Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But a little lizard crawled out of the massive wall and, as insignificant as a beetle, it looked at first as if it might soon disappear into one of the thousands of cracks; but look: it started growing, its tail grew longer, was drawn up towards the spire, kept on spreading out sideways until its cold shell covered the whole wall. Its nasty, thin little head got closer and closer to the ground, and she slowly slumped forward, transfixed in a standing position down below, with her hands reaching up towards the spire atop the vanished tower. She wanted to yell out: gobble me up, you monster; but in her memory-dream, no words crossed her lips.

Then she was standing in Paul’s room again, but this time she had her back turned defiantly towards the window; her back was completely cured, and light was dripping in through the Venetian blinds and clinking down on to the carpet. She knew he was watching her with every segment of his eyeballs, sucking her in, although he seemed to be lying there, half turned towards the wall and stroking the cruel tip of the bayonet.

‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she said, hooking her gaze on to that of somebody else in the far distance so as not to fall, ‘I’m going to have a baby with a priest.’

He hadn’t turned round to face her, he was still lying in the same position; but she could feel in her skin, which suddenly became hot, how he was thrusting himself upon her with his eyes, those eyes which were not crippled: they could scratch and bite, they could rip and claw, and they could shadow you, sharply and ruthlessly; wherever you were in the world.

Now the house was closed like a besieged fortress, but it was the house itself which was besieged; its walls seemed to be closing inwards bit by bit, the rooms became more cramped because the ceiling was also sinking and the floor rising, it became hard to breathe, the only way was to lie down with your chest as compressed as possible and gasp for air and love, like a beached fish.

And then there was the iguana business.

She was standing in Paul’s room again, no, not standing: she was creeping, creeping painfully slowly over the fluffy carpet between his bed and the window, and the air was more stifling than ever and the Venetian blinds had all been repaired. She couldn’t stand up, as the pressure of hatred and longing, sorrow, despair, cruelty that permeated the house immediately knocked you to the floor if you tried to stand up and bear it on your trembling shoulders. His eyes held his hands on the back of her neck, but she couldn’t meet their gaze for they were always looking elsewhere, apparently unconcerned about her but always following her around the house, wherever she went. His voice, which had been shrill and old-mannish for so long, had acquired an apparently evasive tone, gentle, warm, the timbre of a melancholy cello. But in that tone was a trace of acerbity which called forth a special sort of despair in order to comprehend it properly, a particular posture; you could only appreciate properly its warm cruelty on all fours with your hips sagging and your forehead buried deep in the grass of the carpet; it drove wedges into you which stayed, stayed there and swelled up.

‘Can you feel the iguana,’ he whispered, ‘can you feel the iguana growing inside your body? Soon its skin will harden, its long tail will get even longer, its eyes will start protruding and there’ll be no eyelids; its stiff, callous stare will take root inside you, eating you away. Can you see its skull forming? Soon it will be as long as it’s going to be, its snout will have no warm lips, but it will press hard and cold against your membranes, trying to force its way out.’

Oh, she lay there on the floor of Paul’s dark room for days on end, panting, on the fluffy mat between his bed and the window, and felt the iguana growing inside her, felt its skin hardening, its long tail growing even longer, its lidless eyes protruding more and more, its stare stiff and callous inside her, eating her away. She felt its skull forming, growing as big as it was going to be, and its snout devoid of warm lips pressed hard against her membranes, trying to force its way out.

‘The iguana,’ she screamed after the birth, ‘I don’t want to see it, spare me that.’ They brought the baby in to her, held her down and yelled into her ear that the baby was normal, that the baby looked like all other babies, that it didn’t have the skin of an iguana, nor could it only crawl on its belly. But she refused to believe it. Sometimes the door opened suddenly and somebody held up a newly born baby to the light.

‘It’s not mine,’ she would shout. ‘You’ve swapped it for somebody else’s. Mine’s an iguana.’

They were afraid she might do the child an injury if they gave it to her, so they let her be alone in her room. All she could remember clearly from that time was that suddenly there was a smell of birch leaves, she could hear heavy carts clattering up the street, the sun was more fierce and dazzling than ever before, and without her realizing it, she was lifted into summer. It was so quiet in the house, but sometimes there was the sound of baking trays falling down in the kitchen and Claire would come up the stairs, heavier and more out of breath for every day that passed. But one afternoon, she had a dream which revealed to her that this silence contained something unknown, it was like a space surrounding a sound she must have been aware of for some time, but the film around it had only burst in her dream. There was a child crying somewhere in the house, shrill and hungry, complaining, then gradually falling asleep; she was lifted straight up into summer as if on a wave, delivered at last, restored to health at last, and she let the light and warmth embrace her. Her pain disappeared and she was at peace once more, the swell from her bad dreams rolled over the horizon and disappeared. Good God, she thought, iguanas don’t scream.

Even so, she was still a little afraid when they wheeled in the pram with the sleeping child, and she bent slowly over it ready to close her eyes in a flash and sink back once more into her agony. But the child lay there peacefully, its lips were thin, thin, and the blanket covering it heaved gently from its steady breathing; it was not a pretty child, it was too pale and its forehead was depressed in an unusual way, but it was certainly not an iguana.

And so her life slowly got under way once more. She didn’t go to Paul’s room any more. They could often hear him thumping away on his headboard until the whole house shook; he’d recovered his old-mannish voice and pestered the black serving girl who was looking after him now with threats and invectives until one day she ran screaming out of his room and out of the house, explaining she was terrified when the old man tried to kill her with the bayonet.

The boy grew and grew, she hardly left him alone for a single moment, as if she were afraid something might happen to him, a rapid, brutal transition which would overturn her dreams and secret hopes in a flash. She had to be near him all the time, and when he’d gone to sleep in the evenings and she could hear Paul thumping away upstairs in his room, she would bend over him in the light from a table lamp and scrutinize every line, every new shadow and wrinkle in his face; but precisely because she was constantly examining him for fear of some sudden change, she failed to notice the gradual hardening of his features which started to take place when he was two. She didn’t see how his lips gradually stiffened, how his skin grew taut around his jaw and his eyes slowly turned to ice in their sockets, how his eyelids acquired a sharp edge and seemed to be about to split.

Then she fell ill and lay in her room for several days, delirious; everything disappeared behind a green curtain, she tore frenziedly at its shiny folds, behind which so many voices were laughing, warning, threatening and commanding; but in vain. An alarming shadow, long forgotten, was dancing over the curtain; at first she couldn’t make out its shape because of the shadow’s size, but then she drew back in terror and fell down through years of horror. Shaking, half out of her mind with despair, she jumped up in the middle of the night, and raced through all the rooms until she came to the boy; the old nanny woke up and tried to prevent her, but she’d already seen it all: the little shrunken face of an old man, finished with life almost before it had started living, marked by all kinds of experiences, already tired of everything before it had experienced anything. With an agonized scream which woke the child up, she ripped back the covers and stared at the tiny, deformed body and suddenly realized the awful truth: the newly awakened child didn’t cry, its cold eyes were unaffected by anything that happened, and nothing would ever get through to it; the cold breath of an iguana soul wafted up towards her, and sent her screaming from the room.