Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘What should we carve into it?’ asked the captain caustically. ‘That there were seven of us to start with, but that one of us died more or less straight away because we thought he smelt so awful, we couldn’t bear to do anything about his illness and get him on his feet — a little arrow pointing to his grave — and that somebody else murdered us by means of emptying our drinking water, and that a third one served us up with glass beads when we were at our hungriest, saying, here you are, eat these.’

Then Tim Solider gives a yell and he runs at the captain with his hands clenched pathetically over his iguana wounds like the heroes in old melodramas.

‘Shut your gob, will you! Shut up!’

He stands opposite him, panting, and his wounds suddenly start bleeding and two little streams trickle slowly down towards his navel where they join and pause briefly and, throwing caution to the winds, he hurls himself violently at the captain, but of course he falls to the ground, falls right on to the rock, knees first. The captain helps him up and Tim is so weak again he hasn’t the strength to do anything but hold on to the hated hands stretched out towards him.

Then the captain whips round with a nastily powerful movement, the brutal turn of a soldier, and faces Lucas Egmont and the visor falls open in the empty suit of armour but the hatred sparkles forth through the narrow eye-holes like the beams from a lighthouse and as he stands there with his back-plates glittering with hostile solitude and the copper shield at his chest beautifully curved by its longing for a lance, he says so firmly and decisively that everyone can tell he’s made up his mind long beforehand, perhaps even before they found the rock, perhaps even before the catastrophe took place, perhaps even as he was trembling at the very start of his solitude: ‘We’ll carve a lion.’

‘A lion?’ says Lucas Egmont. ‘Who can remember what a lion looks like? It’d be better to do an iguana.’

But Madame remembers what a lion looks like. There’s a tree swaying in the breeze over the lion cage at Bretano’s zoo and an escaped monkey’s sitting in the tree, trembling with cold and despair; people bring a long ladder and she points up at the brown monkey and says to the boy that monkeys are dangerous, especially ones that have escaped; they can swing down out of the tree and split your head open before you know where you are; but the boy isn’t scared, he just looks as uncomprehending as usual, just as bereft of humanity, and in despair she drags him over to the lions’ cage. Look, she whispers, look at the lions, you can’t believe how dangerous they are, look how soft their paws are so they can slink around, you can’t hear a sound, you might think they’re the nicest animals in the world — and then suddenly there’s a terrifying growl and a roar of anger as they fling themselves at the bars, do you see how thick they are, you only need to annoy them the slightest little bit and they hurl themselves at you and try and tear you to bits. Just stick your arm in through the bars, and you’ll see, that’s it, further, a lot further. But nothing happens, nothing at all, except that the biggest lion lies down in the middle of the cage and meets her wild eyes with its bleak gaze. Look at me, she says then to the boy and he pulls his arm slowly back, look at me; and she wants to scream when she sees his eyes, no lion can call them to life, no hungry, roaring lion can touch his soul. Does it ever happen, she says excitedly to the keeper as he climbs down the ladder with the trembling monkey clutched tightly to his chest, does it ever happen that a lion tries to escape? Never happens, answers the keeper like an echo, never happens. Like an echo.

Then the captain holds his jackboot up in the air so that everybody can see its shiny leather and he taps it with his hand just above the heel and when they all get near enough they can see the big lion emblem burnt into the leather.

‘There we can see what a lion looks like,’ he says. ‘Is there any animal with such a simple outline as a lion?’

‘It would be just as good to take an iguana,’ maintains Lucas Egmont, ‘iguanas are also very easy. There’s one lying just down there: we could bring it here, remove its skin, and just press it into the rock.’

‘I think the lion’s better,’ says the captain, ‘and there’s something special about this particular lion even though it’s just a simple trademark lion. If you look really closely’ — and everybody looks really closely, but they don’t notice at first even so — ‘you’ll see the lion isn’t sitting on the ground or in the air; the lion’s sitting on a human being, on a freshly killed human being, and you can see from his stiff outline how surprised he is suddenly not to be alive any more. I’ve sat round many a camp fire and never ceased to be astonished at this trademark, at this painfully honest trademark, the lion’s vibrating solitude after slaying his last enemy, the only one to bar his way to solitude.’

‘Captain,’ Lucas Egmont suddenly shouts out, ‘you surely don’t mean we should also include that detail on your sadistic trademark. It’s quite enough with just a lion.’

‘Oh, it’s not difficult in the least, I can assure you of that, there’s hardly anything easier to draw than a freshly killed human being. There’s more of a firm outline than ever before, a monumental simplicity and clarity of contour which has always pleased and surprised me, and it’s often made me feel pain when I think that all that beauty, that delicious purity will soon be lost forever without having been captured by the hand of an artist. Therefore I have to say I felt extremely attracted to this trademark, no matter how sadistic you might think I am, and of course we shall have this man on the rock as well, since that’s what gives the picture its meaning, it interprets our situation so absolutely splendidly. Of course, there aren’t any lions on this island, if there were we’d certainly have heard them before now; but what there is here, for instance, is a silence, a silence so hideously ancient that every little tiny hole in it, even a hole as tiny as the one we’ve made during the four or five days we’ve been here, is such a terrible deed that once the perpetrators grasp the full extent of what they’ve done, they have no choice but to be horrified and try to obliterate all trace of their crime by taking the fastest possible steps to deprive themselves of any possibility of disturbing this silence in future, and in the end the silence weighs down upon our breasts with all the weight of its lion’s body, alone at last, alone again at long last — and everybody who comes here and finds the rock is bound to think: what courage, what heroic courage, accepting one’s solitude voluntarily and without the slightest quiver, by baring one’s breast to the claws of the lion!’

Then Lucas Egmont cries out in desperation, ‘Is there anyone else who wants to commit suicide? Anybody else who wants to carve a dead body under the lion?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Boy Larus.

‘I don’t know,’ says Madame.

‘I don’t know,’ says the English girl.

‘I don’t know,’ says Tim Solider.

‘In that case,’ says the captain, ‘I suggest we all go for a stroll round the island, and meanwhile think about what we want to do. We can assemble here again at dusk.’

But as they are on their way up the cliff, several of them turn and gaze down for quite a while at the beach with its graves, one of them desecrated and one not yet desecrated, its footmarks suggesting madmen have been dancing along the water line, its little grey hollow where a fire once burned, the battered ship leaning right down over the lagoon as if to drink, the ocean as blue and indifferent as the sky and the silence, and the tall strand of smoke from the vessel of their longing, which has engraved itself deep and indelible into the sky, a chink in the door to eternity; they stand there gazing for such a long time before continuing on their way up to the grass and the solitude, as if they would never return.