Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

And the four shadows soon pounce on her, the beach is suddenly a very lively place, it’s as if herds of all kinds of animals come charging out, wolves, bison, hyenas, tigers, and all their heavy bodies make the beach shake and each animal that flits past her showers her with the acrid perfume of wolves or tigers or lions and then the smoke from a stove in a white tent wrapping itself gently and as soft as cotton wool like bandages round her limbs until she almost chokes — and then those flagpoles, those white flagpoles, those eternal flagpoles being lowered and raised and lowered and raised with a fluttering pennant from a thin, thin scream.

Now the fire is flickering brightly on the beach. The tide is sliding gently in over the sand, and the fire is reflected in the water. But the night has many fires. In Verdisse, the camp fire burned until dawn, the horses shivered in their nakedness, and a giant had slung a necklace of fire over the plain. Then, the stallions snorted loudly just before the explosion came. But the night has many fires. Petrol over the bodies, frozen stiff and breaking like twigs, and then the fires sinking slowly through the ice, leaving behind eighteen graves in Lake Tibirsik when morning came. But the night has many fires. Lying alone and freezing in the heat before the open fire, where all the apples have already burnt to a cinder, and hearing somebody coming downstairs and a whiplash dragging along behind on the stairs like a rat’s tail, then the pain in your back a quarter of an hour too early and then the fire flaring up in response to the drama. But the night has many fires. See the fire smouldering in someone’s eyes, feel the heat radiating from a body that wants more fires but for its own part only wants to be extinguished the whole of the long night, and then extinguished more and more, all the time just covered in ashes, then only ashes. But the night has many fires. Lying stretched out under a canvas sheet and feeling how hot your fingertips become, feeling the heat running through your fingers and into your hands and into your arms and into your shoulders and down through your trunk, down through your legs, into your feet, into your toes, and knowing all the time, always knowing above all else that the only way of getting rid of this pain is to cool yourself down through contact with someone else’s skin, someone else’s body, someone else’s arms, hands. And fighting with yourself as with the devil, fighting with your own limbs, struggling with your own fingers, resisting with all your strength and still not winning, because in the end you get so hot, you’d burn up if you didn’t let your fingers have their own way.

And then those hands, those hands that are always so hot, sneak out on to the canvas and slide over towards the person sleeping by your side. He’s fast asleep, the glow of the fire is breathing in Boy Larus’s motionless face, his eyelids are closed yet alert, and his hand is clenching and unclenching on the canvas. There’s a little way to go yet, the heat is getting worse and worse, it’s as if your skin were burning but not being used up, and that’s the worst thing of all: that you just can’t burn up once and for all and put the whole business behind you at last, and then that hand clenching for the last time and slapping your wrist while that look, filled with the deepest scorn imaginable, digs into your face like a needle, your unprotected face. Boy Larus hasn’t got up, he’s still lying there as usual hunched painfully in a posture made up of equal parts of fear and contempt, exactly the same as usual, but in that case how come the captain now sees him creeping towards him like a snake, his tongue has suddenly grown longer than all the others and is shooting out from between his teeth lightning-fast, but before his feet are covered in the patterned skin he gives Tom Solider a big kick, as if to wake him up, to warn him of a very real danger.

‘Oh, if only you’d been on your own, you’re so cowardly when you’re alone,’ whispers the captain to the snake but the snake just keeps on creeping nearer and nearer, its head swaying slyly and wearily from side to side, and Boy Larus’s eyes are set deep, deep down inside it, as motionless as glass beads.

‘If only I’d had an awl,’ says the captain, ‘a long, cobbler’s awl, you’d have been hopelessly beaten,’ but the snake just keeps on coming and there’s nowhere to run away to, there has never been anywhere to run away to: just wait for the whip, the strike, the bite, the blow — and suddenly the snake’s head falls on him like an axe, its little scales glittering in the firelight, and the bite-wound, always equally horrific, must be gaping like a mouth just above your knee.

All is lost, and he knows that when he starts running, but he runs even so until the poison turns his knee into a stone which first aches and then becomes as heavy as lead and doesn’t hurt any more. He’s pulled down by it and lies there on his back like a beaten iguana while the transformation takes possession of him and everything happens as it usually does. There is a shattering kind of solitude which can change the whole world into one big field or rather, one flat surface; you can see everywhere and yet at the same time you can’t possibly see everywhere, it’s a stretch of metal gleaming like a ball-bearing without any trace of a soft patch, not a single hollow to hide in, not a single hole to crawl down into. This surface gives off a shiny, oily light but it is also lit up by a cruelly sharp radiance from above, coming from some motionless heavenly body, a huge sphere made of the same cool, oily metal as the one you’re attached to yourself, sweating this light through its milliards of pores. On this surface of your solitude, there are no shadows either; you can’t raise your hand or your arm for instance and try and hide behind the shadows they cast, the light just keeps on pouring all over you, and moreover, it’s not possible to move either, you’re stuck to the spot, not by some unseen rope or bond you can tear away or chew to pieces; the remarkable thing, the key to it all, perhaps you might even say the meaning of your situation is precisely the fact that you can’t do anything about it, and you just lie there with your back pressed against the hard surface like a drawing pin sticking to a magnet, and all the time, light keeps on pouring down over you, and suddenly, the whole of space starts singing out of solitude.

You’re alone in space, cast out like a raft at sea, exposed to it like a dartboard to its darts, and you can no longer run away from your destiny and anything can happen. You can expect eagles or hawks to swoop down from the stars and cast themselves over you in a frenzy, because you’re the only thing in the whole world that’s soft, something a beak can sink into, something a talon can dig into; you can expect meteors or whatever to slit open your bare breast, naked in the face of eternity; but the only thing that happens is that space starts singing, space starts singing out of solitude. ‘The only thing’ — but no, it’s more than just ‘only’, it’s pretty horrible.

The odd song, you think you could no doubt put up with the odd song; but that’s not how it is: you can’t put up with it, you just have to. ‘Space’, that silly little concept you like playing around with when you’re out walking through the reeds and the trees, in parks or refrigeration plants, or sitting in your rocking chair watching the sky flickering over the top of the lilac hedge; space, the little lake where idyllic cloud boats glide along before the wind; space as it seems to be when you’re still in the little hole on earth where you were born, grew up, were ill-treated or ill-treated others and where you’re going to die any minute — that space is just a lie for anyone who has experienced properly this enormous, all-consuming, embittered solitude, stuck on to a shiny metal field and with nothing around you and above you but the most gigantic, the loneliest of all wildernesses, the whole of space, the true extent of which you never dared think about while you were living in your hole on earth: it’s like a bottomless well, and you lean further and further out in the hope of seeing water, of seeing something tangible instead of just this terrifying emptiness, and in the end you lean so far out, you fall, and then you fall and fall and fall for the whole of your life without experiencing anything but this endless falling and you die while you’re still falling and although you haven’t come to any sign of a bottom you’re annihilated while you’re still falling and gobbled up by the darkness after your pitiful failed effort at filling it with meaning, the meaning that comes from looking for a bottom.