Man Into Woman - Chapter 22 by Lili Elbe Lyrics

The next morning a letter by Claude Lejeune arrived at Lili's.

"My dear, little Lili!

I just wanted to tell you briefly that I will be in Copenhagen for business the next few days. I will be there in the coming week. I kiss your hand. In haste

Your Claude."

- - -

Lili and Claude were together then from morning until evening for a whole week. She showed him the entire city and the widеr surroundings, and everything was full of spring.

She was happy. It was as if hеr best friend from her youth had finally returned to her.

And he told her of Paris. And he reignited in her all memories of the many, many happy hours the two of them lived through there, and in the South of France, so that her memory, as if awoken from darkness, seemed to her like a shimmering firmament now.

"Do you still remember this – do you still remember that?" Claude asked and could barely await a response and kept on talking.

And Lili said to everything "yes, yes." And her eyes seemed so happy.

But very, very secretly she felt now and then that something new and different was stirring in her and she did not know what it was.
- - -

"Claude and I sat in a restaurant tonight when he all of a sudden he said:

"Listen Lili, I have to get you home now. It is already late and I am afraid that I will compromise you otherwise." I had to laugh out loud. I had never before heard such words out of Claude's mouth.

But as I was looking at him, I felt that his words were serious and obeyed and rose.

When we were sitting in the car I said to him:

"Claude, you almost look solemn. Are you no longer as happy as you used to be in Paris and on the Loire when you were together with me?"

Then Claude said, he had taken my hand:

"Maybe you are right. I have recognized something new with you during these days, something that I had not known in you, back then, when you, if I may say so, had not been born yet. Now you are healthy and in good spirits. But also so defenseless. You are a grown woman, but still you appear to me like a child. You should have a person who is both mother and husband to you. In a few days I have to leave again, far away, and then the thought of leaving you behind, alone, torments me. Exposed to all dangers. Because all the people in Copenhagen, where everyone knew Andreas, look at you, whether you want to admit it or not, as a phenomenon. Even if these people are good to you. You can not run from your past."

Claude looked at me for a long time. Then I asked him:

"What should I do then?"

"You must get away from here."

I nodded.

"That is my intention. Grete is expecting me in June at her and Feruzzi's. But before that I want to go to D. to the "Women's Clinic." Spend a few summer days or summer weeks there, as in the previous year."
Claude shook his head.

"What plans, what plans, Lili! All the long journeys. And all alone. It is so nice of Grete and her husband that they want you with them, but do not forget: they are newlyweds. Do people who for so long have missed their happiness have room for another being?"

And then Claude fell silent again, until he suddenly said:

"I have to tell you that I will be relocated from Paris to Turkey within the next days. And I must begin my journey there within the week at the latest."

Then he looked at me with his big, open eyes and asked:

"Will you go with me, Lili?"

This question came so suddenly that I looked at him like a nonbeliever. "Do you really want me along?"

And then Claude said very earnestly: "My little Lili, can you doubt that? Do you want to marry me? Do you want to become my wife?"

Completely without a will of my own, as if I had not spoken myself, I said: "Yes, but yes, Claude." And I heard my words ringing in my ear, they were completely without excitement, so polite, the way a schoolgirl talks.

And that was why I did not quite understand Claude's excitement, when he takes both of my hands and kisses them. And only as Claude presses himself against me and gives me a kiss on the mouth do I understand what he and I have said, and an inexplicable feeling overcomes me. Something that I have never known before, something fulfilling yet terrible.

And I suddenly hear, as if coming from very far away, the words that Werner Kreutz said to me the last time I saw him: "Go out and spread your wings and glide into life." And he also had said to me: "Now live your young girl's life."

I tore myself from Claude, startled, and he looked at me with upset eyes and asked me: "What is with you, Lili, do you no longer like me?"

And there I replied: "You know well how much I think of you."
And I heard my own words, and I barely recognized my voice. Then I said: "But I can not marry you before I have asked Professor Kreutz. Without his permission I cannot do anything. He alone has the right to decide about me."

"What do you mean?" Claude asked, and his eyes looked at me, almost threateningly.

I looked for words. Involuntarily I think of the conversation I had with my German friend. I hear his words as he is talking to me: "The shame of shamelessness ....."

"Say something," I hear Claude again, and then I said and I apparently stammered:

"Claude, I don't know, if I am allowed to marry, yet – maybe I am not yet strong enough, although I apparently look healthy. Let me go to my helper in Germany. I have to discuss with him what should become of me, where my path leads."

