Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

She has no choice but to flee. She tries to hold her breath but in the end she has to gulp in air and the air is full of the stench of a dead iguana. She runs up towards the highest peak on the island, thinking the wind up there would surely blow away all the unpleasantness in the air, but the higher she gets, the more oppressive it all is. As she’s clambering up, she has to keep stopping and breathing in deeply and her lungs are full to bursting with the horrible stuff.

But high up at the top of a narrow little hill that looks like a shrunken volcano and drops down to an unfamiliar beach with little white rocks glittering in the sand, stained pale pink in the sunset, the air is pure at last, bitter and thin but pure. She kneels down on the brink of the precipice and watches the empty ocean stretching its shivering, glowing sheet over the darkness of the depths, and everything is forgotten. She is alone on her cliff and nothing can reach her, so high is she now. It occurs to her she could be mistress of the world: it’s so easy, all you need is to be alone on a higher peak than anyone else.

Then she thinks she can see an iguana creeping along among the stones on the beach far below; it’s a little iguana and its scaly skin is gleaming and it’s crawling very slowly, as if it had been injured or was frightened of something behind a stone. Madame leans forward as far as she dares and spits down at the iguana, but she misses.

I’m not scared any longer, she thinks, iguanas are nothing to be afraid of. They only bite men who are lying on the ground, and you can fight them, kick them down the cliff if they come too close.

But just as she’s about to spit again, she sees the big iguana crouching behind a burning stone by the water’s edge, and she thinks she should shout to the little one to look out, to run away as quick as it can, but her tongue has stiffened inside her mouth and there isn’t a single loose stone up here she can throw down at the lurking danger. And the little iguana is so comical in its attempts to escape death, it suddenly changes direction and heads straight for the stone where its enemy is waiting, and it’s crawling much faster now. Oh, if only she could throw herself down and save it, but of course, it’s all too late. Without making a single move of its head to ensure that death isn’t lying in wait behind the nearest stone, it crawls past the burning rock and the big iguana jumps out at the little one and hurls it against a stone so hard that its armour-like skin bursts open and as it slithers down the stone twitching with pain and death, the big iguana burrows mercilessly into the little one’s belly and all the time the big one’s tail is smashing into the stone on either side of a gap between two rocks like a vicious whip. It’s a horrible noise which drowns everything else, drowns her heartbeats, drowns her agitated, squeaky breathing, drowns the sea and the whistling wind. But then all is silent and the big iguana, superior in every languid movement, clambers lazily up on a dazzlingly white rock, desecrating it with the death of the little iguana. It lies there motionless on the rock and the sun gleams warmly on its horrible snout, and in the shadows below the little one is still gaping in surprise with its belly, and the echo of its tail whipping the stones seems to be echoing still, loud and terrible.

No, it was a different noise, it is a different noise, it’s something sharp and distinct coming from just behind her, but as yet she’d rather not turn round and face it.

The lion, she crouches there thinking in desperation, still on her knees, which lion should I choose, the lion which. .

. . but suddenly she’s walking down a long staircase, glittering in the bright light from the ceiling above, and the stairs rise towards her with their newly polished copper edges and the yellow bannister rail which she clings on to with both hands is hot and shaking, as if it might explode at any moment. Everything’s bubbling away beneath her, tables are being overturned and there’s creaking and clanking as chairs are crushed to bits against the walls. Her legs and thighs have turned to iron as, in the grip of some ruthless fear, she struggles towards a green rectangle, the beckoning rectangle of the door opening above her — but then suddenly the staircase has become an escalator and the water grasps hold of her ankles and calves with a short, piercing giggle and she sinks down and sinks into the sticky, offensively warm water, it clings to her hips, it clutches at her breasts, it twists itself round her neck and pours into her mouth, callously and with a shrill sucking sound, and into her ears, and her eyes — and now the whole of her has sunk below the surface of her fear. .

She turns round very quickly, she almost flings herself round and stands up at the same time, as if to scare somebody with her agitation. But the iguanas are not easily scared, the hundred, the thousand, the tens of thousands of iguanas that are spread over the whole of the cliff behind her, and the gap between their snouts and the cliff edge starts shrinking and the space she has in which to work out her salvation is getting narrower and it doesn’t tremble under their armour-plated skins when she stamps her foot on the rock. They just keep on crawling closer and closer, and the sun which is about to set glistens on a gigantic carpet of iguanas, a rolling carpet without a beginning and soon to be without an end and already she’s being stifled by the choking stench these million or so iguanas are thrusting towards her. She’s stopped stamping, she’s gone down on her knees again with her face bravely confronting the mass of iguanas, accepting whatever comes. She can’t run away from these iguanas that are already dead, she can’t run over the top of their armour plating as she would over a spiky carpet: she’d be overcome by the stench and fall and they’d be on her in a flash; she can’t fight them: once roused they’d just surge forward and squash her under their horrific, stinking weight. The silence is unbearable as they creep towards her, all the cracks from their twitching tales have been silenced, the soft scratching sound from their scaly skins scraping against each other is the only, the last sound of her life.

Then she screams, then she flings herself down before the iguanas and screams as she tries to scratch wounds into the rock, in vain of course, with her nails: ‘The lion, the lion, I must go to the lion! Let me through, do you hear, I have to get past!’

But the iguanas make no response, they just keep on crawling closer and closer and the ledge is now so narrow that she can’t even lie there with her arms outstretched, as if she were swimming; she has to pull back the arm she’s stretched out towards the iguanas and roll over closer to the precipice so that her other arm is already hanging down over the sharp edge, and roll even closer and with a desperate thrust, with enormous strength born of fear, roll closer still, roll over with clenched eyelids and bleeding fingers and a hunched body that has already accepted all the horrors of the fall and she rolls over the edge and as she falls, eyes closed and with all her senses numb from terror, she can’t even see that the cliff she’s falling from is just as empty as it always was, glittering emptily in the sunset which no longer follows her as the shadows close in.

8

I must keep my face nice and friendly, my hands must be calm and amorous and full of longing, she thinks, and then my body mustn’t tremble, and I must sound calm and my voice must be sufficiently keen for him not to suspect anything. He might fling his arms round me and hug me into his sweat, and if he does I mustn’t vomit, not yet, but I must pretend I’m enjoying it, as if there’s nothing I’d like better than him hugging me close, so very close.