Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

‘Enough of your ropes and silly questions,’ he calls down to them, balancing on a pinnacle, standing on one leg and leaning out over the silent abyss. ‘Enough of your doctors, medicines and silly machines, X-ray machines, the whole lot!’ His father is no doubt down there somewhere as well, the old officer with his mad circus dreams. Yes, there he is, he’s running now, a two-legged ant scuttling across the courtyard, no doubt that’s his spurs glinting in the sun. Then there’s life and movement everywhere: coaches are harnessed, cars come creeping up like ugly beetles, boxes are loaded on board, people climb in and out, horns are sounding non-stop, and the sound flies up towards him like large mosquitoes, and at last the column of vehicles starts flowing out towards the main road, sluggish as pitch — and Lucas runs downstairs in order to solve the mystery of the pony Pontiac and the gardener’s children in peace and quiet.

But instead, his father grabs him roughly by the arm and drags him off through the deserted state-rooms where the smell of dying portraits is becoming more and more unbearable — people in various stages of decomposition even when alive start to smell like portraits after a certain number of years. Into the library, where father bolts the door, draws the curtains, lights the candles in the candelabra, and takes down from the wall the whip with the twelve-foot lash. The old man ran away and joined a circus in his youth, combed the prima donna’s hair, assisted the lion-tamer, was brought back home, and locked in the cellar for a period of four months. There, among the rats, mould and dungeon-dampness he learnt how to use a whip; the ringmaster of his own longings could eventually, at the height of his career, kill a fleeing rat, or a squirrel in the top of a birch tree, and soon he forgot about lions and tigers and concentrated on rats and young squirrels. Generally liked for his stupidity, generally admired for his cruelty, generally respected for his wealth, he gradually acquired the biggest collection of whips in the country.

‘Get undressed,’ his father now ordered the boy, ‘take everything off, put your clothes on the fur rug, bend over like the miserable wretch you are, legs slightly apart, back towards the door, head as near the ground as you can, your mane should be hanging down, so that you look like a lion.’

He unwinds the endlessly long whip, turns the key one more time in the lock; the terrified footsteps of the servants can be heard tip-tapping on the floor outside. Then a minute’s silence, and suddenly the carts start rumbling through the archway, horses neigh, a coachman is singing some song or other, the thong creeps slowly over the floor like a snake as it approaches the terrified boy, whose body is as white as ivory. Then the thong rises in response to its owner’s command, wraps itself gracefully round a silver candelabra, and hurls it violently across the room.

‘Stand still now, hands on knees, stretch your back so that I can get in better lashes.’

Now the whip swishes across the room again, and suddenly, from the boy’s shoulder diagonally across his back and down towards his left hip, it has dug a red canal across the expanse of white desert.

‘One for your damned worrying. Worrying is an unclean occupation, best suited to monks, paupers, swine and subalterns. But when you have plenty of wine, whips and horses, it’s a sin to worry. Think about how well your wine’s tickling your palate — if it doesn’t, choose another wine. Feel how comfortably the whip fits into your hand — if it doesn’t, get a carpenter to make a new handle which suits you better. Horses run fast, if one falls it’s his own fault, there are plenty more. Never have pity, it only makes you look foolish and takes up valuable time; kick the horse up its backside and make yourself respected.

‘One for all your damned prattle about feeling guilty. Guilt is just for the weak, that’s what they’re there for. Sit comfortably in the dress circle and watch how they go about their puppet-lives, they generally act for money, the director might well be a brother-in-law. Don’t join in the play-acting, just sit and watch for as long as you find it amusing. People don’t expect you to do anything in this big farce of a life, and if they do, then disappoint them.

‘One for your damned youth, but you’ll get over that.

‘One in the hope you’ll get over it as soon as possible.

‘One for every horse you’ll ride till it drops in the big wild boar hunt next October, and laugh at like all the rest of us.’

