Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

There follows a brief moment of silence as the captain, sure of his superiority, stops punching; the whole world falls silent save for the panting of the two men. Someone has stifled the pain of the sea, the wind has suddenly dropped, and not even the iguanas clatter over the stones, although on the cliff face just below the two combatants, two large iguanas are lying motionless, evidently watching them.

Lucas Egmont is the first to notice their potential menace. The iguanas on the island have short, wiry, immobile eyelids which have had many thousand years in which to shrink; behind those permanently open curtains, their eyes always seem as though they are crouching ready to jump, but they also have lazy bodies which, thanks to congenital idleness, always hold the leap in check. But the two iguanas lying motionless in wait just below the captain and Tim Solider seem suddenly to have lost their iguana-souls, and intense fury is almost threatening to burst their shells. They’re lying so very, very still, but that’s just the fateful gathering of strength before an enormous leap.

Then he notices the thin brown liquid trickling down the rock and sees how the iguanas let it pass between them, their bodies tensed and threatening, and then it all falls into place. He gropes around for an arm to catch on to, but fails to find one as he is standing all alone. He wants to shout a warning, but can’t as the captain is bending over Tim Solider’s face and screaming, ‘You did it, you bastard. You’re the one who emptied out the water, you’re the one who unscrewed the tap and let it all run out of the keg. You’re the one who tried to trick us saying you’d found some food, you’re the one who brought us a box of glass beads and said: Here you are ladies and gentlemen, I’ve brought some food for you. Oh, don’t think I don’t know how much you hate us, just because you’re inferior to us, because you were put into the world in order to serve people. And so you thought you’d murder us, because let’s face it, from the moment you emptied that water keg you became a murderer, my friend. When you murdered us, you thought: now we’ll see who’s strongest, who’s going to live longest! Ha ha, I’ll laugh at them when they’re writhing in agony, and when I start writhing in agony I’ll still go on laughing. Oh yes, I know what you were thinking all right, but you were wrong, you mark my words, because when we start getting thirsty, when we start getting visions of wells and streams and springs, you won’t be alive any more. You won’t be alive any more the moment we start getting thirsty. We’ll all be out of our minds with fear and thirst and we’ll shout: Where’s the murderer? and somebody will reply: There he is, he’s marching up and down on the hill up there, and then we’ll all chase him till he drops and we’ll leap on him with all the strength our fury gives us, and if anybody tries to protest about what we’re doing, we’ll say: It’s only a murderer, it’s only a murderer getting his well-deserved punishment.’

Oh, how scared he feels while he’s yelling and screaming, how full of morning air he fills his lungs as he forces out his fear so that it spatters all over the man lying underneath him, but the man underneath him has plenty of fear of his own, and he wriggles and writhes as he tries to get out of the grasp of the squashed iguana. An iguana you have squashed between your back and a rock after a violent fall is surely not something you should be afraid of, but even so he can feel the dead iguana’s body swelling up beneath him until eventually the whole of his is resting on it and the cold rises up around his hips like a wave of death and then when he manages to turn his head and sees the thin brown trail containing the iguana’s life-blood trickling down the cliff he opens his mouth wide and shrieks in a frenzy, ‘The iguanas! Watch out for the iguanas!’

But everybody except Lucas Egmont thinks he’s trying to get away with what he’s done, and trembling with an excess of obedience and an excess of fear, Boy Larus goes up to him and bends over him and spits straight in his face. At the same time, the captain sits up so that he’s astride Tim Solider’s knees and that’s what saves him for the time being. The iguanas have been slowly and apparently nonchalantly getting closer and suddenly they attack, their heavy bodies leap forwards as if borne by a flash of lightning, and side by side but on each side of the brown trickle they crash into Tim Solider’s chest in sickening unison. They bite straight through his thin shirt and into his flesh, and hang on limply like rats as the blood oozes up around their armoured snouts. All his blood seems to be flowing down to his wound and his face turns quite yellow as it does on a corpse and when Lucas Egmont kneels down beside him, his eyes have crept back into their horror and the nails on one of his hands are scratching and scratching away at the rock till they bend backwards.

The iguanas are completely passive again, but the leap is still trembling in their bodies and in their treacherous eyes, and when Lucas Egmont gropes around over Tim Solider’s chest he can feel the creatures trembling inside their shells, lying there like time bombs, incredibly sensitive to every pressure. As he draws back his arm he can feel from the silence just how lonely he is in the world, and when he glances quickly round without letting the iguanas out of his sight even so, all four of them are standing quite closely together, at the mid-point between his fear and his hatred.

‘Come and help me,’ he shouts. ‘We must get them off him before he bleeds to death.’

But no one budges an inch. They just stand there irresolutely, like the chief mourners by a graveside after the final oration. Boy Larus makes a symbolic move as if preparing to jump, but is easily stopped by the captain’s foot.

Then Lucas Egmont crouches down beside Tim Solider, takes hold of his hand and pushes it in front of him like a shield over the red battlefield of his chest, and as he watches the limp, insensitive hand sliding forwards slowly towards its goal, it occurs to him with the suddenness of a flash of lightning how shatteringly familiar it all is. This hand is a hand he’s seen in his dreams, time and time again he’s hidden behind the big, yellow hand as its fingers drag it in fits and starts over the red dress, and behind it there have always been animals, hidden but dauntingly present, silent but bellowing out their silence, motionless but burrowing their way into his breast. So everything important and shocking in one’s life is just a re-run of one’s nightmares, everything that happens has happened so many times before; how often has one been forced to suffer the same, familiar pain?

But while the hand is still on its way towards the invisible iguana snouts and the unconscious man starts shivering as he’s on the point of regaining consciousness, Lucas Egmont hears the patter of tiny, tiny feet on the rocks behind him. Someone has stepped outside the magic circle, and he shudders as the female footsteps come nearer and nearer, and when they’re as near as they can get he can feel how the animal he’s trying to forget has imbued the footsteps with its supple caution — and then comes the scream:

‘Leave them alone,’ she yells. ‘Leave them alone,’ yells Madame, and even while she’s screaming she bends right down and strokes the iguanas — and they don’t react at all. Then she raises her arm like a victory pennant and goes on talking, calmer, more rationally, not quite so loudly now she’s found her Jesus, ready to let himself be bitten by her iguanas, ready to be killed reluctantly in her stead.

‘Leave them alone,’ says the woman who’s overcome her fear by letting it bite someone else, ‘leave them alone. It’s too late anyway. Let him take his punishment, it’s no more than he deserves after all, it’s no more than a murderer deserves, after all.’