Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

‘Father!’ he shouts, ‘I have to leave.’

The whip falls silent.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve had a letter. It says I have to go to a certain meeting-place.’

‘Something to do with the bank?’

‘No, I have to leave everything behind. It’s time something I failed to do ages ago is finally put right.’

‘Stay where you are and don’t move.’

‘Yes, Father.’

And it’s the same moment as once before, the whip seems to be the same in any case, no, not quite, maybe even more savage and bloodthirsty. Lucas collapses now on to the cellar passageway, all the walls between then and now have crumbled, the concrete cellar floor fades away and in its place, the soft pelt of a bear rises up, he burrows down into the fur rug and knows he will stay after all.

He gets up and wanders back up the stairs, and behind him the whip suddenly bursts out laughing as it comes into sudden contact with a cellar wall, his mother unpacks again, he sees how she hides the only suitcase under a pile of bank journals in a wall cupboard. They go on eating in silence, and everything is just as it has been for a long time: family happiness, and the greasy smell of cooking and mixed perfumes from mouldy wallpaper waft once more through the room.

Now time passes quickly once more, columns and trout intertwine to form fences round his life; to be sure, he notices the black car following him as he walks home in the afternoon, it keeps flashing its lights, and the man who bundles him in through the back door is somehow familiar. They drive out into the desolate countryside, and by a bridge with a single silvery lamp is an old man playing his fiddle in the middle of the night, his instrument case lying open to receive contributions; suddenly the car skids and crushes the case under a front wheel. They hear the shouts behind them, but gaze down into the darkness under the bridge where the lights on a barge are threading their soft strands through the mists over the water. Lucas is sitting in the back seat squashed between two hefty men with testy voices; they don’t need to guard him so keenly, no one needs to worry about Lucas making a run for it; his firmly laced-up will can be moulded gently by any hand that cares to try, any move from his side will only make an even bigger mess of things, he knows that.

Where are they going? He’s completely calm and has no expectations — what is there for him to hope for any more? — and he listens to the big car roaring into the silence of the night; sometimes farm carts stand sleepily at crossroads, their shafts bowed; terrified cows woken up by the car’s engine scramble in vain to get up on their knees as the headlights catch them; rather less noisily they purr on to a bumpy, crooked side-road where the headlights crash repeatedly into oak trunks or bob over little black, scared ponds. Grass is growing right down to the edge of the road and sways gently as if the headlights were a breeze, and now he recognizes where he is, but without any great feelings of fear or surprise: the path and the oak forest of his childhood have found him again, and the pony also appears as they round a bend, as if emerging from a dream; it still hasn’t moved since it fell, and in the sharp beams before the car brakes to a halt, the bodies of millions of ants glisten like a network of neon lights stretched over the body of the pony, which is still not quite dead.

‘Get out,’ says the gardener’s son, one of those sitting at his side throughout the long journey and smelling of cigars, a podgy man approaching middle age with flabby folds in his face; the woman sitting beside the driver is his sister, the one who’s been hunched over a local map all the time and wearing a transparent mourning veil; she glances up and then gets out on to the path. Lucas walks quickly past her, and can hear her breathing behind the veil.

‘That’s enough,’ she whispers. ‘Get down on your knees.’

He sinks slowly down in front of the dead horse, his legs telescope together as if pressed by an unseen hand, the car lights go out, it suddenly swivels round on the path with a snarl and is sucked into the darkness under the trees. Is the woman still there? His ears grope around helplessly and return empty-handed, and with a sob of loneliness he stretches himself out beside the horse and reaches out his arms to draw it towards him. But by then it’s disappeared, as you might expect, and there’s just a hollow lying by his side, a grave with the outline of a horse five times blacker than the darkness; that’s what he’s trying to caress in all his isolation, and something sucks his body slowly over the edge, his head is pulled gently like a barge falling slowly down into the depths, indeed, the fall is incredibly slow. Doubled up like a foetus, his body sinks downwards, his hands, those white feelers, are quivering in expectation of touching the rough skin, but instead, the white wave rises up from the bottom and wafts over him like a light breeze. Protecting himself, flapping around like a swimmer is of no avail, he’s preparing to choke and opens himself up completely so that the wave can engulf him, when he realizes that nothing can happen, not a single drop has flowed into his mouth, no, the wave wraps itself around his body like a silken sheet and although his body suddenly turns into a gigantic tongue wriggling like a snake in an attempt to capture a little dampness, the result is ill-fated. Meanwhile he goes on sinking, and tempting smells rise up towards him from the distant depths: ambergris and gin, the scent of birdsong over a bubbling spring, the broken clinking of a wine cellar’s chill, the hard smell of metal and poverty from a brass water tap, nothing will be missed, everything pierces his heavy body like sharpened drills, and when he’s endured everything, the dead horse is still lying there dumbly at the bottom, and even the ants can be seen through the water: he’s possessed once again by rage; now he understands the horse’s cruel role as an agent of torture, it’s lying on the bottom of the well of his thirst, and all the scents of pain are rising from its skin. His fingers are hooked voraciously as he hurls himself upon the horse and digs his sharp nails into its soft flesh like needles, his caresses are long since forgotten, now all he wants is bitter revenge.

With his hands buried deep down in the sand, he slowly emerged from the gigantic parcel of his dream with the seventy seals, a worthless little kernel in the last and smallest box of the hundred boxes that are his dream; he rolled over on his back, groaning, his mouth wide open and desperate to catch the insubstantial rain.

But like balloons in spring, the grey tufts of dawn wrenched themselves loose from the fold of the sea, the emerging contours of the island and the wreck’s shattered masts, the liana-like confusion of rigging and the explosion of anchor cables, rose directly into the skies, whose loosely draped silken screen was suddenly flung aside and stretched tightly as ice; it was inadequate to cover the whole space, and from some of the gaps light oozed forth like apple juice and poured into the sea, which was consumed in turn as darts of golden flame licked the shiny black expanse like the tongue of a hungry dog. The green silk of dawn was now snipped away at the edges by the scissors of new light, slits appeared, and pieces of grey mist were set ablaze as light came plunging down; a bloodshot gigantic eye blinked momentarily, then the whole sea burst into flames and bobbed against the eastern horizon like a fisherman’s float in the early morning.

To Lucas Egmont it was all one long fall; still yawning wide, he tried scrambling to his feet, but couldn’t manage it until his speed of fall diminished. Swaying to and fro, pains shooting through his legs and his throat still twitching in response to the water of his dream, he stood there in the sand; his canvas shoes squeaked every time he moved a muscle and the rubbing of sand under his finger-nails made him feel sick. Intoxicated by the certainty of his fate, he staggered forward to the water, sunk to his knees by the lagoon, and thrust his fingers violently into the cooling water; someone was hanging like a dead weight round his shoulders, someone was pressing down on the back of his neck, the urge to dive in became almost irresistible, his lips were drawn to the water like a magnet, his face came nearer and nearer to the surface and his jerky reflection rose from the bottom of the lagoon.