The Danish Girl

Back in Paris, Greta waits impatiently, restlessly, for news about Lili. Her artwork isn’t selling as well as it used to and without her muse, she can’t paint. She’s also still struggling with her feelings toward Hans. The day that Carlisle discovered her in Hans’s arms in the apartment, she had confessed to her brother that Hans was her only friend. He told her that “no one” held her responsible for “any of this,” but she struggled to believe him.

Hans thinks Greta should go to Dresden. He tells her as much one day when she stops by his office. She says that Einar insisted on going alone. Maybe, Hans muses, he was afraid to bring her. But now, Greta decides, she has no choice. She must go to Dresden. Alone, like Einar, even though Hans offers to go, too.

Greta finds Dresden a dreary, unfriendly city, a place to get lost. While she easily locates the Clinic, Frau Krebs is initially confused when Greta asks after a Miss Wegener. She describes Lili, whom Frau Krebs knows as Lili Elbe, not Lili Wegener.

Lili, looking pale and drawn, is sleeping in her hospital bed when Greta arrives. Exhausted, she immediately curls up in a chair next to Lili and falls asleep for several hours. When she wakes up, Lili is conscious. She wants to know if Professor Bolk has made her into a “real woman.” Greta tells her that the operation was a success and that Lili looks beautiful. But Greta is suffering shock from the realization that Einar is as dead as Teddy Cross on the day Greta buried him.

Ursula peeks into the room to ask after Lili and leaves a box of chocolates for her. Greta notices the unnatural shape of her pregnant belly. When Ursula tells Great that Lili missed Greta greatly, Great wonders what that means.

Like Einar before her, Greta must wait several days for Professor Bolk to grace her with his attention. When he finally calls on her at her hotel, he has an interesting report about the operation. He searched Einar’s abdomen for the source of the mysterious bleeding, and he found a pair of rudimentary ovaries. In some ways, Einar has always been “part female.” But Professor Bolk wants to ensure the success of Lili’s transformation by grafting ovarian tissue from a “healthy girl” onto these ovaries. He has already identified a suitable donor, Ursula, who has an inoperable abdominal tumor.

A few weeks later, Professor Bolk performs the next surgery. Lili is excited and grateful that he’s “turning her into a little girl.” She believes him capable of miracles. Greta once thought of Teddy Cross as a miracle worker, too. When they lived in Bakersfield and Carlisle came to visit, Teddy had, in a roundabout way, healed his disabled leg. Since the childhood accident, Carlisle had required crutches to get around. But when he went to see the site where Teddy was prospecting (oil fever had gripped the valley after a farmer struck some while sinking a well), he fell into the hole, breaking the disabled leg. A doctor set it and when the cast came off, Carlisle found that he could walk on it again, for the first time since he was six, although he never fully lost his limp.