Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

‘Never mind, old chap, it’s to do with the air pressure, it’ll soon pass,’ they would say patronizingly to Lucas when he tried to spell out how things were. ‘Look, some headache tablets might help.’ They were a friendly bunch, albeit a bit forced in the way they displayed their sympathy; they had to save time and strength for their work, and tablets always help, of course. Lucas was confused and swallowed a handful of the evil-smelling oval pills, they irritated his throat like pepper, and they didn’t help at first; but after a few weeks the pressure of the log was no more than that of a pair of over-short braces against his chest. Well, what good did it do for the guilt to keep on coming back? It was absurd to feel guilty when no one was being oppressed by him any longer, why should the one lying under the log feel guilt on behalf of the one sitting up above playing the recorder? He read theology at the library, but that didn’t get him anywhere. The Chinese in China were starving to death in rather large numbers nowadays, and in a Velamese newspaper he read how people in a previously undiscovered country were being tortured by bandits, people with unusually grey eyes had them gouged out, for instance, at the whim of their cruel masters. Lucas couldn’t do anything about that, communications alone made any suggestion of intervening out of the question: journeys cost money for a start, though of course he might be able to steal money from the bank — but was it right to put yourself in debt in order to be able to help somebody else pay his debts? It’s a hell of a world when somebody gets kicked every time you raise your foot, and someone is crushed every time you put it down again.

Lucas worried, and was painfully aware that for every hour that passed, more and more poor people in the Velamesian Republic had their eyes gouged out. He explained his dilemma to all his friends and acquaintances, but they read different newspapers and hence didn’t believe him. And so he took upon himself their guilt as well, for somebody had to bear it after all, and his back became bowed because of the weight on his shoulders, so that people naturally advised him to do gymnastic exercises. One day, however, a very perceptive man who used to prey on schoolmasters’ widows, full of cynicism, the only form of wisdom he could still accept, took Lucas by the arm and explained a few facts: for instance, was Lucas in the best position to save those people’s eyes? Those best placed were surely the Velamese themselves, and then, if one thought of Velamesia as the middle point of an enormous circle with Lucas wandering about on its periphery, between him and all its horrors were gigantic segments of guiltladen silence, and between Lucas’s world and the Velamesian crimes was a wall of people as high as the skies, like a fire break, and it was the same no matter which way he turned. Of course, the whole business was messy — but if that’s how things were? Moreover, something had happened at the bank: worried by the deterioration in his performance at work, or as they preferred to put it: his excessively pallid appearance, possibly due to a change of air, he was called before the management of the bank and requested in clear enough terms to sort out the reasons for his indisposition, or face dismissal.

Pressed between the cardboard partition of guilt and the iron wall of existence, therefore, he chose remarkably enough to push back the former in order to create room for his body. As if by coincidence, the wounds he thought had healed long ago opened up again, and he was obliged to walk carefully and avoid exposing himself to any kind of risk. Fire breaks shot up around him, in fact, enclosing the world. Together with a friend from the bank, he would go out on certain Sundays and public holidays to a beck on the outskirts of the town and fish for a species of tiny trout, which were barely big enough for a single breakfast. There on the boggy banks of the fast-flowing beck, Lucas appreciated for the first time the meaning of a life without guilt. Lucky enough to be born with fire breaks in most directions, he felt himself obliged to enjoy his situation for as long as it lasted. Incidents like the gouging out of eyes in Velamesia were bad enough, it’s true, but they were no doubt only made worse by irrelevant lamentations; and obvious injustices nearer home were just as little to do with him, for wasn’t it also unjust fundamentally to let one’s attitudes be governed by geographical considerations? Being doubly careful to take into account all parties concerned as well as himself, and to ensure that no injustice befell those who craved sympathy, there was clearly no better way than leaving everything well alone, including those who were suffering, because if you really had to spell it out, wasn’t guilt merely another word for a lack of concentration? If you acted in response to your guilt, well, how many people would get kicked over every time you moved your foot, and how many people were going to feel delighted when your guilt picked out some objects and not others? Wasn’t it best, not least out of consideration for others, to avoid having any views at all on the vices of the age?

His work output began to increase slowly, and note how he adopted a delightful handwriting style, artistically ornamented; no more than a glance at his lace-like S was needed to convince the management at the bank that he’d be a faithful servant until he died of consumption due to unsatisfactory ventilation at his workplace. Something of himself, it might even have been most of him, flowed from his nib as he wrote the most trivial things, and he acquired a remarkable urge to draw diagrams: he’d portray Sunday’s trout and his everyday walk to the bank in the form of delicate curves on graph paper; in his own way he was no doubt typical of an age which stole its own agony: you’d stand in the midst of the black throng like a pickpocket, slipping your hand into your own pocket and grabbing the evil thing. Then it was time to play the double role of the person robbed, and you always tried to let your torment slink into another pocket, another person’s pocket. But all too often your lack of dexterity led to your choosing the wrong pocket, and it was annoying when you came back home with a hip pocket swollen up like an enormous abscess, and the thief-victim was nearly exposed as a result of his mistake; finger exercises were the only hope, in fact.

But one day the letter comes even so. It’s standing on the shelf over the stove when he comes home one evening, like a white, menacing shadow. He sees it immediately, no doubt, but first he has something to eat and pretends he’s not seen it; he builds tunnels of prawn shells on his plate, and covers the openings with potato peel, not that it helps. With his knife of fear and his sharp conscience-fork, he presses hard and scrapes the grey china, and the gilded layer of duty slowly starts flaking off; he looks into his mother’s eyes and they are festering, the skin is stretched tightly across the bones of her face, the little triangular room seems to be compressing all their thoughts, hopes, imaginings and desires into disgusting triangles. Ah, now he feels he wants to emerge from this prawn-shell and potato-peel tunnel which is set to enclose him for ever. He begs of his knife: cut through my woollen layer, the gilded surface of my nakedness; and of his fork: pierce my contentment and my unscrupulous diagram-poisoning with your silver claws.

Hurriedly, he picks up the letter, opens it, reads it and shouts: ‘I have to leave!’

But his mother has realized that and she’s already packed; he picks up his suitcase without even deigning to give her one last look, echoing up the staircase he can hear his father’s whip, newly bought with money intended for food, clicking its tongue down in the vaulted cellar. He starts running, and his ear is almost torn off by a lash from the whip.