The Danish Girl: A Novel by David Ebershoff

Author:David Ebershoff [Ebershoff, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, General, Historical, Fiction, Erotica, Social Science, Biographical fiction, Sagas, Marriage, Gay, Sex change, Elbe; Lili, Painters, Gay Studies
ISBN: 9780140298482
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2001-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER Seventeen

The next day, the girl behind the bureau located more books for Einar. Books called The Sexes; The Normal and Abnormal Man; A Scientific Study of Sexual Immorality; and Die sexuelle Krise, published in Dresden twenty years earlier. Most were about theories of gender development based on hypothesis and casual experimentation on laboratory rats. In one Einar read about a man, a Bavarian aristocrat, who was born with both a penis and a vagina. There was something about his plight—the confusion as a child, the parental abandonment, his hopeless hunt for a place in the world—that made Einar close his eyes and think, Yes, I know. There was a chapter on the myth of Hermes and Aphrodite. The book explained sexual pathology, and something called sexual interme diacy. Somehow Einar knew he was reading about himself. He recognized the duality, the lack of complete identification with either sex. He read about the Bavarian, and a dull distant pang lay at rest in Einar’s chest.

Some of the books were old, from the last century, dust on their spines. Their pages turned with such a brisk crinkling noise that Einar feared the students would look up from their work on the long reading table and, from the twist of fear and relief in Einar’s face, learn who he really was.

Anne-Marie would place the books in front of Einar in a little tilted stand that held them at an angle. She lent him a string of lead beads wrapped in felt that held the page open while Einar copied sentences into his pewter-backed notebook.

The tables were wide and nicked, and they made Einar think of the worktables the Copenhagen fisherwomen used when chopping chub heads at the Gammel Strand fish market. In front of Einar, there was enough room on the table to fan out several books around him, and with their sand-colored pages open he began to think of them as his little shoal of protection. And that was how it felt to read them, during those mornings when he would slip out of the apartment: as if each sentence about the male and female would protect Einar over the next year, when everything, as he had promised himself, would change.

He eventually read enough to become convinced that he too possessed the female organs. Buried in the cavity of his body were Lili’s organs, the bloody packets and folds of flesh that made her who she was. At first it was hard to believe, but then the notion of it—that this wasn’t a mental problem, but a physical one—made more and more sense to him. He imagined a uterus shoved up behind his testicles. He imagined breasts somehow trapped by his ribcage.

Einar spent a week in the reading room, and there was a point each day when he would become so overwhelmed by what he was discovering that he ’d rest his head on his arms and softly cry.

If he nodded off, Anne-Marie, with her small white hand, would nudge Einar back to work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.