Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But it’s only when she’s groping her way through the grass again, almost closing her eyes because of her desire to be able to go past the thing that’s waiting for her, only when she stumbles against the dead iguana does she realize what a cruel fate lies in store for her. She goes down on her knees beside the stinking iguana and at first she wants to yell out: that’s not it, that’s not my iguana, somebody else has killed this one: but the outline of the stone in the rotten green mass still retains its horrific sharpness, and her lips are burning with the memory of kissing the iguana’s skin and the sound, the horrible wet, sticky sound of the stone embedding itself in its belly starts vibrating devilishly slowly in the air round about her and the fatal stone’s heavy fall down on to the rocks on the beach suddenly starts echoing and the echo darts piercingly from one wall to another throughout the room that’s the world and forces her down closer and closer to the iguana — oh, how she struggles to protect her mouth!

And then she’s running again, for she’s come up again despite everything, it’s even possible to emerge from this, and as she runs, she’s rubbing her lips all the time with the back of her hand, but her lips are just as dry and chapped as always and there are no bits of rotting iguana stuck to them. Feeling calmer, she slows down, but the smell catches up with her again, screws itself on to her, is intimate with her, presses itself against her face like an anaesthetist’s mask. She forces herself to think clearly and calmly, to make a decision which won’t drive her into a state of lamentable panic. After having walked for quite a way through the grass, walking calmly and with strides as confident as one can manage when one’s scared, after having gone in a particular direction and with all her senses on edge to ensure that she doesn’t deviate from this safe route and come to a part of the island that’s unfamiliar to her as yet, after having noticed the smell gradually dispersing and wafting away and just hanging on in the grass around her like a dim memory, she stops and wraps her arms round the grass in front of her and pulls it down over her. Then, hidden by the grass, she gets undressed and lies down stark naked beneath it. It’s so dark down there, a reddening haze is crawling along the ground and she realizes it can’t be long to sunset, she can see the white rock glistening with solitude when she closes her eyes, and she keeps them closed for a long time and allows herself to be soothed by the stifling warmth rising up from the ground. It’s so nice to be naked in the grass, and sleep comes creeping up on her, all she has to do is to reach out for it and pull it towards her. The moment before she falls asleep, she has a dim recollection of the lion and the white rock, but it’s so far away, so pointlessly far away, that she just lets it sink out of sight. What are you supposed to do with a white rock when you can forget everything even so?

She doesn’t sleep for long, however. In actual fact, she starts waking up straight away. It’s a dream she dreams and wakes up from, and there is a big, fiery yellow carpet with a green border and she’s walking slowly over it down an endless corridor. She’s been placed somewhere in the middle of the corridor and isn’t allowed to turn round and see how far she is from the end and now she’s walking very fast and she’s glad the carpet is muffling her rapid footsteps. A vast number of doors open out on to the corridor, all of them with frosted glass in their upper half, and it strikes her that none of them is thrust open by scurrying people, nor is there a sound to be heard behind any of them and even so she feels she is far from being alone. She stops outside one of these doors and examines it through her shoe. It’s funny: there’s a hole in her shoe sole, quite a big hole, but instead of having it resoled someone has put a piece of glass in the hole, a powerful magnifying glass, and she’s examining the door through it. Nothing at all escapes her attention, she notices fingerprints on the yellow handle and she takes out her handkerchief and rubs them away; the glass panel in the door has cobwebs in the corners, and she blows them away with a careful puff. Then she notices something quite new about the door: it has a name plate, an enamel name plate in line with the handle. But the plate is caked in thick dirt which can only be scraped away with sharp nails. She dreams she’s scraping letters out of the dirt, and then she drops her shoe in surprise and it shatters with a loud crack even though it did fall on the carpet, and it’s that noise she wakes up from.

There’s somebody standing in the grass beside her, swaying back and forth on the soles of his feet; it’s a man and he has his back turned towards her and he’s whistling softly, as if to a dog. Without looking round, he throws a little twig over his shoulder and it falls quite close to her and after a while he throws the next bit of the newly broken twig in the same direction. He’s waiting for somebody, and is indulging in pointless activities to pass the time. She’s looking at him from such an unusual angle and is so nervous that she doesn’t recognize him at first, but all of a sudden he pulls off his shirt and rubs his bare back with it and the shiny little red wound on his right shoulder blade immediately gives him away.

It’s grown redder and angrier since she saw it last, or maybe it’s just the slowly encroaching twilight that makes it glow something awful, she thinks it looks like a little cruel, greedy and sensuous mouth busy trying to bite its way further and further into his body. Then he stops whistling, then he stops breaking off twigs, then he stops rubbing himself with his shirt, he drags it quickly back on over his head and then stands still and in silence as he waits for the person who’s now approaching.

Someone is running through the grass and panting hard, and all at once the English girl is standing so close to her that Madame could grab hold of her ankle, pull her over to her through the grass and beg her to refrain, plead with her to have mercy on the doomed man, indeed, even cling on to her so that nothing could happen.

But everything has to happen, there are courses of events one just can’t interfere with because they’re so devilishly logical, so inaccessible to one’s efforts, that it suddenly seems meaningless for anybody to exist at all with free will, human reason and all the attributes people go on about so much.

They meet more or less at her feet, and the man leans forward towards the English girl and clutches her to himself with a ruthlessly quick movement. They stand there in silence for a minute or so, and it looks as though they are pressed tightly against each other in a clinch, but from behind it’s easy to see from the girl’s tense body that she’s drawing back, that she hates and is disgusted by this contact, one of her shoulders is trembling with fear and reluctance, but the man who is resting his chin on her other shoulder doesn’t notice a thing. He’s gazing into the grass behind her with a cold smile of triumph and suddenly he lets go of her and swings her round as if he were her trainer and he grabs tight hold of her trembling shoulder and wants to drag her away with him. Then she tears herself loose and falls down on her knees so close to Madame that she’s sure she’s been detected — but it’s something much worse.

‘Somebody’s killed an iguana,’ she says, pointing down at the ground with a piece of grass.

‘Come on, it stinks something awful, we can’t hang around here, we can’t put up with this smell,’ says the man impatiently, pulling her to her feet, and she says it’s cruel and horrible and that one of them must have done it because this thing has been killed in such a human way, and then they disappear into the dusk of the grass and the silence of the grass, and Madame is all alone with everything she’s been running away from. And everything’s so horrible: she only needs to stretch out her hand and the iguana is lying there, sticky and stinking, just waiting for her hand, and she tears up clumps of grass and rubs her hand clean but that’s not good enough, the horrible stench clings on to her more firmly than ever, and on the plate she’d been scraping in her dream was the word iguana, although she’d forgotten that until now,