Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Boy Larus, lying there on the rock and dripping with sweat, just as accommodating forwards his cowardice as he’s always been, closes his eyes so tightly, the shadows are imprinted into his retina, and he knows that the tighter he can close them, the clearer his own position in the universe will be to him; his own adventure is revealed in all its happy glow. Suddenly he sees the hand before him, the hand his life is clinging to like a nail, a severely trimmed nail on a hard hand, perhaps the world’s hardest hand, a hand much too accustomed to handling fire and red-hot iron to have any gentleness left when the time comes for a manicure. Then, he just grabs the first pair of shears he can find and cuts loose on the nail so that it doubles up in pain and splits right down to the root.

Maybe I should have had a different hand, thinks Boy Larus, maybe things would have been a bit better if my nail had been attached to another finger on another hand, but you can’t choose your hands — and who knows what I might have ended up with instead, perhaps an executioner’s hand, a thick-skinned scoundrel who trims his nails with his axe after every execution. Then I’d have been caked with congealed blood and all the time, all my life been longing for the executioner to miss just once, and cut off the whole of his finger.

It’s amazing what metaphors cowardice can dream up for us. He rolls over slowly on to his back, calm just for a moment, and in a state of deep satisfaction he opens his eyes. The heavens loom high above him, blue with many flashes of cloud; he stretches out an arm and grasps hold of the wall and listens to the grass down below, no trace of anxiety, and it’s rustling away with no sign of fear. The world is bright and cheerful, the man who’s lying there is soon going to die and he knows it, but it’s in the dim distance, and he’s not particularly frightened because there’s no other way out after all, once everything’s come to an end, once all possibilities of living in peace have been eliminated, and everything’s so simple, so horribly simple: a nail’s going to be clipped right off, pulled out by the roots even, because its owner’s grown tired of it — and so what, what’s so remarkable about nails being trimmed, things that happen every day without anybody thinking twice about it?

He lies there as if anchored to the rock, and lets the sun — for the last time, maybe, he thinks, and the whole of his body glows in sympathy with the bold way he dares to think of it like that — lets the sun blaze down straight into his face, it’s still hot and the refined profile he’s always been so careful about, the way one’s careful about a rare china dish, sticks out from his face like a red-hot ember. He’s just lying there peacefully and at one with the world, and his past life isn’t flashing past his eyes like they say it does for people condemned to death, for all our friends who are dying. He’s not thinking of anything in particular, he feels perfectly contented, really contented because he deludes himself into thinking he’s accepted everything, knows all the rules now and isn’t going to be put out by anything; he knows about hunger, thirst, sudden weariness, gradual fading away, and all that. He thinks he’s accepted everything, but in fact he’s accepted nothing at all, all he’s done is find some new prop in some new experience, it’s like a mountain spring and he plunges the straw of his fear into it and sucks and sucks till he chokes and bursts internally — and everything is as pointless as it was always destined to be.

But nevertheless, he’s had a new experience which almost fills him with ecstasy because it’s so incredibly unexpected, because he’d never realized before he was capable of any such thing.

It was that night the English girl was screaming something awful. To start with, she scared everybody stiff with her confused babbling, going up first to one and then the other and begging for quinine for some patient or other with malaria who might just be saveable, or she asked where the boxer had disappeared to, wondered whether he’d just gone for a walk or whether he’d found some boat and left in it, in which case it would be pretty tactless of him because he’d promised faithfully to take her with him in that case, after all, they all knew how close she was to the boxer — oh yes, they all knew that, and that’s why they daren’t yell at her to cut it out for God’s sake, as the boxer had presumably died during the night and they’d only noticed the next morning when it was time to share out the water and there was a different sort of smell coming from under the canvas, not quite so dirty but no less horrible, and there were no more groans of pain to be heard, although they’d all been listening for them with a tiny, tiny bit of hope. Somebody lifted the canvas quickly, and then let it fall again even more quickly — the English girl had been present then, and it was obvious from her face that she’d caught on, even though she tried later to hide all that behind an attitude of defiant, convulsive lunacy.

And this chaotic day was followed by a horrific night, and the darker it became and the quieter it grew on the island and over the endless ocean around them, the more suspicious they were that her madness was really play-acting. They all sat round the fire then, huddled more closely together than ever before, more scared than ever before as well, because this hadn’t been some impersonal storm that no one can do anything about anyway, or some raging floodwater you can’t possibly beg for mercy, oh no, what made it so awful was that it was something that could happen to any of them at any moment, could affect any one of them without a moment’s warning, and take hold of any of them who were still normal and hurl them into the most terrible solitude: as lonely as a man lost in the depths of a forest filled with ghosts — oh, why couldn’t he just be a gnarled trunk?

They could hear her mumbling away in the distance, sometimes monotonous and rambling, sometimes as clear as a bell, and that made them even more frightened because it could be the first stages of a scream, a scream so terrible it would never cease being hurled backwards and forwards over the island like an eternal echo. It was so dark round about them now, even though the fire was crackling, but it was so good to feel their faces were mercifully hidden when this is how it was going to be no matter what. It was so good because you always notice these things first from people’s faces: the English girl had suddenly acquired a frown, a remarkable line running from one of her eyes and right up to the base of her hair, looking like a mark of extreme surprise, and her mouth was pursed without her knowing it: several times while all this was going on, she tried to open it and say something, but her lips just wouldn’t obey, and when she eventually mastered them, she didn’t seem to know what she was saying. And now they were all so grateful for the shadows cast by the firelight, because they didn’t need to fear that outstretched, ruthless index finger aimed shakily straight at them and backed up by that terrifying pupil screaming at them all: There you are, you look just like her!

All the time Boy Larus had been frightened, but irritated as well, irritated because no one was taking the initiative, because the captain didn’t say what ought to be said so that they could intervene and restrain her, and when the captain eventually put his decision to them he more or less started shaking with joy and, filled with determination and ready to obey no matter how unpleasant things became, he strode out into the darkness alongside the captain with a smile on his face, and he had a strange feeling of how marvellous it would be to rub up against him briefly and he enjoyed the sensation of the warm sand tickling the soles of his feet. Boy Larus and the captain walked past quite close to her several times, talking all the while in an attempt to rouse her aggression so that during the unpleasantness that followed they could tell her the whole truth. But it seemed impossible to attract her attention, and as they were having trouble in putting up with the horrible smell, the captain decided they should approach her one at a time, at intervals, and try to irritate her in various ways.