Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But you haven’t started falling yet, and the glass gets thicker and thicker, as if you were drifting further and further away from your sorrow, and you feel furious but helpless as the distance between you and your sorrow grows, a dull despair fills you in large, thick lumps. But then you find something in time or space which helps to bring you down again, an open door through which you can fall, and on a purely physical level it comes as a relief after all the hard tension you’ve been through. Something gives way inside you, tears come to your eyes and lie there like radiators until they dissolve. Then one thing leads to another in an unending chain, and soon there’s nothing more you can see, hear or feel which isn’t directly connected with the object of your sorrow, and every time something new emerges, there’s an explosion inside you, violent at first, giving rise to tears and a strange soporific pain which starts in your diaphragm and then moves upwards, the explosions grow weaker, but there is no pause. Now you’re sobbing quietly and constantly and copiously, you gave up drying your tears ages ago, but your sobbing gives you a strangely fresh and pure feeling in your nose, as if you’d been sucking certain throat tablets.

Time passes, and gradually, everything closes around your sorrow like a flower closing for the night; it’s not like being encased in armour, just a cool, flower-like envelope through which you can hear it pulsating, you’re still partaking of it, it’s alive and well inside you and you can moisten your lips with it whenever you wish, like sipping from a fresh, clear stream; but even now you can choose yourself, to some extent, exactly when you want to associate with it. The danger, however, is that you leave it in peace for too long: fresh sorrow has to be tended assiduously, taken out occasionally like the dearest of treasures and polished like a mirror, or else it will all too soon acquire that hard shell, and the armour plating becomes a fact, something which cannot be prevented in the long run, of course.

And once the armour plating is there, you’re in a way back where you started from, once again there’s this distance in time and space, but now it feels more hopeless than it used to do because you know there’s nothing to expect. Instead of the dull, insistent despair which filled every cavity within you the first time, a horrible period of apathy now takes over, of restless waiting, waiting for nothing to happen. Nothing matters any more, everything round about you takes on a hardness, you want to take hold of something, but all you can grasp is dead, you want to look but your gaze is rejected by the hardness of the object, you want to make love but you realize you can’t, for you yourself are also encased in the same hard film, all your feelings seem to have frozen stiff, you’re dried up and shrivelled, and not even your own unbearable loneliness can make you tremble.

Of course, not even this lasts for ever, at first you notice little currents working away industriously under the armour and under the ice, and one day it all breaks apart and for one last time you are reunited with your sorrow. But you don’t feel numb this time, your body doesn’t partake as heavy-handedly as it did before, it’s as if your muscles, your blood vessels and your joints which used to become tense with sorrow can no longer manage it. Everything shifts now to the level of memory, you keep returning over and over again to the site of the fire, search through the devastated ruins and find twisted bits of a life lying coiled up like snakes under soot and girders. Now your memory drags these remnants like a crowbar, a useful yoke or a copper bucket out into the street, into its merciless cold light, and identifies them slowly and in a state of quiet agony, also called melancholy, under a street lamp. On the anvil of memory, with the aid of memory’s hammer and tongs, you beat these bits and pieces until they’re straight, then meticulously reconstruct their position in time and space and emotions, and this ruin is inexhaustible, this site devastated by fire conceals under the ashes things you’d thought lost long ago, hands not yet quite dead reach out towards you from the bonfires, and everywhere are those foreheads whose white domes can never be completely covered by charcoal and ashes.

These periods of sorrow usually take months, even years to pass through, but Madame endures all of them during the brief sunset, the shock, the first painful surprise, the fateful tension, the fall, the dissolution and the temporary hardening, and then this chase through memory which, to the accompaniment of horses’ hooves, led her into the deepest recesses of solitude.

Now the sun was sinking so very, painfully slowly, as if for the last time; a red spring seemed to gush forth from under the sea, and the gigantic grey clouds, spurting upwards as if from a kettle behind a spiky headland crowned by gigantic fingers, climbed vertically upwards like factory chimneys, gradually turning brick-red, into a sky where pink shadows were still darting around, uncertain of what to do next. And all those birds, creeping out of the ship’s innards one by one, and waddling over the sloping deck before taking off. They were flying unusually high, and for a while circled around the column of smoke rising tirelessly from the beach. Everything was so silent, the rattling of the iguanas had ceased, and the breezes were no longer penetrating Tim Solider’s jungle. There was a moment when life seemed to shrink, and the pulse of time, already beating weakly enough in this island environment, seemed to have stopped altogether; now anything could happen, everything could be compressed and drawn-out events foreshortened as in a drama, and everything could be experienced in the time it took to draw breath.

Madame had had a lot of men, but none of them was quite like him. Several of them had racing cars and drove them slowly along the boulevards: she still hadn’t seen any of them driving fast, and soon saw through their petty wiles. They loved to give the impression of something they called ‘latent power’. Just as the long, throbbing bonnets of their cars were supposed to suggest speeds of a hundred miles an hour, they wanted women to caress their leather jackets and feel them bristling with enormous power which they were only able to hold back with the greatest difficulty. They wore long leather gloves with thick fingers, and would gesture eagerly at the steering wheel during intimate conversations, as if involved in a continual boxing match. But bereft of their gloves and leather jackets and riding breeches with green bindings, they were insecure and hesitant, almost shy in fact. How touching it was to keep hearing them whisper when they’d stopped the car among the willows in some luxuriant park, and embraced you, roughly and brutally, with hands that had only too reluctantly let go of the steering wheel and gear lever, preoccupied despite their apparent frenzy, and with bodies which, even when they seemed brimming over with latent power and at the most tender of moments, longed to feel the throbbing of the engine: I expect I’m your first, aren’t I; or when they discover you’re already married: I expect I’m the first man you’ve been unfaithful with.

Oh yes, she thought she knew these vain, ridiculous people who claimed to despise passion and affection, because they themselves were too cowardly to dare to feel anything but frigidity. Even so, they could be passionate enough when they thought no one was looking, and the warmth they were too cowardly to show their women they squandered on the gleaming cylinders of their racing cars. You sometimes caught them alone in their cars with an expression in their eyes and around their lips which would have been natural and desirable when they were together with a woman, but was perverse precisely because they were alone. Then they would sit up with a start, they would be terrified and look as guilty as if you’d caught them in a compromising situation with their friend’s wife.