Lili Elbe (Einar Wegener) Character Analysis

It became difficult for Einar to keep his eyes open, to continue watching Greta’s fast, fish-like movements as her hand darted at the canvas, then pulled away, her silver bracelets and rings turning like a school of chub. It became difficult for him to continue thinking about Anna singing over at the Royal Theater, her chin leaning towards the conductor’s baton. Einar could concentrate only on the silk dressing his skin, as if it were a bandage. Yes, that was how it felt the first time: the silk was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze—a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on his healing skin. Even the embarrassment of standing before his wife began to no longer matter, for she was busy painting with a foreign intensity in her face. Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna’s dress could belong to anyone, even to him.

In any case, Greta also thought of herself as the least likely to marry. When a young man—a pan-faced Dane of a declining aristocratic clan or the son of an American steel magnate touring Europe for the year—asked her to the ballet or for a sail through the canals of Christianshaven, her first thought was always: You won’t catch me. All she wanted to be was a bluestocking: a perpetually young woman who was free to paint daily in the light of the window and whose only social company occurred at midnight when a group of eight would meet in Sebastian’s, her favourite pub, for two quick snifters of cherry-flavored Peter Heering before the long-faced police would turn up at one o’clock to shut down the house for the night.

The boys were laughing, their noses burning in the sun. Hans was tickling Einar’s stomach with a reed. His face was so close to Hans’s that he could feel, through the grass, his breath. Einar wanted to lie so close to Hans that their knees would touch, and at that moment, Hans seemed open to anything at all. Einar scooted toward his best friend, and the only strip of cloud in the sky peeled itself away, and the sun fell on the boys’ faces. And just then, as Einar moved his bony knee toward Hans’s, an angry gust of wind yanked on the kite, and the spool lifted from the clamp of Einar’s knees. The boys watched the submarine of the kite sail above the elm trees, rising at first but then crashing into the black centre of the bog, which swallowed it as if it were heavy as a stone.

Then, more vaguely, his gravelly voice suddenly smooth: “Einar. Let’s pretend.”

Hans found Einar’s grandmother’s apron with het cotton-grass strings hanging limply next to the stovepipe. He brought it to Einar and cautiously tied it around his waist. Hans touched the nape of Einar’s neck, as if there were a panel of hair he needed to lift aside. “You never played this game?” Hans whispered, his voice hot and creamy on Einar’s ear, his fingers with their gnawed-down nails on Einar’s neck. Hans pulled the apron tighter until Einar had to lift his ribs with an astonished, grateful breath, his lungs filling just as Einar’s father padded into the kitchen, his eyes wide and his mouth puckered into a large O.

Einar felt the apron drop to his feet.

And this was why, perhaps, Einar felt free to grip Henrik’s moist fist and follow: it was a game, part of the game of Lili, and games counted for nearly nothing. Games weren’t art, they weren’t painting; and they certainly weren’t life. Not once before—and not even tonight with Henrik’s hand sweating in his palm—did Einar ever consider himself abnormal, or off the mark. His doctor, when he’d gone to him last year with a question about their inability to produce children had asked, “Do you ever long for someone other than your wife, Einar? For another man, perhaps?” No, never. Not at all,” he replied. “Your inkling is wrong.” Einar told the doctor that he, too, became disturbed when he saw the men with the quick, frightened eyes and the excessively pink skin loitering near the toilets in Ørstedsparken. Homosexual! How far from the truth!

All of this Greta did with a sense of devotion, for she always believed she could defy anyone in the world except her husband. It had been the same with Teddy. She could cross her mother and argue with her father and snub all of Pasadena and Copenhagen alike, but in her chest was a bottomless well of tolerance for the man she loved. She never questioned it, why she allowed Lili to come into their lives. Anything to make Einar happy, she would tell herself. Anything at all.

And yet, Greta being Greta, this open devotion sometimes chafed her. After Lili’s assignations with Henrik, Greta began to escort her on her trips into the Copenhagen streets. Lili had told her that she would never see Henrik again […] but even so Greta knew there were dozens of other young men who could flatter Lili until she blushed and fell into their arms.

“And now I’ve been on my own so long I’m not sure I could ever get married. Too stuck in my old ways, I am.”

“Don’t you think that marriage is the one single thing we should all hope for most in life? Doesn’t it make you more whole than living all alone?”

“Not always.”

“I think it does. Marriage is like a third person,” Lili said. “It creates someone else, more than just the two of you.”

“Yes, but not always for the best,” Hans said. “Anyway, how do you know anything about all of this?”

