The Danish Girl (5 page)

In the evenings Einar and Greta would dine with friends at their favorite café along Nyhavns Kanal. Sometimes he ’d become a little drunk on aquavit and boast childishly of the success of one of his exhibitions. “All the paintings sold!” he’d say, reminding Greta of Carlisle, who would endlessly boast of a good grade in geometry, or a handsome new friend.

But Einar’s talk would embarrass Greta, who tried not to listen whenever money was discussed; after all, what was there to say? Couldn’t they pretend it didn’t matter to either of them? She would glare at Einar across the table, salmon bones bare and oily on the platter. She’d never told Einar about the trust her father had sent her off to Denmark with, to say nothing of the income wired into an account at Landmandsbanken at the end of each orange season—not out of selfishness, but because she was too concerned that all that money would transform her into someone else, someone whose company she herself wouldn’t enjoy. One regrettable day she bought the whole apartment building, the Widow House, but she could never bring herself to tell Einar, who each month delivered the rent check to a clerk at Landmandsbanken with a bit of a grudge in his step. Even Greta knew this had been a mistake, but how could she fix it now?

When Einar became excited he’d knock his fists against the table, his hair falling around his face; the collar of his shirt would split open, revealing his smooth pink chest. He was without any fat on his body, except for his soft breasts, which were as small as dumplings. Greta would pat his wrist, trying to urge him to slow down on the aquavit—the way her mother had done when Greta was a girl drinking Tennis Specials at the Valley Hunt Club. But Einar never seemed to understand her signals, and instead he’d bring the slim glass to his lips and smile around the table, as if seeking approval.

Physically, Einar was an unusual man; this Greta knew. She would think this when his shirt would split open further, and everyone at the table could get a peek of his chest, which was as obscene as the breast of a girl a few days into puberty. With his pretty hair and his chin smooth as a teacup, he could be a confusing sight. He was so beautiful that sometimes old women in Kongens Have would break the law and offer him tulips picked from a public bed. His lips were pinker than any of the sticks of color Greta could buy on the third floor of Magasin du Nord.

“Tell them why you won’t be at the ball,” Greta said one night at dinner. It was warm, and they were eating at a table outside in the light of a torch. Earlier, two boats in the canal had collided, and the night smelled of kerosene and split wood.

“The ball?” Einar asked, tilting his head.

“Greta says your cousin is coming from Jutland,” said Helene Albeck, a secretary at the Royal Greenland Trading Company. She was compact in her little green dress with the low-hanging waist; once, when she was drunk, she took Einar’s hand and pressed it against her lap. Einar resisted instantly, which pleased Greta, who had witnessed the incident through a slat in the kitchen door.

“My cousin?” Einar said, sounding confused. His upper lip became dewy, and he said nothing, as if he’d forgotten how to speak.

This happened more than once. Greta would mention Lili to a friend, even to Anna, and Einar’s face would pinch up, as if he had no idea who Lili was. He and Greta never spoke about it afterwards, about his childlike miscomprehension: Lili who? Oh, yes, Lili. My cousin? Yes, my cousin, Lili. The next day the same thing would occur again. It was as if their little secret were really just Greta’s little secret, as if she were plotting behind Einar’s back. She considered discussing it with him directly but decided against it. Perhaps she feared she would crush him. Or that he would resent her intrusion. Or maybe her greatest fear was that Lili would disappear forever, the detachable white collar fluttering as she fled, leaving Greta alone in the Widow House.

CHAPTER Three

Einar’s father was a failed cereal farmer, an expelled member of the Society for Cultivating the Heath. The first night he ever left his mother’s farmhouse in Bluetooth was when he rode up to Skagen, the fingertip of Denmark, to fetch his bride from a shop that sewed fishing nets. He slept in a bay-inn with a seaweed roof and woke at dawn to marry. The second and last night away from Bluetooth he returned to Skagen with his wife’s body and baby Einar wrapped in a plaid blanket. Because the ground around Skagen was too hard with hoarfrost for gravedigging, they wrapped Einar’s mother in a fishing net picked clean of gills and laid her like an anchor into the icy sea. The week before, a gray wave had washed the bay-inn with the seawood roof into the Kattegat, and so this time Einar’s father slept in the net shop, among the rusted hook-needles and the cord and the faint smell of primrose for which Einar’s mother was known.

