Today was to have been Anna Fonsmark, mezzo-soprano from the Royal Danish Opera. Knudsen, member of the shipbuilding firm Burmeister and Wain. Christian Dahlgaard, furrier to the king. Glückstadt, the financier behind the Copenhagen Free Harbor. Often to full scale, of mildly important people with pink lips and shine in the grain of their hair. He painted the land and the sea-small rectangles lit by June's angled light, or dimmed by the dull January sun. In this way as well Einar was different from his wife. 'I'll be out in a minute,' said Greta, younger than her husband and handsome with a wide flat face. To swallow a man like that, to fold over like batter his sinking growl. It was how Einar knew just how dark to mix his paints: gray enough Painted the gray curl of each wave, he imagined the sailor drowning, a desperate hand raised, his potato-vodka voice still calling his wife a port whore. The neighbor below was a sailor, a man with a bullet-shaped head who cursed his wife. Theīlack water was white-capped and cruel, the grave of hundreds of fishermen returning to Copenhagen with their salted catch.

They were in their apartment in the Widow House, Einar, small and not yet thirty-five, painting from memory a winter scene of the Kattegat Sea. The day was cool, the chill blowing in from the Baltic. 'Of course,' Einar said, his eyes on the canvas. 'Just help me with something for a little bit?' 'Do me a small favor?' Greta called from the bedroom that first afternoon.

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff