Beneath the Earth by John Boyne Read Free Book Online Page A

you like that sort of thing, doing everything they could to make eye contact with him. And I’m sure the boy next to me emitted a faintly erotic sigh at my old friend’s supposed bilingualism. For my part, I found it hard not to laugh out loud, for I had spent most of the last few years living in a town called Tittmoning on the German-Austrian border and had become fluent in the language. (I work on a large dairy farm where, in fact, I have my own brand of local celebrity as the
kuhliebhabermann
– which literally means a man who has a suspiciously close emotional relationship to cattle – a nickname I acquired for no other reason than the fact that I try to treat all my cows, especially the good-looking ones, with atypical kindness before sending them off to the slaughterhouse in Burghausen to be stunned by electrical currents and have their throats slit.) And I can promise you that
kästellfrügenschänge
is not a real word. It’s just a jumble of sounds placed next to each other that have a faintly Germanic ring to them.
    My sighing neighbour, trembling before greatness, raised his hand.
    â€˜A question,’ said Arthur, pointing towards the boy, whose face immediately turned fire-engine red.
    â€˜Please, sir,’ he whispered, like an older, ganglier, gayer version of Oliver Twist. ‘Please, sir, what advice would you give to young writers?’
    Arthur tapped his upper lip with his index finger as he considered this. I rolled my eyes; this could hardly be the first time he’d been asked such an obvious question. Surely he had a stock answer tucked away somewhere.
    â€˜Have you ever visited the southern of the two Brelitzen Islands?’ he said finally, after much thought.
    â€˜No,’ said the boy, shaking his head.
    â€˜The northern one perhaps?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜What about the Cassandra Strait, that spiteful stimulant of cerulean that separates the two?’
    â€˜I’ve never been anywhere,’ said the boy, becoming noticeably aroused now by such close attention. ‘Except to EuroDisney once with my uncle Mark when I was twelve.’
    â€˜The Brelitzen Islands,’ said Arthur, smiling. ‘Go to the Brelitzen Islands. You’ll know why when you get there.’
    I felt myself beginning to grow angry. I’m not an expert on world geography by any means but I had never heard of the Brelitzen Islands and doubted their existence. Still, I said nothing. God forbid that I should piss all over the magic.
    â€˜Creating art,’ declared Arthur a moment later, apropos of nothing, while holding his wretched novel in the air, ‘reminds me of why I look forward to death so much. At the heart of our mortality lies what the ShÄ«n-du monks on Mount Hejiji call
shrān-kao
.’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m pronouncing that wrong, amn’t I? It’s
shrān-kaoj
, I think. With a silent “j” at the end?’
    He looked around but no one said anything. They were staring at him like he was the love child of the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey. An old lady, close to tears at such life-changing wisdom, blew her nose loudly, sounding like a steam engine about to depart a platform in
The Railway Children
.
    â€˜Yes, I think that’s it.
Shrān-kaoj
. Forgive me, Gampopo!’
    Both pronunciations had sounded exactly the same to me and they were, I’m sure, equally meaningless. I also doubted the existence of ShÄ«n-du monks or of Mount Hejiji itself, which, for what it’s worth, he pronounced
He-ki-ki
.
    â€˜But life,’ he added, banging his index finger sharply against the dust jacket, which showed a young boy walking with his back to the reader along a road towards a moonlit horizon. ‘Life is art and art is pain and pain is what makes us know that we are alive.’ He held the book aloft now and waved it at us with all the zeal of John Knox brandishing the Book of