had said, “I was thinking about taking a job.”
“Don’t you see I’m a little sad?” Greta said.
“Don’t you see that I want you to tell me that?”
“Hans,” she said. “Maybe I should go.” It was then that Greta realized they were at the foot of the steps where she and Einar had first kissed, and fell in love. The white balustrades and the plank steps worn from decades of tardy students with incomplete assignments shoved up beneath their arms. The paned windows were hooked against the cold. The hall was quiet; no one was around. Where had all the students gone? Greta heard a door somewhere catch in its latch. Then everything fell silent again, and something imperceptible passed from Hans to her, and out the window, in the courtyard, in the long shadow of the academy, the boy with the blue scarf kissed his girl, again and again, and yet again.
CHAPTER Twenty-five
Lili was sitting in the rope-bottom chair, wondering if now was the right time to tell Greta. Lili could see through the window the masts of the herring boats on the canal. Behind her, Greta was painting a portrait of Lili’s back. Greta said nothing as she outlined the painting, and Lili heard only Greta’s bracelets tinkling. Smoldering in the pit of her groin was the leftover pain, so steady that more and more Lili had taught herself to ignore it; the inside of her lip was shredded from biting down. Professor Bolk had promised it would eventually go away.
She thought of the girls at the clinic. The day before Professor Bolk released Lili, they threw her a party in the garden. Two girls pulled a white cast-iron table onto the lawn, a third carried from her room a primrose in a cachepot painted with bunnies. The girls tried to spread a yellow cloth across the table, but the wind was keeping it aloft. Lili sat at the head of the table, on a cold metal chair, watching the cloth fluttering as the girls tried to tie down its corners. The sunlight poured through the yellow cloth, filling Lili’s eyes, the cachepot in her lap.
Frau Krebs gave Lili a box tied with a ribbon. “From the professor,” she said. “He wanted you to have it. He had to go up to Berlin. To St. Norbert Hospital to attend a surgery. He said to tell you goodbye.” The ribbon was tight, and Lili couldn’t pick it open, and so Frau Krebs produced an army knife from her apron and quickly cut through it, which disappointed the girls, because they wanted to weave it through Lili’s hair, which had grown beyond her shoulders during her stay.
The box was large and packed with tissue, and inside Lili found a double-oval silver frame. In one oval was a photograph of Lili lying in the tallgrass on the bank of the Elbe; the photo must have come from Greta, because Lili had never walked down to the river with Professor Bolk. And peering through the second oval was the face of a small man beneath a hat; his eyes were dark and shadowy and his skin so white it was almost glowing, and his neck looked thin in his collar.
From the rope-bottom chair Lili could see the double-portrait frame on the bookshelf. She could hear the scratch of Greta’s pencil against the canvas. Lili’s hair was parted down the middle and fell to both sides of her neck. The amber beads hung around her throat, and she could feel the cold gold of the clasp. Lili had a vision of a stocky woman with hammy legs and callused thumbs who had once worn the beads; Lili of course did not know the woman, but she could see her in rubber and canvas boots in a sphagnum field, the beads slithering down the crevice of her breasts.
It didn’t bother Lili, what she remembered and what she didn’t. She knew that most of her life, her previous life, was like a book she had read as a small child: it was both familiar and forgotten. She could recall a sphagnum field, muddy in spring and pocked with holes belonging to a family of red fox. She could recall the rusty, flat blade of a hoe slapping into the peat. And the hollow
“You’re blushing,” Greta said from her easel.
“Am I?” Lili felt the heat in her neck, and the quick collection of sweat around the rim of her face. “I don’t know why,” she said.
But that wasn’t true. A few weeks earlier, she had been on her way to Landmandsbanken to lock away in the safe-deposit box the pearl-and-diamond brooch Greta had given her. But before heading to the bank, Lili had stopped in a basement store to buy two bristle brushes for Greta. The clerk, an old man with knuckles that were pink and soft, was reaching up to a shelf of turpentine. He was assisting a customer, a man with corkscrew hair growing past his ears. Lili couldn’t see the customer’s face, and she felt annoyed with him for having asked for the largest tin of turpentine on the highest shelf. “I’m going to fetch a pair of gloves. I’ll be right back,” the customer said to the clerk, who was still balancing on the ladder. The man turned around and passed Lili, saying, “Excuse me,
As the man slipped by her, Lili pressed herself against the shelf and held her breath. His hair brushed her cheek, and she smelled a faint scent of grain. “Excuse me,” he said again.
Then Lili knew. She sank her chin into her chest, unsure of what she wanted to happen next. She worried about how she looked, her face probably raw from the wind. On the bottom shelf she stared at children’s sets of watercolors in hinged metal boxes. She knelt to check the price of a red one with a dozen dry pads of colors. She began to pull her hair around her face.
Then Henrik saw her. His hand fell to her shoulder: “Lili? Is it you?”
They stepped outside, the sack holding the tin of turpentine swinging on Henrik’s arm. He was older now, the skin around his eyes thinner and faintly blue. His hair was darker, like stained oak, without much shine. And his throat had thickened, and his wrists. He was no longer pretty; he had become a handsome man.
They went for a coffee around the corner, settling around a table at a cafe. Henrik told Lili about himself; about his paintings of the sea that sold better in New York than in Denmark; about the automobile accident on Long Island that nearly killed him, the spoke-wheel of his Kissel Gold Bug flying off the running board and into his forehead; about his high-cheeked fiancee from Sutton Place who left him for nothing and no one else, simply because she didn’t love him anymore.
“I forgot,” Lili said suddenly at the cafe. “I forgot to buy Greta’s brushes.”
He walked her back to the store, only to find it closed. Lili and Henrik were on the street, the store’s sign swaying on its iron arm. “I have some extra ones in my studio,” he said. “We can go get them if you like.” His eyes were tear-shaped, and she had forgotten how short and stubby his eyelashes were. Again there was the scent of grain, like the shuck of wheat.
“It all makes me a little worried,” Lili said, as Henrik’s face moved closer to hers.
“Stop,” Henrik said. “Please don’t worry about me.” The shop’s sign continued to rattle on its arm, and Henrik and Lili set out for his studio on the other side of the Inderhavn, where, later, after Henrik had poured her red wine and fed her strawberries and showed her his paintings of the sea, they kissed.
“You’re blushing even more,” Greta now said. She turned on a lamp and began to rinse her brushes in a jar. “Do you need a pill?” Greta asked. “Are you feeling all right?”
Lili didn’t know how to tell Greta. When they’d moved back to Copenhagen, Lili had said, “Do you really think we should go on living together? Two women in this apartment?”
“Are you worried about what people might say?” Greta said. “Is that it?”
And Lili, who wasn’t entirely sure why she had said it, answered, “No. Not at all. It’s just that… I was thinking of you.”
No, Lili couldn’t tell Greta about Henrik, at least not yet. After all, where would Lili begin? The kiss in the dim light of his studio? The wrap of Henrik’s arm around Lili’s shoulders as he walked her into Kongens Have at dusk just as the governesses were wheeling their prams home for the evening? His hand, which was backed with thick black hair, holding her throat, and then the soft cushion of her breast? The letter from Henrik slipped to Lili the next day via the Cantonese laundress, the folded square of paper smudged with ink professing love and regret. Yes, where would Lili begin? Only three weeks had passed since the meeting at the art supply store, but it felt to Lili as if during
