Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Then all of a sudden, with a stab of surprise, she notices how the light of the jungle itself has changed colour, it’s not green any more, like a shower of blood, radiantly red, it pours in through the roof of the jungle and the earth and all the leaves and the branches and the parasol poles are the same colour as she is. A few fiery red birds parachute down from some tree or other, shrieking shrilly and urgently to each other all the time, pecking at the air with their beaks; a large animal, armadillo-like, is hanging asleep on a branch swaying dangerously high above her head: sooner or later it might break, and the animal come crashing straight down on top of her. But even so, she’s not as frightened as she was shortly before; she’s taken on the colour of the jungle, and she thinks she’s entitled to the protection of the jungle, and so she lies down calmly on her back beside the pond, its red water is glimmering under the body of the snake and she’s no longer as frightened of the snake as she was, since now she’s so like him, and as it glides towards her over the red, shuddering membrane, she doesn’t scream, nor does she offer to fend him off.

He trickles up her leg like stiffened water, and the contact she’s dreading is not all that awful but tender, ticklish, and she even caresses the snake with her red fingers and feels how similar they are, both of them are blood held together by some silly little membrane, and the snake makes her feel warm, the snake generates heat, not unlike her own but more intensive, more stupefying, not so shameful because he’s so strong. And she gazes straight up into the red roof of the jungle where butterflies as big as swallows and with burning wings are fluttering around, living lianas that aren’t snakes squirm from branch to branch, giant chameleons thrust out their tongues and butterflies get caught by one wing which then comes loose and they float down through the red air, fluttering pitifully with their only wing, and when they hit the ground they crawl away like maggots; but she can see other animals hanging down motionless from the network of branches that forms the roof, she can see their eyes gleaming like diamonds in a grotto, and suddenly they let go and swoop down, their glittering claws outstretched, they’re like big, big cats, sixty feet they fall, down to the ground, and they thud down with a dull thump and she can hear them hissing like cats as they struggle with the animal they’ve leapt upon and soon everything falls silent, all the time the glittering one-winged butterflies keep on stuttering down through the hot air — the drama is cruel yet stimulating, nice, her body is warmed up by all the things happening above her and around her and now the snake is lying between her legs, heavy and warm and motionless — but suddenly he bursts into life and before she can move a muscle to prevent him, he creeps inside her with all his terrifying length.

She wants to scream and fight and curse, but it’s all too late and she has no choice but to go along with it — but then comes the pain in her back which drives her mad, the snake’s head forces its way along the inside of the thin membrane covering her back, and he stretches out and stretches out into eternity, and soon he’ll snap and she hopes he’ll snap as soon as possible, if only this devilish pain would abate, if only this horrible dirt filling her existence would drain away together with her own defiled blood. But the pain only gets worse, and suddenly the armadillo launches itself out of the tree and swoops down towards her in a shower of blood, and with a scream, or maybe she only whispered a scream, she wakes up under the bush where she’s been lying, but she feels no relief on discovering it was all a dream, she only feels the violent heat of a throbbing hatred rising inside her in waves, and as she drapes herself in her cloth once more and slowly gets to her feet, she keeps on whispering with her hot lips, bursting with desire, to somebody or other, ‘Give me strength, oh, give me strength to do it.’

9

He hides on the plateau until dusk falls, crouching behind the natural barricade and listening, or rather trying to forget to listen to all the things moving in the grass and on the rocks down below. Although it’s not especially hot, although the wind is blowing with the irregular breathing of a feverish patient, his head is sweating as never before. He lies quite still so as not to provoke his body, he unbuttons his clothes and lets the wind breathe directly on to his skin, but it’s no good: he still can’t break free from his sweat. With an agonizing feeling of disgust, he feels his pores opening quite independently of his will and shedding their dirty tears, and he grows painfully aware of the smell, the smell from his sweaty body. Every time he breathes in, he can feel the nasty, acrid smell surging into his nose and filling the whole of his head with its brutal weight. And everything is clinging to him: his stinking trousers, his open shirt, his clumsy shoes, and his hair — for the first time in his life he can feel his hair pressing against his forehead, sucking on to his skin like a cold, slimy marine creature that attaches itself to you while you’re swimming, and then just won’t let go, seems to fuse into your forehead in the sunshine, and is impossible to get rid of until you go for another swim.

In order to have something to think about, and to make sure none of the things he’s afraid of can creep up on him from behind, he starts thinking about his hair, how he’s always had, or at least for twenty-five years or more has had ash-blond hair of varying thickness and size; all kinds of things have happened, he’s lost lots of things and many of them have never been found, he’s voluntarily disposed of other things but then, unfortunately, found them again; but there’s one thing he’s never lost nor disposed of once and for all: his hair. You could say he’s been loyal to his hair even if he has been disloyal to quite a lot of other things. He strokes his own hair like a mother, but he doesn’t burst out crying even though he knows he’s going to die, he’s discovered how much salvation there is in being very sentimental, in stroking oneself, in being aglow with peace even though there might be an awful long time left to live.

The thing about hair, he thinks to himself, is that hair is really a part of your life, perhaps a more important part of your life than you often think, and every time you have it cut, you die, an important part of yourself is cut off, and although you survive you’re more dead than you were before your haircut even so; the innocent barber is in fact a little executioner, an amputator who’s always doing you one of the last favours. And if that’s how it really is with hair — and why shouldn’t it be when there are so many other things that are similar? — then the same thing applies to our nails. Without a second thought and without reproaching ourselves in the least, we cut our nails even though they may be just as much of our life as so much else, such as our eyes, such as our actions that we’re so proud of, such as the thoughts we’re even prouder of churning out, although in fact they’re no more remarkable than our nails growing, or our hair.

He’s lying face down and his sweat is making big stains on the rock, but he pretends not to notice and maybe he doesn’t in fact. He runs his fingertips over the ragged horizons of his nails, and all the time he keeps his eyes shut and tries to think of his life as a big nail, a giant’s nail on an otherwise insignificant creature. It’s trimmed occasionally by a pair of scissors or a file, or it’s not trimmed at all and allowed to grow, big and shapeless and with lumps of black dirt under the rim, and eventually it grows so long it breaks off as a result of some careless movement — finis, that’s it, curtains, this marvellous life no more than a dirty fingernail flushed down the lavatory — or it’s trimmed too much, every day the cruel scissors crawl along its edges and gnaw and gnaw away till the nail would cry out if only it could. Other nails are as well trimmed as hedges, and polished until they shine, and they squirm with self-satisfaction as soon as the hand they’re growing on moves, just as if they were completely independent of the hand’s movements, just as if the hand were their most obedient servant.