little tin of watercolors and a sketch pad to help pass the time, which must move slowly there. Despite what they say, Dresden isn’t Paris, I am sure.
I hope you are comfortable. That’s what worries me the most. I wish you had let me come with you but I understand. Some things you must do alone. Lili, don’t you just sometimes stop and think about what it will be like when it’s all over? The freedom! That’s how I think of it. Is that how you think of it? I hope so. I hope you think of it that way because that is what it should feel like to you. It does to me, at least.
Send word as soon as you can. Edvard IV and I miss you terribly. He’s sleeping on your daybed. Me, I’m hardly sleeping at all.
If you want me, just send word. I can arrive overnight.
With love,
Greta
Lili thought of her life in the casita: Einar’s former workroom, tidy and untouched; the morning light that poured into Greta’s studio; the ottoman quilted with velvet and dented beneath the handsome weight of Carlisle; Greta in her smock, hardened with a dozen smears of paint, her hair running like icewater down her back; Hans honking his horn from the streets below, calling Lili’s name. Lili wanted to go back, but that would have been impossible now.
In the afternoon she met Ursula again, who was red in the cheek from running down the stairs. “There’s a letter from him!” she said, waving an envelope. “It’s from Jochen.”
“How’d he know where to find you?”
“I wrote him. I couldn’t help it, Lili. I broke down and wrote him and told him how much I loved him and it wasn’t too late.” Her hair was pulled into a tail, and she looked even younger today, with cheeks that were full and dimpled twice. “What do you think he wants to say?”
“Find out,” said Lili. Ursula opened the envelope and her eyes began to move across the letter. Her smile started to fall almost imperceptibly, and by the time she turned over the page her mouth was a tight little frown. Then she ran the back of her hand beneath her nose and said, “He might come to visit me. If he can save enough money and get time off from the chocolate shop.”
“Do you want him to come?”
“I suppose so.” And then, “I mustn’t get my hopes up, though. It might be hard for him to get the time off from the shop. But he says he’ll come if he has the time.”
They said nothing for several minutes. Then Ursula cleared her throat. “I understand there’s going to be an operation.”
Lili said yes; she picked at the lint in her lap.
“What are they going to do to you? Are you going to be all right? Will you be just the same when they’re through?”
“I’ll be better,” Lili said. “Professor Bolk is going to make me better.”
“Oh, creepy old Bolk. I hope he doesn’t do anything wrong to you. Bolk the Blade-that’s what they call him, you know. Always ready to open a girl up with his knife.”
For a second Lili became frightened.
“I’m sorry,” Ursula said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. You know how girls can talk. They don’t know anything.”
“It’s all right,” Lili said.
Later, in her room, Lili prepared for bed. Frau Krebs had given her a small chalky pill. “To help you sleep,” Frau Krebs had said, biting her lip. And Lili washed her face at the sink with the rose-colored washcloth. The makeup-the muted orange of her powder, the pink of her lipstick, the brown of the wax she used on her eyebrows-ran down the sink with the water. When she would hold the eyebrow pencil with the waxy tip, her fingers poised to draw, a strange feeling would fill her chest, as if she were reliving something. Einar had been an artist, and she wondered if that feeling, the tight flutter just beneath the ribs, was what he experienced as the slick tip of his brush moved into the rough blank expanse of a new canvas. Lili shuddered, and a taste of something not unlike regret rose in her throat, and she had to swallow hard to hold down the sleeping pill.
The next morning she felt dreamy and dull. A knock on the door. A nurse with upturned hair shifting Lili out from beneath the sheets. A transporting ambulance, smelling like alcohol and steel, waiting at the side of her bed to take her away. The distant sight of Professor Bolk’s face, asking, “Is she all right? Let’s make sure she’s all right.” But not much else registered with Lili. She knew it was still early, and she was wheeled down the hall of the clinic before the sun lifted over the rape fields east of Dresden; she knew the swinging doors with the porthole windows closed on her before the dawn light hit the cornerstones of the Bruhlsche Terrace, where she had looked out over the Elbe and the city and all of Europe and where she had convinced herself she would never again look back.
When she woke up, she saw a yellow felt curtain pulled against a window. Opposite sat a single-door wardrobe with a mirror and a key laced with a blue-thread tassel; at first she thought it was the pickled-ash wardrobe, and then she recalled, although it had happened to someone else, the afternoon when Einar’s father found him in the closet of his mother’s wardrobe with a yellow scarf on his head.
She was lying in a bed with a steel-pipe footrest; she was looking at the room through the footrest, and it was like staring out a barred window. The room was wallpapered in a pink-and-red pattern of nosegays. In the corner there was a chair draped with a blanket. Beside the bed a mahogany table covered with a piece of lace and a cup of violets. The table had a single drawer, and she wondered if her belongings were in it. On the floor was a dust- colored carpet, the nap worn bald in spots.
She tried to lift herself, but a heavy pain spread through the middle of her body, and she fell back onto the pillow, which was hard and spiny with feathers. Her eyes rolled up into her head until the room went black. She thought of Greta, and she wondered if Greta was now in this room, in the corner opposite the window where Lili didn’t have the strength to turn her head to peer. Lili didn’t know what had happened to her, not just then, not with the chloroform still swirling in her nostrils. She knew she was ill, and at first she thought she was a child with a ruptured appendix in the provincial Jutland hospital with its rubber-floored halls; she was ten years old, Hans would soon arrive at the door with a fistful of Queen Anne’s lace. But this couldn’t make sense, because Lili was also thinking about Greta, who was Einar’s wife. It caused her to ask herself, nearly aloud: Where is Einar?
She thought of them all: Greta and Hans and then Carlisle, whose flat, persistent voice was good at sorting things out; she thought of frightened Einar, lost in his baggy suit, separated from the rest of them, somehow away-permanently away. She lifted her eyelids. On the ceiling was a lightbulb set in a box of reflecting silver. There was a long string attached, and she saw that the string ran down to her bedside, its tail capped with a little brown bead. The bead was lying on the green blanket, and for a very long time she thought about releasing her hand from beneath the clamp of the blanket and pulling the brown bead and turning off the light. She focused on it, the brown bead a piece of carved wood like what ran along the wire of an abacus. Finally, when she moved to free her hand, the effort and the pain of shifting her body exploded in her like a crash of hot light. Her head pushed back into the pillow-the feathers matting against her skull-and she closed her eyes. Only hours before, in the black of morning, at the hands of Professor Alfred Bolk, Einar Wegener had passed from man into woman, two testicles scooped from the pruned hammock of his scrotum, and now Lili Elbe slipped into unconsciousness for three days and nights.
CHAPTER Twenty-two
Greta couldn’t stand it. She would button up her smock and clip her hair back with the tortoiseshell comb and mix her paints in the Knabstrup bowls and stand in front of a half-finished portrait of Lili and fail to understand how
