The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff Read Free Book Online

call the match objectively, although he felt unprepared to do anything but help Hans win. And so Einar sat on the rock calling the points—“Forty-love for Hans . . . An ace for Hans”—as Hans and his brother glided over the rye grass chasing the ball, their cheerfully pink penises flopping around like schnauzer tails, causing Einar to heat up under the parasol until Hans’s match point. Then the three boys tow eled off, and Hans’s bare warm arm fell across Einar’s back.
    Hans had a paper-and-balsa kite, brought back from Berlin by the baroness. It was shaped like a submarine, and Hans loved to set it sailing up into the sky. He’d lie in the lucerne grass and watch the kite floating above the bog, the spool of string clamped between his knees. “The Kaiser has a kite just like this one,” he ’d say, blades of grass between his lips. He tried to teach Einar to get it aloft, but Einar was never capable of finding the right current of air. Over and over the rice-paper kite would rush up in a column of breeze and then crash to the ground; and each time Einar would watch Hans wince as the kite returned to earth. The boys would rush over to the kite, which would be lying upside down. Einar would say, “I don’t know what happened, Hans. I’m so sorry, Hans.” Hans would pick up the kite and shake off the dandelions and say, “Good as new.” But Einar could never learn to fly the kite; and so one day, when the boys were sprawled on their backs in the lucerne grass, Hans said, “Here. You steer.” He set the spool of string between Einar’s knees and then resettled himself in the field. Einar could feel the foxholes beneath him. Each time the kite pulled on the string the spool would rotate, and Einar’s back would arch up. “That’s right,” Hans said. “Guide her with your knees.” And Einar got more and more used to the spinning spool, and the kite dipping and rising with the wrens. 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 center of the bog, which swallowed it as if it were as heavy as a stone.
    “Hans,” Einar said.
    “It’s okay,” Hans said, his voice a stunned whisper. “Just don’t tell my mother.”
    The summer before Einar’s father died, Hans and Einar were playing in Einar’s grandmother’s sphagnum fields, the mud swishing through their boots. It was warm, and they had been in the fields most of the morning, and suddenly Hans touched Einar’s wrist and said, “Einar, dear, what’s for dinner?” It was about noon, and Hans knew no one was in the farmhouse except Einar’s father, who was asleep upright in his bed.
    Hans had begun to grow by then. He was fifteen, and his body was filling out to match the size of his head. A fin of an Adam’s apple had appeared in his throat, and he was now much taller than Einar, who at thirteen still hadn’t budged in height. Hans nudged Einar toward the farmhouse. In the kitchen Hans sat at the head of the table and tucked a napkin into his collar. Einar had never before cooked a meal, and he stood blankly at the stove. Hans quietly said, “Light a fire. Boil some water. Drop in a few stone potatoes and a mutton joint.” Then, more vaguely, his gravelly voice suddenly smooth: “Einar. Let’s pretend.”
    Hans found Einar’s grandmother’s apron with the