“I need to see Lili every day,” Greta said to him. She was beginning to miss Lili when she wasn’t around. Greta had always been an early riser, up well before dawn, before the first ferry call or rattle from the street. That autumn, there were mornings when Greta woke even earlier than that, the apartment so black she couldn’t see her hand before her. She would sit up in the bed. There beside her lay Einar, still sleeping, at his feet Edvard IV. She herself was still caught in the hazy hallway of sleep, and Greta would wonder, where was Lili? Greta would quickly climb out of bed and begin searching the apartment. Where had Lili gone to?

“Mr Wegener, I’m a specialist. There’s virtually no trouble I haven’t treated. If you are embarrassed, please remember that I’m not.”

Einar didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted to believe Dr Hexler would understand; that if he were to tell Hexler about the tunnel that led to Lili’s lair, that if Einar were to admit Lili wasn’t really him but someone else, Hexler would tap a pencil against his lips and say, “Ah, yes. No need to worry. I’ve seen this before.”

Einar began, “Sometimes I feel a need to go and find Lili.” He’d come to think of it as a hunger. Not like a hungry stomach an hour before dinner; it was more like when you’ve missed several meals, when you’re hollow. When you’re concerned about where the next plate of food will come from.

Part of [Greta] hoped Hexler would instruct Einar to live freely as Lili […] Part of Greta wanted to be married to the most scandalous man in the world. It had always annoyed her when people assumed that just because she had married she was now seeking a conventional life. “I know you’ll be as happy as your mother and father,” a cousin from Newport Beach had written after her marriage to Einar […] But I’m not like them, she told herself as she shredded the letter into the iron stove. We’re not like them. That was long before Lili showed up, but even then Greta knew she had married a man who would take her somewhere unlike anywhere she’d ever been. […] Einar was different. He was strange. He almost didn’t belong to this world. And on most days, Greta felt, neither did she.

Einar heard footsteps running towards him, and he looked up from his lap. It was Martine in her yellow pinafore. She looked frightened but enthusiastic […] Between Einar and her lay the kite’s tail, a row of rag-bows on a string. Martine wanted it, and from the little smile pushing through her frown, Einar could tell she wanted to be friendly with him. She grabbed the tail. Then she laughed, her face like gold. When she curtsied and said, ‘Merci,’ everything Einar knew about himself pressed together as one: the cottongrass apron strings around his waist; his head held in Greta’s young hands; Lili in the sennep-yellow shoes in the Widow House; Lili this morning swimming laps in the river pool. Einar and Lili were one, but it was time to split them in two. He had one year.

He felt—it was the first time he had ever used this word to describe Lili—pretty. Lili now felt relaxed, her bare white shoulders reflected in the glass, the pretty little cove at the base of her throat. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man to be staring at her in her intimate underthings, the straps of the camisole across her shoulders. As if something inside Einar had snapped, like the canvas window blind, and told him, more plainly than ever before, that this was who he was: Einar was a guise. Peel away the trousers and the striped tie, which Greta had given him on his last birthday, and only Lili was left. He knew this; he had known this. Einar had eleven months. His year was slipping away.

Yes, Einar looked pale to her, with thin blue pads spreading beneath his eyes. A translucence had developed in his skin. Greta had seen this, but had it worried her, more than everything else? And the bleeding, returning irregularly for more than four years now. She’d learned to live with him, with his transformation. Yes, it was as if Einar were on a perpetual track of transformation, as if these changes—the mysterious blood, the hollow cheeks, the unfulfilled longings—would never cease, would lead to no end. And when she thought about it, who wasn’t always changing? Wasn’t everybody always turning into someone new? In a bin with a chained lid, Greta found the perfect frame its lip painted gold, for her latest painting of Lili. “But if you know someone,” she said to Anna, “if you have a doctor in mind […] maybe I should talk to him.”

“I’m afraid you are a homosexual,” Dr McBride eventually said. He capped his pen with a little click.

“I don’t think you understand.”

“You’re not the first person this has happened to,” Dr. McBride said.

“But I’m not a homosexual. That isn’t my problem. There’s another person living inside of me,” Einar said, rising from the chair. “A girl named Lili.”

“And it breaks my heart,” Dr McBride continued, “when I have to tell men like you that there’s nothing I can do for them. […] My only advice is that you restrain yourself. You’re always going to have to fight your desires. Ignore them, Mr. Wegener. If you don’t…well, then, you’ll always be alone.”

Einar met Carlisle at the café. He knew Dr McBride was wrong. Not so long ago Einar might have believed the doctor and sulked away in pity for himself. But Einar told Carlisle that it had been a waste of time.

“Take that pillow…the rubber one. Put it over my face for just a little bit. It won’t take long.”

She stopped. Now she understood. A final request from her husband, whom she wanted to please more than anyone in the world. More than anything she wanted him to leave this world still in love with her, gratitude his final memory. A rubber pillow sat in the rocking chair; Teddy was trying to lift his hand to point.

