exciting for you. It’s what I suppose you’ve always wanted.”
“Since I was little.”
“Yes,” Carlisle said. “What little girl doesn’t want that?” It was true, and Lili was relieved that Carlisle had agreed to travel with her. For a few days she had begged Greta to change her mind. Greta had held Lili in her arms, Lili’s face in Greta’s shoulder, and said, “I think it’s a mistake. I’m not going to help you make a mistake.” Lili packed her suitcase and picked up the ferry tickets with a light sense of dread, and she wrapped her sheer summer shawl around her shoulders as if fighting a chill.
She told herself to think of it as an adventure: the ferry to Danzig, the night train to Dresden, the month-long stay at the Municipal Women’s Clinic. From there she would travel to New York. She had sent word to Henrik that she would arrive by the first of September. She began to think of herself as a voyager, embarking for a world only she could imagine. When she shut her eyes, she could see it: the living room of a New York apartment, with a police whistle rising from the street, and a baby bouncing in her lap. She imagined a little table with a doily across its surface and the silver double-oval frame holding two photographs, one of Henrik and her on their wedding day, the second of their first child in his long, eyelet-hemmed christening gown.
Lili needed to sort through her belongings to make sure everything was crated up so that when she sent for them, all would be ready. There were the clothes: the capped-sleeve dresses from that summer in Menton; and the dresses with the beaded embroidery from her days in Paris, before she became sick; and the rabbit-fur coat with the hood. Most of it, she realized, she wouldn’t want in New York. They now seemed cheap, as if someone else had bought them, as if another woman’s body had worn them thin.
Late one afternoon, as Lili was packing up the crates and sinking nails through their lids, Greta said, “What about Einar’s paintings?”
“His paintings?”
“Some are left. Stacked in my studio,” Greta said. “I thought you might want them.”
Lili didn’t know what to think. His paintings no longer hung in the apartment, and now for some reason she couldn’t quite imagine what they looked like: small gold frames, scenes of the frozen earth, but what else?
“Can I see them?” Greta brought her the canvases, rolled up inside out, their edges fringed with a heavy waxy thread. She opened them across the floorboards, and it felt to Lili as if she had never seen them before. Most were of a bog: one was in winter, with hoarfrost and a dingy sky; one was in summer, with peat moss and a late-night sun; another was simply of the soil, blue-gray from the morainic clays mixed with lime. They were small and beautiful, and Greta continued to unroll them across the floor, ten, then twenty, then more, like a carpet of field flowers blossoming beneath the eye. “Did he really paint them all?”
“He once was a very busy man,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“You don’t recognize the bog?”
“I don’t think so.” It troubled her, for she knew she should know the place: it had the familiarity of a face lost in the past.
“You don’t remember it at all?”
“Only vaguely.” Downstairs, the phonograph came on, an accordion polka, mixed with horn.
“The Bluetooth bog,” Greta said.
“Where Einar was born?”
“Yes. Einar and Hans.”
“Have you ever been there?” Lili asked.
“No, but I’ve seen so many paintings and heard so much about it that when I shut my eyes it’s as if I can see it.”
Lili studied the paintings, the bog surrounded by hazel bushes and linden trees, and a great oak seemingly growing around a boulder. She had a memory, although it wasn’t her own, of following Hans down a trail, the muck sucking her boots as she stepped. She remembered throwing things stolen from her grandmother’s kitchen into the bog and watching them sink forever: a dinner plate, a pewter bowl, an apron with cottongrass strings. There was the work of cutting the peat into bricks, and the hoeing in the sphagnum field. And Edvard I, a runt of a dog, one day slipping off a lichen rock and drowning in the black water.
Greta continued to lay out the paintings, holding down their corners with her bottles of paint and saucers from the kitchen. “It’s where he was from,” she said, on her hands and knees, her hair falling into her face. Methodically she unrolled each painting and anchored its corners and then aligned it into the grid she was creating of dozens and dozens of the little pictures that made up much of Einar’s work.
Lili watched her, the way Greta’s eyes focused in on the tip of her nose. Her bracelets rattled around her wrists as she worked. The front room of the Widow House, with its windows facing north, south, and west, filled with the quiet colors of Einar’s paintings: the grays and the whites and the muted yellows and the brown of mud and the deep black of a bog at night. “He used to work and work, through the day, and the next day again,” Greta said, her voice soft and careful and unfamiliar.
“Can you sell them?” Lili said.
Greta stopped. The floor was nearly covered, and she stood and looked for a place to step. She had cornered herself against the wall, by the iron-footed stove. “You mean you don’t want them?”
Something in Lili knew she was making a mistake, but she said it anyway: “I don’t know how much room we’ll have,” she said. “I’m not sure Henrik would like them. What with his own paintings. He prefers things more modern. After all,” Lili said, “it’s New York.”
Greta said, “It’s just that I thought you might want them. At least some of them?”
When Lili shut her eyes, she too saw the bog, and the family of white dogs, and a grandmother guarding her stove, and Hans, sprawled over the curve of a mica-flecked rock, and then, strangely, young Greta in the soap-green hallway of the Royal Academy of Art, a fresh pack of red-sable brushes in her fist. “I found the art supply store,” Greta was saying, in that lost memory.
“It’s not that I don’t want them,” Lili heard herself saying, this day, one of her last in the Widow House, already slipping away into memory. But whose memory? “I just can’t take them with me,” and she shuddered, for suddenly it felt as if everything around her belonged to someone else.
CHAPTER Twenty-eight
The day after Lili and Carlisle left for Dresden, there was a summer storm. Greta was in the apartment, in the front room, watering the ivy in the pot on the Empire side table. The room was gray without the sun, and Edvard IV was asleep next to her trunk. The sailor below was out at sea, probably caught in the roll of the storm that very minute, and there was a clap of thunder, and then the giggle of the sailor’s wife.
It was funny, Greta thought. How the years had passed, the endless repetition of the flat sunrises over Denmark and, across the globe, the sunset crashing against the Arroyo Seco and the San Gabriel Mountains. Years in California and Copenhagen, years in Paris, years married and not, and now here she was, in the emptied Widow House, trunks loaded and locked. Lili and Carlisle would arrive in Dresden later that day, if the rain hadn’t delayed them. Yesterday she and Lili had said goodbye at the ferry dock. People around them, heaving luggage, dogs in arms, a team wheeling their bicycles up the plank. Hans was there, and Carlisle, and Greta and Lili, and hundreds of others, all saying so long. A pack of schoolchildren herded by their headmistress. Thin young men hunting employment. A countess headed for a month of mineral baths in Baden-Baden. And Greta and Lili, next to each other, holding hands and forgetting about the rest of the world around them. One last time Greta shoved away the rest of the world, and everything she knew and felt shrank down to the tiny circle of intimacy where Greta and Lili stood, her arm now around Lili’s waist. They promised to write each other. Lili promised she would take care of herself. Lili said, her voice nearly inaudible, they would see each other in America. Yes, Greta said, having trouble imagining it. But she said, Yes, indeed. When she thought about it, a horrible shiver ran up her spine, her Western spine, because it felt-this departure at the dock-as if she had somehow failed.
Greta was now waiting for Hans’s horn from the street. Outside, the spires and the gables and the slate roofs were black in the storm, the Royal Theatre’s dome as dull as old pewter. Then came Hans’s call, and Greta scooped
