The Danish Girl (42 page)

“Is she sleeping now?” Anna finally said.

“Yes. She’s in between morphia shots in the early afternoons. Can you come by tomorrow after lunch?” Carlisle said. “But poke your head in now and have a look. So I can tell her you’ve been here.”

Lili heard the door crack open. She could feel another person enter the room—that subtle reshifting of air, the nearly imperceptible change in temperature. Anna’s perfume drifted to Lili’s bed. She recognized it from the counter at Fonnesbech’s. It came in a short little bottle with a gold-mesh tassel, but Lili couldn’t think of the name. Eau-de-Provence, or something like that. Or was it La Fille du Provence? She didn’t know, and she couldn’t open her eyes to greet Anna. She couldn’t speak, and she couldn’t see anything, and she couldn’t raise her hand to wave hello. And Lili then knew that Carlisle and Anna were standing at the side of her bed and there was nothing she could do to tell them that she knew they were there.

The next day, after lunch, Carlisle and Anna bundled Lili into her wicker wheelchair. “It’s too beautiful not to be outside,” he was saying as he tucked the blanket around her. Anna wrapped Lili’s head in a long magenta scarf, building a turban on her head that matched her own. Then they pushed Lili into the clinic’s back-park, settling her against a gooseberry shrub. “Do you like the sun, Lili?” Anna asked. “Do you like it out here?”

Other girls were on the lawn. It was Sunday, and some had visitors who brought them magazines and boxes of chocolate. There was a woman in a pleated polka-dot dress who gave a girl chocolates wrapped in the gold foil from the shop on Unter den Linden.

Lili could see Frau Krebs in the
Wintergarten,
surveying the lawn and the girls and the curve of the Elbe below. She looked small from this far, as small as a child. Then she disappeared. It was her afternoon off, and all the girls liked to gossip about what Frau Krebs did in her spare time, even though the truth was that she headed into her garden with a hoe.

“Should we go for a walk?” Carlisle said, releasing the hand brake and pushing Lili across the rocky grass. There were rabbit holes in which the wheels bounced, and although the rocking rattled her with pain, Lili couldn’t help thinking how glad she was to be outside the clinic with Carlisle and Anna. “Are we going down to the Elbe?” Lili asked when she saw that Carlisle was steering her away from the dirt path that led to the river.

“We’ll get there,” Anna said, and they pushed Lili through a curtain of willows. They were moving fast, and Lili held the chair’s arms as it hit tree roots and rocks. “I thought I’d take you out for a bit,” Carlisle said.

“But I’m not allowed,” Lili said. “It’s against the rules. What would Frau Krebs say?”

“No one will know,” Anna said. “Besides, you’re a grown woman. Why shouldn’t you leave if you want to?” Soon they were beyond the clinic’s gate and out into the street. Carlisle and Anna pushed her through the neighborhood, past the villas set back behind brick walls spiked with iron cupolas. The sun was warm but a breeze was running up the street, revealing the underside of the elm leaves. In the distance Lili heard the bell of a tram.

“Do you think they’ll miss me?” she said.

“So what if they do,” and Carlisle—the way his face was tight with focus, the way he swatted his hand through the air—again reminded Lili of Greta. It was almost as if Lili could hear the tinkle of silver jewelry. She had a memory—as if it were a story once told to her—of Greta sneaking down Kronprinsessegade with Einar in tow. Lili could remember the heat of Greta’s hand in her own, the brush of a silver bangle against her fingers.

Soon Lili and Carlisle and Anna were crossing the Augustusbrücke. In front of Lili lay all of Dresden: the Opernhaus, the Catholic Hof kirche, the Italian-styled Academy of Art, and the seemingly floating dome of the Frauenkirche. They came to Schlossplatz and the foot of the Brühlsche Terrace. A man with a cart was selling bratwurst in a bun and pouring glasses of apple wine. Business was good for him, a line of eight or ten people waiting, their faces pinking in the sun. “Doesn’t that smell good, Lili?” Carlisle said, as he pushed her to the stairs.

Forty-one steps led to the terrace, where Sunday strollers were out, leaning against the rail. The steps were adorned by the Schilling bronzes of Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night. There was a fine grit on the steps, and from the base Lili watched the long yellow skirt of a woman and the disc of her straw hat climb the stairs, her arm looped through a man’s. “But how will we get up?” Lili asked.

“Not to worry,” Carlisle said, turning her chair around. He gave it a pull up the first step.

“But your leg,” Lili said.

“I’ll be all right,” Carlisle said.

“And what about your back?”

“Didn’t Greta ever tell you about our famous Western spines?”

And with that, Carlisle, who never once, as far as Lili knew, blamed Greta for his dented leg, began to lug Lili up the stairs. With each bounce came a horrible jolt of pain, and Anna gave Lili her hand to squeeze.

The terrace looked out across the Elbe to the Japanese Palace and the right bank. Traffic in the river was heavy, with the paddlewheelers and the coal freighters and the dragon-fronted gondolas and the rent-a-day rowboats. Carlisle locked the brake of Lili’s chair in the space between two benches, beneath one of the square-trimmed poplars, at the terrace’s rail. Carlisle stood next to her, Anna on her other side. Lili could sense their hands on the back of her chair. Young couples were on the terrace, holding hands, boys buying girls sacks of grape-flavored candy from a vendor with a cart. On the grassy beach on the other side of the Elbe, four little boys were flying a white rag-tail kite.

