Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

In Ronton, the capital, he embarked as a sick passenger on a little vessel which was just about to depart on a pleasure trip to a little archipelago far away, in among the Bridge Islands. The ship’s doctor soon had him on his feet again, it only needed a little bloodletting, and protected by the false identity he had acquired temporarily, he thought he’d soon be able to recover the peace of mind he’d found during his stay in Belize. He borrowed a mirror the last day he was alone in the cramped sick bay, stinking of veronal, and examined his face closely in the green light from the porthole. Was it not new, was it not the face of another man, a face which hadn’t existed previously but had been born painfully on the bottom of the long, narrow boat, cruising among the dead animals in the harbour? What? Was it possible after all to become a completely new person, to shake off the odious personality one could no longer bear? How he longed for a miracle of transformation!

In a mood of superior gaiety, he noted how the other passengers observed him with sober indifference, evidently no one suspected anything; the experience of boundless beauty, the sea a well of light and blueness, the horizon a hair-fine thread stretched like elastic by the billowing waves, the yellow, pearl-like balloon of the sky, everything combined to make each individual a solitary and removed for the moment any desire to find out more about them. He lay on the after deck in the shadow of a lifeboat, listening to people talking, an infectious laugh, or the cook prattling with his parrot: but none of this affected him, he was possessed once more by blissful tranquillity. Not even over dinner did he need to return to the past; when they talked at all, they only discussed new sensations provided by another day of their voyage: a new kind offish had leapt up over the surface from the depths beneath, a reddish star had been following them all day and seemed to reflect something in the sea, or a ship had passed uncomfortably close to their own.

They gradually approached their destination; the brave little steamer chugged away merrily, quite unlike the big greyhounds they’d passed at the beginning of the trip which didn’t dare venture so far out to sea, but a little work-horse plodding away gamely, straining its every sinew up the hill.

Then he was lying down one day and could feel when he pressed his hands to his eyes that someone was watching him from the side. He looked up quickly: it was only the English miss, slim, always cool no matter how hot the weather, leaning back against the rail and watching him with a remarkable intensity which stabbed into his own eyes. He met her gaze, although he was already starting to tremble as he realized with acute certainty that all was lost. Eventually, she became unsure of herself as well, looked down, kicked a piece of rope end towards him, then walked slowly over the hot deck towards the bridge.

He closed his eyes again and pretended calmly to untwist the little rope and wrap it hard around his wrists. He lay there all afternoon and the thumping of the engines seeped into his excessively fast pulse and every time the pain came on he would tighten the rope as hard as he could, as if he could strangle what was going to come anyway. At dinner he sat there trembling, waiting, could hardly eat a thing, replying sullenly and monosyllabically to all the sympathetic questions, and it wasn’t until the dessert, as she sat there crumbling a rusk over her cream, that she slowly looked up at him and said quickly, through clenched lips, stiff and austere like the daughter of a colonel in the colonial army she may well have been: ‘You’re the boxer Jimmie Baaz, aren’t you?’

Oh, what could he say to that? He pushed his chair back and jumped to his feet, and tried to deny the claimed acquaintance; but inexorably, it all took possession of him, he was forced down cruelly but slowly by a merciless force which affected all parts of his body, he was doubled up by a slow cramp, not even his throat was spared. He wanted to deny it with all the vocal resources he could muster, but everything except a whimper was brutally restrained; exposed to everyone’s gaze like a dartboard, he slumped back on to his chair.

‘Yes,’ he whispered, trying to eat. ‘Yes, yes.’

All was lost now, once and for all. The voyage had lost all its meaning and the destination had never had any meaning, he was the kind of traveller who sets off on a journey in the secret hope of never arriving, just travelling for the sake of travelling, we all know the type. Now the others had him in an octopus-like embrace, it seemed to him, and there was no point in running away. They were crowding round him all the time on deck now; in their way they respected his incognito, and would sit silently for ages in his company, as if just enjoying his presence, sucking out his silence with their voluptuous lips. All he wanted now in his nocturnal frenzy was to get back to Ronton; he was tortured by the slow beat of the pistons which kept him awake all night, and when he did occasionally doze off, he dreamt he was a tall giant wading through the sea alongside the boat in rubber boots; the boat was always a paddle steamer in his dreams, and he was spinning the paddles round at a tremendous speed with his little finger. Filled with despair, he would then be woken up again by the noise of the engines and the nocturnal seas slapping against his porthole. The last night before the shipwreck, he jumped out of his berth and raced upstairs on to the deck into the cold dawn, just when the moon was speeding up. Everywhere the sea was speckled with white foam, the horizons seemed to be raised above the water and hovering loosely between the sea and the sky before moving in on him, drawn by some unseen hand, and the pressure was already beginning to grow around his head. He flung himself down in his usual place by the lifeboat and his fingers started fiddling absent-mindedly with the little piece of rope the girl had kicked over to him. Without realizing it, he lay there freezing in the wind at first, listening to the orchestra playing; an iron rod was clanging down in the engine room, and the parrot seemed to be fluttering around the cook’s cabin.

Then he suddenly felt the rough rope around his fingers and pulled it slowly over his chest and up towards his chin. He held his right arm stiffly in the air, watching the rope in horror; some gruesome quality he had only just seen in it put him in a frenzy, he rolled over on to his stomach and pounded the deck like a man possessed. The rope coiled itself before his very eyes, no, he couldn’t avoid the rope’s red colour, a red which stabbed him from pulse to pulse with a thousand concealed spikes, and howling inwardly, he was flung backwards like a bullet through space, and with a merciless sucking noise the green wave enveloped him once more. He ran from bows to stern, no one was allowed near him; the English girl sometimes stood in his way, gazing at him pleadingly. The artillery captain with the big boxer dog, which later drowned, was running around the after deck in his clattering boots, playfully setting the dog on him while pretending not to notice they existed.

When the storm broke, they could see it rising suddenly from the western horizon like a giant bird, then setting course for their ship, faster and faster, spreading its pearl-grey wings wider and wider; a leaden cloud hung down from its claws like a stolen lamb as it swooped down over them, howling, apparently intent on hacking them to pieces; just before they were smothered, they could see how one of its wings dropped stone-like towards the water, and as if it had been hit by a shot, blood in the form of a blood-red glow was running down its white feathers and all over them. Then everything was compressed into a pitiful mass under the bird, fears and fantasies, happiness, pain, malice and all the other special things; they huddled together in the shuddering lounge as the panelling bulged, and yelled at each other confidential things they would normally only be able to whisper while the captain’s boxer and Madame’s senile little boy lay terrified in a crumpled heap at the top of a staircase, trembling together. Only Jimmie, filled with a disgust which drowned everything else, was on his own, rolling about on the floor of his cabin.