Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Of course, you could point out that it wasn’t possible to see the wounds when it was dark, at least not as clearly as in daylight. At most, all he could make out would be a few dark shadows, much darker than the skin of his thighs, standing up slightly in relief. But the fact is that while twilight on this island lasts only for a brief second, it’s nevertheless long enough for anyone who’s waiting apprehensively for the opportunity to have a look at two wounds. It’s characterized by an unusually sharp light, a light which is certainly condemned to death and is squeezed out of existence by the darkness, but even so its sharpness is awesome; it’s like a flash of green lightning, lasting a little longer than the time it takes an ordinary flash of lightning to penetrate the world, and for that lengthy moment, it demands that all secrets be exposed to its ruthless gaze.

In order to avoid being tormented by this sweet temptation — sweet yes: it was precisely that strange feeling of painful enjoyment, of persistently agonizing, dirty satisfaction, which worried him most — he’d rush off with some excuse or other: he was looking for an unusual stone, he wanted to see a particular star which was invisible from their part of the beach, or something of the sort; well, rush off is relative, since as the wounds were getting deeper and deeper and at the same time bigger and bigger, it naturally became increasingly difficult to walk. It was extremely hard to go uphill, especially when it was a steep slope, but he chose that difficult and exhausting path even so, because once he’d got as far as the little plateau of bare rock about the same size as a skating rink in the middle of the island, high above everything else, he lost all trace of desire to expose his wounds and caress them eagerly with his gaze. He felt as if he were standing in the middle of a stage, in the cruel glare of spotlights and watched by naked eyes shackling his movements, binding him fast to normal respectability, preventing him from exposing himself in such a dreadful way.

The birds were soaring beneath him, their large wings like reflectors casting the green light upwards as sky and sea merged into one, and the wrecked ship lay slumped over its reef. The big searchlight was still there on deck, looking like a doubled-up human being; we’ve all learnt to conceal our wounds, from ourselves and from everybody else, to show nothing of our pain, to keep ourselves under control until something gives way and we’re bowled over with devilish speed. Everyone has heard about the Spartan boy, with the stolen foxcub under his tunic, who allowed the animal to eat its way through his chest rather than confess. That was very courageous, and we’re all expected to be Spartan boys, we’re all expected to let our wounds grow until they cover us entirely and no one can whisper to his neighbour and say: look, he’s concealing something, but he’s doing it well; it’s admirable, the way he lets his wounds grow till they cover his entire body, without bothering any of us others with his problems. Not until it’s all too late, if you can talk of a thing getting too late when it was too late right from the very start, only then is anyone else allowed to know, and nothing can be done about it, of course, because the wound we carry instead of skin always grows inwards, gnawing its way all the time into a tender kernel which will also turn into a vast wound, and the kernel inside that kernel, and that kernel’s kernel, and all the kernels that all the kernels have inside them, and all the kernels all of us bear inside us will turn into wounds, but we’re not allowed to show any sign of it until the immense wound we’re carrying bursts open and we fall down like a disgusting piece of flesh cut off the end of a giant’s finger, and we roll over and break open and pus flows in all directions. Then we’ve kept control of ourselves for long enough, and if we’re ruthless now, then it’s the first time after all, for someone shouted to us as we clambered into the aeroplane: Right lads, Boy, Esper, Loel, Grenn, when you start dropping your bombs bear in mind the houses round the power station are close together so if you hit one of them, the fire will spread rapidly to all the others and light up the power station making things more effective from a bombing point of view, and the wound that I, Boy, was carrying around inside me nodded assent, because it was an obedient wound and it no doubt thought obedience is good for wounds, for a man who just does as he’s told and is faithful to the task he was forced to marry himself to because that year everybody with amputated limbs had to be married off to people who hadn’t yet had amputations, and so a man who just does as he’s told feels the Spartan boy panting through the ages with blood pouring from his thin chest. Maybe he was an ordinary pimply little boy, a bit like you were yourself when you always carried peanut shells around with you in your pockets and dropped them wherever you went, in doorways and on landings, and of course he would have a Greek profile but his shoulders might be thin even so, his back hunched, and he might well have had freckles as he stood there before the stern gentlemen with the fox inside his tunic, accused of having stolen it, and determined to die rather than let a confession or a cry of pain pass his lips. He might have just been eating, nuts maybe, or porridge if they had that in those days, and he might have had a crust of dry milk or perhaps even honey on his upper lip as he pressed it stubbornly against his teeth with the help of his lower lip. The stern gentlemen in their togas, no, it was the Romans who wore them, they mightn’t have been taking it all that seriously even though they were pretending otherwise, because who could care less about a foxcub and there must have been lots more foxcubs besides this one in ancient Sparta; maybe they were just teasing the boy, pretending to be twice as strict as they really felt like being, and after a few minutes of uncompromising sternness they would have burst out into guffaws and everything would have been relaxed and the boy would have been allowed to run out into the sunshine, and they would have shouted after him that he shouldn’t take everything so damned seriously, only that crowd in Athens were as silly as that, where laws about cruelty to animals and all that silly nonsense spoilt all the fun.

But before they got round to that, that business of letting him go again, the fox trapped in his tunic was scratching its way deeper and deeper into the boy’s chest, and the blood would have been pouring out under his tunic and if he wasn’t wearing a long coat or an ankle-length cloak, it would soon have started running down his thighs and down his legs and at any rate some of the men accusing him would have seen it and shouted: Look, the boy’s bleeding! We’d better help him! Or maybe they would have just let him go on bleeding, because such things do happen after all, and Loel who was in charge of the machine gun got hit in his arm, it must have split his artery because he turned white almost straight away and slumped forward and there was nothing anybody could do; the battle had started and the enemy shells were coming up in waves from below and suddenly they were screaming vertically past us and streaks of flame were flashing by and up above there was a roaring sound as if a gun carrier was running away out of control and something big and black that looked as though it was going to gobble up the whole earth seemed to be sliding along just over our left wing and it couldn’t stop itself before it hit the dam beside the power station and in the glow from eight blazing houses you could hear through all the noise from God knows how many different kinds of guns how the burning plane was gobbled up by silence and then first a thin, black angry spurt of smoke and then just a big white cloud that engulfed everything.