His father was tall and weak, a victim of delicate bones. He walked with a knotwood staff, holding on to furniture. When Einar was little, his father was bedridden with maladies the doctor simply called rare. During the day Einar would sneak into his father’s room while he was asleep. Einar would find foam collected on his father’s lips, bubbled with breath. Einar would tiptoe forward, reaching to touch his father’s golden curls. Einar had always wanted hair like that, so thick a silver comb could sit in it as prettily as tinsel on a Christmas tree. But even more lovely than his hair was his illness, the mysterious malady that bled away his energy and caused his egg-shaped eyes to turn milky and soft, his fingers yellow and frail. Einar found his father beautiful—a man lost in a useless, wheezing, slightly rank shell of a body. A man confounded by a body that no longer worked for him.

On some days Einar would climb into the small beechwood bed and slip beneath the eiderdown. His grandmother had patched the holes in the comforter with tiny pellets of peppermint gum, and now the bed smelled fresh and green. Einar would lie with his head sunk into the pillow, and little Edvard II would curl between him and his father, his white tail flicking against the bedclothes. The dog would groan and sigh, and then sneeze. Einar would do the same. He did this because he knew how much his father loved Edvard, and Einar wanted his father to love him just the same.

Einar would rest there and feel the weak heat from his father’s bones, his ribs showing through his nightshirt. The green veins in his throat would pulse with exhaustion. Einar would take his father’s hand and hold it until his grandmother, her body small and rectangular, would come to the door and shoo Einar away. “You’ll only make him worse,” she’d say, too busy with the fields and the neighbors calling with sympathy to tend to Einar.

Yet despite his admiration, Einar also resented his father, sometimes cursing him as Einar dug in the bog, his spade cutting through the peat. On the table next to his father’s sickbed was an oval daguerreotype of Einar’s mother, her hair twisted into a wreath around her head, her eyes silvery. Whenever Einar picked it up, his father would take it away and say, “You’re disturbing her.” Opposite the bed was the pickled-ash wardrobe where her clothes waited, exactly as she’d left them the day she gave birth to Einar. A drawer of felt skirts with pebbles sewn into the hem to hold them against the wind; a drawer of wool underclothes, gray as sky; on hangers a few gabardine dresses with muttonchop sleeves; her wedding dress, now yellow, packed in tissue that would break apart at the touch. There was a drawstring bag that rattled with amber beads and a black cameo pin and a small diamond set in prongs.

Every now and then, in a burst of health, his father would leave the farmhouse. One day when he returned from an hour of chat at the neighbor’s kitchen table, he found Einar, small at age seven, in the drawers, the amber beads twisted around his throat, a yellow deck-scarf on his head like long, beautiful hair.

His father’s face turned red, and his eyes seemed to sink into his skull. Einar could hear the angry rattle of his father’s breath in his throat. “You can’t do that!” his father said. “Little boys can’t do that!” And little Einar replied, “But why not?”

His father died when Einar was fourteen. The gravediggers charged an extra ten kroner to shovel out a hole long enough to hold his coffin. In the churchyard his grandmother, who had now buried all her children, gave Einar a small notebook with a pewter cover. “Write your private thoughts in it,” she instructed, her face as flat and round as a saucer; that flat face showed her relief that her queer, unproductive son had at last moved on. The notebook was the size of a playing card, with a lapis lazuli pencil held to the spine by ostrich-leather loops. She had plucked it from a sleeping Prussian soldier when the German Confederation occupied Jutland during the War of 1864. “Took his notebook and then shot him,” she sometimes said, churning her cheese.

