Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Stupefied, but still inspired by all that had happened to him, he just lay there, clutching the box tightly to him and watching the dead bird bobbing up and down over towards the headland. If he turned over, he could see the big, silent flock of birds clinging high up on the cliffs, motionless, and the smoke from the little camp on the other side of the island, spiralling devoutly heavenwards; he was disturbed to note how it gradually changed direction and started wafting right across the island in a gigantic arc, straight towards him; was that someone running up there in the dry grass, maybe whoever it was who had killed the iguana, or perhaps it was just some animal trying to scare him? Was someone standing up there now in that narrow exit, guarded by the birds, staring at him frenziedly? It would be very easy to loosen a little stone and throw it down at him. Scared in advance, uncertain in advance, already rocked back on his pedestal, he huddled in the tiny shadow of the box: such a big man and such a little shadow. The dialogue between Tim and the sea, so long prepared for, could begin at last:

‘So, you’ve found something good, have you?’

‘Yes, I saw this box the very first day. It was in exactly the same place as it is now, only a bit closer to the sea. I noticed a fish jumping out of the water just behind it.’

‘But you didn’t climb down and fetch it then, did you?’

‘No, I wasn’t hungry then, I thought like everybody else that our rescuers were just round the corner. We’d got plenty of meat come to that, and pineapples, and biscuits, and somebody thought they’d seen hares in the undergrowth near the camp. Somebody suggested we could go fishing and get by in that way.’

‘You didn’t tell anybody you’d seen a box of provisions on the beach, did you?’

‘No. Nobody was hungry, but even so the mood was edgy and I thought my discovery would only make everything even worse. They might start arguing about how to divide the spoils, for instance, especially as somebody had already suggested the women and the injured man should be on reduced rations.’

‘Ah, so you kept it quiet out of consideration for the others, not for yourself. It didn’t occur to you that you’d pretty soon start running short of food, especially when the meat started stinking and had to be buried. You weren’t thinking of keeping the box for your own use later on? You weren’t reckoning quite ruthlessly on getting to the point where your own hunger would crave everything you could lay your hands on?’

‘No, a hungry man doesn’t rationalize things, a hungry man is passionate and ruthless, a hungry man has to do anything he can in order to satisfy his hunger, and everything else goes by the board. Being considerate is just something you do when you’re mixing with people who aren’t hungry.’

‘But you weren’t hungry when you first saw the box. And you weren’t all that hungry when you started spreading the rumour about hares being seen in the undergrowth — it was you who started that one — and you weren’t hungry even when you started suggesting to the others that they could catch fish, although you knew full well it wasn’t possible. Why did you spread rumours you knew full well weren’t true? Was it to distract them from the possibility of maybe finding things washed up on the beach? Or were you just being nice and preventing them from getting over-excited?’

‘What consideration do I owe to these people who call themselves my comrades? I’ve saved several of them — isn’t that enough? What consideration have they shown me, what comradeship, what warmth, what respect, what faith? All the time they’ve made it clear that I’m the servant and they’re the masters, and what does a slave owe his master apart from actually serving him?’

‘Yet again a pitiful failure to face the truth. What is comradeship but living together in the same circumstances? If the provision merchant loses all he owns and comes to beg a share of your wretched lot, do you send him packing like a stranger, or do you try and win him round instead, because you know you two have the most fundamental things in common: hunger which must be satisfied, and the affront of need which must be washed away?’

‘Didn’t I do everything I could to win them round? I did everything they asked me to do, opened those boxes, fed the injured, kept that fire going, went without sleep, all for their sake.’

‘Since when has it been so praiseworthy to have a slave mentality? You didn’t need to obey once all the symbols of power had been shipwrecked, but you kept on doing so all the same. What kind of mysterious quality made you click your heels and bow your head as soon as these people, who are just as ragged and naked as you are, gave you an order? You were too cowardly to see whether you could act in the same way yourself, whether you could say to the captain: fetch me a branch, I want to warm myself by the fire. No, you found another way round it all; while you were still well-fed you reckoned in cold blood that a time would come eventually when your hunger would be greater than anybody else’s. Then you thought: soon I’ll be hungry, I’ll be wild and ruthless, that’s when I’ll rebel against these terrorists, not openly, but in a roundabout way. You sat there coolly and worked out how you could take advantage of your state of intoxication, that was what was so contemptible. Just how much is a man’s lust for rebellion worth if it stays in hiding when he has plenty to eat? Now you’re lying here beside your box, your big secret, and you think you’re rebelling; but all you’re managing to do is to run away from your rebellion, you’re hiding away like a coward behind the most noble of pretexts.

‘Ah well, it wasn’t the first time; it’s something you’re used to, my friend. Fair enough, William was bleeding something awful when the police had finished with him on the strike-breaker boat’s foredeck, once it had become known he was the one trying to organize the underground campaign on behalf of the strikers. Fair enough, it’s quite understandable: you had no desire to bleed like that. Your liver, kidneys, spleen, lungs — they’re all pretty sensitive organs, and if you get thoroughly beaten up like that any one of then could easily burst. And what’s more, it’s understandable that you wanted to avoid other kinds of unpleasantness, we all know how vulnerable some people’s nerves and some people’s marriages are. Most of all: you were afraid all kinds of injustice would become unavoidable if you faced the consequences of organizing the disturbances. No doubt there are problem children and orphans even among the ones who were regarded as oppressors. On those grounds alone there was no obvious duty to rebel like you’d heard somebody going on about, despite the fact that the old lady who’d been sleeping in the stairway the last four nights died coughing and obviously in great pain in a loony-bin bed a week or two later.

‘Come on now, there were probably all kinds of things you could have done but didn’t, and now it’s too late. You can’t stir up trouble when you’re in among comrades, that’s not rebellion any longer, it’s treachery.’

‘Then all I ask is: let me live a little bit longer. I can drop all my excuses, I can drop all my masks; look, I’m standing here naked, indecently naked before myself, and I’m begging myself: let me live a little bit longer. I do so want to breathe, I do so want to smell the sea as it breaks again and again over the reef till it goes down on its knees and begs for mercy, and I’m so scared my body will start observing itself again, that my eye will stare at my naked eye and hence won’t be able to see a thing. I want to live a little bit longer, no matter how wretched a state I’m in.’