- - -

"The next day sixteen-year-old Ruth, the daughter of my German friend, was sitting with me. She was painting her first picture, a self-portrait. And I stood behind her, and I did not need to tell her how to paint. I told her about myself, and of the "Women's Clinic" and many other things that moved me, and which my little student maybe did not quite understand. And we were so happy with each other. And I saw that I could give her much good advice. And when she had gone, the painting she had begun was still standing on the easel, which I had inherited - from Andreas, - I very secretly searched among the many pictures that were still with me from Grete's and Andreas' exhibition, though most of them had been sold, for an empty piece of canvas. I stretched it over a frame, took the painting of my little student from the easel, and put the empty piece of canvas on the easel. And suddenly I myself am taking a paintbrush and beginning to paint. What I want to paint, I do not know. And I paint and paint.

Suddenly there is a knock on the door. And there is another one.

I could not leave the easel. Something held me there, - then Claude stands behind me.

"You are painting, Lili?" he asked amazed, "and what is your picture supposed to introduce?"

"Well, do you see, Claude," I replied a little unsure, and again I had to think of the conversation I had with my German friend, "I want to try to see if I can begin -. When you leave in a few days, I want start my big journey a few days later, too. And then I want to bring a picture for my professor. My very first picture. He owns pictures by Andreas, and I would like to see if I can really pass muster as a painter next to him. Last night, when you brought me home I had an idea."

"Yes, but what is your picture supposed to represent, little Lili?"

And both us of stood in front of my painting, and he said: "Did you not paint a heart?"

And I am almost ashamed to admit it. "Yes," I say, "it is my heart, that was left behind in the "Women's Clinic."" Claude looks at me sadly and questioningly, and I take his hand.

"Don't be mad, Claude, you don't understand yet. See, the "Women's Clinic" was my silent, white, gleaming childhood home. That is why Professor Kreutz must have this picture. He will not be cross with me. He also will not deride the picture. He understands me. I want nothing more than to see his smile when I give him the picture ...

You are so dear to me, Claude, and I already dream of being together with you down south, to live together. There are so many hot, colorful flowers and palms and hot, heavy southern sun. And you will also have a garden. And I already see that garden before me.

But I dream of another garden too. In that garden there are white flowers and white birches. And there I walk, white and pure, beneath a pale and mild sky. Maybe it is the garden of Paradise."

And I further said to Claude. "You good-hearted person," I said, "for me life is still so new and awe-inspiring. I feel so weak in the face of all the strong emotions that I feel stirring inside my heart now and then. And I have long since understood that the life of a woman is mostly one of longing and pain. And yet it is so wonderful to live!"

And then Claude said to me: "Poor little Lili." And he enfolded me in his arms very quietly, as if I were a child. And then speaks again:

"Often I think that nature has put everything female that exists in the world inside your timid, sensitive little soul, out of some wonderful, mysterious mood, and everyone can hurt your little soul because it is so unprotected. That is why I would like so much to take you along. Do you not want to?"

Then I looked at Claude very calmly and gave him both my hands. And I said: "You just go, Claude, and wait for me. But do not ask any more. I understand so little of what is stirring inside me and discover something new and unknown within me every day."

Then I cried a few tears. We stood very closely in front of the picture of my heart. Maybe a tear fell onto the canvas.

The next day I brought Claude to the train."

- - -

It rained out of a blue-grey sky. White birches shone like silver in front of dark, wet pine woods. Violet-blue hills rolled along the horizon.

Lili looked at her watch. In barely an hour she would be in her beautiful city on the Elbe.

She let herself be lulled by the soft, rocking rhythm of the train. With eyes half-open she sat in her corner by the window and saw the lovely, familiar landscape glide by.

Often her heart pounded hard, so that she had to grab her chest, and a hot wave stirred in her blood, so that she felt her face glow.

Then she sank back into a half-conscious dream state, in which she had been since she had boarded the train to D. at Berlin's Anhalter station.

She had intentionally taken the same train as in the past, when she had gone south more than year ago, to find shelter and asylum in the "Women's Clinic."

It was no longer early spring as back then. It was almost summer.

But something of young, fresh spring and the magic of summer closing in lay over the rainy-wet day.

She closed her eyes and tried to collect her thoughts.

The past year wandered through her memory in a hasty, endless pilgrimage. This first, dangerous year of her life, through which she had wandered like a sleepwalker close to the abyss, and yet in a mystical way had always been accompanied by guardian angels.

