The Danish Girl

Something mysterious happened to the latest. A painter of some sort. Some sort of mysterious death. In Germany, I think I heard. But not to worry-now she’s back, and this time with a baron. That’s right, little Miss Radical has returned to Pasadena, and as soon as she marries this fellow she, of all people, will become a baroness.”

That was part of what lay ahead for Greta, but she took comfort in the thought of going home. Her hand was on Hans’s thigh and he smiled at her, his knuckles white around the Horch’s wheel as he steered them back to Copenhagen.

A letter from Carlisle waited for her. After she read it, she slipped it into the side pocket of one of the trunks she was packing. So many things to ship home: her brushes and her paints and dozens of notebooks and sketches of Lili. It was just like Carlisle not to send enough news: the operation took longer than Bolk had thought, almost a full day. Lili was resting, sleeping from the morphia injections she still receives. I’ll have to stay in Dresden longer than I planned, Carlisle wrote. Another several weeks. Her recovery will take longer than any of us guessed. Progress has been slow so far. The professor is a kind man. He sends his regards. He says he’s not worried about her. If he’s not worried about her, then I suppose we shouldn’t be either, wouldn’t you agree?

A week later Greta Waud and Hans Axgil boarded the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd for the first leg of their trip to Pasadena. They would fly to Berlin, and then to Southampton; from there they’d sail. The aeroplane, reflecting the fine summer day, was on the tarmac of the Amager aerodrome. Greta stood with Hans and watched the skinny boys load their trunks and crates into the silver belly of the aeroplane. Farther down the tarmac was a cluster of people around a platform, where a man in a top hat was giving a speech. He had a beard, and a little Danish flag on the corner of his lectern was flapping in the wind. Behind him was the Graf Zeppelin, long and stormy gray, like an enormous ribbed bullet. The people in the crowd began to wave little Danish flags. She had read in Politiken that the Graf Zepp was setting out on a Polar flight. Greta watched the crowd cheer, as the zeppelin hovered above the tarmac. “Do you think they’ll make it?” she asked Hans.

He was reaching for his calfskin valise. The aeroplane was ready for them. “Why shouldn’t they?”

The man making the speech was a politician she didn’t recognize. Probably running for parliament. And behind him was the Graf Zepp’s captain, Franz Josef Land, in a sealskin cap. He wasn’t smiling. His eyebrows were bunched together over his glasses, and he looked concerned.

“It’s time,” Hans said.

She took his elbow, and they found their seats in the aeroplane. She could see the zeppelin through her window, and the crowd, which was moving away from the aircraft. Men in shirtsleeves and suspenders were beginning the untethering. The captain was standing in the doorway of his little cabin, waving farewell.

“He looks as if he wonders if he’ll ever come back,” Greta said, as the aeroplane’s porthole door locked with the turn of a wheel.

The voyage out on the Empress of Britannia was smooth, and the passengers sat in their striped lounge chairs on the teak deck, and Greta thought of the handstand she performed when she was ten. She screwed together her easel, twisting its butterfly bolts through the holes in its legs. She pulled a blank canvas from one of her trunks, nailing it to a frame. And on the ship’s deck, she began to paint from memory: the hills of Pasadena rising out of the Arroyo Seco, dry and brown in early summer, the jacaranda trees having shed their blossoms, and the last day lily folding in the heat. With her eyes closed, she could see it all.

In the mornings Hans kept to himself in his stateroom, going through his papers and preparing for his arrival in California, where they would marry in the garden of the Waud house. In the late afternoons he would move a deck chair to her side. “We’re off at last,” he would say.

“Homeward bound,” she would say. “I never thought I wanted to go home.”

It had come to this, Greta would think over and over, the moist tip of her brush dipping into the paint. The shift of the past, the sprawl of the future; all of it she had navigated both rashly and cautiously, and it had come to this. Hans was handsome with his legs stretched out on the chaise. He was half in the sun, half out, Edvard IV at his feet. The ship’s engines churned on and on. Its bow pried the ocean in two, splitting the endless dimpled water into halves, cutting what had once seemed interminably one into two. Greta and Hans each continued to work in the slanting light, in the air heavy with salt, through the dusk falling red and flat over the blank, shrinking sea, until the moon rose and the white party lights strung along the ship’s rail came on and the chill of eve would send them to their stateroom, where they would be together at last.

CHAPTER Twenty-nine

It was late July before Lili was awake long enough during the day to remember anything. For nearly six weeks she had lolled in and out of consciousness, spitting up in her sleep, hemorrhaging between her legs and in her abdomen. Every morning and night Frau Krebs would replace the bandages taped over her pelvis, pulling away the old ones that looked like scraps of royal velvet, so red and bright they were. Lili was aware of Frau Krebs changing the dressing and the gauze, and the welcoming sting of the morphia needle, and, on many days, the pressure of the rubber ether mask. Lili knew that someone was there laying a damp rag across her forehead, changing it when it warmed.

On some nights she would wake and recognize Carlisle asleep in the chair in the corner, his head back against the cushion, his mouth open. She didn’t want to wake him-so kind he was to spend the night at her side. She’d tell herself to let him rest; she’d turn her head in the pillow and look at Carlisle, his face oiled with sleep, and his fingers curled around the loop holding the cushion to the chair’s back. She wanted him to sleep through the night: and she’d watch his chest rise and fall, and think of the day they spent together before this last operation. Carlisle took her to a beach on the Elbe, where they swam in the current, and then sunned themselves on a blanket. “You’ll make quite a mother,” Carlisle said. Lili wondered why it was so easy for him to imagine it, but not Greta. When she closed her eyes Lili sometimes thought she could smell the powdery scent of a bundled infant. She could nearly feel the little dense weight of a child in her arms. She told this to Carlisle, who said, “I can see it too.”

On the riverbank he ran his hand over his arm, pushing off the water. His wet hair was matted around his face, and then he said, “It’s hard for Greta, this part is.”

A tourist steamer was coughing up black exhaust, and Lili braided the fringe of the blanket, weaving in blades of grass. “I’m sure in some ways she misses Einar,” Carlisle said.

“I can understand that.” She filled with that strange feeling she got when Einar was mentioned: like a ghost passing through her, it was. “Do you think she’d come visit me?”

“Here, in Dresden? She might. I don’t see why not.”

Lili turned on her side and watched the black column of exhaust rise and shift. “You’ll write her, then? After the operation?”

A few days after the surgery, when Lili’s fever stabilized, he wrote Greta. But she didn’t reply. He wrote again, and again there was no answer. He telephoned but heard through the static only a tinny, endless ring. A telegram couldn’t be delivered. It took a cable to Landmandsbanken to discover that Greta had returned to California.

Now, in the middle of the night, Lili didn’t want to disturb Carlisle’s sleep, but she could barely remain silent. The pain was returning, and she was gripping the sash of the blanket, shredding it in fear. She concentrated on the bulb in the ceiling, biting her lip, but soon the pain had spread through her body, and she was screaming, begging for a morphia injection. She cried for ether. She whimpered for her pills laced with cocaine. Carlisle began to stir, his face lifting; for an instant he stared at her, his eyelids fluttering, and Lili knew he was trying to figure out where he was. But then he was awake and went to find the night nurse, who herself was asleep at her station. Within a minute the ether mask clamped down around Lili’s nose and mouth and she slipped away for the rest of the night.

“Feeling any better today?” Professor Bolk asked on his morning rounds.

“Maybe a little,” Lili would try.

“The pain down at all?”

“A bit,” Lili would reply, even though it wasn’t true. She’d try to push herself up in her bed. When the professor