Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘Oh, my God, I’m so scared,’ said the English girl, ‘you must understand how scared I am of night. Jimmie, surely you can understand that it shouldn’t be like this, why couldn’t everything be quite different? You must realize how scared I am of everything that happens here, and what has happened, and what is soon going to happen. I’d thought I could help you, you must know yourself how unhappy you looked when we first met. I’d really have liked to — no I wouldn’t, because I was shy, and frightened as well, really frightened. I knew straight away who you were, and I couldn’t very well have known how dangerous it was to know and let other people know, I mean, I thought the whole time all the others knew as well and I just assumed it was all an innocent masquerade that could end at any minute. Obviously I got frightened and sorry and worried when I saw how you looked when I gave away your secret. It was just that I wanted to talk to you, but you must surely realize that when I knew who you were and had sort of known you such a long time, it would have been so awfully difficult to talk to you if I couldn’t talk to you and laugh with you in your real identity rather than the one they had down on the passenger list.

‘You think I’m silly, sitting here telling you all this when it’s dark and we’re as shipwrecked as it’s possible to be and scared of the dark and hunger and iguanas and all the rest of it. I can see you think I’m extremely silly and I can understand I’ll never get you to pull down the canvas from over your head as long as I’m sitting here. You’re probably thinking she does go on and on, this young idiot who’s been chasing me all the voyage and still can’t leave me in peace even now when everything’s gone wrong, I can hear you’re saying that by your silence and the way you’re not moving a muscle, but here I am still sitting here prattling. Oh yes, you’re going to hear all sorts of things this evening, even if you are lying under your canvas with your fingers in your ears and think you can shut me out. You’ll see that you can’t in the long run and then you’ll fold back the canvas and start talking to me about all the things that have been happening to the two of us and how important it all is, even though it does all seem so hopeless just now. But first we’ve got to agree about one thing, and that’s that it’s evening now; come on, tell me if you agree with me that it’s evening now, and that it won’t be night for a little while yet. You see, I think night is so horrible, it gets so dark and all sounds get so awfully loud and I don’t want to have to beg you to help me endure it, ‘cos I know you want to be left in peace, really I do, and you think what I’m saying and what I’m frightened of is just childish nonsense that doesn’t affect you in the slightest, but because it means so much to me that it’s evening now I only hope you’ll help me to believe that it really is evening.

‘You don’t need to roll your canvas down and answer me, I’ll be able to tell whether you want to help me or not even so, not that there’s all that much I want helping with: just that you can make me believe there really is a period of evening before it gets night, and that you’ll listen to me until the evening has passed and it’s time for me to go to sleep as well. You don’t want to look, and I can understand that I think, you think we’re all awful because we can. . no, I mustn’t remind you of what’s causing you so much trouble. I thought it was unfair, so cruel and horrible of you to send me away, and I didn’t understand you at first. All I could understand was my desire to get even with you, my own anger and my own sorrow; I thought you were making fun of me behind my back the moment I’d left you, and what I really wanted to do was to throw myself. . no, no, listen, I wouldn’t have done that in fact. You see I’d had to learn right from the start never to show what I was thinking, not to show what I was feeling, and Daddy always said that was what you should be like, that’s the way the world is, and so you have to behave like that if you want people to respect you. Poor Daddy, you’d never believe how much he suffered if people didn’t respect him. All the others in the regiment had at least somebody who liked them, who’d embrace them and pat them on the back when they met; but Daddy always surrounded himself with a sort of glass cage that kept everybody at arm’s length.

‘Oh, if only he’d dared to show just what he was thinking and what he was feeling, just occasionally, then everything might have been different; but he was always so sure and so blind about all that business that it’d never have occurred to him to change his mind. And if only I’d been able to tell him what was wrong even so, ‘cos I soon caught on, caught on to the fact that if you go around like that and never let anybody know what you’re feeling or thinking, well, in the end you just can’t feel or think any more. You sort of freeze over, you see, and before long there’s simply nobody anywhere around you who’s warm enough or even sufficiently interested in your frigidity to thaw you out. That’s what was happening to me as well, but then something happened, or various things, well, really it was a series of evenings that were nights for years on end that saved me. Oh, I know you think that what I’m trying to tell you is a bit ridiculous ‘cos for someone like you who’s seen so much, I mean had so many really vivid experiences, well, what happens to me must seem incredibly uninteresting and insignificant and dull. But I’m going to tell you all about it even so, I feel as if I were full of steam and I’m going to burst any minute if I don’t. Are you listening or have you got your fingers in your ears? Never mind, you see, nothing can stop me as long as the evening lasts.’

The English girl paused for a moment and stretched out in the warm sand listening to the water caressing the beach and everything else was quiet apart from the muttering from the fire and as if she wanted to open herself up to the fire and the water and the evening, she flung aside the heavy cloth she had round her and lay naked and thoughtful in the warm darkness. With her hands that were still soft, she fondled her tightly stretched skin, stretched more tightly than ever around her hips and her forehead and her knees and the ice that had lain hidden in the horizon of her body melted rapidly. Oh, your hands, she whispered, your hands at last, keep on caressing me all evening.

Then she heard footsteps on the cliff, someone was hurrying down and stopped abruptly on meeting someone else.

‘This can’t go on,’ she heard someone say, as if from the depths of a well, ‘it can’t go on like this any longer, we’ve got to do something. We’ve either got to get rid of him, that’d be the surest and safest way. And. .’

But she heard no more. Either the pair of them must have been whisked away into the sky, raised up like chimneys into the night, or she herself must have sunk down into the depths with lightning speed, the voices grew vague and floated like shadows through her consciousness. It suddenly occurred to her there was something very urgent, there was something very urgent she’d almost forgotten about and she came to with a start, lying there in the sand and the coldness, the coldest chill of all flowed into her hands and she felt as stiff as glass and couldn’t even pull the blanket over her again, over her body that felt so brutally cold. Hands, long thin hands with no wrists but with thick veins sticking out on the underneath came creeping towards her over the sand, radiating cold, and crept all over her, slowly, slowly. They were crawling on fingers which dug sharp claws of ice into her flesh and she wasn’t even shivering, for she was a block of ice herself. But all the time, like a frozen lake remembering the summer thanks to a tiny current still flowing deep down, she remembered that there was something urgent, something that had to be done before it was too late. Then one of the hands creeping over her breast suddenly gave up, it couldn’t go on, and the nails digging into her dug in even further and the hand just lay there with its spiky fingers sunk into her body. Deep down inside was a tiny muscle, a sensitive string, and when the nail on the weary hand’s forefinger rubbed against it, the string started singing, a sharp, high, dreadful note with sharp edges, and it swung around inside her like the pendulum of a clock gone mad. It ripped her open from within and blood started running through her body, all of it rushing to the same place, all of it rushing to the same source, and she grew heavy and hot just there and the pendulum slowed down and the note sank back into its source and little bubbles rose from the bottom.