And again the dream image appeared before her, the only experience of Andreas' that was alive in her: the guardian spirit with the white wings that stood far out on the end of the narrow path over the abyss, he, who had wrestled death, who had haunted them.

And the dream face took on the features of her helper, who had created her sick body anew and had given her new youth. Would he be happy with her? Was she worthy of all that, which he had done for her? Only in this moment did she understand that he had put her on a pedestal she was not allowed to leave. And she vowed to herself, that nothing that he had sown in her being should be left lying fallow. Everything in her was supposed to sprout and bud and become fruitful. In her life and in her work, in her art, which as she knew now, had only waited to be awoken into young life.

What had happened to her so, she had confessed. Her confession was done. It lay, a bundle of white, written upon pages, in Copenhagen. Some day her confession would, like a small book of prayer, begin its wandering among people, and she smiled to herself when she thought of that. As the confession of probably the first person who had not been born by a mother's pain, but fully conscious through its own pain.

She had wanted to be a bridge builder.

And she thought of the words of her friend, and she thought that she maybe had built a small bridge over that abyss that otherwise separates man from woman.

She saw the Copenhagen station as in a distant dream, all the companions and friends through those hard and also happy past days and weeks and months up there.

She also saw among them her little student to whom she had been a teacher. A teacher who learned to experience that herself, that she too would be able to paint from now on, would have to paint. And that she was strong enough now to acknowledge that undying legacy that Andreas had left her.

And again she smiled when she thought of how the dark girl's head of her student Ruth stood before a bright background from which the palms of the south stretched up into a blue spring sky: and these palms, this sky was nothing but a little corner of a picture, by Andreas, which she still owned from her dead brother. That he had found during his last Italian summer together with Grete and Feruzzi ......

"Ruth," she had said to her student back then, "that I am now able to show you the first steps into your art, I owe that to Andreas. That is why you should borrow something from possibly Andreas' last painting."

And Lili closed her eyes and was still smiling.

Then the train's pace slowed. She opened her eyes, looked out of the window: Neustadt. Was it possible!

And almost feverish from hurrying she got dressed. The train slowly advanced, crossed the big bridge across the Elbe, and there suddenly was her beautiful, beloved city on the Elbe. And cupolas and towers reflected in the broad river, her river.

Shaken to the point of a trembling heart, she had to hold onto the car window. She clenched her teeth: no, do not cry now, do not cry.

A few minutes later she again sat in the car that drove her to the "Women's Clinic." And she held the little Spanish Madonna like a holy relic in her hand, when she humbly crossed the portal of her heart's home.

Suddenly she hesitated. With wide eyes torn open she looked around herself, and the question trembled within her: why did I come here in the first place? What did I wanted to ask of him?

There she stood in the garden of the "Women's Clinic."

It was no longer raining. The white birches stretched out their light, bright crowns toward the wet, pale sky. A few nurses clad in white greeted her. Young doctors in white coats paced through the garden. Young, pregnant women walked around there: blue crocus smiled within her.

And she stopped and looked at the young women. And now she knew why she had come.

A shape dressed in white stood in the door leading to the private practice, and with a cry of joy Lili threw herself into the motherly arms of the Matron. One nurse after the other came and all were happy at the reunion.

And everything was unchanged.

And Lili took the hand of the Matron. "Walk with me through the whole house. I have to see all the corridors again."

And the Matron walked through all corridors with Lili.

And then she sat down, a little tired, in one of the big armchairs in the long corridor, a greenish shimmer of light fell through its big double doors. Maybe she would have to wait a long time.

And she spoke it like a child's wish: "Wait a long time, wait a long time."

And she sucked in the familiar smell of ether and formalin like a thirsty person. And all the familiar noises from the corridors and hallways and halls and rooms trickled over to her.

And she waited. A happy silence surrounded her entire thinking.

Then the double doors opened. The slim shape in the white coat and with dark hair above the high forehead walked towards her.

Like a sleepwalker she let herself be led into the room of the Professor.

And she listened to the odd, somewhat veiled voice. She had completely forgotten why she had come. And she had forgotten everything that she wanted to ask for. She could only say: "Yes dear Professor."

Suddenly Werner Kreutz turned his gaze on her.

"What do you want to ask me? I can see in you that you are wishing for something. Tell me what it is," he spoke full of kindness.

Then Lili woke from her stupor. She overcame a secret fear that was rising in her, and while looking calmly into his eyes she spoke:

"Tell me, dear Professor, do you believe that I am now strong enough for one last operation? Because I would so much like to become a mother."