Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘All right,’ he says reluctantly, slowly loosening his scarf and examining his scar yet again, stroking it, ‘all right, I suppose I might as well stay a bit longer — but don’t get any ideas.’

‘But my dear Ernst,’ she says, going and lying down on the bed, ‘I stopped getting ideas ages ago.’

When he comes in to her, she’s naked under her dressing gown and, thanks to a carefully staged coincidence, she lets him notice. But he just pulls up a chair to the side of the bed and sits down and looks at the little painting over the bureau, one of those things people inherit: a few cats are playing with a ball on a patchwork quilt. The frame is cracked in four different places, and he thinks how he could have mended it were it not for all that solitude that got in the way. But there’s a corner he’s not looking at and he knows it’s empty: all there is there is a few crumpled bills, but until last Friday there used to be a desk there, and then it was sold all of a sudden. What’s the use of a desk when you don’t write any more, when you’ve exposed the whole business, the whole works, and there’s a war on not far away, and you don’t need a desk when you’re there.

‘But darling,’ she says, tugging away at his arm even though he doesn’t lie down beside her, ‘surely you weren’t going to go away without saying goodbye, I mean, that’s the least one might have expected, don’t you think?’

‘Why?’ he asks, turning to look at the empty corner so that he can really feel the pain inside him. ‘Why? Why should that be the least you might have expected? I thought nobody expected anything of me any more. There’s nothing to be expected from here any more, oh no, we’ve closed down for today, we’ve closed down for the night, we’ve closed down for every day and every night for as long as there are days and nights. Can’t you see I’m hollow, I’m squeezed out, I’m like a fish that’s just been caught and bashed against a stone and it bursts and all its juices come spurting out. There’s only one thing I live for now, and that’s nobody’s business. I’m going, yes, OK, but not because I have any special desire to go clambering around in those mountains everybody’s on about so much, or to start fighting with bayonets in all those tunnels. I’ve no desire at all to do anything. But you see, solitary types like me are important for wars. We say to ourselves: hey, here’s an unusually distinguished way of committing suicide. Here’s a chance to die while still observing all the respectable rules, and you might even get a medal to hang on your tombstone as well: this is a death that might satisfy both your vanity and your death wish — what more could you ask for?’

The woman just lies there on the bed, calmly and quietly, and he can sit down beside her without her flinging herself on top of him.

‘You see, we don’t care about which side we’re on or anything like that. It’s all the same to us, nothing matters as far as we’re concerned, and the generals would be horrified if only they knew how many empty shadows they had in their army, how many who’d go over to the other side without any hesitation if only they knew they’d stand a better chance of being lonely in a definitive sort of way over there.’

‘Good God,’ she says softly; but before she knows what’s happening, she’d dug her nails into his thighs and is screaming at the top of her voice: ‘For God’s sake, just go away, can’t you? Go away, get to hell out of here, I never want to see you again, just leave me alone with all the debts and this rotten life and the boy in hospital. You couldn’t care less that everybody’s going on about you and calling you a ruthless bastard who’s running away from everything without so much as a word of explanation, not a single word, a ruthless. .’

She screams herself naked and writhes about like a patient in a high fever, and her throat is positively foaming with all the curses.

‘Just think, I might even have taken you seriously,’ he says, slapping her lightly on the throat and mouth until she quietens down, ‘if your anger hadn’t reeked so much of sex!’ He fastens her dressing gown for her as if he were most offended, and before he gets up and leaves, he takes one last, long look at the empty corner. He thinks he can see a shadow sneaking out of it and giving him a contemptuous nod as it passes him on the way out; a whole procession of shadows, in fact, some of them pacing backwards and forwards between the desk and the bed and representing the young dramatist Ernst Wilson, chewing over some lines that never got properly written, and the shadows rolling about on the floor by the wall look remarkably like the not entirely untalented young poet Ernst W. Wilson just three weeks ago. What’s gone wrong? What kind of a tornado is it that’s devastated this existence that seemed to be on its way to success?

His wife has stopped screaming, true, and now she’s crying instead; but you can’t take into account everybody in the world who starts crying, and now he really is leaving: he closes the door behind him and can hear her crying, but it’s too late to worry about that now. No, he doesn’t even feel that little pang which so often tries in vain to warn people when they’ve done something bad. The rucksack is standing there in the hall, ready to fly, and he lets it do just that: you can let a rucksack do whatever it likes, a rucksack doesn’t cry, a rucksack doesn’t spoil things by shouting when you want to hear space singing, you can say what you like to a rucksack, it doesn’t care whether you’re cold or warm; and they go off together the rucksack and Ernst W. Wilson, and wander along lots of the long, asphalted streets, all shiny with rain and loneliness, and all the time he is aware that something has happened for the last time, it’s as if he’s been stricken by some incurable disease, or maybe incurable healthiness, it all boils down to the same thing in fact.

Already as he leans against a poplar tree and closes his eyes and lets the wind and the rain flow over him, he can see the desolate track leading straight into solitude, a broad track, like a railway without rails, a heavy track pressed down into the earth, whimpering, with flames rising up from it, and somebody is lying crushed between the wheels but the wheels just go on turning, heavy, implacable, stabbing down into the mud with their cogs, water seeps slowly up into the horses’ hoofmarks, smoke rises from the sand as the track passes through deserts, the snow screeches shrilly as it progresses over wintry routes, many lie down wheezing and think they’re drowning and just as they die, they dream the track is a log floating past them and all they need to do is to grab hold of it and they’ll be saved, and they do grab hold of it with their fingers, but then new wheels come along the same track and crush their fingers without any hint of mercy and then Ernst W. Wilson appears, sweat pouring off him, and he’s half-running in order to keep up, and he stands on the odd liver or kidney or stomach, there isn’t much time you see and they’re all dying anyway and they’re lying in such a way that you just have to stand on them if you’re going to get past — and of course you do want to get past, you want to follow that track as far as it goes, to the point where it suddenly leaves this wicked earth and leaps out like a rainbow into space, the space that’s singing out of solitude.

One after another, cigarette ends sizzle and die on the asphalt that’s slowly getting lighter, but the track just keeps on going, on and on; it’s a good track to follow, a straight track, a track full of hatred and curses and he’s never going to leave it, he’s going to love this track with all the hatred and all the love he can muster and trample on anybody who tries to spoil it, who tries to debase it with the stink of their rotting corpses, and with sweat pouring off him he’ll run along it through crunching snow, through dusty sand, through sticky mud, through fields flowing with blood, and he’ll be a private, then a corporal and a sergeant and a lieutenant and a captain — and the track will never desert him. He’ll be faithful to his track. He’ll be faithful to his solitude and unfaithful to everything else.