Then the boy slowly collapses, the network of canals across his back is slowly filling up, the whole world is a bowl of whip-lashes joined together, the fur rug closes around him, its smell of bear’s blood has breathed its last after all the years, now it smells of cigars, spilled whisky, mistresses’ perfumes. Minutes pass and the boy doesn’t wake up, hours pass and the boy doesn’t wake up, years pass: there’s still no sign of him. Then he suddenly finds himself, time has rushed by, he’s a boy no more, his back feels a little sore when his jacket rubs against it, when he puts his shirt on or takes it off, but apart from that he’s no doubt completely restored. His father’s got older, shrunk somewhat, and leans forward at a frightening angle when he walks; his mother, whom he hardly noticed before, is always at the stove nowadays with red peppery eyes, or lying on the sofa in the hall with some secret pains. Yes, it’s true: the castle disappeared as well; according to his father speculators and profiteers were in league, their finances collapsed, first all the horses were sold, land followed a bit at a time, the servants were sent packing, but nothing helped.

Now all three walk these grey streets, bowed under the yoke of dreams and hopeless expectations. Take the old man, for example: every evening when it’s sufficiently dark, he sneaks up into the attic of the old block of flats, and all alone with a length of strong cord and a broken fishing rod he revives his old whip-dreams. Otherwise, he’s broken with the past: now he hangs around one of the four pubs in the area for half the day, grumbles away about politics in rather a loud voice, frequently writes letters to newspapers about the local dogs, and apart from that there’s most probably no one who knows how he feels.

His mother’s in a pitiful state. No doubt it irritates her to find the only thing she has to throw at the rampant cats copulating in the back yard in March are bundles of old correspondence from the castle.

And Lucas himself? As noted, the scars from the lashes get a little bit sore, but who can say why the park still keeps cropping up in his nasty dreams? When he’s working at his desk in the suburban bank, he often sees its contours in bits of the wall where the paint is flaking off, and the pony often emerges from some crack or other. Is the guilt still there, will it go on for ever? The circumstances change; if you’re sitting on a log making music and somebody’s lying trapped underneath it, practically unable to hear, it might seem a simple matter to do your duty, get up and roll the log away. But if the one on the log’s young, he’s often told by the others who are used to sitting up there that the slightest little movement can cause the whole building — symbolically speaking, it’s true, but even so — to collapse. Better to tune your instrument and blow hard so that his moans are drowned; perhaps the poor creature trapped under the log and supporting the whole system can get some pleasure out of the concert. Poking around a bit in one of his ears, so that the music can get through more easily, is the best you can do to help without risking your own skull being smashed in.

If you’re young, then, and rather soft-centred, as Lucas was at the time, for instance, you think you’re duty-bound to stay on the log; if you move slightly the whole world trembles ominously, the baying of the instrument and the red, puffed-out cheeks of the player arouse both disgust and despair, the feeling of helpless guilt is almost overpowering. Then you may get lucky, somebody presses a recorder into your hands, soon you learn which holes to cover and how to blow, and soon you find your own spiral staircase in oblivion’s mansion of notes, and soon you’re sitting of your own free will on that fatal log, conjuring up the little temple of symbolism and adding on ornamentations of your own. You hang up your guilt on the highest point of the gable end like a silly little tin souvenir of your childhood. But it was a bit different for Lucas, that initial period when the child had stopped jumping about on the log without realizing it, the time of inhibitions and guilt: fear of the park, the death of the horse and the gardener’s children, it all held him in a vice-like grip — but the whip came and set him free after all; the little flute flourished for a while in his hands, but it didn’t sound quite right even so, the undertone of fear, guilt and bitterness was rather shrill and was noticed by the family. Just when his father had been practising with his whip enough to drive the last remains of his disobedience out of his body, however, came the crash, the log rolled slowly over, and now they were lying underneath it themselves, gasping in terror for breath. But Lucas — did it happen as one has a right to expect, did his silent conscience do an about-turn and start protesting bitterly against those who were grinding his body down into the dust? Before, he’d felt guilty; surely he now felt vindicated? But it’s remarkable how lonely Lucas always seemed to be! His new friends who sweated away in the same room as him ten hours a day and snatched a hurried meal of warmed-up potatoes and soya beans at their desks, afraid that if they didn’t they’d have to stay behind and not get home in time to do the overtime they had to do in order to be able to afford to pay for the room where they did the overtime when they weren’t sleeping and in order to be able to buy more soya beans so that they’d have enough strength to work both at home and at the bank; these new friends with bent backs and short laughs who gave off a vague aroma of lard and not excessively clean socks had no sensation of being squashed by logs and being slowly serenaded to death by people who were using the logs as benches.