Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

And everybody stands looking at the sparkling white rock and it’s much less hot again, the sun is setting extremely slowly but they can sense that it’s falling slowly down towards the tongue of the horizon; slowly and just as frighteningly pointless as the truth, the sea is moving in on the island in hundred-yard breakers, and, howling lazily, the wind rises and falls between the sea and the sky on that extremely beautiful day in May in the southern, northern, eastern or western hemisphere. Oh, how indifferent fear and death are to our geographical situation.

Then Lucas Egmont says, ‘What do we want a rock for? What are we supposed to do with a rock? Is it a rock we need? For God’s sake!’

But perhaps it is.

6

Yes, what does anybody want a rock for? Can anybody say what you’re supposed to do with a little white rock about nine square yards in size, and with half of it under water come to that? Is there anything more pointless than a little rock, in fact, that you can’t bore holes in and then blow up and extract some meaning from, some sensible meaning?

They’ve sat down round it on the sand and they’re thinking and pondering, sitting there quietly and feeling for one horrific moment God’s or somebody else’s hand swishing through the silence of the bathroom and taking out the plug from the bottom of the bathtub and the sucking feeling as their life begins to run away is like a punctured artery somewhere in their bodies. But it was only a test after all, the plug is back firmly in place and the hand is as motionless as a fly on the ceiling — and look! The cat of fear has once again let its little mouse go, and constantly shaded by its enormous shadow, they’re all running away through the grass of the world. Little mouse, the cat whispers disdainfully, little mouse, don’t forsake me.

They sit thinking about all the little white rocks they’ve come across during their lives, but there aren’t many of them, there’s been a distinct shortage of white rocks in their lives, and the English girl doesn’t even remember the white cliffs of Dover because she’s so busy thinking about that other business.

‘Back home,’ says Tim Solider after all too long a silence, and the bits of rag that have grown into his iguana bites are flapping in the breeze, they’re stinking already, ‘in the square back home there was a statue the same colour as this rock and we used to call it the ghost, because it was so white. Especially in the moonlight it looked as though it was luminous, quite luminous. It seemed as if somebody had given it a coat of phosphorus, but they hadn’t.’

‘We can’t very well make a statue out of this rock,’ says the captain morosely, brushing the sand off his jackboot, ‘and even if we could, what’d be the point, it would be a waste of effort here where nobody will ever see it.’

‘You’re forgetting the birds, captain, and the iguanas,’ says Lucas Egmont, who’s suddenly got such a burning desire to burst out laughing, he’d really like to lie outstretched on the ground, all alone with the sun and the cloud, and just roar with laughter, make fun of the ridiculous lunacy which makes six people already condemned to death, six people who have already got used to the hard padding of the electric chair, six people who have already got a thin, sharp line straight across the back of their necks because they’ve so often felt the axe tickling them, negotiating over a rock, worrying about how a useless bit of rock flung out at random somewhere or other in the world should be used. Pointless indeed, so pointless, so disgustingly pointless — but as he sits there looking down at the rock, he notices how the silence has suddenly become loaded with hostility, and all at once he realizes he’s hurt all of them by what he’s said, and he glances cautiously at them all in turn without letting go of his eyes and he realizes from the seriousness creeping into their expressions that the rock is a sacrament as far as some of them are concerned, the only firm foundation, the only fixed point in this world that’s rotating so madly. Peter — the rock. Maybe it’s Peter who’s turned into a rock and is offering his back to them as a firm foundation.

‘Would it really be as pointless as all that to make a statue?’ he says, therefore. ‘We could draw lots to decide who would be the model and then make one, always assuming of course that we had the chisels and sledge hammers and drills and crowbars necessary to enable us to break off a big enough piece, and it might only be enough for a bust come to that, assuming there’s a sculptor among us.’

‘It would be meaningless in any case,’ says the captain, ‘since nobody would ever come here no matter what. There’s no point in leaving a statue for the birds and the iguanas, as you just said.’

An icy silence ensues, freezing the air round about them, and their thoughts hang like stiff clouds of smoke from their mouths, even though it’s at least eighty in the shade, and snares of hoar-frost tighten round everyone’s neck — but there’s an unspoken word, an as yet unformulated truth or lie which could redeem them all, at least for a few moments. And Lucas Egmont has a completely new experience: without being the slightest bit interested, not even for a moment, since he doesn’t need to feel thirsty just now, in the kind of salvation which needs a rock in order to be realized, indeed, without being especially interested for a single moment in salvation in any shape or form, since he’s convinced or at any rate posits that the only thing which could make a human being seek a way out of the jungle that is this world is total, clearly acknowledged awareness that no salvation is possible on the grounds that a jungle is a jungle is a brutal jungle, that is, without having any sympathy at all for the hunger or salvation shining forth from the eyes of several others here present, he suddenly feels an irresistible desire to express the blessed opinion which everyone except the captain — that man with his perverted ideas about solitude — is longing to hear, he wants to be a medium, an anti-spiritualist medium, and suddenly he discovers the enemy that is his and everyone else’s. He leans over towards the captain and glares short-sightedly, and anyone who can’t detect the animosity in this gaze must have been blind for a hundred years, it’s like staring at an old suit of armour where four hundred years of solitude stare at you from under the rusty visor, while the memories of the knight’s hate-filled eyes during the battle are still glinting in the eye-slits.

Oh, captain, he thinks, what an old suit of armour you are, what an old, empty suit of armour. All your life you’ve been going around like a suit of armour without a knight. Someone wanted to stroke your brow and you said: One moment, I’ll just lower my visor; someone wanted to feel your heart beating, and you replied scornfully: you’ll need a sword for that, and someone fetched a sword and thrust it through you and it just came out of the back-plate without doing you any harm at all, well, maybe it would rain in through the hole, but that’s not much of a risk as rain doesn’t often fall horizontally when all’s said and done. You couldn’t bleed because suits of armour have some trouble in doing that and you were proud of it and you were happy to be an empty suit of armour, since empty suits of armour have such a good time: they’re lonely and they’ll always be so, and in their solitude empty suits of armour can hear all the singing inside them and round about them. Old hunting horns are tooting away, and the ancient cries of falconers, long since forgotten, are once more echoing through the air and suddenly the whole suit of armour is filled with the noises that used to be heard in the days when the armour was alive, in the days when the armour was full of life, of flesh that could bleed, of limbs that could writhe in agony, of rattles and screams of terror, and the shrieks and the old noises rise and fall through the empty suit of armour and there is such a marvellous singing and vibrating inside it. It has no heart, you see, it can only feel vibrations as if they were wonderfully beautiful music, and it misses out completely on all the angst in them, the fear of death and the hatred of life: there’s nothing more stupid than the solitude of an empty suit of armour.