Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

He sits on the girl’s bed as the hairy dawn creeps animal-like over the window-pane, and diagonally opposite the house is a bridge and when the two halves of the bridge start to open all the sand in the tramlines slides down like white beams and dives into the water.

‘Hey,’ he says to the girl, grabbing her by the shoulder for she’s fallen asleep, ‘you should have seen me marching backwards and forwards along that triangle between the table, the bed and the window, trying to condense my solitude and to believe that I was the greatest because I’d been the most solitary of all, and all the time being aware of how impotent I was, understanding all that poetry business, which was a waste of time in fact because nobody was interested, and knowing full well that whatever went on between me and my desk was just a pitiful case of opting out. Sometimes I nearly choked, and managed to save myself at the last minute by throwing myself to the ground and ripping my clothes off; I felt I was being got at, and I screamed at my wife: Why are you getting at me? I’m not your judge, she said. No, you’re my executioner, I yelled. I don’t have a chopper, she yelled back. No, but I do, I screamed back at her — and so it went on: our confrontations went on for ever and ever without end, like an escalator, and I was choking more and more and not getting anywhere on any front. But one evening a couple of weeks ago when I was all on my own — she’d left me, just for the time being, as usual — I suddenly overturned the table and stood it in front of me like a barricade, because I was convinced somebody had just come into the room with the aim of attacking me, biting me to pieces, crunching me between his teeth, and it was as if I’d just been bashed violently on the back of the head: the room disappeared, erased from my consciousness by a giant with a rubber, and I was consumed by a dazzling light and then I was lying once again on the shiny surface in the midst of space, and everything was so boundlessly silent at first, and then there was a whining sound as if a drop of water had let go and had suddenly started falling at tremendous speed through eternity, and then there was that invisible rain that always came before the song started — and then space would start singing and I could see myself like an ear, just growing and growing out of the ground, and once when I woke up my room was just the same as it always was but I was sweating because of the singing and I didn’t realize that I would never again be able to run away from my solitude, least of all by using artificial methods like poetry, and all the past homed in on my scent and flung itself upon me and I got the strange feeling that I was a woman and a man at the same time and I got dressed up in my wife’s clothes and I got drunk and I masturbated and suddenly I found I had something to do up in the attic. Nobody saw me going, but when I got to the attic door I found I’d forgotten the key, and I could hear a noise on the stairs and when I leaned over the rail I could see a mass of black figures, among them my wife, on their way upstairs. I curled up into a ball on the attic stairs in the hope that no one would notice me, but, needless to say, somebody grabbed me by the shoulder and rolled me over. Why, Ernst, somebody shouted, and I ran into my room but they came racing after me. I looked round the room in a panic and was shattered to see that the disorder everything was in was a woman’s disorder, a slightly confused disorder, not the spiky, brutal disorder a man creates. I pushed my desk into the corner and crouched behind it so that I could defend myself.

‘What do you know about solitude?’ I yelled at them, ‘What do you know about the great solitude of space? You don’t know what it’s like when space starts singing out of solitude. You may have read poems about it, you may have heard something about it in Gothic novels — but that’s about all.’

‘But,’ I screeched in a voice that rose up as wild as a stallion, for the executioner within me had grasped the axe outside me and chopped off my normal, decent self, ‘what is the whole of literature compared with a single suicide? What is life but an unsuccessful suicide attempt? What’s the point of decency in life compared with the decency of death?’

‘But now it’s all over and done with,’ he says to the girl, who has fallen asleep again. ‘I’ve sold out, and there’s only one way out now.’ And he wakes her up cruelly and stuffs a banknote into her ear.

‘I didn’t hear a word you said,’ she says, yawning, ‘but thanks all the same.’ He’s already hoisted the rucksack on to his shoulders and is on his way to the station.

And the track slices its way through the deserts, it glows blood-red in the sunsets and he runs through it and his sweat and his blood spurt out of him like a fountain, and he curses the track as well as loving the track, and it’s covered in pure white snow which crunches under his feet and under the wheels, and rib-cages of animals and humans stick up like white spikes out of the track, and in the rivers the skeletons of ancient, wrecked ships all look the same; occasionally, fires flare up alongside the track and sometimes he feels fires burning within him, but the best he can do is to keep going with the only hope he has left now that all the others have gone bankrupt: that the track will dare to make the final leap into solitude, that gigantic solitude where solitude itself sings, and the best thing to do is to sacrifice everything, to be faithful to your solitude and unfaithful to everything else, and maybe the track will pass over Boy Larus at an acute angle, or maybe one of the other survivors, and press down on to his rib-cage, or somebody else’s, because there is always a hope, the only great hope left: the hope that the final leap will be from that very rib-cage, that very heart.

1

He must have suddenly acquired the vacant look of a murderer or a drunk, because everybody starts staring at him, leaning forward over the empty water keg, or so he thinks, and their movements betray both menace and fear. Somebody has woken them up by screaming, and the shock at being so rudely awakened is still flitting about their faces. Worried stiff, he moves a few steps to one side so that the sun won’t expose him even more. The captain slowly turns his hip to the right, towards him, and his clenched fist hovers just below it, as if he had a revolver at the ready underneath his rags.

That was stupid of me, thinks Lucas Egmont, that was really stupid of me. Why didn’t I think of my gormless face which gives away everything I’ve done and everything I will ever do: I might just as well shout out what I’ve done at the top of my voice, and then it wouldn’t feel so awful, so damned creepy. It feels as if my face were covered in crawling ants, and I can’t lift a finger to shift them, because nobody’s supposed to know they’re there.

Now the captain bends over towards him at a ridiculous angle, and his hand is trembling as if he were on the point of going for his revolver. They don’t surround him straight away, they just come closer, menacing, and yet at the same time as cowed as a lion in a circus, and he thinks that if only he had a whip he could get them to lie down in the sand and come creeping up to him with their heads scraping into it — then just one lash of the whip: and they’d be licking the sand from his feet. It’s the fear inside him that’s dreaming.

But the fear inside all of them is dreaming, it’s just about the last day they have to live, and they all know that in a ridiculous, sub-conscious sort of way; just as an old horse knows it’s destined for the slaughterhouse when a little bow-legged fellow smelling of blood comes up to its stable one afternoon and puts a different bridle on it, and he’s hopeless when it comes to taking it out and he leads it out on to the road without even letting it have a drink from the butt by the well and then he sets off in the wrong direction, the wrong direction altogether; or a cow that stands outside a stall all evening, mooing her head off, and she can smell death oozing out of the doors even though she’s been out at pasture all day long and shouldn’t know anything at all, although the heifer that was slaughtered around noon in the stall that day is already hanging up in the shed with swarms of flies crawling all over its stomach.