“Look how high their kite is!” Anna pointed to the boys. “Higher than the city, it seems.”

“Do you think they’ll lose it?” Lili said.

“Would you like a kite, Lili?” Anna said. “Tomorrow we’ll get you one if you like.”

“What do they call this place?” Carlisle said. “The balcony of Europe?”

They said nothing for a while, and then Carlisle said, “I think I’ll go buy a bratwurst from that little man. Are you hungry, Lili? Can I get you anything?”

She wasn’t; she no longer ate much at all, which of course Carlisle knew. Lili tried to say “No, thank you,” but couldn’t form the words.

“Do you mind if we go off for a few minutes to find that man?” Anna said. “We won’t be gone more than a minute or two.”

Lili nodded, and Carlisle’s and Anna’s shoes ground through the gravel, drifting away. Lili shut her eyes. The balcony of the whole world, she thought. Of my whole world. She could feel the sun on her eyelids. She heard a couple one bench over crunching on their candy. And beyond that the slap of water on the side of a boat. A tram called, and then the bell of the cathedral. And for once Lili stopped thinking about the misty, double-sided past and the promise of the future. It didn’t matter who she once was, or who she’d become. She was Fräulein Lili Elbe. A Danish girl in Dresden. A young woman out in the afternoon with a pair of friends. A young woman whose dearest friend was off in California, leaving Lili, it suddenly felt, alone. She thought of each of them—Henrik, Anna, Carlisle, Hans, Greta. Each, in his own way, partially responsible for the birth of Lili Elbe. Now she knew what Greta had meant: the rest Lili would have to undergo alone.

When she opened her eyes, Lili saw that Carlisle and Anna hadn’t yet returned. She wasn’t worried; they’d come back for her. They would find her in her chair. Across the river the boys were running and pointing to the sky. Their kite was lifting higher than the willows, higher than even the Augustusbrücke. It was flying up over the Elbe, a white diamond of bedsheet reaching, bright from the sun, tugging on the boys’ spool-rolled string. Then the line snapped, and the kite sailed free. Lili thought she heard the overly excited shrieks of little boys buried in the breeze, but that would have been impossible; they were too far away. But she had heard a muffled shriek somewhere; where had it come from? The boys were jumping up and down in the grass. The boy with the spool received a punch from one of his pals. And above them, the kite was trembling in the wind, swooping like an albino bat, like a ghost, up and up, and then down, rising again, crossing the Elbe, coming for her.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the case of Einar Wegener and his wife. I wrote the novel in order to explore the intimate space that defined their unusual marriage, and that space could only come to life through conjecture and speculation and the running of imagination. Some important facts about Einar’s actual transformation lie in these pages, but the story, as recounted here with its details of place and time and language and interior life, is an invention of my imagination. In early 1931 when the news broke that a man had changed his gender, newspapers around the world ran accounts of Einar Wegener’s remarkable life. (It is interesting to note that Lili Elbe herself leaked the story to the press, and wrote some stories about herself, including her own obituary, under a pseudonym.) Many of those articles were helpful in writing this novel, especially those in
Politiken
and other Danish newspapers. Another indispensable source was Lili Elbe’s diaries and correspondence, which Niels Hoyer edited and published as
Man Into Woman
. Those journal entries and letters provided critical factual details of Einar’s evolution, especially regarding Lili’s first visit to Wegener’s studio, Einar’s mysterious bleeding and physical decline, and his journey to and stay at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic. The passages in my book that deal with these incidents are especially indebted to Hoyer’s assemblage of Lili Elbe’s original words. Nonetheless, I have changed so many elements of Einar Wegener’s story that the characters in these pages are entirely fictional. The reader should not look to this novel for very many biographical details of Einar Wegener’s life, and no other character in the novel has any relation to an actual person, living or dead.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The number of people who played a role in bringing this book to publication is long, and to each I extend my gratitude.

My early readers: Michael Lowenthal, Lee Buttala, Jennifer Marshall, Mitchell Waters, Chuck Adams. My Random House colleagues, present and former, who never balked at having a novelist in their midst: Ann Godoff, Alberto Vitale, Bruce Harris, Joy deMenil, Leah Weatherspoon, Cathy Hemming, Sascha Alper, Benjamin Dreyer, Courtney Hodell. The staff at Viking, each a writer’s advocate: Jonathan Burnham, who intelligently edited the early drafts, my championing and deft editor Barbara Grossman, Ivan Held, Hal Fessenden, Leigh Butler, Jim Geraghty, Paul Slovak, Gretchen Koss, Amanda Patten, Paul Buckley, and Alex Gigante for his legal counsel; and for their hard work on the publication, Lynn Goldberg and Mark Fortier. For their kind assistance in Copenhagen, Liselotte Nelson, Susanne Andersen, Mette Paludan, my excellent translator Kirsten Nielsen, Luis Soria, and Peter Heering. For his help with the German chapters and publication, Georg Reuchlein. Bill Contardi, Eric Price, Todd Siegal, and Stephen Morrison each watched over the novel’s progress with godfatherly eyes.

And, finally, Elaine Koster, my agent and friend.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR