become Lili. He explained that the systematic tests-the blood counts and the urinalysis and the hourly monitoring of Lili’s temperature-were all showing signs of proper healing. The Listerian antisepsis was protecting Lili from infection. “The biggest concern right now is the pain,” Professor Bolk said.
“What are you doing about that?”
“A daily morphia injection.”
“Is there any risk to that?”
“Very little,” he said. “We’ll wean her off it over the next several weeks. But right now she needs it.”
“I see.” Now that she had Bolk at her side, her concern about him faded. He was no different from most busy, important men: impossible to track down, but once you had him his full attention was yours.
“I was concerned about her bleeding,” Professor Bolk continued. “She shouldn’t have been hemorrhaging like that. It made me think something was wrong with one of her abdominal organs.”
“Like what?”
“I didn’t know. A crushed spleen. A hole in the lining of the intestine. Anything was possible.” He crossed his legs. Greta could feel her heart quicken as she became frightened for Lili.
“She’s all right, isn’t she? I shouldn’t be worried about her, should I?”
“I opened her up,” Bolk said.
“What do you mean?”
“I opened up her abdomen. I knew something was wrong. I’d been in enough abdominal cavities to know something was wrong.”
For an instant Greta shut her eyes, and she saw, on the backs of her lids, a scalpel drawing a line of blood across Lili’s belly. She had to stop herself from imagining Professor Bolk’s hands, with the help of Frau Krebs, pulling apart the incision.
“It’s true that Einar was indeed female. Or at least part female.”
“But I already knew that,” Greta said.
“No. I don’t think you understand.” He snatched a star-shaped sugar cookie from the tray brought by the maid. “It’s something else. Something rather remarkable.” His eyes were bright with interest, and Greta could tell he was the type of doctor who wanted something-a disease, a surgical procedure-named after him.
“In his abdomen,” Bolk continued, “tangled in with his intestine, I found something.” Dr. Bolk folded his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “I found a pair of ovaries. Underdeveloped, of course. Small, of course. But they were there.”
Greta decided at that moment that she should paint Professor Bolk: the square line of his shoulders; his hanging arms; the long neck emerging from a starched collar; the skin around his eyes crinkled and tender. She sat back in her chair. An opera singer was staying in the suite next door, and Greta could hear her singing Erda from
“What does it mean for her?” Greta finally asked. “Are these ovaries real?”
“It means I’m even more certain that this will work.” And then, “We’re doing the right thing.”
“You really think this explains the hemorrhaging, then?”
“Probably,” he said, his voice rising. “It explains almost everything.”
No, Greta thought; she knew the ovaries couldn’t explain everything.
“There’s a grafting process I want to try,” Professor Bolk went on. “From a healthy pair of ovaries. It’s been done with testicles but never with the female organs. But there have been results.
“I’d like to harvest some tissue from a healthy pair of ovaries and layer it over Lili’s,” he said. “But it’s a matter of timing. A matter of finding the right pair.”
“How long will that take?” And then, “Are you sure you can do this?”
“Not so long. I have a girl in mind.”
“From the clinic?”
“There’s a young girl from Berlin. We thought she was pregnant when she arrived. But it turns out a tumor has taken over her stomach.” He stood to leave. “She doesn’t know, of course. What would be the point of telling her now? But she might be the one. It might be only a month or so.” He shook Greta’s hand. When he was gone, Greta opened her double-lid paint box and began to set out the bottles and lay down a tarp, and then, through the walls, came the opera singer’s voice, slow and dark and climbing the notes alone.
Several weeks later Greta and Lili were sitting in the clinic’s garden. The birch trees and the willows were shiny with buds. The hedges were still patchy, but dandelions had sprung up in the brick path. Two gardeners were digging holes for a row of cherry trees, burlap bags bundling their roots. The gooseberry shrubs were beginning to leaf.
A circle of pregnant girls was on the lawn, on a tartan blanket, weaving blades of grass. Their white hospital gowns, loose in the shoulders, were trembling in the wind. The clock in the clinic’s eaves was striking noon.
A cloud shifted, and the lawn turned nearly black beneath the shadow. The cherry trees blew over, and a figure emerged from the clinic’s glass door. Greta couldn’t tell who it was. He was wearing a white lab coat, which was flapping like the pennants strung along the tourist cruiser that was plying the Elbe.
“Look,” Lili said. “It’s the professor.”
He moved in their direction, and the cloud shifted again, and Professor Bolk’s face lit up, the sun on his spectacles. When he reached them he knelt down and said, “It’s going to be tomorrow.”
“What is?” Lili asked.
“Your next operation.”
“But why all of a sudden?” Lili asked.
“Because we’re ready with the graft tissue. We should operate tomorrow.” Greta had told Lili about the next procedure, about the ovarian tissue that Professor Bolk would lay into her abdomen.
“I expect everything to go as planned,” the professor said. In the sunlight the skin in Bolk’s face was thin, the sea-color of his veins showing through. Greta wished Hans had traveled to Dresden with her. She’d talk it over with him; she’d like his counsel-the way he’d tent his fingers together in front of his mouth as he thought through a situation. Greta suddenly felt exhausted.
“What if it doesn’t go as planned?” she asked.
“We’ll wait. I want to work with tissue from a young girl.”
“All of this is hard to believe,” Lili said. She wasn’t looking at Greta or Bolk. Her face was turned to the circle of girls, who were lying on their sides.
When Professor Bolk was gone, Lili shook her head. “I still can’t believe it,” she said, her eyes still on the girls. “He’s doing it, Greta. Just as you said he would. He’s turning me into a little girl.” Lili’s face was still, the tip of her nose red. She was whispering. “I think he might be a man capable of miracles.”
A breeze pushed Greta’s hair over her shoulder, and she looked to the shaded windows of Professor Bolk’s laboratory-the stucco walls, the glassed-in corridor connecting it to the rest of the clinic. It was off limits to her, but Greta imagined the tiered operating amphitheater and the steel ambulances cold to the touch and a shelf of jars filled with formaldehyde. One of the window shades was lifted, and for a minute Greta could see the silhouette of someone working in the laboratory, his head bent over his task; and then a second person-all black shadow-drew the shade again, and the stucco building was yellow in the sunlight and as lifeless as before.
“So,” she said. “Tomorrow it is,” and she lowered Lili’s head into her lap, and they closed their eyes and received the weak heat of the sun. They listened to the muted squeals of the girls on the lawn, and the far-away splash of a paddlewheel on the Elbe. Greta thought of Teddy Cross, whom she had also once thought of as capable of miracles. There was that time with Carlisle’s leg. Greta and Teddy had been married only a few months, and they were living in the Spanish house in Bakersfield, and the first hot winds were beginning to blow through the eucalyptus groves.
Greta was pregnant with baby Carlisle and sick on the sofa from Gump’s. One day Carlisle drove over the Ridge Route in his yellow- fendered Detroiter to visit them and to investigate potential oilfields.
The strawberry fields were a carpet of green that spring, edged by the buttery gold of the poppies in the
