Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

They’re working away now lustily and energetically, as if they were digging a canal leading to their rescue; they’ve stopped using their hands as they’re not efficient enough, the rock goes down deeper the closer it gets to land, and the captain is scooping sand with his jackboot while Boy Larus and Tim Solider are using their canvas shoes, which means they have two tools each and in order to make the work go more quickly — needless to say they hope the rock will prove to be endless and they’ll still be working away stubbornly when the liberator comes with his teeth and claws — the women’s job is to empty the filled receptacles in the deeper water beyond the far tip of the rock, and a circular membrane of sand rests like a blind eye on the placid surface of the lagoon and this eye is the only happy eye on the whole island. They can’t see the shadowy ruins of the stranded ship which has sunk to the bottom of the lagoon, nor the graves on the beach over two hopes which no one had expected anything of and which are therefore mourned all the more deeply, nor the fire which is slowly going out because no one has felt cold for such a long time, nor the images of terror which keep on flitting like bats across their field of vision, images of what each of them fears most grinning scornfully down at them even though they persist in gazing down at the sand and the water.

Suddenly the rock rises up quite steeply, just at the point where land and water meet, and at the same time it gets thinner and shoots off almost at right angles and about three feet across, towards the cliff; it’s only a few inches into the sand now, so shallow that everyone’s surprised they haven’t stumbled over it at some time during the few days they’ve been on the island. The women come up from out of the water and stand behind the men and gaze down on their naked backs, burnt brown by the sun and glistening as hard as an iguana skin, and the men’s hands are working like pistons as they brush away the sand which is steaming in the heat, and the rock emerges more dazzlingly white and clearer and smoother and more polished than ever, like a woman’s back.

But as mercilessly as any destiny you like, the rock heads straight for the buried water keg and they hesitate just for a second, although you couldn’t notice any change in their mechanical movements, before opening up the grave. The sand is hard packed and steam is rising just a little from its dampness and then they can feel the keg under their fingers and they roll it to one side with an enormous heave until it comes to a halt splishing and splashing in the shallow water at the edge of the beach. After just a few more seconds they’ve removed all trace of Lucas Egmont’s work and they’ve barely finished when they realize it was all in vain as the rock suddenly comes to an end, quite pointlessly, like when you check one movement in order to make another one which is just as pointless; it’s grown tired of creeping any further up the beach, maybe it thought the island was too awful for a little white rock to rest on but then it couldn’t be bothered to crawl back again as the bottom of the sea wasn’t much better either.

It’s an awful moment when the rock comes to an end: they’ve been ejected from a horrific existence, with no hope of rescue, it’s true, but obscured by forgetfulness, and thrust into a horrific existence with no hope of rescue where the only certainty is pointed awareness; and as they kneel there with their necks bent over the opened grave, their backs reflect their terrified indecision in so comical and so frightening a fashion that the women observing them from above first want to roar with laughter and then scream in fear.

Cover your backs up, we don’t need mirrors any more is what Madame wants to shout to them, cover yourselves with sand, cover yourselves with ashes and clothes and let’s see your terror in your hard faces instead, it’s much purer there, it won’t frighten us there so much, not any more, we won’t need to see how awful we look when we can’t control ourselves any longer, when we’ve spread ourselves to prepare for the first bit of terror that comes our way; but just then the English girl grabs hold of her arm just above her elbow, so hard it turns white, and with her free hand, the same hand that’s been stiff with hatred for three hours now, she points quickly at one of the backs on the beach and Madame notices straight away the little red teeth marks on its right shoulder-blade, and she glances up at the English girl and sees how clearly her mouth remembers its bite of hatred and her tongue the taste of blood from the previous night, and from this mouth and this hand which drops down to her hip once more she can see what is soon going to happen, the inevitable that can’t be prevented just as you can’t stop an avalanche by standing in its way, and he’s burnt by their gaze and turns his head round quickly and spits a glance over his shoulder and straight away he’s just as hideously aware of it, for when he turns his head back again and looks down at the sand, his shoulder is trembling something awful.

Then they don’t really know what to do: they all walk down to the water’s edge and roll the keg out into deeper water and let it fill up slowly and when they roll it back over the rock it makes a dull, heavy clanging noise and it’s only when they get it back to the little crown that they realize fully how sadistic they’re being towards themselves. Oh, how will they be able to open the tap and let the water rinse away the last grains of sand from the rock without remembering those marvellous moments of blissful coolness when a handful of water trickled down their throats and then continued to spread coolness through all the canals of their bodies? Then someone shuts his eyes and quickly as an axeman he turns on the tap so that the water starts cascading down the rock, making it still whiter, making it sparkle like a jewel of salt and mother of pearl — but the thirstiest of them all, who was still hoping desperately that the last drop of drinking water which might have still been there at the bottom of the keg could possibly be still there on the rock, flings himself down headlong and starts licking the rock and he licks it all from top to bottom until he vomits from all the salt and starts crying, starts crying salt tears which he can’t drink either. And he’s terribly ashamed when he gets up again and with a gesture of simulated defiance kicks the empty keg over the beach, down the rock, and before it starts floating it clanks away so piercingly and frighteningly that Lucas Egmont wakes up and sits up with a start — and immediately realizes what’s happening.

‘What are you doing with my water keg?’ he yells, ‘Why have you dug up my water keg, how dare you!’

They stare at him with the empty, ruthless gaze of a statue, and he casts down his eyes.

‘Why did you do it?’ says Madame, though like the rest of them she knows it doesn’t matter any more, ‘why did you pour away our water?’

Then he remembers his dream and then he remembers all the moments of guilty horror when all the world’s prosecutors marched up to him in order to make him answer for everything that happened through no fault of his own, and bitterly furious and offended at being accused of such a petty matter he first looks round and then starts yelling once more: ‘What about the fire, then? Why did you let the fire go out? And the food! Why did you eat the food? What’s the use of water without food? And what’s the use of food and water if there’s no boat to take us away from here? And what’s the use of a boat coming to rescue us if we don’t want to be rescued, if we’re all refugees who have come to the only no man’s land where we belong!’

After a while somebody says, ‘Have a look at this rock we’ve found.’