The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff Read Free Book Online Page A

cottongrass strings hanging limply next to the stovepipe. He brought it to Einar and cautiously tied it around his waist. Hans touched the nape of Einar’s neck, as if there were a panel of hair he needed to lift aside. “You never played this game?” Hans whispered, his voice hot and creamy on Einar’s ear, his fingers with their gnawed-down nails on Einar’s neck. Hans pulled the apron tighter until Einar had to lift his ribs with an astonished, grateful breath, his lungs filling just as Einar’s father padded into the kitchen, his eyes wide and his mouth puckered into a large O.
    Einar felt the apron drop to his feet.
    “Leave the boy alone!” His father’s walking stick was raised at Hans.
    The door slammed, and the kitchen became shadowy and small. Einar could hear Hans’s boots squish through the mud, heading toward the bog. Einar could hear the wheeze of his father’s breath and then the flat punch of his fist landing on Einar’s cheek. Then, across the bog and the tadpole pools, over the sphagnum field, trailing into the afternoon, came Hans’s voice in a little song:
    There once was an old man who lived on a bog And his pretty little son, and their lazy little dog

CHAPTER Four

    Greta spent her eighteenth birthday on the Princess Dagmar , sulking at its rail. She hadn’t returned to California since the summer of the butcher-wagon incident. The thought of the whitewashed brick house on the hill, with its view of the eagle-nested Arroyo Seco, the thought of the San Gabriel Mountains purpling at sunset, filled her with regret. She knew her mother would want her to take up with the daughters of her friends—with Henrietta, whose family owned the oceanside oil fields down in El Segundo; with Margaret, whose family owned the newspaper; with Dottie Anne, whose family owned the largest ranch in California, a parcel of land south of Los Angeles not much smaller than all of Denmark. Greta’s parents expected her to proceed as if she were one of them, as if she’d never left, as if she should become the young California woman she was born to be: smart, schooled, horse-trained, and silent. There was the Christmas debutante ball at the Valley Hunt Club, where the girls would descend the staircase in white organdy dresses, albino poinsettia leaves pinned to their hair. “How appropriate that we’d return to Pasadena in time for your coming out,” Greta’s mother clucked nearly every day on the Princess Dagmar on the return voyage. “Thank God for the Germans!”
    Greta’s room in the house on the hill had an arched window that overlooked the rear lawn and the roses, their petals fringed brown in the autumn heat. Despite the good light, the room was too small to paint in. After only two days she felt cramped, as if the house, with its three floors of bedrooms and the Japanese maids whose geta sandals clacked up and down the back staircase, were choking her imagination. “Mother, I just have to return to Denmark right away—tomorrow, even! It ’s too confining for me here,” she complained. “Maybe it’s fine for you and Carlisle, but I feel as if I can’t get anything done. I feel as if I’ve forgotten how to paint.”
    “But, Greta, dear, that’s impossible,” said her mother, who was busy converting the stable into a garage. “How could California cramp anyone? And compared to little Denmark!” Greta agreed that it didn’t make sense, but this was how she felt.
    Her father sent over a statistical survey of Denmark published by the Royal Scientific Control Societies. Greta spent a week with it, studying its charts with both self-pity and longing: last year there were 1,467,000 pigs in Denmark, and 726,000 sheep. The total number of hens: 12,000,000. She would read the figures and then turn her head to the arched window. She memorized them, certain she would need them shortly, although for what, she couldn’t say. Again she’d try her mother: “Can’t I go back? I don’t give a hoot about