Beneath the Earth by John Boyne Read Free Book Online

more, he had no more to give, and then he gave some more. He collapsed under the pain of it, he fought out the other side of it. He realized that he was made of strong stuff, that he was his father’s son. He reached the end, he passed out, he was applauded, he took another train to Southampton where he boarded a boat for France and the uncertainty that lay ahead.
    He lay in his bunk the night before the first battle began and thought of that night when he was just a boy and a brick had come through the parlour window and life as he knew it began to change.
    â€˜What’s your name?’ asked the boy in the bed next to his.
    â€˜Ã‰mile,’ said Émile.
    â€˜You’re French?’
    â€˜My mother is. My father was English. He died in the Great War.’
    â€˜And you?’
    Ã‰mile hesitated. It still came down to this end, didn’t it? Who you were, where you came from, how you defined yourself. The country you called home.
    â€˜I’m Irish,’ he said, before rolling over and trying to find some sleep.

The Schleinermetzenmann

    I never had a chance to observe Arthur in his public role until a few days before my mother’s funeral. We grew up next door to each other, the closest of friends throughout our younger years, but drifted apart in adulthood for all the usual reasons. Almost a decade earlier, with my nascent and much-longed-for career already smothered in its cradle like a mewling infant, I decided to spend a summer travelling and somehow lost track of time, building a new life far away from anyone who knew me. Arthur, in fact, came to the airport to see me off and just as I was about to make my way through the security gates he asked whether I would mind if he called Becky, a girl I had briefly been dating earlier that year, and invited her out for a drink. ‘She has amazing tits,’ he told me, which was true, although I had got no closer to seeing them in their exposed state than he had for she subscribed to some outdated and frankly nonsensical ideas regarding maintaining her virginity until her wedding night.
    â€˜Do whatever you like,’ I told him, thinking this was a disappointing way for him to say goodbye to his oldest friend. ‘I don’t care.’
    We seemed to lose track of each other after that and when I eventually dug out his email address and wrote to tell him that my mother had died, he wrote back almost immediately, offering condolences while inviting me to a reading he was giving at a city-centre bookshop the following day, to be followed, he said, by an evening of alcohol-fuelled reminiscing.
    I had no great desire to see him in front of an audience but nevertheless I went along and was surprised to see that he’d become a little bit famous, or as famous as a novelist can get anyway, for a sizeable crowd had gathered to hear him tell us all how wonderful he was.
    â€˜Before writing this novel,’ he said, putting both hands to his face and dragging them slowly across the skin, as if his fingers might offer an early-evening exfoliant, ‘I had a serious case of what our German friends call …’ He paused for a moment and looked around the room. ‘Are there any Germans here?’ he asked, and if there were, no one spoke up. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I had a serious case of what our German friends call
kästellfrügenschänge
, which literally means the sensation a man feels when he is standing on a precipice, usually but not necessarily naked, preparing to jump to his death but being held back by a feeling that he might yet be of some use to the world.’ He smiled gently and shook his head as if he could not quite believe that he had ever doubted his own genius. ‘But when the words came?’ He wagged his finger at us as if we were unruly children. ‘No more
kästellfrügenschänge
.’
    The audience, morons all, lapped it up. I could see two university-aged girls, pretty if