Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

And just before dawn, when he and the girl go up to her room in a damp little riverside house, she flings herself straight down on to the bed in the alcove and he says to her harshly, ‘Don’t get any ideas.’

And she replies, ‘You don’t get any ideas in this job. But aren’t you going to take off your rucksack?’

Feeling better, he takes off his rucksack and sits down on the edge of the bed and he notices she’s naked underneath, but the way she shows it is less brazen than when his wife did it.

‘You’ve got undressed for nothing,’ he says. ‘I just want to have a little chat for a while, just a chat.’

‘Go on then,’ she says, closing her eyes.

‘Why are you closing your eyes?’

‘I’ve no desire to see you naked.’

‘Have you ever felt really lonely?’

‘You’re never lonely in this job.’

‘Oh,’ he says, and wanders off although his body stays on the bed for a while and his nose can smell all the men — the sweat, sandwiches and whisky — who have cashed in their despair in the alcove, ‘Oh, I’ve felt so lonely, so lonely and so happy.’

And he goes on to recall all the sublime moments of solitude when everything has sunk out of existence, people, needs and thoughts, and only that fearful music was left to flood his being. A little boy is left behind in the grass, very high grass; he can’t walk properly yet, and they’ve just seen a long, black grass snake wriggling under a tuft of grass and all the other children have raced back to the house screaming, but they’ve forgotten about him, because you can’t run as fast as you’d like to if you’re dragging along a little boy who still can’t walk properly because he’s been ill, they’ve just left him behind with his fear, his extreme terror of the black snake. He’s just about to start crying and already he can see the house and the long, soft grass through a surging haze of tears, but then the rain starts falling, violent and brutal rain that hammers away with its fists on all the roofs and swishes down into the grass and the abandoned boy is soaked to the skin straight away. There’s a dull rumbling behind the house and suddenly the thunderstorm approaches, lightning crawls over the roof and rain comes pouring down the path and swirls about at his feet, the grass hangs down like hair when you’ve just been swimming and then, all of a sudden, he realizes he’s not afraid, not the slightest bit afraid any more, he’s so alone, so abandoned by everybody, but it feels good to be alone, good to be abandoned. All there is in the whole world apart from himself is this wet grass, the rain, and the thunderstorm; there’s nobody left to pull his hair, to force him to chew his food even though everything he’s ever eaten in all his life is rising up into his throat, the lightning doesn’t have any whips and the grass doesn’t have any nails and the rain doesn’t have any harsh voices — and that’s why he starts screaming like a thing possessed and kicks and struggles like the very devil when somebody suddenly remembers about him once it’s stopped raining and runs out to fetch him in.

And then another time his piggy bank is lying in pieces on the sideboard like a shattered dream, and he’s stolen money from himself so that he can buy a little atlas showing all the countries where he can be alone, and his father, a chauffeur for the upper classes, beats him into solitude with a little whip. How delighted he is when he suddenly realizes he can get away from everything and everybody with the aid of a little whip, and he’s in a state of ecstasy as the lashes cut into him; and then he remembers all the times when he does what seem to be the strangest things, the most disgusting deeds, the crudest acts, just so that somebody will beat him into another world, that everybody will hate him into that sweet solitude. The time comes when he’s too old for that sort of thing, but he takes secret delight in discovering all the possibilities opened up by self-torture: you can take your protective membrane with you and move among people who are all laughing and with no effort at all turn their laughter into arrows that tear your heart open; or you can be desperate for sex but just as desperate for deprivation and on midsummer eve you can stroll about the big public parks where everybody’s making love all over the place in the grass, and take bitter delight in feeling your heart fill up with tears; there’s so much you can do when you’re that age, when you’re sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and every day God gives you can discover even more things.

You can discover contempt, for instance: oh how lovely it is, how delightful, to recall some twisted memory of laughter distorted by contempt, thousands of red lips, all of them curled in disgust, and to be launched by them into the solitude of space. There’s that time when the middle-aged stoker on the little coaster he worked on as an ordinary seaman when he was still at school invites him into his cabin and seduces him after making him feel disgusted by all the nasty smells women have and all the diseases they spread and getting him to drink a few glasses of whisky, and what takes place is so surprising that he doesn’t get round to putting up any resistance, it’s so incredibly novel, it’s as if some animal he’s never seen before has suddenly revealed itself to him and rendered him helpless through surprise and fear; but afterwards, when he goes back over the deck in the dark and down into the dormitory, he feels so dirty, he wants to jump overboard and drown himself in order to get clean. And all the ones playing cards and all the ones writing letters turn to look at him at exactly the same time as he comes down the ladder.

‘How did you get on with Christian, then?’ one of them shouts.

‘I hope you were really nice to him,’ another one bellows.

‘It’s about time you got yourself a boyfriend,’ yells a third. But nobody hits him, nobody laughs, and in the end everybody’s face is stiff with contempt, and he’s infectious, and everybody else has gone into quarantine. He just stands there with his arms dangling and feels their contempt seeping into his blood, and then he realizes with a feeling of enormous happiness that he couldn’t care less, it’s just good that people feel contempt for him, perhaps the best thing that could possibly happen, and he has no problems at all when he goes back again up the ladder after one of them shouts, ‘Clear off, you’ve no business round here! Go back to Christian, you can sleep in his cabin from now on! There’s plenty of room for you as well in his bed.’

And so he stays in Christian’s cabin for the rest of the trip because that makes him lonelier than ever and you can get used to anything and there are ways of lying like a desert island miles away from anywhere: true, it can be plundered and pillaged, but when the plunderers and pillagers have gone away the water is still lapping around its shores and it’s still just as remote as it ever was, as long as nobody builds a bridge to it.

But he’s brought back to school, and time passes and heals all wounds and a romantic teacher tricks him into believing there’s such a thing as sublimation, you can sublimate your urges, you can get away from all your bad experiences by experiencing all your actions on an inner plain. He leaves school and starts work in a solicitor’s office, works as a language teacher, gets married early and becomes a father and hasn’t felt any urge to travel out into the world of solitude for ages, because somebody has told him the only possible way of doing things is the normal way, and all you can do is to laugh in the right place and cry in the right place and conform to all the conventions and only go against them on an inner plain, the popular inner plain; you want to be happy after all, and happiness means being ruthless with yourself and considerate towards everybody else, and then again: time itself has bidden farewell to all freebooters of the soul.