Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But she doesn’t manage to see him: as many as there’s room for fling themselves upon her and drag her away towards the fire, she’s kicking and screaming — oh, those screams are so horrible they all want to start screaming — and the sand and the water come showering all round her and cool them all down, for the heat is starting now and steam is rising from the boxer’s canvas and the reek of his death spreads slowly over them like a parachute. Then she breaks loose and runs stark naked into the water up to her waist and Lucas Egmont wants to shout and warn her about the big, dangerous fish at the bottom of the lagoon, but then she stops and turns slowly to face them and they can see her white body glistening through the water like white marble through a torrent of green rain. She stands there motionless, looking down at her feet, two small white fish sleeping belly-up on the bottom, and just for a moment the whole world stands still. Behind her silent head lies the calm ocean, a single, eternal wave arches its way over the horizon only to be swallowed up swiftly by the silence of the sea and it seems to one of them as if she’s leaning back against the thin line of the horizon, so beautiful is the backward curve of her body.

Then she raises her arms out of the water and rubs off the sand, muttering half-aloud, ‘Let him come to me, let him come to me. .’

But they don’t let him go to her, no matter how entreatingly she pleads. They stand guard round the dead man, their fingers turning white from the painful strain of holding back a scream. They glance quickly round, sizing each other up and down as the hot sweat starts trickling down their bodies, and everything grows harder to bear for the ones that aren’t in the water: the heat is now suspended over their heads like a heavy, heavy extra-cranium and their pulse suddenly starts running wild, it’s like being locked in a sauna with the heat getting more and more intense until in the end you’re crawling around on the floor, moaning, and begging for the most absurd of rescues: please let the earth open up beneath us so the sauna collapses and we can get away from this fiendish heat.

Oh, if only the English girl would start screaming again, if only there would be some violent explosion which would get them out of this awful predicament — but all that happens is that the girl cups her hands and quietly proceeds to pour water over her breasts and all the time she keeps on repeating in a nagging monotone, ‘Let him come to me, let him come to me.’

Then she stops pouring and comes a few paces closer and suddenly she starts dancing in the water, at times her body is completely submerged and they can see her legs pedalling away with short, painful movements while her arms rise and fall like the skirts of a jellyfish and then her dazzling shoulders leap up and she soars high over the horizon before sinking back down into the greenness like a silken sheet. It’s a dance of desire, a dance of desire which would hate to be satisfied, a desire for oblivion.

Then Madame finds the English girl’s cloth on the sands and she flings it over her shoulder and she runs away from the stench, the heat, the men whose horrible smell of manhood she has only just become aware of; she’s shaking with shame and bitterness, having just realized how horribly naked she herself has become thanks to the naked girl’s obscene dance: the mad girl is exposing both of them to the lustful stares from the beach — and Madame grabs hold of her by the shoulder and stops her in mid-leap. They glare at each other like two people confronting each other on the lonely rope between terror and hatred and there’s nothing for it but for one of them to fall. Madame shields her with the cloth as they approach the beach and then she says disdainfully, ‘Are you on your way to your lover now? Is this how he wants you?’

The English girl punches her right between the eyes with her hard knuckles, and as she butts Madame in the back and tries to bite her, she yells at her, ‘You killed him, that’s what you did. Don’t think I don’t know. Just wait till it gets dark, just wait till it gets dark.’

‘Is he dead? Is your lover dead?’ asks Madame in mild surprise, holding her at arm’s length. ‘That can’t be true, my dear.’

And she lifts the girl’s hand and lets it glide over the three angry red bites on her shoulder. And the hand is surprised and then the hand is filled with hatred and one of those standing on the beach feels painfully moved by the gesture of ice-cold fury described by the hand as it slumps down to her hip.

4

As they don’t have any spades nor anything else they can dig with and moreover the sand is too hard for their nails to cope with, they have to carry out the burial by fetching wet sand from the bottom of the lagoon and spreading it over the dead body. They work for a large part of the hottest period around noon and make no attempt to hurry, except at first when the stench is so awful, but then they bury their terror, with the kind of calm, sweeping, convincing gestures you make when you’re frightened, under four layers of wet sand which soon hardens in the heat. They dig away with their hands quite close to the shore but at different places along the beach and all the time the burial is taking place they hardly ever look at one another. Sometimes they arrive at the corpse simultaneously and then they get down on their knees side by side and their hands touch as, full of devotion, they spread the new, soft sand over the old, hard surface.

But no matter how much sand they carry under the hot midday sun, they cannot bury their fear along with the corpse. Even if they had a whole desert, the vast Sahara Desert or one of Mongolia’s deserts, they may not have had enough sand. One of them wishes they had a train, a little train with lots of deep wagons, like the train that used to run from the claypit to the brickworks back home when he was so little that everything was an animal and the train was the biggest animal he’d ever seen. If only they’d had that train and the wagons heaped up with sand! He could have run from one wagon to the next with the biggest spade the parish had to offer and emptied them just as they were clanking past a boxer lying dead by the side of the track.

Another of them is walking in the desert. The sun is blazing down from a sky as empty and relentless as the white of an eye. Nothing but sand all around, all the sand in the world is spread round about him and he is the shifting centre in this ocean of sand, for no matter where he goes, the centre goes with him. There’s no end and no beginning, no up and no down, no forward and no backward. The world’s clock has stopped and God is busy with a lit de parade on some other planet far, far away. The sun has also stood still, and now it’s going to burn away until it melts: that’s the challenge it’s taken on. And everywhere, nothing but sand. You’ve stripped naked and lain down on your back in the sand, and the sand is millions, milliards of little animals that have been asleep for ages but if the sun blazes down as fiendishly as this for just a few more hours — no, there’s no such thing as time! — as few hundred paces forwards and backwards and round and in a square until they wake up and they’re raving when they wake up and all they want to do is to grab hold of this swine who has disturbed their sleep — ‘and in order to reach the sun they climb up on me, the lonely wanderer in the desert, but then eventually when they realize they’re wasting their time they’ll turn their fury on me and creep into all my grottoes, over the bridge of my tongue, into the sewers of my nose, through the mineshafts of my ears, and into my eyes, the things I’d like to have preserved till last so that in the least false moment of annihilation I could establish that all my hopes of salvation were just as naïve as I’d always thought, and they’d bore their tiny little holes into the middle of my pupils and then trickle in through them, curious about the marvels they were bound to find behind such beautiful membranes — but God only knows how disappointed they’ll be, oh, how disappointed they’ll be’.