Bluetooth was named for one of Denmark’s first kings. No one really knew when it was founded, or where its people came from, although there were myths about the Greenland settlers giving up on that rocky land and releasing their sheep to graze here. It was not much more than a village surrounded by bogs. Everything in Bluetooth was always wet: feet, dogs, and, sometimes in the spring, carpets and the walls of halls. There was a plank walkway that crossed the spongy ground leading to the main road and then the grain fields beyond. Every year the walkway would sink the length of a girl’s arm, and in May, when the hoarfrost would melt to bits no bigger than fish scales, the men of Bluetooth would rehammer the warping planks into the few yellow heaps of solid ground.

As a boy Einar had a friend named Hans who lived on the edge of the village in a brick villa that had the town’s first telephone. One day, before they were close friends, Hans charged Einar an
øre
to pick up the receiver. He heard nothing, only the staticky hollow silence. “If there were anyone to call, you know I’d let you,” Hans said, throwing his arm around Einar’s shoulder and rocking him gently.

Hans’s father was a baron. His mother, whose gray hair was twisted tightly, spoke to him only in French. Hans had freckles on the lower half of his face and was, like Einar, smaller than most other boys. But unlike Einar, Hans had a voice that was fast and raspy, that of a good, always excited boy who spoke with equal enthusiasm and confidence to his best friend, his Corsican governess, and the red-nosed deacon. He was the type of boy who at night would fall asleep instantly, exhausted and happy, suddenly quieter than the bog. Einar knew this because whenever he slept at the villa, he would lie awake till dawn, too excited ever to seal his eyes.

Hans was two years older than Einar, but that didn’t seem to matter. At fourteen, Hans was small for his age yet taller than Einar. With his head handsomely larger in proportion to his body, Hans seemed, when Einar was twelve, more like an adult than any other boy he knew. Hans understood the grown-ups who ran the world: he knew they didn’t appreciate their inconsistencies being called out. “No, no—say nothing,” he’d advise when Einar’s father, nearly always bemoaning his bedridden state, would throw back the eiderdown and fly to the teapot whenever Mrs. Bohr or Mrs. Lange stopped by for gossip. Or Hans would suggest—the way he did, with his fingers pressed together into a small finlike paddle—not to tell Einar’s father that he wanted to be a painter. “You’ll change your mind again and again. Why worry him now?” Hans would say, his pressed-together fingers touching Einar’s arm, causing the little black hairs to stand alert, their bases pimpled and hard. Because Hans knew so much, Einar thought certainly he must be right. “Dreams shouldn’t be shared,” Hans told Einar one day when teaching him to climb the ancient oak that grew on the edge of the bog. Its roots wrapped mysteriously around a boulder so white and speckled with mica that you couldn’t look directly at it on a sunny day. “I want to run away to Paris, but I’m not going to tell anyone about it. I’m going to keep it to myself. One day I’ll be gone.
That’s
when people will know,” Hans said, swinging upside down from a branch, his shirt creeping down to expose the hairs sprouting in the bowl of his sternum. Were he to let loose and fall, he’d neatly slip away into the open bubbling mud.

But Hans never disappeared into the bog. By the time Einar was thirteen, he and Hans had become best friends. This surprised Einar, who expected nothing less than scorn from a boy like Hans. Yet instead Hans would ask Einar to play tennis on the rye-grass court marked out with powdered sugar next to the villa. When he discovered Einar couldn’t swing a racquet with any precision, Hans instructed Einar on the rules of umpiring, claiming it was more important anyway. One afternoon Hans and one of his brothers—there were four in all—decided, in an effort to rankle their mother, to play tennis naked. Einar sat in a sweater on a li chened rock, a pink paper parasol set up by Hans protecting him from the sun. Einar tried to call the match objectively, although he felt unprepared to do anything but help Hans win. And so Einar sat on the rock calling the points—“Forty-love for Hans . . . An ace for Hans”—as Hans and his brother glided over the rye grass chasing the ball, their cheerfully pink penises flopping around like schnauzer tails, causing Einar to heat up under the parasol until Hans’s match point. Then the three boys tow eled off, and Hans’s bare warm arm fell across Einar’s back.