Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘Who screamed? Who was is that screamed?’

It’s the captain talking, and he cocks his invisible revolver, and they all remember the scream that started waves rippling over a mill-pond, made a deep hole that would last forever in a mirror, a hole their lives could drain away through. If a human being is like a white bath-tub which it always is when you’re a child, and when you’re really little it gets filled with fresh, clean water for you to play around in, lukewarm at first, but later it gets hotter and hotter, water fit for actions, thoughts, feelings to bathe in, water condemned to stop being clean but maybe it doesn’t have to become all that dirty, water that’s destined to be emptied out when the bather hasn’t the strength to wash off any more dirt — if a human being’s a bath-tub like that, then there’ll be a point in his life when the plug is suddenly pulled out by some unseen hand, and all the water, cool now, full of dirt and purity, flows out of him and the gurgling of death as it pours down the drain first fills him with horror, and then with resignation, and in the end he just longs for the same unknown hand that pulled out the plug to come with a brush and scrub away the rim of dirt from the sides of the bath. But with a pitiful sort of whimper, the last drops of dirty water are sucked down into the black hole and the tub becomes silent and empty, the bath-tub is dead and darkness falls over the bathroom. A key is turned in the lock from the outside, and the bathroom is closed once and for all: there’ll be nobody else taking a bath in this bathroom.

They remember the scream — but who screamed? They can hear the roar of the breakers — but where does it come from? They’re scared already — but why? They walk slowly back up the beach, towards the cliff, and a cluster of iguanas that have evidently been lying there watching them turn back slowly and defiantly and shuffle up towards the grass. Then they stop and hesitate, and the smell of the corpse under the canvas sheet wafts over to them in broad waves of velvet and threatens to choke them. They’re filled with death, they’re like vases that have been standing for so long in an empty room that both the flowers and the water have gone musty.

The scream hovers over their heads, it has the ruthless shadow of a gallows, and the weaker their memory of what it sounded like, the more tangible it becomes. The scream gets hotter and hotter, and they all start sweating; the scream turns into this shadow, and they all shiver with the cold like dogs; the scream is in the way the iguanas move and in the lazy rustling sound from the plateau and the scream is hiding under a canvas sheet, which is held down on to the sand by stones so that it won’t suddenly rise up and reveal what nobody wants to see.

And what’s all this about the water keg?

2

There’s nothing you can do about it: you take a glass and empty it, or you take an evil deed from the pile of undone deeds and carry it out — and all at once, you look different. As far as you’re concerned, it’s something you can put up with. You yourself are not too worried about what you’ve done, but it’s as if there were muscles in your face which like playing at being your conscience.

A few brisk winds have got up, and just for a moment blown away the sticky sweet smell of death out into the lagoon, so that it’s easier to talk again.

‘It must have been one of us who did it,’ says the captain. ‘The water can’t have run out of its own accord like this.’

As he speaks, sweat comes crawling over his face. Big, grey beads of sweat, sweat that looks scared. They all move closer to each other, as if they could avoid death that way. The captain hardly has room to swing his revolver hand round, even. They have their backs turned towards the beach, and they’re facing the cliffs, as if they were expecting to be gunned down from behind.

‘No, somebody must have done it.’ Boy Larus echoes his words, but his voice is so uncertain that everyone apart from Lucas Egmont glances up at him and his eyes shy away like a horse, because no innocent person can look as innocent as a guilty man.

It’s his temples, his cheek-bones and profile that give the game away. It’s always been the same, thinks Lucas Egmont, the tiniest glass of wine and everybody can tell just by looking at me that I’ve been on the booze. I could hit a fish on a stone and afterwards look like a double murderer. It’s too late now of course — God knows I’ve got used to the idea of dying! — it’s too late now, but I should have always carried a mask to hide behind.

They haven’t noticed anything yet, though; they’re more scared of the dead boxer than of the dead water keg. Tim Solider was the one who’d come up with the idea of the stones. We must do something to stop the canvas from blowing away, he’d said the previous night when he was pacing up and down restlessly between the fire and the rambling English girl; something that’ll keep the smell in until we can bury him.

Tim Solider is very scared of the smell, more scared of the smell than of anything else. He once had an aunt who lived on her own in an attic room, and she used to say until the day she died that you should go to a funeral or a house where somebody’s just died, and take note of how you can smell the corpse, because just before you die you’ll notice a similar smell coming from your own body and you’ll lock yourself in and scrub yourself down, but nothing helps, there’s nothing more you can do.

Bunched tightly together, like a winning football team leaving the pitch, they walk up the cliffs and the morning is as clear as a peach although the air is terribly difficult to breathe. They stop, panting, after almost every other step and pretend to look round, to gaze out to sea, to peer at the clouds in the sky or the peaceful horizon; but it’s all a put-on act, for no one must hear that you’re out of breath, no one must know that you’re bleeding, and when you cry, it must always be hidden by a smile. Oh yes, everything’s a put-on act: hardly any of them knows what the sea or the sky looks like this morning, because if they do look out to sea, all they can make out is an oblong bundle, half-covered by a canvas sheet, tossing in the waves, and an unpleasantly familiar keg rolling slowly in towards land, and the whole of the sky is obscured by the dead body and the empty water keg.

Oh, how they hate him. Imagine being so isolated, and still being so betrayed. It feels like having been set down in the desert, with no hope of rescue — and then even being robbed of the salvation offered by the empty water keg. They hate him, but the ashes of fear are raining down all the time, and as they climb up towards the plateau, where the smell can’t reach because its wings are too heavy, the dead body is slowly covered by those ashes, and soon there’s nothing left but an inadequate outline of his memory — and then when they stop to get their breath, the whole beach is filled by a gigantic water keg, and they start back slightly in surprise, and now they’re even less keen to look at one another than before; but when they hastily turn their backs on the beach, they imagine they can still see that same, nasty tank falling slowly over in the grass and reluctantly disappearing, for fear is a cunning beacon which isn’t satisfied with useless symbols when there are so many useful ones.

In their eagerness to get away from the corpse they’ve got as far as the first bushes and it’s there, on the steep, shiny cliff, its green furrows glistening in the sunlight, that the first explosion occurs. Tim Solider is standing like a negro with his arms dangling, and staring at the mysterious bushes which still frighten him just as much as they did at the start, he’s just parted some branches and peered into the green darkness, and then with a sudden start, as if he’d unexpectedly caught sight of a snake in the woods, he jerks back his hand — and at that very moment of terror, the captain pounces on him, almost like a tiger. His heavy body crashes into Tim Solider’s with potentially cruel force and they fall over more or less straight away, locked closely together, and Tim Solider’s back smacks into the rock with a sickening, dull thud. Perhaps he’s broken something, or something’s been crushed: he just lies there at first and ignores the way the captain is pounding away non-stop at his chest with his clenched fists.