Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But all of them came back depressed after having failed, and her voice grew increasingly shrill and in the darkness they could hear the scream creeping up over the sand like a big, black animal that would suddenly strike at their throats and somebody said the best thing to do might be to leave her alone until she fell asleep from the strain of keeping herself so terribly tense in tune with her mourning; but Boy Larus didn’t dare abandon the idea that something might be done, and hence he kept on walking backwards and forwards in the shallows behind her with the warm water lapping lusciously around his ankles, and occasionally he would stop just behind her and dig in the sand with his toes evidently without her noticing. Words just tumbled out of her in a confused torrent, and the more frightened he became, the further he went out into the water until it came up as far as his knees, and then he stopped with his feet buried comfortably under the sand and stared towards the shore, at the silent group huddled around the fire and the two motionless bundles straight in front of him, one of them silent and the other prattling, one dead and the other alive, and it dawned on him that no one could see him standing there in the darkness and he felt so protected from everything that was frightening and dangerous, he’d fled to the safest place in the whole world.

It was then he suddenly realized the English girl was lying naked in the sand, having cast aside the cloth she normally wrapped round herself so carefully, and her body was glistening like a rock of marble through the darkness, glowing in the sand; her breasts and all the other contours of her body were gleaming with unusual intensity, it seemed that hot, glowing, slender chains were trembling in a frenzy all over her body — and he suddenly realized with a start that he was standing on the beach very close to her: he must have wandered out of the water in a trance and now he’d been brought to his senses by his burning desire throbbing away inside him and filling him with burning pus.

Then somebody over by the fire moved so suddenly that he couldn’t fling himself down beside her for fear that somebody might be approaching. Instead, he withdrew hesitantly towards the fire, and the captain rose quickly to his feet and came to meet him, and slowly and quietly they sneaked up on the naked girl. They stopped a yard or so short of her motionless head and listened vaguely to her ramblings as they gulped in the flow from her outstretched body.

Then Boy Larus let his discipline slip and he grabbed the captain by the arm.

‘Somebody ought to,’ he said excitedly, ‘somebody ought to.’

‘I forbid you to do it,’ said the captain sharply, and turned on heel so suddenly the sand screamed, and he marched back to the fire with swaggering, brutal strides.

Boy Larus waded slowly out into the water, and just for a moment he felt a stab of cold in his burning boil; but once he was back with the water swirling round his knees, everything was just as it had been before. He was facing the lagoon, and outlined against a little reef of stars on the bottom of the sky he could see a blurred detail of the ship’s outline, but then all he could see was a little white rock shining forth from out of the water, and, all eager, he leant forward to grasp it, and the water that crept up his thighs and his stomach was so burning hot, he had to forget all about the rock and instead turn and walk towards land — and there it was, that thing lying on the sand, and he was drawn towards it but even so he might never have gone down on his knees and pressed first his hands and then his arms and then all of himself up against her if she hadn’t asked for it, if she hadn’t yelled at him to rape her.

It was then he ripped off his clothes, it was then he became so hot, no water in the world could have cooled him down, and no ban, not even the most scarifying, could have stopped him: always, he’d only been able to perform his best with the sort of girls that could overcome his weakness by flinging all the words you shouldn’t say into his face as he pressed himself against them. He can’t have known anything about how he hurled himself upon her and just what happened at the beginning, but he came to his senses a little when it was all over and he was panting as he pressed his lips against her hot, white ear and found his mouth filling with sand, and then he came round a little bit more when she twisted violently and with a thrust which only made him feel all the more delirious she bit his shoulder blade, and as she struggled to throw him off, and succeeded because he had no strength left to resist, he was more or less wide awake again and waded out into the water to rinse the rest of his heat away.

When he eventually returned to the fire, they were all sitting there as before, but not huddling in quite so much terror, and when he listened he realized the girl was silent now and he just wondered whether they knew everything, or part of it, or nothing at all. And then he realized that he didn’t care, that it didn’t matter what anybody thought or knew, all he could feel was the sense of jubilation, jubilation over finally having defied an instruction that something was prohibited, having disobeyed an order, having discovered for the first time how his own will operated, having seen that one can do whatever one likes, and that it’s just marvellous to do it.

But for the first few hours, indeed, for a large part of that first day, he was still so paralysed with sheer joy that he automatically responded to the captain’s whistles, but just occasionally it would dawn on him and he’d recall his incredible experience, rather like a new graduate the first day after the ceremony occasionally glances at the diploma hanging on his bedroom wall and, with a pang of joy, thinks to himself: wow, I’m a BA!

And there they are sitting around the white rock, when suddenly he remembers: Of course, I have a will of my own, I can do whatever I like on this island, I don’t need to carve anything into this bit of stone; and so, shortly before dusk, he leaves the English girl and all the time he’s thinking he won’t go back, that nobody can make him go back if he doesn’t want to. And so a little bit closer to sunset he’s lying on his plateau and imagining himself as a badly treated nail that’s soon going to be trimmed once and for all, but he’s not afraid of that, he thinks. The image is so perfect and he’s so proud of being able at last to do whatever he wants, and to think whatever he wants about anything he wants to think about.

He stands up and the world is stained red by the sunset, but the rock beneath him has a wet outline from his sweat; he doesn’t want to think about that, though, he hears somebody approaching through the grass, and he climbs back over the parapet. It’s about now I ought to be back there again, he thinks, that I ought to be standing down there on the beach listening to those idiots babbling away, but what do they want with a lion? Why bother about a lion when you can have sexual intercourse?

When he starts clambering down the hillside, however, he can feel a stabbing pain in a little bite on his right shoulder-blade, and he rubs it aimlessly with the index finger of his left hand, and thinks it’s probably just a pimple after all.

10

They leave Madame to her fate, then, without having seen her lying there in the grass, and the iguana they’ve both seen and smelt, they’re walking closely intertwined and Boy Larus is slightly taller than the English girl and he beats down the grass in front of them in triumph. They suddenly come upon a biggish hollow in the grass and so as not to remember what it was like when the captain caught up with him that time, he guides her to one side so that they only pass through untouched grass and all the time he thinks he’s the one who’s leading her, taking her to a quiet, hidden place where they can lie down together: the illusion of free will has so benumbed his mind that he thinks everything’s happening because he wants it to.