The Danish Girl (40 page)

“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 Edvard IV into her arms and shut out the lights, the bolt of the lock turning heavily.

The storm continued, and the drive out of the city was slippery. The apartment houses were stained with rain. Puddles were swallowing the curbs. Greta and Hans witnessed a plump woman on a bicycle, her body battened down in a slicker, crash into the rear ramp of a mason’s lorry. Greta pressed her hands to her mouth as she watched the woman’s eyes shut with fear.

Once they were beyond the city limits, the gold Horch, with its white cabriolet top buckled closed, began to roll across the fields. Meadows of Italian rye grass and timothy and fescue and cocksfoot were damp and dented in the rain. Red and white clover, lucerne grass, and trefoil lined the road, bent and dripping. And beyond the fields the kettle-hole lakes, dimpled and deep.

The ferry ride to Århus was choppy, and Hans and Greta sat in the front seat of the Horch during the crossing. The car smelled of Edvard’s wet coat, curled by the damp. Hans and Greta didn’t speak, and she could feel the churn of the ferry’s engines when she set her hand on the dash. Hans asked her if she needed a coffee, and she said yes. He took Edvard IV with him, and when she was alone in the car she thought of the journey Lili and Carlisle were on; in a few hours they’d probably be settling into the room at the clinic with the view over the willows in the back-park down to the Elbe. Greta thought of Professor Bolk, whose likeness she had captured in a painting that had never sold; it sat rolled up behind the wardrobe. And when she returned to Copenhagen in a few days, when she finished sorting through her furniture and her clothes and her paintings, she would send it on to him, Greta told herself. It could hang behind Frau Krebs’s reception desk, in a gray wood frame. Or in his office, above the sofa, where, in a few years, other desperate women like Lili would surely come in pilgrimage.

It was night when they arrived in Bluetooth. The brick villa was dark, the baroness already retired to her apartment on the third floor. A houseman with a few tufts of white hair and a snub nose led Greta to a room with a bed covered in a slip of lace. He turned on the lamps, his snub-nosed face bent forward, and lifted the windows. “Not afraid of frogs?” he said. Already she could hear them croaking in the bog. When the houseman left, Greta opened the windows some more. The night was clear, with a half-cut moon low in the sky, and Greta could see the bog through an opening in the ash and elm trees. It looked almost like a damp field, or a great lawn in Pasadena soaked after a January rain. She thought of the earthworms that were driven from the ground after a winter downpour, the way they writhed on the flagstone paths trying to save themselves from drowning. Had she really been the type of child who would cut them in two with a butter knife thieved from her mother’s pantry and then present them to Carlisle on a plate, beneath a silver warming bell?

The curtains were made of a blued eyelet and they hung down and across the floorboards, fanning themselves out like wedding trains. Hans knocked and said, through the door, “I’m down the hall, Greta. If you need anything.” There was something in his voice. Greta could sense his curled knuckle pressed against the paneled door, his other hand gently on the knob. She could imagine him in the hall, lit by a single wall sconce at the top of the stairs. She imagined the point of his forehead pressing the door.

“Nothing now,” she said. And there was a silence, only the frogs cho rusing on their patches of peat, and the owls in the elms. “All right then,” Hans said, and Greta couldn’t quite hear him retreat to his room, his stockinged feet padding across the runner. Their time would come, she told herself. All in time.

The next day Greta met Baroness Axgil in the breakfast room. The room looked out toward the bog, which sparkled through the trees. Around the room potted ferns balanced in iron stands, and a collection of blue-and-white porcelain plates was secured to the wall. Baroness Axgil was gaunt and long-limbed, her hands backed with rubbery veins. Her head, also Borreby in size and shape, was held up by a throat tight with tendon. Her silver hair was pulled back snugly, slanting her eyes. The baroness sat at the head of the table, Hans opposite her, Greta in the middle. The houseman served smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs and triangles of buttered bread. Baroness Axgil said only, “I’m afraid I don’t remember an Einar Wegener. W-E-G, did you say? So many boys came through the house. Did he have red hair?”

“No, it was brown,” Hans said.

“Yes. Brown,” said the baroness, who had invited Edvard into her lap and was feeding him strips of salmon. “A nice boy, I’m sure. Dead how long?”

“About a year,” Greta replied, and she looked to one end of the breakfast-room table and then to the other and was reminded of another breakfast room on the other side of the world where a woman not unlike the baroness still reigned.

Later in the day Hans led her down a path alongside a sphagnum field to a farmhouse. It had a thatched roof and timber eaves, and a puff of smoke was rising from the chimney. Hans and Greta didn’t approach the yard, where there were hens in a coop and three small children scratching the mud with sticks. A woman with yellow hair was in the door, squinting against the sun, watching her children, two boys and a girl. A pony in its pen sneezed, and the children laughed, and old Edvard IV trembled at Greta’s leg. “I’m not sure who they are,” Hans said. “Been there awhile.”

“Do you suppose she’ll let us in if we ask? To have a look around?”

“Let’s not,” Hans said, his hand falling to the small of her back, where it remained as they returned across the field. The long blades of grass swiped at her shins. And Edvard IV chugged behind.

In the graveyard, there was a wooden cross marked WEGENER. “His father,” Hans said. A grassy grave in the shade of a red alder. The graveyard was next to a whitewashed church, and the ground was uneven, and flinty, and the sun burning the dew off the rye grass made the air smell sweet.

“I have his paintings,” she said.

“Keep them,” Hans said, his hand still on her.

“What was he like then?”

“A little boy with a secret. That’s all. No different from the rest of us.”

The sky was high and cloudless, and the wind ran through the red alder’s leaves. Greta stopped herself from thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Summer in Jutland, no different from the summer days of his youth, the days when Einar certainly was both happy and sad at once. She had returned home without him. Greta Waud, tall in the grass, her shadow lowering itself across the graves, would return home without him.

On the drive back to Copenhagen, Hans said, “What about California? Are we still going?”

The Horch’s twelve cylinders were running powerfully, the vibration shaking her skin. The sun was bright, and the top was down, and there was a strip of paper swirling about Greta’s ankles. “What did you say?” she yelled, holding her hair in her fist.

“Are we going to California together?” And just as the wind was rushing around her, sending her hair and the lap of her dress and the strip of paper whirling, her thoughts began to pass chaotically through her head: her little room in Pasadena with the arched window overlooking the roses; the casita on the lip of the Arroyo Seco, now let to tenants, a family with a baby boy; the blank windows of Teddy Cross’s old ceramics studio on Colorado Street, transformed after the fire into a printer’s press; the members of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society in their felt berets. How could Greta return to that? But there was more in her head, and then Greta thought of the mossy courtyard of the casita, where in the light filtering through the avocado tree she painted her first portrait of Teddy Cross; and the little bungalows Carlisle was building on the streets off California Boulevard, where newlyweds from Illinois were settling; and the acres of orange groves. Greta looked to the sky, to the pale blue that reminded her of the antique plates on the walls of the baroness’s breakfast room. It was June, and in Pasadena the rye grass would have burned out by now, and the palm fronds would be brittle, and by now the maids would have pulled the cots onto the sleeping porches. There was a sleeping porch at the rear of the house; its screens were on hinges, and as a girl she would open them up and stare out, across the Arroyo Seco to the Linda Vista hills, and she would sketch the rolling dry-green sight of Pasadena. She imagined unpacking her paints and screwing together her easel on the sleeping porch and painting that vista now: the gray-brown of the blur of the eucalyptus, the dusty green of the stalks of cypress, the flash of pink stucco of an Italianate mansion peeking through the oleander, the gray of a cement balustrade overlooking the expanse of it all.