Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘“What do you want?” he shouted; not: What have you done, what’s the matter, have you hurt yourself? If you screamed, you must want something, he couldn’t imagine any other possible reason.

‘“It’s the animal, Daddy,” I yelled, “the animal under the chopping board.”

‘I wanted to hug him and get support and warmth, but he drew back, lifted up the chopping board and squashed the little beetle against the work surface. Then I thought I was going to die, I thought I was going to throw up all my insides, ’cos he picked up the yucky remains between his finger and thumb and held it up so close to my face I thought I could smell its acrid fumes prickling in my nose.

‘“You mean this?” he inquired contemptuously: he was always contemptuous with subordinates when he wasn’t giving them orders.

‘You should have seen me running through that silent house, chased by horrible tentacles, acrid smells, sticky signals from little insects, the kind that always huddle under small, flat stones, in the joints of old chairs that have been standing out in the rain, in the seams of old military overcoats, in the window-frames in the summer-house, in the holes where the croquet hoops have been taken away as autumn sets in, in tennis racquets that have been up in the attic for the winter, in your handkerchief when you just put it down for a moment on a bathing beach, in old newspapers that haven’t been thrown away yet, under the thwarts of leaky rowing boats, in the cracked putty in old windows — all of them just waiting for some human to display a moment of weakness, just one second when they all shut their eyes, so that they can swarm out in their millions and spread out all over the world suffocating all other signs of life.

‘It was horrible, and in fact those little insects were the only thing that beat me when Daddy came and lifted me out from under the bed and sat me down with a thump and shouted: What did you say you were playing? Eunuchs, Daddy, I said, I was Nicky’s eunuch. Then do you know, he took two big paces backwards, as if he were going to take a measurement, and gave me a series of quick looks like electric shocks.

‘“Just you say that word one more time,” he said threateningly. And I said “eunuch” one more time because I wanted to know what it meant.

‘Then he gave me such a thwack on my cheek that I’d have fallen over if the bed hadn’t been in the way.

‘“Just you say it one more time,” he said triumphantly, not believing I would ever dare to do so.

‘“Eunuch, Daddy,” I said. I still had no idea what was going on.

‘Then he thwacked me on my other cheek so hard the bed disappeared in a shower of stars and I fell over. As I lay there, trying to find my way back into the room, I heard him shouting in the far distance, “Come on out, Nicky. Did you teach Draga that word?”

‘“No, Daddy,” I heard her saying from the roof of a well, so cheeky and wide-eyed you’d have to be a soldier not to realize she was lying. “I’ve never heard that word before.”

‘Then he shouted for Mrs Muehlhouse, and she came rushing in and picked me up, breathing onions all over me, and dragged me off to the bathroom.

‘Daddy had said I should be shut up in disgrace until I said I was sorry. She put me down on the floor, put the light on and locked the door as quickly as she could, so that I couldn’t get a look into her eyes and see that she was really ashamed of herself. There I was, you see, thinking I wanted to stay in that bathroom for ever and ever and never come out, never ever, because everything was so unfair. I found a comb and combed my long hair over my face, so hard and wild and defiant I dared not even look at it in the mirror. I made a couple of little cracks so I could see through, and hoped I would look like Clara Bow when I grew up.

‘But that was when I remembered the little insects that lived in the bathroom wall. Milli always used to show me them when she bathed me. What a life, she would say, what a miserable existence. They were little, hunched-up grey insects that could fly a couple of inches at a time when you touched them with your finger, but generally they just sat there on the wall like little bits of hardened dirt. I just can’t tell you how horrible it was when they tried to fly. There are kinds of butterfly that look so like rats when they spread their wings out that you have to keep thinking: butterfly, butterfly, in order not to feel sick; and there are all kinds of insects that move through the air with a sort of mechanical jerkiness you just can’t imagine is natural; but there isn’t a single bird or insect or beetle that flew in as horrible a way as these did, ’cos you could see all the time they were creeping really, that somehow or other they’d been given a pair of dirty little wings by mistake, and they could use them to help them up or down a wall, but not in the air, not when it came to flying.

‘I sat down on the edge of the bath, and all of a sudden, are you with me, everything started spinning round, and I could feel the walls slowly creeping in on me, just as slowly as Daddy had walked when he approached the bed a few minutes previously. They gave off a piercing, painful smell, and although I didn’t dare look at them for fear of falling, I knew they’d changed colour, they weren’t green any longer, they were grey, grey because they were covered all over from floor to ceiling in a layer of these little flying insects. The room was getting smaller and smaller, and when a few drops of water dropped from the ceiling and into my hair, I thought I was finished and I started screaming, I just screamed and screamed until the boots started clumping up the staircase.

‘“What do you want?” shouted Daddy through the locked door. “Are you going to say you’re sorry at long last?”

‘I’d do anything to get out of this prison, no price was too high to pay.

‘“Yes,” I yelled, so scared I thought I was going to die, “Oh, yes, Daddy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry Daddy.”

‘There was only an inch left before I suffocated to death, so there were still sacrifices to be made.

‘“Promise me you’ll never say that word again!”

‘“Yes, Daddy,” I shouted. “Never, never again.” I couldn’t even remember what word he was talking about.

‘Then I was lying under the bed in mine and Nicky’s room, without crying, as cold and lifeless as a log floating in a lake. All I had strength to do was to give Nicky a kick, the little hypocrite, when she came to console me.

‘“And he’s supposed to be a soldier,” she said scornfully. She’d heard Uncle Bennie (Mummy’s brother, who did exist once upon a time, but now he only emerged as God and King) use words like that about Daddy when he was reprimanded for borrowing too much money from the gardener in order to go gambling; and she pinched my bottom gently but I just kicked at her till she went away giggling. I just lay there, you know, like I’m lying here now with you, on my back, my heels pressed down on to the ground with my toes pointing straight up, and my hands pressed so tightly against my breasts they must have left a red mark afterwards, and I was staring up at the stars, I was pretending the bottom of the bed was the sky you see, and nothing hurt any more, and nothing felt nice either, but down inside me was a scream that was still hidden like an unknown fish under the mud at the bottom of a little lake, but then: look how it’s working away, digging with its nose, slowly forcing its way up through the green light at the bottom, then it swishes its tail and shoots up to the surface, and eeeeh. . and I screamed under the bed and nobody heard me even so, everybody was down on the croquet lawn, and only seconds earlier I’d heard the regular, dull thuds of the mallets, maybe somebody was standing in front of one of the hoops, leaning on his mallet: Did you hear that fox yelping over there in the park? Nobody heard me, and you could say: Who would understand why I screamed? That I screamed because nobody came to keep me warm, nobody came and unbuttoned his coat and let my head nestle up against his chest, nobody came and bent over me so that I could stroke his head and caress it, nobody came and saw that I could feel cold even though it was so warm inside the house and so warm outside as well during the day. They just laughed away on the croquet lawn, in a dignified manner, of course, maybe they were laughing at one of Daddy’s jokes which always ended up with a command: Laugh now, one, two, three.