Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘And then you escaped. Yes, you’ve told me about that before. You found a sailing boat to take you to Ronton, and caught this boat to get you to the seventeenth squadron on Rivinos. Is that right?’

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Yes, as I say, you told me all this the very first day, and everything fits in with what you say. Everything fits in so incredibly well, it all fits in so well it sounds as if you’ve learnt it all off by heart so that you can give all the right answers in convincing fashion if anybody should be so cheeky as to ask.’

‘What do you mean, captain?’

‘Well, I mean there’s something about all this that doesn’t make sense.’

‘What do you mean, captain?’

He suddenly felt in dire need of support and slid down from the bulwark, leaning hard against it with his back. He pressed his back hard, hard against the stone and tried to sink into it, but was rejected coldly. He was so extremely hot inside, but felt cold even so.

‘Well,’ said the captain, sitting up and blowing out air as if he were smoking, ‘when I started thinking about this business, there was something that just didn’t fit in. I remembered a certain picture I’d seen in a certain newspaper when we sailed from Ronton, with several emaciated prisoners from the camp you say you were stationed at. They’d stolen a sailing boat and landed on an island north of Ronton called Bellos. There was nothing remarkable about them at first glance, they were considerably thinner than you are, but that needn’t be very significant. But if you held the paper steady and looked really closely at them, there was something special about them you noticed, and quite rightly the article commented on it: they were all wearing enemy uniform — and why? Well, quite simply because the prisoners’ own uniforms had been burnt, in accordance with the old tradition of trying to squeeze out of them the last dregs of resistance. Now you are wearing a uniform with the flashes of the seventeenth squadron. Unfortunately I don’t have the newspaper with me here, I expect it got left behind on the boat — but if —’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Boy, and everything collapsed: himself, the plateau and the island and the world, and he was consumed by dizziness, ‘yes, I’m a deserter.’

The captain didn’t need to stretch far in order to slap Boy’s face, three quick slaps like whiplashes, and he fell back along the bulwark gasping as the sensuous darkness swallowed him up, only to spit him out violently and cruelly once more. The captain was leaning over him, breathing heavily, and Boy noticed for the first time the acrid smell of sweat emanating from his body and from his words and his breath,

‘Now I’ve got you,’he said. ‘Now I’ve got you.’ And he added in a whisper, ‘Show me your wounds, where are your wounds, you must show me them now.’

‘It’s so dark, captain, can’t we wait till it gets light? In my groin, in my groin.’

He scrambled warily to his feet, gave the captain a little push and flung himself over the bulwark and down into the darkness and the silence. He slithered noisily down the slope, it sounded as if the earth was opening up beneath him, and landed at the bottom, then tried to crawl away into the sheltering grass. But the captain caught him and helped him to his feet.

‘Be careful,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you shouldn’t waste your strength in silly ways like this.’

They walked into the grass together, and it closed gently over their heads like a gigantic wave.

‘I don’t mean you any harm, I just want to have a look at your wounds.’

Boy Larus tore himself violently away from him and tried to escape, but one of those treacherous potholes that were everywhere and which the iguanas often used as a refuge at night caused him to fall, something screamed in acute pain and clattered away into the grass.

Boy Larus was so scared of the darkness and of that mysterious scream and of all that was happening to him, although it hadn’t yet happened. ‘They’re my wounds,’ he yelled, ‘Leave me alone, get away from me. I know your type. I know what was going on in a certain library at the Brosto garrison shortly after midnight when the fire had gone out and the armchairs were pushed together in pairs and there was whispering and panting behind the locked doors. What do you want with my wounds? I can assure you, there’s nothing to see, just two ordinary wounds. What do you want to do with them? Let me feel the pain myself, they’re mine, mine, not yours, go and stroke your own wounds instead.’

‘You should take this in a different way,’ said the captain, kneeling down beside him in the grass. ‘Don’t get so excited, calm down a bit, there’s nothing outrageous about what I want to do, and anyway: I can order you to do it, I can give you an order and you must obey.’

‘Obey!’ he whimpered. ‘As if I haven’t obeyed enough! Haven’t I obeyed all of you, haven’t I always done what I didn’t want to do, what I found so horrible, things that hurt so much I wanted to die?’

‘But you didn’t die.’

‘Everything people shouted at me, funny how they always shouted at me, never requested, I did everything people shouted at me I should do. You always said things were going wrong, everything was collapsing, the system won’t work if you don’t obey — and I obeyed all right and the system didn’t collapse, but there was something inside me that did collapse. I got a wound — ’

‘It’s not bleeding.’

‘I got a wound that just grew and grew, but you didn’t care about that when it still wasn’t too late, you didn’t demand to see it then, you didn’t shout then that I should kindly show us all your wounds, please, we’re all so interested in wounds, especially the kind that still haven’t turned nasty. You just let it go on growing inside me and outside me and through me and round about me and I did everything you told me to do just so that I could forget about the wound under my clothes; I obeyed you every time, in everything.’

‘That’s why I can’t understand why you haven’t obeyed on this occasion,’ said the captain, getting quickly to his feet and pulling him a little way through the grass, and it was so endlessly silent; stars seemed to be hanging from the swaying panicles and smoke was blowing in regular puffs over the grass and the rocks, but the faint splashing of someone wading along the beach perforated the silence. Everything was so late, and so excessively late, the thought that it hadn’t always been like this rose like the red star above his head, just as high and remote, and then this wound spreading over his body like a carpet, covering everything, extending into him, covering everything, and if wounds could talk this one would have screamed out in despair: And now this, now this as well, but he was so much a wound that he hadn’t even the strength to bite when the captain’s hands started caressing him voluptuously.

No, obviously, there was no evening on the island. After the brief, green twilight, night fell like a weary snake gliding down over its rock and everything became pitch black. Well, the stars could sometimes serve to guide anyone who really had to go for a walk, as they sent small, thin, fragile shafts of light falling almost like puffs of breath through space; unsure of themselves and seemingly unwilling to arrive at their destination, they emphasized the stubborn and bitter stringency of the darkness in its role as night, hopeless night, eternal night. For a while, you could get your bearings from sounds if you wished. Most iguanas had retired for the night, of course, and soon they could no longer be heard rasping their way through the rocks with their hard skins, but there must be some special strain of iguana here that felt most at home in the dark; no one knew what they looked like as none of them had ever come near the fire or even come down from their rocks. Nevertheless, as long as it was dark, from time to time you could hear loud and clear the hard slapping of tails, quick shuffles over stones and a strange jabbering sound like that made by birds, something you never heard by day; but the slapping was harder, the shuffling quicker, as if they were bigger, more ruthless and less indolent animals that had now come to life; or could it be that the uncertainties of night encouraged the ears of the castaways to magnify all noises, make everything more scary, stir up eddies of hidden desires and apparently dead fears in which the ego could rotate like an abandoned snail shell?