“Just hold it against my face for a minute or two” he said. “It’ll be easier that way.”

“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “I can’t. Dr Richardson will be here in the morning. Wait until then. Let him take a look at you. He might know what’s next for you. But just hold on till then. Please stop talking about that pillow. Please stop pointing at that pillow.”

Immediately Einar felt as if the officers were disappointed with him—as if, no matter what, he was incapable of causing any trouble. The one with the raw fingernails demanded Einar’s passport; when he saw it was Danish, he became even less interested. He opened it while looking at his partner. Neither of the officers, who were breathing through their mouths, checked the information in Einar’s papers, or held up the photograph, taken so long ago in a musty-smelling photographer’s studio steps from Rundetårn, to compare it to Einar’s face. The officers said nothing. The first one threw the passport into Einar’s lap. The second, whose eyes narrowed in on Einar, slapped his own stomach, the brass buttons on his cuff shaking, and Einar almost expected the dang! Of a bell. Then the officers were gone.

“See what?”

“At last I’m free.”

But Einar didn’t see, not just then. He didn’t see that Greta would need to be alone in Denmark, relationless in Europe, in order to become the woman she saw herself as. She needed to put an ocean and a continent between herself and her family in order to feel that at last she could breathe. What Einar didn’t understand then was that it was another of Greta’s brazenly American traits, that bubbling need to move away and reinvent. Never before had he imagined himself doing the same.

And this was another part of his life that the obituary written by Nationaltidende would miss.

The rest Lili could imagine: the first kiss in the back room; the gentle tumble into the bowl of the stainless-steel vat; the passion in the middle of the night when the chocolate house lay still; the sobs of love.

How very sad, Lili thought, sitting in her metal chair as the afternoon sun hit the Elbe. In five fast days she and Ursula had become friends. And despite Ursula’s current predicament, Lili longed for something similar to happen to her. Yes, she told herself. It will be like that with me: instant love; helpless, regrettable passion.

“All I need to do is remove it and refold the—” Lili couldn’t bear the details, and so instead she looked to Greta [… When ] Greta’s eyes met Lili’s, Greta sat down her pencil and said, “She’s right. Can’t you hurry up the next operation, Professor Bolk? What’s the wait?”

“I don’t think she’s ready. She isn’t strong enough yet.”

“I think she is,” Greta said.

They continued to argue, while Lili shut her eyes and imagined Einar as a boy on the lichen rock watching Hans return a shot with his tennis racquet. He thought of Henrik’s moist hand in hers at the Artists Ball. And the heat of Carlisle’s eyes on her that early damp morning at the market. And Greta, her eyes narrowing into concentration, as Lili posed on the lacquer trunk. “Do it now,” she said softly.

“How’s Greta been lately?”

“You know Greta. Always the same.”

“That’s not true. Is she settling back all right?”

Lili stopped and wondered what he meant. Wasn’t that the frustratingly wonderful thing about Greta? That she was always the same—always painting, always planning, always pulling back her hair?

“She’s fine.” And then, “I think she’s angry with me.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes I wonder why she let me go through with all of this in the first place. If she thought everything was going to be the same afterwards.”

“She never thought that,” Hans said. “She always knew what it meant.”

[…]

Then Hans asked, “What are you going to do, Lili?”

“I thought something like this had happened,” Henrik said. Lili could detect no horror in his face. Even now, it was what she sometimes expected: upon hearing the news, the world would turn away in disgust. “I’m not surprised.”

She asked him what he thought of her do you think I’m a freak of some sort, she asked. For Lili’s notion of herself could flip-flop by the minute: sometimes she looked in the mirror and exhaled and felt the settling peace of gratitude other times she saw a man-woman, its head peering out of the collar of a dress. Greta and Hans told her not to think like that. But when she was alone, the self-doubt would creep back into her chest.

Then Lili decided it was time to tell Greta. She could no longer keep anything from her. There was a terrible stretch of time in Einar’s life—from the time Hans left Bluetooth until the day he met Greta at the Academy—when he lived without anyone to reveal his secrets to. Lili could remember that, the feeling of biting down on one’s thoughts and feelings and storing them up for no one. Then Greta had changed Einar’s life. Lili could remember the feeling of that, too, of realizing, gratefully, that at last the loneliness would fall away. How could she be less than honest with Greta for another minute? “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

[…]

But where to begin? What news should Lili deliver first [?]

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 much 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. […]

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.

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.

[…]

“What was he like then?”

“A little by 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, then days when Einar was certainly 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.

[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 felted 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 Carlislie was building […] where newlyweds from Illinois were settling; and the acres of orange groves. […]

“I’m ready to go,” Greta said.

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 bedlinen 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 over-excited shrieks of little boys buried in the breeze; 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.