Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Sand everywhere, sand sand sand, the sand is darkness and light, the whole of your head is full of sand now that everything else has trickled out, sand is rattling away in your intestines and your stupid stomach is doing its best to digest it all, but even so the sand doesn’t help you to get away from your terror, get away from the horrific awareness of what that devilish angler let his bait rest on. Shudder after shudder of terror stutters through your sandself and they follow the twists and turns of the hook as faithfully as anyone could ask. It’s so horrible, perhaps the most horrific thing of all, to hit directly against a dead body with your nerve ends — you want to explode, you want to be blown to pieces, but sand is so merciless in that it can’t explode no matter how hot and agitated it gets, no matter how wildly and how long you scream at it that it really must get a grip on itself and blow itself into the skies, but sand is so scornful and so unreceptive to flattery or warnings, and just to show you what it can do twenty-five feet under the surface, if it is that deep, it creeps close up to you and starts tickling you for all it’s worth, and you can’t even laugh.

Then at last comes the signal from up above, there’s a slight tug on the hook, and you do all you can to make sure you don’t come loose from it, oh you dear little hook, your sand thinks, don’t abandon me now. And the hook doesn’t abandon you, you’re pulled up, relentlessly up, and you bless the hook for being so strong. But then you’re suddenly hit by that horrific moment when you realize you’re not alone, that you’re not the only one on the way up, that the booty the angler had been hoping for so much is also on its way up, clinging fast to your nerve ends as if on to a rope and the dead man won’t let go even though you start wriggling more and more violently and your nerves don’t snap even though you wish they would with all the heat of your sand. And then daylight at last, daylight at last, you’re not wriggling any more, you just hang limply while the sand runs out of you without anything else coming in to replace it apart from pain. Your legs are lying in the sand underneath you and they must be dead, they’re not moving in any case but your feet are clamped fast into the sand, possibly out of despair and because they’re longing for a trunk.

Then the horrific thing that’s followed you up comes loose and the angler laughs so much he sprays you with red-hot saliva and he kicks it and it responds with a dull clang — and before your eyes fall down into the sand, weary from having seen so much pain, you manage to make out that it’s a water keg, quite a big, green water keg, there’s nothing else to say about it, but perhaps there must have been something wrong with it even so because suddenly the angler kicks into shape a big hole in the sand and he pushes the water keg into it until it disappears, yelling and screaming all the while. And what happens next is just that the sun swells up like a red-hot toad and finally explodes and turns into balloons, millions, perhaps even milliards of balloons, all of them glowing just as terrifyingly red-hot as they sink slowly down over your desert and merely increase the heat of the earth and you’re just glad that you don’t have legs any more to feel the heat with, and the balloons come nearer and nearer and suddenly there’s an enormous crush as all the millions and milliards of them are just as keen as the next one to fall into your eyes — and all at once, in a single singeing stabbing moment they all join up with their heat and the whole desert trembles and the angler falls into his hole and the water keg goes up in smoke and your eyelids quake till they shatter in the horrific cascade of blinding light and all-consuming heat which is now pouring over the earth and over you yourself.

And when Madame and the English girl return from their secret excursion to the inland part of the island and one of the three men sitting in the shadow of the cliff, their hands and arms covered in dried grey sand, suddenly remembers how full of hatred a hand was as it moved down against a hip, they stop in surprise at the sight of the two low sandhills that have appeared on the beach.

‘He got a decent burial, nobody can deny that,’ says Tim Solider, and he’s forgotten all about keeping his distance now that so many horrible things are behind them.

‘He passed away from us so quickly,’ says the captain, anybody would think he’d got sunstroke, he’d stopped walking over to the boxer, and all the sand he carried he just flung over the emptied water keg, it was as if he were even less able to bear the sight of that than of the dead body. He worked like a slave to get it covered up and in the end he was crawling on all fours between the tank and the water with sand in his hands, and when we tried to help him up he squirmed like a snake and kept yelling that we ought to let him go because he was just as dead as we were, he just yelled. Anybody would think he was the one who’d done it, nobody knows any more, knows nothing, knows nothing about that.

Then Madame goes up to Lucas Egmont who’s lying outstretched like a gravestone on the grave over the water keg and his body is all limp when she tries to lift him up.

‘We ought to try and get him into the shade at least,’ she says. It’s just then she notices the white rock, and she lets him slump back on to the sand and wades out into the water and bends down and strokes it, for under the sand they have carried away to make the graves is a shimmering white rock, but none of them had noticed.

‘You must have been blind,’ she says, brushing the sand off it, ‘you must have been blind as bats.’

She’s no idea how blind they are.

5

The white rock is quite different from what they had first thought. They imagine it starts at the spot where Madame discovered it and then runs out towards the middle of the lagoon, covered with a thin layer of sand; but when they scrape away the sand with their weary hands, they find it takes off in a quite different and unexpected direction, and suddenly they’re all possessed by a powerful, compulsive desire to uncover the whole of the white rock, and to persuade it to reveal its white secrets. Indeed, they’re all so keen to get to work that they kneel down in the water and start digging away the sand with urgent movements of the hands.

It’s already less hot than it was and the water in the lagoon is motionless. There’s a slight breeze higher up and they can hear the panicles of the grass rustling, a single iguana is falling from one stone to another, and although the sea is so near it sounds as though it’s in the far distance, swishing like an invisible waterfall from a point beyond the horizon. The closest noise is Lucas Egmont’s voice as he talks in his sleep. They’ve put him in the shade next to the cliff, and he’s still asleep, lying on his stomach, and convinced he’s on the water keg’s grave; from time to time he says, quite clearly: I want to be crucified, and he seems to be groaning with happiness.

There are five of them kneeling in the water, digging, and they’re working so doggedly, so self-sufficiently, as if what’s lying hidden under the coarse sand is the soul of the world, the solution to the riddle of earthly suffering, and they’ve forgotten about everything else apart from this warm, shallow water and this sand which is still hot when it fills their cupped hands, and the white rock whose whiteness grows more and more dazzling the closer to land its nakedness shines upon them.

And they’ve forgotten everything else, in fact: little mouse, says the grey cat of fear, little mouse, go and run around in the grass for a while, forget my mouth, forget my claws, let the sharp, white teeth hovering over you be swallowed up by the twilight. Little mouse, dear little mouse, let me stop torturing you for five minutes or twelve minutes or two hours or three days, run as far as you have time for, run as far as you can manage, run as far as you dare! Run through the clear night whose brightest stars are my eyes, they’ll light you up for as long as you deserve, run through the dewy morning and don’t worry about who’s forcing the grass apart just behind you, run through the long, sunny day and seek oblivion in my merciful shadow which is following you all day long, just as faithfully as your own! And never complain about the loyalty of fear, little mouse, but do so occasionally about your own disloyalty whose only excuse is that it won’t last any longer than I let it.