Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

The next time it’s night, a fire’s burning close by and she’s covered by warm cloth; someone is lying beside her and seems to be asleep. Someone else is walking towards her across the sand. He stops, bends down over her and pushes food into her mouth, gives her something to drink; she swallows eagerly and licks her benefactor’s hand when he’s finished.

And then all those dawns, with the thudding of the iguanas piercing all over her body, those iguana mornings, days, sunsets, dusks, evenings and nights. Over and over again, she found herself contracting like a muscle, and would sit motionless, waiting, by the fire, unable to feel anything, think anything, say anything. She wanted to mourn the dead boy, but could only grope around the glass roof of her apathy without finding the way in to her sorrow. She wanted to regret what had happened, but something inside her was not functioning; she was numb and dumb. Well, what could she do about it?

Then she killed the iguana. That day at sunset, watched by all the other castaways, she wandered up the cliff path towards the plateau, found the stone lying in the grass; the iguana emerged from the gloom, was overturned and crushed. Why did she do it, why did she kill the iguana? Well, in the first place, she had no idea. It wasn’t a plan worked out long in advance and carried out suddenly and brutally; when she set out up the cliff path, she wasn’t clear about anything, but something was nagging her in the back of her mind, sharp and stimulating — but what?

But when she was led down from the scene on the captain’s arm, she could feel this new mellowness inside her, this relaxed feeling of liberation from what had gone before. I must know what it feels like to kill an iguana, she thought, I must know that so I can say: I’ve never done it before, I’ve never turned a reptile over on its back and found the vulnerable spot on its belly to hit with a stone. In that case, the boy was not an iguana, in that case he was a human being in spite of everything; that’s not what it felt like when I punched him, it was much cleaner, just that brief soreness in my knuckles and then it was all over.

Her sorrow closed in on her, that sweet sorrow which absorbs everything, consumes everything with the same voracious lust — evil intents and impudent desires, love and hatred; how marvellous it is just to let oneself sink down and hope to re-emerge whole again when everything is done, when regret has been satisfied and angst has faded away. But even sorrow is treacherous, divers are at work in its depths and thrust their long spades into one’s mud; the memories one has allowed to gush forth like tears, innocent and with no apparent relevance, are suddenly linked to form a chain as steadfast as iron, and nothing can be done about its ruthless, stifling logic. The staircase rising steeply from the saloon to the deck keeps coming back, the handrails on each side with large, brass knobs at top and bottom, and its iron-shod steps resounding to the flurry of footsteps. The dog is always bounding up and down the staircase by the captain’s side, and the boy is sitting in its shadow; the boy is always just sitting there, his chin resting on his hands, oblivious of the sea: the swordfish have nothing to say to him. Then the lamps start swaying in the storm, swinging wildly on their hooks, and suddenly there’s a wide crack in the saloon wall, and water comes pouring in. How could she stay there to the very end, although the water level was rising rapidly and the list was making it more and more difficult to force one’s way to the staircase? She stood there on the first step with water almost up to her knees, and the boy came wading towards her, and tried to get past her; she let him get five steps up before running past him, and then that punch which sent him hurtling backwards into the water below, and it was all over so quickly, she hardly realized what was happening herself. But suddenly the staircase is empty and long and steep and silent; the image of the empty staircase with water rising swiftly up it pursues her deep down into her sorrow, and then she understands that something has to happen to her on account of that empty staircase. Why did she hit him, why did she let him die? If it really was the iguana, the detested iguana, can she mourn now, can she let herself sink down into voluptuousness? But if she has killed the one she is mourning, the knife edge must be turned upon her; then it was a beloved human being who fell down that staircase, killed by her own hand.

She opens her eyes now and sees the horizon quivering over where the sun has set, with just a few tardy streaks glinting red over the sea and in the English girl’s hair. Then she feels that despair rising inside her like a pillar, and to prevent herself from being split open, so that her own head is not pierced, she stands up and rushes up the cliff path, everyone watching her as usual, and hastens through the grass where the light of sunset is still gleaming like dew on a few blades. Then she sees the lizard lying there, apparently asleep or making its painfully slow way to somewhere or other. Then she sinks to her knees and, with her ulcered lips, kisses the iguana’s slowly softening skin, the old hypocrite.

When twilight fell, Boy Larus, the airman, liked to stand on the highest cliff; only the breeze penetrated that far, and the spot was concealed by undergrowth which was just turning deep blue as silence engulfed one in wave after massive wave. The wound in his groin was getting worse every day, he could feel a nagging shooting pain all the time, as if there were two small animals with sharp teeth, each one gnawing away at one of his testicles and working its way further and further in by the hour. He ran his hand carefully over the wounds, but the sensitivity of his fingers which had always embarrassed him, and yet of which he was quite proud in private, had been spoilt by the grinding sand, the hard rocks and the corrosive sea-water; all he could feel were a few lifeless calluses, and that couldn’t be right. When he crept away to an inaccessible spot and had a look at the wounds, what impressed him was the way they seemed to be alive, eating away voraciously at his flesh. He’d hurried back as fast as he could to the camp, all the time aware of how the little animals were triumphantly exploiting his weakness. When he got back, he asked Miss Hardlock in a whisper for a length of cloth.

‘I have some wounds that require to be bandaged,’ he said in halting English, ‘some rather bad wounds that I have acquired.’

‘Oh,’ she’d replied, ‘can I be of help?’ — and then, when she noticed his embarrassment and his reluctance to say any more: ‘How much to you need?’

‘Oh, not much,’ he’d assured her, and then disappeared into the grass with his piece of cloth. Of course, it hadn’t helped; his wounds were not open wounds after all, and although they did make him feel a little warmer, the bandages fell down his leg as soon as he started moving at all strenuously, and in general they were a nuisance.

The exertions involved in climbing affected him badly, and his condition seemed to deteriorate rapidly. He didn’t dare look at the wounds any more as, when he let his hand venture anywhere near his testicles, he was horrified to discover how quickly they were getting bigger. The temptation to look at them was enormous, plucking away at his fingers, and at times he had to search frantically for something to do, spend ridiculous amounts of energy doing things that didn’t need doing at all, just so as not to give way. Apart from that, it wasn’t too bad during the day when everybody else’s eyes, everybody else’s attention prevented him from giving way to his innermost desires; but when it started getting dark and no one could keep an eye on him any longer, it became appallingly difficult.