Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But even so, you don’t realize how huge this space is by falling or lying there stuck to the ground like that, feeling the pressure against your chest; it’s only when space starts singing you begin to grasp what you’ve had no idea about before, and you catch on with such shattering certainty that you’d burst like a balloon if only you could. But when you’re lying there stuck so hopelessly to the magnet, there’s nothing you can do about it: all you can do is listen, you can’t even raise your hands and stick your fingers in your ears, and in any case: that wouldn’t help either because when space is singing out of solitude, you’re changed into a big, tense, listening ear and if you don’t want to hear anything you’d need a meteor to stick into it, or a heavenly body might do, a star perhaps. As for the song — oh, it’s so beautiful and yet terrible, it’s the most beautiful thing there is and yet the most horrible thing there is. If only you could be killed by it, but all you can do is lie there alive and let the song flow through you like water through a turbine, and it will always be like that, you feel space will always echo with solitude and you yourself, a vulnerable ear, will lie there outstretched over a heartless, naked surface listening to a cruelly beautiful song made even more cruel by the lack of echoes, atmospheric turbulence and earache.

But somehow or other: you must have been cured of this solitude, or just simply fallen asleep; you wake up in your hole on earth and see the usual little glimpse of eternity smiling through between the roller blind and the bed-end.

So, you’re not alone any more, then, you think, all right, the awkward adventure, the desperate episode is over — and life goes on, a little bit less solitary all the time; but in fact it’s not over, it’s only just beginning. You sit in your room or you go out of your room, it doesn’t matter which, and you meet people or you don’t see a soul, it makes no difference, you talk to your wall or you don’t say a word to your wall, you write a letter or you just buy a stamp, you set off on a journey or you just buy a ticket, you go out dancing or you just go to the dance hall, you do something or you don’t do anything, you let things go or you don’t miss a trick; it makes no difference, no difference at all: you’ll always feel this glass wall separating you from everybody else even so, this hard pane of glass you always carry around with you and look through and are seen through and which you brought back with you from your journey through space. You’re as isolated as a fever patient, and that’s only right: you’ve got a higher fever than most people; you could also say: you’re as isolated as a condemned man, and that’s also right: you’re more fit to die than anybody else.

You’re alone now as well, but in a worse way than you were before; space isn’t singing out of solitude, space isn’t singing at all: it’s raining or snowing or it’s windy — but so what? You’re alone in a dirty way, in a miserly way, an unaesthetic way — and when there isn’t any way out in any case (if ceasing to feel alone is in fact a way out), don’t be surprised that you long to be back in that huge space with its devilish but sublime music, its heartless but hygienic solitude, its absolute freedom from any kind of life, that’s true, but at the same time an absolute freedom from any necessity to seek company, to open doors where no doors exist, to smile when you feel like crying, to caress when you feel like scratching, to look for friends when you have learnt that the world is full of enemies.

You long for moments of absolute self-effacement, of the most brutal and sublime solitude with as much intensity as you can muster, with all the fire of your dreams; you have become a party to a dangerous secret, you have been initiated into the use of a dangerous poison called solitude, and like a drug addict you now divide your life into two periods: intoxication and recovery. But what should you do when you’re in your hole on earth? Should you try and acquire close friends? — No, because you’re afraid, and probably rightly so, that having a close friend, even if ‘close’ is as relative as you like, will put you in an awkward position from the outset, for your chances of being flung out into wide, cold space will be all the fewer. You should keep people at arm’s length, then — and come to that, the glass pane or the membrane surrounding you is of considerable help. Should you get yourself a mistress? — Yes, but only so that when a suitable moment comes, you can terrify her with your coldness, get her to hate you, to push you away from her with the coldest of hands, give you a push full of hatred which flings you head over heels into space, that was just what you wanted — thank you very much! Or join the social whirl, perhaps, mixing with sympathizers and people of like mind, and letting yourself be bitten by the snakes slithering around the salons and claiming they admire you, respect you, etc. Or why not expose yourself to the contempt of the whole world, to the anger of the whole world, how you do it is irrelevant, and the result is irrelevant come to that as long as it can drive you into a state of absolute solitude, if only it can make you hear once again how space is singing out of solitude.

As he says to her one night, their last night in fact: the train is leaving the next morning with the three thousand volunteers and he’s still quite a young man: ‘We’re a special kind of person, we solitary ones, we’re a race on our own. We really ought to be marked in some special way so that everybody can tell straight away and say to themselves: ah, he’s one of those solitary types, I’d better leave him alone in case he infects me, he’s got big wounds under his clothes, like all of them have.’

He stands there in front of the mirror in the hall made brown from all the smoke, where all the inherited dark furniture from the smoking room is, looking into a young face, tense with excitement, criss-crossed with small furrows caused by the despair he’s already lived through, his eyes are shining and slightly bloodshot after the whisky, his chin displays a souvenir of a careless blow from an axe when he was a boy, a white scar sliding down towards his neck; it’s not a handsome face, but it’s quite an honest one, it tells surprisingly few lies for a face, and he thinks: I don’t need a sign, you can tell by looking at me even so. But he covers the scar with his scarf and continues talking to her while looking in the mirror and arranging his scarf, because he wants to leave shortly.

‘We could have a sign, as I said, a little patch sewn on to our chests, a patch with a big letter L, L for Lonely, Loner, Lonesome and all the other compounds beginning with lone-; just one sign, note, not two, not six, not a hundred. When we go out to war as volunteers, we could. .’

‘Ernst,’ says his wife, in that gentle tone of voice you reserve for when you’re feeling desperate and want a particular person, but only him, to know you are, ‘thank you so much for torturing me so splendidly. I’ll remember it always. But Ernst, don’t go just yet — what on earth will you do with yourself all night? Your train doesn’t go until six.’

His rucksack is already packed and ready by the front door, ready to take off at any moment, a big, heavy bird that’s finally got tired of waddling around on land. He looks first at his rucksack, then at his wife, and then back again, and he pictures to himself those long, miserable streets lined with bare poplars all round the station, and thinks about how he’ll wander around aimlessly, chain-smoking and watching the butts drown in puddles, whistling snatches of melodies as they come into his head, being accosted by dubious types who think he’s looking for company, feeling cold and all alone but still not managing to get that lovely feeling of solitude.