Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

However, soon afterwards when they were burying the boxer and he was getting tired out from the least bit of effort, he started wondering about what had actually happened, and then the merest glance at the steep cliff convinced him how impossible it must have been for a solitary, badly wounded person to drag himself down such a precipice without falling. Somebody must have helped him, and he looked around to try and find out who. It couldn’t have been either of the missing women: in the first place, they wouldn’t have had the strength, and moreover, they always radiated that half-unconscious bitter coolness women often surround themselves with as a protection in case of attack. The captain was out of the question, of course, as this was a question of life and death and not some chivalrous parlour game. Actually, he was surprised the captain hadn’t just thrown him straight over the cliff after the iguanas had bitten him. Boy Larus was much too loyal to the captain and wouldn’t dare do anything he might have wished to do for his own sake but knew was against the captain’s wishes.

That left Lucas Egmont, the Lucas Egmont nobody knew anything about, who maybe had something to hide or just looked as though he did — there are secretive faces just as surely as there are open faces. And as he was looking for him, he noticed the bits of cloth stuck in his wounds; of course, he’d seen them lots of times during the course of that hot day, but he hadn’t thought about what they looked like or where they’d come from. Now, for the first time, he noticed the details. He felt them and discovered they were bits of fine, soft material, better quality than he’d ever felt before, and before they’d been stained by the dirt on the island and his own blood, they had been white, and part of a white shirt.

They were all stripped to the waist as they worked, but he walked over to the shadow of the cliff where their clothes were lying, and could see straight away that Lucas Egmont’s shirt was the one in question. He stroked the soft, white cloth briefly in gratitude, but also because it felt so nice and cool against his skin, and when he went back to the grave, possibly intending to embrace his saviour, he saw him crawling up the beach with staring eyes and quivering lips, his hands full of wet sand which he used to cover up the empty water keg.

It was such an amazing sight, he just stood there, his arms dangling, and watched; and the other two had also stopped working and were staring at him, but Lucas seemed oblivious to the lunacy of what he was doing and kept on crawling with a patience that was almost intolerable to watch, backwards and forwards between the keg and the water, carving a little canal in the sand with his knees.

All of a sudden, it dawned on Tim Solider what the others hadn’t yet realized: Lucas Egmont was the one who’d emptied the water keg, and Tim first grew hot with rage and wanted to run up to him and thrust his head under the water, again and again, till it no longer had the strength to raise itself any more, but then the heat of of the sun suddenly became so terrible that it wasn’t possible to stick to a single resolve and he walked mechanically back to the water’s edge below the boxer’s grave and started carrying sand again, but his head was swimming. For a while, he actually felt sorry for Lucas Egmont: he wasn’t an especially tall man at the best of times, more or less normal, but now as he crawled over the sand he seemed to be so hideously shrunken that Tim was tempted to leave the boxer to his fate and instead help to bury the water keg.

But then came his thirst and rubbed away like pepper and ginger against his guts and intestines and stomach and throat, his mouth and his dry, chapped lips hated Lucas Egmont with the greatest hatred in the world, or on the island, at least. But afternoon arrived and brought with it cooling shadows and quenched all hatred except just one and when they were sitting around the white rock and the captain was taunting him and hurting him with his biting superiority, he found once again he was in league with Lucas Egmont, he was the one Lucas Egmont was defending in his long speech, they were his thoughts Lucas Egmont was presenting to the audience, whether or not they were listening, gathered around the rock, and suddenly he felt the same overwhelming gratitude he’d just felt at the burial.

‘Solidarity,’ he thought, ‘solidarity from a water thief, but solidarity even so, the only time anybody has offered me any here on the island. I mustn’t reject it, because it’s the only solidarity in the world, because it’s the only sign provided so far by the world order that there may be cracks in its compact injustice.’

Now he’s lying in the angle between the cliff and the undergrowth, thinking about Lucas Egmont’s lion, a solitary lion. Oh, he doesn’t need to wait until sunset before choosing sides, it’s all clear to him already and he can start fighting straight away; he feels glad, paradoxically glad, because when all’s said and done he’s going to die at any moment, of his wounds, of hunger, of thirst, or of what at the moment is the worst of all, his bites. But he’s glad because despite the late hour, he’s been given an opportunity to show his solidarity with something, with an idea, with a fellow human being, with a symbol. He’s glad because a life without water, a life without food, a life without cinemas and banana skins, chewing gum and church bells, can still give somebody who wants it a chance to defend himself against the indifferent criminality of the world.

Only symbolic? So what, what isn’t symbolic? Aren’t all our achievements, even if we are struggling in a world where there are millions of human relationships and where we have the destinies of millions in our fingertips, aren’t all our achievements so pitiful even so, that the struggle we put up for them would be meaningless if we didn’t acknowledge the symbolic significance of the struggle, the significance of the struggle as a struggle? Would it be possible to do anything at all, to perform a single deed, when the practical achievements are as puny as they are, if we didn’t acknowledge symbols as practical realities?

Suddenly he can’t bear to sit still any longer; he has holes in his chest but he thinks he can feel his life throbbing stronger than ever behind those two rust-coloured rags stuck there like corks in a big blood tank. He’s weak, but in a stimulating way, rather like after a late-night party when you’re on your way home and all the thoughts that have to be thought and still haven’t been thought come surging in over you and you’re almost stifled by your own weary vitality. He walks quite quickly through the grass, forces his way through a few clumps of bushes, feels the hard shells of several iguanas under his feet but has no time to worry about them. When he reaches the cliff there’s still some time to go before sunset and he settles down to watch the clouds spreading out over the stranded horizon in large clusters, looking like the smoke from cannons firing a salute. He finds a stone up there as well, a narrow, wedge-shaped hard stone which might be useful if you want to carve something into a white rock. He takes it with him, as well as some branches he’d broken off on a previous occasion but left up here on the cliff, but when he gets down he suddenly remembers there’s no fire burning anyway, and with an impatient gesture he throws the branches out into the water without paying much attention to where they go. He puts the stone on the rock and then stands gazing out over the lagoon, thinking about the shape of a lion. Then he suddenly feels a prick in his right ear, it’s as if a little flash of lightning had struck home there and he turns round with the speed of a bird of prey and he sees the bird bobbing up and down like a big float where it’s drifted in to the edge of the beach.